Earlier this month, Marco Rubio gave his first floor speech as a U.S. Senator. Ross described it as “a paean to national greatness,” which I suppose it was, and it is entirely in keeping with the hawkish interventionist line Rubio has been pushing since last year as a candidate. Since coming to the Senate, Rubio has become the retiring Joe Lieberman’s appointed heir and successor as the most recklessly ideological militarist in Congress, which he confirmed again with the joint op-ed he wrote with Lieberman on the Libyan war earlier this week. We need to approach Rubio’s speech with this in mind, because it is very important that we recognize Rubio’s anti-declinism as an implicit call for continual, unending conflict with the rest of the world. Like John McCain, Rubio promises to be an advocate for perpetual war. Just as McCain misrepresents anything short of support for perpetual war as “isolationism,” Rubio wants to portray it as an embrace of American decline. Like Paul Ryan, Rubio absurdly exaggerates and then overreacts to the dangers that come with what he describes as decline. Here is a sample:

If America declines, who will serve as living proof that liberty, security and prosperity can all exist together?

Today, radical Islam abuses and oppresses women. It has no tolerance for other faiths, and it seeks to impose its will on the whole world. If America declines, who will stand up to them and defeat them?

Today, children are used as soldiers and trafficked as slaves. Dissidents are routinely imprisoned without trial. They’re subjected to torture and forced into confessions and labor. If America declines, what nation on the earth will take these causes as their own?

What will the world look like if America declines? Who’s going to create the innovations of the 21st century?Who will stretch the limits of human potential and explore the new frontiers? And if America declines, who will do all these things and ask for nothing in return?

Motivated solely by the desire to make the world a better place?

Whenever Rubio refers to American decline, we need to remember that what he means by this is that the U.S. will not attack other countries, intervene in their internal conflicts, or attempt to dictate the pace and content of political developments abroad as much as the U.S. does right now. In other words, what Rubio calls decline is what many of us would call a return to normal, or at least a reduction in the number and frequency of foreign conflicts and entanglements. What Rubio calls American decline is what many other nations around the world would refer to as being left alone.

In fact, the decline Rubio describes won’t prevent the U.S. from being that “living proof” of the co-existence of liberty, security, and prosperity. It is quite conceivable that both American liberty and security would be enhanced when our government concentrates its “defense” policies on nothing but the defense of the U.S. and those allies that America will have for limited periods of time. There are many states that already combat jihadist militants on their own soil at great cost, and because most of them are fighting largely in self-defense they are going to continue doing so no matter what the U.S. does or does not do. Something that believers in Rubio’s particular version of American exceptionalism seem to take for granted is that the rest of the world is largely hopeless without constant, direct American involvement in their affairs. If that was ever true, it isn’t any longer. It is flattering to us to believe that other successful nations have become successful only by basking in the reflected glory of American light, as Rubio claims at the end of his speech:

You see, these nations, these new emerging nations, these new shining cities, we hope they will join us, but they can never replace us. Because their light is but a reflection of our own.

The rest of the world increasingly doesn’t need the U.S. in the way that it did in the past. Most nations are simply not going to cooperate with an international order premised on the idea that they must remain forever under American tutelage and direction. For their part, Americans are understandably tired of a role that has become outdated and redundant.

P.S. I should add that the conviction that the U.S. government is motivated “solely by the desire to make the world a better place” is not just untrue, but for those who believe this it means that there is no definable limit on what the U.S. should be trying to do to “make the world a better place.” In an era of austerity, Rubio is proposing that the U.S. engage in infinite meliorism for the whole world. Not only can the U.S. not afford this, but there is no nation that ever could.

In his column on Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, Ross cited a quote from the recent profile of Sen. Paul in The Weekly Standard:

Whereas Ron Paul criticizes U.S. interventionism in tropes familiar to the left — anti-imperial blowback, manipulation by neocons, moral equivalence — Rand Paul merely says America doesn’t have the money.

