If anything is conspicuously absent from the document, it is the word “earmarks.” There is no doubt that the conservative crusade against earmarks is often more symbolic than substantive—earmarks are hardly at the core of our budget woes. But symbols matter, and for many voters, earmarks are a symbol of the corruption of our system of government. Republicans already took a no earmark pledge this past year. Some Republican members, particularly those on the appropriations committee, would rather not take another one, and the party’s leaders have been wobbly on the subject in recent weeks. They should straighten up, and make it very clear to voters that if Republicans win the majority, there will be no earmarks. That’s almost certain to be the case whatever the leadership wants—a massive new class of members elected for the first time this year is very likely to make sure of it. Why not make it clear in advance that this is where Republicans stand? ~Yuval Levin

Levin is proposing that the GOP take an uninspired“let’s go back to 2007” message and augment it with the Republican obsessionwith earmarks from 2008. What makes this worse than the usual anti-earmark rallying cry is that Levin understands perfectly well that earmarks are irrelevant to the government’s fiscal problems. He knows that a ban on earmarks would address none of the long-term liabilities that the “Pledge” document also avoids discussing. It is one step removed from promising spending reductions by targeting “fraud, waste and abuse.”

He says that earmarks are a “symbol of the corruption of our system of government,” but this isn’t true. Arguably, earmarks are one of the few things done by members of Congress that have something to do with serving members’ constituencies. Symbols of the corruption of our system of government abound from the TARP to Medicare Part D to the Iraq war, all of which most of the current Republican leadership in Congress supported. If they want to make symbolic gestures, it might be more useful if they acknowledged and repudiated those colossal errors.

Levin has managed to take a document roundly mocked as milquetoastfrom the right and fiscally disastrousfromeverywhere else and found a way to make it that much more easily ridiculed.

Conservatives are generally underwhelmed by the domestic policy sections of the GOP’s “Pledge to America,” and they have every reason to be, but like Kevin Sullivan I was actually a little bit glad to see that the treatment of foreign policy was minimal and superficial. Jonathan Bernstein is right that the foreign policy section was “amateurish and pathetic,” but it could have been so much worse than that. I don’t disagree with Bernstein when he says that “it’s a sad piece of work that really does not reflect well on the party,” but compared to what some of the would-be 2012 Republican presidential contenders have been saying in recent years on the subject it is refreshingly dull.

From the Republicans’ perspective, it’s better that they produced something amateurish and pathetic rather than something demagogic and absurd, especially since that is what most criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy from the right have tended to be for the last two years. As Kevin says, 2010 is an election focused entirely on domestic issues, and this document is the first hint I have had that Republican leaders realize that attacking Obama on foreign policy right now is pointless. First of all, most voters don’t care about it under present circumstances. Second, Obama’s approval rating on foreign policy is better than most of his other ratings, so there simply aren’t as many votes to be had by attacking the administration on it.

The House GOP probably also realized that they will have no power to change anything in foreign policy even if they win a majority. Even if they manage to win the House, they will have a razor-thin majority and little power to influence foreign policy. They have no power over treaties, so there was no need for them to wade into the debate over START. It’s not as if Republican gains are going to represent broad public disgust with administration failures overseas. I would argue that 2006 definitely represented that, but there’s simply no serious way to claim that the GOP is making gains because of, say, the “reset” with Russia or the troop escalation in Afghanistan. Everyone understands that Republican gains this year will be a product of high unemployment, slow recovery and discontent with things at home. It would have been genuinely foolish for the House GOP to stake out a full foreign policy platform when it would mostly provide fodder for their critics and potentially alienate voters they might have otherwise won over. Nothing would more quickly remind many Americans of why they drove the GOP out four years ago better than a lot of confrontational, jingoistic rhetoric and promises to plunge the country into new wars. The bad news is that I suspect this is exactly what would have been in the document if it weren’t a pre-election campaign document.

This is where I think Kevin gets it wrong:

Ideological rigidity, or, in the specific case of Iran, radical statements about preparing for a regime change, make for good soundbites and exchanges on the Sunday morning shows, but they don’t resemble, as far as I can tell, the actual Republican plan for governance regarding the Islamic Republic – and that’s a good thing.

