Commentary about the Tea Party is all the rage these days. That’s fair enough, and I have certainly written a number of posts about the movement and its possible foreign policy implications, but these two pieces by Nile Gardiner and P.J. O’Rourke stand out for being respectively tendentious and pointless.

Gardiner proposes that the Tea Party movement could “save the special relationship.” Of course, one has to assume that saving the special relationship is both desirable and possible, and one must further assume that it is within the power of a subset of the party that doesn’t control the White House to influence the nature of U.S.-Britain relations. As a pretext for another round of predictable Obama-bashing, it is pretty weak. Gardiner starts by reminding us that his view on the special relationship is absurdly skewed:

I’ve written extensively on how the Obama White House has been the most anti-British presidency since the Suez crisis of 1956, and predicted months before Obama’s election win that his leadership would be damaging for the US-British alliance.

Of course, the most direct assaults on the special relationship have come from the current Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister during their time outside government. It is the British who have very sensibly recognized that the special relationship, especially during the Bush-Blair years, was tremendously harmful to British interests and the repuation of Britain in the world, and it is their leaders, not ours, who have made a point of calling for a serious reappraisal of the relationship. It was the current PM who said that Britain should not be slavish in its relations with America. Except for an unforced error on the Falklands and creating some ill will after the Gulf oil spill, the Obama administration has not done much that could be construed as anti-British by any reasonable observer.

Everything in the rest of Gardiner’s, er, analysis depends heavily on the ideas that Obama has been a disaster for relations with Britain (basically false) and that the Tea Party represents an approaching “conservative revolution” that will send Obama packing in 2012 (probably wrong). When it remains uncertain whether the GOP can even take over the House, it is a bit much to start plotting out the agenda of the next Republican administration in the fall of 2010. Rather foolishly, Gardiner seems to think that a change of party and administration will significantly alter the U.S.-U.K. relationship, when the reality is that relations between the two countries are far more stable than that and there is far more consensus between the parties than pre-election demagoguery would lead one to believe. The old special relationship was an artifact of the Cold War and the decades immediately following it, and it has outlived its usefulness. Meanwhile, most Britons find the old special relationship to be abusive, one-sided and harmful has long since ceased to serve the interests of either nation.

Gardiner goes on to engage in some truly wishful thinking:

My sense is that the next Republican administration in Washington will seek a far warmer relationship with Britain than the Obama team. It could also be the most Eurosceptic White House since the birth of the European project. While the Obama administration has been openly Eurofederalist, the Bush administration was split down the middle on the issue of European integration, with the State Department in favour and the Pentagon fervently opposed. Most US administrations have been mixed in their views on Europe – the next one will be more decisively against.

Anything’s possible, and Republicans are more likely to be sympathetic to Euroskeptics, but there is really no reason to assume that Obama will not be President come 2013 and even less reason to assume that the next administration will be firmly against the European project. One of the constant things in the bipartisan foreign policy consensus is that Europe should be “whole, free and united,” and there has generally been sympathy among the leaders of both parties for anything that encourages European integration. Amusingly, it is Republicans who have unwittingly aligned themselves with the cause of deeper European integration with their latest spasms of anti-Turkish agitation. Turkish accession would expand the EU, but make deeper integration virtually impossible. This is one reason why opponents of Eurofederalism want Turkey in and why Eurofederalists would rather keep them out.

If Gardiner is relying on the Tea Party to prop up his bad argument, O’Rourke simply rambles on about some Tea Party activists he met while making disjointed observations about this and that. Here is O’Rourke:

Nor is the past record of decentralization in foreign policy reassuring. It went well when the Soviet Union lost control of Eastern Europe’s foreign policy. It did not go so well when the European colonial powers lost control of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. And total decentralization of foreign policy meant a nightmare in the former Yugoslavia.

I take the Tea Party point that, politically speaking, control is scary. Out-of-control is also scary. And what’s most scary about foreign policy is how often it’s simply beyond our control.

I talked to a Tea Party supporter with strong libertarian inclinations. “I’m for staying out of other people’s business,” she said, and told me she was surprised by Barack Obama’s continuation of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. I’ll bet Barack Obama was surprised too.

It seemed strange when I saw that O’Rourke was writing an essay on the Tea Party movement and foreign policy. As far as I knew, O’Rourke has no insight into populist, constitutionalist or decentralist politics, and I can’t recall him having anything to say about foreign policy, but I thought I would give it a chance. Unfortunately, this is what the essay is like: a lot of generalizations and observations strung together without much of a discernible argument, and the frequent use of the phrase “foreign policy” without much attention to what the phrase actually means. O’Rourke says that it “went well” when the USSR lost control of “Eastern Europe’s foreign policy,” but what he really means is that it “went well” when the USSR lost control of eastern Europe. This was not so much an episode of “decentralization in foreign policy” as it was a dramatic change in the foreign policy of a declining superpower. In reality, foreign policy wasn’t decentralized in eastern Europe; eastern European nations simply changed their alignment from the USSR to the U.S. and have lined up pretty reliably for the last twenty years with their new patron.

Political decentralization as such was not what led to disaster for Yugoslavia. It was the drive to create ethnically uniform nation-states out of a multi-ethnic federation and the willingness of outside governments to encourage separatism that created the disaster. This was ultimately because of Great Power decisions in the aftermath of WWI, which were some of the most significant decisions ever taken by such a relatively small group of people. Arguably, a greater degree of decentralization and autonomy for ethnic enclaves might have avoided some of the destruction of the Balkan Wars by making armed separatism and mass expulsions seem unnecessary. Even so, what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s was not the “total decentralization of foreign policy.” Newly independent, centralized nation-states began pursuing their own foreign policies. Obama wasn’t surprised that he was continuing large parts of Bush’s foreign policy, because he didn’t actually disagree with that much of the substance of what Bush did overseas. The only people surprised by Obama’s foreign policy were supporters who hoped he was a McGovernite and opponents who feared that he was. The title of the essay is “The Tea Party’s Search for Foreign Policy,” but for the most part it is just O’Rourke’s vain search for a thesis.