Daniel Larison

The Window for Republican Foreign Policy Reform Won’t Be Open for Long

The 2012 election was not decided because of foreign policy issues, but foreign policy hawkishness and the legacy of the Bush administration’s multiple failures were real liabilities for the Romney campaign and the party as a whole. These will continue to be liabilities for future Republican tickets unless party leaders recognize this and make the necessary changes. That will involve repudiating a lot of the foreign policy of the Bush era, and adopting in its place a foreign policy defined by restraint and prudence.

It is possible that the damage among younger voters has already been done such that these cohorts are lost to the GOP for many elections to come, but there is virtually no chance of winning them and future cohorts of voters if the party’s foreign policy remains what it is. Failing to reform Republican foreign policy will have effects beyond the relatively small portion of the electorate that votes on these issues, because the perception of incompetence and recklessness on these issues will sabotage the party’s efforts to repair its overall reputation.

The Republican weakness on foreign policy isn’t simply that Republican candidates favor many unpopular policies, but that most Americans don’t trust that Republicans won’t agitate for new, unnecessary wars in the future. Most Americans would presumably still endorse a message of “peace through strength,” but they have to be able to believe that Republican leaders are interested in preserving the peace rather than finding excuses for destroying it. Where Republicans were once considered sober, responsible stewards, most of their foremost spokesmen on foreign policy are now correctly regarded as dangerous and intoxicated with ideological fantasies.

It isn’t just that most of their preferred policies are substantively bad, as important as that is, but that most Americans reasonably expect the worst from them when they are in power. It will take some significant effort to get things to a point where a majority at least gives Republicans the benefit of the doubt on these issues. So far, the party’s leaders haven’t been making any effort to reform their foreign policy, and the Republican figures that have the most to say on foreign policy are daily moving the party in the wrong direction. There is still a window for Republican foreign policy reform, but it will close quickly if no leading Republicans take advantage of it.

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The Ever-Shrinking Republican Foreign Policy Tent (II)

James Joyner discusses Republican hawkish hostility to Hagel in connection with the diminishing space for moderate Republicans and realists in the party:

Lindsey Graham notwithstanding, Hagel’s views on most foreign policy issues of the day are well in the mainstream of the professional foreign policy establishment. It’s why so many legends of the business — Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, Zbigniew Brzesinski, Robert Gates, Jim Jones, and so many more — have lauded his nomination.

Problematically, while Scowcroft, Powell, and Eisenhower are admired by professionals in their field, their party’s leadership views them as Republicans in Name Only — if not outright apostates. It’s a status they share with Richard Lugar, George H.W. Bush, Jon Huntsman, and, yes, Chuck Hagel.

Either the Republican Party has to re-embrace its traditional foreign policy agenda, or those of us who have been left on the outside looking in will have to conclude that it’s no longer our party.

The predicament James describes is one that has been at least 10-15 years in the making. Obviously, it became much worse during the Bush years, but instead of abating once Bush left office it continued to intensify. Moderates and realists might be partly forgiven for thinking that the second Bush term hinted at the possibility that the GOP was slowly returning to its senses, but that gave Bush’s second term too much credit and underestimated the extent to which many self-described realists inside the administration contributed to its disastrous record. Except for Powell, almost all of the self-described realists that served in the Bush administration remain firmly in the Republican orbit and are in no danger of leaving the party. Indeed, many of them served as advisers in some capacity on the Romney campaign, but clearly had little or no influence on the candidate’s policies. Some Republican realists went out of their way during the campaign to find hints of prudent thinking in Romney’s camp that were notable for being so rare and isolated. If party leaders are going to take seriously the possibility that they are in danger of losing current supporters, Republican realists and conservative voters have to stop making excuses for deeply flawed, hawkish candidates and refuse to support future nominees that hold reckless and aggressive foreign policy views.

It’s understandable that the party couldn’t suddenly switch so quickly from Bush-era foreign policy between the repudiation in 2006 and the next presidential election, but it would have been a normal and healthy reaction to the failures of the Bush years to make some significant changes by the next presidential election. That didn’t happen. Worse than that, the eventual nominee was so desperate for shore up his partisan support that he seemed to revert to the rhetoric and many of the ideas of the first Bush term as if Bush’s failures had never happened or had already been forgotten. The party has a chance in the next few years to start recovering from these mistakes, but that recovery won’t be possible as long as the energy, activism, and organization remain on the side of Republican hard-liners.

