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?

Following up on Newt Gingrich and his assessment of threats, I see that the New York Times has a William J. Broad front-pager on Gingrich's obsession with the possibility of adversaries using an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) against the United States:

[I]t is to the risk of an EMP attack that Mr. Gingrich has repeatedly returned. And while the message may play well to hawkish audiences, who might warm to the candidate’s suggestion that the United States engage in pre-emptive military strikes against Iran and North Korea, many nuclear experts dismiss the threat. America’s current missile defense system would thwart such an attack, these experts say, and the nations in question are at the kindergarten stage of developing nuclear arms.

The Missile Defense Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that maintains an arsenal of ground-based interceptors ready to fly into space and smash enemy warheads, says that defeating such an attack would be as straightforward as any other defense of the continental United States.

“It doesn’t matter if the target is Chicago or 100 miles over Nebraska,” said Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman. “For the interceptor, it’s the same thing.” He called the potential damage from a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack “pretty theoretical.”

Yousaf M. Butt, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who last year did a lengthy analysis of EMP for The Space Review, a weekly online journal, said, “If terrorists want to do something serious, they’ll use a weapon of mass destruction — not mass disruption.” He said, “They don’t want to depend on complicated secondary effects in which the physics is not very clear.”

Mr. Gingrich’s spokesman, R. C. Hammond, did not respond to e-mails asking for comment. But the candidate, a former history professor and House speaker, has defended his characterizations as accurate. At a forum in Des Moines on Saturday for military veterans, Mr. Gingrich said an electromagnetic pulse attack was one of several pressing national security threats the United States faced. “In theory, a relatively small device over Omaha would knock out about half the electricity generated in the United States,” he told the veterans.

I'm neither a security expert nor a rocket scientist.  After reading Broad's article, the Space Review annalysis, the rebuttal to that analysis, and Sharon Winberger's excellent FP write-up from last year, however, I'm reasonably confident that the threat posed by EMP is remote for the near-to-medium future.  The scenarios in which an EMP would affect the United States rely on a) rogue states making serious leaps forward in their ballistic missile technology and nuclear engineering; and b) those same actors deciding that it's in their national interest to launch a first strike against a country with a reliable second-strike nuclear deterrent. 

Nevertheless, I can see why Newt Skywalker would be concerned.  Most of the taking-EMP-threat seriously essays harp on the devastating effect of such an attack.  Surely, Gingrich would argue, even a small possibility of this actually happening justifies at least some investment into countermeasures and preventive actions.  Indeed, Gingrich has explicitly made that argument: 

Without adequate preparation, its impact would be so horrifying that we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.... I think it's very important to get people to understand now, before there is a disaster, how truly grave the threat is.*

Fair enough... let's be generous and say there's a 10% chance of this being a real problem over the next two decades.  If that's the case, maybe Gingrich is right to bring it up as an underestimated threat. 

Here's my question, however.  If we're talking about threats to civilization as we know it, isn't there another possibility that has a much higher probability of occurring -- let's say, better than 50% at least -- and a similarly lax amount of preventive action?  Like, say, climate change? 

As Uri Friedman and Joshua Keating have documented for FP, however, Gingrich's assessment of that threat has changed recently.   Last month, on this issue, he said the following: 

I actually don't know whether global warming is occurring.... The earth's temperatures go up and down over geologic times over and over again. As recently as 11,000 years ago the Gulf Stream quit for 600 years. And for 600 years you had an ice age in Europe because there was no warm water coming up. And then it started up again. Nobody knows why it quit, nobody knows why it started up. I'm agnostic.

This is fascinating.  On the one hand, you have a long-term cataclysmic threat to the planet that commands the consensus of an overwhelming majority of experts in the field.  On the other hand, you have a long-term cataclysmic threat to the United States that commands nowhere close to the same level of consensus.  Based on his rhetoric, Gingrich wants urgent action to be taken on the latter, but not the former.  Why? 

