Romney then added, however, that his gripe with Obama is that he “actually said on Arabic TV that America has dictated to other nations.”

“Look, America has not dictated to other nations,” said Romney. “We have freed other nations from dictators. We have nothing to apologize for in terms of America’s great contribution to the world. . . .” ~The Note

This is unusually ignorant even by the standards of Romney’s remarks on foreign policy. First, we need to go back to the Al Arabiya interview and find exactly what Obama said. It’s quite easy, as it is one of the first things he said in the interview. Obama made his remarks in the context of discussing his dispatch of George Mitchell as his special envoy on Israel and Palestine:

And so what I told him [Mitchell] is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating — in the past on some of these issues — and we don’t always know all the factors that are involved. So let’s listen. He’s going to be speaking to all the major parties involved. And he will then report back to me. From there we will formulate a specific response.

Remember that Obama said this back in January 2009 before there was any discussion of settlements. At that time, Obama was saying that he did not want to dictate terms or dictate a settlement to Israelis and Palestinians. This is a pretty conventional position, and it is an argument that Republicans used against Obama later when he did start trying to pressure Israel on settlements. Viewing the remarks in the context of the interview, we see that Obama was effectively endorsing a continuation of the status quo, which works to perpetuate current Israeli policy. Romney wants the audience to believe that Obama went on an Arabic-language channel and bad-mouthed the United States, when in reality what Obama did was reiterate a standard position that says America should not dictate terms to Israel. This is a position that Romney himself would presumably endorse. It is things like this that confirm my deep dislike for Romney and his habitual dishonesty.

Added to his dishonest recounting of what Obama said is the self-righteous nationalist nonsense that is at the heart of his critique of Obama’s foreign policy. America has never dictated to other nations? We dictate to other nations all the time. As far as nationalists are concerned, we only do it for the most noble ideals and with the purest of intentions, but I simply don’t understand why a nationalist would deny that America dictates to other nations. That is an integral part of being a superpower and would-be enforcer of Pax Americana. Of course, this dictating is often done in the guise of speaking on behalf of “the international community” when most of the “community” wants nothing to do with Washington’s objectives. At other times, we dictate to other nations on our own with a “coalition of the willing” in tow. I would have thought that this dictating to other nations was what made hegemonists and nationalists happy. Isn’t it the supposed unwillingness of Obama to take a sufficiently hard line against rival and authoritarian states that irritates his hawkish critics so much?

When the title and subject of Romney’s new book were first announced, I have to admit that I was a bit confused. As David Bernstein wrote last month in his review of the book, Romney has no national security or foreign policy experience to speak of, but for some reason he has chosen to make a significant part of his critique of the current administration in his book center on these issues. This was something that didn’t make sense when I first read about the book, and it makes even less sense now.

Despite the endless inane attacks from the GOP, most of the public approves of Obama’s handling of foreign policy and a plurality approves of his handling of various national security issues. This is the wrong place for Republicans attack him. It is clearly on fiscal and economic policy where they may be able to gain a significant advantage, and this is the kind of policy argument for which Romney is well-suited. Instead he wastes his time and makes a fool of himself discussing a subject he doesn’t seem to understand very well.

Jonathan Bernstein refers us to 2012 GOP presidential nominee rankings by David Bernstein. The latter ranks Pawlenty as #1, and he explains why:

East Coast urban sophisticates saw Pawlenty’s CPAC speech as uninspiring. I saw it as perfect for Iowa. Hey, you know who else was no good at delivering a slick, rousing, barn-burner of a stump speech? Every Republican Presidential nominee of the last quarter-century, that’s who.

I will grant Bernstein the second point, but who said that Pawlenty’s CPAC speech was either slick or rousing? These are two things that Pawlenty is not. The key problem is that the reception to Pawlenty’s speech was not particularly strong. He was in a room filled with conservative activists assembled to listen to red-meat stump speeches, and he did not generate the kind of excitement that Rubio or even Romney managed to inspire. Pawlenty’s routine may satisfy some voters, but my guess is that for a lot of activists and future Iowa caucus-goers it comes off sounding either overly rehearsed or stale and unconvincing.

