Now, if you believe these rights are universal human rights, then that clearly forms the basis of your views on foreign policy. It leads you to reject moral relativism. It causes you to recoil at the idea of persistent moral indifference toward any nation that stifles and denies liberty, no matter how friendly and accommodating its rulers are to American interests. ~Paul Ryan

I have read this section of Ryan’s speech several times, and I keep trying to come up with a word to describe it other than fanatical, but that is the word that springs to mind each time. Consider the sort of agitated, puritanical mentality that one would have to have to believe what Ryan is saying here. This is the sort of destabilizing zealotry that is very good at promoting disorder and upheaval, but not good for much else.

Minding our own business isn’t moral indifference, and it comes from having a clear understanding that a government’s duties are to its own people, and that these duties don’t extend to other nations. Failing to mind our own business often leads to inflicting injustices and injuries on other nations, and it is small consolation that these have been inflicted with good intentions or in pursuit of high ideals. Not interfering in the affairs of other nations is not an endorsement of the social and political conditions in other countries. The decision to interfere not only takes for granted that there are universal human rights that all states must respect, but that our government has a responsibility to penalize states that fail to do so. Ryan also seems to show no concern for whether or not “promoting our principles” leads to better or worse outcomes than the status quo. In this respect, he is an unusually reckless Wilsonian.

Ryan’s speech suffers from the enduring contradiction of hegemonism when it is joined to democratism. Ryan would have the U.S. remain the global hegemon (the world would become a chaotic mess otherwise), but he would also insist that it be U.S. policy to undermine major allies that facilitate that role and push for democratization in those allied countries ruled by monarchs and dictators:

For example, we share many interests with our Saudi allies, but there is a sharp divide between the principles around which they have organized their state and the principles that guide the United States. Increasingly, we hear voices in the Kingdom calling for reform. We should help our allies effect a transition that fulfills the aspirations of their people.

“Help our allies.” This is amusing phrasing, since the allies in question want no such help, and would very much prefer it if our government stopped encouraging such ideas. As things stand now, relations with most of the Gulf monarchies have deteriorated significantly, and they started deteriorating rapidly when the U.S. merely encouraged Mubarak’s fall from power. Pushing allied governments to accept transitions that will mean the end of their tenure or radical change in their political systems is a good way to lose allies or to replace them with new governments that are far more likely to be neutral or aligned with other states. No less important, the states that are pushed into such transitions might turn into failed states, or the new governments might prove to be even worse for the people living under them than what they have now.

Ryan goes on to say:

We have a responsibility to speak boldly for those whose voices are denied by the jackbooted thugs of the tired tyrants of Syria and Iran.

Why? It’s not at all clear that “we” have any such responsibility. It may or may not be the wise thing to do. If “we” speak boldly for oppressed people in those countries, is the encouragement that provides more important than giving those governments additional pretexts for portraying their dissidents as foreign-backed? If speaking boldly provokes even worse treatment of dissidents, are “we” doing them any favors? Ryan seems oblivious to the possibility that “promoting our principles” may backfire to the detriment of other nations and the U.S.

Many people seem to havetaken Paul Ryan’s historically ignorant, ideological foreign policy speech as evidence that he may be considering a run for President. Michael Barone practically begs him to commit political suicide rise to the occasion, and in his recent conversation with Ryan urged the Budget Committee chairman to read Paul Rahe’s plea. Rahe is deadly serious that Ryan has a “duty to serve,” and he explains why:

Ryan is something different. He has attained a stature that no Congressman in my lifetime has achieved. When I cast my mind back in the past in search of comparable figures, I can come up with only two – James Madison in the First Federal Congress, and Henry Clay, when he was Speaker of the House. There were no doubt others, but the list is not long, and I doubt whether there would be anyone on it who served in the last hundred years.

This might be overstating things just a tad. Before we can say that he has attained such great stature, won’t he have to get one of his plans passed and signed into law first? Many profiles of Ryan mention that Jack Kemp was his mentor. Wouldn’t it help if he had a legislative accomplishment to his name that is at least as significant as anything Kemp did? If Ryan is one of the greatest members of Congress since Madison and Clay, it might be worth remembering that Clay didn’t win the presidential election he contested, and Madison’s turn as chief executive was somewhere between mediocre and an unmitigated disaster. Based on the dangerous, ideological foreign policy Ryan outlined in his speech, a Ryan Presidency would certainly have the potential for the latter. That said, a Ryan Presidency is not in the cards, and all of the people saying otherwise have been doing him an enormous disservice.