I'm not bringing this up to suggest that Gingrich is a buffoon.  He could plausibly argue that a lot of people are harping on climate change while only Gingrich can call attention to the EMP possibility.  It's possible that the costs of preventive action on climate change are much greater than dealing with EMP (though if that includes preventive attacks on Iran and North Korea, I'm dubious). 

What I'm wondering is whether there is a partisan divide in assessing threats, as there is in assessing economic principles.  I wonder if conservatives are far more likely to focus on threats in which there is a clear agent with a malevolent intent, whereas liberals are more likely to focus on threats that lack agency and are more systemic in nature (climate change, pandemics, nuclear accidents, etc.) 

What do you think? 

*Incidentally, this is the same logic I used to justify greater research into the threat posed by the living dead.  Just saying.... 

Your humble blogger has  just completed writing a long essay on the 2012 candidates and their foreign policy views that will be coming out soon.  Readers will be shocked, shocked to learn that it's pretty scathing. 

I'm hardly the only person to make this point.  When Senator Lindsay Graham is castigating his fellow Republicans, you know there's a problem.  FP's own David Rothkopf thinks this is a harbinger of Obama winning re-election.  And now the New York Times' Michael Shear reports that the GOP presidential candidates' myriad foreign policy gaffes are starting to embarrass the Republicans' foreign policy wonks: 

[T]he embarrassing moments are piling up, and some veteran Republicans are beginning to wonder whether the cumulative effect weakens the party brand, especially in foreign policy and national security, where Republicans have typically dominated Democrats.

“It is an ‘Animal House.’ It’s a food fight,” said Kenneth Duberstein, a chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan. “Honestly, the Republican debates have become a reality show. People have to be perceived as being capable of governing this country, of being the leader of the free world.” ....

[S]ome veterans of past Republican administrations said the candidates’ national security stumbles could have a more lasting impact on how voters perceive the party in the future.

“This is the core of the Republican brand. You mess with it at your peril,” said Peter Feaver, a national security official under President George W. Bush. He compared the foreign policy flubs to reports about safety problems in Toyota vehicles.

“The whole reason you bought a Toyota was so that you didn’t have those problems,” he said. “It cuts directly to the essence of the brand. Republicans should be concerned about this.”

George W. Bush confronted some of the same concerns in his party during his 2000 campaign, especially after he was unable to name the leader of Chechnya, Taiwan, India or Pakistan. But Mr. Bush surrounded himself with veteran Republican foreign policy advisers who helped reassure the doubters.

Peter Wehner, a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush, said that “in the short run, you can do some damage to the so-called brand,” but he said long-term damage would happen only if the party’s presidential nominee made such mistakes.

“The key thing is the nominee,” Mr. Wehner said. “One worries, if you are a Republican, if you get too many statements like this.”

Mr. Wehner said many of the Republican candidates had demonstrated a “pride in ignorance and a lack of knowledge.” But he predicted that voters would not reward those kinds of appeals during the primaries and caucuses.

Peter is a good friend, and I don't like to see him this anguished in print, so let me say that for once I agree with Peter Wehner.  Six months from now, when we know who the GOP nominee will be, I suspect a lot of the ignorance on display right now will be forgotten. 

I say this because, oddly enough, even before a vote has been cast, the political ecosystem actually seems to be working.  Sure, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain have had their moments in the sun -- and then the media reported on them, and people actually listened to what they were saying.  At which point, they crashed and burned.  They didn't only crash and burn because of their foreign policy gaffes -- but I don't think they helped. 

I can understand if international observers look at what's been said and gasp in horror at the American process of selecting a major party nominee.  In the end, however, the difference between the system now and the system fifty years ago is that nowadays someone like Cain can enter the race.  Before, the barriers to entry would have been higher.  Now, the barriers to entry are low, but the crucible of the campaign is far more fierce.  So people like Cain or Bachmann can enter and then be destroyed. 

At this juncture, it looks like Mitt Romney is the most likely nominee, and he's also the candidate who's done the most heavy lifting in thinking about foreign policy.  There's a lot of stuff to criticize in his foreign policy views, to be sure -- but that's true of Barack Obama as well.  Romney does pass the test of someone whohas some background knowledge about the world, and someone who has actually bothered to think about the subject.  Post-primary, that will be the foreign policy brand of the GOP. 

