Since this week is George W. Bush retrospective week, it's worth pondering some of the possible counterfactuals of that administration. For example, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played a pretty important role in the foreign policy clusterf**ks that dominated the first six years of that administration. You'd think that an alternative SecDef would have mattered. 

It's worth considering the plausible counterfactual, however. Remember that Rumsfeld wasn't Bush's first choice for the job. Initially, Bush interviewed Senator Dan Coats of Indiana. According to Karl Rove, however, "after a couple of face-to-face meetings, the president-elect was concerned whether Coats had the management skill and toughness to do the job." So maybe a counterfactual of Secretary of Defense Coats would have led to a worse outcome!

I bring this up because I watched Dan Coats on ABC's This Week, and it was ... quite a performance. If we go to the transcript, here's his first intervention, on whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be Mirandized: 

COATS: I think we should stay with enemy combatant until we find out for sure whether or not there was a link to foreign terrorist organizations.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Even though he's a citizen?

COATS: Even though he's a citizen. There have been exceptions to this before with the public safety issue of course on Miranda rights. But also the fact that he's traveled back to his hometown which is a Muslim area, could have been radicalized back there.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That was his brother though.

Now you have to hand it to Senator Coats here -- inside of ten seconds, he makes a dubious statement about the law and a factually incorrect statement. It wasn't like these were obscure facts, either, like the capital of Chechnya or something. So, great prep work, Senator Coats' staff!

This is just a prelude, however, to Coats' most noteworthy intervention: 

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, what do you do though if no connection to a specific group is found? Instead we just find that these young men were inspired by al Qaeda, but not directed. That's almost impossible to find.

COATS: Well it is. And that's the reality of the world we're now living in. Because we not only face terrorism from abroad, that is, planned and coordinated. We face these lone wolves or these others or whoever gathers together that has a vengeance or a demented mind or who has been kind of radicalized through over the internet or through a mosque or whatever. We're going to continue to have to understand that is a threat to America also.

That's why we all need to be engaged in not only looking out for this type of thing, but helping identify and see, whether these loners, is there a kid in the classroom that's just --

RADDATZ: He wasn't a loner. He wasn't a loner (emphasis added).

Now in fairness to Senator Coats, it does seem as though the Tsarnaevs were lone wolves without any direct connection to overseas terrorist networks. Still, he got his brothers mixed up again -- as Martha Raddatz points out, there's no evidence that the younger Tsarnaev was a loner. 

But let's skip the preliminaries and get to the more basic point. Is Dan Coats suggesting that high schools profile which kids are loners and put them onto a "possible terrorist watch list"? I'm picturing this kind of exercise at a typical high school: 

PRINCIPAL:  So, what about Jeremy? 

TEACHER #1: Well, his grades are pretty good, but he does seem to stare out of the window a lot. And I keep having to yell at him to remove his sunglasses and earbuds in math class.

PRINCIPAL:  Hmmm ... does he socialize with the other students?

GUIDANCE COUNSELOR #1: Well, I saw him get into a pretty big argument with another kid once over whether Marjorie Tyrell or Daenerys Targaryen was hotter in Game of Thrones. It got pretty heated...

PRINCIPAL: We can't take any chances after Boston. Put him on the watchlist. Oh, and it's totally Marjorie.

TEACHER #2:  SAY WHAT??!! It's obviously Cersei!!

As someone with first-hand experience of loneliness in high school, I'd wager that this kind of exercise would be the dumbest f**king idea in the history of counterterrorism. This sort of half-assed thinking would multiply the amount of alienation and disaffectedness among America's teens. 

Now, this isn't the first time Dan Coats has sounded like a dumbass on a morning show. So perhaps, as a public service, someone should suggest that the next time a television show asks him to be on the air to talk homeland security, he go sit in the corner and read up on Type I and Type II errors -- here's a good Cliffs Notes version for the Senator. 

Am I missing anything?

Yesterday an amendment to the continuing resolution funding the U.S. government, sponsored by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was passed by a voice vote in the Senate. Its purpose? 

To prohibit the use of funds to carry out the functions of the Political Science Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation, except for research projects that the Director of the National Science Foundation certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.

Now, from a pure material interest perspective, this should make me happy. I've never received a dime in NSF funding, and I'm sitting on a pretty good grant for the next 5-10 years, so from a strictly relative gains perspective, I acquire more influece in the discipline. Furthermore, the national security exemption means that whatever scraps the NSF throws to political science will go to my preferred subfields like international relations and comparative politics. 

The thing is, though, that I love political science. I want to see more quality research being done, and the NSF cutoff pushes things in the opposite direction. So I'm not happy. 

If I'm displeased, however, then I think it's safe to say that the American Political Science Association is galactically pissed off at this outcome: 

Adoption of this amendment is a gross intrusion into the widely-respected, independent scholarly agenda setting process at NSF that has supported our world-class national science enterprise for over sixty years.

The amendment creates an exceptionally dangerous slippery slope. While political science research is most immediately affected, at risk is any and all research in any and all disciplines funded by the NSF. The amendment makes all scientific research vulnerable to the whims of political pressure. 

Adoption of this amendment demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the breadth and importance of political science research for the national interest and its integral place on the nation's interdisciplinary scientific research agenda. 

Singling out any one field of science is short-sighted and misguided, and poses a serious threat to the independence and integrity of the National Science Foundation.

And shackling political science within the national science agenda is a remarkable embarrassment for the world's exemplary democracy.

I've blogged at length in the past on the substantive reasons why a cutoff of NSF funds for political science is really, really, stupid. Another post on that question won't change things. And I vented my frustration at the willful ignorance of Senator Coburn yesterday, so there's no reason to go there now. Yesterday, however, there was rollicking debate on Twitter about the need for political scientists to, well, be better at politics. Folks such as Phil Arena, Jay Ulfelder, William Winecoff, and Jacob Levy observed that APSA's tactical response to Coburn's folly -- encouraging APSA members to email Congress and so forth -- was pretty lame. Only if we used the Dark Arts of political science knowledge could we somehow stymie the Senator from Oklahoma. 

Here's the thing, though -- while I'm no expert in American politics, I think I know enough of the Dark Arts to know that we could have the best arguments in the world and still recognize that political science is good and truly f**ked. 

From a straight interest group perspective political scientists don't matter. At all. The NSF funding for political science is a $13 million appropriation spread out geographically. There is no concentrated interest in a particular congressional district or state to motivate a member of Congress to fight for this issue with as much ardor as Tom Coburn or Jeff Flake. 

Now, one could argue that if you believe in epistemic communities -- i.e., the power of collective expertise -- to influence uninformed members of Congress, then maybe political scientists could function as Weberian activists and educate members about the inherent value of political science. The thing is, as I've argued previously, politicians and pundits do not think of politics as a scientific enterprise. Maybe a few pundits developed a new appreciaion for statistics following the 2012 election, but that's not quite the same thing. So an epistemic community of political scientists won't cut it. Hell, all social scientists would be unlikely to persuade the Senate -- remember, this is a body that was copacetic with a Senator blocking a Nobel Prize winning economist from sitting on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Maybe we could logroll with all  the natural and physical sciences too, but if the past decade of climate change policy has proven anything, it's that this won't work terribly well. 