Update: Jonathan Bernstein comments on the idea of a Ryan bid:

Political scientists usually argue that issues and candidate are usually not all that important as fundamentals such as economic performance. But Ryancare is a different matter altogether: Nominating Ryan would make the election an argument over the GOP’s least popular policy proposal, instead of a referendum on the economy, which would be the GOP’s best chance of winning.

My next column will discuss the Libya resolution votes, and that should be online early next week, but I did want to make a few remarks today. Obviously, it’s unfortunate that Boehner and the House leadership arranged to divert Republican frustration into a meaningless, symbolic vote that changes nothing. The encouraging thing is that 87 Republican House members voted the right way on the Kucinich resolution in spite of that. The Kucinich resolution failed 148-265, but well over half of the yeas were Republicans. The roll call of the vote is here. I am usually very skeptical of apparently antiwar moves by most elected Republicans, and I make a point of doubting antiwar rhetoric when it comes from their members of Congress, so it is a rare occasion when I can point to a demonstration of what seems to be a genuinely significant protest against a bad policy and an illegal war. It was not enough, but it’s much better than I had expected.

Update: The column is now online.

Speaking ofimagining a world led by elves and wizards, Jeffrey Anderson has written up a 2012 Electoral College analysis that is so other-worldly that it might as well refer to the politics of Ansalon:

Among top-tier prospective nominees, Ryan would have the biggest geographical advantage in a race against Obama. To win the presidency, Ryan would just have to win his home state and hold GOP-leaning Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. That would be it: election over, Obama defeated, Ryan’s pen poised to sign the Obamacare-repeal legislation.

Where to start? Ryan isn’t a top-tier prospective nominee. He’s not any kind of prospective nominee. Does anyone seriously believe that the Wisconsin electorate is going to vote for Ryan for President? Assuming that Ryan ran, somehow won the nomination, and managed to run competitively in other swing states (we are once more in elves-and-wizards territory), his identification with Medicare reform would definitely make him unpopular in his home state. This is not a guess. According to a PPP poll from last month, he is increasingly unpopular in his home state after becoming identified with Medicare reform:

The survey finds Ryan with a personal favorability rating of 41%, with 46% unfavorability. In a hypothetical presidential match-up, President Obama leads Ryan by a margin of 50%-43%.

Ryan does benefit a little from being a native, and he runs ahead of some of the other well-known Republicans against Obama, but it isn’t nearly enough to imagine that Ryan could pull Wisconsin into the Republican column. This is one more reason why I don’t understand the enthusiasm in some Republican circles for a Ryan presidential run.

Anderson carefully avoids this problem by citing more favorable numbers from a March PPP poll from Wisconsin:

Ryan’s advantage in Wisconsin as a home-state candidate would fundamentally change the dynamic in that “must win” Democratic state. A Public Policy Polling survey in March showed Ryan having a higher net favorable rating in Wisconsin among independents, among Republicans, and among all respondents, than any other prospective GOP candidate included in the survey. Additionally, Wisconsin borders three other states in play: Michigan, Minnesota, and the important toss-up state of Iowa.

This doesn’t work out very well if there is no advantage for Ryan in Wisconsin. All of this seems to overlook the small problem that Obama will still be from Illinois. There aren’t many modern precedents where the major party nominees hailed from neighboring states, and it’s not clear why putting up a nominee from the same region as the incumbent is actually smart electoral politics.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this choice. In The Weary Titan, Aaron Friedberg–one of the founders of the Hamilton Society–has shown us what happened when Britain made the wrong choice at the turn of the 20th century.

At that time, Britain’s governing class took the view that it would be better to cede leadership of the Western world to the United States. Unfortunately, the United States was not yet ready to assume the burden of leadership. The result was 40 years of Great Power rivalry and two World Wars. ~Paul Ryan

Via John Tabin

I have not read this book. Despite that, I am fairly confident that Ryan is describing its argument incorrectly. For one thing, the British governing class between 1895 and 1905 did not “take the view” that “it would be better to cede leadership of the Western world” to the United States. This was the time of Salisbury’s government when the British were as overconfident and aggressive in their empire-building as ever. Britain wasn’t inclined to give way to U.S. “leadership” in the years leading up to WWI.

