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. 

Conor Friedersdorf has an provocative essay over at The Atlantic in which he states a few hard truths about the state of the GOP on foreign policy... and then goes to a very strange place.  The hard truths first:

President Obama's foreign policy is vulnerable to all sorts of accurate attacks. But Mitt Romney, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement are totally unable to exploit them. This is partly because the last four years have been spent advancing critiques so self-evidently implausible to anyone outside the movement that calling attention to them seems impolite. There is no factual basis for the assertion that Obama rejects American exceptionalism or that he embarked on an apology tour or that he is allied with our Islamist enemy in a "grand jihad" against America; or that his every action is motivated by Kenyan anti-colonialism. And while those critiques are especially inane, they aren't cherry-picked to discredit conservatives; they're actually all critiques advanced by prominent people, publications, and/or Republican politicians.

The fact that the vast majority of conservatives give no indication of having learned anything from the Iraq War is an even more significant reason that the GOP has lost its traditional edge on national security issues, with a majority of Americans telling pollsters they trust Democrats more.

OK, I'm with him so far.  But then we get to how Friedersdorf thinks the GOP should ground its criticism: 

So what could an opposition party less dysfunctional than Republicans say about Obama's foreign policy?

1) The Afghan surge turned out to be a failure that cost a lot of American lives and money with little if any lasting benefit.

2) In the course of the successful Bin Laden raid, the Obama Administration ran a fake vaccination campaign that failed in its mission to get the fugitive's DNA, failed to stay secret, and undermined public health efforts in Pakistan and elsewhere for a generation -- a catastrophic bungle that could conceivably make the world more vulnerable to a pandemic in the future.

3) Obama's main counterterrorism strategy, secretive CIA drone strikes in multiple Muslim countries, scatters terrorists to more countries than they'd otherwise be in, arguably creates more terrorists than it kills over time, and has definitely killed hundreds of innocent people at minimum.

4) Agree or disagree with the idea of intervening in Libya, the way President Obama went about it violated the U.S. Constitution, the War Powers Resolution, and an Obama campaign promise.

There are a lot more critiques of Obama's foreign policy. It's instructive to focus on these because they're just the sorts of things you can't attack if your party defines itself as most hawkish; totally discounts the importance of things like public health compared to military operations; doesn't pay any attention at all to dead innocents killed by America; and has totally abandoned Madisonian notions of checks and balances when it comes to national security policy (emphasis added). 

I don't necessarily disagree that these lines of attacks exist -- but I also don't think that Friedersdorf comprehends the history of the GOP on foreign policy -- and I'm not just talking about the post-Cold War era.  As Colin Dueck noted in his book Hard Right, the Republicans have been branding themselves as the more hawkish party since Thomas Dewey faded from the scene.  Sure, the Ron Paul wing would love these lines of attack -- but I don't think either the rest of the GOP or the rest of the country for that matter is gonna dislike the drone strategy. 

I agree that the GOP has made its mistakes in its foreign policy critiques, but the kind of conceptual pivot that Friedersdorf expects Republicans to make strikes me as pretty absurd. 

So what should the GOP do?  I'm not entirely sure, but I do know two things: 

1)  The Republican Party can't summarily reject the hawk brand it's built for more than a half-century;

2)  Unless and until the GOP acknowledges that Iraq was a tragedy and a mistake, it will be as enfeebled on foreign policy as the Democratic Party was on this issue for a generation after the Vietnam War went south. 

In the wake of the GOP debate earlier this week, there's been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and to-ing and fro-ing as to whether Republicans have shifted away from the neoconservatism of George W. Bush and towards offshore balancing or isolationism.  I don't think it's a settled question -- I'd conclude that it's partly a genuine realpolitik backlash to the massive costs of Iraq, partly a reflection of public sentiment, and partly a partisan reaction to the fact that it's a Democratic president who's launching wars kinetic military actions nowadays. 

What's more disturbing, however, and uncommented until now, was the total lack of support for freer trade among the GOP field. 

This came through loud and clear through what was said and what was not said in New Hampshire.  Trade didn't come up all that much during the debate.  Tim Pawlenty provided the only comment of substance, and it wasn't a productive one:

[N]umber one, we've got to have fair trade, and what's going on right now is not fair.

I'm for a fair and open trade but I'm not for being stupid and I'm not for being a chump. And we have individuals and organizations and countries around this world who are not following the rules when it comes to fair trade. We need a stronger president and somebody who's going to take on those issues.

In presidential campaigns, this amounts to "don't expect to see any new trade deals anytime soon."  As for the other dimensions of globalization, well, peruse the section on immigration provided you have a green card if you dare.  No one said anything about the positive economic and demographic benefits America receives from immigration. 

The other thing that was striking was what wasn't said during the debate.  All of the candidates focused like sharks with frikkin' laser beams attached to them on the economy.  The standard GOP litany of solutions for jump-starting the economy were offered:  tax cuts, cutting regulation, tax cuts, cutting government spending, tax cuts, reigning in the Fed, tax cuts, ending Obamacare, tax cuts.  Not one of the candidates, however, mentioned trade liberalization as part of their fornmula for getting America moving again. 

To be fair, this isn't as bad as when Obama and Clinton were debating over who would eviscerate NAFTA faster in 2008 (and funny, isn't it, how that never happened).  And it's not like I was a huge fan of Obama's trade policy.  To be just as fair, howeever, at least the current president completed KORUS negotiations and signaled strong interest in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  I get the sense that no one in the GOP field is going to stick their neck out on international trade or investment.  For the party that claims to be in favor of lower taxes and regulation, this is a travesty. 

My latest column at The National Interest online looks at the state of the Republican Party with regard to foreign policy.  I'm not optimistic: 

What would a Republican approach to foreign policy look like? Here’s another problem. The GOP was traditionally the party of realpolitik, but that has changed as of late. Realism and neoconservatism lead to divergent policy preferences on issues like Iraq, Afghanistan, Putin’s Russia and democracy promotion. It is difficult to mount a unified and loyal opposition when there is an absence of consensus about first principles. Politically, it will be difficult to for the GOP to pirouette from the Bush administration’s neoconservatism to a more modest foreign-policy strategy.

The concept of a “loyal opposition” is a difficult one to straddle. On the one hand, it is vital for Americans to be exposed to contrasting takes on the best way to advance American interests. Opposition forces the current leadership to defend and articulate their preferred course of action. On the other hand, opposition based on the principles of Joe the Plumber is simply not an opposition that can be taken seriously. Let’s hope the GOP can form a viable counterweight so that more foreign-policy opinions and valuable debates become a reality. Peanut-gallery snarkery will serve no one.

Let me add here that FP's own Shadow Government represents a welcome exception to the general lament that infuses my essay.  As such, I dare their contributors to disabuse me of my pessimism.