Another gambit would be to move public opinion on this issue to the point where Congress had no choice but to accede to the masses ... except the masses likely support the cuts. A mass public that believes the foreign aid budget is a thousand times larger than it actually is likely believes that cutting NSF funding of political science goes a long way toward tackling the deficit. Furthermore, as Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler's research shows, it's next to impossible to correct that misperception. 

There are three other ways for political scientists to alter the status quo -- but each of them has issues: 

1) A political scientist needs to come up with a killer scientific breakthrough that really advances knowledge in the field in an unambiguous manner. We're talking something Nobel-worthy. Oh, wait, Elinor Ostrom already did that, and it didn't matter. Never mind...

2) A political scientist needs to develop a predictive model that's so powerful that it yields substantial profit -- to the point where the political scientists can afford to set up an endowment that substitutes for NSF funding. The thing is, there already are political scientists who have thrived in the private sector -- but I'm not seeing enough cabbage being earned to create endowments. 

3) Finally, maybe a trained political scientist could just run for the Senate, get elected, and apply the necessary counterweight to Coburn et al ... except that one of Coburn's co-sponsors is Arizona freshman Senator Jeff Flake, who has -- wait for it -- an M.A. in political science. 

Am I missing anything, or is political science good and truly f**ked? 

UPDATE: OK, there's one other possibility that could theoretically shift the status quo. Suppose a rival great power -- say, a country that rhymes with "Dinah" -- were to suddenly throw around huge research $$$ to develop a comparative advantage in poli sci. Say that the money was so good that it started to attract the cream of the political science crop. That might spur Congress to freak out about the existence of a political science gap. 

So, any political scientists sitting on fat research offers from China -- now is the time to accept them. 

In an exit interview with the Wall Street Journal, outgoing U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said some provocative things about the state of America's political system and how that affects our standing in the world. In particular: 

If you look past the political dysfunction, the economy looks encouragingly resilient. We’ve got much more diversity of strengths, from energy to high tech to manufacturing than is true for any major economy, and people should find comfort and some optimism in that.

But the failures of the American political system are going to be very damaging over time unless they’re addressed. Although the world will give us some time to find a consensus around long-term fiscal reforms, they’re not going to give us forever. And you can’t count indefinitely on the worlds having more confidence in our political system than is justified. We have to earn that confidence. It’s going to have to produce better results from the legislative process.

So is he right? 

My natural instinct is to be skeptical about claims like these. After all, the U.S. Constitution and America's great power status have co-existed pretty peacefully for the last 70 years. One could go further and argue that America's economic might has co-existed happily with the Constitution for the past century. Is it really the system that's at fault? 

Perhaps a better way to frame Geithner's claim is to distinguish formal rules from informal norms. For example, the Senate filibuster has existed in its current form for quite some time, but there was a norm about not abusing this option that allowed necessary government operations to continue without significant impediments. Given rising levels of polarization, however, maybe these norms are breaking down? 

I'm not sure that's it either, however. Even polarized party elites do share some common incentives not to completely destroy their reputations. If one looks at Barack Obama and John Boehner, for example, one finds two politicians with pretty different ideological starting points that are nevetheless willing to do some compromising. 

No, based on what I've read over the past 24 hours, I'd wager that something else is happening. For lack of a better way of putting it, I think large swathes of the GOP elite simply lack instrumental rationality.

Let me explain what I mean here. I'm not saying that the GOP is insane in its policy preferences. One can debate whether it's wise policy to oppose any form of gun regulation, seek massive reductions in government spending or pursue a single-minded, bellicose foreign policy. Whatever one thinks about the wisdom of those policies, the GOP has beeen pretty clear in expressing them. Message received.

Instrumental rationality is whether  an actor pursues the optimal course of action to maximizse those preferences given structural constraints and the preferences of other key actors. And it's here where the GOP's behavior puzzles me a wee bit. Consider two examples from yesterday's news cycle.

First, Maggie Haberman reports that a new right-wing group has sprung up to oppose Chuck Hagel's nomination to be Secretary of Defense: 

A group of Republican strategists is forming a new outside group aimed at thwarting Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination as defense secretary, with a plan to air TV ads and to have people on the ground in the states of key senators to apply pressure in advance of his confirmation hearing.

Americans for a Strong Defense will be the latest group to hit Hagel from the right. As POLITICO reported yesterday, the well-funded American Future Fund is launching a multistate ad campaign against Hagel, and the William Kristol-founded Emergency Committee for Israel has already aired cable ads in Washington arguing the former Nebraska senator is weak on Iran and in his support for Israel...

The group’s officials acknowledged that Hagel is a Vietnam veteran and war hero, but made clear they will paint him as “outside the mainstream” on key defense issues.

Among the senators the group will pressure to oppose Hagel are Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina. All of those Democrats are up for reelection in 2014.

Again, I get the opposition to Hagel from some in the GOP. What I don't get is what anyone donating to these groups thinks they're going to accomplish. The moment Chuck Schumer endorsed Hagel's selection, this ballgame was over. No Senate election two years from now will hinge on this confirmation vote because -- just to remind everyone for the nth time -- voters don't care about international relations. The most plausible story one could gin up is that  by fighting the good fight now, a marker has been laid down for future nominations.  Except that since the reputation for power is a form of power itself, the groups that fight this and lose won't seem terribly imposing for the next critical vote. If I was a wealthy GOP donor who cared a lot about foreign policy and national security issues, there are at least ten other ways to spend this money that would be more efficient than trying to oppose Hagel right now.

The second data point comes from rumblings within the House GOP caucus that maybe they shouldn't risk hitting the debt ceiling. Hey, this sounds rational!! As more GOP elites and public opinion polls tell the Republicans that this is a dead-bang loser of an issue for them, it would make sense for Republicans to give Obama what he wants on the debt ceiling but fight him tooth and nail on the budget. 

Except that the more I read about the House GOP's thinking on this, the less instrumentally rational it sounds: 

Republicans are mulling the “possible virtue” of a short-term extension of the debt limit, according to Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Ryan and other House leaders see such a move as the best way to engage President Barack Obama on spending cuts in the coming months. They believe that once the immediate threat of default is off the table, Republicans will be in a better bargaining position; the less drama, the better. "The last thing we should be debating is whether we’re going to put the nation’s full faith and credit at risk," Representative Greg Walden of Oregon said at a press conference.

This doesn't make any sense.  If the full faith and credit of the nation shouldn't be a subject for debate, and if the GOP now realizes this is not a good arena for political combat, why kick this can down the road for less than three months?  All this does is set up House GOP members to have to vote multiple times to raise the debt ceiling.  Why force numerous no-win votes if you can economize on the pain, have one vote early in everyone's term, and then engage in actual budgetary politics? 

I'm not  a Washington insider, but I've observed politics for a couple of decades now.  Most of the time, even if I disagreed with the preferences of a politician, I understood what they were doing to try to attain those preferences.  I honestly don't understand how many in the GOP are thinking about how they're gonna achieve their ends.  It's like they've all flunked Backward Induction 101.  Or watched this scene from Blazing Saddles once too often. 

