Jim Antle writes that Gary Johnson is “badly positioned to make a credible presidential run,” and Dan McCarthy adds that he is “setting himself up to play the libertarian stock villain in the GOP’s quadrennial opera buffa.” They’re both right, but I have to admit that this is part of what I find appealing about the prospect of a Johnson candidacy. He isn’t just badly positioned–he’s horribly positioned, but there’s a chance that he might run anyway and have a salutary effect on the primary contest. His candidacy would force debates on civil liberties, foreign policy, and the drug war, which are all subjects where most of the other likely candidates hold misguided and sometimes appalling views. The rest of the field will all be officially pro-life*, but perfectly content with the idea of starting wars, detaining suspects indefinitely, and perhaps even torturing detainees when “necessary.” The contrast would be useful and instructive, and it might even lead some pro-life voters to insist that their leaders show more consistent respect for human life. All right, that last part is pretty unlikely, but it couldn’t hurt to try.

On a more serious note, I admit that I am more puzzled than repelled right now by Johnson’s apparent endorsement of humanitarian interventions. My first impression is that he hasn’t fully thought through the implications of what he’s saying. Let’s look at what Johnson says:

If there’s a clear genocide somewhere, don’t we really want to positively impact that kind of a situation? Isn’t that what we’re all about? Isn’t that what we’ve always been about? But just this notion of nation building—I think the current policy is making us more enemies than more friends.

These are rhetorical questions for Johnson. Obviously, he believes the answers to all of these are yes. It’s hard to know why Johnson believes that this is “what we’re all about,” since there isn’t much in American history that would lead anyone to conclude that humanitarian interventions are at the core of who we are as a nation. It doesn’t make much sense to support humanitarian intervention and oppose nation-building. Whatever outside power chooses to intervene in the internal affairs of another nation will end up taking on responsibilities for security after the intervention is over, and typically this will be paired with civilian reconstruction efforts, diplomatic engagement with the various political factions in the country, and an attempt to sort out an enduring post-conflict political settlement. Based on Johnson’s opposition to nation-building, I conclude that he wouldn’t actually be very interested in launching humanitarian interventions, since these interventions would inevitably lead to the nation-building that he sees as unacceptable. Humanitarian intervention really makes no sense on its own terms if there is no effort to follow it up with political stabilization, and Johnson seems to see that follow-up effort as misguided.

One of the other problems with this position is that it is often not “clear” that a genocide is taking place. Even when it is “clear,” it is not always certain that outside intervention would halt the killing, but might instead lead to its intensification. There is a presumption that outside intervention can meaningfully resolve or end these conflicts, when in most cases it will merely interrupt them until the intervening forces depart. In order to engage in a successful preventive intervention, the U.S. would have to involve itself before the policy and intentions of the government or group in question became “clear,” which would make the case for intervention extremely difficult and vexed. For that matter, this reason for intervention has been horribly abused, leading to the entirely unjustified 1999 war against Yugoslavia, and it is difficult to separate the idea of humanitarian intervention from that grossly illegal war, especially when most of the champions of humanitarian intervention and the “obligation to protect” remain dedicated supporters of that war. The strangest thing of all is that Johnson is coming around to see the virtue of humanitarian interventions at a time when humanitarian interventionism is meeting with a lot more skepticism among some of the people who previously endorsed it. As Mark Mazower wrote in World Affairs Journal earlier this year:

To the more ardent interventionists, such considerations represented pure legalism when set beside the chance to topple a dictatorship and prevent mass murder. But the more thoughtful of them have come to realize that the way leaders treat their people is not the only problem that counts in international affairs. On the contrary, if the history of the past century showed anything, it was that clear legal norms, and the securing of international stability more generally, also serve the cause of human welfare. Let alone the fact that it is much easier to destroy institutions than to build them.

