Bullying Protectionists: Democrats on Trade

This Wall Street Journal editorial highlights a key international relations election issue that's been out of the media glare with so much talk about Iraq: Will the next president expand America's historic commitment to free trade, global markets, and the internationalization of economic opportunity?

The answer's less clear on the Democratic side:

Democrats claim the world hates America because President Bush has behaved like a global bully. But we don't recall him ever ordering an ally to rewrite an existing agreement on American terms -- or else.

Yet that's exactly what both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are now promising to do to our closest neighbors, Mexico and Canada. At their Ohio debate on Tuesday, first Mrs. Clinton, followed ever so quickly by Mr. Obama, pledged to pull America out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if the two countries don't agree to rewrite it on Yankee terms. How's that for global "unilateralism"?

Democrats sure have come a long way from the 1990s, when Bill Clinton pushed Nafta through a Democratic Congress. And the truth is that both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have spoken favorably about Nafta in the past. Yet now they are sounding the loudest protectionist notes by a potential President in decades. More dangerous, neither is telling the truth about the role of trade in the U.S. economy. If either one makes it to the White House, he or she will carry the weight of this campaign protectionism while trying to lead the global economy.

Protectionism has been an important theme throughout the campaign. See my earlier post, "Iowa Voters Jittery on Trade Policy."

But the gains from trade remain largely uncontroversial among economists.

But note further WSJ's editorial, which highlights the gains to both Canada and Mexico from the North America Free Trade Agreement.

Especially interesting here is Barack Obama's statements on trade. He campaigned as a free trader in earlier phases of his political career. Now he wants to roll back America's commitment to free international markets: He's like John Kerry on trade policy: He was for trade liberalization before he was against it.

Communist Revolutionaries: 'The Executive Branch of the Democratic Party'

From David Horowitz, "The Manchurian Candidate":

Van Jones is the carefully groomed protégé of a network of radical organizations -- including Moveon.org -- and of Democratic sponsors like billionaire George Soros and John Podesta, former Clinton chief of staff and co-chair of the Obama transition team.

At the time of his appointment as the President’s “Green Jobs” czar – and despite a very recent 10-year history of “revolutionary” activity – Jones was a member of two key organizations at the very heart of what might be called the executive branch of the Democratic Party ....

How did John Podesta and Al Gore and Barack Obama come to be political allies of a far left radical like Van Jones, a 9/11 conspiracy “truther” and a supporter of the Hamas view that the entire state of Israel is “occupied territory?” To answer this question requires an understanding of developments within the political left that have taken place over the last two decades, and in particular the forging of a “popular front” between anti-American radicals and “mainstream liberals” in the Democratic Party.

The collapse of Communism in the early Nineties did not lead to an agonizing reappraisal of its radical agendas among many who had supported it in the West. Instead, its survivors set about creating a new socialist international which would unite “social justice” movements, radical environmental groups, leftwing trade unions, and traditional communist parties – all dedicated to the revival of utopian dreams.

The new political force made its first impression at the end of the decade when it staged global demonstrations against the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. The demonstrations erupted into large-scale violence in Seattle in 2001 when 50,000 Marxists, anarchists and environmental radicals, joined by the giant leftwing unions AFSCME and SEIU, descended on the city, smashed windows and automobiles, and set fire to buildings to protest “globalization” – the world capitalist system.

In the direct aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the anti-globalization forces morphed into what became known as the “anti-war” movement. An already scheduled anti-globalization protest on September 29 was re-redirected (and re-named) to target America’s retaliation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The new “peace” movement grew to massive proportions in the lead up to the war in Iraq but it never held a single protest against Saddam’s violation of 17 UN arms control resolutions, or his expulsion of the UN arms inspectors. It did, however, mobilize 35 million people in world-wide protests against America’s “imperialist war for oil.” The orchestrators of the demonstrations were the same leaders and the same organizations, the same unions and the same “social justice” groups that had been responsible for the Seattle riots against the World Trade Organization and the international capitalist system.

A second watershed came in the run-up to the 2004 elections when billionaire George Soros decided to integrate the radicals – including their political organization ACORN -- into the structure of Democratic Party politics. Together with a group of like-minded billionaires, Soros created a “Shadow Party” (as Richard Poe and I documented in a book by that name) whose purpose was to shape the outcome of the 2004 presidential race. “America under Bush,” Soros told The Washington Post, “is a danger to the world,…” To achieve his goal, Soros created a galaxy of 527 political organizations headed by leftwing union leaders like SEIU chief Andrew Stern and Clinton operatives like Harold Ickes. As its policy brain he created the Center for American Progress.

Soros failed to achieve his goal in 2004 but he went on working to create new elements of the network, such as the Apollo Alliance. Four years later the Shadow Party was able to elect a candidate who had spent his entire political career in the bowels of this movement. Obama’s electoral success was made possible by the wide latitude he was given by the press and the public, partly because he was the first African-American with a chance to be president and partly because his campaign was deliberately crafted to convey the impression that he was a tax-cutting centrist who intended to bring Americans together to find common solutions to their problems. When confronted with his long-term associations and working partnerships with anti-American racists like Jeremiah Wright and anti-American radicals like William Ayers, he denied the obvious and successfully side-stepped its implications.

Just eight months into his presidency, however, a new Barack Obama has begun to emerge. With unseemly haste Obama has nearly bankrupted the federal government, amassing more debt in eight months than all his predecessors combined. He has appeased America’s enemies abroad and attacked America’s intelligence services at home. He has rushed forward with programs that require sweeping changes in the American economy and is now steamrolling a massive new health-care program that will give the government unprecedented control of its citizens.

Among the hallmarks of this new radical regime the appointment of Van Jones stood out for its blatant departure from political normalcy. In his White House role, the radical Jones would have represented the president in shaping a multi-billion stimulus package, which could easily function as a patronage program of particular interest to his political allies in the “Apollo Alliance,” ACORN and the leftwing unions. In the classic manual for activists on how to achieve their radical goals, Obama’s political mentor Saul Alinsky wrote: “From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.” As the president’s green jobs commissar, Van Jones had entered the trillion-dollar community of the federal government and would soon have been building his radical army. The rest of us should be wondering who his sponsors were within the White House (senior presidential advisor and long-time “progressive” Valerie Jarrett was certainly one). Then we should ask ourselves what they are planning next.

Gingrich Teams With Pelosi on Climate Change, Loses Credibility

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has teamed up with current Speaker Nancy Pelosi to make a global warming advertisment for Al Gore's change awareness campaign, via YouTube:

I've seen this ad a couple of times now, and the word "INCONGRUITY" just jumps out at me as a look at Pelosi flashing her big smile at Gingrich.

These people are intense partisans, and given the controversial science on climate change, I'm thinking, especially about Gingrich, the bomb-throwing conservative: "What the heck has gotten into this guy?"

It turns out Gingrich has gone centrist, as the Fort Mill Times indicates:

Newt Gingrich says he wants to help Democrats. Really.

The former speaker of the House from Georgia who led the fiercely partisan Republican revolution in 1994 and once seemed to delight in firebombing Democrats with vicious verbal assaults is these days preaching a new breed of politics searching out the middle.

Gingrich just filmed a new environmental commercial with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He's back in Georgia this week pitching a platform of issues on which he says the vast majority of Americans agree. And he's shipped that list to Howard Dean at the Democratic National Committee, as well as to Republicans.