Ross was using this as evidence that Rand Paul “has smoothed the crankish edges off his famous father’s antiwar conservatism, reframing it in the language of constitutionalism, the national interest and the budget deficit.” Both the quote and the distinction between the two Pauls struck me as basically inaccurate. For one thing, Ron Paul’s criticism of U.S. intervention is also framed in terms of constitutionalism, national interest, and the overall fiscal burden imposed by overseas commitments. He does go beyond that to argue that intervention overseas is a cause of terrorism, which is hardly a trope familiar only to “the left.” Until the Iraq war made it so, the harmful influence of neoconservatives in shaping U.S. foreign policy was not at all familiar to “the left.” The charge of “moral equivalence” is another way of saying that Rep. Paul holds the U.S. government accountable for its actions, and he doesn’t suspend moral judgment when our government engages in illegal or outrageous behavior. This isn’t moral equivalence, but the application of moral and legal standards to the conduct of the U.S. government. The “moral equivalence” charge is one that hawks like to use to suggest that their domestic opponents believe that the U.S. is “the same” as repressive dictatorships or terrorist groups. It is a scurrilous charge, and it ought to be dismissed as such.

Dan Drezner claimed that the “real turn” in Republican views was on trade, and cited Tim Pawlenty’s lame appeal to fair trade as proof of this. The trouble is that Pawlenty was indulging in the latest bit of Republican pseudo-populism, and he has no intention of supporting anything like what trade skeptics would call “fair trade.” How do we know this? He endorsed all of the pending free trade agreements in his economic speech, including the genuinely undesirable trade agreement with South Korea. Pawlenty’s call for fair trade is a bit like his overall economic proposal: gear all of the major proposals for the benefit of corporations and wealthier individuals, and round out the speech with some sentimental appeals to his Midwestern working-class background in the hopes that most voters won’t notice that he offers to do little or nothing to serve their interests.

Whatever the respect that must be accorded to Putin’s Russia — given that it is vast, nuclear, rich with oil, and still a strategic player — it is hardly a society analogous to the new democracies of Eastern Europe such as Poland or the Czech Republic. But in all discussions about the thorny issues of missile defense, that fundamental fact was lost. It was almost as if Russia’s past anger at the U.S., and Eastern Europe’s support for the Bush administration, earned the one respect from the Obama administration, and the other suspicion. It seems too surreal to even suggest the following, but it is nevertheless likely: The degree to which a nation opposed the United States between 2001 and 2009 now wins it exemption from judgment; the degree to which it once supported us earns it present distrust. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Hanson has made some version of this argument for most of the last two years, and it still doesn’t seem to bother him that it is painfully wrong. It was not lost on anyone that Poland and the Czech Republic are democratic members of NATO and Russia is an illiberal authoritarian state. It doesn’t matter to Hanson that the missile threat against which the Polish and Czech installations were supposed to be defending didn’t exist. It doesn’t give him pause that most Poles didn’t want the installation, or that the Polish government’s decision to accept the arrangement was part of a confrontational foreign policy with its neighbors that the current government has been steadily working to undo. Poland’s relations with its neighbors, including Russia, are much better today than they were in 2008, and the decision not to proceed with the missile defense plan contributed to this desirable outcome.

On top of all of this, the decision removed an unnecessary, pointless provocation, and U.S.-Russian relations have since improved considerably to the benefit of both countries. In addition to being the correct one as far as American interests are concerned, the missile defense decision has so far not had any obviously negative effects on the security or interests of the two allies that the decision supposedly “sold out.” Indeed, far from “selling out” these allies, the decision has allowed them to resume more normal, less antagonistic relations with Russia than would have been possible had the missile defense installation gone ahead as planned. Instead of making them into front-line states that would become the focus of Moscow’s ire, the decision freed them from commitments to a plan that actually made them less secure.

Hanson seems to think that a substantive decision on where or whether to place missile defense installations ought to be driven primarily by the degree of ideological sympathy we have with the governments in the region. Presumably, if Russia were a liberal democratic state and its smaller neighbors to the west were all authoritarian regimes, Hanson would insist that U.S. policy favor Russia regardless of whether that policy serves U.S. interests. Likewise, he seems to judge such decisions not according to whether they enhance or damage U.S. and allied security, but whether they send ideologically appropriate signals of solidarity with other democratic governments. It hardly needs to be said that this way of judging decisions on security policies is absurd.

