Reihan complains that critics of Palin on her Bush Doctrine answer probably could not define it very well, either.  Whether that is true of other critics or not, I cannot say, but before taking a stab at it I will reiterate my point that the existence of divergent interpretations of the Doctrine does not excuse not knowing anything about it.  Clearly, Palin knew nothing, so the fact that other people disagree about what exactly falls under this Doctrine is neither here nor there when discussing Palin’s answers.  Indeed, the argument made in her “defense” is that Gibson also got it wrong.  The telling part of the interview, then, is when Palin agreed with the definition Gibson gave, which Palin’s defenders are insisting was wrong.  She didn’t know this definition was wrong, because she had no idea what it was.  So what is the right definition? 

The Bush Doctrine evolved somewhat between late 2001 and September 2002 with the National Security Strategy of that year.   Before September 2002, the Bush Doctrine would have been understood to mean that the U.S. government would treat terrorist-sponsoring nations as culpable for any acts carried out by the groups they sponsored or harbored, and that they would be treated as enemies of the United States accordingly.  This initial form of the Doctrine served well enough to make sense of the intervention in Afghanistan against both the government and the terrorist group they were harboring.  Indeed, you could say that this first draft Bush Doctrine was tailor-made to support what we were doing in Afghanistan.  The 2002 strategy statement was really the first official statement of a doctrine during the Bush years.  Mr. Bush enunciated the Doctrine at West Point.  In that statement, the government claimed the right to launch wars against states that might pose future threats to the United States:

And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed [bold mine-DL].  We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies’ plans, using the best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation. History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action.  

This is preventive war, which is illegal under any form of international law known to man, but it was routinely defended by calling it pre-emptive war, which is permitted under certain circumstances.  What is often linked to the Bush Doctrine, but which is not necessarily part of it, is the democracy promotion element of the so-called “freedom agenda,” which holds that democratic governments are inherently more peaceful, less likely to sponsor or harbor terrorists and more likely to maintain good relations with the United States, so that there is a national security interest in promoting democracy.  None of these propositions is true, but that has been the rhetoric.  This democracy-promotion element was an ancillary justification for the invasion of Iraq based on the “drain the swamp” theory espoused by many of the President’s backers, but it acquired full force in the Second Inaugural, even though events in the last three years have largely made a mockery of the pretensions of that speech.     

One might forgive Gibson for confusing the Bush Doctrine with support for pre-emptive war, when this is what President Bush said we were doing in Iraq.  In June 2002, Mr. Bush said:

And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives. 

And again:

While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of selfdefense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country…

Yet in the same June address Mr. Bush makes clear that he is describing preventive war:

We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten [bold mine-DL] or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends.

In the same address when he calls for pre-emptive action, he makes it clear that he is redefining what permissible pre-emption is supposed to be:

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat—most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.

We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction—weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning.  

So it’s true that Bush administration has warped and twisted the words pre-emptive and imminent beyond recognition to serve its purposes, and confusingly referred to preventive war as pre-emption, which are the likely reasons why Gibson’s definition was imprecise.  As I have said before, when Gibson referred to anticipatory self-defense he was using the same phrase that supporters of preventive war have used to describe preventive war (e.g., in connection with bombing Iran), and the reason they use this phrase is to justify the unjustifiable.  Having muddled the definitions and engaged in misdirection, these same people now point at Gibson and laugh because he made the mistake of repeating their own words.

Palin’s remark about Russian actions in Georgia being “unprovoked” has garneredsome attention, since it is obviously untrue, but let’s remember that she is the captive of fanatics who believe, or at least claim to believe, that Georgia is an innocent lamb targeted by “Russian aggression” akin to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 or the invasion of Afghanistan (when it was not being compared, naturally, to 1938).  In this view, Saakashvili is a brave, wise leader of a besieged democracy, rather than the bumbling authoritarian who plunged his poor country into an unwinnable conflict for the sake of irredentist obsession.  Remember that the standard GOP attack on Obama in the first days of the war was that he said that both sides were at fault (because, well, both sides were at fault), which was an unforgivable deviation from the official line.  However, when officials in the Bush administration are furious with Saakashvili for his blundering and you have such reliable establishment columnists as Jackson Diehl voicing dissatisfaction with old Misha, the fanatics have lost this part of the argument.  One thing we can be sure of about a McCain administration is that it will be even more stubbornly committed to supporting Saakashvili’s hold on power than Bush was in backing Musharraf, and so it was imperative that Palin conform to this position, which necessarily entails overlooking or flatly denying that Saakashvili has done anything wrong or reckless.

