The nature of both representative democracy and complex modern societies requires us to put a high degree of trust in those to whom we delegate responsibility. We know that they’re generally smarter about their subject matters than we are, simply because that’s what they do. By no means does that mean we should suspend skepticism or meekly accept judgments that strike us as wrong. We should ask questions and diversify the range of expert opinions we consult. The greater the risk, the more skepticism and less deference is due. But starting with the proposition that those whom we reason to trust are probably doing the right thing is reasonable enough. ~James Joyner

James was responding to Kevin Drum’s posts on trusting Obama’s judgment. In his second post, Drum says that trusting Obama’s judgment requires trusting him even when he disagrees with him, and I agree that this is what trusting someone else’s judgment would have to mean.

Where things become a bit murkier is the reason why Drum trusts Obama’s judgement so much. As Drum said in his original post, Obama based his appeal to Democratic primary voters partly on his claim to having better judgment than Clinton. The main piece of evidence Obama could cite to back this up was his early opposition to the war in Iraq. It’s important to remember that Obama’s claim to superior judgment relied heavily on his opposition to the Iraq war in 2002 shortly before his presidential rivals were casting votes in favor of the authorization resolution. This seems to have been an important factor in Drum’s decision to trust Obama:

I was one of many who ended up voting for Obama on the grounds that his judgment seemed a bit sounder. Maybe not as toughminded as Hillary, but just as smart and, in foreign affairs, seemingly a little more willing to look at the world with fresh eyes and resist the siren call of intervention at every turn.

It’s this last part that I have a hard time understanding. Obama hasn’t opposed a single U.S. or allied military action in the last twenty years except for the Iraq war, and on Iraq one can argue that he happened to get lucky to oppose what turned out to be a disaster because he was playing to a Democratic audience in a blue state. Perhaps some people regard that as an encouraging track record, as Iraq was by far the most disastrous for the U.S. of any of the interventions during this period, but I don’t see how anyone could conclude that Obama would be willing to “resist the siren call of intervention at every turn.”

Obama told voters during the campaign that he was a liberal interventionist, and he staffed his administration with many other liberal interventionists, but it seemed as if the demands on the military from Afghanistan and Iraq would preclude him from ever acting on this. There wasn’t much reason to expect that Obama would be willing to resist the “siren call” except for practical and political constraints imposed by the ongoing wars. Put another way, we already knew that Obama’s judgment on this question was not very good, but there was a good chance that circumstances would make it impossible for that poor judgment to result in a new war. Despite all that, Obama plunged into Libya.

The troubling thing about Obama’s judgment on many foreign policy and national security issues is that he tends to take the same positions as more reliably hawkish and authoritarian figures, and he takes longer to get there. This holds out the possibility that Obama might come to a better decision, and then rips it away. This is what happened on Libya. Hawks and authoritarians not only largely get the policies they want, but they get to present Obama’s final decision as proof that it was because of their merits that their arguments won the day, when it was simply a matter of Obama coming more slowly to the position that he was always going to take. If it were just one or two issues where this happened, I suppose an Obama supporter would have reason to keep trusting his judgment, but when it becomes a fairly consistent pattern of reaching wrong or questionable major decisions it would have to be hard even for Obama’s voters to conclude that his judgment merited the trust that they put in it.