While I have been away, Republican opposition to the Libyan war has intensified, and at the first New Hampshire primary debate the candidates generally expressed support for withdrawal from Afghanistan as quickly as possible. The flurry of predictable “isolationist” charges followed as usual. When those inevitably proved bogus, since there are no isolationists alive today (and arguably there have never been any actual isolationists), there were the charges of opportunism and partisanship. Of course, it is true that partisanship is a major factor in explaining new Republican skepticism of military intervention, just as it was a major factor in accounting for the sudden, odd collapse of the antiwar movement after Obama’s election. Chait explains:

Republicans have a hawkish faction that supports every military intervention, and Democrats have a liberal faction that opposes every military intervention. But large numbers of both parties make their decision about any particular intervention based on whether they trust the president — which means whether he’s in their party or not.

That’s true. Most Republicans became increasingly critical of Clinton’s military interventions as time went on because their distrust and indeed contempt for him eventually exceeded their instinct to support military action. That is certainly part of what is happening again now. Trust in Obama’s judgment has been a significant reason why so many liberals have fallen in line on Libya, or at the very least they have muted their criticisms of the war. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the President’s partisans assume that he knows what he’s doing. This is how otherwise astute critics of the Bush administration give Obama the benefit of the doubt when he engages in illegal warfare or claims unreviewable authority to order the assassination of U.S. citizens.

I have long been very skeptical when some Republicans suddenly rediscover prudence and restraint in foreign policy as soon as their party no longer controls the White House, because I have assumed correctly that opportunism and partisanship explained almost all of this. Since opportunism and partisanship explain almost all of it, there is normally no reason to attach undue significance to it, and it will change back to the old pattern as soon as the out-party takes over. There has nonetheless been something unusual about the GOP reaction to the Libyan war. The customary support for military action once it has begun, the standard deference to the executive on matters of national security, and the normal acquiescence to outrageous executive abuses of authority that we expect from almost all Republican politicians are noticeable by how lacking they are among House Republicans and many presidential candidates.

When I described a shift in conservative attitudes towards military intervention a few weeks ago, I wasn’t arguing that the shift was huge, but I would insist that it is significant. I was careful not to make extremely broad claims that this proves that the GOP is undergoing a massive shift on foreign policy, much less that it is going to be reliably non-interventionist or antiwar in the future, but there is some real movement going on. It is important to emphasize that the actual antiwar votes for the Kucinich resolution in the House represented a minority of Republicans, and the most vocal opponents of the Libyan war among the 2012 candidates are generally considered second-tier or long-shot candidates. Even so, the number of antiwar votes was remarkably high, and the number of candidates opposed to the Libyan war is much greater than anything we’ve seen in the past. Republican and conservative opinion on military intervention has never been monolithic, but until recently skeptics and opponents of such policies have been almost completely unrepresented in Congress and in presidential debates.

The difference between the field of candidates now and in 1999-2000 is real. Despite similar partisan reactions to Kosovo in 1999, there were hardly any opponents of the Kosovo war among the Republican candidates in the 2000 race. This time there are almost as many opponents as there are supporters. On one level, the candidates are taking advantage of the fact that the Libyan war has incredibly weak support from the public, and that is a product of the public’s general weariness with foreign conflicts. Romney clumsily pandered to war weary voters in the first debate, but if there is one thing we can learn from his pandering it is the mood of the voters inside the GOP.

Up until now, Romney has been doing his best to make himself appear as hawkish as possible, but he seems to be picking up that this is not what most Republican voters want to hear. Huntsman is attempting to repeat McCain’s 2000 and 2008 strategies, but he is doing so by running as a less hawkish internationalist. Despite the best efforts of activists and pundits to build up Pawlenty as an acceptable alternative to Romney, he continues to languish at the back of the pack. Bachmann has found an opening for a message that is at once nationalist, anti-Obama, and critical of unnecessary war, and so far she has been flourishing at Pawlenty’s expense.

We can also detect some shifts in the party’s mood in Congress. Twelve years ago, Sen. Lugar was a vocal supporter of bombing Yugoslavia, and he once insisted that NATO had to go out of area or “go out of business,”* but he has nonetheless been one of the leading critics of the Libyan intervention and he has criticized it on both constitutional and strategic grounds. It is probably not a coincidence that Lugar faces a primary challenger and will be running for re-election next year. Lugar has had a generally very close relationship with the administration on foreign policy, so it is all the more remarkable that Lugar has chosen to use Libya as an issue that separates him clearly from Obama. There is broader bipartisan support for the Libyan war in the Senate than in the House, but there is more vocal opposition there on the Republican side than one would expect.