Unfortunately, the Pledge doesn’t appear to be a plan for governance. It is a means of getting Republicans elected, and as such ideological rigidity and radical statements that alienate most Americans wouldn’t be included. That might seem reassuring, because it suggests that Republicans have some awareness that their foreign policy ideas are political liabilities in much of the country, but that just means that they are going to be more circumspect about what they believe during election season. There’s still no evidence that the GOP leadership understands that it has been wrong about many foreign policy questions in recent years. So far, it has only managed to discern that most Americans think they have been wrong, which is a small improvement over being completely oblivious.

Like much of the rest of the document, the foreign policy section was aimed at taking positions that a majority of Americans would find uncontroversial. Militarists and hawks are likely going to be disappointed, because many of them very much wanted to make 2010 into some sort of referendum on Obama’s foreign policy, but this was never going to be a document that satisfied hard-liners and activists, and it also wasn’t going to please political observers and pundits. It’s true that their unwillingness to touch any military or security-related spending or anything related to entitlements is proof of their fiscal unseriousness, but that’s hardly news. What is interesting is that some Republican leaders seem to have recognized that re-litigating the “surge” or the entire Iraq war is a loser for them, so they go largely unmentioned. The House GOP probably could not come up with anything substantive to say about Afghanistan because it would put most of them in the awkward bind of basically agreeing with the administration’s policy.

The main things they say that they will do in the document presumably all poll fairly well. There is something comical about a Republican foreign policy statement reduced to the bare essentials of keeping detainees at Guantanamo, missile defense and sanctioning Iran, but it is amusing because that is almost the whole of affirmative Republican foreign policy in the Obama era. After that, there is automatic rejection of anything Obama does or doesn’t do, and much of that has taken the form of demagoguery and distortion. Most of it has been intended for consumption by other conservatives who believe in the main myths about Obama.

Kathleen Parker can’t find enough good things to say about this manipulative and rather dishonest piece of advertising. Perhaps the most annoying part of the ad is at the end when the narrators says that voters should “choose a smaller, more caring government, one that remembers us.” It doesn’t actually make sense to argue for a government that is both smaller and more “caring.” Under other circumstances, serious advocates of smaller government would not stoop to manipulating the sentiments of voters by talking about a government that is “more caring.” It used to be that critics of expansive and intrusive government sensed danger when people started talking about a government that “cares,” because this was cover for unnecessary and harmful power-grabs.

The old-fashioned argument is that it is not government’s responsibility to “care” for us, but that we should support ourselves or care for one another. That’s not exactly a winning message in a weak economic recovery with 9% unemployment, so the producers of the ad have to be misleading. From the perspective of small-government conservatives, one of the virtues of small government is that the government is in no position to “remember” the citizens, much less be “more caring” towards them than a more expansive, larger government. The producers of the ad hope to tap into the belief that Americans can have it all: a government that is smaller than the one we have, and a government that is “more caring” than the government we already have. The producers want to appeal to the American conceit that Americans love negative liberty while leaning heavily on the reality that many Americans want the government to provide for or “care” for them.

Parker continues:

As someone behind the scenes in the ad’s production told me: “It says what we know in our hearts, that something is terribly wrong.

“In 1984, Americans were more optimistic about their future. Now, Americans feel uncertain and are deeply concerned about the direction of the country. . . . This president truly looks at America differently than Reagan did. Reagan saw America as a shining beacon to the old world. Obama explicitly rejects American exceptionalism. . . .”

For the thousandth time, Obama doesn’t reject American exceptionalism explicitly or implicitly. This is what we call a lie. We can only hope that Obama does not indulge in the same cheap, saccharine optimism that informed Reagan’s wonderfully content-free re-election campaign. It was partly because of that belief in limitless growth and the optimistic delusion that Americans could have it all that we now find ourselves in our current predicament. What would be truly sad is if we keep making the mistakes that we have made for the last several decades and confuse those mistakes for the path to national recovery.