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U.S. Foreign Policy in the Second Term: Not Retreating, Trying to Avoid Major Blunders

Greg Scoblete looks ahead to what U.S. foreign policy will most likely be in the second term:

For the record, I don’t see the nomination of either Chuck Hagel or John Kerry as tipping a massive U.S. retreat from the world. I’d venture a guess that almost all U.S. military bases abroad not currently slated for closure or consolidation will still be in operation when they leave. The U.S. will still retain a wide network of ambassadors, will still participate and lead most international organizations, will continue to engage in trade negotiations and will still use lethal force against al-Qaeda in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. There may be a stronger reluctance to start large scale wars with countries absent a clear casus belli, but that’s not a “retreat” in any meaningful sense of the word [bold mine-DL].

Scoblete is making sense. What Hiatt refers to as “retreat” is mostly the reluctance to take on additional, unnecessary burdens and commitments in various parts of the world. As Scoblete says, that isn’t retreat. It’s a refusal to squander even more resources and lives than the U.S. already does right now. The U.S. will still have far too many burdens and commitments, and as far as I am concerned it will still have a foreign policy that is far too militarized and activist, but the potential of the administration’s second term is simply that these things won’t get any worse over the next few years.

Hiatt is disappointed because he very much wants a more militarized and activist foreign policy than the one Obama has conducted in the first term, and so far the signs are that he probably won’t get it. The danger of Romney’s election was always that he would make these flaws in U.S. foreign policy much worse. Indeed, he campaigned on a platform of doing exactly that. The danger for the Republican Party in the next four years is that it will keep trying to attack Obama’s foreign policy as insufficiently aggressive, despite the fact this line of attack has proved to be entirely unsuccessful and has only worsened the GOP’s reputation on these issues with the public. As long as the party keeps weighing itself down with hard-line foreign policy views, it will have a harder time recovering politically and it will continue ceding the foreign policy advantage to its opponents.

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Hyperactive Hardliners Against the World

Fred Hiatt is unhappy that some people call warmongers by the proper name:

Those who argue for a more vigorous international role are sometimes caricatured as war-loving and unilateralist when, in fact, an activist stance has been favored by Democrats from Harry Truman to Madeleine Albright and Republicans from Richard Nixon to Colin Powell. It would be no fairer to label them all bellicose neocons than to call Obama a pure isolationist.

Not all internationalists are “war-loving and unilateralist,” and it’s obvious that neoconservatives and other Republican hard-liners do not represent the majority of internationalists, but it is quite fair to describe people who routinely call for unilateral and/or U.S.-led military action in response to virtually every international crisis in that way. The most hard-line advocates for “a more vigorous international role” would be less likely to be criticized in these terms if their idea of “vigor” weren’t so often limited to the imposition of cruel sanctions regimes, bombing and invading other countries, and deposing foreign governments. When these people speak of a “robust” or “forward-leaning” or “vigorous” U.S. role, we know that in practice this means more wars, increased costs to the U.S. military, additional lives squandered, more destabilized and chaotic countries, and more anti-Americanism around the world.

When they warn against “disengagement” or “retreat,” as Hiatt does, the rest of us hear demands that the U.S. maintain an unsustainable, hyper-active foreign policy regardless of the costs and benefits. The debate is not between supporters of an activist foreign policy vs. their critics, but between the hyper-activist hard-liners and everyone else. The Hagel debate is one microcosm of that larger argument, and Hiatt and his paper have been on the wrong and losing side of both.

The silliest part of Hiatt’s article is the claim that previous U.S. “retreats” have somehow invited trouble:

But if the United States retreats too quickly and too far, history will reach out to grab us back.

Of course, “history” isn’t doing anything, and there is nothing that says that the U.S. is fated by history to have a particular role in the world. What dragged the U.S. into the last decade and more of conflict wasn’t an overly hasty retreat in the 1990s, but an ongoing, deep involvement in other countries’ affairs that comes back to bite us every so often. The response beginning in 2001 was to deepen and intensify that involvement even more, which has cost the U.S. a great deal and resolved very little, and to create new generations of enemies that may “grab us” again in the future.

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Hagel, Right and Left

Charles Krauthammer’s explanation of the “meaning of Hagel” gets off to a horrible start and never recovers:

The puzzle of the Chuck Hagel nomination for defense secretary is that you normally choose someone of the other party for your Cabinet to indicate a move to the center, but, as The Post’s editorial board pointed out, Hagel’s foreign policy views are to the left of Barack Obama’s, let alone the GOP’s. Indeed, they are at the fringe of the entire Senate.

