The Honeymoon's Over

He can't fire Bibi

My comment on Thomas Friedman's column about the Israeli election yesterday was one of 21 designated as "NYT Picks":

Bibi can afford to be honest thanks to the sea change in U.S. attitudes. Israel's historic left-leaning U.S. supporters cared more about democracy for democracy's sake than do her new friends on the right, who don't seem to worry much about disenfranchised Palestinians on the West Bank. With a GOP Congress and a better than even chance for a GOP president, Bibi's sitting pretty for the time being as far as keeping the U.S. is concerned.

At home, if he's being honest about abandoning two states, he probably envisions a plan along the lines of Naftali Bennett's -- annexation of the West Bank with a glacial phasing-in of Palestinians' rights. Meanwhile the Palestinians will continue to lobby in international forums for de facto statehood. These visions will inevitably and perhaps violently clash. Maybe that's just what Bibi's evangelical end-time friends in the U.S. want.

Israelis can run their country however they want. But I'm feeling more and more like Israel is morally equivalent with China, Germany, and Japan as far as U.S. policy is concerned. Relations among countries need to be reciprocal and mutually beneficial. Since 1948, our main interest in Israel has been that we loved her for the sake of who she was and what she stood for. I still respect that, but the honeymoon's over. I don't have to love Israel's democracy if Israel doesn't. And I am not going to favor a Mideast policy driven primarily by end-timers. I don't like their influence in Iran, and I don't like it here.

Condi, Condi, Condi

Molly Ball on the star of the RNC so far:

At the Republican convention Wednesday night, there was indeed a lofty, high-minded speech, one that managed to forcefully articulate a conservative world view without cheap partisan attacks or facts stretched to the breaking point. But it wasn't [Paul] Ryan's -- it was delivered by Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state.

Rice's address had a sophistication, ease, and grace almost never found in modern political speeches. It was a speechwriter's speech, the kind you could imagine reading in a history book. She spoke with a diplomat's formality and the teleprompter turned off, glancing only occasionally at her notes on the podium.

Most of the speech was a policy argument, starting with foreign policy and moving to economics, but at the end, Rice, more circumspect than emotive, struck a personal note.

"A little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham, the most segregated big city in America," she said. "Her parents can't take her to a movie theater or a restaurant. But they make her believe that even though she can't have a hamburger at the Woolworth's lunch counter, if she wants to, she can be president of the United States -- and she becomes the secretary of state."

The crowd, rapt throughout her remarks, came to its feet and roared, and you could practically feel the Condi for President buzz sweeping through the collective hearts of the Republican elites. Being pro-choice, Rice's actual presidential prospects might prove tricky, but that's a matter for another day. For now, she has clearly -- and by no accident -- established herself as a political voice.

She also spoke up for foreign aid, compassionate immigration policy, and attentiveness to inequality in education funding that hurts minority students. The crowd applauded almost every line, as though they didn't know that tea party orthodoxy was being gently but firmly rebuked.

The Obama-First Foreign Policy

Roger Cohen hammers Barack Obama for surrounding himself with sycophants and comes pretty close to saying his foreign policy is a failure:

In the end the trust of a cool man who had sublimated abandonment into a singular willfulness was limited. The sense of a controlling leader, unable to provide connective tissue to fire the economy, lies behind the fact that many Obama voters will cast their ballot in November with more grudging respect than enthusiasm.

Nixon, like Obama, was a loner, but he had Kissinger generating ideas. Carter had Brzezinski. Reagan had Shultz. The first Bush had Baker. Obama has Tom Donilon as national security adviser. Donilon is an affable pro who has been described as a one-client lawyer. It is clear who the client is.

Then there is Hillary Clinton, a superb secretary of state. But for various reasons (her future is very much ahead of her), she has generally acquiesced to the White House being the locus of major foreign-policy decisions (salvaging things where necessary, as in Pakistan.)

The Obama inner circle remains a group of tough political tacticians: David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Valerie Jarrett. The White House national security team does not boast a single name of strategic stature. Anyone outside Washington would be hard pressed to name one.

The policy upshot has been predictable: cerebral, cool, and with one big exception, cautious. Obama has corrected big mistakes — abandoning the unwinnable global war on terror and pulling out of Iraq. To his immense credit he took a big gamble on killing Osama Bin Laden. But elsewhere he has been cautious to a fault, eyeing the political calendar.

He held out a hand to Iran but promptly reverted to tired old carrots and sticks; his response to the great popular uprising of 2009 was slow. He took half-steps on Israel and Palestine — criticizing Israeli settlements, saying the pre-1967 lines were the basis for a two-state peace — only to offer zero follow-through. Nothing changed.