As a matter of economic power and cultural influence, one could argue that the U.S. surpassed Britain in some respects after the war, but this was hardly something that the British wanted. Rather, at that point they did not have much of a choice, and had to put up with the severely reduced resources that they had after the war. The Great Power rivalry in Europe had been going on for more than half a century by 1914, and it had nothing to do with the U.S. failing to “assume the burden of leadership.” Had the U.S. become more directly involved in this rivalry earlier on, it would have complicated the alliance structure, but it would not have eliminated the causes of the rivalry. The notion that the U.S. would or could exercise “leadership” outside the Western Hemisphere was still a very new and controversial one before entry into WWI, and as a result of the Spanish War the U.S. was being pulled more into the Pacific.

One of the critical failures of British foreign policy in 1914 was that it delayed taking sides during the July crisis and then threw its weight behind France and Russia, which helped halt the German advance in 1914 and ensured that the war would be very long and destructive. It is possible that British neutrality would have avoided the prolonged catastrophe that WWI became, and it would certainly have saved Britain millions of lives and avoided massive debt. Niall Ferguson has also made this argument in The Pity of War. If WWI wrecked Britain and sent it into decline, we may say that British decline was a choice of sorts, but it was partly the result of incompetent diplomacy during a crisis that led to recklessly committing Britain to a foreign war. What Ryan and those like him see as the “exercise of leadership” is often enough the cause of a state’s decline.

If the title is any indication, Friedberg’s book refers to relative decline. Relative decline does not have to be a choice. It is something that can happen to the preeminent world power despite its best efforts. America today is experiencing relative decline mainly because of the successes and growth of other states. We couldn’t prevent this even if we wanted to, and there is no good reason that we should want to do that. This is what Zakaria was attempting to explain in his frequently misunderstood Post-American World.

So Paul Ryan sets up his entire speech around what appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of early 20th century history. He then continues it with a bit of fear-mongering:

Take a moment and imagine a world led by China or by Russia.

All right, but what would be the point? The world isn’t going to be led by China or Russia. Russia doesn’t have the economic base or the inclination to “lead” the world, and China is surrounded by major and rising powers that have no interest in following China’s “lead.” Yes, Russia can use its energy resources to wield influence in Europe, and its influence will likely increase thanks to Germany’s decision to abandon nuclear energy, and China will become the main regional power in East Asia, but there are significant political and economic limits to what these governments can and will do abroad.

Later in the speech, Ryan goes on to declare that “America is an idea.” Many people treat it as though it were, but it isn’t. America is our country. Americans share a certain set of political principles or assumptions, but these are not what make us Americans, or to be more precise we would continue to be Americans and this would continue to be America without them. Ryan goes on to make an even more absurd claim:

America’s “exceptionalism” is just this – while most nations at most times have claimed their own history or culture to be exclusive, America’s foundations are not our own – they belong equally to every person everywhere.

This just isn’t true. If other nations choose to follow the example that Americans have set, they may do so, and if they come to accept the same principles that Americans have we can take some satisfaction in this, but America’s foundations are quite obviously our own. To say otherwise is to indulge in a lot of ideological fantasizing. If this is what American exceptionalism is, I rather doubt that there are quite as many Americans who believe in it as Ryan imagines.

Update: Checking Friedberg’s book on Amazon, I found an important passage from his preface in which he makes the comparison between late 19th/early 20th century Britain and late 20th century America:

There is no simple prediction or lesson to be derived from these facts. To take the most obvious possibility, just because the erosion of Britain’s position (albeit by fits and starts) from the end of the nineteenth century down through the twentieth does not mean that the United States will necessarily suffer a similar fate. Not all relative declines are irreversible, nor does a loss of relative advantage inevitably lead to a change in absolute status [bold mine-DL].

Later in the book, Friedberg does discuss how Britain ceded supremacy in the Western Hemisphere to the United States (p. 174), and British leaders had accepted it as a foregone conclusion that America would achieve naval supremacy in the western Atlantic (p. 197). That’s clearly not what Ryan means when he’s talking about “leadership of the Western world.” Friedberg describes the policy of Britain towards the United States between 1895-1905 in terms of accommodation. This is true. This accommodating posture was the result of U.S.-British detente following the Venezuelan boundary dispute of 1895-96. Salisbury agreed to settle that dispute by arbitration–oh, what appeasement!