[And if it's not Romney?--ed.  Then it's Newt Gingrich, who, again, has demonstrated a little knowledge about foreign affairs.  Throw in Rick Santorum and Jon Hunstman as wild card candidates yet to have their bubble.  Huntsman clearly knows foreign affairs, and that's also been Santorum's strength in the debates.] 

Don't worry, Peter -- the wheel is turning. 

It took me a couple of hours of reading, cogitation, and regurgitation to critique Mitt Romney's foreign policy positions. Clearly, I didn't think it was perfect, or even all that good in many places. But, I had to assess it, mull over the content... you know, think.

Now, I desperately want to be an equal opportunity blogger, and at this point Herman Cain appears to be the co-frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination. Sure, I've had my fun with him in the past, and he has no shortage of foreign policy gaffes, but I figured that impromptu utterances during debates are only one part of a candidate's overall policy vision. The thoughts that are written down, they imply some forethought. So I thought I'd go over to Cain's campaign website and spend an equal amount of time to analyze his foreign policy thinking.  

I found.... a total of five paragraphs on "national security."  That's it.  No white papers, fact sheets, bullet points, or list of advisors.  So you gotta think that these are going to be the most awesome and mind-blowing foreign policy paragraphs ever!!! 

Let's jump right in: 

The primary duty of the President of the United States is to protect our people. In fact, it is the principal duty of a limited federal government. They must ensure that our military and all of our security agencies are strong and capable.

I'm with you so far, Mr. Cain -- my only objection is your odd pronoun choice of "they." 

Unfortunately, national security has become far too politicized with our elected officials using the issue as a means to polarize our country as the “war hawks” and the “peace doves.” In response, the safety and morale of our brave men and women in uniform are often at risk for political gain. The judgment of our military experts on the ground is often underutilized in exchange for political purposes. National security isn’t about politics. It’s about defending America.

Let me just stop you right here and ask a few questions.  First, which elected officials are politicizing national security -- could you be a bit more specific?  Second, just out of curiosity, is President Obama a "war hawk" or a peace dove"?  I mean, he's pretty hard to categorize at this point, right -- maybe a "peace hawk" or a "war dove"?  So if the commander-in-chief doesn't fit your typology, is it at all useful?  Also, when you accuse others of politicizing national security issues, aren't you, well, playing politics with national security? 

While diplomacy is a critical tool in solving the complex security issues we face, it must never compromise military might. Because we are such a free and prosperous people, we are the envy of the world. Many regimes seek to destroy us because they are threatened by our ideals, and they resent our prosperity. We must acknowledge the real and present danger that terrorist nations and organizations pose to our country’s future.

On this "many regimes seek to destroy us" business -- can you give me more than one example?  I'm not talking about a lot of countries, all you need to provide is a few.   

Further, we must stand by our friends and we must not be fooled by our enemies. We should never be deceived by terrorists. They only have one objective, namely, to kill all of us. We must always remain vigilant in dealing with adversaries.

Now my head is starting to spin.  What if an enemy pretends to be a friend just to fool us -- you know, like Lindsey Lohan in Mean Girls?  What do we do then?  How do we know you won't be fooled?  Also, if you think terrorists only have one goal, how could they ever deceive us? 

We must support our military with the best training, equipment, technology and infrastructure necessary to keep them in a position to win. We must also provide our men and women in uniform, our veterans and their families with the benefits they deserve for their tremendous sacrifice. These heroes have served us. We must never forget to serve them.

This "pro-winning" national security policy is quite daring and provocative. 

So, that's it.  Nothing on great power politics, nothing on foreign economic policy, nothing on our alliances, nothing on any particular region of the globe.  Nothing but a faint whiff of Carl Schmitt's logic of friends and enemies.  This is actually worse than Rick Perry's efforts, in that I don't think it passes the Turing Test. 

