From James Traub's latest FP column:

I first need to amend something I wrote a few weeks ago. After thefirst Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire, I concluded that the "neo-Reaganite" ethos in foreign policy -- uncompromising rhetoric, intervention in the name of "values," democracy promotion -- had no followers among the GOP candidates. I should have said that the candidates have calculated that Republican primary voters don't have much of an appetite for that language (nor do many Democrats). In fact, three of the more likely candidates for the nomination -- Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and Pawlenty -- all offer some variant of conservative internationalism.

Traub's essay prompted a fair amount of angry pushback from RealClearWorld's Ben Domenech, who accused him of... hmm, let me check... elitist bias, membership in the secret council of elders that rules the world Council on Foreign Relations, and ignorance of the disparate foreign policy views of the GOP candidates. 

While contretemps like these are fun, I wonder if they're missing the point.  What I'm wondering is whether Traub's description of a Reaganite foreign policy -- "uncompromising rhetoric, intervention in the name of "values," democracy promotion" -- is at all accurate.  I mean, it described the neoconservatives or "Neo-Reaganites," but what about Reagan himself? 

Mehdi Hasan writes in the Guardian that Reagan was no Reaganite:

[Reagan] succeeded in avoiding a direct military confrontation. As the liberal US writer Peter Beinart argues in his book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris: "On the ultimate test of hawkdom – the willingness to send US troops into harm's way – Reagan was no bird of prey. He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totalled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war – the 1986 bombing of Libya – was even briefer."

In contrast, consider the blood-spattered record of his successors. George Bush launched Gulf war I and sent troops into Panama and Somalia; Bill Clinton bombed Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia; George W Bush invaded Afghanistan and gave us Gulf war II and the war on terror. And the Nobel peace prize winner Obama had troops surging in Afghanistan, launched a war on Libya and sent drones into Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

Lest we forget, after America's first encounter with jihadist violence in 1983 – when 241 US military personnel were killed – Reagan, to use the disparaging lingo of the neocons, chose to "cut and run". Every single soldier was pulled out of Lebanon within four months. "Perhaps we didn't appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle," Reagan later wrote in his memoir, adding: "The irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there … If that policy had changed towards more of a neutral position ... those 241 marines would be alive today."

These are the words not of a hawk but of a dove; of a leader who did not share the neocons' blind faith in the use of military force to spread freedom.

The truth is that Reagan wasn't a Reaganite; he ended the cold war through negotiation and with far fewer military interventions than his successors have managed so far in the war on terror. His actions, rather than his occasionally bombastic words, reveal a president more interested in jaw-jaw than war-war.

This is the foreign policy variant of debates that fiscal policy wonks have about Reagan's record on taxes, in which it could simultaneously be claimed that:  a) Reagan enacted the largest marginal tax rate cuts  in history; and b) Reagan enacted the largest tax increase in history. 

The point is, there's an awful lot of expanse within Reagan's actual foreign policy record for a GOP candidate to camp in.  William Kristol, Robert Kagan and others who brand the term "Reaganite" to equal neoconservatism do a disservice to history. 

Here's my question, however.  It could still be argued that neoconservatism was the primary theme of Reagan's presidency, even if it doesn't match Traub's description of it.  So, dear readers, I'll put it to you:  what were the key themese of Reaganite foreign policy? 

OK, apparently the Wall Street Journal now has a policy to publish an op-ed every quarter asserting that:

1)  U.S. defense spending is woefully inadequate compared to the Cold War era;

2)  Those advocating further defense cuts are advocating taking the United States back to the 1930's; and

3)  Today's threat environment is really, really bad. 

Last quarter it was the Arthur Brooks/Edwin Feulner/William Kristol op-ed.  Today it's Mark Helprin.  The gist of his argument:

Based upon nothing and ignoring the cautionary example of World War II, we are told that we will never face two major enemies at once. Despite the orders of battle of our potential adversaries and the fact that our response to insurgency has been primarily conventional, we are told that the era of conventional warfare is over. And we are told that we can rest easy because military spending is an accurate index of military power, and we spend as much as the next however many nations combined.