But to my infinite frustration, a moderate degree of hawkishness such as my own — I supported the Iraq war on international-legal grounds; I supported independence for Kosovo on grounds of honor for the US and expediency for Europe; I am a philosemitic friend to Israel, but think the challenges facing the US and Israel are not identical — is inadequate to the folks who have captured the hawk wing of the Republican and Democratic parties alike. John McCain is their prince, but Joe Lieberman is their king; and I must repeat that I feel a complete dunce for not realizing that none other than Joe Lieberman would be training Palin in all catchphrases pertaining to national security international insecurity. ~James Poulos

James shouldn’t be so hard on himself.  I think most sane people are surprised time and again by the power of the GOP’s single-issue love-affair with Joe Lieberman, and I consistently underestimated the probability of McCain selecting Lieberman as his VP, which turned out to have been remarkably and frighteningly high.  That said, whether or not Lieberman was personally involved in coaching Palin, it was inevitable that she would be turned into a McCain clone on foreign policy.  Given her lack of interest in the subject and the ideological obsessions of McCain’s advisors, there was simply nothing else that could have happened, and once the excitement about Palin died down that was bound to be revealed.  What is true in domestic politics generally is true here: those who are more obsessive and passionate about their cause will have disproportionate influence over and against those who are not.  Hegemonism and aggressive militarism are effectively without strong competition, especially in the GOP, and so these become the default views of more and more politicians.    

As for James’ moderate hawkishness, I am reminded of Ross’ complaint about the lack of realists in the GOP presidential field, and what I said then applies just as well now:

If the space filled by Paul should be filled by an internationally-minded realism, then why isn’t it being filled?  Because it is not at all clear that most of the internationally-minded realists in the GOP actually believe, for example, that the Iraq war was a mistake.  If they do believe this, there is little evidence that most realists think the answer is to withdraw from Iraq in some fashion sooner rather than later.  If acknowledging that the Iraq war was a mistake is the starting point for a realist turn away from Bushist foreign policy, realists who actually say this seem to be thin on the ground.  Perhaps I am missing some of them.  They do exist, but they are not very numerous nor are they usually very prominent, and those who tend to be prominent are prominent because they are reliable CFR types who never say anything too wildly interesting or creative.

The trouble with moderate hawkishness and the desire for some middle-ground “realist” alternative between Ron Paul and, well, everyone he ran against is that both moderate hawks and most Republican realists functionally end up aligning with or not being strongly enough opposed to reckless and destructive policies.  They have the numbers and the potential influence to serve as a meaningful check on interventionists, but they share too many of the latter’s assumptions to want to serve as a check on them most of the time.  Moderate hawks and realists should prudently be resisting these policies more vigorously than they actually do, but their desire to remain both politically and rhetorically the reasonable and moderate alternative between the extremes usually ensures that the status quo prevails.  When realists do raise their heads above the crowd (Chuck Hagel, for instance), they are ridiculed as traitors by interventionists and dismissed as opportunists by non-interventionists (and especially by me).  It is something of a thankless task, but I am one who thinks that it should be a thankless task, since the moderate hawk and realist views are, despite their greater moderation, still wrong often enough to be troubling.  James stands out among moderate hawks by drawing a reasonable conclusion (i.e., Georgia and Ukraine should not be brought into NATO) from the experience of last month’s war, but for most of these people this does not seem to be an option.  We can all see how mad it is to include Georgia in NATO, but it nonetheless remains the mainstream position espoused by all four nominees of the major parties.  Hence James’ infinite frustration and Ross’ futile search for realists among leading Republicans.

Sure, she didn’t state the academic “Bush doctrine”, but her description of the Bush foreign policy worldview wasn’t wrong. ~Kristen Soltis

As others have noted, her description was wrong because she was simply repeating back what she understood Gibson’s characterization of the Doctrine to be, which many of Palin’s defenders have insisted misrepresented what the Doctrine was.  The relevant point here is not that Palin disagrees with the Bush Doctrine, which I’m sure she will come to endorse full-throatedly once her handlers explain to her what that is, but that she had no idea what it was and latched onto Gibson’s definition so that she would have something to say.   

I would agree that her own statement of support for pre-emption to address an imminent threat based on sound intelligence was technically quite different from what the Bush administration has actually practiced, which is preventive war based on flawed, manipulated intelligence about a non-existent threat.  However, I would qualify this by noting that Gibson used the phrase anticipatory self-defense, which supporters of preventive war have adopted as one of their euphemisms, so someone who accepted traditional pre-emption would find something familiar in her answer and so would a supporter of preventive war.  It is also worth noting that supporters of preventive, which is to say aggressive, war frequently misuse the word pre-emption to describe their own view.  One of these people can say that he favors pre-emption or would only approve of attacking when an “imminent threat” exists, and he can nonetheless endorse preventive war because of the deliberate conflation of the two by supporters of preventive war. 

