The CNN National Security Debate

I just finished watching the CNN-Heritage Foundation National Security Debate, the second foreign policy debate so far in this election cycle. I was most interested in seeing how the front runners performed: Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. I thought that Romney outperformed his chief rival. Romney was cautious and played not to make any major errors as well as getting in subtle digs at his opponents. Newt was busy showing off and showing how smart he was--which left him open for attack from Michelle Bachmann and others for supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants. Romney said he was opposed to creating magnets for illegal immigration and he specifically mentioned in-state tuition rates for illegals. This was a subtle dig at Rick Perry.

Bachmann and Rick Santorum again had their moments as in the first foreign policy debate in SC about ten days ago. But neither has much chance of winning the nomination if polls are anything to go by. Huntsman also sounded intelligent, but he also is not going anywhere. Herman Cain sounded as ignorant as ever. In fact he sounds like a black male version of Sarah Palin--winging it and hoping to cover up his ignorance by his fervor.

Ron Paul is beginning to wear on me. He repeats the same things every time. His libertarian approach to foreign policy has some ideological appeal, but his claim that the Taliban just want to be left alone is a vast distortion of the historical record. The Taliban leadership invited Al-Qaeda into their country in the expectation that Bin-Ladin would attempt to carry out terrorist attacks against the West. Paul is just beginning to sound like Dennis Kusinich--he even looks like a taller version of him.

Go here for a very good critique of the debate looking at what was not asked. The article also ridicules Romney's pompous assures about keeping American military primacy and stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon's capability. As Pakistan demonstrated during the Reagan administration and North Korea demonstrated during the Clinton administration, if a country wants the bomb badly enough and is willing to pay the peace, it will get the bomb. Only Huntsman was willing to risk electoral oblivion to make this rather obvious point.

I look forward to the days after the South Carolina primary when the field begins to really thin out and it will be possible to only have three or four candidates up on the stage instead of eight, so that a real debate can be staged in which the candidates will have the opportunity of interacting with one another. In the past this occurred after the New Hampshire debate, but with the Republicans copying the Democrats and awarding delegates by percentage it will take the field longer to thin out this year.

The Republicans and Foreign Policy

About a month or two ago--I never saved the article--Real Clear World ran an article on the foreign policy experts advising the candidates. The only one to have many names I recognized was then frontrunner and establishment favorite Mitt Romney. He had three names I recognized: Richard Haass, Stephen Hadley, and Mitchell Reiss. Richard Haass was/is an expert on regional conflicts especially the Arab-Israeli conflict and Northern Ireland. He served as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council in the George H W Bush administration. For Dubya he served as the first American envoy to Northern Ireland, where he played a major role in convincing Gerry Adams that the IRA was actually disarm. Upon leaving there he took up a position with the Council on Foreign Relations that puts out the establishment Foreign Affairs magazine. Stephen Hadley served as Condi Rice's assistant at the National Security Council and then took over during Dubya's second term as National Security Advisor to George Bush. Mitchell Reiss was an expert on nuclear proliferation and a country expert on North Korea. When Haass left Belfast for New York, Reiss became his successor as American envoy. Reiss recently wrote a book exploring the question of when terrorist movements should be co-opted by negotiation and power sharing and when they should be shunned.

Perry relies on figures that he met while serving as governor of Texas. I did not recognize any names. The other candidate who had some recognizable names is Ron Paul. Paul has Leon Hadar, a former journalist working for the Jerusalem Post and the author of two books on American policy in the region, Sandstorm and Quagmire. He advocates an American military and political disengagement from the region. The opinion would be considered mainstream in the Democratic Party but is unsaleable to the Republicans. Because Paul is a libertarian running in a conservative party--a square peg in a round hole--he has no chance of being nominated.

Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah and American ambassador to China, basically serves as his own foreign policy advisor. He was a Mormon missionary in Taiwan as a young man, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and is quite knowledgeable about trade matters and economic policy. But he registers at about two percent in the polls and is betting his whole future on New Hampshire, where he will have to compete with Romney, the other Mormon.

So far foreign policy, as distinct from immigration, has hardly registered in the Republican debates. The party is agitated by economic and social policies: abortion, immigration, health care, tax levels and debt. By slowly withdrawing from Iraq and continuing to oversee the assassination of leading Al Qaeda figures around the Middle East, Obama has effectively removed terrorism as a major political issue. Democrats still debate the American presence in Afghanistan; Republicans do not. It is almost a repeat of Vietnam forty years ago, but with the roles of the two parties reversed. The Democrats got us involved in Vietnam and then Nixon oversaw the withdrawal and the GOP spent twenty years talking about the Democrats as the party that was unreliable on national security. Maybe the Democrats can do the same about the Republicans for the next twenty years.

Should Perry or someone else other than Romney end up as the nominee, he (or she) can inherit the establishment foreign policy advisors by default. After all, Kissinger was never a Nixon advisor in the 1960s. He was a Nelson Rockefeller advisor whom Nixon inherited after he won the election in 1968. Obama inherited Clinton's stable of foreign policy advisors once he named her as his secretary of state. But he could have done so even without naming her--anyone who wanted to serve in government in a senior position had nowhere else to go in the short term. 

In American politics the conservatives determine who the Republican nominee is; the progressives determine who the Democratic nominee is. It is then up to the independents, who rarely vote based on foreign affairs, to determine which party's foreign policy establishment serves in office.

As a postscript let me add that on Friday Oct. 7, 2011 Romney gave his first foreign policy address of the race. Here is a link to a commentary on it. (See the article by  James Joyner in the Atlantic on the Sat. Oct. 8 panel.)                        )