"If you want the level of change that I think America has to have to remain the leading country in the world it can't be just Republican," Gingrich said in an interview with The Associated Press at an Atlanta restaurant.

"It's a red, white and blue strategy rather than a red versus blue strategy."

At one point Gingrich interrupts the interview to take a call on his cell phone. He's beaming when he hangs up.

"That was Al Gore," he said. The former Democratic vice president had called, he said, to thank him for the ad with Pelosi on behalf of Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.

What's going on? Some suspect that the politically-astute Gingrich - who abruptly abandoned a possible run for president last fall - is laying the ground work for another White House bid in 2012.

Gingrich, who will turn 65 this summer, does not exactly deny this.

"If the bow wave of acceptance got large enough that it was inevitable I'd run," Gingrich said.

But for right now, he said, "I'm happy to be a citizen."

A citizen who, through his political think tank "American Solutions," is jockeying to be at the center of the debate over public policy.

A conversation with the former college professor can be dizzying. Within minutes he has tackled the woes of the crumbling city of Detroit, the rise in childhood diabetes, alcoholism on Sioux Indian reservations and the troubling rate of sexually transmitted diseases in teenage girls.

The unifying theme: "We are crippled by bad culture reinforced by bad government," he said.

True to form, Gingrich is espousing some controversial ideas to turn things around. He's intrigued by an effort to pay students to study, saying it would instill badly-needed study habits in poor students. He also thinks that child labor laws should be reformed to allow those age 13 to 16 to be able to work and to keep their wages without paying taxes. The nation's entrepreneurs began young, he says.

Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University, said Gingrich will have an uphill climb in making himself over as a centrist unifier. Most people still know him as an angry partisan crusader, Black said.

But Gingrich said that label is something of a caricature. He points out that welfare reform - one of the signature accomplishments of his tenure in the House - passed with support from half the chamber's Democrats. (He doesn't mention that it was also being pushed by Democratic president Bill Clinton, whose presidency the then-speaker went on to compare to the Jerry Springer show.)

Still, Gingrich said although he remains a loyal Republican he hopes Democrats steal his platform, arguing - with his trademark self confidence - that it would raise the bar.

I agree with Merle Black: Gingrich has a huge chasm to bridge in making himself over as a centrist.

But that phone call from Al Gore's what really kills me. It's Gingrich's "inconvenient truth," on which he'll be pummelled by conservative global warming skeptics.

Democrats Struggle Ahead of 2022

 I love it.

Frankly, there's little more I love than to see Democrats struggle. This like a Christmas present.

At NYT, "Democrats Struggle to Energize Their Base as Frustrations Mount":

Democrats across the party are raising alarms about sinking support among some of their most loyal voters, warning the White House and congressional leadership that they are falling short on campaign promises and leaving their base unsatisfied and unmotivated ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

President Biden has achieved some major victories, signing a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill and moving a nearly $2 trillion social policy and climate change bill through the House. But some Democrats are warning that many of the voters who put them in control of the federal government last year may see little incentive to return to the polls in the midterms — reigniting a debate over electoral strategy that has been raging within the party since 2016.

As the administration focuses on those two bills, a long list of other party priorities — expanding voting rights, enacting criminal justice reform, enshrining abortion rights, raising the federal minimum wage to $15, fixing a broken immigration system — have languished or died in Congress. Negotiations in the Senate are likely to further dilute the economic and climate proposals that animated Mr. Biden’s campaign — if the bill passes at all. And the president’s central promise of healing divisions and lowering the political temperature has failed to be fruitful, as violent language flourishes and threats to lawmakers flood into Congress.

Interviews with Democratic lawmakers, activists and officials in Washington and in key battleground states show a party deeply concerned about retaining its own supporters. Even as strategists and vulnerable incumbents from battleground districts worry about swing voters, others argue that the erosion of crucial segments of the party’s coalition could pose more of a threat in midterm elections that are widely believed to be stacked against it.

Already, Mr. Biden’s approval ratings have taken a sharp fall among some of his core constituencies, showing double-digit declines among Black, Latino, female and young voters. Those drops have led to increased tension between the White House and progressives at a time of heightened political anxiety, after Democrats were caught off-guard by the intensity of the backlash against them in elections earlier this month. Mr. Biden’s plummeting national approval ratings have also raised concerns about whether he would — or should — run for re-election in 2024.

Not all of the blame is being placed squarely on the shoulders of Mr. Biden; a large percentage of frustration is with the Democratic Party itself.

“It’s frustrating to see the Democrats spend all of this time fighting against themselves and to give a perception to the country, which the Republicans are seizing on, that the Democrats can’t govern,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who leads the A.M.E. churches across Georgia. “And some of us are tired of them getting pushed around, because when they get pushed around, African Americans get shoved.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading House progressive, warned that the party is at risk of “breaking trust” with vital constituencies, including young people and people of color.

“There’s all this focus on ‘Democrats deliver, Democrats deliver,’ but are they delivering on the things that people are asking for the most right now?” she said in an interview. “In communities like mine, the issues that people are loudest and feel most passionately about are the ones that the party is speaking to the least.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats acknowledge that a significant part of the challenge facing their party is structural: With slim congressional majorities, the party cannot pass anything unless the entire caucus agrees. That empowers moderate Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia to block some of the biggest promises to their supporters, including a broad voting rights bill.

A more aggressive approach may not lead to eventual passage of an immigration or voting rights law, but it would signal to Democrats that Mr. Biden is fighting for them, said Faiz Shakir, a close adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Mr. Shakir and others worry that the focus on the two significant pieces of legislation — infrastructure and the spending bill — won’t be enough to energize supporters skeptical of the federal government’s ability to improve their lives.

“I’m a supporter of Biden, a supporter of the agenda, and I’m frustrated and upset with him to allow this to go in the direction it has,” said Mr. Shakir, who managed Mr. Sanders’s presidential run in 2020. “It looks like we have President Manchin instead of President Biden in this debate.”

He added: “It’s made the president look weak.”

The divide over how much attention to devote to staunch Democratic constituencies versus moderate swing voters taps into a political debate that’s long roiled the party: Is it more important to energize the base or to persuade swing voters? And can Democrats do both things at once?

White House advisers argue that winning swing voters, particularly the suburban independents who play an outsize role in battleground districts, is what will keep Democrats in power — or at least curb the scale of their midterm losses. They see the drop among core groups of Democrats as reflective of a challenging political moment — rising inflation, the continued pandemic, uncertainty about schools — rather than unhappiness with the administration’s priorities.

“It’s November of 2021, not September of 2022,” John Anzalone, Mr. Biden’s pollster, said. “If we pass Build Back Better, we have a great message going into the midterms, when the bell rings on Labor Day, about what we’ve done for people.”

Even pared back from the $3.5 trillion plan that Mr. Biden originally sought, the legislation that passed the House earlier this month offers proposals transforming child care, elder care, prescription drugs and financial aid for college, as well as making the largest investment ever to slow climate change. But some of the most popular policies will not be felt by voters until long after the midterm elections, nor will the impact of many of the infrastructure projects.

Already, Democrats face a challenging education effort with voters. According to a survey conducted by Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm, only about a third of white battleground voters think that either infrastructure or the broader spending bill will help them personally. Among white Democratic battleground voters, support for the bills is only 72 percent...

Still more.

