Giving Romney Too Much Credit

Two views on Mitt Romney's cultural superiority speech. Peter S. Goldman at the Huffington Post says Romney was playing to a home town audience, and not just U.S. Jews:

He is asking for votes by telling the story of a mystical America in which life is equally fair for everyone, one in which winners and losers reflect their innate virtues. So help yourself to a giant tax cut, wealthy Americans, because you've earned it! And look in the mirror, struggling people who may need help, because you are the loser spawn of damaged culture.

This is something Romney could never say quite so explicitly at home -- at least, not without running the risk of being branded insensitive and maybe a racist. But the upside of owning this message seems clear: He cultivates support among those distrustful of government, the usual means of rectifying systemic injustice such as that which separates white America from black America, and Palestine from Israel.

Jacob Heilbrunn at the National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, argues that Romney might be right:

Are the Israelis solely to blame for the plight of the Palestinians? Or is Romney pointing to a larger problem, one that has afflicted the Arab world? It's surely not racist to point out, as Thomas Friedman repeatedly does, that there is something rotten in the Middle East, that kleptocratic tyrannies have held back their populations over the past century, that the Arab world remains far behind the West economically, despite its incredible oil wealth, and that Israel's existence has permitted Arab leaders to use it to deflect attention from their own grievous shortcomings, particularly when it comes to education and social programs. For his part, [David] Landes, who taught economic history at Harvard, was trying to explain why the West had come out so far ahead of the rest--part of his effort was to refocus attention on Max Weber's theory of the [P]rotestant work ethic. Does that ethic also prevail in, of all places, Israel?

I'd say both writers give Romney too much credit. He was being neither as diabolical as Goodman proposes (his aides seemed pretty upset about the story) nor as insightful as Heilbrunn. It's fine to talk about Arab leaders holding their people back. It's a terrible idea to talk about superior and inferior cultures, which sounds too much like a euphemism for race and religion.

Visiting Israel, Romney could have accomplished his mission of winning the votes of U.S. Jews while also demonstrating the capacity for nuance required of commanders-in-chief. Maybe he and his aides think we're tired of nuance. But in foreign policy and especially in the Middle East, you can never have too much. And yet in what was billed as a major policy address, he snubbed the peace process. Instead, he said something about Palestinians that sounded intellectual to try to make his neglectfulness look respectable.

China Syndrome

In an analysis that seems more carefully considered than the ex-Nixon's Center's Jacob Heilbrunn's, Ian Johnson blames a case of cold feet rather than Barack Obama's cold heart for Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng's second thoughts:

Soon, Chen was making various assertions, including that US officials told him that if he didn’t leave the embassy, his wife would be beaten. This seems implausible given that State Department lawyers were advised by one of the sharpest China human rights lawyers, Jerome Cohen. Cohen is a strong supporter of Chinese dissidents and acted as Chen’s advocate in the negotiations. He has backed US Ambassador Gary Locke’s statement Thursday that Chen was not coerced or tricked into leaving.

Another Reagan-Era Scandal

Invoking Checkers, as any writer naturally would at a blog owned by the former Nixon Center, the National Interest's Jacob Heilbrunn insists that Seamus' wild ride is an issue for Mitt Romney -- though Heilbrunn gets the date wrong. The Romneymobile rolled north in 1983, not 2004. Unless he was using dog years.

You Can Always Count On The Nixon Guy

At The National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center in the spirit of 37's hermeneutic of hard-headed, clear-eyed realism, Jacob Heilbrunn surfaces the alarming prospect of a Santorum presidency. The ingredients would be the politically inept Mitt Romney continuing to wane with the improving economy, Santorium's nomination, and an October surprise:

So far, this has not been an ordinary election year. It may be about to get a lot more extraordinary before it ends. War, the collapse of Greece, a stock market meltdown—anything might derail Obama, whose prospects appear much sunnier than they did a few months ago. Nothing could be more improbable than Rick Santorum swearing the oath of office in January 2013. But then who thought Barack Obama could become president when he first set out on his crusade?

The Nixon Line Is Not Pauline

Ron Paul's odious newsletters notwithstanding, Andrew Sullivan likes the GOP candidate's George McGovern-like foreign policy isolationism opposition to the U.S.'s tendency toward global hegemony -- and so does Jacob Heilbrunn, writing at "The National Interest," published by the Center Previously Known As Nixon. Pretty ironic, since in today's Iowa caucuses 37 would be supporting the candidate most susceptible to his favorite post-presidential talking point: If the U.S. won't lead in the world, who will? It's a good guess it would be someone proclaiming a world view somewhere between Rick Santorum's reckless militancy and Paul's whole-scale retreatancy. Anyway, Heilbrunn writes:

[T]he dominant foreign-policy wing of the Republican party...is focusing on a new war with Iran--as though any attempt to stop Iran short of bombing constitutes a new Munich. Sen. Rick Santorum, for example, has flatly said he would bomb Iran. Paul, by contrast, says that's nuts. The result is that the Republican debates have, at least when it comes to foreign affairs, actually seen the candidates debating with each other, or, to put it more precisely, with Ron Paul. It's Paul who blows the raspberry at everyone else in the debates. Say what you will about the man, the Iowa caucus would have been a lot more boring if he weren't around to enliven it.

