Deep-seated patterns of power politics are thus driving the United States and China toward mistrust and competition, if not necessarily toward open conflict. But this is not all there is to the story. In contrast to what some realists claim, ideology matters at least as much as power in determining the course of relations among nations. The fact that America is a liberal democracy while China remains under authoritarian rule is a significant additional impetus for rivalry, an obstacle to stable, cooperative relations, and a source of mutual hostility and mistrust in its own right. ~Aaron Friedberg

The new issue of The National Interest has several interesting articles, including Friedberg’s article on China, and on TNI’s site there are tworesponses to Friedberg’s article that are also worth reading. Friedberg sees some form of U.S.-Chinese rivalry as more or less inevitable, and I’ll come back to that, but I first wanted to address the idea that “some realists” don’t think ideology matters that much in international relations. If anything, realists are wary of “values”-driven policies because they believe that ideology is a powerful and dangerous factor in obscuring the national interest and subordinating that interest to the dictates of ideology. If there is an “additional impetus for rivalry” between America and China on account of ideology, whence does this impetus come? Does it not come mainly from the American push for political change inside other countries? In other words, as Andrew Nathan says in his response:

As long as the West wants to change the Chinese political system, Beijing’s rulers will, as Friedberg says, quite rationally “believe that they are engaged in an ideological struggle, albeit one in which, until very recently, they have been almost entirely on the defensive.”

The question that comes to mind is this: why does the U.S. insist on waging such an ideological struggle, when it is likely to intensify any rivalry with China? There’s no question that ideology matters as much as power, but what remains puzzling is why states permit themselves to be held hostage to the dictates of ideology when these promise to fuel dangerous rivalries with other major powers. It is all the more puzzling when the state promoting political change abroad is supposedly the status quo power and the allegedly “revisionist” rising power mostly favors the status quo domestically and internationally.

I recently finished reading Orlando Figes’ impressive history of the Crimean War, and I was struck by the extent to which the reigning ideologies in Britain, France, and Russia all drove their respective governments to undertake policies that were obviously irrational and contrary to the interests of all belligerents. Of the three major non-Ottoman belligerents, France was probably the least ideologically-driven, but it is also true that France would likely not have participated in the war except that Napoleon III saw it as an important way to solidify his position as emperor and to secure Catholic support for his regime. The British actually had the least directly at stake, and they committed the smallest number of soldiers of any of the major powers, but they were also curiously the most enthusiastic and unreasonable in their desire for conflict with Russia. The British framed the conflict in the most absurdly ideological terms imaginable by portraying themselves as defenders of liberty, when they were, in fact, supporting the prerogatives of the Sultan. British hostility to Russian autocracy was linked together with the paranoid fear of a Russian threat British imperial interests in Asia. For their part, the Russians were swept up in the profoundly unwise enthusiasm on behalf of Orthodox Christians inside the Ottoman Empire, which propelled them into a war that ended up earning them humiliating defeat and cost them hundreds of thousands of lives, and which presaged later interventions in the Balkans that ultimately brought the Russian Empire crashing down in WWI.

The “gains” made by either side were risibly small and for the most part transitory and couldn’t begin to equal the costs. As Figes argues, the Crimean War was a very significant conflict, and one that foreshadowed many of the major military and political developments leading up to WWI. Like WWI, it was also an irrational, pointlessly destructive and wasteful conflict, and one that came out of the “atmosphere of suspicion” fueled by ideological preoccupations. If we can see that such an “atmosphere of suspicion” poisons relations between major powers, and we see the potentially disastrous effects of an escalating rivalry between them, shouldn’t we be repudiating the ideological obsessions that create it?

Dr. Gene Callahan noticed that Niall Ferguson’s dire warning of the rise of a neo-Ottoman Empire is not based on any real evidence. Ferguson wrote the column in the wake of the AKP’s significant electoral victory earlier this month. He wrote:

And yet we need to look more closely at Erdogan. For there is good reason to suspect he dreams of transforming Turkey in ways Suleiman the Magnificent would have admired.