The rest of the list is worth looking at, too, but I find about half of his top ten to be very implausible nominees. It seems to me that DeMint is an obvious non-starter. Many activists may love him, but his appeal to larger state electorates during the primary contest will be distinctly limited. Mike Pence is coming from the House, which is one thing that makes him much less likely to succeed. As far as getting through early primary states is concerned, he is just moderate enough on immigration to anger restrictionists but not enough to satisfy moderates, and he suffers from the same problem that Ross has identified with Mitch Daniels: he has no power base, no constituency within the party that he can rely on. Rick Perry is the governor of Texas, and I feel fairly safe saying that no Texas Republican governor will be entrusted with his party’s presidential nomination for decades to come. Jeb Bush is a remote possibility, but his name makes it impossible.

Thune has the unfortunate distinction of being a pro-bailout Senator who has since tried to become a leading anti-bailout Senator. He will have some of the credibility problems that plagued Romney last time around. Gingrich is unlikely to run, and if he does run I am fairly confident that he will not win a single caucus or primary. Whatever other problems or virtues he has, he is just not a likeable person. Barbour is more plausible, though he faces the same problem that Pence and Daniels face.

Sadly, Romney has to be considered the most plausible of the first ten listed here. He has been cultivating activists, supporting candidates around the country, and doing all the right things to prepare for a presidential run. His support for the bailout is a liability, as is his corporate background, but if anyone can campaign as a phony populist it would have to be the candidate who excels at being phony. Even though he is the most plausible, he does have a great electoral weakness. His religion remains an enormous hindrance, as Bernstein’s article on Romney mentions. This is true not only among evangelicals, but with the general electorate as well. I don’t see anything changing here in the next few years. A Barbour or a Daniels stands to benefit from Romney running into a wall of opposition in the primaries.

P.S. For the record, I have an absolutely awful history of predicting future nominees, so bear that in mind when reading all of this.

Generally speaking, I am a restrictionist on immigration and I am sympathetic to our Euroskeptic friends in Britain, so I understand why some Tories might think that immigration and Europe are winning issues that need to be emphasized more. Nonetheless, Massie’s analysis seems correct when he writes this:

There is a grave risk that tacking to the right and endorsing a populist, “robust” approach to immigration could have similar consequences again. And for all that it might help secure what Americans might call “Beer Track” votes it risks alienating “Wine Track” voters. Not necessarily because they disagree with the idea of more strictly controlling immigration but because they dislike being associated with the kind of party that harps on about immigration all the time.

Similarly, the Tories will not want to make Europe too great an issue. Yes, there’s probably a euro-sceptic majority in the country, but many voters are turned off by the stridency of anti-Brussels rhetoric. They don’t much care for Brussels themselves, but they’re not keen on voting for a party that seems obsessed by the subject.

When I read that there is pressure for the Tories to make immigration into a major issue of this general election, I find that it has the same irritating, agitating effect that Republican anti-spending rhetoric has. Whereas the GOP has concocted a very pleasing, completely unfounded story that spending lost them their majorities and a strong anti-spending line will win them back, the Tories seem in danger of revisiting the obsessions that have helped to keep them out of power for over a decade. I call them obsessions not because the positions are irrational or wrong, but because many Tories seem to see them as quick fixes for Conservative electoral difficulties and they keep returning to them every few years to test the same failed proposition all over again. Just as harping about earmarks is the GOP’s way of avoiding any discussion of their failed foreign policy record and the real reasons why they were thrown out (as well as not having to take any risky stands on entitlements), there is an impulse among Tories to talk about asylum-seekers and the European superstate to change the subject from domestic spending. They correctly fear this to be an issue that they will keep on losing even when Britain’s deficits are huge and growing.