I have only just quickly searched Friedberg’s book, so perhaps Ryan’s reading of it is not as wrong as it seems to be, but it appears that Ryan has not really understood the book’s argument or the historical period he is using for his cautionary tale.

Second Update: Greg Scoblete lets Ryan have it on his warnings of Russian/Chinese hegemony:

While we’re at it, we can imagine a world led by elves and wizards because that’s just about as likely to happen as a world “led” by China or Russia.

Third Update: Daniel Trombly has read The Weary Titan, and has this to say of Ryan’s speech:

Larison noted he hadn’t read Friedberg’s book. I have, and it is even more apparent to me Ryan missed the point. Firstly, as Larison pointed out, Britain did not choose to turn over “leadership” to the United States, or even “leadership of the Western world.” The Western world did not have a leader in the late 19th and early 20th century, it just had a foremost power, the British Empire. Britain’s main competitors over the 19th century – France, Russia, and Germany – were within the Western family of nations. In fact, Britain looked outside the center of Western civilization, Europe, to the United States and Japan not to turn over leadership of a Western community within which significant enmity existed, but to reduce the burdens of Britain’s commitments in the Western Hemisphere and Asia so Britain could focus more efforts not on leading but deterring its fellow members of Western civilization.

Friedberg’s argument was not that Britain made the wrong choice by choosing to decline, it was that it made the wrong choices to cope with the political reality of relative decline. Friedberg was writing in the context of the debate which Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers revived: how to cope with imperial overstretch? The Weary Titan was not challenging the conventional thesis that Britain had to decline, because historical analysis demonstrated it was in decline, but the thesis that Britain had responded to this decline with elegance and made the best of it. Indeed, a significant part of Friedberg’s argument is that Britain did not properly assess the reality of its decline, relied on poor national measures for calculating national military and economic power.

Mitt Romney officially announced his presidential candidacy today. Foreign policy was not a major theme of the announcement, and perhaps Romney now understands that he does best on this subject when he sticks to generalities and cliches. Looking at his campaign website, I checked the foreign policy part of its issues section to see how Romney is presenting his positions. Not surprisingly, those positions are a mish-mash of the unremarkable and the terrible. Probably Romney’s worst idea is his first one. He starts off making a general appeal for the importance of American soft power, which is fine as far as it goes, and then offers his new idea. That is where things go awry:

Our diplomatic and assistance efforts, however, are hampered by a complicated foreign policy bureaucracy that divides authority across agencies. Mitt Romney will place all diplomatic authority in a given region under the charge of one envoy [bold mine-DL]. This will ensure accountability and effective, unified strategies.

This was one of the bad ideas Romney proposed in No Apology. Spencer Ackerman summed up the problem with this idea when he reviewed the book last year:

The concept of diplomacy is completely foreign to Romney. He dismisses the State Department as “assistant secretaries and… bureaucrats” and proposes designating regional relations to “one individual” who would become a “presidential envoy or the ambassador from CENTCOM or any of the other regional military commands.” Such an individual would “encourage people and politicians to adopt and abide by the principles of liberal democracy,” something that “would be ideal if other allied nations created similar regional positions, and if we coordinated our efforts with theirs.” That’s it for diplomacy, and he doesn’t have an agenda for global development. Why the world will simply do what America says simply because America says it is something Romney never bothers to consider. High school students at model U.N. conferences have proposed less ludicrous ideas.

I wasn’t expecting Romney to abandon this idea entirely, but it is odd that he makes it into one of the three main sections of his foreign policy page. What about the other two? The second set of proposals is filled with boilerplate calls for more military spending and modernization, plus a call for an increase in the number of soldiers. Almost everything in this section seems misguided to me, but Romney isn’t trying to get my vote anyway. It’s in the third section where Romney truly outdoes himself:

Fast-track NATO admission for our allies

Bolster our support for Israel, which has always been and will continue to be our strongest ally in the Middle East.

Building on NATO, establish a global military alliance of democracies dedicated to ensuring security and protecting freedom.