In his early career as mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan was imprisoned for publicly reciting these lines by an early-20th-century Pan-Turkish poet: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.” His ambition, it seems clear, is to return to the pre-Atatürk era, when Turkey was not only militantly Muslim but also a regional superpower.

It is true that Erdogan recited the Gökalp poem in question, and he was then imprisoned for it. Such was the absurdly illiberal nature of the old Kemalist order for which so many Westerners now seem to be pining. It was Erdogan’s imprisonment that served as the catalyst for the reinvention of Islamist politics in Turkey that led to the emergence of the AKP as the ruling party in Turkey. It might be worth adding that Gökalp was a member of the Committee of Union and Progress, which was the ruling party in the years following the 1908 revolution, and it was also the political organization to which Mustafa Kemal belonged before and during WWI. Gökalp was a leading ideologue of Turkish nationalism, and his thought was an important influence on the shape of Turkish nationalism in the republic. Sibel Bozdogan describes the intellectual milieu in which Gökalp was working in Modernism and Nation-Building:

It was after the consolidation of power of the nationalist wing of the CUP in 1913, however, that the primacy of Islam in the official definition of Ottoman identity was replaced by an emphasis on Turkishness. The emerging definition of nationhood on the basis of shared cultural, historical, and linguistic heritage, rather than shared religion under the patrimony of the Ottoman sultan, differentiated the new nationalist ideology from the earlier patriotism of the Young Ottomans. The classical texts of Turkish nationalism were written in this period, especially after the founding of the nationalist organization Turkish Hearth Society and the publication of its journal, Turkish Homeland…. [ed. -Gökalp was a major figure in this organization.]

The leading ideologue of Turkish nationalism was Ziya Gökalp. Before everything else, Gökalp differentiated “nationality” (the Ural-Altaic group of Turkic peoples) from “religion” (the Islamic community, which was supranational), although both were constitutive of Turkish identity….Second, on the basis of of the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde, who identified the locus of social life in “culture groups” and “civilization groups,” respectively, Gökalp formulated his well-known distinction between “culture” (hars) and civilization (medeniyet). This was a distinction between “beliefs, morals, duties, aesthetic feelings, and ideals of a subjective nature” on one hand, and on the other, “scientific truths, hygienic or economic rules, practical arts pertaining to public works, techniques of commerce and of agriculture–all of an objective nature.” From this he observed that whereas civilization could be borrowed from the West, culture had to reside in the nation’s own people and history. (p. 35)

Like many non-Western nationalists, Gökalp saw Westernization as a technical process that would aid in the defense of the nation, but which did not have to involve abandoning national culture. Most important for understanding Gökalp’s nationalism was his attitude towards the “high culture of the Ottoman sultans.” As Bozdogan explained:

The Turkish nationalism of Ziya Gökalp (ironically himself of Kurdish origins) was anticosmopolitan in cultural terms. From his perspective, it was not the high culture of the Ottoman sultans but the folk culture of Turks that could be the real source of “national culture”–as it would indeed be in the late 1930s.

I hope that this shows just how misleading the opposition Ferguson sets up between Gökalp and Atatürk really is. It creates the impression that Erdogan wants “to return to the pre-Atatürk era.” All that it really shows is that Erdogan was drawing on some of Gökalp’s use of Islamic imagery and rhetoric in this poem to link himself and the Welfare Party to which he then belonged to a famous Turkish nationalist figure whose ideas continued to be influential during Atatürk’s tenure as president and afterwards. In other words, linking Erdogan to Gökalp doesn’t prove the point Ferguson wants to make, but mostly contradicts it.

It is entirely appropriate to be skeptical of Erdogan, as it is appropriate to be skeptical of any powerful politician. He clearly has authoritarian instincts and a willingness to demagogue issues to benefit himself and his party, and he has been content to exploit rising Turkish nationalism. He has presided over a perceptible shift in Turkish foreign policy that takes greater account of Turkey’s regional interests and aims to establish stronger ties with all of Turkey’s neighbors, but this makes Erdogan’s Turkey a new Ottoman Empire as much as Germany’s preeminence in the EU makes it into a new Kaiserreich. If there are problems with Erdogan, and I don’t dispute that there are as far as people living in Turkey are concerned, they are the problems of a popular, successful religious-nationalist leader presiding over a system of increasingly one-party rule.

