He wasn’t asked about Clapper’s remarks, but given Pawlenty’s comments, I am certain he wouldn’t name Russia and China as our most serious threats or declare Libya’s revolution to be a lost cause. ~Jennifer Rubin

So Rubin assumes that Pawlenty inhabits a fantasy world, and this is supposed to be a good thing? In fairness to Pawlenty, he hasn’t committed to the views Rubin is “certain” he would hold, but if he did it wouldn’t be to his credit. Drezner and Weigel have both observed that Clapper’s remarks on Libya, Russia and China are basically correct. As Weigel says:

We estimate that North Korea has less than [sic] 10 nuclear weapons, and Iran has none. So it’s literally true — only China and Russia can obliterate us.

More to the point, it isn’t just that China and Russia have the second and third-largest nuclear arsenals in the world, but they also have the ICBMs to deliver those weapons. North Korea’s longest-range missiles may one day be able to reach the West Coast, but they can’t do that yet, and they do not yet have deliverable warheads. Iran has nothing that can reach beyond Europe. Obviously, Clapper forgot that he is supposed to pretend that Iran and North Korea are “mortal threats” despite evidence to the contrary that they aren’t major, much less mortal, threats to the United States.

One of the reasons why it was important to ratify the arms reduction treaty with Russia a few months ago is so that the U.S. would be able to have a verification regime to keep track of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, which is still potentially the greatest threat to American security in the world. This is a treaty that Pawlenty and Rubin, among others in the GOP, wanted to see go down in defeat because of ignorant or dishonest objections to different parts of the treaty. Improving U.S.-Russian relations, increasing security cooperation, and defusing tensions between our governments are all desirable things to make sure that the chances of future hostilities between our countries will remain as low as possible, but it would be negligent in the extreme to pretend that the Russian arsenal doesn’t still have the ability to destroy the entire country. Fortunately, the U.S. retains a credible deterrent, and relations with Moscow have been getting better rather than worse in recent years (over the objections of Pawlenty, Rubin, et al.), and the people in this country who would like to stoke tensions with Russia while depriving the government of the ability to inspect the Russian arsenal have been unsuccessful.

As for the military situation in Libya, Clapper was addressing the imbalance in forces that currently exists. If the U.S. and other governments started arming the rebels, that imbalance would change, but that hasn’t happened yet, and it isn’t clear that it will happen. Was Clapper supposed to indulge in a bit of happy talk and misrepresent the balance of forces in Libya? Had he done so, wouldn’t many of the same people be throwing a fit and denouncing Clapper for “spinning” the situation so that it matches up with the administration’s relatively hands-off approach to Libya?

For his part, Pawlenty has hardly distinguished himself in his foreign policy remarks over the last two years. In the past, Rubin has criticized Mitch Daniels for offering “worn out cliches” on foreign policy. Well, there is no cliche more tired than what Pawlenty had to say the other day:

My basic perspective on foreign policy – this is oversimplifying it – but in the interest of time this is it: You may have learned it on the playground, you may have learned in it business, sports. You may have learned it in some other walk of life, but it’s always true. If you’re dealing with thugs and bullies, they understand strength. They don’t respect weakness.

In other words, Pawlenty endorses the “worn out cliche” of peace through strength, which is the same “worn out cliche” Daniels endorses. When Pawlenty endorses the cliche, he is impressive, and when Daniels does it he has shown a troubling indifference to policy substance. To date, whenever Pawlenty has made a statement on foreign policy that touches on substance he has made sure that it lines up predictably with whatever the party line is. He started in early 2009 when he was whining about the changes to missile defense in central and eastern Europe, and continued with his knee-jerk reactions to New START to the recent upheavals in North Africa. I have yet to hear anything from him that suggests that he actually understands the subjects he’s commenting on, and that isn’t a good sign for the GOP going into an election year when one of its leading presidential candidates is so unprepared on these issues.