If a center-left Democratic president appoints a center-right Republican to his Cabinet, almost by definition he cannot be doing anything other than moving to the center or the right. The Hagel-is-left-of-Obama idea is ridiculous for many reasons, but this is the most obvious one. Hagel’s appointment is a puzzle only to those that can’t or won’t comprehend that he wasn’t on “the fringe of the entire Senate.” Indeed, I suspect that many of the people making this charge know it to be nonsense, but find it useful for the moment to promote it. Hagel belonged to a group of moderate Republican internationalists that have all but vanished from the Senate GOP. When they were there, they were arguably among the more reliable supporters of most consensus views than many of their other Republican colleagues. While most Republicans tried to stop the ratification of New START in 2010, for example, it was the remaining relative moderates that provided enough Republican support to approve the treaty.

Are Republican realists and moderate internationalists to Obama’s “left” on foreign policy? The question shows how useless right/left labels can be and how easily they can be abused. Is it only a view of “the left” that unilateral sanctions are ineffective? No, it isn’t. Anyone who gives the issue a moment’s thought will understand why multilateral sanctions are less likely to be evaded than unilateral sanctions. Likewise, one doesn’t have to be on “the left” to be appalled by the senseless waste of unnecessary war or to recognize the futility of continuing to wage such a war after it has proven to be a disaster.

Republican hawks want to accuse Hagel of moving to “the left” because he has become even more skeptical of military action than he was in the past, but one might just as easily say that he had moved towards the right of traditional and dissident conservatives opposed to unnecessary wars and hyper-activist foreign policy. Hard-liners in the GOP have long wanted to portray any conservative and Republican dissent against unnecessary wars as “leftist,” which they have to do to obscure the reality that the policies they favor are antithetical to conservative principles of restraint and prudence. This is necessary for them to maintain the fiction that hard-line foreign policy is the proper conservative view and that conservatives should be hard-liners when the opposite is the truth.

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On Being “Mainstream” and Foreign Policy Groupthink

I appreciated Rod’s continuation of the discussion of Hagel and his record. Rod writes:

But I fail to see where being inside the supposed “mainstream” of US foreign policy and national security decisions over the past 12 years has been advantageous to the US.

Indeed, it is a fairly good rule that the more conventionally “mainstream” Hagel’s past votes and views have been, the more likely they were to have been wrong according to realist and non-interventionist standards. What distinguishes Hagel from most of his colleagues is that he has been more willing than they are to entertain and hold views that the rest of them avoid for fear of appearing to be moving outside of “the mainstream” as defined by the likes of Graham. Of course, as Greg Djerejian notes today, this relies on a definition of “mainstream” that is itself extremely limited and stifling:

Posturing aside, I do not understand how Hagel can be out of the “mainstream”, unless one means the suffocating clutches of supine group-think that have eviscerated much of the foreign policy class [bold mine-DL]. I believe skepticism about a military adventure in Iran is eminently “mainstream”. Indeed, I would go further, and would think that fuller consideration of a “containment” doctrine vis-à-vis Iran should be “mainstream” too—if ultimately diplomacy and sanctions were to run aground, only leaving potentially less desirable military options, and as done with arch-foes in the past of far greater geopolitical strength than Iran (even if the President has ostensibly removed this policy option from the table). I believe skepticism about unilateral Iran sanctions—as compared to the multilateral variety that Hagel more typically has supported—is “mainstream” and indeed, far more intelligent, as unilateral sanctions can be avoided with ease and so have materially less bite.

Absolutely. When Lindsey Graham complains that Hagel’s views are not “mainstream” enough, he is speaking for a very limited range of opinion within the political class and within his own party. He is speaking on behalf of what Djerejian calls the “suffocating clutches of supine group-think.” The closer that one looks, the more that one sees that Graham’s “mainstream” is very narrow and excludes large parts of his party’s own rank-and-file and a majority of the public on many issues.