Foreign policy experts are also picking up on similarities. Walter Russell Mead, then a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Economist magazine earlier this year that Mr. Obama is “avoiding the worst mistakes that plagued Carter.” But he warns that presidents like Mr. Obama who emphasize “human rights” can fall prey to the temptation of picking on weak countries while ignoring more dire human rights issues in powerful countries (Russia, China, Iran). Over time that can “hollow out an administration’s credibility and make a president look weak.” ~John Fund

This is more of Fund’s crack reporting. As Fund, Mead and everyone else paying attention knows, the Obama administration has hardly emphasized human rights in its conduct of foreign policy. One need only look out over the ocean of crocodile tears conservative pundits have been shedding for Iranian protesters, the Dalai Lama, and countless other neglected dissenters for proof of that. Neither has the administration been been the lickspittle of dictators that its detractors want to pretend that it is, but it is perfectly fair to say that the new administration has been reluctant to engage in a lot of empty rhetoric about human rights. This is partly because they seem to understand that empty rhetoric helps no one, and partly because they seem to understand that nothing is gained for either the U.S. or dissenters abroad if American interests are jeopardized at the same time that dissenters are set up to appear as agents of American influence. Obama has been conducting foreign policy in a significantly different fashion from that of Carter, and for the most part most would have to agree that Obama’s approach is preferable to that of Carter.

To refer to Obama as a President who emphasizes human rights is to say something that everyone knows isn’t true for the sake of a very lame Carter comparison. If I were Mead, I would claim that I had been horribly misquoted, because the alternative is that Mead has just proven that he is intent on forcing an identification between Carter and Obama regardless of the facts. Since he wrote a lengthy article in Foreign Policy making the argument that Obama could be the new Carter, that isn’t exactly surprising, but in the past he maintained that he didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. Here he clearly does.

Fund continues with his “reporting”:

Pat Caddell, who was Mr. Carter’s pollster while he was in the White House, thinks some comparisons between the two men are overblown. But he notes that any White House that is sinking in the polls takes on a “bunker mentality” that leads the president to become isolated and consult with fewer and fewer people from the outside. Mr. Caddell told me that his Democratic friends think that’s happening to Mr. Obama—and that the president’s ability to pull himself out of a political tailspin is hampered by his resistance to seek out fresh thinking.

There is one small problem with all of this. Obama isn’t significantly sinking in the polls. His average approval rating is still 45%. He isn’t in a political tailspin, so how is it that there are so many people confident that he is having difficulty pulling out of it?

Fund then engages in a bit of sleight-of-hand right at the end of the article:

Democrats need no reminding that Mr. Carter wound up costing them dearly in 1978 and 1980 [bold mine-DL] as Republicans made major gains in Congress.

Obviously, the election in which Carter cost Democrats dearly was 1980. This is the reason why he remains a symbol of Democratic failure to this day, and the 1980 result was overwhelmingly an effect of the hostage crisis in Iran and the recession resulting from the effort to stop the loose monetary policy that the Fed had been pursuing so disastrously for most of Carter’s term. 1978 represented a below-average loss of Democratic seats in a Congress overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats. If the midterms this year were as good for Democrats as 1978 was, we all know we would not be talking about comparisons between Obama and Carter. The only purpose of such comparisons is to predict political disaster for the administration, and no one would be talking about disaster for Obama if there were only going to be 15 seats lost in the House. If 2010 turned out to be another 1978, as I once thought it might, that would mean that Obama was on his way to a relatively good midterm result. Fund knows that, or he should, but it would get in the way of his deeply flawed argument for tying Carter and Obama together.

What is most ridiculous about these comparisons is that Carter’s administration suffered on the domestic front because he and the liberals in Congress were perpetually at odds. Carter had run as a relatively moderate Democrat in 1976, and he dissatisfied many liberals in the campaign and then during his administration. Obama has governed from the center-left, but he has worked with liberal leaders in Congress more harmoniously than Carter ever did, and he signed off on more ambitious social legislation than Carter ever dreamed of supporting. Carter and Obama have both ended up frustrating liberals in their party, but for entirely different reasons: Carter was often at odds with liberals in his party, whereas Obama mostly had their full support from early on, allowed them to push through legislation they wanted in the House, and appeared to settle for too little of what they wanted.

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.