Cain is busy promoting his new book, This Is Herman Cain!, so I checked it out to see if there was anything more illuminating on foreign policy.  And, indeed, there were two revealing facts.  On page 131, he states:

I can tell you what the Cain Doctrine would be:  if you mess with Israel, you're messing with the United States of America.  Is that clear? 

Actually, that is clear.  Unfortunately, we get to the problem on p. 133: 

It's difficult to say how the Cain Doctrine would apply to the Middle East's other countries, especially those affected by the "Arab Spring," and to nations elsewhere in the world. 

OK, that's totally unclear.  Could you provide any more guidance to your thinking? 

I'm not trying to escape the broader issues, but I think a President should first be briefed on classified intelligence about America's relationships before offering opinions. 

The public doesn't know the answers to those [foreign policy] questions, and neither do I.

Three thoughts.  First, you're totally trying to escape the broader issues.  Second, if one accepted this logic at face value, then a president could never articulate anything useful on foreign policy in public, since the rest of us ain't going to be briefed on these matters anytime soon. 

Third, I am 100% in agreement with Mr. Cain:  he hasn't the faintest clue what to do when it comes to American foreign policy. 

Am I missing anything?  Seriously, is there anything Cain has written that displays anything resembling an understanding of how foreign policy works? 

Over the weekend Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell wrote a Washington Post op-ed suggesting that for the good of the country and the Democratic Party, Barack Obama should announce he won't seek re-election in 2012. My first response was that this was the dumbest op-ed I'd read in a decade, but upon further reflection... it's just the second-dumbest (I'd forgotten about this one). Even Barack Obama's harshest critics thought this was a foolhardy idea.

Slate's David Weigel doesn't go that far, merely labeling it "the worst column of the year." That said, he points out that regardless of its stupidity, a lot of people are talking about it. This suggests a serious flaw in the idea ecosystem:

A typical Post column may get a few hundred comments, a few hundred recommendations on Facebook. George Will's bitter I-told-you-so about the Chevy Volt, for example, has inspired around 700 "likes" on Facebook. Caddell and Schoen have inspired almost 5,000 "likes" and almost 2,000 comments (and counting), in what has become the paper's most-read piece of the day. Undoubtedly they've inspired some smaller number of TV producers to book "One and Done" segments, even though no one buys the Schoen/Caddell argument that Obama could achieve more by declaring himself a lame duck....

This is the paradox of the opinion industry: If it sounds stupid, it leads. If it's counterintuitive, it's surely because the columnist has found a fresh angle on a mundane problem, and this angle will produce insights. Data is unexciting, especially if it's the same data everyone else has. Discussions of fantasy scenarios that could prove your theories right? Exciting!

This is just as much of a problem in international politics as domestic politics. If there's a crisis somewhere, inevitably someone will suggest the use of force even if it's wildly inappropriate, and someone else will suggest that the United States just withdraw its influence completely and immediately, even if it's wildly impractical. If it's dumb, it goes on Page One! [Um....op-ed pages are in the back of newspapers, and everyone reads them online now anyway--ed. Hey, you get your fact-based arguments away from my imperfect rhyming scheme!]  I mean, in talking about how stupid Schoen and Caddell's argument is, I'm calling attention to Schoen and Caddell's argument. 

This was less of a problem in the bad old days, when powerful gatekeepers to the opinion industry weeded out the non-mainstream viewpoints. Of course, the best and the brightest of the mainstream had some galactically stupid ideas too. I'm not suggesting we return to that world -- it's neither possible nor desirable.

When it comes to policy debates I'm always on the side of John Stuart Mill -- the best way to deal with stupid arguments is to counter them with better arguments in the public sphere. That said, there's a serious cost to this philosophy in a world in which the stupid ideas can command the policy agenda. The opportunity cost to the inordinate amount of time that is spent swatting away these ideas is that less time is spent debating policies and ideas that have a real chance of being enacted. Furthermore, sometimes the dumbass idea just goes into hibernation among a few die-hard believers until a propitious moment arises for its zombie revival.

In the end, I think Mill still carries the day. Still, every once in a while, it sure would be nice not to have to waste the energy and the attention on stupid policy ideas.