Finally, when Ross writes a column in which he sides with Rand Paul over Marco Rubio on foreign policy, something has definitely started changing for the better on the right.

* Of course, if Lugar’s formulation was right, the proper response to this was to let NATO go out of business.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be away on vacation for about two weeks. Before I go, let me point you to my new column on Syria.

This had been expected for some time, but the timing of the withdrawal announcement by Norway comes as an unintended rebuke to Secretary Gates’ hectoring of European allies:

Meanwhile, Norway’s government says it will scale down its fighter jet contribution in Libya from six to four planes and withdraw completely from the NATO-led operation by August 1.

Defense Minister Grete Faremo said she expected understanding from NATO allies because Norway had a small air force and cannot “maintain a large fighter jet contribution during a long time.”

On one level, this confirms what Gates was saying about the lack of military capacity, but it also points to the absurdity of turning the Libyan war into a NATO mission when even some of its most willing members cannot sustain a prolonged military campaign on the other side of the Mediterranean. In fairness to the Norwegians, they have been more heavily involved in the Libyan war than all but a few members of NATO and they have more than done their share, but it seems unlikely that there are any governments that are going to fill the gap that Norway will be leaving.

The “hand-off” to NATO in Libya was always a way to maintain prolonged U.S. involvement in the Libyan war by another name, which allowed the administration to pretend that the U.S. role did not amount to participation in ongoing hostilities. This has put significant additional military and political strains on the alliance at a time when there is already stiff resistance to increased military spending in Europe. By dragging NATO into a war that had nothing to do with members of the alliance or their security, the U.S. and Britain especially are overburdening the alliance with demands that both governments know the other allies cannot meet, and what is worse they are doing it for the sake of a military campaign that doesn’t even serve the purpose of the alliance. For the foreseeable future, calls for increased military spending are going to be linked in the eyes of European governments with ill-conceived “out of area” operations. European governments are going to continue to be at odds over their respective roles in Libya, and those divisions are likely to become even deeper if the Libyan mission drags on or ends badly. All of this makes it that much less likely that hitherto skeptical governments will support efforts to improve European defense cooperation.

P.S. In a more pointed rejection of Gates’ criticisms, the Dutch still refuse to participate in the bombing campaign.

A successful economic speech, one rival’s campaign implosion and another’s decision to skip an influential Iowa straw poll has given Tim Pawlenty a very good week. ~Michael O’Brien

Perhaps we are using different definitions of successful, but wouldn’t a successful economic speech be one that was not mockedby conservatives as wishful thinking and fantasy? It’s true enough that Pawlenty has entered the good graces of The Wall Street Journal editors with his tax proposals, but that is not automatically going to win him many admirers in Iowa. Now that Romney has decided that he will skip the straw poll, that potentially makes it easier for Pawlenty to gain some ground, but it also raises expectations that he will do that much better. It’s not as if Romney is giving up on Iowa entirely, and Romney knows very well the limited value of spending time and resources on winning the straw poll.

Should Gingrich’s implosion lead to a Rick Perry candidacy, as many have been speculating since yesterday, Pawlenty may find himself in greater difficulty than he did before. The implosion of Gingrich’s campaign revealed a candidate who is not terribly serious about his presidential bid, so Pawlenty is probably worse off now if he has to head off a challenge from a much more formidable candidate in Perry.

Besides, Pawlenty has more than Romney and Gingrich to worry about in Iowa. Antle is right in his assessment of the importance of Iowa for Pawlenty. He is also correct that Pawlenty has yet to move into the top tier, and he is in danger of remaining behind several of the other “marginal” candidates. Should Perry enter, there is no particular reason why Pawlenty would become the “plausible” alternative to Romney.