But this takes no account of the nature of our commitments, the fading contributions of our allies, geography, this nation's size and that of its economy, conscription or its absence, purchasing power parity, exchange rate distortions, the military trajectories of our rivals individually or in combination, and the masking effects of off-budget outlays and unreported expenditures. Though military spending comparisons are of lesser utility than assessing actual capabilities, they are useful nonetheless for determining a country's progress relative to itself.

Doing so reveals that from 1940 to 2000, average annual American defense expenditure was 8.5% of GDP; in war and mobilization years 13.3%; under Democratic administration 9.4%; under Republican 7.3%; and, most significantly, in the years of peace 5.7%. Today we spend just 4.6% of GDP—minus purely operational war costs, 3.8%. That is, 66% of the traditional peacetime outlays. We have been, and we are, steadily disarming even as we are at war.

Hmm... I'll concede Helprin's point about fading contributions from allies from Western Europe -- but not elsewhere.  Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that if a sober analyst took into account geography, purchasing power parity, off-budget outlays, conscription, and actual military readiness, the argument in favor of moderated defense spending becomes stronger and not weaker.  When the closest great power rival to the United States has difficulties supplying an anti-piracy flotilla, I think it's safe to say that the gap in capabilities is not going to shrink all that dramatically anytime soon. 

More, importantly, it's not the same threat environment as the Cold War.  If the Wall Street Journal is going to recycle the same tired argument about going back to Cold War era defense spending, then I'll just cut and paste what I said the first time this argument was made:

Terrorism and piracy are certainly security concerns -- but they don't compare to the Cold War. A nuclear Iran is a major regional headache, but it's not the Cold War. A generation from now, maybe China poses as serious a threat as the Cold War Soviet Union. Maybe. That's a generation away, however.... 

I'm about to say something that might be controversial for people under the age of 25, but here goes. You know the threats posed to the United States by a rising China, a nuclear Iran, terrorists and piracy? You could put all of them together and they don't equal the perceived threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And until I see another hostile country in the world that poses a military threat in Europe, the Middle East and Asia at the same time, I'm thinking that current defense spending should be lower than Cold War levels by a fair amount. 

The "we're-not-spending-enough-on-defense" argument reminds me that I'd like to see the foreign policy community make some New Year's resolutions.  To be specific, there are arguments and memes that commentators have made over the past year that I'd like to see less of in 2011.  More about this later. 

Am I missing anything? 

There's been a raging debate the past few weeks over whether conservatives suffer from what Julian Sanchez labeled "epistemic closure."  If conservatives get their information and opinion only by listening to other conservatives, the argument runs, they will be unprepared and unconcerned about criticisms from outside their intellectual cocoon. 

The blogosphere has been having a grand old time with this debate, and whether the problem afflicts conservatives more than liberals (click here for Patricia Cohen's roundup in today's New York Times).  Paul Krugman goes so far as to argue that this problem has clearly affected macroeconomics in freshwater schools. 

This leads me to wonder if the problem affects the GOP wing of the foreign policy community.  And as much as David Frum might argue for greater internal debate within the GOP on the political facts of life, for example, he was never shy in attacking the realpolitik wing of the Republican foreign policy establishment (more here). 

A few years ago I implicitly made this kind of critique when it came to neoconservatives.  That saids, my gut instinct on this is that the epistemic closure problem is not nearly as big a deal in foreign policy circles as it is in domestic policy circles.  That is to say, conservative foreign policy wonks do collect their information from a diverse array of sources.  They might not agree with every scrap of information about a particular issue, but they usually acknowledge its existence.  A quick glance at FP's own Shadow Government tells me that even if I disagree with these bloggers on policy recommendations, I still think we're operating in the same epistemic universe. 

I'll get to why I think this is true later, but for now, I'm curious if my experience corresponds to my readers.  So, a genuinely open question -- is there an epistemic closure problem among the conservative foreign policy community?