On Egypt, he toyed with preserving Mubarak ad interim before the tide became irreversible. On Syria, he has in essence dithered. On Afghanistan, domestic politics dictated the agenda, at a cost in American lives.

Iran To Israel: Words Will Never Hurt Us

Weighing the chances of an Israeli strike before the U.S. elections, Amos Harel speculates that war would only set the Iranians back a year or two. He wonders whether Iran's foes in Jerusalem and Washington are just waging psychological warfare and concludes that the Iranians think so, too:

[B]ased on the hard line they have taken in their negotiations with the Western powers over the last few months, in which they have not retreated by so much as a millimeter or displayed any willingness to compromise, it seems that Tehran, at least, doesn't believe Israel will attack in the next few months.

Romney's Disconcerting Speech In Israel

After a rough visit to England, when he said that some aspects of its preparations for the Olympics were "disconcerting," Mitt Romney went to Israel and rallied in the special relationship department. Standing with the Old City behind him, dappled with the light of a Jerusalem sunset, Romney said:

I believe that the enduring alliance between the State of Israel and the United States of America is more than a strategic alliance: it is a force for good in the world. America’s support of Israel should make every American proud. We should not allow the inevitable complexities of modern geopolitics to obscure fundamental touchstones. No country or organization or individual should ever doubt this basic truth: A free and strong America will always stand with a free and strong Israel.

All true. And this:

Hopefully, this new government understands that one true measure of democracy is how those elected by the majority respect the rights of those in the minority.

No, that wasn't Romney calling on Israel to respect the rights of Palestinians. He was calling on Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood president to protect his political opponents. Romney didn't actually mention the Palestinians -- not a boilerplate line saying that his administration would support a peace agreement that guaranteed Israel's security or even a passing reference to the two-state solution, which has been explicitly endorsed by Presidents George W. Bush and Obama and was tacit U.S. policy for many years before that.

On the 40th anniversary of the Munich massacre, I see no problem with a paean to U.S.-Israel ties. But Fox News and Romney's other supporters called this a major foreign policy address. Let's hope they're wrong, since ignoring the peace process and an entire people living under military occupation would be dangerously radical and destabilizing in a substantive speech. Let's just call it a play for Jewish votes and go back to watching the exquisitely-run London Olympics.

For Campaigns The Candidates (And We) Deserve

Does anyone else think that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are being trivial with their commercials and comments about who's tougher, the Osama-killer or the would-be one? On NPR this morning, Michael O'Hanlon, author of Bending History, a new book about Obama's foreign policy, had this to say:

I tend to think we have two outstanding candidates, two honorable men who are pragmatic and fairly centrist in a lot of their views of the world. But their campaigns are already in overdrive, even on an issue that you would consider to be relatively non-divisive, like the death of Osama bin Laden. And I think both campaigns need to look in the mirror a little bit and ask just where they want to take the country these next six months.

Drifting Together

It won't surprise MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's fans that her new book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, explores how those who wage war have become less accountable to the public. It might surprise them Fox News founder Roger Ailes gave her a blurb. When it comes to issues of war and peace, are the left and right converging? Maddow explored the possibility in a March 27 conversation with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air":

I think the discomfort that we have as civilians in terms of our distance from the military that's been fighting these wars for 10 years is something that people feel on the left and people feel on the right. And I think the problematic political decisions that got us to this point were not made, mostly, for ideological reasons. They were made by politicians on the left and the right for what they thought were pragmatic short-term reasons.

And they've had long-term problematic consequences. And I think Republicans and Democrats are getting closer to each other in terms of how fast we should end the Afghanistan War, for example. I think Republicans and Democrats are finding a lot of overlap among themselves on whether or not the defense budget is where it ought to be.

This is just one of those issues where there isn't a real sharp right/left axis. And I know because I am a liberal and I am known as a liberal, that people might have thought this was going to be a real liberal, anti-war book. This isn't a liberal anti-war book. It's a book about the politics of making war and whether or not they've changed in a way that's bad for the country.

War Powers And The Problem With Presidents

Tom Campbell, who served five terms in Congress from a district in northern California, has been dean of the Chapman University law school since February 2011. "It's a pleasure to have another moderate Republican in Orange County," I told him last night at the Pacific Club in Newport Beach, where Kathy and I were guests of our St. John's friends Bob (serving again as a peerless MC) and Ann Mosier. "On behalf of the other four, welcome."