So I disagree wth Geithner.  Sure, the American political system can be sclerotic.  But what we're witnessing right now is something different.  Like the revolutionaries in Stephen Walt's Revolution and War, the current crop of GOP elites seem to believe that loud, repeated affirmations of their preferences will simply and eventually steamroll Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and the American people into acceptance of their policy platform.  One would have thought that the aftermath of the 2011 debt ceiling fight, the 2012 election, the fiscal cliff negotiations, and the superstorm Sandy relief bill would have led to some learning.  But it hasn't.  And that's the scariest fact of all. 

Developing.... in an utterly irrational way.

As President Obama moves towards nominating former GOP senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, and as Republicans gear up to try and totally unhinge themselves defeat him, it seems like a good time to follow up on my Foreign Affairs essay on how badly the GOP has screwed the pooch on foreign policy.  Let's start by addressing some critical feedback. 

Ben Domenech wasn't all that impressed with my essay, as he explained in his newsletter: 

Drezner’s problem is that Republican foreign policy has largely become bipartisan, so the critique is one that is more of tone than policy details: the grandstanding of the Romney campaign, its single-minded endorsement of unrestricted Pentagon spending, and the simplicity of its bullet point approach to issues. But these are critiques of a campaign and a candidate who wished to contrast without offending in every policy arena, not simply the foreign policy space – it’s unfair to assign this as due to an entire party’s approach to foreign policy.

A few thoughts here: 

1)  I'm not sure Domenech read the whole essay, because while I certainly talked about the 2012 campaign, I talked a fair amount about the previous decade of GOP foreign policy, and it's not pretty. 

2)  What Domenech doesn't seem to get is that the "single-minded endorsement of unrestricted Pentagon spending, and the... bullet point approach to issues" don't just apply to the Romney campaign -- it applies to the overwhelming bulk of GOP elites that weigh in on foreign policy.  That sentiment perfectly captures the essence of the 112th Congress, not to mention the "Defending Defense" initiative put together by conservative think tanks.  Actually, in some ways the congressional wing was worse because of the anti-Muslim hysteria, though to its credit that is an area where the GOP really does seem to be making some strides.   

3)  Saying that my critique is "one that is more of tone than policy details" shouldn't make the GOP feel any better.  Because the GOP didn't win either the presidency or the Senate, tone and rhetoric are pretty much all Republicans can control on foreign policy.  Oh, sure, Congress has some power, but it's largely a negative one -- they can say "no" to the president from time to time.  The problem is that when they do this they either look like know-nothings or paranoids. 

So the rhetoric actually matters for the GOP, because that's all anyone -- voters and wonks alike -- are gonna imbibe from Republicans for the next four years.  Now this sets up an genuinely unfair challenge to the GOP:  they'll be tarred with extremist statements made by the fringiest of the fringe.  That said, the party leadership can improve its brand by taking the occasional stand if some back-bencher strays too far off the reservation (as occurred when a few idiots questioned Huma Abedin's loyalty). 

4)  Both Domenech (and Seth Mandel in Commentary) argue that because Obama has suceeded by co-opted the successful aspects of the GOP's foreign policy, Republicans can't be in that much trouble.  The trouble here is which parts Obama co-opted, and how the GOP has reacted to that.  Republicans used to have a pretty big tent on foreign policy -- realists, internationalists, and neocons galore.  Bush 43's second term was pretty pragmatic and neocon-free, and that was what the Obama team co-opted.  I'm honestly not sure that today's GOP is as keen on these kibds of foreign policy worldviews.  The reaction to Chuck Hagel's possible nomination, for example, or the tenor of Danielle Pletka's Foreign Policy musings on the GOP, suggest that despite a decade of monumental f**k-ups, neocons still rule the GOP roost.  Which means that leading GOP spokespeople on foreign policy no longer embrace the aspects of GOP foreign policy traditions co-opted by Obama.  Or to put this another way:  ask yourself if any of the viable 2016 GOP candidates for president would appoint someone like Bob Gates to be Secretary of Defense. 

Now, it's possible that the next GOP president will campaign as a neocon and govern as something else.  But doing that means that Republicans are sticking with a brand that, as I pointed out here and in Foreign Affairs, will cost them votes. 

For the past few decades, the GOP triad to victory was low taxes, wedge social issues, and advocating for a robust foreign policy.  Each of those three legs is now in jeopardy.  Public opinion favors higher taxes, the right has lost the culture wars, and the public now trusts Democrats more than Republicans on foreign policy.  Unless and until the GOP faces these realities, and figures out some new path forward beyond "REAGAN!", it's dooming itself to be the doppelgänger of eighties Democrats. 

Domenech accuses me of lacking a clear way forward.  I don't think that's true, but I will acknowledge that the primary point of my essay was to get the GOP to admit that it has a problem.  If Mitt Romney's campaign proved anything, it's that creedal passion isn't enough to win on foreign policy -- there actually has to be some policy content.  As to the way forward, I like James Poulos' suggestions in this post. 

Look, I get that this seems like a thankless exercise.  Talking about foreign affairs when you're out of power is a frustrating and abstract task.  On the other hand, one reason the GOP is out of power is that its loudest voices don't sound terribly reasonable when it comes to world politics.  This is the challenge it has to face for the next four years. 

Pop quiz:  which administration has been more enthusiastic about joining international treaties, George W. Bush or Barack Obama? 

The Obama administration has been slow to submit new treaties to the Senate, and only nine have been approved so far. In contrast, the George W. Bush administration secured Senate approval of 163 treaties over eight years. These included not only bilateral treaties but also multilateral agreements on many important subjects, including human rights, atmospheric and marine environmental protection, the laws of war and arms control.

That paragraph comes from John Bellinger III, Bush 43's former State Department legal adviser.  Now, one obvious pushback to this is that Obama has had to deal with a sovereigntist caucus in the Senate that is even more rabid than it was under Bush.  Bellinger acknowledges the obvious, but then goes on to argue that fault also lies with the Obama administration: 

 It isn’t enough to blame Republican opposition to international agreements, which certainly has risen among the party’s senators in recent years. That trend only makes it more important that President Obama work harder to gain Senate support for treaties in his second term....

President Obama must devote more energy to securing Senate approval for pending treaties, both by using the presidency’s bully pulpit to explain the benefits and by directing administration officials to pay more attention to the concerns of individual senators. Despite increasing Republican hostility toward treaties, the president should still be able to persuade between 12 and 15 pragmatic Republican senators to support treaties that give concrete rights to Americans and American businesses or that promote important American interests.

The president should begin with the Law of the Sea Convention, which enjoys strong support from all branches of the United States military and from the American business community. He almost certainly could have gained Senate approval of this important treaty during his first three years in office but inexplicably waited until the maelstrom of the 2012 election year to push for it.

Over at the Monkey Cage, Erik Voeten looks at the political science of this and concludes that Bellinger has a valid point.  The reason that Obama has been lethargic on treaties?  The opportunity cost of the effort: 

The idea that it is indeed hard work to pass treaties is supported by a recent working paper by Judith Kelley and Jon Pevehouse. Passing a treaty isn’t a simple matter of tallying the votes. The Senate’s agree and consent process takes away legislative time and political capital that could be used for other, perhaps more valuable, legislation. This opportunity cost theory yields some interesting and counterintuitive hypotheses. Presidents should become less likely to advance treaties when their approval ratings are high and when their party controls the Senate because that is the time when they can pass more valuable legislation on domestic issues. Kelley and Pevehouse find strong support for these patterns in their analysis with data from 1967-2008.