 

A Defense Strategy for the New Administration

From Mac Thornberry and Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., at Foreign Affairs, "Preserving Primacy":

Should the United States fail to protect the global commons, no like-minded power will take its place. https://t.co/Kdh1RRWAIX

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) August 18, 2016

The next U.S. president will inherit a security environment in which the United States con­fronts mounting threats with increasingly constrained resources, diminished stature, and growing uncertainty both at home and abroad over its willingness to protect its friends and its interests. Revisionist powers in Europe, the western Pacific, and the Persian Gulf—three regions long considered by both Democratic and Republican administrations to be vital to U.S. national security—are seeking to overturn the rules-based international order. In Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin has seized Crimea, waged proxy warfare in eastern Ukraine, and threatened NATO allies on Russia’s periphery. Further demonstrating its newfound assertiveness, Russia has dispatched forces to Syria and strength­ened its nuclear arsenal. After a failed attempt to “reset” relations with Moscow, U.S. President Barack Obama has issued stern warnings and imposed economic sanctions, but these have done little to deter Putin.

Nor has the administration’s “pivot” to Asia, now five years on, been matched by effective action. China continues to ramp up its military spending, investing heavily in weapons systems designed to threaten U.S. forces in the western Pacific. As a result, it is proving increas­ingly willing and able to advance its expansive territorial claims in the East China and South China Seas. Not content to resolve its disputes through diplomacy, Beijing has militarized them, building bases on natural and artificially created islands. The United States has failed to respond vigorously to these provocations, causing allies to question its willingness to meet its long-standing security commitments.

The lack of U.S. leadership is also fueling instability in the Middle East. In Iraq, the Obama administration forfeited hard-won gains by withdrawing all U.S. forces, creating a security vacuum that enabled the rise of both Iranian influence and the Islamic State, or ISIS. Adding to its strategic missteps, the administration fundamentally misread the character of the Arab Spring, failing to appreciate that the uprisings would provide opportunities for radical Islamist elements rather than lead to a new democratic order. The administration also failed to learn from the previous administration’s experience in Iraq when it chose to “lead from behind” in Libya, intervening to over­throw Muammar al-Qaddafi, only to declare victory and abandon the country to internal disorder. It then drew a “redline” over President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria but failed to act to enforce it. The result is growing instability in the Middle East and a decline in U.S. influence.

The threat of Islamist terrorism has grown on the Obama administration’s watch. Al Qaeda and ISIS, both Sunni groups, have gained new footholds in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and even West Africa. Obama’s negotiations with Iran, the home of radical Shiite Islamism, have not curbed the country’s involvement in proxy wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen or its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. What the talks did produce—the nuclear deal—may slow Tehran’s march to ob­taining a nuclear weapon, but it also gives the regime access to tens of billions of dollars in formerly frozen assets. The ink on the agreement was barely dry when, in March, Tehran tested ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, in blatant defiance of a UN Security Council resolution. Adding to all this instability, military competition has expanded into the relatively new domains of outer space and cyberspace—and will eventually extend to undersea economic infrastructure, as well.

With the current approach failing, the next president will need to formulate a new defense strategy. It should include three basic elements: a clear statement of what the United States seeks to achieve, an understanding of the resources available for those goals, and guidance as to how those resources will be used. The strategy laid out here, if properly implemented, will allow the United States to preclude the rise of a hegemonic power along the Eurasian periphery and preserve access to the global commons—without bankrupting the country in the process...

Sounds great.

Frankly, I'm not worried about the U.S. maintaining its material preponderance, even with China supposedly "catching up."

It's that we need robust, non-politically correct leadership. Global preponderance is a state of mind as well as an objective reality. I'd argue that President Barack Hussein wanted to chop the U.S. down to size, to attack U.S. global hegemony at home, for ideological reasons. He's still doing with his appeasement and apology tours.

America will lead again, in both word and power. It's just a matter of the political dynamics. A Hillary Clinton administration's just going to be four more years of Obama's failed policies. But the pendulum is going to swing back to American exceptionalism at some point. Of that I remain optimistic.

But keep reading, in any case.

Romney Wins Michigan Primary!

Mitt Romney secured his first primary victory in 2008's topsy-turvy race for the GOP nomination. The New York Times reports:

Mitt Romney, seizing on his personal ties to a state where his father made his family’s political fortune, captured a must-win victory in the Michigan primary on Tuesday, claiming the first major trophy for his ailing campaign and throwing the wide-open Republican field into further disarray.

Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, led Senator John McCain by 9 percentage points. Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, the winner of the Iowa caucus, conceded after polling at 17 percent of the vote.

In the Democratic race with 14 percent of precincts reporting, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won by a commanding margin in a field that did not include her closest competitors, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and John Edwards. However, about a third of voters in the Democratic primary opted to allow the party to choose uncommitted delegates to the national convention, effectively a vote against Ms. Clinton.

“It’s a victory of optimism over Washington-style pessimism,” Mr. Romney told The Associated Press. “The people of Michigan said they believe in someone who is going to fight for them.”

Mr. Romney’s victory guarantees a headache for political watchdogs as the competitive Republican field heads to South Carolina for its Saturday primary. Mr. Romney, Mr. McCain and Mr. Huckabee have each won a major primary or caucus, leaving the party without a clear frontrunner.

Another top Republican, former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, is putting most of his immediate efforts into Florida, which will hold its primary on Jan. 29.

Mr. McCain, of Arizona, conceded the Michigan race, but he told supporters in South Carolina that he would not be deterred in his campaign.

“Starting tomorrow, we’re going to win South Carolina, and we’re going to go on and win the nomination," Mr. McCain said.

Mr. Huckabee has also flown to South Carolina, a state he is looking to win with support from his evangelical base.

Mr. Romney, who was born and raised in Michigan, used his final campaign appearances to remind voters of his personal ties to the state, where his father served three terms as governor. He promised, if elected president, to “not rest” until the state’s battered economic fortunes have been restored.

The message appeared to resonate with Republican voters, more than half of whom said in exit polls that their vote was driven by overwhelming economic concerns. A majority of those polled after they voted said a candidate’s position on the economy was more important than the war in Iraq, illegal immigration or terrorism. The exit poll was conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and the Associated Press.

Early reports of sluggish voter turnout may also have helped Mr. Romney’s cause. Freezing temperatures, an early morning snowfall, and a dearth of Democratic contenders on the ballot may have affected turnout, according to a state official.

It appeared from early returns that much of Mr. Romney’s support came from the three-county Detroit metropolitan area, home of many well-off Republicans and where the Romney name is better known from his father, George, being governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969.

Surveys of Michigan voters leaving the polls on Tuesday also showed that Mr. Romney did well among those who decided in the last day or two, validating his strategy of saturating the state with advertising and personal appearances over the last five days. Mr. Romney aired almost twice as many television ads as his two leading opponents combined.

In exit polls, more than half of Republican voters in Michigan said their vote was driven by overwhelming economic concerns. A majority of those polled after they voted said a candidate’s position on the economy was more important than the war in Iraq, illegal immigration or terrorism. The exit poll was conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and the Associated Press.

While the voters said a candidate’s position on the issues was more important than a candidate’s personal qualities, more than 4 in 10 voters said it was more important to them that a candidate share their values than be able to win in November against a Democrat or have the right experience.

About a quarter of the voters said it mattered a great deal to them that a candidate shared their religious beliefs.

On the issues of abortion, about 10 percent of Republican voters said it should be legal in all cases, 25 percent said abortion should be legal in most cases, about 35 percent said it should be illegal in most cases and about 25 percent said abortion should be illegal in all cases.