"Richard Nixon?" he said with a bemused look. Dead these 17 years, I replied, as he knew. "Of course," he said with a smile. "Chuck Percy? George Romney?" Alas, also gone are the great Illinois senator and Michigan governor, beacons of the great American center. Campbell was suggesting that pragmatic conservatism had died along with its lions. Then he perked up and said, "Olympia Snowe! Ah, but then she's retiring."

We agreed that Nixon -- promoting detente with communists, the EPA, and near-universal health insurance, not to mention wage and price controls -- wouldn't be welcome in today's GOP. Indeed in most portraits of the modern conservative movement, Nixon's corner of the Etch A Sketch screen has been rendered inoperative. And yet a prominent local jurist standing nearby said that he too would join a party for the socially tolerant and fiscally prudent. One does meet such people in Orange County, even while clinking glasses in its premier social and business club. Perhaps Mitt Romney, if nominated, will be able to erase the hard-right positions he took to get onto the ticket, having spent years trying to do so with his centrist positions as Massachusetts governor. If not, in November we may learn that the lions' passing presaged a diminishment of the GOP's ability to contend for the White House.

During his lecture on war powers and the U.S. Constitution, Campbell demonstrated the capacity for nuance that makes pragmatists so infuriating. Bolstering his analysis with quotations from the Founders, he argued that only Congress may conduct an aggressive war, though the commander-in-chief has broad authority to act defensively. That being said, the War Powers Act (which Congress passed over Nixon's veto in 1973) lets a president wage war without permission from Congress for up to 90 days, meaning that any president can start World War III by himself so long as he sends Congress a memo within 48 hours of firing the first shot and then wins (or loses) inside of three months.

From Nixon on, presidents have resented this limitation on what some construe as their sovereign right to protect and defend the country. During a congressional hearing after Bill Clinton went to war in Yugoslavia in 1999, Campbell pressed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to explain the difference between war or hostilities, which would have triggered the War Powers Act, and her description of the massive bombing campaign, armed conflict. She responded, "You're the law professor. You figure it out."

That's the war-making executive's usual high-handedness toward Congress for you. Then there's the judiciary's timidity. When Campbell and 15 Republican and Democratic colleagues sued Clinton for violating the War Powers Act, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that Congress, though it had refused to declare war, had tacitly authorized it by appropriating funds to pay for it. "But the [current] appropriation isn't for the cruise missiles that are being used in the war," Campbell said. "They've already been paid for. The appropriation is to rebuild the stock that will be needed for the next war." By Campbell's lights, the judge was saying that Congress could only stop an illegal war by reducing the nation's overall preparedness.

Campbell advised judges who may fear being ignored by a willful president to remember July 1974's Nixon vs. United States, when the Supreme Court, by an 8-0 vote, ordered the president to turn over tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor. Nixon complied and then resigned on Aug. 9 in the firestorm over one transcript's contents.

Since Campbell had mentioned Kathy's and my ex-boss, I asked during the Q&A about Nixon's own constitutional scholarship. Campbell had already argued that that Congress had authorized the Vietnam war with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. Fast forward to the 1977 Nixon-Frost interviews, when the ex-president was asked about an operative's scheme to expand the president's power to monitor and harass anti-war activists, 1970's Huston Plan. It was never implemented. But when David Frost wondered why he'd even considered such an appalling abuse of power, Nixon replied that if the president does it, it's "not illegal."

My question last night: Since the U.S. was at war, was Nixon's formulation (widely misunderstood as an excuse for Watergate crimes) actually a defensible assertion of a president's sovereign right to protect the country? Campbell replied that Nixon would have been better off saying that Congress, by authorizing the war, had already permitted security measures at home. It was an overreach for Nixon to arrogate the power to the executive, which, as it turns out, seems to be a persistent problem with presidents.

GOP Losing Its Will

Michele Bachmann (who I once predicted would be the right-wing dark horse in 2012; never listen to my political predictions) was quoted tonight as saying that Barack Obama's foreign policy made him the most dangerous president in history. George Will (who cut his teeth during the Cold War on the staff of Democratic super-hawk Scoop Jackson) has grown tired of such insubstantial fear-mongering:

Romney says: “It is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” that if he is elected, Iran will not get such a weapon, and if Obama is reelected, it will. He also says that Obama “has made it very clear that he’s not willing to do those things necessary to get Iran to be dissuaded from” its nuclear ambitions.” Romney may, however, be premature in assuming the futility of new sanctions the Obama administration is orchestrating, and Panetta says Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is “unacceptable” and “a red line for us” and if “we get intelligence that they are proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon, then we will take whatever steps necessary to stop it.” What, then, is the difference between Romney and Obama regarding Iran?