One reason I’m not instantly put off by Johnson’s answer is that it doesn’t really fit with anything else he’s saying. If Johnson’s positions generally put him on the side of respecting international law and state sovereignty, which they seem to do, I am far less worried that Johnson would be willing to intervene militarily in another nation’s internal conflicts. Compared to everyone else in the likely GOP field, none of whom opposed invading Iraq and most of whom want to attack Iran, Johnson seems far less likely to support violating another country’s sovereignty for any reason. If Johnson wants to decrease military spending by half, or at least by some large amount, he is arguing for a significantly reduced ability to project power around the globe. A policy preference for humanitarian interventions requires the ability to project power quickly to many different places around the globe, and absent an extensive network of clients and bases that becomes much more difficult. Johnson’s interest in reducing military expenditures dramatically seems to be much greater. In the end, he doesn’t seem interested in willing the means to achieve the end he endorses, which suggests that his support for humanitarian intervention is not as deep or significant as it might seem at first.

* It is worth noting that Johnson’s position on abortion is actually the one that is basically consistent with the view of constitutionalists:

But as a matter of law, Johnson thinks Roe v. Wade should be overturned. “It should be a states issue to begin with,” he says. “The criteria for a Supreme Court justice would be that those justices rule on the original intent of the constitution. Given that, it’s my understanding that that justice would overturn Roe v. Wade.”

On the main question of appointing justices to the Court and his view of the relevant case law, Johnson is no different from most conventionally pro-life Republicans.

It is fitting that the first significant legislative struggle since the midterms concerns the extension of the Bush tax cuts. One of the stories some conservatives told themselves in 2010 was that the Tea Party movement had succeeded in getting the Republican Party “out from under Bush.” This has become a recurringtheme in Peggy Noonan’s columns in the last few months. According to the new received wisdom on the right since 2006, it was principally Bush’s spending that harmed GOP fortunes, and the Tea Party was supposed to represent a reaction against this. “The tea party rejected his administration’s spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so,” Noonan wrote back in October. Granted, for many Tea Partiers, they became only too willing to say so beginning in 2009, but at least they said something.

Fresh off of a significant electoral victory aided in part by the Tea Party movement, what has been the first and most pressing priority of the Republican leadership? To make sure that the deficit-expanding tax cuts they failed to pay for in the Bush years continue to increase the deficit in the future, and to make sure that they don’t pay for them now. On the whole, the tax cuts were arguably the one Bush administration policy at home that satisfied most conservatives, and if this continues to be true we will have confirmation of just how little conservatives are concerned about adding to the debt even now.

It is certainly true that the Tea Party movement opposes tax increases, but it is also supposed to be interested in bringing public debt under control. The leadership has made clear that it is quite happy to add significantly to the debt through tax cut extensions, payroll tax cuts, and continued spending. Bush-era habits of spend-and-borrow have resumed within weeks of the midterms that supposedly represented the repudiation of these habits. Will the new members of the House and Senate rebel against this rapid return to the old ways? If Tea Partiers and conservatives are at all serious about reducing the debt, they need to make sure that they do.

Ross:

Given the parlous state of the economy, it makes sense to maintain the low Bush-era tax rates, it makes sense to extend unemployment benefits, and it makes sense to temporarily drop the payroll tax rate … if, that is, our leaders use the time between today and 2012, when this bargain comes up for renegotiation, to make real progress on a strategy for long-term deficit reduction, joined to a base-broadening, rate-lowering tax reform package that renders the debates over the Bush tax cuts obsolete.

In other words, the deal makes sense if Obama and the GOP will prove themselves to be fiscally responsible stewards working in the national interest. So the deal doesn’t really make sense. As Ross explains, the last administration and this one have been very good at pushing through big, expensive legislation. The Bush administration failed completely to pay for anything it did. There is no reason to expect anything better this time around.

The deal does provide a useful contrast with the federal wage freeze theater we saw earlier in this session. Phony deficit hawks love this sort of theater, because it allows them to oppose spending without opposing enough of it to run real political risks. When it came down to it, and there was a decision to be made between deficit reduction and deficit expansion, both the White House and the GOP chose the latter. Certainly, it’s helpful to be reminded immediately that Republicans in Congress are incorrigible and fiscally irresponsible. That can save their supporters the trouble of going through the time-consuming and embarrassing phase of expecting something different from Bush-era behavior.

