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April 08, 2011Foreign Policy in 2012, Ctd.
Greg Scoblete has an interesting response to my criticism of Mitch Daniels and other Republicans. My basic point in my original post was that Newt Gingrich's opinion on Libya at least has the advantage of getting into specific policy details - while his fellow 2012 candidates are speaking either in neo-isolationist platitudes (Barbour), knee-jerk anti-Obamaisms (Bachmann), or dodging the question entirely (Romney).
I singled out Daniels for particular criticism because while he's clearly forming a niche as the 2012 cycle's wonkish candidate, with a significant base of intellectual support (not a proven winning strategy, but that's beside the point), he also seems loathe to allow for any expression of public thought on foreign policy issues, and has studiously avoided making comments on Egypt and Libya.
Greg, on the other hand, points out that Daniels is merely prioritizing the interests of his day job above the interests of the 2012 political cycle, and that it's better to engage in such activity than to share vacuous platitudes about the country's foreign policy challenges.
This is a perfectly valid response. It hearkens back to an older era of political engagement when politicians weren't expected to have opinions on everything under the sun, and I certainly think that era was healthier on a number of counts. "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt," as the saying goes.
But I would suggest that in this era, Daniels' lack of offerings on this topic are of greater concern. And contra Greg's post, Daniels actually has spoken out on other foreign policy issues in the recent past, albeit in small ways.
My concern is that in avoiding comment on more difficult situations - Egypt and Libya - Daniels indicates he hasn't thought these things through as anything but a cost issue, as befitting his role as George W. Bush's OMB director.
At least, that was the case several months ago. I attended a roundtable along with Jennifer Rubin and several other online conservative writers with Daniels, and while most of my questions concerned practical political matters and domestic issues, I was concerned by the platitudes he offered in response to questions from Rubin. She notes one answer here:
I asked him [Mitch Daniels] the sole question on foreign policy — in what fundamental ways Obama had erred? He did not address any of the basic concerns conservatives have been discussing (e.g., engagement with despots, indifference on human rights, animus toward Israel). Instead, he gave a platitude, “Peace through strength has totally been vindicated.” And then he immediately asserted that we have to “ask questions about the extent of our commitments.” He said, “If we go broke, no one will follow a pauper.” At least temporarily, he said, we can’t maintain all our commitments. But if our foes don’t take a break, what do we do? Should we pull up stakes in Iraq and Afghanistan and hack away at the defense budget? It’s not clear whether he has thought these issues through, or whether he views foreign policy as anything more than a cost-control issue.
It's convenient to say that the nature of the American electoral process is to elevate state level executives to the presidency who tend to have few publicly expressed opinions about foreign policy. But this is an exaggeration based on past history, not the post-World War II era: Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, H.W. Bush, and Obama were all elected as individuals who had clearly formed and thorough views on foreign policy, and both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had expressed their views in multiple speeches and public remarks in the lead-up to their candidacies. While he ran a campaign that was not focused on foreign policy, in 1999, Bush spoke out against Clinton policies in Kosovo, expressed his opinion that troops shouldn't be committed to stop ethnic cleansing in non-strategic interests, given a thorough speech on his views on defense spending and technology, shared his thoughts on a number of treaties, and given interviews on his views on Russia and China. In fact, I'd argue Jimmy Carter is the only example in the modern era of a president elected to office as a virtual blank slate on foreign policy ... and no one wants to be compared to the Carter presidency on such matters.
While many of Daniels' supporters have speculated about comparisons to Ronald Reagan's three-legged approach to campaigning, I am concerned that one of those legs is entirely absent from his portfolio. At this point, we have no real knowledge of what Daniels thinks about foreign policy issues. Is he an isolationist? Is he a globalist? How would he part from Obama's policies, or follow them? And he is hardly alone in this defect.
For comparison, it's striking to consider how much we knew about Ronald Reagan's views on the Cold War by the time he was elected president. He had given countless speeches, written dozens of columns, given hundreds of radio interviews on the topic by the time he was elected president. I've written about the public nature of his education, how Reagan went from broad terms to more and more specificity, to the level of criticizing specific aspects of internal policy. By the time he was elected, Americans - even those who disagreed with him - knew what foreign policy course he would pursue, and they chose it.
The lack of top tier candidates on the Republican side in 2012 of whom this is true is, for me, a matter of great concern.
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