I suspect that Bellinger is correct that the Obama Administration could have persuaded a few Republicans to switch sides on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities if it had expended more time and capital on the treaty. This is not just about Republican opposition but also about priorities in the Obama Administration, which have, rightly or wrongly, been more on the domestic side.

One could argue that this logic also applies to Obama's cabinet selection process on foreign affairs.  With Susan Rice, Chuck Hagel and John Kerry, the White House strategy appears to be, "hey, let's float the name, see if anyone gets upset, and see if the nominee can push back effectively before bothering to actually nominate the person." 

Now from a pure logic of politics, this strategy makes some sense on some foreign policy matters.  As embarrassing as it was that the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities did not get ratified by the Senate, it doesn't change much.  There is no effect on domestic law and the U.S. takes a marginal hit on the global stage.  Even on cabinet appointments, one could be truly bloodless and argue that Susan Rice's Value Over Replacement-Level Policy Principal wasn't that high.  The fiscal cliff negotiations matter a lot more. 

Still, politics is art as well as science, and there's something just a little bit chickens**t about the Obama White House's tactics.  Politics isn't only about winning -- sometimes it's just about making the effort.  And the truth of the matter is that when it comes to dealing with Congress, this administration hasn't made the effort.  By my recollection, during its entire first term, the only international relations piece of legislation that got the full court Obama White House press was the New START treaty with Russia.  Now given what was going on with the economy, one could argue that the administration had the right set of priorities.  But one way to help jumpstart the global economy would be a series of potentially significant foreign economic policy moves -- including the ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention, by the way.  And I'd feel safer about my bet with Phil Levy if I knew that the Obama administration was willing to get some skin in the game when it came to foreign policy and Congress. 

Letting peple like Susan Rice or Chuck Hagel twist in the political wind is, well, cruel.  So I hope that in its second term, the White House cares enough about foreign policy to actually engage Congress rather than throw up their hands and say, "crazy Republicans, what can you do?"  Actually, President Obama, you could do one whole hell of a lot if you made an effort. 

Your humble blogger was all set to talk about the nail-biter of an election for China's Standing Politburo Committee, but gosh, it seems like there wasn't much surprise in how it played out (with the admitted exception of Xi Jinping managing to sweep Hu Jintao off the Central Military Commission). So instead I'd like to talk about the clusterf**k that is the current debate in the United States on the Benghazi attack.

Yesterday at his press conference, Barack Obama defended Ambassador/possible future Secretary of State Susan Rice from Republican critiques of her Sunday news show appearances on Benghazi:

President Obama strongly defended U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice against attacks Wednesday by a trio of Republican senators who said she is ill-qualified to serve as secretary of state because of how she explained the roots of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Bristling with evident indignation during a news conference, Obama said Rice has “done exemplary work” with “skill, professionalism and toughness and grace.”

He then made a pointedly and almost personal challenge to Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.),Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) who earlier Wednesday said Rice is unqualified to lead the State Department because she appeared either misinformed or ill-prepared to discuss the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, on national political talk shows a few days after the attack.

“If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham and others want to go after somebody they should go after me,” Obama said. “For them to go after the UN ambassador who had nothing to do with Benghazi…to besmirch her reputation is outrageous.”

Apparently the troika weren't pleased, taking to the Senate to blast Rice, Obama and everything else within range.

Slate's David Weigel has already blogged about the ways in which McCain has already distorted what Susan Rice actually said in those Sunday appearances. Rather than repeat his points, I'd note a few things:

1) It's fascinating to me how critics seem to think that Susan Rice flat-out lied in those Sunday shows. "Lied" is different from "saying things that are wrong." Lied implies that Rice knew exactly why that attack occurred but for political reasons said something else. Being wrong would have been a much simpler task -- simply echoing intelligence talking points that were given to her. It's to Marco Rubio's credit, for example, that he nails the distinction. As quoted by Weigel:

"We have a process for nominations, and we want to give her a full hearing," said Sen. Marco Rubio yesterday when asked about Rice. "I'm concerned with the fact she went on Sunday shows and said this was the product of a spontaneous uprising and not a terrorist attack. Obviously she based those comments on directives or information that she had, and it's important to know where those directives came from and what that information was." (emphasis added)

Everything that I have read about Benghazi suggests that this was a bureaucratic nigtmare -- but Rice didn't lie. And anyone who says differently better have something better than the assertion of "it's obvious!!"

2) Tying Rice to Benghazi seems.... odd, since her only role in what happened appears to be those Sunday morning talk shows. The better questions to ask would be about Rice's performance at the United Nations. Richard Grenell has a piece over at Fox News that gets at this issue. Grennell is the embodiment of a pure partisan -- but that doesn't mean he's wrong in this case. These are the questions that should form the basis of any confirmation hearing -- if it happens.

3) Do Republicans really want to make their new standard for bouncing cabinet nominations to be "says inaccurate things on television"? By that standard, an awful lot of the GOP's foreign affairs machine that served or defended the Bush administration would be blackballed from any foreign policy office for the future.

Hey, remember when I said that China's debt holdings did not pose a serious threat to the United States?  And remember when I banged my head against the desk because Very Serious People continue to insist otherwise? 

I bring this up because, according to Bloomberg's Tony Capaccio and David Kruger, the Department of Defense has my back: 

China's holdings of more than $1 trillion in U.S. debt and the prospect that it might “suddenly and significantly” withdraw funds don’t pose a national security threat, according to a first-ever Pentagon assessment.

“China has few attractive options for investing the bulk of its large foreign exchange holdings out of U.S. Treasury securities,” given their extent, according to the report dated July 20 and obtained by Bloomberg News

China is the second-largest holder of U.S. government debt after the Federal Reserve. Acting at the direction of Congress, the Defense Department studied the rationale behind the investments and whether “the aggressive option of a large sell- off” would give China leverage in a political or military crisis. China’s debt holdings have been cited as a sign of U.S. vulnerability by Republicans in this year’s election campaign....

“Attempting to use U.S. Treasury securities as a coercive tool would have limited effect and likely would do more harm to China than to the United States,” according to the report, which was sent to congressional committees by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. “As the threat is not credible and the effect would be limited even if carried out, it does not offer China deterrence options” in a diplomatic, economic or military situation, the Pentagon found....

China decreased its Treasury holdings last year with little apparent impact in the market, Treasury data show. The world’s most populous country reduced its position in Treasuries in the first yearly decline since Bloomberg began tracking the data in 2001.

The holdings declined 0.7 percent, or by $8.2 billion, to $1.15 trillion last year. The decline was much steeper in the second half of the year when China’s stake plunged 12 percent, or by $163 billion, from an all-time high of $1.31 trillion in July 2011, the data show.

During that period, 10-year Treasuries rallied as the U.S. credit rating was reduced by Standard & Poor's to AA+ from AAA and the European sovereign debt crisis worsened, pushing the yield to 1.88 percent from 2.80 percent.

