Andrew Stuttaford cites a new Rasmussen poll of Republican presidential preferences showing some sizeable support for Huckabee, and he wonders if this means that the GOP will become the “party of Huckabee.” I think this is extremely unlikely. While Huckabee was officially the second-biggest vote-getter in the primaries last year, he achieved this mostly through perseverance and concentrated support from evangelical voters. Had Romney continued to compete and waste his money on what would still have been a losing bid, it is not certain that Huckabee could have managed his second place finish.

Approximately a third of Republican primary voters backed Huckabee, and slightly less than a third of the Republican respondents would now like to see him as the nominee, so he retains a considerable base of support that he had built up last year. Does this mean that the GOP is or is going to be the “party of Huckabee”? Only in the sense that in terms of sheer numbers Huckabee’s voters and sympathizers make up the largest bloc of Republicans. The trouble is that Huckabee consolidates this bloc behind him at the expense of losing most others. The strange thing is that Huckabee’s charisma and style make it less likely that this would be replicated in a general election: where Palin won enduring Republican devotion by being strident and combative, the good culture warrior, Huckabee has typically cultivated a style on the national stage laced with humor and self-deprecation that seemed to make him less polarizing.

He is able to do this because his record on social issues is already solid and does not need to be emphasized (as McCain’s was), exaggerated (as Palin’s was) or invented out of thin air (as Romney’s was). I have thought for a while that Huckabee’s personality could have some of the appealing all-things-to-all-people quality that Obama had during the election. If the economy remains a major issue in the next election, as it most likely will be, the sheer disgust economic conservatives still have for him could be worn almost as a badge of pride in the general election. An early opponent of the bailout, Huckabee could tap into populist dissatisfaction with the coziness of corporations and government without being pigeonholed as nothing more than an obsessed tax-cutter.

Huckabee isn’t going to have that chance. Even if it seems irrational, movement activists who are not primarily interested in social issues distrust Huckabee intensely, and they will work to block him and deny him funding just as they did last time. The anti-Huckabee sentiment among movement activists is a useful reminder that all the Republican culture war defenses of Palin during the general election were aimed at mobilizing all the people whose candidate, Huckabee, they had just spent the previous 18 months mocking and ridiculing with all of the same language used against Palin. For turnout purposes, the GOP still finds Huckabee’s people useful, but its leaders and activists will not tolerate Huckabee taking the lead in the party as the nominee.

The effect this will have, as Stuttaford’s post suggests, is that most Catholic, mainline Protestant and secular Republicans will rally to whichever anti-Huckabee candidate appears strongest. This will most likely mean a coalition of voters arrayed behind Romney, who will then be a far weaker draw in the general election than Huckabee would have been. At first, that sounds implausible. Surely the more “moderate,” less “sectarian” candidate should be able to win more support, right? No, not really, because the things that make Romney more attractive to non-evangelicals in the GOP also force him to spend more time trying to prove that evangelicals and social conservatives can accept him. Aside from the complication that his religion introduces into this, this means that Romney has to emphasize social issues, on which he has no credibility, and public professions of religious faith, which are some of the things that so many Republicans and independents find viscerally unappealing about what they perceive to be the norm in Republican politics. Huckabee does not need to do as much of this because he would already have much of the right locked down. Like McCain, Romney will continually be trying to satisfy people on the right who cannot muster much enthusiasm for him, but who will wrongly conclude that he is more “electable.” That could involve another desperate VP nomination to generate interest or a campaign that actually moves right after the primaries are over. Fear of their own evangelicals could lead Republicans to embrace a technoratic wonk whom most voters will not be able to trust and whom most conservatives grudgingly accept because he is not Huckabee.

It is raining and overcast here in Athens (Koukaki), so I am inside this morning and thought I would check in. As I’m on vacation, I won’t be writing much over the next couple of weeks, but I did see something that I wanted to address. Philip Klein complained that National Security Advisor Jim Jones (Gen., U.S. Army-Ret.) was going to speak at an “anti-Israel conference.” I thought that sounded odd, so I read on and found that he will be addressing J Street. J Street, Klein informs us, is “a liberal organization actively campaigning against Israel’s right to defend itself.” The second part of this is absolutely false, and it is one of the most tired tropes in the book. The first part is less debatable, since it is largely true that the place where you are most likely to find anything like a remotely sane view of Israel-Palestine, among other Near Eastern matters, is among American liberals and progressives. If J Street is overwhelmingly liberal, this is a result of how ideologically committed most Americans have become to dead-end, counterproductive and harmful policies that work against the long-term interests of Israel. These policies also work against U.S. interests in the region and the world to the extent that our government is tied to the enabling of the policies. I don’t think these policies are the source of most of our troubles in the Near East, and I don’t think those troubles would end even if these policies were changed for the better, but the perception and reality that our government tacitly permits them are aggravating factors that make things harder for the U.S. around the region than they need to be.

