The American Conservative

Ross Douthat employs a strange anachronism in his recent column on Obama’s foreign policy:

If Hagel does get through, it will be the clearest sign yet that Obama enjoys more trust — and with it, more latitude — on foreign policy than any Democrat since Harry Truman [bold mine-DL].

I call this an anachronism for a few reasons. It was Truman’s foreign policy mistakes, both perceived and real, that helped the Republicans to end their two decades out of power and made the Republicans a credible alternative for governing for the first time since the 1920s. Truman’s expansion of containment doctrine into a policy to be pursued globally had long-lasting, pernicious effects on U.S. foreign policy that would last until the end of the Cold War. Truman left office with approval ratings worse than the lowest ratings of George W. Bush, and rightly so. It was only much later that Truman’s reputation was rehabilitated. The later rehabilitation of Truman after what most contemporaries regarded as his disastrous tenure has given endless encouragement to Bush’s remaining boosters, since they imagine that historians later in the century will engage in enough revisionism to make people nostalgic for the calamitous Bush era.

The point here is that Truman’s last years in office didn’t include his being widely trusted on foreign policy, but rather just the opposite. One of the main reasons that he didn’t seek re-election was that he couldn’t even command enough of the support of his party’s members to be re-nominated. Few Americans trusted him on foreign policy or anything else by the end of his term, which is so far very much not the case with Obama. Indeed, to the extent that Obama has earned the public’s trust (rather than benefiting from not being Bush), it has been by conducting a relatively less Truman-like foreign policy than his predecessor. Beinart’s Truman/Eisenhower distinction here is a bit exaggerated, but it hints at the reason why Obama had a foreign policy advantage during the election and why so many realists have moved into his camp.

A new Post/ABC News poll confirms that the hard-liners don’t speak for most Republicans and conservatives:

Still, a substantial proportion of Republicans say they have no opinion on the pick, and nearly as many Republicans support Hagel as oppose him. The numbers suggest the party’s base is hardly as incensed by Hagel’s selection as the GOP’s Senate conference — at least for now.

The difference between Republican support for the nomination (28%) and opposition to it (35%) is not that great. Among conservatives, there is likewise less support (31%) than opposition (37%), but considering the overwhelming, overt hostility to Hagel from many conservative media outlets it is striking that nearly a third of conservatives supports his confirmation. It’s worth noting that Republican and conservative opinion nationwide is almost evenly divided on the Hagel question, and nearly two-thirds of Republicans and conservatives don’t oppose him. The overall opposition to Hagel’s nomination is 24%. Republican hawks are in a political fight of their own making that gains them nothing and puts them on the wrong side of public opinion.

Aaron David Miller makes the case that the anti-Hagel campaign is ultimately just an anti-Obama campaign:

That’s why I think that the Hagel affair really isn’t about Chuck Hagel.

This is really a fight about Barack Obama. It is being driven by three somewhat overlapping constituencies — a pro-Israel community that doesn’t trust the president, a Republican party and a neoconservative elite struggling unsuccessfully to define its own foreign policy identity, and finally, a party in opposition that is determined to remind Obama that, reelected or not, he doesn’t have a free hand.

On one level, Miller is correct. Strident opposition to a presidential nominee is opposition to the president, and many of Hagel’s critics insist on interpreting the selection as confirmation of views that they have frequently and wrongly attributed to Obama. Republican hawks have been railing against a fantasy Obama record for four years, so I suppose it’s inevitable that they would subject one of his Cabinet nominees to the same treatment. Hard-liners convinced that Obama wants to preside over American decline look at Hagel, impute views to Hagel that he doesn’t have, and then say, “Yes, just as we thought, Obama wants to preside over decline.” “Pro-Israel” hawks in the GOP have been pushing the idea that Obama doesn’t support Israel enough since before he was elected, so naturally they will claim that Obama is “revealing” his “real” views by associating him with the distortions of Hagel’s record they are circulating. One nonsensical criticism informs the other.

It’s also true that Hagel is encountering resistance from his own party because Obama appointed him, but it’s equally true that Hagel would never have been given a Cabinet post in a McCain or Romney administration. It’s easy to imagine that a Republican-appointed Hagel would face just as much hostility from the same critics, but it’s very difficult to imagine that a Republican would appoint him to a comparable position in the first place (in part because of the sway Hagel’s critics still have inside the party). Yes, Hagel’s critics are going after Hagel in large part to inflict damage on Obama, but they would not have thrown such a fit over the other possible nominees for Defense, and they have shown no interest in targeting Kerry despite the fact that he will be the one carrying out Obama’s foreign policy. There’s no getting around the fact that this controversy is primarily one about Hagel.

