“The Neocons’ Long Game”: Don’t Expect Fuzzy Moderate Feelings To Last If Romney Ends Up In The White House
Most of the snap polls taken after last night’s foreign policy debate, the last before the November 6 election, gave the win the President Obama—if not an outright knockout then at least a TKO on points. But beyond the candidates themselves, the debate did have one clear loser: neoconservatives.
During the many years Mitt Romney has been running for president, he’s taken a number of fluid positions on foreign policy. In addition to reflecting Romney’s character as an eager-to-please shape-shifter, the changing positions also represent a genuine—and growing—policy tension among foreign policy factions within the GOP establishment.
Even though old school realists like Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft retain some influence, and more isolationist voices like Senator Rand Paul represent a rising challenge, the neoconservatives remain the most dominant. But even though Romney had worked diligently since 2009 to build ties to the GOP’s neoconservative wing, and relies heavily on a number of them as his key advisers, the foreign policy vision he articulated last night indicates that he understands that American voters (at least the ones he needs to eke out an Electoral College victory) just aren’t that into the expensive, world-transformative schemes that neocons are still busy dreaming up.
Romney’s new foreign policy tack was evident on the very first question of the night, in which moderator Bob Schieffer served the issue of the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks to him on a plate. Romney chose not to re-boot his fumbled criticism of the Obama administration from the last debate, something his hawkish surrogates and the GOP’s Fox News annex have been pushing hard for over the last week. Rather, Romney chose to draw back to a broader view of a region in chaos. His Obama-esque declaration that “We can’t kill our way out of this mess,” while surely appealing to voters tired of war in the Middle East, was sure to disappoint the neocons, for whom there are few problems in the world that can’t be solved through the application of American ordnance.
It wouldn’t be the last time Romney echoed the president last night. With regard to the prospect of U.S. military interventions, Romney insisted that “We don’t want another Iraq,” even though neocons still proclaim the Iraq war a success (a commanding majority of Americans disagrees). On Iraq itself, though he criticized the failure to achieve a new status of forces agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments, Romney recoiled from President Obama’s suggestion that he didn’t support withdrawing American troops. On Syria and Afghanistan, Romney took positions 180 degree opposite what his neoconservative supporters have been advocating, assuring viewers that “I don’t want to have our military involved” in the former, and agreeing with President Obama’s withdrawal timetable for the latter.
One moment where Romney did let his inner neocon out to play was in his claim that President Obama’s efforts to engage the Iranians in diplomatic talks were taken by Iran as a sign of weakness. “I think from the very beginning, one of the challenges we’ve had with Iran is that they have looked at this administration and—and felt that the administration was not as strong as it needed to be,” Romney said. “I think they saw weakness where they had expected to find American strength.”
First, when one considers how Iran’s hardliners profited—both domestically and in regional influence—from the Bush administration’s reckless show of “strength” in the Middle East, this claim falls apart. But it also seriously misunderstands the manner in which U.S. diplomatic outreach to Iran has discombobulated an Iranian regime that much prefers to deal with an openly hostile U.S. government.
As Israeli analyst Meir Javedanfar noted, President Obama “called this regime’s bluff by recognizing it. This is the worst thing you can do to your enemy, to unmask them.” Exploring this dynamic in a 2010 column, David Ignatius wrote, “White House officials argue that their strategy of engagement has been a form of pressure, and the evidence supports them.”
Perhaps the most brutal moment of the night was President Obama’s takedown of Romney’s claim that the president had gone on an “apology tour” after taking office, a treasured conservative myth despite its pantaloons being rendered aflame by virtually every fact-checking organization in existence. True to form, the Romney campaign blasted out a new “Apology Tour” ad this morning, which notably doesn’t include any footage of President Obama apologizing.
It tells us a lot about Romney’s lack of a clear foreign policy agenda that this was the moment his campaign thought most-worthy of highlighting from last night—a cheap attack based not on any substantive policy difference, but a stylistic difference founded on a complete falsehood, the idea that President Obama hasn’t proclaimed or exerted American power boldly enough.