There is one reliable thing about the label “anti-Israel” when it is used to refer to other Americans in debate: the people being so described are almost guaranteed to believe that Israel has a right to defend itself, a right to exist and, more often than not, a right to constitute itself as an officially Jewish state. In other words, they accept all of the basic assumptions that every “pro-Israel” person accepts. For what it’s worth, I don’t really disagree with any of those propositions, either, but that won’t keep me from being labeled “anti-Israel.” What makes J Street “anti-Israel” in Klein’s view is that they believe that the Israeli government cannot simply do whatever it pleases to its neighbors and to the people under its occupation benevolent protection, and they might even suggest that continuing to violate every agreement Israel has ever made on settlements is not necessarily ideal. If one is ideologically driven to define support for Israel in such a self-defeating way, anything outside those exceedingly narrow boundaries has to be counted as “anti-Israel.”

This is what I find so irritating about these labels: they are used deliberately to avoid discussing the merits of the respective policy views, because there is clearly a fear among hawks that their policy preferences cannot withstand scrutiny and have to be pushed through debate with this sort of browbeating. Klein could reasonably argue that he thinks J Street’s recommendations are misguided, wrong and bad for the U.S. and Israel, and I assume he thinks this, but he isn’t satisfied unless he has completely delegitimized and insultewd his opposition by saying that they are “anti-Israel” as such.

On the other side, J Street et al. make plain that they regard the recommendations of Israel hawks to be disastrous, but to the best of my knowledge they refrain from accusing their opponents of being “anti-Israel.” They do challenge the idea that hawks have some monopoly on real support for Israel, and they point out how damaging to Israeli security their preferred policies have proved to be, but even when they do this they take for granted that hawks believe themselves to be working in the best interests of America and Israel. The issue, of course, is whether they actually are working in the best interests of both countries, but even if they are mistaken their positions cannot be written off as inherently “anti-Israel.” Likewise, those who advance aggressive and hawkish policies for the U.S. are not therefore “anti-American” despite the very real damage their policies have done to the United States. They are in error, but they are not opposed to the existence and security of their country. Of course, it seems to be in the nature of being a hawk that the same respect must never be extended to the other side.

P.S. Klein also finds it obnoxious that the conference will also include Salam al-Maryati, who made a statement immediately following September 11 which he regretted making and for which he quickly apologized. Typically, Maryati’s one mistake made at a time when feelings were running exceptionally high is enough to make him politically radioactive forever in the estimation of many “pro-Israel” advocates, which is one of the many reasons why fewer and fewer people listen to what such advocates have to say and why organizations such as J Street are gaining a hearing.

Later today I’ll be flying to Athens for a two-week visit to see my girlfriend in Greece. I may check in once or twice from the road, but I will be away most of this time. Check in at The Week to see my next couple of columns.

What if the Republicans come up with a conservative standard bearer who is smart, attractive, and dedicated to debunking Obama’s weakling foreign policy — and female? ~Jennifer Rubin

Via Jack Ross

I think they tried that twice last year in different ways. First there was Clinton, who received some fairly fawning admiration from Republican hawks whenever she would try to belittle Obama as an inexperienced weakling, and then there was Sarah “He Pals Around With Terrorists” Palin who attempted to make Obama’s appropriate concern about Afghan civilian casualties from U.S. and NATO actions into some kind of anti-military insult. (That concern for protecting Afghan civilians also happens to be at the heart of McChrystal’s current thinking.) Palin certainly did her best to engage in all of the hawkish posturing she could. Combined with her shaky grasp of policy detail, this was not reassuring, but reminded voters of why she and McCain made them nervous. McCain attempted in vain to persuade voters that his reflexive bellicosity would be a steady, reliable guide for U.S. foreign policy. It might just be that no one buys the idea that Obama has a “weakling foreign policy,” so it won’t matter who the messenger is. It could also be that when this is the best Liz Cheney can offer by way of criticism, she does not fit Rubin’s description in any case.