More fundamentally, Paul, in all his crankiness, represents a budding debate inside the GOP that the party pooh-bahs will not be able to defer much longer. The truth is that the GOP has been peddling a schizophrenic approach to the federal government. On the one hand we are told that the growing size of the federal government is a very bad thing; on the other hand we are told that the very part of the government that is growing most quickly—the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, Homeland Security—cannot be touched at all when it comes to budget cutting. Indeed, they are to be pampered and showered with even greater funding.

Exit The Valkyries And Richard Nixon

My two concerns about Libya, stated better by others. First, Jacob Heilbrunn on the roots of the Iraq and Libyan wars:

Contrary to popular opinion, the Iraq War was not simply the product of neoconservatives. It was also championed by liberal hawks. An alliance between the two factions propelled the debate forward. It was forged in Bosnia, welded together by Iraq, then seemed to fall apart as the liberal hawks went AWOL. Now the liberal hawks have returned with a vengeance....

[I]f the venture goes south, Obama knows squarely where to stick the blame. [Hillary] Clinton, [Samantha] Power, and [Susan] Rice have taken their biggest gamble. The liberal hawks and neocons may well have prepared a new foreign policy disaster should Libya devolve into tribal warfare. And so this is a crucible for the idea of humanitarian intervention. If it fails, the liberal hawks will return to ignominy. At least until the next crisis erupts.

And "HuffPo" on President Obama's poor consultation with Congress. I'd raise my hand on that one as well. I definitely feel insufficiently consulted with, principally because the U.S. hasn't mentioned one vital U.S. interest to explain its decision to go to war in Libya. Obama actually veered in the direction of rash overstatement when he said Friday that Qaddafi was a risk to "global peace and security." That reminds me of George W. Bush stressing WMD instead of his freedom agenda in justifying the Iraq war. For his turn, Obama used strategic rhetoric to justify a humanitarian war.

It's important to give worthy motives their due. Perhaps Obama really fears a Libyan genocide. He's mentioned Muammar Qaddafi's "no mercy" rhetoric at least twice. George Will said yesterday that we've intervened in a civil war in a tribal society we don't understand. Fair enough, but if President Clinton had intervened in Rwanda in 1994, Will probably would've said exactly the same thing, and we might have saved a few hundred thousand lives nonetheless. If Obama or anyone else has evidence that Libya is different than a hundred civil wars before it that didn't lead to genocide, we should see it.

In suggesting that Libya is just a bleeding heart war, like the Washington Post and New York Times before him, Heilbrunn can't resist stressing the divide between, in his estimation, the pro-war "Valkyries" and Obama's more cautious male advisers. The mama grizzlies, this line suggests, were more attuned than the male grouchies to the potential f0r massive civilian casualties.

But if you're afraid of a repeat of Rwanda, as the secretary of state and President Clinton reportedly were, then gender has nothing to do with it. Yet Heilbrunn and the other gender-fixated reporters and analysts seem to be suggesting that women are more likely to commit our volunteer forces out of the goodness of their hearts, even in situations where civilians are at risk but U.S. interests aren't. That's pretty much tantamount to saying women aren't ready to be president, which, I don't think, Heilbrunn and the others really mean.

Actually, I'd put this all down to lazy journalism and a lapse of good taste. Richard Nixon, Bob Haldeman, and Fred Malek were, I trust, the last to count Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nobody would write anymore that a president's African-American advisers had lined up against his white ones. It's also time to stop categorizing presidential advisers by gender.

That shortcoming aside, Heilbrunn and others are providing essential commentary, rooted in principles of Nixonian pragmatism, at The National Interest, published by the Center Formerly Known As Nixon. The Nixon Center's experts did the same after Sept. 11 and during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

But today, the Nixon legacy is silent. "nixoncenter.org" is now inoperative. The web site of its blandeloquent successor, "The Center for the National Interest," though promised last week, is still nowhere to be found. There's also not a word on Libya from Nixon's foundation in Yorba Linda, now controlled by lower-echelon, non-policy Nixon-Haldeman operatives.

On March 10, James Joyner stuck up for the former Nixon Center's decision to throw its founder and namesake over the side. Joyner thinks Watergate and the bigoted comments on Nixon's tapes make it hard to operate a foreign policy center in his name.

I don't buy it. Without his name and personal endorsement, the Center wouldn't have attracted the funding and star power to get started in the first place. That was because Nixon was internationally acknowledged as a course changer, in the words of one top supporter, whose foreign policy principles, at once hard-nosed and enlightened, would have permanent salience in the post-Cold War world. As Joyner himself admits, Nixon was "a giant of American foreign policy [whose] vision looks all the better in hindsight, in a town where neoconservatives and liberal interventionists seem to see no affliction in the world that is not worthy of American military intervention."

Eerily, Joyner wrote that a little over a week before the Libyan war. We need Nixon's vision in foreign policy now more than ever. But his friends in Washington and Yorba Linda had other plans.