Foreign investors held 50.3 percent of the $10.52 trillion in outstanding Treasuries as of June, government data show. That’s down from April 2008, when they reached 55.7 percent of the $4.64 trillion in U.S. marketable debt....

The Pentagon said in its report that the Fed also is “fully capable of purchasing U.S. Treasuries dumped” by China and “reducing the economic impact.”

A Chinese move to “suddenly and significantly” reduce its Treasury holdings “would fundamentally change the international finance and business community’s perception of China as a reliable and respected economic and financial partner,” the Pentagon said.

This report isn't going to end the silly campaign rhetoric or the Niall Ferguson/Tom Friedman foreign policy community talking point, of course.  But I thought it was worth posting here so I can link back to it the next time I need to bang my head against a desk.   

If you're an American and want o worry about China, don't focus on the debt -- focus on the apparent disappearance of China's next leader. 

Here's a more complete transcript of my interview with Peterson Institute for International Economics founder C. Fred Bergsten that Foreign Policy excerpted earlier in the week.  I edited and abridged the transcript to clean up some of grammar.  Have at it -- Bergsten's discussion of his role in the Trans-Pacific Partnership should make for interesting reading!! 

DANIEL W. DREZNER: I guess the first question I would ask is, what do you think the [Peterson Institute for International Economics'] greatest accomplishment has been?

C. FRED BERGSTEN: I think our greatest accomplishment has been to educate Americans on the benefits of globalization. And the first calculation that tried to quantify the effects, namely a trillion dollar a year -- higher -- national income, the potential for further gains of another half-trillion a year could go all the way to reducing barriers to global trade. Um, it's been a tough battle. It started in earnest I'd say in the NAFTA fight in Congress, and it continued during every one of the trade policies at the time. It's of course come up repeatedly in the capital flows context as well with all the monetary crises going back to the 80s with the debt crisis, and the 90s with Asia, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, etc. And now, with the crises of the high-income countries...but I think, putting it in the broadest terms, we have been the people trying to expand understanding of globalization -- its benefits and costs, which there certainly are -- but how [on] balance, it's a positive force, both for the U.S. economy and for U.S. foreign policy. In doing that, we have never tried to cover up or short-change the costs, particularly the adjustment the cost to workers and [immobile] factors of production, but it's mainly workers. We've quantified that, about 50 billion a year to offset against the one trillion a year of gains --20/1 cost ratio -- pretty overwhelming but that is significant cost. So that has to be dealt with, and the U.S. has not dealt with it very well. Trade adjustment is miniscule --  one billion a year. We need to invest more to deal with the downside; the cost of losing, in order to keep the benefits of globalization on a stable basis. And we've argued that throughout, and I think our balance carried the day. But the battle rages on, as you know, so much work yet to be done.

DWD: Of course, I know you're a Fletcher alum, and I'm speaking right now from the Fletcher school, so I have to ask this question: In what ways did your Fletcher experience prepare you for going to DC and then sort of creating the Institute for International Economics?

CFB: Well, it prepared me really well because I learned really most of my international economics there, from the top professors of the day, [like] Charles Kindleberger.

DWD: Kindleberger was there when you were? Oh, I didn't know that.  

CFB: Charlie taught a couple of courses -- a course on Europe, Europe Economy, an economics course on development with Humphry called the Don and Charlie show -- that was one of the highlight performances on the campus. But their teaching gave me most of my roots in international economics, and always -- obviously in a global context -- but also in a real world context; a political economy context that was, of course, really useful then for going into the policy world, which I did, most immediately into government, and then with that of most of my 20 years of career then to creating the institute.

DWD: Do you think America's foreign policy establishment has become more or less economically literate since when you first started IIE?

CFB: I don't think there's been much change. They were not very literate then, and they're not very literate now. My first big job -- I had a couple of lesser jobs -- my first big job was becoming economic deputy to Kissinger when he was National Security Advisor under Nixon.

Read on

Lots o' stuff to chat about in the higher education universe, but let's keep it to three items in this blog post:

1)  My student-soon-to-be-Doctor-of-Philosophy Patrick Meier and Chris Albon blog "Advice to Future PhDs from 2 Unusual Graduating PhDs."  They make some interesting, provocative, and dare I say counterintuitive arguments. 

I disagree with a couple of their points.  First of all, I ain't buying "the blog is the new CV."  The blog is a calling card, and if you're lucky it's a branding device -- but it's not the same thing as a vita.  Second of all, I think they tend to inductively generalize from their own experiences and capabilities.  Not everyone should take on outside projects or teach at every opportunity, because these are excellent not-writing-your-dissertation activities.  Finally, I think their seven pieces of advice are out of sequence.  Their #3, #6 and #7 are the most important things.  Only once you've answered those questions should you even consider following the rest of their advice.  Still, read the whole thing. 

2)  I see that Naomi Schaefer Riley got fired from her Chronicle of Higher Education gig for writing a 500 word blog post bashing dissertations-in-progress in African-American studies without reading them.  Riley has written her response on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page.  James Joyner provides an excellent round-up of the affair.  My take is similar to Joyner in that, to be blunt, neither the Chronicle nor Riley come out of this looking very good.  The Chronicle looks like it kowtowed to the pressures of academic political correctness by either not reacting sooner or standing their ground.  Riley, on the other hand, has put herself in the indefensible position of calling for greater academic rigor while whinging that those standards shouldn't apply to her when she blogs for the Chronicle.  So, a pox on everyone's house for this affair. 

3)  The House of Representatives, in its infinite wisdom, has voted to cut funding for political science -- and only political science -- from the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences part of the National Science Foundation.  Representative Jeff Flake's justified cutting the funding using pretty much the same logic as Senator Tom Coburn did in 2009 when he lamely tried to do the same thing [At least he didn't claim that "social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos"!!--ed.  Thank goodness for small favors.] . 

See John Sides, Erik Voeten, Michael Flynn , Seth Masket and Jay Ulfelder  for some useful responses.  Ulfelder's point is particularly trenchant:

There’s real irony here in a Republican-controlled House of Representatives voting to defund a political-science program at a time when the Department of Defense and “intelligence community” seem to be increasing spending on it. With things like the Minerva Initiative, ICEWS, IARPA’s Open Source Indicators programs, the parts of the government concerned with protecting national security seem to find growing value in social-science research and are spending accordingly. Meanwhile, the party that claims to be the stalwart defender of national security pulls in the opposite direction, like the opposing head on Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-pullyu. Nice work, fellas.

Indeed. 

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Escape Artists, Noam Scheiber has a behind-the-scenes story in The New Republic about how the Obama administration mostly botched the debt ceiling negotiations with Republicans last year. I'm guessing that Scheiber's best sources were the Treasury folk, because they come off looking the best -- advising Obama to cut a deal with the Republicans in December 2010, telling him to not negotiate policy concessions to get a debt ceiling boost, and so forth. Obama did not listen to them, and we all know what happened. Scheiber goes on to note that after the debt ceiling drama of the summer, Obama learned to attack conservatives rather than compromise with them, thereby improving his political fortunes.