Osama bin Laden and many other “high-value targets” are dead, the drone war is being waged more vigorously than ever, and Guantanamo is still open, so Republicans can hardly say that Obama has implemented dramatic and dangerous discontinuities regarding counterterrorism. Obama says that, even with his proposed cuts, the defense budget would increase at about the rate of inflation through the next decade. Republicans who think America is being endangered by “appeasement” and military parsimony have worked that pedal on their organ quite enough.

Back To 1996

The Economist on the Obama administration's newly announced plan to be home from Afghanistan in 2013:

Accelerating the pace of the transition and cutting the numbers of the Afghan forces inevitably risks eroding the real security gains that have been made in the south (particularly in Helmand and Kandahar provinces) since America’s “surge” in 2010. It also places in jeopardy the aim of a concentrated effort to peg back the insurgency in the still-violent east during the next two fighting seasons. Before [Defense secretary Leon] Panetta’s announcement, General [John] Allen’s job looked difficult but doable. Now it just looks difficult.

What makes all this so unfortunate is that there has recently been some progress in coaxing the leadership of the Taliban towards the negotiating table—a tribute of sorts to the potential success of the previous (as it must now be regarded) transition plan. However, a secret NATO report, leaked this week, called “The State of the Taliban”, based on interrogations with more than 4,000 Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees, painted a picture of an insurgency that is resilient and likely to remain so for as long as Pakistan believes it is in its strategic interests to give it material and moral support. The confidence undoubtedly owed something to the bravado of some of the interviewees. The Taliban’s senior leadership, better informed, may well be less optimistic about their prospects—although most Afghans yearn for peace, few want to see the return of the Taliban to Kabul. But Mr Panetta’s words, intended primarily to pander to opinion at home, can only have given them encouragement and stiffened their resolve.

So 2,000 U.S. deaths (so far), and the Taliban, who live to assassinate the spirits of girls and women, will be back in power? The mind boggles.

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.

Giving Teheran Iran Around

Want another war? Then support the current U.S. policy in Iran, which is designed to give the regime no incentive whatsoever for improved behavior.

DeterrIRANce

Ron Paul's right about at least one thing: Iran.

Dragging Our Feet For Egypt's Women

In a study of the Obama administration's foreign policy (the perennial hoo-ha between realists and idealists), Ryan Lizza reveals one reason it resisted the temptation to encourage Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's immediate ouster:

[T]he first major problem arose when State Department officials learned that if Mubarak stepped down immediately, the Egyptian constitution would require a Presidential election in sixty days, long before any of the moderate parties could get organized. Egyptian officials warned the Administration that it could lead to the Muslim Brotherhood’s taking over power. “My daughter gets to go out at night,” Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Egypt’s then foreign minister, told Secretary Clinton during one conversation. “And, God damn it, I’m not going to turn this country over to people who will turn back the clock on her rights.”

Why Libya But Not Syria?

In Syria, we'd probably lose.

The Oilist

Discussing foreign policy at a tea party rally in Florida, Donald Trump leapfrogs the realists, neorealists, neoconservatives, isolationists, nation builders, and liberal idealists:

He said he’d only be interested in current U.S. military actions in Iraq or Libya if the U.S. got the oil from those nations.

Obama's Optimism

Steven Metz:

Obama’s foreign policy worldview, like all others, is no stronger than its assumptions: that the Arab Spring will prove positive for both the Arab world and the United States, and that the international community will play a major role in nurturing it. If these assumptions hold, then Obama’s scaled-back approach to American leadership will enable the world to become a better and safer place. If not, dark days lay ahead.

Remember Budapest 1956

Fred Kaplan liked President Obama's Libya speech --

Obama's main point was this: When, as he put it, "our interests and values are at stake," and when taking military action a) carries few risks, b) costs little, and c) may reap huge benefits, both political and humanitarian, then such action is worth taking even if the interests involved aren't quite vital.

-- except for the last bit:

There is...something worrisome about the final minutes of Obama's speech, which took flight into lofty sentiments about America's pledge of a helping hand "for all those yearning for freedom around the world." After the finely measured passages about the need to weigh our values and our interests, this finale comes off as troublingly open-ended—and perhaps dangerously encouraging to some of the world's would-be rebels who should know that, really, we're not going to come help them when their brutal dictators' bullets start to fly.