As for Obama, he has managed to adopt and then abandon a pretense of deficit hawkishness in a relatively short period of time, which has served to annoy his core supporters without having any redeeming value on policy substance. Thanks to this deal, he has added one more charge of embracing “centrist” governance in a country where most of the public actually loathes the products of “centrist” governance from the last decade.

The most tiresome response to this deal I have seen is the claim that it somehow helps Obama with “the center” because the left is unhappy about it. It seems clear to me that he has put himself in the position of being identified with the interests of the wealthy and powerful yet again, which has been one of the administration’s problems for two years. Something like two-thirds of the public favored letting the top rate go up, and that includes the precious voters of “the center,” and Obama has now effectively taken the very unpopular side of this debate.

Too-clever-by-half interpretations of this hold that Obama is playing a cunning long-term game. However, it is never cunning to abandon a core commitment, disillusion one’s most active supporters, and cede an opponent everything he wants from a relative position of strength in the hopes that the opponent will later be easier to outmaneuver after he has become even stronger. “Centrist” and conservative pundits who have been urging Obama to capitulate on this issue are rather like Gollum urging Frodo on into Shelob’s lair. “No, really, this is the right way to go!” Obama’s defenders on this are reduced to saying that the lair could have been a lot worse. Provided that he isn’t eaten by the spider, all will be well.

It’s worth noting that the argument for voting on START now contradicts the positive spin some Obama supporters are trying to put on the deal. The administration has correctly argued for voting on the treaty now. This is not just because it is important and should be ratified as soon as possible, but because they assume that five more Republican votes are more than enough to kill it outright. They take for granted that everything, including a treaty that has overwhelming consensus support, will be far more difficult to move through the Senate next year, and obviously the new Republican House will be even more combative. Everything gets much harder for Obama over the next years, and he is already giving in to the opposition before the new Congress has met.

People who insist that Obama is playing a long game haven’t taken account of the fact that, politically speaking, Obama has been steadily losing the long game for most of the last year. They are also overlooking the reality that Obama and the Democrats frittered away their advantages for much of the year, which hardly inspires confidence in anyone that they are going to become more effective once they are weaker.

This explanation [anti-American sentiment] is not on firm footing: the group of voters were from a set of countries that are ordinarily relatively friendly to the United States. Of the 22 nations represented, 7 are members of NATO, and 5 others — Argentina, Egypt, Japan, South Korea and Thailand — are designated as major allies by the Department of Defense. This list does not include other countries like Brazil and Switzerland that have also traditionally enjoyed strong relations with the United States.

Certainly, the 22 individuals representing these countries may not have held the United States in the same high regard as their governments officially do. But they were not from countries, by and large, that would seem to hold a grudge against the country. ~Nate Silver

Why Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup beat the U.S. bid is not really very important, but when I came across this passage from Silver’s post on the subject I was a bit puzzled. There may have been much more straightforward reasons for Qatar’s success related to the internal politics of FIFA, but it makes sense that a U.S. bid would run into significant resistance from FIFA representatives from Europe and “Argentina, Egypt, Japan, South Korea and Thailand.” With the possible exception of Thailand (and arguably not even there), all of those nations have mixed or hostile attitudes about America and American influence, and those attitudes probably become more negative when it comes to soccer. Resentment towards the U.S. in Egypt, Japan, and South Korea is fairly easy to explain, and in Argentina many people associate the collapse of their economy ten years ago with the neoliberalism associated with America. Depending on the political leanings of the individual representatives, these resentments might be weaker or stronger, but what would be strange is if they were not present.

Missing from Silver’s discussion is the statement from FIFA’s President Sepp Blatter earlier this year that “The Arabic world deserves a World Cup. They have 22 countries and have not had any opportunity to organise the tournament.” Incidentally, Blatter also serves as Switzerland’s delegate, so that would explain Switzerland’s vote. Blatter also praised Qatar’s earlier hosting of the Asian Games, and the head of the Asian Football Confederation (who is Qatari) endorsed Qatar’s bid earlier in the year. It doesn’t seem so odd that other Asian countries would back Qatar’s bid, especially when other Asian competitors, South Korea and Japan, have both hosted the Cup in the recent past. If there was an understanding that Qatar was the favorite Asian bid, and Qatar’s bid also provided an opportunity to give the tournament to an Arab country, which the head of FIFA told everyone months ago, we needn’t assume that Qatar won the final round to spite us. Neither should we find it surprising that representatives from the countries in question were unenthusiastic about a U.S. bid.