I asked him [Mitch Daniels] the sole question on foreign policy — in what fundamental ways Obama had erred? He did not address any of the basic concerns conservatives have been discussing (e.g., engagement with despots, indifference on human rights, animus toward Israel). Instead, he gave a platitude, “Peace through strength has totally been vindicated.” And then he immediately asserted that we have to “ask questions about the extent of our commitments.” He said, “If we go broke, no one will follow a pauper.” At least temporarily, he said, we can’t maintain all our commitments. But if our foes don’t take a break, what do we do? Should we pull up stakes in Iraq and Afghanistan and hack away at the defense budget? It’s not clear whether he has thought these issues through, or whether he views foreign policy as anything more than a cost-control issue. ~Jennifer Rubin

Via Joseph Lawler

One can hope that Daniels is thinking mainly about controlling the costs of our foreign policy. There are some encouraging signs in Daniels’ answers. First of all, he doesn’t feel the need or obligation to rehearse mostly bogus or misguided attacks against Obama. Maybe he agrees with some of the attacks, or maybe he thinks they are ridiculous, but what I find interesting is that he refused to play at being a demagogue when given the opportunity. This might be proof that he simply isn’t that interested in these issues, or it could be that he wanted to distinguish himself from the ridiculous 2012 competition by avoiding the boilerplate whining that passes for foreign policy argument in many parts of the right today. Instead of indulging in a lot of self-congratulatory rhetoric about American greatness, Daniels seems to appreciate the limits of American power under present circumstances, and he is willing to question the extent of American commitments abroad. In other words, he is willing to question things that most Republicans regard as unquestionable.

That doesn’t mean that Daniels will come to the conclusions that traditional conservatives and libertarians will like, but it suggests that he is willing to reconsider American commitments abroad and possibly reduce or eliminate some if necessary. More important, Daniels seems to have his priorities straight. As I read his remarks, he seems to be saying that arguments about what American should do abroad will largely be irrelevant without addressing the debt and economic growth first, because the U.S. will simply be unable to afford to do that much until we put our own house in order. It isn’t a flashy or exciting approach, but it is a responsible one that will probably win Daniels some respect from hawks, realists and non-interventionists alike.

The new Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey of American opinions on foreign policy and America’s place in the world is revealing in a number of ways. There are several encouraging signs that a majority of Americans is taking a very sensible view of how activist and interventionist the U.S. should be in the future. There appears to be much more acceptance of relative decline in U.S. preeminence and the rise of more independent powers, and there is clearly a desire for the U.S. to be engaged in international affairs through greater consultation and cooperation with other states along with an interest in the more selective exercise of U.S. power. Some of the findings that I find particularly noteworthy were the reaction to the rise of increasingly independent states such as Brazil and Turkey, and the view on what the U.S. should do in the event of a war between Israel and Iran.

A large majority (69-28%) said that it was “mostly good” for Turkey and Brazil to become more independent of U.S. foreign policy, which suggests that the hysterical anti-Turkish reaction in the last few months has a very limited base of support. I should note that the questions might have biased the result towards the “mostly good” side by explaining that Turkish and Brazilian independence in foreign policy would mean that they do not rely on the U.S. as much. Arguably, the reason why there was such a favorable response to this option was that most Americans are under the basically false impression that Turkey and Brazil rely heavily on the U.S. for something, so they might assume that greater independence implies greater self-sufficiency, which ultimately means reduced costs for the U.S. Even so, the strong support for greater allied self-sufficiency is indirect evidence that most Americans don’t want the U.S. subsidizing the defense of other countries that can fend for themselves perfectly well.

56% of Americans say that the U.S. should not enter a war between Iran and Israel. Of course, the question assumes Iranian retaliation against Israel alone, which is probably not what would happen in the wake of an Israeli attack. What is interesting is that there seems to be a significant majority of Americans that does not take for granted that the U.S. should intervene on Israel’s side in a war with Iran so long as the conflict remains a bilateral one. Perhaps more striking is a related result on Israel. As the report explains:

Contrary to the long-standing, official U.S. position, fewer than half of Americans show a readiness to defend Israel even against an unprovoked attack by a neighbor. Asked whether they would favor using U.S. troops in the event that Israel were attacked by a neighbor, only 47 percent say they would favor doing so, while 50 percent say they would oppose it.