The problem is not that a more restrictionist line on immigration or a more skeptical line on Europe would not be appealing, but that these issues cannot be dominant, central planks in any major party’s agenda if it hopes to win a majority. Restrictionism in itself is absolutely not a net vote-loser, and arguments to this effect are always completely unpersuasive, but when it becomes a major or overriding part of a campaign it cannot win a big enough coalition on its own. It is my impression that Euroskepticism is even weaker when it is on its own or when it is promoted in tandem with law and order and national identity questions. This is common sense. The Republian coalition would hardly ever win if it abandoned social issues entirely, but it will rarely win if these issues displace or compete too much with the rest. These issues can increase the size of a coalition built around an appealing message on fiscal and economic policy, but they cannot take the place of that message.

What Labour has failed to do more than anything is to be competent managers of fiscal and economic policy. The Tories can either attempt to make the argument that they can and will be competent managers, and make clear that they are willing to make unpopular choices to bring the deficit under control, or they can retreat to their comfort zones, rehearse all their old arguments that were already losing them elections when William Hague was making them ten years ago, and go down to another defeat. In the aftermath, the modernizers and Europhiles will get a lot of mileage out of this and will make it that much harder to advance these issues later on.

One thing that is becoming increasingly clear is that Hillary Clinton should not speak on contentious issues, as she seems to have no knack for handling them without creating a larger problem than the one she found. We saw this with her clumsy handling of administration policy on Israeli settlements. Granted, she had to balance a half-hearted policy the administration never really believed in with the need not to offend her Israeli hosts, but that’s why it is important to have a Secretary of State capable of striking the right balance. We don’t have one.

We saw another mistake in her handling of Honduras’ provisional government and the desperate, failed bid to restore Zelaya, and we saw it yet again in her ridiculous threat that China would face “diplomatic isolation” if it did not get on board with Iran sanctions. One or two blunders might be overlooked and forgiven, but we are seeing a pattern of mistakes, the latest of which is this Falklands gaffe. Instead of simply remaining non-commital and restating U.S. neutrality, which is a perfectly legitimate and defensible position to take, Clinton felt the need to say this:

We would like to see Argentina and the United Kingdom sit down and resolve the issues between them across the table in a peaceful, productive way.

This might be a way to settle the dispute, but if it is none of our business whose islands they are it is also none of our business how they handle their dispute over the islands. Non-interference and neutrality mean that the U.S. does not involve itself in the issue. Unless both parties specifically asked for U.S. mediation, we should say nothing. Some people in Britain were already angry about U.S. neutrality, and that’s their prerogative, but until now the administration could defend its position and point out that U.S. neutrality works in favor of the status quo power. Once Clinton starts urging both parties to negotiate over something one party regards as non-negotiable, that defense is no longer credible. At that point Washington has begun to align itself with Argentinian objectives and against British claims.

In my earlier post I compared the handling of the dispute to Obama’s earlier mishandling of Kashmir, which he later corrected. In that case, Obama started at a position of proposing U.S. mediation in a dispute that India wanted to keep as a bilateral issue. The backlash from India made Obama realize that this was futile, and he gave up on this idea. In the case of the Falklands, the administration began with a position of neutrality and has started moving towards a position that the British can reasonably interpret as a pro-Argentinian one. This has needlessly antagonized our British allies, it will change nothing in the dispute of the Falklands in any case, and it has reinforced the perfectly justified impression in Britain that it receives absolutely nothing for its reliable support for U.S. initiatives around the world.

Dan McCarthy picks up on an odd passage from Game Change:

They sat Palin down at a table in the suite, spread out a map of the world, and proceeded to give her a potted history of foreign policy. They started with the Spanish civil war, then moved on to world war one, world war two, the cold war…

Assuming that Heilemann and Halperin have this right, this might fit in with the weird strain of conservative admiration for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War that occasionally re-emerges, but it is almost too much to believe that Palin’s handlers were this ideologically obsessed that they would waste time with a foreign policy novice discussing a conflict in which the U.S. took no part. No, Palin’s tutors must have been covering the Spanish-American War. Given McCain’s love of all things T.R., it seems difficult to imagine that this would be neglected in Palin’s lessons. This actually fits the scene much better and makes sense. The authors must have mistakenly described what was covered.