Which is why, despite Romney’s momentary embrace of President Obama’s policies, we should still be concerned with the role that neoconservatives would play in a Romney administration. It’s important to keep in mind that, as a candidate, Governor George W. Bush made a lot of moderate, reasonable-sounding noises about foreign policy too. But when faced with a crisis on 9/11, the inexperienced president with unformed foreign policy ideas fell back on the comforting but naive idea that America’s greatness could be proclaimed, and its deterrence re-established, through the massive exercise of military force. The next president will likely face a similar crisis, even if not likely on the scale of 9/11. It very much matters who has his ear.
By: Matthew Duss, The American Prospect, October 23, 2012
“A More Extreme Place”: Mitt Romney Is Not George W. Bush, He’s Worse
Much to Democrats’ chagrin, George W. Bush hasn’t played much of a role in larger 2012 political conversation. His name was rarely uttered during the Republican presidential primaries; the failed former president hid during the party’s national convention; and Mitt Romney did his level best to ignore the news when Bush endorsed him.
It came as a pleasant surprise, then, when a voter broached the subject last night. She noted she’s been “disappointed with the lack of progress” over the last four years, but she’s afraid of going back to Bush-era policies and wanted Romney to explain how they’re different.
Romney responded by answering a previous question about contraception. When he got around to responding, Romney stressed oil drilling and trade as examples of why “President Bush had a very different path for a very different time” — despite the fact that Romney and Bush have the same positions on oil drilling and trade.
What struck me as interesting was Obama making a counter-intuitive point — he said Romney and Bush are different, but Romney is worse:
“You know, there are some things where Governor Romney’s different from George Bush. George Bush didn’t propose turning Medicare into a voucher. George Bush embraced comprehensive immigration reform; he didn’t call for ‘self-deportation.’ George Bush never suggested that we eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood.
“So there are differences between Governor Romney and George Bush, but they’re not on economic policy. In some ways, he’s gone to a more extreme place when it comes to social policy, and I think that’s a mistake.”
Now, when I heard the question, my first thoughts turned to the fact that Romney has surrounded himself with former Bush/Cheney aides who are shaping a Bush/Cheney platform. Obama didn’t mention this.
But in some ways, the president’s response was even more effective: if you loved Bush’s economic policies, but didn’t think he was right-wing enough on Medicare, immigration, and women’s health, then Mitt Romney’s the candidate for you.
I have a hunch the woman in the audience who posed the question wasn’t reassured.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 17, 2012
“Terror Management Theory”: The Republicans’ Foreign Policy Problem
Pop quiz: if you had to describe the Obama foreign policy in one sentence, what would you say? Not easy, is it? Back in 2008, it was pretty simple: “Not Bush.” Now back then, there was something called the “Bush doctrine,” which may have had a subtle meaning to those working in the administration, but as far as the public was concerned mostly meant “invading lots of countries and making everyone in the world hate us.” So it was easy to imagine Obama as a breath of foreign policy fresh air. He’d use a less-bumbling combination of diplomacy, “soft power,” and carefully restrained force. He’d get us out of Iraq. Things would change for the better.
But now that Obama has been president for four years, “Not Bush” has lost its relevance. Obama’s actual foreign policy is too complicated to sum up easily, and probably therefore too complicated for most voters to understand. We did get out of Iraq, but things don’t seem to be going too well in Afghanistan; Obama has dramatically increased the use of drone strikes, which have solved some problems and created others; though opinions of America are somewhat better, lots of people still don’t like us. It’s a complex picture, and in the context of an election, the Obama campaign is going to react to most foreign policy questions with, “Remember that guy Osama bin Laden? He’s dead.”
True enough, but this complexity has left Republicans seemingly unable to critique the Obama foreign policy. As Conor Friedersdorf points out, Republicans can’t figure out what to say:
President Obama’s foreign policy is vulnerable to all sorts of accurate attacks. But Mitt Romney, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement are totally unable to exploit them. This is partly because the last four years have been spent advancing critiques so self-evidently implausible to anyone outside the movement that calling attention to them seems impolite. There is no factual basis for the assertion that Obama rejects American exceptionalism; or that he embarked on an apology tour; or that he is allied with our Islamist enemy in a “grand jihad” against America; or that his every action is motivated by Kenyan anti-colonialism. And while those critiques are especially inane, they aren’t cherry-picked to discredit conservatives. They’re actually all critiques advanced by prominent people, publications, and/or Republican politicians.