Ferguson’s misunderstanding of Erdogan and Gökalp seems to be driven to a large degree by his misunderstanding of Atatürk. Atatürk was a Westernizing and modernizing ruler, but he wasn’t “pro-Western” or aligned with the West in the way that Westerners today think of post-WWII Kemalists, and instead set policy according to what would best serve the interests of Turkey. Atatürk was strongly opposed to aligning Turkey internationally with any grouping of states, and he was also against the sort of foreign adventurism that Enver Pasha’s later career exemplified. Not only did Turkey need to recover from the decade of war that preceded the formation of the republic, but Atatürk saw the CUP’s involvement of the empire in WWI as a major blunder that he would try to avoid making in the future. His successor likewise maintained strict neutrality during WWII. Because of Turkey’s experience after WWI and the attempted partition of Anatolia by European powers, Atatürk understandably retained a strong distrust of Western powers. To portray Erdogan as significantly less interested in good relations with the West than Atatürk and his successors is to misunderstand both Atatürk and modern Turkey, and to see him as a would-be restorer of the Ottoman Empire credits him with too much power.

The vote failed 180-238 – but, in fact, there were more than enough lawmakers to pass the measure. Of the 149 Democrats who stuck with the president, up to 70 of them are totally opposed to the Libya intervention and want to see it completely defunded as soon as possible. They voted “no” on the Rooney’s bill because they thought it was too weak, did not cut off all funds, and implicitly authorized the intervention [bold mine-DL].

These 70 Democrats make up the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), the largest caucus within the House Democratic Caucus, whose leadership includes Reps. Mike Honda (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ).

“Members of Congress voted no because the bill provided funding and legal authority for everything we’re currently doing. It was back door authorization. Members didn’t support authorizing what we’re doing now in Libya,” Michael Shank, Honda’s spokesman, told The Cable. “The majority of the CPC voted no on the Rooney vote because of this.”

In other words, if the GOP had put forth a stronger anti-Libya resolution, the progressive Democrats would have joined them and it would have passed. Despite what Clinton or other administration officials may say, the bill’s failure cannot be seen as an endorsement of the Libya war. ~Josh Rogin

This makes sense of the voting patterns among those Republicans known to be opposed to the war on constitutional and other substantive grounds. For example, Justin Amash, Ron Paul, Jimmy Duncan, and Walter Jones are all among the Republicans who voted against both resolutions on Friday. Had the “defunding” resolution actually defunded the war, they would have voted in favor. Like the progressives Rogin mentions in his post, these antiwar conservatives opposed the “defunding” resolution because they saw it as effectively authorizing almost everything U.S. forces are doing right now. As Rogin explained, this objection to the “defunding” resolution was a major factor in explaining its defeat. Rogin quotes Rep. McClintock to this effect:

“This bill purports to cut off funding for combat in Libya. In doing so it simply forbids what the constitution already forbids, the waging of war without explicit congressional authorization. But then it specifically grants to the president what up until now he has completely lacked: Congressional authority to engage in every conceivable belligerent act short of actually pulling the trigger.”

“Refueling bombers on their way to targets, identifying and selecting targets, guiding munitions to their targets, logistical support, operational planning… these are all acts of war in direct support of belligerence at war and this bill authorizes them,” he said. “Let’s not enter a war through the backdoor when we have already decided not to enter it through the front.”

This gets to the heart of the issue, which is whether or not Congress is willing to accept the bogus claim that the U.S. military is not engaged in hostilities when it is providing refueling, surveillance, logistical support, and planning in support of an ongoing war effort that would not be feasible without that support. The good news from Friday’s votes is that the House has not authorized the Libyan war in any form, and it has specifically rejected the argument that actively supporting a war effort does not constitute involvement in hostilities. The bad news is that the House GOP leadership keeps trying to find ways to divert discontent in the House into symbolic protest votes or backdoor authorizations, which suggests that they will continue trying to block any measure that would meaningfully halt U.S. participation in the war.