Refrain from criticizing allies publicly and without consultation.

NATO doesn’t need to expand any more, and those few countries that might still be considered as prospective members are either ill-suited to the alliance or don’t want to join. Indeed, Ukraine’s government has passed legislation forbidding it from joining any military alliance. Georgia may continue to aspire to NATO membership, but that is never going to happen. Which allies does Romney mean here? Another round of expansion is highly unlikely, and an attempt to make the process of bringing in new members even faster is not going to win over European allies that don’t want to bring in any more ex-Soviet states.

As for bolstering support for Israel, how is it possible to bolster it more than it already is? Presumably, this is related to the fourth point concerning criticism of allies, which means that a Romney administration would be even more reflexively supportive of Israel and publicly uncritical of all allies no matter what. It appears that Romney is taking hawkish support for allies to a new extreme. The global “alliance of democracies” is a revival of the “global NATO” concept that has gone precisely nowhere for a reason: many of the largest and most powerful democracies around the world want no part of it. Non-Western democracies don’t share U.S. and European priorities, and they are going to take very different views about what “ensuring security and protecting freedom” will involve. In a post-Libya world, there is even less appetite for this sort of armed democratic posse.

That’s it. As of right now, that is the whole of Mitt Romney’s foreign policy as a presidential candidate. Aside from passing mentions of “three hot wars, looming threats, and a military mission spectrum that now includes humanitarian relief,” Romney has essentially nothing to say about the vast majority of foreign policy issues. Granting that this is just a campaign website and not a policy essay, this still seems badly lacking.

It never occurred to me that someone would try to defend Pawlenty’s unfortunate Iran/Iraq blunder from last week, but here’s John McCormack giving it his best shot:

Yes, Pawlenty referred to Iraq as Iran multiple times, even after saying “You’re talking about Iran?” But considering the noise and the convoluted question, the gaffe wasn’t much of a gaffe. To anyone who’s spent three minutes talking to Pawlenty about foreign policy, Chait’s suggestion that the former Minnesota governor has difficulty grasping the difference between Iraq and Iran is pretty ridiculous.

All right, let’s be generous and assume that someone aspiring to become President of the United States eight years after the invasion of Iraq understands the difference between Iran and Iraq. That’s very reassuring! As Chait notes, he didn’t just get the name of the country wrong, but rattled off an entire answer about Iraq to a question about Iran. If Pawlenty knows the difference between the countries, he kept it well-concealed in this encounter.

The reporter had a slight accent, and the question wasn’t as clear it might have been, but it was not all that convoluted. The reporter was asking Pawlenty to reconcile the U.S. desire to contain Iran with one of the effects of the Iraq war, which is that Iran now has greatly increased influence in Iraq. Even though Pawlenty’s rehearsed answer could have been tied into answer addressing Iranian influence in the region (“U.S. forces need to remain in Iraq beyond the end of the year to prevent Iran from dominating it”), he didn’t make that connection. He may not have even understood the premise that the Iraq war has made Iran more influential inside Iraq. In fairness, his answer took less than a minute. Perhaps it takes the full three minutes for Pawlenty’s foreign policy expertise to become apparent.

Setting aside Pawlenty’s blunder, let’s consider the substance of the answer that he gave. If we grant that he meant to refer to Iraq and Iraqis and got his wires badly crossed, that doesn’t make the answer much better. Pawlenty believes that U.S. forces should remain in Iraq (though he said Iran) beyond the end of this year, and he said the U.S. should accept an invitation from the Iraqis (whom he called Iranians) if they invite our forces to stay. This is the position one would expect from a hawkish Republican, and it happens to match up with what Gates has recommended, and it is also a terrible idea. In addition to the fact that the Iraqi government absolutely wants U.S. forces gone by the end of the year, it is more than likely that a new insurgency would start up if U.S. forces remained beyond that date. More important than Pawlenty’s confusion is that he is endorsing an unwise proposal to keep American soldiers in Iraq beyond the date agreed upon by the U.S. and Iraq.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Thursday said it appears increasingly likely that Republicans will join anti-war Democrats Friday in demanding an end to U.S. involvement in the civil war in Libya.

The House is expected to take up a resolution by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) calling for an end to the U.S. operations in the NATO-led campaign in Libya.