He closes the essay with the following:

For voters contemplating whether he deserves a second term, the question is less and less one of policy or even worldview than of basic disposition. Throughout his political career, Obama has displayed an uncanny knack for responding to existential threats. He sharpened his message against Hillary Clinton in late November 2007, just in time to salvage the Iowa caucuses and block her coronation. He condemned his longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright, just before Wright’s racialist comments could doom his presidential hopes. Once in office, Obama led two last-minute counteroffensives to save health care reform. But, in every case, the adjustments didn’t come until the crisis was already at hand. His initial approach was too passive and too accommodating, and he stuck with it far too long.

Given the booby traps that await the next president—Iranian nukes, global financial turmoil—this habit seems dangerously risky. Sooner or later, Obama may encounter a crisis that can’t be reversed at the eleventh hour. Is Obama’s newfound boldness on the economy yet another last-minute course-correction? Or has he finally learned a deeper lesson? More than just a presidency may hinge on the answer.

There are two big problems with this kind of formulation. The first is that, for all of Obama's stumbles and bumbles on the debt ceiling issue, it's hard to argue in retrospect that he lost that political fight. Since the debt ceiling dispute, Obama's approval numbers have moved north while Congress has become historically unpopular. The improving economy likely explains some of this -- but if that was the only part of the story then Congress' numbers should be rising as well.

It's not that Obama handled the debt ceiling talks terribly well -- it's just that Scheiber misses the point that the Republicans made an even bigger hash of things. Obama came off as someone willing to deal and the House GOP came off as a group of people looking forward to the apocalypse. Looking more reasonable that one's adversaries occasionally matters in domestic politics -- and it's not in Scheiber's account (full and fair disclosure: I would have been in agreement with Scheiber six months ago).

The more interesting question is whether there's any validity to Scheiber's larger point -- that Obama's initial passivity in responding to political crises suggests he's ill-prepared for handling global crises. Does Scheiber's pattern of how Obama responded to domestic political challenges match up with his foreign policy?

I think Scheiber has half a point. As I've noted in the past, the administration's first set of foreign policies were predicated on the same basic impulse that Obama had domestically: deals and bargains were possible in many parts of the globe. However, as the administration found itself rebuffed and frustrated by various international actors (Iran, China, etc.) it quickly pivoted to a more aggressive -- and more fruitful -- counterpunching approach. Similar to how the debt ceiling negotiations play out, Obama has benefited from his initial outreaches; he can say he tried the olive branch before turning to the stick. When it comes to global actors that Obama perceives as enemies or rivals, his administration has been pretty ruthless.

Where Scheiber might have a point is with how Obama has handled America's friends and allies. Obviously, these countries should have more common interests with the United States, so by and large they should be less obstreperous. When issues have flared up, however -- with Israel on housing settlements, with Europe on the sovereign debt crisis, with post-reset Russia on anything, and with G-20 allies on quantitative easing -- the administration seems slow-moving, awkward, and occasionally shocked that these countries might have interests that diverge from the United States.

Pressuring and cajoling allies is a tricky and delicate business. One would be hard-pressed to argue that the Bush administration did a great job of it. Still, as the latest iteration of the Eurocrisis plays out, Scheiber might have hit on the Achilles heel of Obama's foreign policy acumen.

What do you think?

American politicians are super-mad at Standard & Poor's for downgrading U.S. debt even after the debtopocalypse was averted earlier this week.  These same politicians seem torn between pointing out that S&P  sucks at math and blaming the other political party for the S&P screw-up. 

I really don't care about that as much as the debate over whether S&P got its political analysis  right.  Here's the key paragraphs of the actual Standard & Poor statement: 

[T]he downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011....

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Felix Salmon, thinks that this analysis is spot on:   

[T]he US does not deserve a triple-A rating, and the reason has nothing whatsoever to do with its debt ratios. America’s ability to pay is neither here nor there: the problem is its willingness to pay. And there’s a serious constituency of powerful people in Congress who are perfectly willing and even eager to drive the US into default. The Tea Party is fully cognizant that it has been given a bazooka, and it’s just itching to pull the trigger. There’s no good reason to believe that won’t happen at some point.

David Weigel concludes that the S&P political analysis is fair:

This is not crazy.This what Republicans imply about the supercommittee -- they will not accept plans that increase taxes, and despite the fact that they've agreed to let the Bush tax cuts lapse on January 1, 2013, they are making noises about not accepting a return of the rates. The best possible scenario, if we assume that stance, is what I wrote about today -- tax reform plans that start in the supercommittee and win over a committed Congress.

Kevin Drum, however, thinks that S&P's political analysis is way off: 

S&P shouldn't be in the business of commenting on a country's political spats unless they've been going on so long that they're likely to have a real, concrete impact on the safety of a country's bonds. And that hasn't happened yet. There's no serious macroeconomic reason to think Americacan't service its debt and there's no serious political reason to think the Tea Party has anything close to the power to provoke a political meltdown in which wewon'tpay our debt....

[S&P]should care only about the safety of U.S. bonds, and for the moment anyway, there's no legitimate reason to think either that we can't pay or that we won't pay. The bond market, which has all the same information as S&P, continues to believe that U.S. debt is the safest in the world, and in this case the market is right. S&P should stop playing dumb political games and stick to its core business.

I side, mostly, with Drum.  It's totally fair for S&P to factor politics into their assessment of sovereign debt.  Indeed, a key trend in sovereign debt analysis over the past five years has been the recognition that political fundamentals can matter as much as economics.  That said, if ratings agencies are going to do this, then their political expectations can't just be retrospective -- they need to do some actual forecasting.  Instead, they looked at recent weeks and extrapolated into the future. 

There are three factors that should give S&P pause before assuming that political dysfunction could lead to no increae in tax revenue.  First, as Drum points out, despite all the displays of ideological inflexibility, in the end the debt ceiling vote secured a strong majority of the GOP House caucus.  Some Tea Party members were willing to risk a crisis, but not actually go and perpetuate one.  It was not a Great Moment in Democracy, but in the end a deal was done.  You can't dock for intransigence without noting the outcome. 

Second, unlike the debt ceiling, deadlock in late 2012 means that the Bush tax cuts expire.  Either a lame-duck Obama or a newly-re-elected Obama will be able to make that fiscal decision (no way any faction in Congress musters the 2/3 vote necessary to override).  As Jonathan Chait has repeatedly observed, that dynamic is the opposite of the debt ceiling episode, in which case paralysis led to bad fiscal outcomes.  If S&P thinks partisan gridlock will persist on Capitol Hill, then the conclusion to draw is that taxes will go up. 

Third -- and this is pretty important -- S&P has failed to observe the political aftereffects of the debt deal.  As I argued previously: 

[T]he thing about democracy is that it has multiple ways to constrain political stupidity and ideological overreach. The first line of defense is that politicians will have an electoral incentive to act in non-crazy ways in order to get re-elected. The second line of defense is that politicians or parties who violate the non-crazy rule fail to get re-elected. So, in some ways, the true test of the American system's ability to stave off failure will be the 2012 election.

The first line line of defense has been breached, but the second line of defense looks increasingly robust.  Public opinion poll after public opinion poll in the wake of the debt deal show the same thing -- everyone in Washington is unpopular, but Congress is really unpopular and GOP members of Congress are ridiculously unpopular.  At a minimum, S&P needs to calculate how the current members of Congress will react to rising anti-incumbent sentiment.  If they did that analysis and concluded that nothing would be done, I'd understand their thinking more.  I didn't see anything like that kind of political analysis in their statement, however.   

