“The Conservative Imagination”: Why Republicans Cannot Have A National Security “Doctrine”
In case you missed it, Marco Rubio delivered a Great Big Foreign Policy Speech yesterday, at the hallowed venue of the Council on Foreign Relations. It was such a big deal that Charlie Rose introduced him. And it even unveiled a proposed “doctrine” for national security, which I am sure the Floridian hopes will soon be known as the Rubio Doctrine.
But as Peter Beinart notes at The Atlantic, the Rubio Doctrine is basically just a collection of banal principles almost anyone could agree with:
The Rubio doctrine, which the Florida senator announced on Wednesday, “consists of three pillars.” Pillar number one is “American strength”: America must “adequately fund our military.” Pillar number two is “the protection of the American economy”: America must pursue “free trade.” Pillar number three is “clarity regarding America’s core values”: America must “support the spread of economic and political freedom by reinforcing our alliances, resisting efforts by large powers to subjugate their smaller neighbors” and “advanc[ing] the rights of the vulnerable.”
These, Rubio told moderator Charlie Rose, “are timeless truths.” But that’s precisely the problem. Historically, foreign-policy doctrines have been the opposite of “timeless.” They represent efforts to further American interests and ideals by offering a specific response to a specific geopolitical reality. Every president wants the United States to be strong, prosperous, and moral. Doctrines are supposed to outline a strategy for achieving those goals. They are not the goals themselves.
The most significant part of Beinart’s critique is this acerbic explanation of why Rubio has to keep his “doctrine” at 40,000 feet above the specific challenges of our era:
Rubio and most of the other GOP candidates want the United States to go on offense overseas after the perceived retrenchment of the Obama years. But Americans have little appetite for additional wars, and the threat that Republicans focus on most—“radical Islam”—lumps together states and organizations that are not only disparate, but bitterly hostile to each other. Truman’s “containment” doctrine and Reagan’s doctrine of “rollback” each had problems. But at least they were aimed at a specific enemy. Rubio can’t lay out a doctrine like that today because the two enemies he and other Republicans talk about most—Iran and ISIS—are only linked in the conservative imagination. On the ground, they’re at war.
That’s a bit of a problem, eh? I’m guessing if Rubio were challenged on this point, he might answer the way Will Rogers once did shortly before World War I when he was asked exactly how he proposed to drain the Atlantic Ocean, which was his “solution” to the problem of German U-Boat attacks: “That is a detail, and I am not a detail man.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly 15, 2015
“The Distracting Game Of Mirrors”: How To Survive The Hillary Hype; Liberal Dreams And The Media’s Big Elizabeth Warren Trap
Hillary Clinton is reportedly set to end the biggest non-mystery in American politics today by announcing her presidential candidacy. But even as we learn that she’s running, along with when and how she’ll make the announcement (via social media and video, we’re told, on Sunday afternoon), it seems the only actual mystery about the race will remain unsolved: How does Clinton propose to restart the engines of American opportunity that built a broad middle class after World War II, which began to sputter and fail over the last 30 years?
With neither a grand thematic backdrop for an announcement – Seneca Falls? Ferguson? McAllen, Tex.? Outside a small-city McDonald’s during a fast food workers’ strike? – nor a big address to outline the themes of her campaign, Clinton will leave defining what she stands for to the media for a little while, at least, and that’s risky. So far, journalists only seem able to define Clinton in contrast to a past or future opponent, asking whether she’ll attack President Obama (it’s a dumb media given that she has to), distance herself from her husband, the popular former president, or push back against the economic populism of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, even without Warren in the race.
If that limbo is risky for Clinton, it’s even more dangerous for progressives. As we wait to find out how Clinton will respond to the increasingly populist pulse of her party’s base, we’re beset by substitute, over-personalized storylines, heavy on drama but light on issues: Will Clinton co-opt the Warren wing of the party, or will she stand up to it? Is she going to rebuke Wall Street, a la Warren, or offer succor?
We’ve even got a surrogate battle of Ivy League economists: Is she closer to Harvard’s Raj Chetty, whose studies of upward mobility focus on how to restore it (which is said to be a more optimistic, plutocrat-friendly analysis), or Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz, who recently wrote, in an essay shared with the Clinton team, that an effective economic policy must go beyond incremental policies like raising the minimum wage and improving education, to include “redistribution” of income – a once-routine assumption of public policy that now sounds like communism to a lot of business-oriented Democrats. (For the record, Clinton has met with both men.)
Without a Clinton challenger – and specifically, without Warren – most of the media struggle to explain what will matter to Democrats in the race. Witness this bizarre exchange between CBS’s Charlie Rose and Warren herself last week. Exasperated at Warren’s failure either to declare her own candidacy or critique Clinton’s, the respected interviewer – the “Charlie Rose” brand has long stood for substance, at least – began to badger the senator for more “specifics” about her agenda – after she’d already talked about reducing student loan interest rates and hiking the minimum wage.
ROSE: It’s hard to get to you be more specific. You talk about the Democratic Party’s a fluid thing and is going here and there and it’s always changing. But we want you to really-
WARREN: I’m sorry, what was nonspecific about let’s reduce the interest rate on student loans to 3.89%?
ROSE: You’ve been saying that in a lot of different–
WARREN: I’m there.
ROSE: I know. You’ve been saying that in a lot of different places and that’s a very specific position.
WARREN: And I have supported our efforts to try to get the minimum wage—
ROSE: And you say, well—
WARREN: I’ve supported it at $10.10. I would support it at a higher number. And I’m willing to sit down and negotiate with those who are willing to raise the minimum wage.