It is possible that support for aiding Israel is relatively low because the idea of one of Israel’s neighbors launching an unprovoked attack against now seems so far-fetched and implausible. It may be that at least half of Americans recognize that Israel wouldn’t need U.S. help in defending itself, and perhaps there is also the recognition that Israel possesses sufficient military strength that none of its neighbors would be reckless enough to attack it. Then again, maybe there are just that many Americans who correctly see these conflicts as being none of our business.

Rather depressingly, 68% of Americans still believe Iran’s nuclear program represents a “critical” threat to the United States. Just 4% believe the U.S. should not try to stop Iran from enriching uranium, and 18% want U.S. military strikes now. 41% support economic sanctions, and 33% favor “diplomatic efforts” to get Iran to stop enriching uranium. If carried out with U.N. approval, support for military action increases slightly (21%), support for sanctions goes up (45%) and support for diplomacy decreases (26%). If sanctions and diplomacy fail, most Americans seem to understand that military action would not end Iran’s nuclear program and would merely slow it down, and they also understand that it would provoke greater resentment against the U.S. among Muslims and lead to retaliatory attacks on U.S. targets in the region and perhaps even here in America. A large majority assumes that Iranians would rally around their government, and 52% believe that Iran’s government would not lose support as a result of the strike. Despite all this, 47% would still favor military action if Iran persisted in enriching uranium. The good news is that slightly more would oppose an attack, and with opinion this sharply divided it would be more difficult for a President from either party to authorize an attack.

The report points out something strange:

In comparing the responses about the possible outcomes of a military strike among those who
would favor or oppose it if all else fails, it is striking that large majorities of both those who favor and
oppose a strike agree that such strikes would not lead Iran to give up trying to have a nuclear program
and that strikes might slow but would not stop Iran’s program. Large majorities on both sides also
agree that retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets in neighboring states and the United States itself are
likely.

The question that needs to be asked then is how so many Americans can support taking military action that they assume will be ineffective and will lead to attacks on Americans. Apparently, supporters of an attack believe that simply by launching the ineffective attack the U.S. will deter other states from pursuing nuclear weapons. Of course, the exact opposite is true. An attack on Iran will convince other states that a nuclear deterrent is needed to prevent a U.S. attack, and an ineffective attack will lead other governments with nuclear ambitions to conclude that the U.S. will not be able to stop them. It will be at once encouragment for more proliferation and a demonstration that the U.S. is unable to prevent proliferation by force, which would make for the worst combination of threatening aggressiveness and impotence possible.

In light of all the demagoguery surrounded the Nuclear Posture Review earlier this year, it is worth noting that just 20% of Americans support the use of nuclear weapons if the U.S. has not suffered a nuclear attack, which puts the hawkish critics of the review on the opposite side from three-quarters of the public. For that matter, the administration position on the use of nuclear weapons makes the administration significantly more hawkish than most Americans. Administration policy is that non-compliant NPT states that launch chemical or biological attacks (or cyber-attacks) could be targeted with nuclear weapons, which is something most Americans don’t accept.

Perhaps most remarkable is the strong opposition to the use of U.S. forces to defend South Korea and Taiwan. At present, defending South Korea with U.S. forces is a given, and in the event of a North Korean invasion U.S. defense of the South would begin immediately, so it is more than a little amazing that 56% oppose it. Defending Taiwan with U.S. forces is understandably even less popular (just 26% favor it), but unlike Taiwan the U.S. has formal defense obligations to South Korea. Somewhat bizarrely, support for defending South Korea jumps from 40% to 61% if the U.S. were operating as part of a U.N. force. The distinction seems to be that the U.S. should not be the only one responsible for aiding in South Korea’s defense.

All of this is worth bearing in mind in the coming years as hegemonists and interventionists start claiming to speak in the name of the American people. Americans don’t want hegemony, they want to keep the U.S. out of most conflicts, and it seems that they don’t believe in risking American lives to defend countries that can defend themselves.