In the end, I suspect Moody's and Fitch won't follow S&P's move, so this could be a giant nothingburger.  Still, if these guys are going to be doing political risk analysis, it might help to actually have some political scientists on the payroll.  Based on their statement, S&P is simply extrapolating from the op-ed page, and that's a lousy way to make a political forecast. 

Am I missing anything? 

Here's an open secret -- most American foreign policy observers loathe domestic politics.  To those who seek to define and distill the national interest, the notion that factions or parties can get in the way of the common good is very, very frustrating.  This is why, whenever gridlock breaks out in Washington, there is a spasm of caterwauling from prominent foreign policy thinkers that Something.  Must.  Be  Done. 

This leads to some silly memes, like claims that a third party will break the logjam.  It won't -- a glance at Duverger's Law and you know that the first-past-the-post electoral system in this country means that a two-party system is the only stable long-term equilibrium.  A third party in the United States could only achieve electoral viability in one of two ways:  either supplanting one of the existing parties, or focusing on success in a particular region.  Since neither of these outcomes has occurred since the Civil War, I'm not holding my breath. 

Gridlock frustration also leads to proposals of Grand Diagnoses and Remedies for Fixing the System.  Fareed Zakaria goes down this road, offering a diagnosis of why partisanship has been rising in the United States and then links to Mickey Edwards' essay in The Atlantic of how to fix things.  Zakaria, riffing off of Edwards, lists four reasons why partisanship is so high: 

1)  Redistricting has created safe seats so that for most House members, their only concern is a challenge from the right for Republicans and the left for Democrats....

2) Party primaries have been taken over by small groups of activists who push even popular senators to extreme positions.

3) Changes in Congressional rules have also made it far more difficult to enact large, compromise legislation.

4) Political polarization has also been fueled by a new media, which is also narrowcast.

These sound compelling, except that A) none of them really explain increased polarization in the Senate; and B) only the fourth trend is in any way recent (the rest of these phenomenas can be traced back to the 1970's).   

The real problem with Congress is that any proposed institutional reform to correct the problems would require either a dilution of legislative power or a dilution of the minority's power to obstruct.  Neither minority nor majority parties in Congress will be interested in moves like that unless and until we're in a crisis that made 2008 look like a ripple in the pond. 

If you are looking to this humble blogger for ways out of this current problem... um... look elsewhere.  My training is in international relations, and I've found that people with that kind of training tend to prefer policy reforms that provide political leeway and insulation to the executive branch.  These measures are appealing because they tend to minimize the number of stupid interactions with galactically stupid members of Congress.  Over the long-term, however, even a stupid Congress still serves as a valuable check on executive branch authority. 

I'm as frustrated as the next foreign policy observer when it comes to the current policy paralysis.  I know my own kind, however, and we suffer from the flawed belief that there was a halcyon era of bipartisanship in the foreign policy days of yore.  Be very, very wary when a foreign policy pundit gives advice about how to reform the American system of government.  Most of the time they are relying on decades-old Introduction to American Government arguments that are either obsolecent or incentive incompatible. 

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Dear Chinese overlords alien visitors robot masters zombie hegemons post-apocalyptic historians: 

Greetings.  My goal in this message is to explain to you why the most powerful country in the world committed financial seppuku in the summer of 2011 AD*. 

To set the stage:  by now you know that the U.S. Congress was obligated to increase the debt ceiling in order for the United States government to continue to function normally.  President Obama, Democrats in Congress, and most of the Republican leadership recognized the gravity of the situation.  The GOP leadership, however, wanted to use the debt cekiling vote as leverage to get President Obama to commit to significant deficit reduction.  After much haggling over "grand bargains," there was a recognition that no such deal could be passed.  As a backup, leaders from both parties reluctantly advocated a bill that hiked the ceiling and put off questions about long-term deficit reduction to the future. 

The problem was, a political faction emerged that some called "debt kamikazes."  These were politicians and interest group leaders -- all Republicans -- who genuinely believed that nothing of consequence would happen if the debt ceiling wasn't raised.  There were a few others who did believe it and were nevertheless copacetic with that outcome -- I'll get to that group later. 

Sounds absurd to your futuristic ears, you say?  Consider my evidence. The Daily Beast's John Avlon detailed the position of the 2012 GOP presidential candidates:

Michele Bachmann believes it’s all a hoax. Tim Pawlenty told an Iowa crowd, “I hope and pray and believe they should not raise the debt ceiling.” Ron Paul based his first presidential ad on a call to not raise the debt ceiling, proclaiming “No Deals.”  And Rick Santorum has said that raising the debt ceiling should be avoided until a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution is passed.... 

Even supposedly responsible Republican presidential candidates like Mitt Romney—whose campaign slogan might as well be ‘He’s the Sane One’—are finding it politically beneficial to flirt with debt-ceiling denial, announcing a ‘cut, cap and balance’ proposal without revenue increases as his ‘line in the sand’ for supporting raising the debt limit.

There were also interest group coalitions called "Tea Party" organizations that pressured their members of Congress not to raise the debt ceiling.  As CNN's Shannon Travis chonicled, these organizations believed that the effects of more government spending were far more disastrous than defaulting on the debt: 

What they're saying around the country is, "Do not raise the debt ceiling. It's that simple. It's time for Congress to get its fiscal house in order," Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin told CNN. The group is the nation's largest tea party organization.

Martin explained that her group's supporters want a balanced-budget amendment, significant spending cuts and lower taxes. And they don't want the debt limit raised.

Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns for the Washington-based FreedomWorks, explained that he and other activists understand the possible financial implications if the debt limit is not raised (emphasis added)

Similarly, Red State blogger Erick Erickson  wrote an open letter  to the House GOP that boiled down to "do not believe the doom and gloom." 

Now, future historians, you might argue that neither Tea Party activists nor presidential candidates (Bachmann excepted) were in Congress and therefore did not matter.  However, what's important to understand is that these views were prevalent inside the House GOP caucus as well.  The Washington Post's David A. Fahrenthold provided a detailed description of the members of the House of Representatives who thought a default wouldn't be such a big deal.  Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) offered the most extreme example of House GOP thinking:

As the Aug. 2 deadline looms, the debate over how to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis is being complicated by legislators such as Crawford who think the crisis is not as bad as it’s made out to be.

On Thursday, several House Republicans said they didn’t believe predictions that economic calamity would result from a missed deadline. That opinion — held despite a stream of warnings from both parties’ leaders — could make it difficult for the House to pass a debt-ceiling deal.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), another freshman, said that a much bigger fear was that raising the debt ceiling would enable Washington to spend itself into paralyzing debt in a few years.

“A debt-ceiling problem, as large as it is, is not anywhere near as a big or as bad as” that, Brooks said. If Aug. 2 arrives without a deal, Brooks said, the federal government could continue paying creditors. He said that a show of tough fiscal self-discipline could actually improve creditors’ confidence.