ROSE: What we’re trying to understand is that you represent — you really have become the voice of a wing of the Democratic Party, and maybe all of the party. What we want to know is where does Elizabeth Warren want to see this party go?
WARREN: Oh golly, how could you not know?
ROSE: In terms of minimum wage. In terms of income inequality. In terms of a whole range of things.
WARREN: I’m ready.
ROSE: You’re ready to tell them where you are and where you think the country…And where you differ from former Secretary of State Clinton. Why can’t you tell us that? Why isn’t that interest in the interest of a full debate about the future of the country, the future of the Democratic Party and who the nominee ought to be?
WARREN: Charlie, I’ll tell you where I stand on all of the key issues. It’s up to others to say whether they stand there as well or they stand in some different place. I’ll tell you where I stand on minimum wage. I’ll tell you where I stand on equal pay for equal work. I’ll tell you where I stand on expanding—
ROSE: Name me one thing you would like to see — name me one thing that you would like to see Hillary Clinton do and say and commit to that she has not committed to?
In fact, Warren has laid out her agenda in an eight-point plan to restore the middle class, which includes a minimum wage hike, protecting and expanding Social Security, strengthening labor laws, restoring a more progressive tax code, and building infrastructure. Similar ideas are in the “Ready for Boldness” statement the Progressive Change Campaign Committee is organizing around (Senators Harry Reid and Al Franken are among 5,000 Democrats who’ve signed their names to the statement), trying to “incentivize” Clinton to move to the left. PCCC leaders recently met with members of Clinton’s campaign team.
But if journalists can’t frame these ideas in terms of someone “attacking” Hillary Clinton, they’re not interested, and they’ll insist there’s no progressive agenda.
Meanwhile, frustrated in their efforts to gin up a fight between two popular Democratic women, some will find surrogates elsewhere that let them frame the narrative in terms of “centrist” Clinton facing down and “taming” progressive critics – or being tamed by them. Politico gave us an example this week with “Rahm shows Hillary how to tame the left.”
As Elias Isquith explained, however, the piece took itself apart, as it argued that Emanuel won because he co-opted progressive ideas, not because he ran away from them. Still, it was framed as a “lesson” for Clinton to thumb her nose at the party’s base. Let’s hope she’s not listening.
There are real divisions among Democrats – and maybe even within the Clinton camp – over both tone and substance when it comes to economic policy. Personally, I’m with Joseph Stiglitz, who wrote in an essay shared with the Clinton campaign:
The increase in inequality and the decrease in equality of opportunity have reached the point where minor fixes — such as modest increases in the minimum wage and continuing to strive to improve education and educational opportunity — will not suffice. A far more comprehensive approach to the problem is required, entailing redistribution and doing what one can to improve the market distribution of income and to prevent the unfair transmission of advantage across generations.
But we have no evidence that Clinton herself disagrees, and progressives should ignore the distracting game of mirrors the media will continue to play with the Democratic frontrunner and her base. Personally, I’m not seeing Sunday as the kick-off to Clinton’s campaign (though there are reports that her announcement tweets will deal with issues). That will come when she begins to outline her own substantive agenda for closing the widening income and opportunity divide.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 12, 2015
“Dark, Heartless And In No Position To Criticize”: It’s Time For Dick Cheney To Get Off The Stage
In the midst of the Crimean crisis, Dick Cheney saw fit to undermine the commander in chief. “I also think he hasn’t got any credibility with our allies,” Cheney said Sunday on a CBS News broadcast, speaking of President Obama.
That’s unseemly, to say the least, in a foreign policy crisis. A once-high official simply does not say such things about a sitting president, by protocol; George W. Bush is scrupulously silent these days. It’s just Cheney’s latest outrage; keeping track is like counting cattle.
Who asked him, anyway? Charlie Rose, hosting Bob Schieffer’s Sunday show, “Face The Nation.” Rose apparently had not heard of a famous declaration by a Republican senator, one swell Arthur Vandenberg, that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Cozy with his Southern charm, Rose did not challenge Cheney’s bald, ugly assertion about President Obama, laced with an edge malice. Old pro Schieffer, my favorite CBS Newsman, wouldn’t let an unpatriotic line go by so easy.
Why wasn’t Cheney back home on the range in Wyoming, where the deer and the antelope play — all the better to hunt? Let him leave us in peace and spend more time with his family.
The country knew of Cheney’s glaring influence inside the Bush White House and its wars of choice. Less known is that the former president and Cabinet colleagues had grown weary of Cheney’s sharp style and he’d eventually lose his place in the power scheme. The man who ducked every chance to serve in uniform during the Vietnam War seemed to see himself leading “on the field of battle” in a dark shadowy conflict. He took the tragedy of September 11 into other spheres as well and masterminded scaring us into surrendering our civil liberties.
Yet Cheney’s star began to wane about six years into the Bush presidency, according to Peter Baker, the author of “Days of Fire.” This was about the time Bush himself fell out of public favor.
By then, the nation was weary of war, especially the empty grounds for the Iraq War. At home, Bush’s cavalier reaction to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina drowning of New Orleans awakened the nation out of a slumber. So, of course, not all the failings of his presidency had Cheney’s fingerprints on them.
But back home on the Texas ranch, Bush himself wrote in his memoir that Cheney had “become a lightning rod for criticism from the media and the left. He was seen as dark and heartless — the Darth Vader of the administration.”
Cheney has not lightened up since.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, March 11, 2014
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