As an aside, I would remind everyone what Benedict XVI said before the war in Iraq began (“The concept of pre-emptive war does not appear in the Catechism”), so that even if Palin merely supports pre-emption this is something that should still be worrisome and not at all reassuring.

When it comes to Palin’s record, I am more inclined to believe now that McCain isn’t distorting what he knows to be the truth–he simply has no idea what she did when she was governor and so invents a record for her that is consistent with his own obsession with eliminating earmarks.  That is how you get this:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Friday running mate Sarah Palin has never asked for money for lawmakers’ pet projects as Alaska governor when in fact she has sought nearly $200 million in earmarks this year.

—–

When pressed about Palin’s record of requesting and accepting such money for Alaska, McCain ignored the record and said: “Not as governor she didn’t.”

Perhaps McCain was simply referring to one of those “underlying truths” about her record–those are the truths that need not square with the facts. 

This is what happens when a campaign makes opposition to earmarks the measure of political purity, defines the VP nominee as a reformer based almost entirely on her supposed hatred of earmarks and tries to make an anti-earmark crusade a major theme of the election.  Since almost no politician at the state or federal level has entirely “clean” hands when it comes to this sort of spending, there was no way McCain’s VP nominee would have the kind of anti-earmark record that he clearly wants Palin to have, so it had to be invented.  Having scrutinized Palin’s record for all of five seconds, McCain probably had no idea just how mismatched his chosen obsession and his running mate really are.  Maybe he still doesn’t, but we can be sure that he won’t care when he finds out.

This is getting out of hand.  Andy McCarthy objects to reporting that Palin didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was, making the ridiculous argument that this can’t be true because there are technical disputes among Bush supporters about how many policies the Bush Doctrine encompasses.  In other words, despite Palin’s obvious ignorance of any part of the Doctrine, she must know what it is because many people who do know generally what it is disagree among themselves about its precise definition.  According to her defenders, disagreements over the interpretation of an overarching foreign policy doctrine are no different from complete ignorance about the overarching foreign policy doctrine.  This is like saying that someone who cannot give a rudimentary definition of what the Bill of Rights is knows just as much about it as the constitutional scholars who spend their lives arguing about the finer points of the equal protection clause. 

Palin wasn’t “pressing” Gibson so that she could deliver her own nuanced take that she had pondered for a long time–it was as if she had never heard the phrase before, which is why she asked if Gibson meant Bush’s worldview.  Palin knew what the word doctrine meant, but using it in a foreign policy context was clearly something she had not encountered before.  I wish her apologists would just go back to saying that being from Alaska gives her foreign policy experience–at least that was amusing.

P.S.  This interview reminded me earlier of the “pop quiz” that a reporter gave to then-Gov. Bush back in ’99.  Here was the priceless spin from his communications director at the time, Karen Hughes, when he couldn’t provide the answers:

The person who is running for president is seeking to be the leader of the free world, not a Jeopardy contestant.

How long before someone says something like this to justify Palin’s lack of knowledge?

And it was eerily reminiscent of watching George W. Bush, circa 2000. ~Steve Benen

How could she not know this? For the same reason I don’t know anything about European football/soccer standings, player trades, or intrigue. I am not interested enough. And she evidently has not been interested enough even to follow the news of foreign affairs during the Bush era. ~James Fallows

Both of these assessments are right, but they point to a more serious danger for Palin and for us than mere lack of interest or ignorance would pose.  Worse than being simply uninterested and uninformed about foreign affairs, Palin is now in a position where she will have to be utterly dependent on the “expertise” of McCain foreign policy advisors for her understanding of these matters, and these just happen to be some of the most irresponsible and dangerous advisors she could have.  As I said at the start of the month:

Folksy governors with little acquaintance with foreign affairs unfortunately seem to make for easy targets for interventionist advisors; their own non-Washington credentials persuade them that they need to listen to “experts.” The “experts,” of course, have their own agenda.    

Benen’s observation confirms my Bush/Cheney-in-reverse interpretation of this ticket, so it is worth revisiting Candidate Bush, the Texan governor who talked about Grecians and was vaguely aware of some general running Pakistan, to remember the laughable arguments made by Bush’s defenders about why his lack of preparation was irrelevant.  Rather like Kagan’s claim that foreign policy elites and completely uninformed people have equally good judgement in guiding foreign policy (a proposition that Kagan and his colleagues do seem to want to vindicate through their own incompetence), Bush’s defenders usually argued that, yes, Bush was ignorant about much of the world, but he would have a team of top advisors who would guide him along the way.  They kept insisting that the important thing was to have someone who could make decisions.  I don’t recall whether they made a point of stressing the need for good decisions or not.  Given the record of the last seven years, my guess would be that they overlooked that part.