A plurality of voters said immigrants should be deported to the country they came from rather than be allowed to stay as temporary workers or offered a chance to apply for citizenship.

A majority of voters approve of the war in Iraq. When asked to describe their feelings about the Bush administration, they were closely divided.

Michigan’s primary occurred much earlier than usual this year, and many residents interviewed over the past few days said they were not even aware there was an election on Tuesday. Mrs. Clinton is expected to lead the pack on the Democratic side because she was the only major candidate whose name is on the ballot. Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards withdrew their names at the request of the national Democratic Party, which stripped Michigan of its delegates because the early date of its primary violated party rules.

But state party leaders said they believed the Michigan delegate slates would be seated.

The race here in Michigan forced the Republican candidates to focus chiefly on the dismal economy of the state, where thousands of manufacturing jobs have evaporated over the last several years and where the unemployment rate, 7.4 percent, is the highest in the nation.

Mr. McCain may have hurt himself here when he declared in a debate in South Carolina last week that because of the restructuring of the global automobile industry many of those jobs would never be restored in Michigan.

As I noted in the update to my previous post, Romney's optimistic message of economic revitalization appealed to Michigan voters who have been battered by economic transformation and the housing collapse (thanks to Elaine, over at Elaine's Place, for providing me with inside information on Michigan's housing market).

There's a lesson of caution for John McCain's straight-talk campaign: He's right that most jobs lost to global economic competition and market restructuring won't be coming back to the Great Lakes region. But his message was easily attacked by Romney as "economic pessimism." McCain's realism plays better in foreign policy than in economic affairs, where people need a voice of hope to lift their spirits.

I'll be looking at the polling data and political analyses over the next couple of days, but even without checking Memeorandum, I predict that the Daily Kos netroots will take credit for an independent crossover impact in blunting the McCain momentum (which early voter turnout data shows to be false).

Now, while I think McCain's right to focus on the next stop in South Carolina, the bigger impact of the Michigan results is to topple Mike Huckabee from his top-tier perch secured by his win in Iowa.

Romney - with his Michigan take - will have a big push heading into South Carolina. A Huckabee win in the Palmetto state is the former Arkansas governor's do-or-die sitiuation. Fred Thompson's down but not out, and he too will have to secure a victory or a strong second place showing in the first Southern primary to have any hope of being competitive heading into February 5.

John McCain, fresh off his New Hampshire comeback, has the wind of national public opinion at his back - and note that national polls show way more diversity of opinion than the views coming out of the Wolverine State, so it remains to be seen how substantial a bounce Romney gets heading into the later contests.

What's not in doubt is this is the most exciting GOP nomination process in decades!

The "Super Tuesday" round of nominating contests will truly be a crowning event if one of the GOP candidates taps some compelling theme to carry him to victory in a plurality of states, especially the big states like California and New York.

Don't forget, Florida votes before then. Maybe Florida will indeed provide Rudy Giuliani with the bounce that he needs to avoid an utter collapse, although things aren't looking good.

Photo: New York Times

The End of the World Trade Organization?

Who cares, really?

The conflict between economic regionalism and global economic openness, embodied in the post-WWII multilateral trade regime, has been a longtime topic in international relations theory.

The Trump administration is accelerating the shift to regionalism.

Not to mention Brexit, which should go through on January 31st, thanks to the Conservative triumph in the general election.

All is not lost, as bilateral trade agreements will take the place of wider multilateral pacts.

In any case, at the Los Angeles Times, "House passage of USMCA marks major shift away from free-trade policies":

WASHINGTON —  The House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly passed the new North American trade deal, voting in unusually bipartisan fashion just a day after impeaching President Trump strictly on party lines. 

Approval of the trade bill, which now goes to the Senate for almost certain ratification, did far more than help Trump notch a major achievement: It marked a significant change in U.S. economic strategy toward the rest of the world.

For much of the last 70 years, throughout the Cold War and down to more recent times, Washington used America’s vast wealth and economic power to build friendships and alliances that bolstered national security.

That strategy included a fundamental commitment to free trade — opening the large U.S. market to products from all over the world. For the most part, American companies and their workers had to compete against foreign businesses and labor with little or no protection from the federal government.

As Trump has long complained, that free-trade policy cost millions of American jobs. But leaders of both parties and economic experts considered it worth the price because it boosted American growth, generating many new jobs, and opened new opportunities for many U.S. companies to profit in a global economy. At the same time, it helped cement U.S. leadership in the world.

“In the post-World War II era, we were so much more powerful and so much richer than everybody else that we could improve the living standards at home and still give away the store on trade,” said Clyde Prestowitz, a former top trade negotiator in President Reagan’s administration.

“And we’re now culminated at a moment in which the cost of our old policy is really hard to bear, and so we’re de facto changing our policy,” he said.

The march toward free global markets with lower tariffs and other barriers always had exceptions. Beginning in the 1970s, U.S. companies began to complain about unfair competition: dumping of textiles and steel by foreign producers subsidized by their governments, for instance, or the sale of below-cost television sets, electronics and other consumer goods.

Reagan and his successors responded to these complaints with demands for import quotas and other measures. But overall, the United States remained committed to a broad strategy of free trade — relying on market forces and competition to determine outcomes.

While Republican business leaders complained about specific instances of what they saw as unfair tactics, such as currency manipulation and intellectual property theft, they largely remained committed to the overall free-trade strategy.

Democrats, responding to their union supporters, complained that American workers were paying a heavy price for a system that primarily benefited corporations and upper-income Americans.

The original North American Free Trade Agreement, which passed the House in 1993 by a margin of only 34 votes, highlighted the political unease about trade.

The agreement, however, fit squarely into that strategy of using trade in part for geopolitical reasons. It aimed to make Mexico more prosperous and hence make the United States more secure at a time when radical, leftist regimes seemed to be on the rise in Latin America. Economically, many saw it as a bulwark against rising competition from a unified Europe and Asian tiger economies.

NAFTA tore down tariffs and shaped North America into a powerful economic bloc — three-way trade in goods now reaches $1.3 trillion — but it was in many ways outdated in a global economy driven much more by technology and data.

Trump long attacked NAFTA, calling it one of the worst trade agreements ever and promising to renegotiate it. As president, he has attacked the whole system of free trade, undermining the World Trade Organization, which the U.S. helped create in the 1990s, and starting trade wars not only with China but with longtime U.S. allies such as Europe, Canada and Mexico.

He has enjoyed quiet but significant Democratic support on the issue. Witness the large bipartisan majority for the new version of NAFTA.

Renamed United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, the measure won approval by the Democratic-majority House 385-41, a remarkable show of unity at a time of deep partisan acrimony.

Not that there wasn’t the usual jostling and one-upmanship which have characterized relations between congressional Democrats and Trump.

“Of course we’ll take credit for it, because what he proposed did not fill the bill of what he described,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said shortly before the vote, referring to Democrats’ successful pressure on the administration to amend the trade deal to strengthen enforcement of labor and environmental protections.

Earlier Wednesday night, at a rally in Battle Creek, Mich., Trump insisted that Pelosi and other Democrats had no choice but to pass USMCA.

“She had a lot of pressure, especially from manufacturing areas, farm areas, a lot of pressure to sign it.... I had a lot of union labor vote for me, tremendous amount of labor,” he said...

More.

Joseph Lieberman: Neoconservative Apostate

Joseph Lieberman's a real tough guy. His reelection to the Senate in 2006 defeated antiwar netroots-backed insurgent Ned Lamont, discrediting the notion of anti-Bush online revolution in politics that year.