Finally, we shouldn’t assume that Qatar’s bid is some travesty of the sport (for those who care about the sport) or proof that FIFA has shown itself to be a ridiculous organization (for most Americans who pay attention to the World Cup and soccer mostly for the sake of mocking them). As one soccer blogger for ESPN noted in April of this year:

The Qataris already have much hosting experience, of course. This coming January, just six months after the finals in South Africa, they will host the best Asian football nations in the Asian Cup 2011.

You could seriously argue that if Democrats approve extensions of all the Bush tax cuts, it would be as big a cave-in than George H.W. Bush’s cave-in on the 1990 budget. ~Dave Weigel

Yes, you could. Weigel is correct that it would be as big of a cave-in as that of George H.W. Bush in 1990, and it is already starting to be perceived as a cave-in on that scale. For conservatives who were already strongly inclined to see Bush as unacceptably moderate, the 1990 budget deal confirmed their fears, and more broadly it did enormous damage to Bush’s credibility. The “no new taxes” promise had not only been central to Bush’s effort to appropriate the mantle of Reagan, but when he broke that promise it also added to the general dissatisfaction with Bush’s domestic governance that many voters were starting to feel.

I would go beyond this to say that Obama’s cave-in on taxes will alienate more than vocal progressives. It could be far more politically damaging than that. This is not simply a matter of provoking the base with yet another compromise. This is a matter of abandoning a position that is widely and strongly held throughout his party. In some cases, Obama has angered progressives by doing exactly what he promised during the campaign, but in this case he would be openly repudiating one of the most prominent positions he took during the campaign.

We should understand that this has nothing to do with the policy merits or flaws of the decision to make such a deal. The 1990 budget deal was arguably an important and desirable one as far as fiscal responsibility was concerned, but it was (correctly!) perceived as a betrayal on a core promise. This deal happens to be both fiscally irresponsible and politically foolish, so it is difficult to see how Obama comes away from making such a deal without looking bad all around. What will make this deal seem even less palatable to his party is that it is one that Obama is agreeing to not because of an argument on the merits, since Obama clearly doesn’t believe that it is undesirable or unwise to raise taxes on higher earners, but purely as a concession to free up the rest of a limited lame-duck agenda. As a supporter of START ratification, I appreciate that Obama is doing what he can to try to have the treaty ratified, but there is every chance that the Senate GOP will extract the concession on tax cuts and then revert to additional delaying tactics on the treaty anyway. If Obama does somehow save the treaty in all of this, he will have the consolation that he achieved something valuable for the country, but politically he will have paid an enormous price.

Andrew responds to Weigel by saying:

He’s saying that he’d prefer to raise taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year, but cannot in this political climate at this particular time. Nothing prevents Obama from sunsetting them in their entirety if he wins re-election on a sturdier economy. And nothing prevents him from campaigning on long-term debt reduction from now on, as a way to restore the confidence that can keep the recovery moving [bold mine-DL].

It is questionable whether running on “long-term debt reduction” is politically advantageous, but assuming for the moment that it is Obama would have destroyed any credibility he may have had on this by agreeing to the extension of the tax cuts. What does he say? That he firmly believes we need to rein in debt when he just agreed to extend unaffordable tax cuts that significantly added to it? What a deal on these cuts shows is that Obama won’t hold firm when he still has the advantage of superior numbers in Congress, which tells us that he will probably be even more accommodating when one of the chambers is dominated by the other party. How does he argue that he will let the cuts expire in a few years’ time if he won’t do so now? If the recovery improves after he has capitulated, the GOP will take credit for having forced Obama to abandon his “job-killing” policies, and if it doesn’t Obama will face the same dilemma he does today with less credibility and fewer supporters in the Congress.