The Egyptian Roadblock To Peace

Jacob Heilbrunn on why no one should expect progress between Israel and the Palestinians with Egypt in play:

For Israel to embark upon serious negotiations would be tantamount to negotiating with a loaded revolver to its head. It doesn't know how Egypt is going to play out, either. Might Egypt turn into an actively hostile foe after decades of a cold peace? Is Israel's "strategic space" about to shrink further? The odds are that Israel will turn even further to the right should Egypt devolve back into nationalism, or some syncretic form of "isms" that includes radical Islam.

If Egypt turns out well, and some form of tender democratic shoots take hold, then the pressure on Israel would mount considerably to reach some kind of deal with the Palestinians. But the situation is far too murky to expect more than bluff and bombast to emanate from both the Israelis and Palestinians about the peace process for weeks to come.

Anyway, the problem in the Middle East right now isn't Israel. It's radical Islam. Pakistan, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia could all face internal turmoil should the Tunisian revolt continue to spread. Perhaps this really will be 1989 all over again. But there is plenty of room to wonder.

Will The U.S. Begin To Turn Away From Israel?

At the Nixon Center's "National Interest," Jacob Heilbrunn thinks it unlikely that the Obama administration will take the political risk of trying to impose a peace settlement on Israel and the Palestinians, as suggested by his blogging colleague Paul Pillar. Instead, Heilbrunn predicts that Obama will adopt the posture of all too many of his predecessors when it comes to the world's most intractable dispute -- benign neglect:

In the Middle East the Israeli government may think that it's holding the upper hand over Obama. Paradoxically, however, I think that Benjamin Netanyahu is miscalculating. The Obama administration will pull back from the conflict, in essence washing its hands of Israel. But this can't be good for Israel. 2011 may mark the year when he United States began to turn away from Israel, not in anger but simply resignation.

No Strategic Sense

At "The National Interest," the Nixon Center's foreign policy journal, Jacob Heilbrunn says opponents of the U.S.-Russian arms treaty were either neocons or missile defense fantasists. And then there's this theoretically possible president of the U.S.:

Sarah Palin...chirped that the treaty makes "no strategic sense." How would she know?

Live And Let Spy

Jacob Heilbrunn on Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers and their hold on the right and left in postwar America.

Combining Mush And Steel

At "The National Interest," Jacob Heilbrunn liked what he heard about foreign policy in President Obama's inaugural address:

Obama’s remarks about foreign affairs, by contrast, were noteworthy for their sobriety. America, Obama announced, “must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.” Obama sounded a familiar theme when he stated, “Our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” Exactly. The swaggering braggadocio of the past eight years boomeranged, creating the very coalition of antagonists that realist thought had predicted. Obama wants to unravel it by making American an example to the world, not a hectoring bully. Damascus and Tehran must realize that their salad days of profiting from America’s PR missteps are coming to an end.

Maybe. But I wish he'd managed one stern, look-them-in the eye wartime vow to those hostile to our interests that any move to take advantage of our good intentions by attacking the United States or its friends would be met with withering and relentless fury.

Neocons Waxing Neolib?

As historians get to work studying how foreign policy neoconservatives captured the heart and mind of the Bush administration, Jacob Heilbrunn argues that the neocons themselves may be getting set to run home to mamma -- the Democratic Party in general and the interventionist secretary of state-designate, Hillary Clinton, in particular. According to Heilbrunn, who also writes for the Nixon Center's "National Interest" (this article is in "The American Conservative"), the neocons never much liked Republicans:

There can be no doubt that as staunch cold warriors, or, if you prefer, liberal internationalists, the neocons viewed the Republican Party, which was led by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, both realists and promoters of détente, with unease. The neocons, who had started out as Trotskyists, espoused a social-democratic program in domestic policy. Essentially, they were Hubert Humphrey Democrats. The neocons clustered around Sen. Scoop Jackson, whose adviser was Richard Perle. They didn’t want détente with the GOP itself; they beseeched Democrats to decry their opponents as selling out human rights and American ideals.

Bush Leaves An Abominable World

At the Nixon Center's journal "The National Interest," Jacob Heilbrunn isn't mincing words:

Today, the parties have experienced something of a role reversal. It is Obama who sounds like the realist, while Bush continues to indulge in delusions about the advance of freedom even as terrorists around the globe make new encroachments into Pakistan and Afghanistan. After eight years, Bush is indeed leaving behind a transformed world but the transformation has decidedly not been for the better. It has been an abomination.

Mr. Conservative And Mr. Democrat?

Over at "The National Interest," journal of The Nixon Center, Jacob Heilbrunn:

Maybe not, but what Obama’s [Cabinet and personnel] choices indicate is that his temperament is fundamentally a conservative one—and it’s the reason, after all, that he got elected in the first place. Obama’s statements and choices suggest sobriety rather than risk-taking. Obama, in other words, is the anti-Bush not only in tone, but also in substance. Where Bush was a radical, Obama could be the most conservative president America has had in decades. This, in brief, could be the real change that Obama represents.