When Graham lectures someone else for their supposedly marginal or “fringe” views, we are treated to the spectacle of an ideological hard-liner representing the view of a small faction who is trying to pretend that he represents the broad majority of Americans. He represents no such thing. Graham has hardly ever seen a foreign crisis or conflict in the last decade that he didn’t want the U.S. involved in, and he usually favors military action as a desirable way to handle major international issues. Compared to Graham’s record, Hagel has been far more “mainstream” in his views in that Hagel’s views are the ones much more in sync with those of the public than Graham’s. The bipartisan foreign policy consensus helped lead the country into the disaster of the Iraq war, but unlike Graham et al. most of its adherents were able to acknowledge that it had been a terrible mistake. Graham represents the people who still refuse to acknowledge the reality of what their preferred policies did and would do do again if they are repeated. We shouldn’t be interested in what such people consider “mainstream,” and we certainly shouldn’t take their advice on who should serve in important government positions.

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The Romney “Vision” on Foreign Policy: Seeing Connections That Don’t Exist

He exaggerates the differences between Obama and Romney on foreign policy, but Henry Nau makes a comment that deserves a little more discussion:

The foreign policies of Obama and Romney, or what is now the loyal opposition, could not be wider apart. Obama’s foreign policy is inordinately piecemeal, even picayune. It lacks a vision that draws connections between specific issues, such as terrorism, and the broader American interest to protect and promote freedom [bold mine-DL]. The loyal opposition, by contrast, connects the dots between terrorism and authoritarian challenges to American and global freedom.

There is a real difference here in that the “vision” that Nau describes is a mish-mash of Bush-era ideas that didn’t make sense ten years ago and still don’t today. Obama didn’t ever fully subscribe to these views, and he made a point of moving away from the folly of the “freedom agenda” at the beginning of his first term. Is there a connection between issues of terrorism and “protecting and promoting freedom”? No, there isn’t. What connections are there between terrorism and “authoritarian challenges to American and global freedom”? There might be some extremely tenuous connection somewhere, but the truth is that these issues (assuming we can treat the entire phenomenon of terrorism as a single “issue”) are not closely connected. Are there authoritarian challenges to American freedom? If so, they can only come from Americans, since there is no foreign power today capable of restricting that freedom.

Linking these things together was a clumsy, arbitrary move by the Bush administration that was eager to push its “freedom agenda” in tandem with waging the “war on terror” as if one had much to do with the other. One of the major flaws of the foreign policy of the Bush administration and the views of his supporters was the tendency to conflate and link things that had no connection. Advocates for invading Iraq did this most famously when they promoted spurious claims of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The habit of linking unrelated things was a common error often informed by the bad habit of imagining that “values” and interests could be advanced together without trade-offs. Insofar as Romney represented a return to these false assumptions, Americans and other nations around the world were fortunate that he lost the election. The “vision” that Nau attributes to Romney is a fantasy that distorts understanding of the issues that it forces together.

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Santorum vs. Hagel (II)

Here is Santorum at the start of his anti-Hagel campaign:

His anti-Israel, pro-Iran mindset makes him uniquely unqualified to serve as our Defense secretary.

Consider how many layers of dishonesty and delusion are packed into that sentence. Unless someone subscribes to Santorum’s hard-line version of what constitutes support for Israel and opposition to the Iranian government, Santorum believes that this person has an “anti-Israel, pro-Iran mindset.” Santorum may be one of the more fanatical critics of Hagel, but he shares the assumptions of other opponents of the nomination, so it’s worth reflecting on these charges a little more.

The first thing to note about these charges is that they are automatically self-discrediting. No remotely fair reading of the evidence supports this description of Hagel, and in a saner foreign policy debate it would be dismissed out of hand. Unfortunately, it won’t be, and that tells us a great deal about what is wrong with the state of foreign policy debate in this country. On one side, there are people attempting to make reasonably good-faith arguments about the pros and cons of the nomination, and on the other there are people inventing things out of thin air and hurling the most despicable accusations. Somehow we’re still supposed to believe that the latter are engaged in serious, substantive debate.

Why would anyone trust the judgment of someone who makes such an obviously dishonest argument? Of course, describing Hagel as being either “anti-Israel” or “pro-Iran” is wildly and intentionally inaccurate. Labeling others in this way is an old tactic that hawks have used for a long time to marginalize even the mildest dissenters. It is supposed to imply that the person is sympathetic to an antagonistic government and declares that disagreement over the best policy for the U.S. is tantamount to disloyalty.