In an unusually stinging speech, made on his valedictory visit to Europe before he retires at the end of the month, Gates condemned European defense cuts and said the United States is tired of engaging in combat missions for those who “don’t want to share the risks and the costs.” [bold mine-DL]

“The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources . . . to be serious and capable partners in their own defense [bold mine-DL],” he said in an address to a think tank in Brussels. ~The Washington Post

It may be obvious, but Gates’ two examples of non-U.S. NATO failings have nothing to do with European defense. Certainly, the limitations of European military power show that their governments remain dependent on the U.S. for security, but there are few worse ways to persuade European governments and publics that they have the wrong priorities than to lecture them on their insufficient support for Afghanistan and Libya. While the non-U.S. NATO allies pledged support to the U.S. after 9/11, European nations have no particular security interests in achieving U.S. goals in Afghanistan. If the American public has soured on the war in Afghanistan and doesn’t understand its purpose, imagine how baffling it must be to Europeans to have their soldiers in Central Asia. European governments have continued to support the war in Afghanistan long after they were obliged to do so, and despite lending support that they don’t have to provide they are routinely lectured for not doing enough.

As for Libya, it is important to remember that the governments that have contributed nothing to the war never wanted to attack Libya, and they wanted to keep NATO out of it all together. Gates directed his ire at several of these governments the other day, as if Germany, Poland, and Turkey should be expected to pitch in to support a military campaign they explicitly opposed. These are not the governments that wanted the U.S. to engage in combat missions in Libya, because they didn’t want any outside government taking military action in Libya. What Gates should have acknowledged when faced with the refusal of German, Polish, and Turkish governments to participate in bombing Libya is that Libya is not properly a matter for NATO and should never have been a NATO mission. Many of the most significant military powers in Europe saw no good reason to intervene in Libya. It’s absurd to expect that they would “share the risks and costs” of yet another mission that has nothing to do with European security. There is a solid argument to be made that European governments should devote more resources to providing for European security, but using the examples of Afghanistan and Libya is sure to confirm in the minds of European skeptics that increased military spending will simply lead to participation in missions that have nothing to do with that security anyway.

P.S. As Greg Scoblete points out, massive U.S. military spending, American insistence on remaining a European power, and exercising an oversized “leadership” role in Europe give European governments every incentive to keep military spending low.

Goldberg, as far as I can tell, entirely misread the series. There’s no big shift where he sees one. Yes, I’m sure Ron Moore was conscious of what was going on in the real world while he put together his series (and I’ve only occasionally read interviews with him, so I don’t know what he thinks he was doing), but as far as I can see it’s just perverse to assume that the human insurgency against the Cylons he was so upset about was supposed to represent the Iraqi insurgency against the US, with Americans cast as the evil Cylons [bold mine-DL]. ~Jonathan Bernstein

This was my viewatthe time. It is almost five years since I watched the third season for the first time, and I know full well how disappointing the series proved to be, but I still believe that it was always absurd to read an Iraq war analogy into the occupation of New Caprica. Obviously, there were parallels, because the experience of occupation and insurgency is going to have some common features that all depictions of these conflicts share, but it’s ridiculous to push it beyond that.

As Bernstein explains, Ron Moore has been working with these themes for years before the invasion of Iraq:

As I’ve said before, the two shows have a lot in common; BSG is basically, in its themes, a DS9 with much, much, better acting and without the constraints of the Star Trek universe….And you know what? In that series, made well before the Iraq disaster, insurgency/occupation is a major recurring theme. Indeed, the specific things that Goldberg thinks are transparently about Iraq (insurgents as good guys, imperial overlords who can’t quite believe that the natives can’t appreciate them) are very much present in the earlier, pre-Iraq show. One of the central characters in DS9, real white hat, is a former terrorist — indeed, that’s the word that’s used to describe her.

Indeed, the insurgency/occupation aspect of DS9 was one of the more interesting and creative things about the show. The station itself was a holdover of past Cardassian occupation, and as Bernstein says the Bajoran liaison officer was a former resistance fighter/terrorist who had fought to kick the Cardassians out. The Maquis subplot was an interesting one that forced the audience to think about the unintended consequences of peace agreements and the legitimacy of armed resistance to unjust rule, and it confronted the audience with the conflict between maintaining international peace and supporting the aspirations of people who had once been fellow citizens. The use of the name Maquis to refer to the anti-Cardassian resistance was perhaps a bit too heavy-handed of a WWII reference, but it was an obvious and intentional one.