Writing the progressive version of a disastrous Caddell/Schoen “advice” op-ed, Michael Lerner proposes that the key to making Obama adhere to progressive positions is to launch a primary challenge against him from the left. As far as Lerner’s goals are concerned, this is madness, but his op-ed is useful as a corrective for the bizarre notion put forward by Noonan that Obama should capitulate completely on taxes because his relations with the left couldn’t possibly get any worse. As Noonan wrote:

This would further damage his relationship with the more leftward part of his base, but that can hardly be made worse, and a compromise would leave them angry anyway. In time they may become so horrified by the Republican House that they come to see the president more sympathetically.

Lerner’s op-ed is one piece of evidence that this is quite wrong. Obama has alienated progressives on a number of issues, but some of them are making it clear that extending all tax cuts will be one concession too many. Conservatives should understand the frustration progressives are feeling. Noonan is arguing that Obama should do what George H.W. Bush did in the 1990 budget deal: betray a core campaign pledge as part of a deal with the other party. Extending all of the tax cuts may be the right economic policy, but politically it is as perilous for Obama to extend all the tax cuts as it was for George “Read My Lips” Bush to agree to a tax hike.

Lerner’s argument fails in several ways. Its central flaw is the conceit that a primary challenge will “save” Obama rather than weaken him. Lerner writes:

But there is a real way to save the Obama presidency: by challenging him in the 2012 presidential primaries with a candidate who would unambiguously commit to a well-defined progressive agenda and contrast it with the Obama administration’s policies. Such a candidacy would be pooh-poohed by the media, but if it gathered enough popular support – as is likely given the level of alienation among many who were the backbone of Obama’s 2008 success – this campaign would pressure Obama toward much more progressive positions and make him a more viable 2012 candidate. Far from weakening his chances for reelection, this kind of progressive primary challenge could save Obama if he moves in the desired direction. And if he holds firm to his current track, he’s a goner anyway.

It was an appropriate expression of conservative discontent with the incumbent, but Pat Buchanan’s ’92 primary challenge against Bush did not significantly change how Bush campaigned or governed. Any sitting President that has faced a serious primary challenge has gone on to lose the general election. Bush in ’92, Carter in ’80, and Ford in ’76 were all defeated after heading off significant primary challenges. It is very hard to argue that any of these challenges made the incumbents stronger in the general election than they would have otherwise been.

It is possible that they were all “goners” anyway, and it could be that the primary challenges were just symptoms of existing weakness rather than causes of greater weakness, but what Lerner calls for has never worked and it is difficult to see how it could work. One can reasonably argue for backing a third party as a protest designed to move political debate in a certain direction, or at least as a statement of how unsatisfactory the major parties are, but in doing so one already accepts that this is usually going to harm rather than help the ideologically-closer major party candidate. Primary challenges usually don’t make general election candidates more viable than they already were, and Lerner cannot cite examples of presidential primary challenges that have done this because none of them has.

The second chief problem in Lerner’s argument is that he assumes that Obama would continue to hold and defend progressive positions once the pressure of the primary challenge is over. Based on what happened in 2008 and since, there is not much reason to believe that. If Obama continued his habit of accommodating his opponents, he would attempt to placate progressives with new promises, and then revert back to “centrist” campaigning and governing once re-nomination was secure. Even if Lerner were right that Obama needed to tack left and shore up progressive support to win, a primary challenge might force him to pay lip service to some of the things Lerner mentions, but Obama would then busy himself with appealing to independents and moderates by moving away from the things that he pledged to do during the primaries. The same pattern of unreasonable expectations, disillusionment, and bitterness that we have seen over the last three years would follow.

The most significant practical problem with Lerner’s proposal is that there seems to be no Democratic politician with any ambition of higher office who would run against Obama in 2012. Lerner rattles off a list of names, including a number of recently defeated House and Senate candidates, but it is hard to see why any of them would want the notoriety of being the one to try to impede Obama’s re-election. Anyone who did would face the constant criticism from his colleagues that he was facilitating Republican victory, and the critics would have a point. None of them wants to be responsible for undermining Obama and putting a Republican in the White House. Some progressive politicians dissatisfied with Obama might very well want to let Obama fall on his own, since they could explain his eventual failure as a result of too much compromise and accommodation with Republicans.

