Defeat of a 'New START Treaty' Would Not Be the End of International Relations

Tim Fernholz, at the American Prospect, adds a novel twist to the increasing progressive demands for "Senate reform." Discussing Mitt Romney's recent op-ed at WaPo ("Obama's worst foreign-policy mistake"), and citing a snarky attack on Romney by Barron Youngsmith ("Non-STARTer"), Fernholz goes on to whine about how some non-existent "extremist" right constituted by "unelected posturers" has destroyed the ability of the Senate to act on a president's negotiated international agreements:

I suppose it ought to be obvious that if our broken Senate can scarcely manage to find 60 senators to agree on anything, finding 67 is a near impossibility, even on an issue that seems to have attracted as much centrist support as this one. This is doubly true if not just unelected posturers like Romney or Sarah Palin but also elected Republican leaders decide to politicize this issue.

A situation where it is impossible for the United States to enter into formally binding international agreements is one where the president has one hand tied behind his back anytime he seeks to engage with another country, friend or foe -- how can any president assert U.S. leadership abroad if world leaders realize that there is no way his political opponents at home will allow him or her to make a deal? While the president's unfettered authority to act destructively in foreign affairs merits a rethinking of the executive's legal authorities, the reverse situation -- the inability of the president to act constructively abroad -- is just as worrisome.

Leftists are dying to get a straight majority vote in the Senate because that'll be the only way they can get their wildly unpopular Obama-Dem agenda passed in the Congress. Of course, the Senate's working exactly as it was envisioned by the Founders as a deliberative body that would place checks on the ability of the House --- the so-called "people's branch" --- to ram through policies that would threaten liberty and destroy the established layers of orderly society. The lefties are kinda pathetic, actually. Months of unbuttoned rants by Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias have been woefully lacking in building traction for reform, so now we're hearing more whiny agitation. And of course ObamaCare has by now proved to be as disastrous as conservatives originally warned, but thick-headed leftists haven't learned a thing and would now like to push through a disastrously flawed strategic arms treaty that would do nothing more than put the U.S. at risk with absolutely no downsides for Moscow.

That's just brilliant.

But the fact that it's Mitt Romney making the case against this dumb new START treaty is what really seems to stick in the craw of the neo-commies. Robert Farley takes all of this a nice chance to do some Romney-bashing:

The influence of the institutional right wing is even more pronounced on foreign policy than domestic policy because so many major political actors (both Democrat and Republican) simply don’t care about foreign policy. I suspect that Mitt Romney actually has opinions about major issues of US domestic policy, and these opinions may even be informed by some subject area knowledge. In foreign policy this is not the case, and Heritage Foundation ideologues who would have been laughed out of the Reagan administration find themselves in command of the foreign policy statements of several major GOP presidential aspirants.

I have no idea how much ghost-writing Mitt Romney solicits for his policy papers and what not. But I have read his book, and I'd bet that's more than Robert Farley can say (especially given his track record on "book reviews"). And my sense, in any case, is that the U.S. would be miles better off sticking to some of the platform proposals laid out by Romney than anything the progressive lefties are offering in furtherance of their long-held goal of U.S. capitulation to a legal regime of supranational sovereignty.

And by the way, while Fernholz might not be hip, and Robert Farley certainly should be, this notion that presidents are just all of a sudden tied down by some implacable domestic resistance to executive foreign policy autonomy is absurd. In the late-1980s Harvard's Robert Putnam offered a pathbreaking analysis on the "politics of two-level games." Basically, executives of the advanced democracies can never assume a free hand in foreign policy, since there'll always be domestic constituencies that will have to be satisfied simultaneously to foreign negotiators. There are two games being played in any international agreement, and this talk currently of some newly restrained Democratic president is a joke. Here's the Wikipedia entry on the two-level games model:

Two-level game theory is a political model of international conflict resolution between liberal democracies derived from game theory and originally introduced in 1988 by Robert Putnam.

The model views international negotiations between liberal democracies as consisting of simultaneous negotiations at both the intra-national level (eg. domestic) and the international level (eg. between governments). Over domestic negotiations, the executive absorbs the concern of societal actors and builds coalitions with them; at the international level, the executive tries to implement these concerns without committing to anything that will have deleterious effects at home. Win-sets occur when the concerns of actors at both levels overlap, a condition under which an international agreement is likely.