The anti-Hagel campaign is partly a case of sour grapes over losing the election, but it’s also being done as payback to strike at Hagel for his past criticisms of Republican hawks. Hagel’s critics believed that his nomination would make it easier to split off Democrats in the Senate and hand Obama an early setback, but something close to the opposite has occurred. As Pat Buchanan observed in his new column, the Hagel nomination set up Republican hawks for a no-win scenario:

If Hagel is confirmed, Republican resistance will have been routed. If Hagel is rejected, the Republican Party will be damaged in the eyes of many for having trashed a patriot, war hero and friend of veterans who put America first and wanted no more unnecessary wars.

The problem for Republican hawks in this case is that they didn’t understand that there was no way for them to win this contest, and so they launched their assault on Hagel anyway.

National Journal reports on the “overwhelming” support for Hagel among “national security insiders.” The report quotes one of them saying this:

Hagel’s survival would represent glasnost on the right.

I would like to believe that Republican foreign policy debate can improve and incorporate a much wider range of views, but would this happen because of a Hagel confirmation? Will the many foreign policy dissidents inside the GOP this person mentions become more willing to make their arguments publicly after the campaign against Hagel, or will the intense hostility towards any and all dissenters that has been on display in recent weeks convince them to remain quiet? Assuming that there are “lots of foreign policy dissidents” out there, how does Hagel’s confirmation make them less fearful of the hard-liners? If they are still intimidated by hard-liners after the Iraq debacle and three electoral defeats in the last six years, what would encourage them to speak up now? This raises the question: what have they been waiting for? Dissenters against the hawkish party line should take advantage of the hard-liners’ apparent failure to derail Hagel’s nomination to challenge their policing of the foreign policy debate. If they don’t, everyone will assume that these dissenters don’t exist and that the hard-liners’ views are representative of the party as a whole.

The article quotes another “insider,” who says:

Hagel comes from the school of foreign policy that Republicans used to be able to display proudly — including during elections. Those opposing him should ask why the GOP hasn’t been able to talk about foreign policy in a winning way in the last two presidential elections [bold mine-DL].

There are several reasons why the GOP hasn’t been able to do that. The party tied itself to a belligerent and triumphalist nationalism that was politically useful in the short term in the early 2000s but intellectually bankrupt and exhausting after just a few years. Republican hawks assumed that the party’s advantage on foreign policy and national security derived from a willingness to make demonstrations of military strength, but this was the opposite of why most Americans trusted Republicans on these issues. They failed to see that the party’s advantage depended much more on the sober defense of national interests without resorting to force and the competent conduct of international relations that allowed the U.S. to advance those interests peacefully. Finally, having plunged into an unnecessary war and then horribly mismanaging it, Republican hawks refused to acknowledge error or failure and continued denouncing the Republicans and conservatives that had been right on Iraq all along. Republican hawks can’t talk about foreign policy in a winning way because they have still not come to terms with the fact that a majority rightly regards them as both incompetent and dangerous. As long as the hawks define the party’s foreign policy, the party will fail to win the public’s trust.

To answer the question in the title of Leon Hadar’s new article, no, Obama isn’t a realist in the tradition of Scowcroft and the elder Bush. Inasmuch as his foreign policy has been less reckless and less aggressive, there have been things that realists, Republican and otherwise, can find in it that they support, but Obama still has the worldview and instincts of a liberal internationalist that will always separate him from that realist tradition in some important ways. The administration may have launched the Libyan war grudgingly and mostly because it was urged to do so by France and Britain (France is now meddling in Mali in a belated, misguided attempt to cope with the consequences of the war in Libya), but intervention in Libya was exactly what one wouldn’t expect from “a replica of the administration of George H.W. Bush.” Obama launched the Libyan war over the objections of Robert Gates, so we cannot rule out the possibility that he could do the same elsewhere over the objections of a Secretary Hagel. I’m not saying that this will happen, but only that it could. If this were “a replica of the administration of George H.W. Bush,” we would presumably be able to rule that out.

The most interesting thing about Dr. Hadar’s article is that a realist scholar still wants to make the argument for Obama-as-realist even after the Libyan war. That points us to something important about the foreign policy debate during the election and the Republicans’ deficiencies on foreign policy. As we all know, the Iraq war thoroughly discredited the GOP with many realists on the right, and they turned sharply against the party during the last decade, but their traditional political “home” was still most likely to be the Republican Party. During the last six years, the Democrats made room for those that movement conservative pundits often like to call “natural” Republicans on foreign policy. Instead of trying to appeal to them to win them back, the common Republican hawkish response was to curse them as they left. The Republican foreign policy tent continues to shrink because the people still inside it seem to want it that way, and there are still remarkably few in the party willing to argue otherwise.