There’s only one credible reason to launch a primary challenge against Obama from the left, and that is because progressives have decided that there are not enough significant differences between Obama and his Republican opponents to justify supporting him for another term. Indeed, the only reason for progressives to launch a challenge against Obama is to try to take the nomination and the party from him. No sitting President who has sought re-nomination has been denied it by his party, so the real goal of a primary challenge would be to wound Obama enough to make him less viable and less competitive to express the degree of dissatisfaction with the party’s direction.

The cables show that for several years, as Georgia entered an escalating contest with the Kremlin for the future of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway enclaves out of Georgian control that received Russian support, Washington relied heavily on the Saakashvili government’s accounts of its own behavior. In neighboring countries, American diplomats often maintained their professional distance, and privately detailed their misgivings of their host governments. In Georgia, diplomats appeared to set aside skepticism and embrace Georgian versions of important and disputed events.

By 2008, as the region slipped toward war, sources outside the Georgian government were played down or not included in important cables [bold mine-DL]. Official Georgian versions of events were passed to Washington largely unchallenged. ~The New York Times

Eli Lake has continued this tradition of setting aside skepticism and embracing Georgian versions of events. He has reported on leaked cables from the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi, which was depending heavily on the Georgian government for its information and uncritically reporting back what the Georgians told our diplomats, and he has done this without doing much to contextualize the reports he is citing. The Weekly Standard‘s John Noonan is pleased by this:

Lake’s piece is a narrative buster. For the past two years, a growing false narrative has emerged about how the Russian invasion was morally reprehensible but ultimately “provoked by the Georgians.”

Actually, it isn’t a “narrative buster” or anything close to it. Pretty much everyone accepts that the Kremlin kept trying to bait Saakashvili into escalating the conflict over the republics, and that he was finally stupid and reckless enough to turn a manageable dispute into a full-scale war with disastrous consequences for South Ossetia and Georgia. U.S. policy of backing Saakashvili no matter how reckless and confrontational he became enabled him to wreck his country. Turning Georgia into a front-line state as part of a general anti-Russian policy backfired badly, and it was the Georgians who suffered because of this. The U.S. failure to question or doubt Saakashvili and his government was an important contributing factor to the escalation of hostilities in 2008. U.S.-Georgian relations between 2004-08 are an excellent example of what happens when a government combines unwise foreign policy and diplomatic malpractice.

Incredibly, our government’s practice of taking the Georgian government’s word at face value as reflected in these cables is now being cited as “proof” that the Georgian government was not responsible for the provocations it obviously engaged in. It was the Georgian government that escalated hostilities in August 2008, and one would expect that information derived from the Georgian government’s own views of previous episodes would tend to confirm a pro-Georgian interpretation of the years leading up to August 2008. As the NYT article reminds us:

The [OSCE] observers, in the heart of the conflict zone, did not report hearing or seeing any Ossetian artillery attacks in the hours before Georgia bombarded Tskhinvali. Rather, they reported to an American political officer that “the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali began at 2335 on Aug. 7 despite the cease-fire.”

No Westerner critical of Georgia’s government has denied that there were ongoing tensions between the separatist republics and Georgia that sometimes erupted into violence, no one denies that separatist militias had been launching small-scale attacks against Georgian positions in the months prior to the 2008 war, and no one denies that Russia was encouraging the separatist republics in their activities for the last several years. I don’t doubt that Russia armed the separatist republics, but it is hard to separate this from U.S. efforts to arm and train the Georgian army. What is lacking in this account is any mention on the ongoing reckless, confrontational attitude of the Georgian government under Saakashvili since he first came to power. It is impossible to understand Russian intensified activities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia without seeing it primarily as a reaction against Saakashvili’s rise to power, his preoccupation with “reintegration” of the separatist republics, and his insistence on aligning Georgia with NATO with Washington’s obvious encouragement.