This is a handy table from last November that provides a more precise picture of what would be required for a Republican takeover of the House.  As the table shows, even a 48% result could leave the Democrats with a majority.  If we look at the generic ballot poll from Rasmussen, whose likely voter screen is the most favorable to Republicans, we find that Republicans have a wide lead but register only 44% support.  “Not sure” and “other” receive 14% and 6% respectively.  According to the poll, 37% of independents are unsure which party they will support or say they prefer a third option.  Republicans have 45% of  independents, which is as well as they have done with this group in the last year, but despite the large number of independents unwilling to state their support for the Democrats the GOP is not winning them over.  As disaffected as these independents have become, they have not yet moved into the Republican column, and this is not surprising.  It was overwhelmingly these voters who fled from the GOP in the last four years, and they have not forgotten the reasons why they did this.

The Economist’s Democracy in America blog joins the Iran debate:

What strikes me is that it is of little import what Iran debate we have. The question of what stance the American government adopted towards the Green Movement was always moderately peripheral [bold mine-DL]. We are now arguing not about what stance to adopt towards Iran, but about what stance to adopt towards members of our own political elite who have argued for various stances towards Iran.

These are two very good points. This is why it has always seemed to me that the degree of outrage one expresses against the Iranian regime or the degree of sympathy one expresses for the regime’s victims has little bearing on the merits of the different policy options before us. The administration correctly responded to the protests last summer with a hands-off approach, recognizing that there was little or nothing constructive they could do, and a lot of this was treated as weakness and “appeasement” by the administration’s domestic foes. Of course, when there is nothing for the administration to do it is beyond absurd to criticize it for not having done enough. What administration critics wanted was for Obama to express the correct attitude and strike the right pose. They wanted him to show that he cares, when his concern or lack of it is of absolutely no help to the regime’s opponents. Lacking any practical means to aid the Green movement or influence events in Iran (thanks in part to three decades of cutting the U.S. off from Iran), movement sympathizers seem to want a lot of sentimentality as a substitute for offering a workable policy alternative. This is what it seems like Crowley and many of the Leveretts’ other critics want from the Leveretts.

Responding to something I wrote last week, Patrick Appel says this is not so:

I am not asking the Leveretts to pound the table over human rights abuses in Iran. I am asking them to wrestle with these tragedies and explain why they don’t impact their analysis.

Perhaps we are talking past one another, because it doesn’t make much sense why regime crimes would actually have much bearing on the available policy options. Washington has made strategically valuable bargains with authoritarian states several times in the past, and our government has done this with regimes that were vastly more repressive, violent and cruel. The opening to China has served both U.S. and Chinese interests reasonably well, and the Chinese people have benefited some from this as well, and none of this would have happened had our government been swayed by the objection that the Chinese government at that time had been killing hundreds of thousands of its own people for years. Out of necessity or interest, we have forged alliances with some genuinely awful Arab and Central Asian regimes as well. Where then does the horrified reaction to negotiating with Iran come from?

This is all the more frustrating because making a comprehensive settlement with Iran is the best and the most realistic option there is. Trying to build up Iran’s opposition or wait for its eventual success is a waste of effort and time that we cannot really afford. Stratfor’s George Friedman (via Race for Iran) commented on the prospects for political change in Iran in an important essay on Iran policy:

One attempt at redefinition involves hope for an uprising against the current regime. We will not repeat our views on this in depth, but in short, we do not regard these demonstrations to be a serious threat to the regime. Tehran has handily crushed them, and even if they did succeed, we do not believe they would produce a regime any more accommodating toward the United States.

Friedman proposes instead a deal based on shared interests:

Now consider the overlaps. The United States is in a war against some (not all) Sunnis. These are Iran’s enemies, too. Iran does not want U.S. troops along its eastern and western borders. In point of fact, the United States does not want this either. The United States does not want any interruption of oil flow through Hormuz. Iran much prefers profiting from those flows to interrupting them. Finally, the Iranians understand that it is the United States alone that is Iran’s existential threat. If Iran can solve the American problem its regime survival is assured. The United States understands, or should, that resurrecting the Iraqi counterweight to Iran is not an option: It is either U.S. forces in Iraq or accepting Iran’s unconstrained role.