I’d say they have two problems. First, their impulse is to just say that their foreign policy is “Not Obama,” and that just doesn’t have the same persuasive power as “Not Bush” did four years ago, because American foreign policy doesn’t look like a disaster. For instance, when Mitt Romney criticizes Obama for getting out of Iraq too fast—since if Obama did it, it had to be wrong—most people are going to respond, “Are you crazy?” Second, the closest thing to an articulation of their own foreign policy vision they can come up with is “Obama weak! America should be strong! Grrr!” And voters don’t actually think Obama is weak.
That’s partly because of his own actions, and partly because in 2012, Americans aren’t actually fearing for their lives. They did during the Cold War, and they did in the aftermath of 9/11, but that feeling has faded. There have actually been some experiments showing that when you remind people of the possibility of their own deaths, they’re more likely to support conservative candidates (it’s called “Terror Management Theory”). I’ve heard pollsters say that one of the key moments of the 2004 campaign was the horrific Beslan school massacre that September in which 330 people were killed, over half of them children. It brought terrorism and fear back on to the front pages, to George W. Bush’s advantage.
But today, for all the world’s problems, Americans aren’t feeling like they might be killed tomorrow. That’s a good thing. But it leaves the Republicans without much of a coherent foreign policy critique.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 24, 2012
“The Factions And Their Guns”: Don’t Blame Mitt Romney For The GOP’s Problems
Yes, Mitt Romney had a week I wouldn’t wish on … well, Mitt Romney. Yes, his campaign is incompetent, as Peggy Noonan wrote Friday. Yes, there is something really off about the guy personally. But as conservatives like Noonan start in on Romney vilification, I feel the need to stand up and reiterate: Romney’s problems aren’t all Romney’s fault. They’re not even half his fault. They’re chiefly the fault of a movement and political party that has gone off the deep end. Almost every idiotic thing Romney has done, after all, can be traced to the need he feels to placate groups of people who are way out there in their own ideological solar system, with no purchase at all on how normal Americans feel and think about things. This is much the harder question for Noonan and others to confront, and they really ought to ponder it.
Since he started running, Romney has had to cater to four factions in the GOP, each of which contributes in its way to the party’s self-destructiveness: the rich and their apologists, who think Barack Obama has made life in America well-nigh impossible for those earning $1 million a year; the Tea Party populists, the middle-aged and older white people who feel intense resentment against Obama and his America; the foreign-policy neocons, who invented this fable about Obama apologizing for America and so on; and the rabble-rousers—Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, etc., whose megaphones announce all these anxieties and others.
These four groups have each been holding guns to Romney’s temple. He’s a weak man, yes. But in a way—in only this one particular way—I feel a little sorry for him. These groups permit no room to maneuver whatsoever. None. Not an inch. So when something happens that is in their wheelhouse, the expectation immediately arises that Romney will utter every syllable precisely as they want to hear it.
So it was with the neocons after the Cairo and Benghazi riots. Now, I’m sure it’s partly true that Romney and his team are one big overeager floppy-eared dog, galumphing across the lawn anxious to please their masters. But the master sets the dynamic in place. There’s no doubt whatsoever that if the Romney people didn’t feel they had to rush to please that crowd, he wouldn’t have issued that statement at an utterly inappropriate time and then tried absurdly to defend it the next morning.
The same can be said with regard to Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan. We don’t really know that this was forced on him per se by the right, but we have reason to believe that the logic, shall we say, of his naming Ryan was made clear to him. And what good has Ryan done him? Did you notice the poll last week, which deserves more attention than it’s received, showing that Ryan was a less popular vice-presidential choice than Sarah Palin? This is the man the gun-holding factions said was a brilliant, game-changing choice. He’s game changing all right, though not as they intended.
And it’s the same story on the 47 percent. The man who asked that question was speaking very clearly for Faction A above. There can be little doubt that the vast majority of the people in that room, maybe every person, felt his pain, and Romney knew exactly what he had to say. Again, it’s certainly a two-way street; Romney obviously believed every word he said. But he knew the catechism.