It is worth noting that the cables sent home by our embassy in Tbilisi on the eve of the 2008 war were quite unreliable:

The last cables before the eruption of the brief Russian-Georgian war showed an embassy relaying statements that would with time be proved wrong.

It is possible that some of the earlier cables contain correct information, and the Georgian government fed more misinformation to our embassy in 2008 than it had before, but something that all these cables should remind us is that foreign governments are going to give our diplomats information that they want us to have and report things to our diplomats as they want the U.S. to see them. If our diplomats accept the other government’s statements uncritically and do not check them against other sources, as they apparently did in Tbilisi, that will leave Washington blind to realities that the other government doesn’t want the U.S. to see. For a new client state with a reckless foreign policy such as Georgia, misinforming its patron might be a vital part of maintaining U.S. support for the client while it carries out its “reintegration” policy. Similarly, the “true” beliefs of a foreign ruler or head of government conveyed to U.S. diplomats and reported back in diplomatic cables may simply be what he thinks the U.S. wants to hear, and not necessarily what he “truly” believes but can only say in private. Leaked cables are not necessarily giving us new or more reliable information. They are often conveying the same propaganda and sycophantic appeals in a different medium.

Mitt Romney has written another tiresome anti-ratification op-ed:

Does New START limit America’s options for missile defense? Yes. For the first time, we would agree to an interrelationship between strategic offensive weapons and missile defense. Moreover, Russia already asserts that the document would constitute a binding limit on our missile defense program. But the WikiLeaks revelation last weekend that North Korea has supplied Iran with long-range Russian missiles confirms that robust missile defense is urgent and indispensable.

Is this just a rehashing of discredited objections that Romney mindlessly repeats? Yes. For the umpteenth time, the preamble to the treaty is non-binding, and the preamble’s acknowledgment of a relationship between strategic arms and defense capabilities is a statement of the blindingly obvious that in no way impairs U.S. ability to pursue missile defense. Whatever the Russians are saying, the actual treaty doesn’t do what Romney says it will. It is telling that treaty opponents must rely on the rhetoric of Russian officials over the testimony of our military officers. As Romney has been corrected numerous times on this point, his persistence in this error is a bit strange. A former Deputy Commander in Chief and Chief of Staff of U.S. Strategic Command, Ret. Lt. Gen. Dirk Jameson wrote the other day:

Some critics have attempted to muddy the waters with questions that have already been addressed. They claim the treaty restricts American missile defense, an argument that does not hold water. Lt. General Patrick O’Reilly, Director of the Missile Defense Agency testified that the treaty, “has no constraints on current and future components of the Ballistic Missile Defense System.” Frankly, their concerns have been put to rest.

These “red herrings” are presented wrapped in ever more demanding commitments from future legislators that no arms control treaty past or future could meet.

As for the “revelation” Romney mentions, there is good reason to believe that the alleged transfer of BM-25 missiles to Iran doesn’t mean much of anything, since it is not at all clear that these longer-range missiles work. So the treaty doesn’t limit missile defense, and the missile threat from Iran and North Korea has been significantly overhyped in recent days. This is the core of Romney’s opposition to the treaty, and it is laughably wrong. The rest of the op-ed rattles off more of the red herrings Lt. Gen. Jameson correctly dismisses.

If we instead refuse to raise taxes right now, we will be setting a stage in which cuts in federal spending are the only path. Cutting spending will seem inevitable, like something that will actually happen. This will give rise to hope. There’s a way out! We can do it! ~Peggy Noonan

This is silly. Maybe there is a case that extending all of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts is desirable for spurring economic growth, but the idea that extending the tax cuts will compel spending reductions is pretty clearly nonsense. Spending cuts won’t “seem inevitable.” As always, they will seem readily avoidable, as they have been for decades. During the 1999-2000 presidential primary debates, Bush explicitly invoked the “starve the beast” argument to guard against attacks that he was not fiscally conservative enough. We know how that worked out. Taxes went down, spending exploded, and the deficit soared. As Bruce Bartlett argued last week, the “starve the beast” theory is nonsense. The tax debate offers a very simple test for all those newly-converted deficit hawks who claim to care so much about mounting federal debt: Republicans can refuse to extend some or all of the tax cuts if they genuinely wish to tackle the problem of debt, or they can make clear that this problem doesn’t really matter to them right now. Senate Republicans have made clear that they want to increase the deficit, and will hold up legislative action on everything else until that happens.