Alex Massie noticed this statement by Roger Ailes:

I see myself between the Hudson River and the Sierra Madres. I do not see myself at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel or Le Cirque here in New York. Those are people who aspire to different things. They’re the chattering class. They’re the people who think Ahmadinejad wants to have a chat with us and that we haven’t been reaching out to him enough. No, actually, Ahmadinejad wants to cut our heads off and blow us up with nuclear weapons. He’s made that clear. There is something about those people that makes them think, “Oh, he’s just kidding.” No, he’s not kidding. He wants to kill us.

I tend to be a realist about things.

I agree entirely with Massie that this is “a frothing silliness that is almost hysterically unrealistic,” and he is also correct that all that is accomplished by inflating and exaggerating an Iranian threat like this is to make Ahmadinejad and his allies seem much more powerful than they are. What I would like to add is that Iran hawks such as Ailes are apparently entirely oblivious to how much they resemble the picture of Ahmadinejad that they have painted. After all, Ailes and those like him quite openly support launching unprovoked attacks on Iran, they make no secret of their contempt and loathing for Iran’s leaders, and they routinely urge an economic war aimed at destabilizing Iran’s government. If anything, Iran hawks in the U.S. have been far more explicit in expressing their willingness to inflict catastrophic destruction on Iran than Iranian hard-liners have been.

That doesn’t mean Iranian hard-liners aren’t aggressive and very accustomed to using force to get what they want, but it is a reminder that the vast majority of threats of war and national “obliteration” in the last decade has come from our side. Political candidates, elected representatives and commentators in the media have made these threats. Back in 2002, the President himself targeted the Iranian government for elimination. Ahmadinejad might very well want to kill us, but he does not have the luxury to say so openly, nor does he have the means to do it. Not that it will matter to Ailes, but in his public statements with respect to nuclear weapons Ahmadinejad regularly claims that he does not want Iran to pursue nuclear weapons. Few believe him, and I certainly don’t, but Ailes can’t even get this most basic fact right. It would be one thing if “the chattering class” dismissed something that Ahmadinejad actually said, but what Ailes really means is that “the chattering class” doesn’t endorse Ailes’ own paranoid fantasy about the Iranian threat.

To appreciate fully how relatively badly the Tories are doing right now, we need to remember that the Blair-Brown government has been to Britain what Bush and the GOP were to the United States. If someone had told you in October 2008 after the financial crisis and during the onset of a major recession that the public was seriously considering electing McCain and giving the majority in both houses to the Republicans, you would have rightly regarded him as a madman. That is how crazy the idea of a Labour victory ought to seem to us today, but it is now quite possible that Labour will emerge from the next general election as the largest party and the head of a governing coalition. For a more accurate comparison, imagine an alternate world in which the Republicans never lost their majorities and Cheney was the 2008 Republican nominee and he won. That is what another five years for Labour would be like.

There are a few things to take away from this. First, center-right parties that cannot muster the conviction to defend the spending cuts that they are absolutely right must me made will quickly lose the public’s trust. Voters may sooner reward profligate incompetents than they will entrust power to an opposition that has no credibility on a central issue of the election. Brown is certainly hoping that they will. This means that there is no guarantee of victory by default. Republicans who hope to benefit politically from bad economic times and a flailing majority party should take note that the Tories have almost grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory against a vastly more unpopular government. If the Tories can squander a 10-point lead in a matter of weeks, the GOP can very easily squander its small generic ballot lead in the next eight months.

Something else we can learn is that complete shamelessness in the face of a record of monumental failure may succeed against all odds. As Massie observes:

Sure, common-sense demands that we laugh at any Brownite claim that Gordon is a “safe pair of hands” but that’s what he’s pitching. If you’re bold and brassy enough perhaps you can get away with anything.