Palin is interested in a 2012 presidential run, she would be wise to continue to stress foreign policy issues. ~Craig Robinson

Via Ben Smith

This is probably the worst advice Palin could possibly receive. By all means, Palin should keep stressing a subject she doesn’t understand and make herself nothing more than an echo of Mitt Romney. Her “hard-hitting critique” in her Iowa speech wasn’t hard-hitting. She repeated a few boilerplate lines that many Republican politicians and pundits have used countless times before. Calling it a critique suggests that some thought or analysis was involved in making it. Her foreign policy remarks were a perfect example of a reflexive rejectionism that makes whatever Obama does or tries to do into the wrong thing regardless of the substance. She has made an empty litany of complaints like this before. Last time, she made more obviously false statements, but her latest remarks do contain some false and misleading claims as well.

Robinson quotes her as saying:

The president writes friendly letters to Iran’s leaders, and yet, picks a fight over housing policy with Israel, our strongest ally over there. He reset relations with Russia, but cancels missile defense plans with our NATO allies. He’s eased sanctions with Cuba, but failed to move forward on trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea. And he can’t muster spending time or meaningful support for Iranians risking their lives by opposing Ahmadinejad, but he found the time to send a report to the United Nations claiming our own country’s alleged human rights violations.

What is a little funny about this is that Palin is mostly harping on things that happened in early 2009, which conveniently ignores everything that has happened since then, such as the push for sanctioning Iran and the complete climbdown on settlements. Referring to opposition to illegal settlements as a “fight over housing policy” is dishonest, but it is also just echoing what dozens of pundits have already said. Her statement about missile defense is misleading at best, since a different missile defense system is being built with Romanian cooperation, and Patriot missile batteries are being installed in Poland much to Moscow’s chagrin. I don’t know whether Palin has been told about these things, but making this objection keeps drawing attention to how little she knows about the subject. Had Obama lent the Green movement some substantial or direct support, he would be aiding the Iranian government in providing a pretext for harming them even more. Restrictions on travel to Cuba have been eased slightly, which is a boon mainly to Cuban Americans who want to visit relatives, but the futile, ridiculous embargo remains in place.

So most of her claims are untrue, or they fail to acknowledge what has happened since the first months of 2009, or they ignore that doing the opposite would have led to a worse result on Palin’s own terms. That reduces her “hard-hitting critique” to complaining about the slow progress of free trade agreements of questionable value and a basically irrelevant human rights report. I’d be interested to know how many voters, including Republican voters, are actually offended that Obama has not been rushing to push through additional free trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia. On the whole, her new empty litany of complaints shows what she is: a demagogue rattling off a series of half-truths and distortions as if she had just said something really insightful and clever.

Back in 1999 and 2000, Bush was a lightweight on foreign policy, and everyone knew it, but because he was surrounded by veterans of the first Bush administration many people assumed that he might at least be well-advised. We know how wrong that assumption was, but it seemed plausible at the time. At present, Sarah Palin is lighter than lightweight, everyone knows it, and she is advised by Randy Scheunemann, who inspires zero confidence in anyone who doesn’t want to go to war over South Ossetia. If I were a Republican partisan whose goal was to win the White House, I would not want to nominate someone who would make Obama seem like a foreign policy giant by comparison. If I were a Republican partisan who didn’t want to see his party destroyed by another episode of gross presidential incompetence on foreign policy, I wouldn’t want such a person to have a chance of becoming President. Unwittingly, Robinson has just highlighted one of the main reasons why Palin is not going to be the nominee in 2012.

It’s important to remember that back in 1999-2000 that foreign policy was a minor part of Bush’s campaign. To the extent that he had a dominant theme, it was his focus on domestic policy and so-called “compassionate conservatism.” Bush was considered a “safe” nominee in 2000 partly because there appeared to be no major foreign policy crises on the horizon, but foreign policy is likely to be a much more significant element in the next presidential election campaign. Republicans are not going to want to put forward an ill-equipped, ignorant nominee against Obama, especially when some of his best approval ratings come from his handling of foreign policy. They have the problem that their likely contenders for 2012 are all almost equally unqualified to discuss the subject, but some of them might be more successful at pretending that they know what they’re talking about. Palin isn’t one of those, and more and more Republican voters are going to see that as time goes by.

P.S. An interesting new survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs reveals a lot about changes in American attitudes on foreign policy (via Scoblete). Particularly relevant to this post was this finding on trade agreements:

Americans favor the status quo on free trade agreements, opposing new agreements with
China, Colombia, India, and South Korea. Only Japan receives majority support, though slim, for
a free trade agreement with the United States.