House Republicans are set to meet Thursday afternoon to discuss Libya and whether they should back Kucinich. Cantor said GOP support is clearly driven by the lack of a clear mission and the “seeming disregard of the role that Congress plays under the Constitution. I think that’s very real for our Members.”

In an interview with Roll Call on Thursday morning, the Virginia Republican said support for the resolution “could go either way” and that he bluntly warned President Barack Obama of the situation Wednesday morning during a meeting on the debt limit.

“I told the president, ‘you have a real problem with our members in Libya.’ I told him ‘the Kucinich resolution is coming up and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if it passes, because people are upset,’” Cantor said. ~Roll Call

The strange thing about the way the administration has handled this since March is that Congress would have likely signed off on the Libyan war if it had been asked to debate and vote on it. There must normally be enough Republican hawks and reliable Democratic partisans that they could have pushed through an authorizing resolution without too much difficulty. The remarkable thing is that the sheer contempt that the administration has shown for our law and representative institutions may have finally alienated enough people to turn them against a military intervention that they might otherwise have supported.

Members of Congress haven’t been clamoring to go on record before now, but as the war drags on, and as more people realize that the decision to intervene was unwise and unrelated to American security, there seems to be more of an interest in taking a public stand. Bypassing Congress may have been temporarily useful at the time, but the administration failed to consider the possibility that Congress might assert itself and seriously complicate matters later on. Presidents have become so accustomed to paying Congress little more than lip service in matters of war that the administration seems to have thought that it could get away with ignoring Congress almost completely. It would be very encouraging if this is not the case.

If the Kucinich resolution passed, that would be great news, but I have to wonder if it would change anything in the near term. The administration would have a problem if it just ignored it and flouted it, but it is already ignoring and flouting the law, so why wouldn’t they do the same to the Kucinich resolution? The resolution directs Obama to withdraw U.S. forces from the war within a specified period of time, but the administration clearly pays no heed to deadlines set by Congress. I suppose at that point the war’s defenders would have a harder time making excuses for the illegality of the war, but the war is already blatantly illegal and it hasn’t stopped them yet. The war continues to be funded out of the Pentagon budget that has already been appropriated, and presumably the administration will just keep doing that for as long as it can. It would be extremely embarrassing for Obama if the resolution passed, but the administration’s contempt for the law is such that I doubt it would actually end U.S. involvement. Then we’ll see how far members of Congress are really willing to go to reclaim some of their lost authority.

Update: Politico reports that the House GOP leadership is drafting an alternative to the Kucinich resolution, and there will be a vote on it tomorrow.

Second Update: The Pentagon is complaining that passing the resolution would “send an unhelpful message of disunity.” Perhaps the civilian leadership in this administration should have thought of that before launching an arbitrary, illegal war.

Carey, the former Bachmann chief of staff who now supports Pawlenty, worries that Bachmann will again prove to be a burr in Pawlenty’s saddle by inadvertently throwing the nomination to Mitt Romney. He compared Bachmann to former Sen. Fred Thompson, who took enough votes away from Mike Huckabee in 2008 to allow John McCain to carry the key state of South Carolina.

“My concern with Michele is that she fragments the conservative vote and then somebody like Romney, who is the moderate in this year’s primaries, is able to thread the needle,” Carey said. “Her emotionally charged campaign is going to steal enough votes early in the process that it opens a pathway for someone like Romney.” ~Politico

The Bachmann-Thompson comparison doesn’t work very well here. Thompson grudgingly got into the race after being practically begged to jump in by conservative pundits and activists, and Bachmann is getting into the race when party and movement elites would prefer her to stay out. Pawlenty is clearly seeking to be the broadly acceptable conservative alternative to Romney, and in this respect he is very much like Romney in 2007-08. Romney’s plans to defeat McCain were upended by Huckabee coming out of nowhere, winning Iowa, and becoming the main alternative to McCain in South Carolina, which is more or less what Pawlenty’s supporters now fear Bachmann could do to him in his contest with Romney. She can outflank him on the right on fiscal and social issues, and she has stronger connections with pro-life and Tea Party activists than he does. As the article explains, she is an activist who happens to be in elected office. Even if she doesn’t win Iowa, she has the potential to do better than Pawlenty. Were that to happen, it’s not clear what reason Pawlenty would have for continuing his campaign.