Third, stylistic re-branding in the absence of a coherent, consistent message and workable policy proposals will eventually implode thanks to its own insubstantiality. The Cameroons have been very good at the first part, and the GOP might learn a thing or two from them, but they have not done very well at all on the other. Massie’s description of the way Cameron is perceived gets to part of the Tories’ problem. Cameron is seen as being “[d]ecent, amiable, brightish, but, in some sense, lacking bottom.” One is reminded of the Urquhart line about the PM he was attempting to oust: “His deepest need was that people should like him. An admirable enough trait in a spaniel…but not, I think, in a Prime Minister.” The drive to make Tories seem likeable has oddly enough deprived them of their reputation for harshness and toughness that they may need at the present time more than they have needed it in two decades.

Finally, the possibility of approaching Tory failure in a fourth straight general election should make Republicans reflect on how long they might be kept out of power. The time it takes to rebuild trust that was squandered during years of misrule and failure may take as long a period as the party was in power. The memory of Tory failures in the 1990s has been so strong and the inability of the Tories to recover has been so great that they may not be able to capitalize on their best electoral opportunity in a generation. That should make Republicans start doing a lot more thinking about how they are going to compete against a party and a President that are still more popular than they are.

Just because a fact is not convenient to the argument at hand does not mean you can disregard said fact. Ignoring the strongest evidence against a position opens one to charges of intellectual dishonesty and does not move the debate forward. It’s intellectually lazy and it damages the discourse. ~Patrick Appel

What is this “strongest evidence” that the Leveretts have ignored? Initially, the Leveretts questioned the extremely easy assumption that massive fraud must have taken place. So did the analysts at Stratfor. Since then, they have not disputed that there was fraud, but have argued that it was not enough to change the outcome. In the last month, PIPA released a report at WorldPublicOpinion.org that provided evidence that helped explain how Ahmadinejad could have won the first round outright while also believing before the election that he would need to resort to fraud to secure victory. Oddly enough, the report has more than a few similarities with Jonathan Bernstein’s latest post on Watergate.

One can raise objections to the WPO report, but for the most part its release has been greeted with silence. Appel does not address this evidence, which one might call the “strongest evidence” against his belief that Ahmadinejad did not win outright, so I could say that he was ignoring the “strongest evidence” against his position. I could say that he was committing the same error he condemns. That would be the most uncharitable interpretation possible, and it would get us nowhere, but it would be a useful rhetorical trick. I don’t think Appel is actually ignoring contrary evidence. My guess is that he has already taken contrary evidence into account and he has decided for any of a number of reasons to focus on something else.

The other problem Appel has with the Leveretts is that he says that they have ignored Iranian regime crimes. One might ask what they are supposed to say about them that would satisfy their critics. When they have attempted to provide perspective and compare them with larger, more brutal crackdowns, as analysts should, they have been accused of being heartless pro-regime shills. As Kevin Sullivan says:

I’m not sure what would sufficiently qualify as recognizing the crimes of the Iranian regime here; the Leveretts have absolutely acknowledged the regime’s brutality [bold mine-DL]. Their point is not that violence hasn’t occurred, but that the government has yet to crack down with the full capacity and brutality at its disposal.

Advocates of engagement have recognized the crimes of the Iranian regime, but some of us still believe engagement is the most realistic and correct course despite these crimes. If advocates of engagement do not devote a large amount of space to denouncing regime crimes, which everyone finds atrocious and wrong, perhaps it is because we realize that our outrage will do nothing for the regime’s victims. Perhaps it is because we have seen how stoking moral outrage against another government has been used many times in the past to justify destructive policies that will intensify the suffering and difficulties of the people. How many thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive and how many millions of Iraqis would never have been displaced had we been more concerned with getting our policy towards Iraq right and less concerned with denouncing Hussein’s atrocities (and using them as fodder for war propaganda)? Appel may not agree with this approach, but he should bear it in mind before he concludes that advocates of engagement such as the Leveretts have not recognized and acknowledged regime crimes.