Juan Cole misunderstands the significance of the House votes:

Whatever its domestic meaning, the vote undeniably sent unfortunate signals abroad. You have to wonder whether, for good or ill, the vote is the end of NATO. The US House can hardly ask the British and French to risk their young soldiers’ lives in Afghanistan if it can’t be bothered to vote to help defend the latter’s aircraft over Libya.

If Libya proves to be the end of NATO, or at least the last military intervention carried out under NATO auspices, it will be because of the pressure by the U.S. and Britain to “hand off” command and control of the war to the alliance when most of its members did not want to become involved in Libya. Members of the House did not put NATO’s reputation and future on the line in Libya. The administration did that when it opted to reduce the U.S. role and abuse the alliance to coordinate the ongoing attack on Libya. Making the Libyan war into a NATO operation has provided the intervening governments with some useful political cover, and it has been especially useful for the administration and the House leadership to use as a bludgeon against opponents of the war. Britain and France insisted on intervening in Libya, and the U.S. made it possible for them to do so, and if France had had its way NATO would never have become involved. For its part, the administration made commitments to Britain and France that it had no authority to make, and now it may end up paying the price for that overreach.

This has never had anything to do with European contributions to the war in Afghanistan. When it made a primarily Anglo-French expedition into a NATO operation, the administration has created a phony issue that the U.S. must remain involved in Libya for the sake of NATO. Much like the administration’s claim that the U.S. is not currently engaged in hostilities in Libya, the claim that the U.S. must continue in the Libyan war for the sake of the alliance is false and fundamentally dishonest.

NATO has flown 12,000 sorties and hit more than 2,400 targets since launching strikes against Libya under a United Nations mandate to protect civilians. The attacks are small compared with those in the 78-day Kosovo campaign that defeated Serbian aggression in 1999 [bold mine-DL]. The total number of NATO sorties flown then was 38,000.

“NATO has not yet achieved the result it did in the Kosovo campaign. But it is using only a third of the number of aircraft [bold mine-DL]. Deploying small teams of air controllers or special forces on to the ground could allow air attacks to better co-ordinated with the rebel forces,” said Ben Barry, land warfare fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies. ~The Daily Telegraph

I have said something along these lines before, but one of the huge flaws of the Libyan war has been that the U.S. and its participating allies have been attempting to achieve a much more ambitious goal of regime change with far fewer resources than they used in Kosovo. Unsurprisingly, the Libyan war has already dragged on for almost a month longer than the Kosovo war did, and there is no reason to expect it to come to an end very soon. Obviously, the limited U.S. role in the war is one of the main reasons for the lack of resources the article describes. Meanwhile, U.S. and NATO forces have been operating under much greater restrictions on what they are allowed to do, and they are supporting a force on the ground that is even weaker and less effective than the KLA.

These comparisons are valuable, but they are also potentially misleading in that they suggest that it was the air campaign that forced Milosevic to withdraw Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, when it was Russian diplomatic pressure that made Milosevic yield when he did. The stakes for Gaddafi are much higher, and he has every incentive to fight on, so it would be wrong to expect a Kosovo-like “success” even if the U.S. and NATO were devoting greater resources to attacking Libya.

Despite all of this, we are treated to optimistic claims that “all the trends favor the rebels.” This is not obviously true, as renewed rocket attacks on Misurata show, and it is also the wrong way to measure whether or not the Libyan war has been worthwhile and justified. If the war is being fought to protect Libyan civilians, it loses its justification if it can’t do that or if it makes things worse than it would have been otherwise. As the war has dragged on, the entire civilian population has been suffering from shortages, and the intervention is prolonging the conflict with no end in sight. This is one reason why Italy has broken with the other intervening governments in calling for a cease-fire to facilitate humanitarian aid. Earlier this month, the International Crisis Group issued an extensive report on the Libyan war, and strongly recommended negotiating a cease-fire to make humanitarian aid available to the population.