Philip Klein asks the question that Obama’s critics were inevitably going to ask:

So President Obama agreed to negotiate with the Iranians, and he agreed to abandon a missile shield in Eastern Europe. What did he get for all this good will? Bubkes, it turns out.

Klein’s post is entitled, “Russia thwarts Obama on Iran,” which sounds dramatic until you realize that it is about as newsworthy as “sun rises in the east.” It is also a little strange to describe the maintenance of Russia’s long-standing position on sanctions as an effort to “thwart” anyone in particular. As I said when the missile shield decision came down and in the days that followed, it would not do any good to portray the decision as a concession to Russia aimed at “getting” something on pressuring Iran:

If the administration insists that Russian support for tightening sanctions or isolating Iran is the “payoff” for abandoning the shield, the decision will be judged to have been a quid pro quo that gained us nothing. If we see it instead not as a concession to Moscow, but rather as a concession to reality and common sense, it does not have to produce Russian cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program to be regarded as the correct and appropriate move.

I warned enthusiastic administration supporters not to make too much of minor statements coming from the Kremlin:

Andrew and Zakaria are also attaching far too much importance to Russian statements on Iran. Zakaria called recent Kremlin statements a “striking shift,” but there has been no shift, and while Andrew is more skeptical he has cited Medvedev’s remark about inevitable sanctions as if it meant something. Like the administration they are praising, they are holding out unrealistic hopes of Russian cooperation on an issue where this cooperation is not going to be forthcoming. The administration and its supporters are setting themselves up for a fall, and they open themselves to the jeers of an otherwise hapless opposition that Moscow has played Obama for a fool. Russian cooperation may be forthcoming in other areas, and repairing relations with Moscow might yield some desirable results, but to measure the success of Obama’s Russia policy by Moscow’s willingness to do something it has no intention of doing is to rig the game in favor of the hawks who preach confrontation and aggression.

Moscow has no interest in pressuring or isolating Iran, which was clear all along. This is not a problem in Russian policy towards Iran, but draws attention to the flaws in our Iran policy. We insist on stopping something that we do not have the means to stop, and we are defining our relationship with Iran according to whether or not Iran ceases doing something it is never going to cease doing. We then compound this mistake by making the quality of our relationship with Russia dependent on whether or not Russia will cooperate in our dead-end Iran policy.

It also happens to be true that harsher sanctions on Iran would be “counterproductive” in several ways. If the sanctions are designed to hamper Iran’s nuclear program, they will instead show Iran that it needs a deterrent all the more. If they are aimed at aiding internal political opposition and weakening the regime, they will have the opposite effect. Unless the goal is to secure Khamenei and Ahmadinejad in their positions of power and accelerate the advance of Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions would seem to make no sense at all. If Russian opposition to sanctions helps us realize the futility of such an approach that much sooner, so much the better for us.

When talk turned to probable presidential contenders, no one last night seemed to give Tim Pawlenty much of a chance. Nonetheless, it appears that Pawlenty is moving to re-assemble many members of the McCain campaign as part of his preliminary efforts in preparing a bid. This makes sense, as Pawlenty was one of the true McCain loyalists during the last election. While many elected officials had either abandoned McCain early on or refused to back him until he was already the de facto nominee, Pawlenty was unusual in his consistent and public support. The story from The Hill had this passage that should remove any doubt about the kind of foreign policy thinking Pawlenty will be entertaining:

Among those interested in getting to know Pawlenty are Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Randy Scheunemann [bold mine-DL], two top policy advisers from the McCain presidential campaign who have joined the Minnesota governor’s host committee.

If you are interested in angry Russophobia and needless provocation of other major powers, Pawlenty might well be the candidate for you.

What might be more interesting is whether or not Republican activists and primary voters will recoil from a campaign filled with top McCain staffers. As a losing nominee unpopular with conservative activists, McCain would have much to offer Pawlenty in terms of prestige, so I wonder how much of a liability close association with McCain and his advisors could be. Add to that the instinctve revulsion many economic conservative activists seem to have for any candidate who expresses interest in addressing the concerns of working-class voters, and Pawlenty could have some significant difficulties.