On the one issue where Palin may have detected a real administration weakness in the eyes of the political class, a majority of the public opposes her position. Obviously, if most Americans oppose these agreements they are unlikely to see their non-passage as proof that the administration is slighting U.S. allies. On the contrary, Palin has managed to put herself on the wrong side of public opinion by taking a fairly elite view of free trade and identified Obama with opposition to unpopular trade deals.

As embarrassing as the defenses of D’Souza’s article have been, something that I would like to add is that I doubt this article could have been published if there were not already widespread agreement on the right that Obama hates the idea of American exceptionalism. After all, D’Souza takes that for granted, and he knows that many conservatives do, too. D’Souza’s article is a ridiculous attempt to provide an answer to the dumb question many conservatives have been asking, “Why does Obama hate American exceptionalism?”

The claim that Obama rejects American exceptionalism that is every bit as untrue and laughable as the “anti-colonialist” claim, but it is one that has been made repeatedly and at great length. The Ponnuru/Lowry article in National Review was probably the most developed expression of this misguided view in the last year, and in it the authors claimed to have identified Obama’s “assault on American identity.” Near the end of the article, they wrote:

It is madness to consider President Obama a foreigner. But it is blindness to ignore that American exceptionalism has homegrown enemies — people who misunderstand the sources of American greatness or think them outdated.

It is also blindness to believe that Obama is one of the homegrown enemies of American exceptionalism, when he specifically, repeatedly declares himself to be one of its friends. As Ryan Chittum pointed out yesterday, the notion that Obama does not embrace American exceptionalism is absurd. In the very same remarks that his critics cite as proof that he rejects American exceptionalism, Obama goes out of his way to affirm the idea.

Via Andrew, Jonah Goldberg confirms once again that he isn’t very good at making important distinctions. It is telling that he makes the criticism of Gingrich and D’Souza into another episode of conservative victimization and unfair treatment, but it is more significant that Goldberg describes an extremely sloppy, embarrassing, anti-intellectual argument as “meticulous.”

More to the point, Goldberg doesn’t seem to understand what D’Souza was arguing. D’Souza wasn’t merely “taking seriously what his [Obama’s] father believed” and he wasn’t just examining Obama’s psychology by looking at his relationship with his father. He was directly imputing what Obama’s father believed to Obama with nothing in the way of evidence to support it, and then using this to explain Obama’s supposedly “inexplicable” policy decisions, which he further declared were intended to wreak anti-colonialist vengeance on the Western world. Goldberg says that such caricatures have a kernel of truth in them, but this one doesn’t, and it isn’t hard to see that it doesn’t.

These decisions happen to be ones that Obama either never made or made for reasons that are entirely conventional and not very interesting. D’Souza proposes instead a nonsensical fantasy, and Goldberg thinks it was a “good piece of reading” and an “interesting bit of the puzzle.” Later in the conversation, Goldberg amends his description by saying that the article was “provocative” before launching into another one of his irrelevant diversions about what the other side has done and said. He believes it is fair game to do what D’Souza has done because Obama refers to his father’s influence in his writings and speeches. This misses the rather crucial point that, as Tim Cavanaugh says, “Dreams From My Father is in fact a narrative of Obama’s non-relationship with his father.” At one point, Goldberg mentions the Cairo speech, so it’s worth noting that Obama’s father is mentioned just twice by way of saying that his father came from a Muslim family and received a scholarship to study in America. That was it. Yes, the anti-Western rage was really coming through there.

Weigel puts it more bluntly:

He hated his father! People, the man’s memoir has been on sale for 15 years, and he had his much love for his drunk of a father as Ronald Reagan had for his drunk of a father.

If one insists on psychoanalyzing Obama instead of just looking at his actual policies and public statements, it would be a lot more productive to think about how Obama made himself into the accommodating, establishmentarian, conventional politician and monogamous family man he is as a complete repudiation of his father’s life and political failures. People who insist on trying to see Obama as a left-wing radical, closeted or otherwise, will simply be chasing after ghosts and making themselves look inexcusably foolish in the process.