And by the way, does anyone think a Republican presidential candidate would have said this, even behind closed doors, in 1992 or 1996 or 2000 or even in 2008? I think there’s no chance. It’s probably the sort of thing a lot of them thought. But it’s something they never, ever would have said. They’d have known better. So the existence of these factions in their precise form is new. The concealed anxieties of all these factions were brought to the surface by the financial crisis and its aftermath, the black guy standing up there representing the America that they don’t know and that scares them, and the former Massachusetts governor who seems squishy and must forever prove his loyalty. And boy is the lid ever off now.
Could Jim Baker fix this campaign, as Noonan asserts or hopes? He’s a knife fighter, there’s no doubt about that. Look at Florida 2000. But remember, he came in during the late innings to help Poppy Bush’s 1992 campaign, and that ended pretty ingloriously. And besides, he’s 82 now. Can he work 14-hour days, make crisp, snap decisions? One could argue that Romney’s gotten all the help he needs this year from 82-year-old men.
Romney deserves everything that is happening to him (I guess I would wish this past week on him after all). But it isn’t happening because of Mitt Romney alone, or even the now-hated Stuart Stevens. It’s happening because of the factions and their guns. It’s happening because of a party and movement that are out of control and out of touch. There is not a prominent Republican in the country who could be doing any better, with the possible lone exception of Jeb Bush, but it’s probably too early yet for another Bush. Face it, Republicans: he was and is your best candidate, and he’s tanking now more because of you than because of him.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 23, 2012
“Lines In The Sand”: Is Netanyahu Trying To Blow Up The U.S. Election?
He is now actively involved in the Republican campaign to get a war against Iran – preferably before the election in order to scramble a race that Obama now looks as if he could win. He is pulling a Cheney, equating Salafist Sunni mobs in Libya with the Shiite dictatorship in Iran:
“Iran is guided by a leadership with an unbelievable fanaticism. It’s the same fanaticism that you see storming your embassies today. Do you want these fanatics to have nuclear weapons?”
He is making Santorum’s argument that the entire regime in Iran sees itself and its entire country as a suicide bomber, eager to destroy itself in order to annihilate the Jewish state. Does he provide an historical example of such suicidal tendencies for the nation as a whole? No. Because there is no precedent. No precedent in Mao’s China in its most radical era. No precedent in the Soviet Union under Stalin. No precedent even in North Korea, run by total loonies. The obvious answer, if you believe in just war theory, is to ratchet up non-military pressure to get real, effective inspection of Iran’s nuclear facilities while protecting its absolute right to pursue peaceful nuclear power. Another obvious answer, if you think non-proliferation is the key to world peace (which I don’t) is to get Israel to give up its nuclear weaponry – so that the entire region is nuke-free.
There is no just war theory on earth that can justify a pre-emptive strike against nuclear facilities which have not been used to produce a weapon in a country whose Supreme Leader has explicitly called a “sin” to deploy.
As for a radical regime in terms of international relations, which country in the Middle East has launched more wars than any other since its creation, has occupied territory it has then sought to ethnically re-balance, has killed civilians outside its borders in the thousands, has developed a nuclear capacity outside of international non-proliferation treaties, has physically attacked both Iraq and Syria to destroy their nuclear programs, and is now threatening war against Iran, a war that could convulse the entire world into a new clash of civilizations?
Israel is the answer. I have no doubt that this new incident of anti-American Salafist violence in the Middle East is now being used by prime minister Netanyahu to concoct a casus belli with which to scramble global events and get rid of Obama – and his continuing threat to Israel’s illegal expansionism.
When the prime minister of an ally is openly backing one political party in the US elections in order to plunge this country into a war whose consequences are unknowable and potentially catastrophic is a new low. If it is allowed to succeed, if Romney were to win and hand over US foreign policy in the Middle East to Netanyahu and Israel’s growing religious far right, then we will be back to the Bush era without even a veneer of sympathy for Arab democratic convulsions. Above, Netanyahu calls those, like me, who favor containment, are stupid. We are not as stupid as you think we are, Mr Netanyahu.
By: Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast, September 16, 2012
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