It turns out the experience was liberating for the Connecticut Senator, a big backer of assumed GOP nominee John McCain. The New York Times has the story (via Memeorandum):

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, not so long back the Democratic nominee for vice president, has become chief endorser, campaign companion and all-around champion for his buddy Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican presidential standard-bearer.

So inseparable are these men lately that the question often arises: Would Mr. Lieberman consider another tilt at the vice presidential lists, this time on the Republican ticket?

A smile crossed his face like a cloud, and the white-haired senator began waving his hands.

“Oh, no, no,” Mr. Lieberman insisted in an interview in his Capitol hideaway, a nook that he occupies between votes and that once belonged to none other than Mr. McCain. “Been there, done that”....

For the longest time, Mr. Lieberman was a regular Democratic Joe. He clambered up the party ladder, serving as state attorney general before taking a Senate seat in 1988. Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham volunteered in an early campaign while at Yale Law School.

He flapped like a hawk on foreign politics and sang like a moderate bird on domestic affairs. He annoyed the White House when he denounced Mr. Clinton’s conduct in the Monica Lewinsky affair, but he voted against impeachment.

In 2000, Al Gore tapped him for the No. 2 slot. Mr. Lieberman did not flash the dirk as often as Gore aides preferred, and he went curiously passive in Florida, when the election hung in the balance. But he worked the trail as if plying the tables at Grossingers, the Catskill resort hotel. “Have you heard our campaign slogan?” he would tell the crowds. “Gore-Lieberman: No Bull, No Pork.”

Later he become a mentor to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, sharing lunches with the freshman. Their offices are 148 feet apart.

In 2004, Mr. Lieberman alighted in New Hampshire as the presidential candidate with the broadest name recognition. But voters criticized his support for the war in Iraq, and he lectured them, and this did not go well. He finished fifth and soon folded his tent.

Mr. Curry had lunch with Mr. Lieberman in December 2005 and warned about the antiwar sentiment sweeping Connecticut. “This is not an argument over the capital gains tax,” Mr. [Clinton advisor Bill] Curry recalled telling him. “This is the biggest foreign policy mistake in the history of the country.”

Mr. Lieberman, who often praised the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumseld, shrugged off this advice. He saw the war as an epic struggle against Islamic terrorism; bombing Iran might not be a bad idea, either.

This is the latest steeply graded curve in the long, strange trip that is Mr. Lieberman’s career. Eight years ago he exhorted sweaty ironworkers in Boynton Beach, Fla., to join the Democratic cause. Four years ago he told voters in New Hampshire that President Bush was “a divisive leader.”

But four weeks ago, he returned to Boynton Beach to address 250 Republicans at a country club. This time, he deplored the Democrats’ “visceral” anger at Mr. Bush. He is skipping the Democratic National Convention in Denver, but may turn up at the rostrum of the Republicans’ conclave in Minneapolis.

“I suppose if Senator McCain is going to be nominated, and he asks me, I will go,” Mr. Lieberman said.

I can see Lieberman as secretary of defense in a McCain administration, which would help cement the "Maverick's" neoconservative foreign policy direction.

Still, McCain might not want to campaign too much with Lieberman, who's traditionally liberal on many hot-button issues, like global warming; and don't even think about a McCain-Lieberman ticket...

McCain's had enough problems with the GOP base as it is!

Neoconservatism and Regime Change Iran

Abe Greenwald's got an awesome essay over at Commentary, "Give Bush Credit on Iran."

He links to Reuel Marc Gerecht's earlier essay, from 2002, "Regime Change in Iran? Applying George W. Bush's 'Liberation Theology' to the Mullahs."

Here's this longer section from Greenwald citing Gerecht:

Seven years ago, Reuel Marc Gerecht looked into the best crystal ball in all global strategy and wrote down what he saw in the pages of the Weekly Standard:

If the United States stays in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime, and ushers in some type of a federal, democratic system, the repercussions throughout the region could be transformative. Popular discontent in Iran tends to heat up when U.S. soldiers get close to the Islamic Republic. An American invasion could possibly provoke riots in Iran--simultaneous uprisings in major cities that would simply be beyond the scope of regime-loyal specialized riot-control units. The army or the Revolutionary Guard Corps would have to be pulled into service in large numbers, and that's when things could get interesting. The clerical regime fears big street confrontations, afraid that it cannot rely on the loyalty of either the army or the Guard Corps.

And if an American invasion doesn't provoke urban unrest, the creation of a democratic Iraq probably will. Iraq's majority Shiite population, who will inevitably lead their country in a democratic state, will start to talk to their Shiite brethren over the Iran-Iraq border. The collective Iranian conversation about American-aided democracy in Iraq will be brutal for the mullahs (which is why the Bush administration should prepare itself for Iranian mischief in Iraq's politics once Tehran determines that the Bush administration is indeed serious about ensuring a democratic triumph in Baghdad). The Bush administration should, of course, quickly and loudly support any demonstrators who hit the streets in Iran. America's approval will not be the kiss of death for the brave dissidents who challenge the regime's armed defenders. On the contrary, such psychological support could prove critical to those trying to show to the people that the die is now decisively cast against the regime.

More than a testament to Gerecht’s uncanny grasp of theocratic politics, the passage highlights the thoughtfulness of George W. Bush’s much maligned Iran policy.

Among Bush’s critics it has become accepted fact that “the big winner of the Iraq War is Iran.” There are several arguments to support this view: the invasion empowered the fanatical Shia of Iraq, who inspired their ideological brethren across the eastern border; difficulties in establishing order in Iraq hurt America’s image as a formidable military threat; the U.S., in turn, needed Tehran’s help in subduing Iraqi unrest; without Saddam to worry about, the mullahs were free to follow through on plans for regional hegemony. All these arguments could be supported by events that were actually unfolding in the region – once upon a time. Today, few of them hold water.

You know, that's the thing about neocons: It's not so much "they knew they were right" and failed, but that they knew they were right AND stayed true to their principles when the chips were down. And as folks have been suggesting, "we're all neocons now."

This naturally hard for a lot of folks to accept (so brain-addled by neocon derangement as they are), but neconservatism's making a comeback, big time.

**********

By the way, if you've never read it, now's a good time to check out Max Boot's, "What the Heck Is a 'Neocon'?"

Two Party Conventions Showcase America's Stark Political Polarization

This is good.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Two conventions, one vast gulf: Republicans and Democrats appear to be speaking to different countries":

One night this week, the Democratic convention featured eight black women whose children had died in shootings or at the hands of police. A week earlier, Republicans repeatedly paid tribute to law enforcement.

In Philadelphia, the billionaire global warming activist Tom Steyer was ubiquitous. In Cleveland, Republicans put a spotlight on the plight of out-of-work miners and pledged to increase use of coal.

A speaker needing applause at a Democratic convention can always praise teachers. Republicans can reliably criticize public employee unions.

As the themes and tableaus of the parties’ conventions illustrated, a deep political gulf separates the country’s two major parties, their elected officials and their most reliable voters. And it is getting wider. Voters not only disagree on solutions to the nation’s ills, they hold starkly different views about what the problems are.

“Rarely in American history,” as Gov. Jerry Brown said here at the DNC, “have two parties diverged so profoundly.”

Both presidential nominees now face the question of whether either can bridge that divide — or whether they even want to try. Each entered the convention weeks with  a strategic choice: Does the path toward victory involve reinforcing party loyalty in hopes of driving more on your side to vote? Or does winning require reaching across the tribal lines of American politics?