“There should be no default on August 2,” Brooks said. “In fact, our credit rating should be improved by not raising the debt ceiling.”  (emphasis added)

Lest you think the view that a default was not such a big deal was limited to backbenchers, Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor found House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan telling CNBC that a "technical default" of a few days wouldn't be a big deal:

If a bondholder misses a payment for a day or two or three or four — what is more important is you are putting the govegnment in a materially better position to better pay its bills going forward.

Now, at this point, I'm sure you, future post-apocalyptic historians, must be scratching your third eye heads, thinking the following: 

WHY???!!! 

Why, why did these human beings maintain these beliefs in the face of massive evidence to the contrary?  Why did these people continue to insist that default wasn't that big a deal when Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke (a Republican first appointed by Republican president George W. Bush) insisted that there would be a "huge financial calamity" if the debt ceiling wasn't raised?  Why did their belief persist when Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch Ratings all explicitly and repeatedly warned of serious and expensive debt downgrades if the ceiling wasn't raised?  Why did they stick to their guns despite news reports detailing the link between the rating of federal government debt and the debt of states and municipalities?  Why did they stand firm despite the consensus of the Republican Governors Association and the Democrat Governors Association that a failure to raise the debnt cailing would be "catastrophic"?  Why did they refuse to yield despite bipartisan analysis explaining the very, very bad consequences of no agreement, and nonpartisan analysis explaining the horrific foreign policy consequences of American default?  Why did they not understand that even a technical default would cost hundreds of billions of dollars**, thereby making their stated goal of debt reduction even harder? 

Most mysteriously, why did these people throw their steering wheel out the window despite witnessing the effect of the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse, which revealed the complex interconectedness of financial markets?  Treasuries were far more integral to global capital markets than Lehman, but the debt kamikazes refused to recognize the possibility that a technical debt default would have unanticipated, complex, and disastrous consequences.  Why? 

I would like to be able to offer you a definitive answer, I really would, but I can't.  The implications listed in the previous paraqgraph seemed pretty friggin' obvious to a lot contemporaneous observers at the time.  As near as I can determine, there are four partial explanations for why the debt kamikazes persisted in their belief that nothing serious would happen:  One explanation, which I've detailed here, is that the debt kamikazes refused to budge because refusing to budge had yielded great political rewards in the past. 

Another explanation is that the debt kamikazes convinced themselves that no possible alternative was worse than the federal government accumulating more debt.  They looked at countries like Greece and Portugal and decided that the U.S. was only one more Obama administration away from such strictures. 

A third explanation was the general erosion of trust in economic experts during this period.  To be fair to the debt kamikazes, many of the prominent policymakers who warned about calamities if the debt ceiling wasn't raised had pooh-poohed the effects of the housing bubble in 2005, or the collapse of that bubble in 2007. 

The final explanation goes back to those people who acknowledged that a default might be a big deal, but were nevertheless OK with the outcome.  These debt kamikazes had undergone a fundamental identity change.  That is to say, despite all their protestations to the contrary, they were no longer loyal Americans.  They were loyal to Republicans first and Republicans only.  Erick Erickson made this logic pretty clear in his open letter to Congress: 

Now is a time for choosing. Now is your time for choosing.As I pointed out to John Boehner yesterday, despite what the pundits in Washington are telling you, it is you and not Obama who hold most of the cards. Obama has a legacy to worry about. Should the United States lose its bond rating, it will be called the “Obama Depression”. Congress does not get pinned with this stuff.

As Outside the Beltway's Doug Mataconis explained in response: 

[I]n this quote above Erickson is clearly saying that he’d be okay with sending the economy into the tank by failing to raise the debt ceiling because he thinks it would benefit the Republican Party....

He’s perfectly fine with economic collapse because he thinks the President of the United States and the Democratic Party will take the blame, and the Republican Party will benefit. The economic pain that will be suffered by his fellow Americans is secondary, it seems, to the political gains he thinks can be made from throwing the nations economy over the brink. How is that different from someone else hoping that, say, the Iraq War had gone horribly wrong immediately before the 2004 elections because it would hurt the Bush Administration and the GOP?

The answer, of course, is that it isn’t. Willfully hoping that the country is harmed because it might potentially benefit your political party is perhaps the most cravenly partisan thing that anyone would ever wish. You are saying to your fellow citizens that you don’t care that something bad is about to happen because, in the end, it will mean that more Republicans will be elected. Frankly, I find it disgusting.

That's the best set of answers I can give you.  I'm sure, future post-aopocalytpic historians, that you have devised new and sophisticated methodologies to unearth the mysteries of the past.  I hope you can solve this historical puzzle -- because me and my contemporaries are thoroughly flummoxed.  

I wish you the best of luck, and once again, apologies for the whole collapse-of-Western-civilization-thing that happened in 2011.  Our bad. 

*To translate into your time scale, 15 B.B. (Before Lord Beiber, Praised Be His Hairness)

** 100 billion U.S. dollars = 15 BieberBucks

Hey, remember a few months ago, when I wrote that, "the Tea Party's influence on American foreign policy has peaked and will be on the downswing for quite some time."?  How has time treated that statement? 

Well, it's kind of a mixed bag.  On the one hand, as Greg Ip notes over at the Economist's Free Exchange blog, the distrust in government that is the fuel for Tea Party activism has waned considerably: 

My colleague at Democracy in America imputes from Mitt Romney’s surge into the lead among presidential contenders the beginning of the end of the Tea Party’s influence in the GOP. Now, the latest WSJ-NBC opinion poll contains clues that the movement’s broader appeal may also be waning. As my chart shows, after a brief reversal, Americans are once again getting comfortable with more government in their lives....

[T]ime and events have cooled passions. The bail-outs are receding from memory (and turning a profit), Mr Obama has tacked to the centre, and the economy continues to disappoint. Republicans overreached with Paul Ryan’s budget, thinking the population ready for a draconian restructuring of Medicare to deal with a looming debt crisis. Apparently, it isn’t.

I read several lessons into these results. First, political leaders regularly get out over their ski tips when they think the population is shifting rapidly to the left or the right. Ronald Reagan learned that in 1982, Mr Obama did so in 2010, and it may soon be the turn of the Republican far right.

As Ip  also notes, Americans trust in government parallels a disturbing decline in trust in free markets.  Which is kinda consistent with my point on GOP trade policy.

While this suggests that the Tea Party's animating force is waning, it's possible that foreign policy proves to be the remaining policy dimension through which mainstream candidates like Mitt Romney appease the Tea Party wing of the party. 

At a minimum, John McCain ain't pleased: 

US Senator John McCain on Sunday expressed concern about growing isolationism in the Republican party, particularly among those vying for the 2012 presidential nomination.

McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, said he was alarmed to hear various candidates at a campaign forum last Monday express opposition to US military involvement in the NATO military assault on Libya's Moamer Kadhafi.

"There's always been an isolation strain in the Republican party, that Pat Buchanan (a former Republican presidential contender) wing of our party. But now it seems to have moved more center stage, so to speak," he said.

I'm not entirely sure that this is isolationism talking, but the evolution of GOP foreign policy thinking is likely to move in a realpolitik direction.  Which, coincidentally enough, is a cheap way to satiate the Paulite wing of the Tea Partiers. 

Developing....

UPDATE:  Wow, I might have broken my personal typo record in one sentence.  Fixed now.