The ICG report’s executive summary stated the following:

Although the declared rationale of this intervention was to protect civilians, civilians are figuring in large numbers as victims of the war, both as casualties and refugees, while the leading Western governments supporting NATO’s campaign make no secret of the fact that their goal is regime change. The country is de facto being partitioned, as divisions between the predominantly opposition-held east and the predominantly regime-controlled west harden into distinct political, social and economic spheres. As a result, it is virtually impossible for the pro-democracy current of urban public opinion in most of western Libya (and Tripoli in particular) to express itself and weigh in the political balance.

At the same time, the prolonged military campaign and attendant instability present strategic threats to Libya’s neighbours. Besides fuelling a large-scale refugee crisis, they are raising the risk of infiltration by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, whose networks of activists are present in Algeria, Mali and Niger. All this, together with mounting bitterness on both sides, will constitute a heavy legacy for any post-Qaddafi government.

Thus the longer Libya’s military conflict persists, the more it risks undermining the anti-Qaddafi camp’s avowed objectives. Yet, to date, the latter’s leadership and their NATO supporters appear to be uninterested in resolving the conflict through negotiation. To insist, as they have done, on Qaddafi’s departure as a precondition for any political initiative is to prolong the military conflict and deepen the crisis. Instead, the priority should be to secure an immediate ceasefire and negotiations on a transition to a post-Qaddafi political order.

According to the criteria for justifying military action under the R2P doctrine, the intervention must not make things worse for the population that it is supposed to be protecting:

Military intervention is not justified if actual protection cannot be achieved, or if the consequences of embarking upon the intervention are likely to be worse than if there is no action at all [bold mine-DL]. In particular, a military action for limited human protection purposes cannot be justified if in the process it triggers a larger conflict. It will be the case that some human beings simply cannot be rescued except at unacceptable cost – perhaps of a larger regional conflagration, involving major military powers. In such cases, however painful the reality, coercive military action is no longer justified.

The ICG report’s assessment suggests that actual protection has not been achieved. The consequences of the intervention have likely made things worse than they would have been otherwise. Each day that it continues, that verdict becomes more certain.

Micah Zenko provides a useful summary of the most prominent secondary justifications offered for the Libyan war. One of these was that the intervention would easily succeed:

A final proposition put forward by intervention proponents was that, ultimately, it would not be very hard to achieve the desired end state. Whether based on recent technological advances or the fragile nature of loyalist security forces, such best-case scenario thinking was evident on both sides of the Atlantic. Libya’s rebels encouraged the Western assumption that Qaddafi could be deposed with ease.

Of all of the dubious, debatable arguments for the Libyan war, this was the least credible, but the error in assuming that the intervention would be easy affected interventionists’ judgment about the war’s overall justification. When judging whether or not the intervention had a reasonable prospect of success, the mistaken assumption that the intervention would be successful and finished quickly tilted the balance in favor of war. A less optimistic, more realistic assessment of the chances of quick success would have made intervention appear much less desirable, because it would have forced interventionists to consider the potential for greater harm that the intervention would do by prolonging and intensifying the conflict.

Bolton’s presentation concluded the way the chant usually concludes, which is that because “diplomacy has failed,” the only “realistic alternative” is to use military force preemptively [against Iran]. And also as usual, he said absolutely nothing about all the ways in which diplomacy has not yet been tried. ~Paul Pillar

While I was in Florida, I happened to find a copy of George Kennan’s The Fateful Alliance in a used bookstore. Kennan addresses exactly this problem of leaders and officials who treat the next war as both inevitable and ultimately more desirable than the alternatives. Kennan was investigating the history of the creation of the Franco-Russian alliance, which later contributed greatly to the start of the general European war in 1914, but his observations apply very well to the habitual American saber-rattling directed at Iran. Kennan wrote:

In the history of the negotiation of the Franco-Russian Alliance one can witness the growth of a whole series of those aberrations, misunderstandings, and bewilderments that have played so tragic and fateful a part in the development of Western civilization over the subsequent decades. One sees how the unjustified assumption of war’s likelihood could become the cause of its final inevitability. One sees the growth of military-technological capabilities to levels that exceed man’s capacity for making any rational or intelligent use of them. One sees how the myopia induced by indulgence in the mass emotional compulsions of modern nationalism destroys the power to form any coherent, realistic view of true national interest. (p.257)

As Pillar explains very well, the idea of launching a war with Iran is madness, which is what makes the conviction of Bolton and other Iran hawks that there must someday be a war launched against Iran so disturbing. It is this conviction, which seems to be widely shared among many officials and politicians of both parties, that may lead some future administration to follow through on the statement that an Iranian nuclear arsenal is “unacceptable.” When Iran hawks say often enough that “the only thing worse than a war with Iran is an Iranian nuclear weapon,” they have preemptively rejected every other policy option except for war in the event that Iran acquires such a weapon, and they are guaranteeing that any crisis resulting from an Iranian nuclear test (should one ever take place) would lead inexorably to war. Presumably, no diplomatic resolution will be acceptable during such a crisis, because it will have become conventional wisdom that diplomacy has already failed, despite having hardly been attempted.

Prof. Luigi Zingales was one of the most articulate opponents of the TARP financial bailout in 2008. I citedhis arguments against the TARP when I was arguing that it was a terrible mistake. Because I respect his judgment on these matters, it is a little surprising to me that he wrote an article endorsing Paul Ryan as a desirable presidential candidate. Prof. Zingales wrote (via Aaron Goldstein):

Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan says that he’s not running, and I assume he means it, but the GOP clearly needs a candidate more like Ryan than like Mitt Romney, currently the party’s leading candidate and a favorite of the establishment. A candidate in Ryan’s mold, from the Jack Kemp tradition of libertarian conservatives who helped make the GOP great, would be a strong believer in free markets who is not beholden to the bailout-addicted big-business establishment. This kind of candidate, if the GOP could only find him, could win in 2012 and help get the nation’s economy back on track.

I have no idea why Prof. Zingales believes that Paul Ryan is “not beholden to the bailout-addicted big-business establishment.” Paul Ryan voted for the TARP, and has given no indication as far as I know that he believes that this vote was a mistake. On the question of bailouts generally and the TARP in particular, Ryan and Romney are essentially indistinguishable. One can either conclude that Ryan abandoned “the Jack Kemp tradition of libertarian conservatives” that Prof. Zingales praises, or one can accept that Ryan’s support for the TARP didn’t matter, but I don’t see how Ryan wins anyone’s support as an anti-establishment foe of bailouts.

Our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan’s independence from the Taliban. ~Mitt Romney

I understand the sentiment to which Romney was so blatantly pandering during the New Hampshire debate, but at the same time I am puzzled by his statement. The war against the Taliban is not a “war of independence” in any meaningful sense. Afghanistan’s independence has never been at stake, because Afghanistan’s independence has been severely compromised for much of its history and continues to be so to this day. On one side, there is the prospect of Pakistan’s dominance of an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban, and on the other there is an Afghanistan dominated by Tajiks more closely aligned with Iran. Whether or not the U.S. and NATO depart from Afghanistan after having claimed victory, Afghanistan’s independence will continue to be limited by what its neighbors want from it. Romney’s description of this as a “war for independence” treats one of these arrangements as if it were genuine Afghan independence, when that is not and has never been in the cards. It seems that this was Romney’s bungled attempt to express skepticism about U.S. support for foreign causes without being able to articulate why this support was misguided.

Alex Massie noticedthis bit of silliness at National Review before remarking:

I’m sure you too are persuaded by the many parallels between London 1940 and the Afghan War today. As is customary, it’s not clear which is worse: the Churchill Fetish or the (presumably) deliberate hackery.