In Cleveland, Donald Trump placed a clear bet on the former path. Nearly every element of the Republican convention played to the anxieties and frustrations of the older white conservative voters who form the core of the GOP coalition.

His campaign strategists believe they can do better than the last two GOP nominees in motivating those voters to the polls. They’re also counting on Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable image driving down turnout among Democratic-leaning groups, particularly young people and minorities, who may not back her as readily as they did President Obama.

Clinton confronted a more complicated calculus.

Her party has proved the strength of its electoral coalition — winning the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. But its voters have grown frustrated at the gridlock that has resulted from a divided political system.

Moreover, Trump’s powerful appeal to the economic unease — and the racial resentments — of blue-collar whites has accelerated the trend of such voters identifying with the GOP. To make up for potential losses among them, Democrats need to increase their vote among suburban, college-educated voters who in the past have often sided with Republicans.

“We're trying to bridge that gap, to try to make an argument that the politics of division are dangerous for our country,” Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, said at a meeting with reporters sponsored by the Wall Street Journal.

The Democratic convention, culminating in Clinton’s speech, reflected that imperative. With speakers like former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and repeated descriptions of Trump as a dangerously unsteady authoritarian, they sought to make moderate, college-educated Republicans and Republican-leaning independents comfortable with the idea of crossing the line to vote for a Democrat.

Creating such inroads, however, is a tricky task...

More.

Cap and Trade Follies

Check out Punditte & Pundette, "The Growing Backlash Against Global Warming.

Also, here's this from Kimberley Strassel, "The Climate Change Climate Change":

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.

If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

Also Blogging: Michelle Malkin, "Cap and tax liveblog: Democrats limit debate, stampede toward national energy tax," and Ed Morrissey, "Cap and trade vote today, complete with AP spin; Update: 300-page, last-minute amendment; Update: Greenpeace opposes."

Cartoon Credit: Ed Driscoll, "2009: A Smoot-Hawley Odyssey."

(P.S. Don't miss the Greenpeace opposition!)

More at Memeorandum.

Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea

I'm about half way through C. Bradley Thompson's new book, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea. Yeah, it's an attack on neoconservatism, by one who was sympathetic to the ideology at one time. It's an excellent read, although I disagree with its conclusions, and it'll take me some thinking to put those disagreements in more detailed writing here. I can say that Thompson's focus so far is primarily on Irving Kristol and how he was informed by Straussian political philosophy. Hence, Thomspon reads an allegedly extreme authoritarianism into the movement that --- it is argued --- is at odds with the vision of the American founders. I'd simply note that neocons are way more eclectic than is postulated at the book, and again, I'm not done yet. I have peeked ahead to the conclusion, and Thompson takes his thesis to its logical conclusion to find neoconservatism anti-democratic. More on this later. Meanwhile, this is the kind of response I'd offer outside of the Irving Kristol exegesis, from Max Boot:

"Neocons Are Liberals Who Have Been Mugged by Reality"

No longer true. Original neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol, who memorably defined neocons as liberals who'd been "mugged by reality," were (and still are) in favor of welfare benefits, racial equality, and many other liberal tenets. But they were driven rightward by the excesses of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when crime was increasing in the United States, the Soviet Union was gaining ground in the Cold War, and the dominant wing of the Democratic Party was unwilling to get tough on either problem.

A few neocons, like philosopher Sidney Hook or Kristol himself, had once been Marxists or Trotskyites. Most, like former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, simply had been hawkish Democrats who became disenchanted with their party as it drifted further left in the 1970s. Many neocons, such as Richard Perle, originally rallied around Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democratic senator who led the opposition to the Nixon-Ford policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Following the 1980 election, U.S. President Ronald Reagan became the new standard bearer of the neoconservative cause.

A few neocons, like Perle, still identify themselves as Democrats, and a number of "neoliberals" in the Democratic Party (such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman and former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke) hold fairly neoconservative views on foreign policy. But most neocons have switched to the Republican Party. On many issues, they are virtually indistinguishable from other conservatives; their main differences are with libertarians, who demonize "big government" and preach an anything-goes morality.

Most younger members of the neoconservative movement, including some descendants of the first generation, such as William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have never gone through a leftist phase, which makes the "neo" prefix no longer technically accurate. Like "liberal," "conservative," and other ideological labels, "neocon" has morphed away from its original definition. It has now become an all-purpose term of abuse for anyone deemed to be hawkish, which is why many of those so described shun the label. Wolfowitz prefers to call himself a "Scoop Jackson Republican."

BONUS: At Dr. Sanity, "WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW...":

...is not love or global orgasms, but more neoconservatism.

John Murtha's Cut-and-Run Turnaround

Bullying John Murtha's abandoned his cut-and-run retreatist agenda on Iraq, which poses some problems for Democratic withdrawal plans in Congress. Investor's Business Daily offers its take on the topic:

How exactly can House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defend the obstruction of $200 billion in emergency combat operations funding for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan when one of her closest cronies, the Vietnam vet she tried to install as House majority leader, now believes America is winning the war there?

Murtha's "Road to Baghdad" conversion may not have knocked him to the ground with a blinding light. But it's certain to throw congressional Democrats for a loop as it exposes their years of blindness on the importance of winning in Iraq as part of the global war on terror.

Only last summer Murtha was calling belief in the chances of President Bush's new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, with a new commander and 30,000 fresh troops and Marines, "delusional to say the least."

"I'm absolutely convinced right now the surge isn't working," and "there's no way you're going to have success," he told ABC in June. In other venues, Murtha has accused the Pentagon of lying in reporting that the surge was effective.

But in the wake of his trip to Iraq last month, Murtha said in a videoconference from his congressional district office, "I think the surge is working."

This while the congressman insists that $50 billion is all Bush will get for Iraq and Afghanistan this year.

Murtha also made the usual complaints about lack of political progress and reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites — in spite of the fact that thousands of Sunnis and Shiites are now working together manning checkpoints and conducting other security operations directed against al-Qaida in various regions of Iraq.

Two months into the new fiscal year, the Democratic Congress has failed to pass almost all its annual spending bills. Yet Democratic leaders such as Murtha, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada don't seem to feel even a tinge of shame in whining about a society that, deeply divided ethnically and religiously for centuries, has been unable to iron out all its divisions overnight.

Representative government is alien to the Arab Middle East. What right do Democrats in Congress have to expect Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and the various factions of the Iraqi parliament instantly to do what it took the genius of America's founding fathers and Constitutional framers many years to achieve?

Beyond the embarrassing questions now sure to be asked of Pelosi about Murtha's unexpected flip-flop, and Democrats' crass unreasonableness toward a people who risk their lives to exercise the voting rights we take for granted, there's something bigger for Pelosi, Reid and the Democrats running for president to think about:

Murtha, like so many other high-ranking Democrats in the House and Senate, and those seeking the White House, was "absolutely convinced" that surrender was the only answer in Iraq.

They were so sure of their position that when the party's 2000 vice-presidential nominee, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, placed patriotism before the party line, they actually let someone take the Democratic senatorial nomination away from him and tried, without success, to beat him in his 2006 bid for re-election.

Democrats have invested everything in losing the war in Iraq and blaming it on President Bush, and now they've been proved wrong. Murtha has admitted it; other Democrats, one by one, will follow.