Coming back to Noonan, spending cuts will not be “the only path.” The other path of growing the deficit is the path that both parties always take. They do this because it is true that most voters don’t care about deficits, and any party that makes any effort to impose real austerity or reduced spending is punished. This is part of what just happened at the midterms: one party proposed cuts to Medicare as part of its health care legislation, and the other energetically demagogued the issue to its advantage. The demagogues won in a big way. The House GOP leadership issued a “pledge” that, if taken seriously, would address no long-term, structural problems and would increase the deficit in the near term. Most voters were probably unaware of the “pledge,” but despite being widely mocked on all sides it certainly did the Republicans no harm on Election Day.

Noonan asks, “Will the American people, over the next few years, act seriously on their own beliefs?” Yes, they will. The trouble is that these beliefs do not include large spending cuts and entitlement reform. Everything Republican leaders have been doing over the last few months tells us that they understand this far better than the people who have become fashionable fiscal conservatives. This is why they put everything controversial off limits in their “Pledge.” Republican politicians know that their constituents will punish them for real fiscal responsibility, but the constituents will reward those politicians who offer them the illusion that they can have it all. This is the same illusion Noonan is offering: you can have lower taxes, which will supposedly force the government to rein in spending, so you can feel as if you are fiscally responsible when you absolutely are not.

Noonan insists that things are different now. We are in a crisis! “It can engender a spirit of unified action and sacrifice.” Maybe it can, but have you seen any evidence of such a spirit? No, you haven’t. Noonan allows that “it will take leadership to make that spirit concrete,” but while she is waiting for this concretized spirit to appear she might do well to notice that none of the leaders in her party has any intention of appealing to a spirit of “unified action and sacrifice.” Over the last month since the election, the leaders of her party have made clear that it wants as little unified action as possible (except to unite in opposition to the administration), and wants to avoid making any sacrifices. After all, why would they want to do that? If they can receive credit for being fiscally responsible when they are not, why risk trading political support to be fiscally responsible in reality?

Noonan then goes on to give Obama some remarkably bad advice:

Barack Obama should startle everyone right now. He will win on New Start. He should confound everyone, and give a headache to his foes, by bowing to the spirit of 2010 and accepting the Bush tax cuts, top to bottom. It would be electrifying. It would seem responsive, and impress the center. And it would help Mr. Obama seem credible, not ideological or partisan but reasonable and moderate, when he weighs in on taxing and spending in the future.

It wouldn’t confound everyone. It would hardly surprise many of us. It would confirm that Obama is so willing to accommodate his political opponents that there is nothing he would not accept if it meant building a consensus. At that point, Obama would have declared to the world that the second half of his term would not be defined by triangulation, but instead by abject capitulation. This wouldn’t impress “the center,” but would thrill his most determined foes and disillusion anyone who still had confidence in his abilities. His credibility on taxes and spending would not be enhanced. In his party, his credibility would be badly damaged if not destroyed, and the other party would not give him credit for coming around to their view, but would instead ridicule him for taking so long to embrace their position.

What doesn’t make much sense is Noonan’s confidence that Obama will prevail on New START. Despite some more positive hints from a few Senate Republicans that they might be willing to consider the treaty this year (and even this is thin gruel), it remains the case that Obama has reached this point through unfailing accommodation and yielding on every demand Kyl has made. Kyl has reasonably concluded that he can keep dragging his feet, and Obama will simply keep giving him more, and the more that Obama insists that the treaty must be ratified the more eager Kyl becomes to extract a larger price. In other words, Obama has been reliably willing to give in on every demand on this issue, and it is partly because of this that the treaty is much more likely to be delayed and to fail than it is to be ratified. DeMint’s wild-card filibuster threats make the treaty’s delay and death that much more likely, and DeMint is the sort that will not be satisfied by any concession that Obama makes.