The McCain campaign obviously had nothing appealing to offer realists on foreign policy, but the 2012 ticket might have. Of course, that didn’t happen. Instead of breaking with Bush-era folly and recklessness, the 2012 ticket embraced most of what was wrong with Bush-era foreign policy and made one of its reliable supporters the vice presidential nominee. That left Hadar and other alienated realists with the choice of supporting Obama, not voting, or casting a protest vote. In Hadar’s case, the last two weren’t acceptable, which left him supporting Obama for this reason:

I voted for Obama in order to deprive Romney and the members of his foreign policy clique from getting us into new military adventures and quagmires that would have made the invasion of Iraq look like a picnic on the shores of the Euphrates.

Romney gave realists, moderates, and antiwar conservatives and libertarians absolutely no reason to support him because of foreign policy and national security issues. Some may never support a future Republican nominee, but unless the next nominee offers a substantively very different foreign policy from the one that the party has been selling for the last decade virtually all of these people are going to withhold their support permanently. That doesn’t simply deprive Republicans of their support in the present, but creates a lasting impression with each new cohort of voters that they must not be trusted with the conduct of foreign policy. It is in the party’s own interest to fix this problem, and until it does the opposing party will reap the benefits whether it deserves them or not.

James Joyner quoted a comment from Susan Eisenhower in his recent article on Republican foreign policy that merits some discussion. Eisenhower wrote:

The Republican Party is now at a crossroads. Over the last decade moderate Republicans have felt increasingly out of place in its ranks. If the GOP confirms Hagel, it could bolster the idea of a ‘big tent’ Republican Party. A GOP-led rejection of a Republican war hero with impeccable centrist credentials, however, could well be a fatal blow to that concept, along with some of the party’s longest and most successful traditions.

There is a third possibility that hasn’t received much attention: Hagel could be confirmed over the opposition of a very large number of Senate Republicans. That’s an acceptable outcome for the administration and the country, but it would sabotage any chance that Republican leaders would come to their senses on military and foreign policy matters in the short term. It would still represent a pointed rejection of Hagel and his views by perhaps as much as half of the Senate GOP, and it is likely that many of the party’s youngest and newest Senators would be voting nay. Ted Cruz has already declared his opposition, and it would be genuinely surprising if Rubio didn’t end up voting the same way. Unfortunately, opposing Hagel seems to be something that many hawkish Republicans believe they have to do in order to maintain their hawkish credentials, and the more ambitious hawks in the Senate might want to distinguish themselves by being as vocal and obnoxious in their opposition to Hagel as they can. That doesn’t bode well for the immediate future of Republican foreign policy thinking.

Considering that confirmation votes for recent Secretaries of Defense have normally been unanimous or near-unanimous in their support of the nominee, even 15 or 20 Republican nays would be remarkable statement of hawkish intransigence. There could be 65 or more yeas in favor of Hagel’s confirmation, and confirmation still seems very likely. However, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which there are so many Senate Republicans opposed to Hagel that they will inflict additional needless damage on the party’s reputation in spite of the confirmation.

The campaign against Hagel has already done further substantial damage to the party by demonstrating how committed so many Republicans still are to aggressive and confrontational policies. Keeping the military budget excessively large and promoting hawkish foreign policy appear to be among the only things that Republican elites won’t seriously question, and most movement conservatives appear to be just as ready as always to cheer their leaders on as they lead them deeper into the political and policy wilderness. Meanwhile, the Hagel appointment and the reaction to it have encouraged realists and conservatives that supported Obama and/or opposed Romney on foreign policy and military spending grounds to believe that they were right all along. Leon Hadar cites the Hagel nomination, and considers the appointments Romney might have made:

Consider this post-Romney victory counterfactual: president-elect Romney nominates John Bolton as his next Secretary of State (after the neocons veto his first choice, Bob Zoellick) and Joe Lieberman as his Pentagon chief (with the Democrats less hostile to this “bipartisan” nominee than the Republicans are in their opposition to the selection of Hagel).

The last few weeks of the smear campaign against Hagel, which has also been directed against sanctions and war skeptics in general, have given these realists and conservatives that much less incentive to take the risk of supporting a Republican candidate in the future. A future Republican nominee was always going to face a steep uphill battle to convince the public to trust him on national security and foreign policy issues, and the hostility to Hagel from members of his own party makes that battle more difficult than it would have already been.

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.

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.

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.

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.