How much faith can Americans place in a party so committed to a national failure — and now so discredited?

See also yesterday's post, "Democrats Can't Get Things Right on Iraq."

The Power of American Alliances

Charles Krauthammer's got a killer indictment of the Democratic Party's "our frayed alliances" meme, over at the Washington Post.

When the Democratic presidential candidates pause from beating Hillary with a stick, they join in unison to pronounce the Democratic pieties, chief among which is that George Bush has left our alliances in ruins. As Clinton puts it, we have "alienated our friends," must "rebuild our alliances" and "restore our standing in the world." That's mild. The others describe Bush as having a scorched-earth foreign policy that has left us reviled and isolated in the world.

Like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who insist that nothing of significance has changed in Iraq, the Democrats are living in what Bob Woodward would call a state of denial. Do they not notice anything?

France has a new president who is breaking not just with the anti-Americanism of the Chirac era but also with 50 years of Fifth Republic orthodoxy that defined French greatness as operating in counterpoise to America. Nicolas Sarkozy's trip last week to the United States was marked by a highly successful White House visit and a rousing speech to Congress in which he not only called America "the greatest nation in the world" (how many leaders of any country say that about another?) but also pledged solidarity with the United States on Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation. This just a few months after he sent his foreign minister to Iraq to signal an openness to cooperation and an end to Chirac's reflexive obstructionism.

That's France. In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder is long gone, voted out of office and into a cozy retirement as Putin's concubine at Gazprom. His successor is the decidedly pro-American Angela Merkel, who concluded an unusually warm visit with Bush this week.

All this, beyond the ken of Democrats, is duly noted by new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who in an interview with Sky News on Sunday remarked on "the great change that is taking place," namely "that France and Germany and the European Union are also moving more closely with America."

As for our other traditional alliances, relations with Australia are very close, and Canada has shown remarkable steadfastness in taking disproportionate casualties in supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Eastern European nations, traditionally friendly, are taking considerable risks on behalf of their U.S. alliance -- for example, cooperating with us on missile defense in the face of enormous Russian pressure. And ties with Japan have never been stronger, with Tokyo increasingly undertaking military and quasi-military obligations that it had forsworn for the past half-century.

So much for the disarray of our alliances.

Even before the elections of new leadership among our traditional alliance partners, the Democratic attack on the Bush administration's alliance relations was a myth. The U.S. had deep policy differences with a few alliance partners, but there's never been any serious expectation that our post-World War Two treaty partnerships were in danger of disintegration.

Not only that, the post-9/11 media infatuation with global anti-Americanism masqued a robust trend in pro-Americanism internationally, and in recent years American good will, in countries like Indonesia, has resulted in a burst of America-backing in international life.

Krauthammer notes, as well, that strategically-placed states in the Middle East are tightening their interests closer to those of the U.S. The reason, success in Iraq.

Putin's War Is Fortifying the Democratic Alliance

I love this.

And remember what I wrote the other day: "Unipolarity Is Not Over."

From Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, at Foreign Affairs, "Return of Pax Americana?":

The United States and its allies have failed to prevent Russia from brutalizing Ukraine, but they can still win the larger struggle to save the international order. Russia’s savage invasion has exposed the gap between Western countries’ soaring liberal aspirations and the paltry resources they have devoted to defend them. The United States has declared great-power competition on Moscow and Beijing but has so far failed to summon the money, the creativity, or the urgency necessary to prevail in those rivalries. Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin has now inadvertently done the United States and its allies a tremendous favor. In shocking them out of their complacency, he has given them a historic opportunity to regroup and reload for an era of intense competition—not just with Russia but also with China—and, ultimately, to rebuild an international order that just recently looked to be headed for collapse.

This isn’t fantasy: it has happened before. In the late 1940s, the West was entering a previous period of great-power competition but had not made the investments or initiatives needed to win it. U.S. defense spending was pathetically inadequate, NATO existed only on paper, and neither Japan nor West Germany had been reintegrated into the free world. The Communist bloc seemed to have the momentum. Then, in June 1950, an instance of unprovoked authoritarian aggression—the Korean War—revolutionized Western politics and laid the foundation for a successful containment strategy. The policies that won the Cold War and thereby made the modern liberal international order were products of an unexpected hot war. The catastrophe in Ukraine could play a similar role today.

Putin’s aggression has created a window of strategic opportunity for Washington and its allies. The democracies must now undertake a major multilateral rearmament program and erect firmer defenses—military and otherwise—against the coming wave of autocratic aggression. They must exploit the current crisis to weaken the autocrats’ capacity for coercion and subversion and deepen the economic and diplomatic cooperation among liberal states around the globe. The invasion of Ukraine signals a new phase in an intensifying struggle to shape the international order. The democratic world won’t have a better chance to position itself for success.

SHOCK THERAPY

The United States has been talking tough about great-power competition for years. But to counter authoritarian rivals, a country needs more than self-righteous rhetoric. It also requires massive investments in military forces geared for high-intensity combat, sustained diplomacy to enlist and retain allies, and a willingness to confront adversaries and even risk war. Such commitments do not come naturally, especially to democracies that believe that peace is the norm. That is why ambitious competitive strategies usually sit on the shelf until a shocking event compels collective sacrifice.

Take containment. Now considered one of the most successful strategies in U.S. diplomatic history, containment was on the verge of failure before the Korean War broke out. During the late 1940s, the United States had undertaken a dangerous, long-term competition against a mighty authoritarian rival. U.S. officials had established maximalist objectives: the containment of Soviet power until that regime collapsed or mellowed and, in the words of President Harry Truman, support for “peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation.” Truman had begun to implement landmark policies such as the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe and the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty. Yet before June 1950, containment remained more of an aspiration than a strategy.

Even as Cold War crises broke out in Berlin, Czechoslovakia, Iran, and Turkey, U.S. military spending plummeted from $83 billion at the end of World War II to $9 billion in 1948. The North Atlantic Treaty was new and feeble: the alliance lacked an integrated military command or anything approaching the forces it needed to defend Western Europe. Resource constraints forced Washington to write off China during its civil war, effectively standing aside as Mao Zedong’s Communists defeated Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government, and to draw a defense perimeter that initially excluded South Korea and Taiwan. U.S. statecraft combined sky-high ambitions with a bargain-basement approach to achieving them.

The reasons for this shortfall will sound familiar. U.S. officials hoped that the United States’ overall military superiority—especially its atomic monopoly—would compensate for weaknesses everywhere along the East-West divide. They found it hard to believe that even ruthless, totalitarian enemies might resort to war. In Washington, moreover, global visions competed with domestic priorities, such as taming inflation and balancing the budget. U.S. officials also planned to economize by splitting the country’s rivals—specifically, wooing Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s communists once they won China’s civil war and pulling that country away from the Soviet Union.

That policy failed: Mao sealed an alliance with Moscow in early 1950. Just months before, another strategic setback—the first Soviet nuclear test—had ended the United States’ atomic monopoly. Yet even then, Truman was unmoved. When Paul Nitze, the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, crafted his famous memo, NSC-68, calling for a global diplomatic offensive supported by a massive military buildup, Truman politely ignored the paper and announced plans to cut the defense budget.

It took a brazen international land grab to shake Washington out of its torpor. North Korean Premier Kim Il Sung’s assault on South Korea, undertaken in collusion with Mao and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, changed everything. The invasion convinced U.S. policymakers that the dictators were on the march and the danger of global conflict was growing. The conflict also dispelled any hope of dividing Moscow and Beijing: Washington now faced a communist monolith applying pressure all around the Eurasian periphery. In short, the North Korean invasion made the Truman administration fear that the postwar world was hanging in the balance.