I’ll have more to say soon about the Princeton panel, which was very enjoyable. Thanks again to the Committee on Public Lectures, Prof. Wang, our moderators, Professors Kruse and Zelizer, and my fellow panelists for a good discussion. In the meantime, see the remarks by Mark Thompson of the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, who attended the lecture, and take a look at Tim Lee’s new blog. Tim and Mark were both there, along with a few regular readers and commenters, and it was a pleasure to meet all of them in person after all this time.

Conflating American security with military interventionism is an old trick, but it doesn’t make it any more intellectually defensible. And again, it’s worth repeating: when those disposed to Krauthammer’s arguments held policy making positions, American power declined precipitously. ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete is responding to this Krauthammer article, which makes the preposterous claims that Obama has been proposing a series of “strategic retreats” and that so-called New Liberalism aims to undermine U.S. hegemony. This is rather like the imaginary “apology tour” Obama has been on these past few months–it hits all the right ideological notes for the people making the charge, but it is pure fantasy. Obviously I agree with Scoblete, and I have made the same point about the previous administration’s disastrous record of declining U.S. influence and power.

One thing that does concern me is that turning the old “weakness” smears around on the GOP will not encourage intelligent re-thinking on foreign policy and national security, but will instead foster a redoubling of the worst aggressive instincts that Republicans currently have. If everyone comes to accept that Bush weakened American power, which he did, the conclusion some national security conservatives will reach is that Bush weakened America by not being hard-line and aggressive enough. In this mad interpretation, the failure of the Bush years was not found in plunging us into an intractable, unnecessary war, harming allied interests with blank checks of support or encouraging reckless allies into self-destructive action, but in failing to follow through. This is also the rationale for the flurry of attacks against Obama, who has more or less maintained second-term Bush status quo on most aspects of foreign policy. If doing the same things as the Bush administration in its second term can be redefined as Obama’s “New Liberalism,” the more aggressive interventionists and hawks on the right can claim that they are guardians of a “conservative” foreign policy, which allows them to promote the self-serving, albeit completely absurd, idea that everyone except for them favors “weakness” and “retreat.”

What is a little amusing about the Krauthammer argument against Obama is that it obsesses over symbolism and superficial appearances while ignoring substance, which is one of the standard complaints against Obama. Bush used triumphalist, self-congratulatory rhetoric, but bungled the execution of many policies to the detriment of the United States. Obama has so far mostly eschewed the national self-congratulation and public displays of moral preening, but now what bothers Obama’s critics here is that he is not showy and superficial enough. For example, Fred Hiatt is worried that delaying a meeting with the Dalai Lama, a meeting which is pretty much purely for show, will send discouraging signals to dissidents everywhere despite Hiatt’s own admission that the administration is apparently interested in making substantive gains on their political rights.

P.S. While I don’t think the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize matters one way or the other, it is instructive that Obama’s acceptance of the award has received this kind of reaction:

What’s more, he’s etched in stone the phrase with which critics will dismiss his presidency.

As Ross says elsewhere in the column, accepting the Prize changes nothing about the realities around the world and makes none of the problems Obama faces any easier, so why should it change anyone’s expectations of what Obama will do? I keep seeing and hearing arguments to the effect that the Nobel Committee was trying to neutralize or corner Obama by making it harder for him to support additional troop deployments in Afghanistan and the like. It must be one of the few things on which Rush Limbaugh and David Frum both agree. This doesn’t make any sense. If Obama does not deserve the award, and if it has no real significance, why will Obama give it a second thought when he considers what should be done in Afghanistan or elsewhere? If his acceptance was grudging, why is he going to let the award constrain what he does? If the reasons provided for giving him the Prize mainly concern climate change and nuclear disarmament, why should the award affect a decision on Afghanistan troop levels or pressuring Iran on its nuclear program?

I am here in Princeton preparing for the panel, but I had noticed a couple items that I wanted to discuss briefly. Bill Frezza takes that ludicrous Bret Stephens’ op-ed from the other day, which I remarked on here, and he uses it as his starting point for an argument that is, if this is possible, even more bizarre. Frezza writes:

It was shocking. Only after reading it [Stephens’ op-ed] twice did I realize it was just a forecast and not reality. Yet as Nobel Peace Prize winner Barak Obama pursues his strategy of global multilateralism, the inexorable logic of reciprocal disarmament smacks one in the face.