This brings us back to the question of experience, or more properly the question of preparation.  Time-serving in Washington may or may not result in acquiring knowledge about policy issues (McCain has been there for decades and has managed to avoid this so far), and this time-serving may often be a very poor sort of experience, since it reinforces all of the worst establishment instincts when it comes to foreign policy.  The necessary preparation for handling foreign affairs can come in many different forms.  Someone whose career and responsibilities are in an entirely different field can take an active interest in foreign affairs and become familiar with the debates, so that he would at least be able to identify the different kinds of arguments he encounters.  What is most important about this preparation is not the paradigm that one adopts or the area of foreign policy that one knows the most about, but having enough knowledge and a critical mind to be able to make one’s own judgements.  The real problem with Palin’s lack of preparation is that she is exceedingly vulnerable to misinformation and ideological agendas because she has no grounded perspective of her own concerning foreign affairs.    

On a related note, it is worth revisiting then-Gov. Bush’s promise of a “humble” foreign policy.  This was the sort of language that originally made McCain the neocons’ favorite in the primaries and misled many conservatives to expect a sane and responsible Bush administration, and it is the promise that many antiwar conservatives cite when they make their own arguments against foreign intervention.  What should have given us all much greater pause then was that Bush argued for the “humble” foreign policy mainly because this was what the realist advisors around him were telling him to say.  This humility was also an obvious complement to Bush’s lack of knowledge, which allowed him to avoid discussing things in detail on the grounds that America should not be as involved in as many foreign crises.  Instead of being reassured by Bush’s reliance on many old Bush administration “realist” hands, we should have seen that as much more of a red flag that he would go in whichever direction the people around him recommended.  The most dangerous thing about an unprepared President is how malleable he is.  What is worrisome about Palin is that if she were to become President she would succeed to the office already in the grip of reckless, jingoistic advisors.  What Bush became in 2002 and afterwards, Palin would likely be from her first day as President.

You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska. ~Sarah Palin

That settles it, doesn’t it?  You have to be impressed, in a chilling, unnerving way, by how she avoided the question about restoring Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and how she insisted that the Russian incursion was unprovoked.  She made sure that she reiterated support for Saakashvili, which is apparently now fundamental to U.S. foreign policy.  Palin also came fairly close to saying that the 9/11 attacks occurred because the hijackers hated us for our freedom.  Also, we must not blink.

Josh Marshall isn’t helping:

Wow, going to war with Russia might be necessary if Russia invades another one of the former states of the Soviet Union. So says Sarah Palin. War with Russia over Armenia [bold mine-DL]? If Russia and Georgia go at it again?

Unfortunately, this misses the point that Palin was talking about going to war to defend NATO members, which she thinks should include Georgia and Ukraine, as people at The Corner are only too happy to point out.  Instead of ridiculing the notion of expanding NATO into the Caucasus, Marshall blows it.  Hemingway is also glad to remind Marshall that Obama and Biden support exactly the same thing for Georgia and Ukraine, which happens to be true and it also happens to be something I have been talking about for months. 

I would make the additional point that anyone with much understanding of the geopolitics of the Caucasus would know that Armenia is Russia’s most faithful ally in the region and there is no chance whatever of a Russo-Armenian conflict, not least because Russia and Armenia do not border on one another and landlocked Armenia is even more heavily dependent on Russian energy and trade than Georgia.  For that matter, while Russia regards Karabakh as quite distinct from the cases of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and even though it also has important trade relations with Azerbaijan, the likeliest scenario would be Russia coming to the aid of Armenia in the event of any Azeri attempt to retake Karabakh.

Sarah Palin endorses anticipatory self-defense preventive war, but seemingly without knowing what she is talking about.  She was not as bewildered as Philip Klein makes her sound in this post, but take his reaction as some indication of how underwhelming hawks are finding Palin to be:

But overall, she looked so rehearsed and scripted, and just kept repeating catch phrases without displaying any depth of understanding about the complexity of the national security issues being discussed. She came off very nervous, like a student who had crammed for an exam and was speaking in generalities becuase she doesn’t have an understanding of the specifics [bold mine-DL]. 

In other words, she did just about as well as McCain usually does.

P.S.  Palin also thinks we “must not blink” when it comes to sending forces into Pakistan without Islamabad’s permission.  In other words, she thinks Obama’s position on launching raids into Pakistan without their government’s permission is acceptable, while McCain thinks it is reckless and dangerous.  In this case, McCain is right and Palin is clueless.