Reordering The Universe

Ben Smith profiles my former colleague Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center (I took this photo of Steve with the ambassador of Singapore, Chan Heng Chee, at the last Center dinner I attended in 2009; with typical graciousness, he was squatting):

The 6-foot-5, same-sex-married son of an Air Force master sergeant is the quintessential Washington figure for the new age: a self-made, uncredentialed blogger and social butterfly, intellectual entrepreneur, name-dropper and media networker. He’s both a very new kind of Washington figure — his Washington Note cracked the foreign policy establishment open for the blogosphere back in 2004 — and a very old one, the spiritual descendant of great Washington hostesses like Pamela Harriman and the nearest thing to an inheritor of the largely dead, civil, bipartisan salon of the old foreign policy elite.

“Steve is a really important part of the foreign policy universe, and he deserves a huge amount of credit for reordering that universe,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official...

Nixon Abandoned

Beginning from my first days as Richard Nixon's chief of staff from 1984-90, his lack of enthusiasm about his presidential library presented a considerable problem. It was his least favorite post-presidential subject. In his private discourse, he would sometimes actually modify the word "library" with one of those famous deleted expletives.

While generous with his own funds, he refused to raise library money beyond appearing at a few fat cat events and the grand opening in July 1990. Even then, he would dematerialize a few minutes before Bill Simon or Maury Stans, his cabinet members-turned-Nixon library volunteers, made the pitch. One time after another, I was the guy who got to tell Simon, Stans, and others that when it came to the library, Nixon was unable to add anything to his schedule. They'd sometimes wonder why they were raising $23 million for a disgraced president who actually made them feel a little dirty for even mentioning it.

Getting him to focus on architecture and exhibits was rough sledding, too. He realized that any ex-president could get his rich friends to build a museum for him, hold reunions and cocktail parties for his family members and operatives, and say whatever they wanted about the ups and downs of his presidency (such as, in his case, Watergate). As a lifelong reader, Nixon understood that his historical reputation would reside not between museum walls but book covers. That's why, after I became director of the newly opened library in 1990, he reluctantly acquiesced in my plan for an archive of his pre-presidential records. It's also why his last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, and I devoted so much energy to getting his White House records home to Yorba Linda by making the private library part of the National Archives, a mission we completed in 2007. We did so despite considerable resistance from Nixon family members and factotums alike.

What would Nixon have thought about the federal library? His feelings would have been mixed, of course. His love of history notwithstanding, he didn't especially love historians. What did he love? Being relevant. Making a difference. His eyes only began to sparkle in conversations about his library when George Argyros (later foundation chairman and U.S. ambassador to Spain), Soviet expert Dimitri Simes, and I asked him to bless our plans for a affiliated foreign policy center that would apply his principles of enlightened national interest to America's challenges in the post-Cold War world.

He agreed immediately. That work, he told us, was worth doing. That work, he said, would have an impact on the course of events. When we were planning the Nixon library, it was hard to get him to drive 50 blocks to midtown Manhattan to attend a meeting. He came all the way from New Jersey to Yorba Linda to announce the creation of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom in January 1994, on the 25th anniversary of his first Inaugural.

When he died that April, some questioned whether a brand-new Nixon organization in Washington could succeed without him. The momentum his enthusiasm had given us helped us persevere, and in November 1994 the Nixon Center (its shortened name, eventually) opened its doors. In the years since, with Simes at the helm, its experts did exactly what we promised Nixon they'd do: Analyze current events through a Nixonian prism. As recently as last year, when Nixon's White House tapes reminded a new generation of Americans of the less worthy aspects of his legacy and temperament and the Nixon White House operatives now controlling his foundation waxed silent in response, the Nixon Center called attention to the continued relevance of his robust, carefully shaken mixture of Wilsonian idealism and Kissingerian realpolitik.

Nixon would have been proud of its work. Too bad the Nixon Center apparently isn't proud of him. In fact, it just threw its first and greatest patron over the side. At a fundraiser last night, it announced that it was in receipt of "new resources" and also proclaimed its new name: "Nixon Who?", aka "The Center for the National Interest." The National Interest is a foreign policy journal founded in the 1980s by neocon godfather Irving Kristol. Ironically, the Center Formerly Known As Nixon acquired it several years ago and turned it into the voice of principled, Nixonian realism. His kind of thinking became unfashionable in the Republican Party years ago. Who would've thought the foreign policy establishment, not to mention his friends, would finally abandon Nixon as well?
Photos: Nixon in Moscow in 1989 with Dimitri Simes (John H. Taylor photo) and in his suburban New Jersey study