If the US refuses to acknowledge the existence of evil, rejects unilateralism, and insists on an even-handed approach to international relations, what else can we expect the UN to deliver but an insistence that all sides in the Middle East give up their weapons of mass destruction, including Israel? If this harrowing forecast becomes reality, what might happen next?

War.

The small problem with this “inexorable logic” is that Obama has already ruled out any sort of Israeli disarmament. Having ignored this and all that it implies, Frezza goes on to explain why the Iranian government would welcome an Israeli attack and uses this in support of the attack:

The Iranian mullahs may be crazy but they’re not stupid. The biggest threat to clerical rule comes not from Israel or the US but from Iran’s own restive people. The surest way to crush domestic opposition is to unify the country around hatred for the infidel invader. A price would have to be paid, but Ahmadinejad might find a little death and destruction acceptable compared to the loss of power. Bloodying Israel’s nose by putting up a good fight wouldn’t hurt his standing either. If Ahmadinejad’s handlers believe that Israel will execute a careful surgical strike, which is likely given Israel’s interest in minimizing collateral damage, the mullahs may roll the dice.

So Frezza wants us to believe that a course of action that makes Ahmadinejad and Khamenei more secure in their positions of power and which will at most delay, not prevent, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is in the interests of Israel’s government. To listen to advocates of attacking Iran, one might have thought that it is the character of the current regime that makes an Iranian nuke so threatening. By Frezza’s own admission, an Israeli attack would strengthen the current regime and open Israel to retaliatory strikes, which would in all likelihood be seen by much of the world as justified self-defense against an unprovoked attack, and this is going to help Israel’s government? It is fair to say that Frezza’s article has an abundance of “[t]ortured logic rife with miscalculation.”

In recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, it had also broken the cardinal rule of post-cold war European security: that borders in Europe would never again be changed by force of arms. ~Ronald Asmus

The Russians might not have realized that this was such a “cardinal rule of post-cold war European security” when the United States and NATO blatantly violated it beginning in 1999. Kosovo was separated from Serbia by force of arms, and this de facto arrangement guaranteed by Western military forces became official when the United States and many western European states recognized the independence of Kosovo. So, yes, many of these Europeans were in a bit of a bind when faced with the consequences of their governments’ actions over the previous decade.

Of course the EU report disproves that Russian claims of “genocide,” which were clearly hyperbole and propaganda from the begnning. The idea that NATO began bombing Serbia because it was committing “genocide” in Kosovo was likewise laughable, but to this day Westerners continue to take this claim seriously. The report acknowledges that Russia had the right to protect its “peacekeepers,” but said that the Russian response was excessive. This is true, which adds to the responsibility of the Georgian government for the stupid decision to launch an attack that would precipitate a Russian response that it must have known would not be minimal and proportional. That doesn’t absolve Russia of responsibility for its excesses, but it makes the responsibility of the escalating party all the greater. It is also true that the separation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia violates international law, just as the partition of Serbia violated international law. As far as I can tell, virtually no one who objected to the partition of Georgia paid any attention to international law when Kosovo was illegally detached from Serbia. Indeed, many of the same people endorsed the latter move and claimed that it was a “one-time” exception that would not create a precedent. The trouble is that precedents were created whether or not Western governments wanted to acknowledge them or not. Official Russian propaganda claimed outrageous and false things, and I suspect one of the reason why Moscow framed its propaganda the way that it did was to mimic and thereby mock false Western claims over Kosovo. Then again, perhaps mockery was not the intent. Perhaps Moscow believed that the West would be more willing to accept military action if it were wrapped into the sanctimonious cant of humanitarian intervention.

In the end, holding out the prospect of NATO membership for Georgia was a dangerously provocative act that the West had no interest in backing up when it elicited the angry Russian response that inevitably followed. Recognizing Kosovo was madness, and Georgia paid the price for it. Trashing international law and ignoring state sovereignty when it suited us paved the way for other major powers to do the same to their weaker neighbors. The aggressive and confrontational foreign policy of at least the last ten years, including both Clinton and Bush administrations, brought about this state of affairs, and it will probably take decades to undo the damage that “humanitarian” and “well-intentioned” hawks have done to the international order.