The Churchill Fetish is always worse, because it is always, always such uninformed, nostalgic hero-worship for a man his American admirers don’t know very well. A close second is the refusal to understand that we cannot possibly judge limited wars by the standards of earlier, global total wars, and we shouldn’t want to judge them this way. In many respects, it is better that the government has never been seeking total victory and unconditional surrender in Afghanistan. Not only would these things not be forthcoming without vastly greater losses and expense (and perhaps not even then), but the obsession with total victory and unconditional surrender inherited from WWII is something that prolongs wars for much longer than they need to go on. This is a legacy of the earlier era of mass mobilization and conscription for wars between whole nations, but these are not the wars that Western governments are fighting today. If we cannot adjust and lower our expectations of what limited wars can accomplish accordingly, it would be better if we avoided them all together.

Yet for someone whose campaign has already adopted a view prioritizing global issues, and whose announcement in front of the statue of liberty this week was purposefully constructed to spark recollections of Ronald Reagan’s run against Jimmy Carter, Huntsman’s publicly-expressed foreign policy views seem to have more in common with Carter than with Reagan. ~Ben Domenech

Many conservative pundits of various stripes have a bad habit of invoking Reagan as supporters of policies that Reagan would not have supported in real life, but hawks are often the worst offenders when they pretend that Reagan would have supported whatever policy they happen to prefer. It is questionable whether Reagan would have endorsed an open-ended American mission in Afghanistan in the first place, but it seems likely that he would not have favored Obama’s escalation of the Afghan war. Considering his willingness to withdraw from Lebanon, it is hard to treat Reagan as someone who would insist on “staying the course” no matter what. Setting Reagan aside, what is obvious is that Huntsman is representing the views of a significant part of the GOP in his position on Afghanistan (as well as his position on Libya).

Republican opinion on Afghanistan is now quite divided. No position commands overwhelming support within the GOP, but according to Pew withdrawal as soon as possible even has the backing of 43% of Republicans. Supporters of total withdrawal, some “counter-terror” half-withdrawal, or the administration’s stated policy of a much slower, more limited withdrawal all have a claim to representing some part of the contemporary Republican Party, and all of them can draw on Republican foreign policy views from the last thirty years to defend their positions. Huntsman’s preference for a “counter-terror” policy is one that many other Republicans share. I have disagreed with that position in the past, and I still regard it as the worst of both worlds, but other Republicans that Domenech will have to dismiss as having “more in common with Carter than Reagan” include those from George Will to Dana Rohrabacher to Jason Chaffetz. It’s a ridiculous position for Domenech to take, but it is typical for hawks to issue denunciations of this sort instead of making arguments for the merits of the policy they favor.

Domenech says near the end of his post:

One does not have to accept the view of Washington’s neoconservative elite in order to take a view of America’s role in the world that has been consistent in the Republican Party since the post-Nixon era.

That’s true, which is why it is bizarre that Domenech would make support for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan into a litmus test for what makes someone a real Republican on foreign policy. Virtually the only other people on the right who believe that it should be treated as a litmus test are neoconservatives and their allies in Washington. Huntsman is re-introducing an internationalist, Republican realist perspective into the debate, and in the process he is proving that he “does not have to accept the view of Washington’s neoconservative elite in order to take a view of America’s role in the world that has been consistent in the Republican Party since the post-Nixon era.”

Update: According to Rasmussen’s new poll, 40% of Republicans favor either immediate withdrawal (24%) or total withdrawal within a year (16%). A very slim majority of Republicans opposes a timetable (51%).

Second Update: Josh Trevino manages to avoid the substance of this post entirely. Asusual, Trevino misrepresents what I have said here. This post has nothing to do with thinking Huntsman is “great.” I don’t support or even like him. I am responding to Domenech’s laughable attempt to define what it means to belong to the modern foreign policy tradition of the Republican Party.

Trevino also misrepresents my views on the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, and he resorts to the cheap, lazy, and untrue “apologist for Putin” charge. I have maintained from the time that the war broke out until now that the Georgian government was responsible for escalating the conflict, which produced the entirely predictable Russian reaction, but I also said at the time that the Russian response after it expelled Georgian forces from South Ossetia was excessive and wrong. No one disputes this latter point, but Saakashvili’s defenders in the West regularly deny the first. No one should ever trust Trevino to describe my views with any accuracy.