A Bit More on the Romney Thing…
More than a few people have noted that the foreign policy vision of the Republican Party appears to have moved to the far right of the Reagan administration; thus, when the Heritage Foundation ghost writes an op-ed for Mitt Romney, the resulting cesspool is a mishmash of opinions that would have been on the far right fringe of Reagan’s national security apparatus. As the oft-cited Baron YoungSmith has argued:
It means, first and foremost, that the responsible Republican foreign policy establishment is not coming back. Mandarins like George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker, who have all testified or written on behalf of the START treaty—calling it an integral, uncontroversial way of repairing the bipartisan arms-control legacy that sustained American foreign policy all the way up until the George W. Bush administration—are going to be dead soon (or they’ve drifted into the service of Democrats). The people who will take their place will be from a generation of superhawks, like John Bolton, Liz Cheney, and Robert Joseph, who are virulently opposed to the practice of negotiated arms control. Mitt Romney, though a moderate from Michigan, is not going to be the second coming of Gerald Ford.
I made a similar argument in a Right Web article a few weeks ago:
Many of the moderate Republicans who favored arms control and engagement with the Soviet Union are still around, but they have minimal influence on the institutional right. Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, and George Schultz have all played key roles in developing foreign policy for multiple Republican administrations. However, none have developed an extensive base within the institutional right wing, the constellation of independent organizations and foundations (including the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute) that have emerged as key players in internal Republican Party debates. This faction has, by and large, concluded that the greatest threat posed by Russian nuclear weapons is loss, theft, or accidental launch, rather than pre-emptive attack.
In contrast, the signatories to the Washington Times op-ed mentioned above all represent organizations that are part of the institutional machinery of movement conservatism.[11]
In addition, prominent political figures have been able to promote the studies and reports produced by these groups, including for instance Sarah Palin, who despite her clear lack of knowledge on the subject tried to use that hardline rhetoric in attacking Obama’s arms control initiatives.
The influence of the institutional right wing is even more pronounced on foreign policy than domestic policy because so many major political actors (both Democrat and Republican) simply don’t care about foreign policy. I suspect that Mitt Romney actually has opinions about major issues of US domestic policy, and these opinions may even be informed by some subject area knowledge. In foreign policy this is not the case, and Heritage Foundation ideologues who would have been laughed out of the Reagan administration find themselves in command of the foreign policy statements of several major GOP presidential aspirants.
Youngsmith is right to note that the GOP moderates aren’t coming back, but it’s worth additional investigation to determine why they were so helpless in the face of the dire fanatics when it came to developing an institutional base. I suspect that at least part of the answer is personality based; Baker and Scowcroft, for example, seem to have eschewed institution building in favor of cultivating an elite consensus. For whatever reason, this strategy has failed utterly to ster the last ten years of foreign policy production in the Republican Party.
Yes, yes, I wish there was reasonable foreign policy voices (outside of Dick Lugar) in the GOP who mattered in the least. But I took a little cheer from this:
Mandarins like George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker…are going to be dead soon
Schultz and Baker have had some moments, but Schultz puked Condi on the world. And Baker’s Saudi-centric focus hasn’t done us any favors either. Kissinger is so abominable, he forced Hitchens into his last moment of decency.
And, given the “sensible” Democrats in the foreign policy arena and their robust warmongering bent, I’m not sure who I’m supposed to listen to.
Of course START is a good idea, but one might at least wonder, at long last, why we can’t have any common sense when it comes to foreign policy.
Since rightwingers care about “stuff” and leftwingers care about the vague territory of “rights” in foreign policy, I can’t see how the monied rightwing won’t be dominating this sphere far into the future. It’s much easier to implement a stuff-based policy(even if it’s costlier and inherently illogical).
It is interesting to know that when rightwingers need to sell a big stuff-based policy they often use a leftwing argument to articulate themselves. So Iraq is all about destroying a competing regime in the oil game, but it is sold on democracy for Iraqis and of course fear-mongering about non-existent terror weapons.
As for the capture of other regimes, this is usually accomplished through corruption, destabilization, and if all else fails assassination. Making the world safe for US-based corporations does tend to cause a lot of money to flow into the coffers of foreign policy institutions that express the same philosophy.
It is interesting to know that when rightwingers need to sell a big stuff-based policy they often use a leftwing argument to articulate themselves.
Not really. They used the language of patriotism in its US frame, one that’s been popular since the Cold War. “Democracy” is one of the things that separated us from the godless Commies (religion is another, but using religion to sell a war in the Middle East would have been … a bad PR move to say the least).
When you hear a right-winger talk about democracy or “spreading democracy” or whatever, he’s not using a left-wing idea at all. He’s appealing to US notions of patriotism, the same way he might invoke the flag or the Boston Tea Party or George Washington. The focus on democracy was useful in the run-up to the Iraq War precisely because it could be used to quash both right-wing isolationists and left-wing anti-war sentiment by appealing to either patriotism or human rights depending on how the hearer wanted to interpret what was being said.
The very idea of Kissinger, Schultz, and Skowcroft being voices of either reason or moderation is pretty frightening in and of itself, and shows just how far out of whack our foreign policy really is. In any arena, a fear-based policy is the easiest to promote, but even more so when dealing with external forces that actually are scary on some level. Equating scary with threatening is the easiest move of all, and if there’s money to be made, that’s what we’ll continue to see, regardless who’s in charge.Peace out………
The growing influence of the right-wing foreign policy fringe is due not only to indifference or ignorance, but it is a symptom of the reflexive opposition to anything and everything this administration does that drives the Republican Party. President Obama is pursuing a center-right foreign policy, and too many of the mandarins would either agreer with that policy, or would have only the most subtle disagreements with it. For the Republicans, however, nuance is out, screaming is in. Who is going to get the base more excited: Baker or Scowcroft, saying “Well, maybe not . . .”, or Liz Cheney, shrieking that the Islamofascists are at the door?
Sure, scoff at Romney all you like. We’ll see who’s laughing once the InterContinental Ballistic Missiles are raining upon us from Russian bombers.