Something else that continues to impress me is how self-destructive it is for “pro-Israel” hawks to fling these charges at people with such modest policy disagreements. Not only are the people being targeted with these attacks never going to follow the hawks’ line on policy, but they are making their definition of “pro-Israel” so narrow and exclusive that fewer and fewer people can possibly qualify. These hawks are putting themselves on a fast track to irrelevance. Considering how much damage they have done to U.S. and Israeli interests over the years, that is a very welcome and overdue development.

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The Case Against Hagel Depends on Distortion and Ignorance of the Facts

Peter Lawler doesn’t know very much about Hagel:

The Hagel nomination is pushing all the right buttons–unifying, as I predicted, the lefties at THE NATION with the isolationists at THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE–in support of the ANTI-MCCAIN. The “neocons” (well, of course, not just neocons) are interpreting the nomination as evidence that the president–contrary to what he said during his campaign–doesn’t care about Israel’s future or a nuclear Iran or even a resolute national defense. There is, after all, evidence from Hagel’s mouth that support those concerns. But the McCain perspective is really unpopular now, and so why not trick the Republicans into projecting it once more? Another issue, of course, is there’s little evidence that Hagel could actually RUN the Pentagon (I admit there’s not much McCain could do it either). The drop-off in quality from Gates and Panetta is pretty obvious, from an executive perspective.

This is just extremely poor analysis. No one is playing a “trick” on Republican hawks. They could refrain from panicking over the Hagel nomination if they weren’t so eager to denounce anyone who deviates even a hair’s breadth from hard-line policies. It seems that they cannot help themselves. These Republicans “project” the “McCain perspective” because they share it or because they think it is politically necessary for others to think that they share it. Why might the “McCain perspective” be unpopular at the moment? Perhaps because it is a perspective that incessantly demands the waging of unnecessary wars in countries where the U.S. has nothing at stake?

Like a lot of other people, Lawler buys into the caricature that Hagel’s critics have created. He might have made some effort to investigate Hagel’s record to find that there’s no “evidence from Hagel’s mouth that support those concerns” on Israel and Iran, but he’s clearly just reproducing what hawkish detractors have said without checking any of it. On the last point, Lawler doesn’t even pretend to have any evidence to support his claim. Perhaps he doesn’t know that Hagel has some significant executive experience in the private sector and from his time as president and CEO of the USO. That record suggests that there won’t be any “drop-off in quality” in the management of the department. Of course, no one gave the executive experience of Gates or Panetta a second thought when they were nominated, because they weren’t being subjected to ideological purity tests during their confirmation processes.

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Santorum vs. Hagel

CNN reports some hilarious news:

Rick Santorum will launch a drive against the nomination of former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as Defense secretary, CNN has learned.

Santorum really is the hawkish gift that keeps on giving. If there is one current or former elected official other than John McCain who embodies everything wrong with the Republican Party’s current foreign policy thinking, it would have to be Rick Santorum. It’s appropriate that Santorum is launching an anti-Hagel campaign, because he is in some important respects the anti-Hagel in terms of temperament and foreign policy views. Where Hagel was a grudging supporter and later critic of the Iraq war, Santorum was an unflinching supporter of the invasion and occupation, and he remains so until now. As wary of war as Hagel can be because of his experience in combat, Santorum is the classic example of the heedless activist/ideologue whose obsession with talking about foreign policy issues is equaled only by his staggering ignorance of the rest of the world.

Faced with the debacle in Iraq, Santorum not only failed to learn anything from that, but railed against the Bush administration for being insufficiently aggressive towards Iran and other countries. The disaster in Iraq caused Hagel to become more skeptical and prudent about the use of force. Santorum concluded from the same experience that the U.S. needed to become even more confrontational in its dealings with every pariah state and the major authoritarian powers. Santorum’s re-election bid in 2006 was always going to be difficult, but he ensured that a likely loss turned into the most humiliating rout of an incumbent Senator ever by making the election a referendum on his fanatical foreign policy views.

Instead of being chastened by the overwhelming repudiation of those views, Santorum intensified his support for reckless and militaristic policies. He was bound to be opposed to Hagel’s nomination. There has scarcely been one sound idea related to foreign policy and the military that Santorum hasn’t opposed. The GOP has a choice in the coming years on foreign policy: it can become more like Santorum or it can become more like Hagel. If the party chooses the former, its political fortunes over the long term will be every bit as bright as Santorum’s.

P.S. In case anyone has forgotten, one of Santorum’s last votes was to oppose Robert Gates, who was at that time Bush’s nominee for Secretary of Defense.

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