U.S. policymakers decided not just to defend South Korea but to mount a global campaign to strengthen the noncommunist world. The North Atlantic Treaty became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with a unified command structure and 25 active divisions at its disposal. The Truman administration dispatched additional forces to Europe, where U.S. allies accelerated their military preparations and agreed, in principle, to rearm West Germany. In the Asia-Pacific, the United States created a cordon of security pacts involving Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and the Philippines and deployed naval forces to prevent a Chinese takeover of Taiwan.

The Korean War thus turbocharged the emergence of the global network of alliances and the enduring military deployments that constituted the backbone of containment. It precipitated the revival and rearmament of former enemies, Japan and West Germany, as core members of the free world. Underpinning all this was an enormous military buildup meant to make Soviet aggression unthinkable. U.S. defense spending more than tripled, reaching 14 percent of GDP in 1953; the U.S. nuclear arsenal and conventional forces more than doubled. “The Soviets respected nothing but force,” said Truman. “To build such force . . . is precisely what we are attempting to do now.”

To be sure, the Korean War also showed the danger of going too far...

Keep reading.

 

McCain is Tonic for Post-Bush Republicans

One of my commenters suggested I was falling asleep on the job!

I'm supposed to be pumping John McCain, not wasting my time on some "'third-generation' of Ditto-head denial arguments" against the Arizona Senator.

Okay, okay...we've got a nomination to wrap up, so I'll keep up the pace.

Here's Jonathan Rauch from National Journal, who argues McCain's just the tonic for the Republican Party this year:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., endured boos amid the applause when he spoke at last week's Conservative Political Action Conference. Good for him. And good for the Republicans. Those boos may not have been music to McCain's ears, but they were one indication that he is the healthiest thing to happen to the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan.

This year's primary season has been so full of healthy developments that you could package it with oat bran and hawk it at Whole Foods. The country can thank its lucky stars that the process has pushed forward -- in McCain and in Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama -- the three most formidable figures in American politics. If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, the result will pit the two most widely admired political figures of their generations against each other in a presidential race. The last time the country saw anything remotely like that was when Dwight Eisenhower faced Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956.

Democrats can be grateful they have two tough races on their hands, first for the nomination and then, as now seems virtually certain, against McCain in the general election. Remember LBJ and Jimmy Carter? When Democrats win against weak opponents or crippled parties, they overreach, underperform, and lose touch with the country.

But the healthiest news of all is McCain's emergence as the presumptive Republican nominee. Of all the Republicans in America, McCain is best positioned to undo the errors and correct the excesses of Bush-era Republicanism. If the Bush years were snakebit, think of McCain as an antivenin.

Not all Republicans see it that way, of course. Some would like to see more ruthless partisanship, more fiscal recklessness, more polarization, more presidential monarchism, more erosion of U.S. credibility on human rights, more immigration-bashing. Wiser Republicans, though, know better. They understand that the Big Four of post-Reagan, post-Gingrich Republicanism -- President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former White House strategist Karl Rove, and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay -- steered the party to a dead end.

Wise Republicans know, to begin with, that the party is lost if it cannot rebuild its own center and appeal to the country's. Bush-era Republicanism was all about suppressing the center and mobilizing the extremes, on the (correct) assumption that conservatives outnumber liberals. It worked, for a while, because of 9/11 and because the Democrats unwittingly cooperated. Forced to choose between the Republican Right and the Democratic Left, independents leaned Republican or just stayed home.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the Democrats wised up and started choosing candidates with centrist appeal. Forced to govern from the center of their party instead of the center of the country, Republicans meanwhile swung too far to the right. Independents cut loose. Blood rushed back into the political center. Republicans found themselves marginalized by their own polarizing strategy. The wiser among them now understand that the only way back is through the middle.

McCain stands unrivaled among Republicans as a proven magnet for moderate and independent votes. He has a long record of working and talking across party lines. He not only understands independents, he needs them, because polarized partisans don't trust him (for good reason). Even if he wanted to, he couldn't run a Bush-style "50 percent plus one" strategy of playing to the base and picking off just enough moderates. "He may be able to bring the party back to the center, and that would be deeply useful," says Steve Bell, who, as a longtime senior aide to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., has observed McCain for years. (Domenici has endorsed McCain, despite past encounters with McCain's epithet-laced temper.)

Democrats control both chambers of Congress and are expected to consolidate their majorities this year. In 2009, a Republican president is unlikely to be able to scare Democrats into submission, as Bush did for a while. Instead a GOP president would have to do a delicate job of triangulating between the Democratic majority and a sometimes truculent Republican base.

With his long record of working across party lines -- on campaign finance law and global warming and judicial appointments and much more -- McCain is uniquely equipped to provide Republicans with the last thing they expected to see post-Bush: a productive Republican presidency. "I think we might actually get some stuff done," Bell says.

Most Republicans understand that their loss of credibility on spending restraint and fiscal responsibility has damaged the Republican brand. Wise Republicans understand, further, that supply-side dogmatism has become part of the problem. The supply-side movement made sense when the top tax rate was 70 percent, taxes rose with inflation, and tax cuts were only one part of a program that also included deregulation and lower spending. It stopped making sense when Bush-era Republicanism turned it into an obsession, fixated on the idea that if you just cut taxes and then cut them some more, lower spending, smaller government, and shrinking deficits will follow.

McCain has a long record of vocal opposition to pork-barrel spending and congressional earmarks; he makes a point of calling for entitlement reform; and he is not a supply-sider, having voted against both of Bush's biggest tax cuts. Supply-siders hate that, and it's true that he has now rallied to them with expensive and unpaid-for promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and abolish the alternative minimum tax. Still, McCain's heart belongs not to the supply-side absolutism of the Bush era but to the tightfisted rectitude of the Eisenhower era. If anyone has a shot at restoring Republican fiscal credibility, it is McCain.

Read the rest.

Rauch takes some cheap shots at the administration, but for the most part he makes a good case.

McCain and Obama Coming Together on Iraq?

Are candidates John McCain and Barack Obama seeing eye-to-eye on Iraq?

McCain's been criticized for allegedly pledging a 100-year commitment, while Obama's been one of Democratic Party's most vocifererous Iraq critics and surrender hawks.

Can these two be reconciled on the war?

Well, with John McCain's major address yesterday on his presidential vision and goals by 2013, there's speculation that the Republican and Democratic Party Iraq positions are merging toward a happy medium.

The Los Angeles Times make the case:

After launching their candidacies with opposite positions on the Iraq war, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama seem to be edging toward a middle ground between them.

McCain has long denounced timetables for withdrawal, but said for the first time Thursday that he would like to see most U.S. troops out of Iraq by a specific date: 2013.

Obama has emphasized his plan to withdraw all combat brigades within 16 months of taking office, but also has carefully hedged, leaving the option of taking more time -- and leaving more troops -- if events require.

The positioning is noteworthy because McCain and Obama have made Iraq war policy a core element of their campaigns. But McCain has bowed to the political reality that American impatience with the war is growing, and Obama to the fact that a poorly executed exit would risk damage to other vital U.S. interests.

"It's one thing to stake out a relatively uncompromising position early in the presidential process," said Stuart Rothenberg of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. "But when the idea that you might move into the Oval Office hits you squarely between the eyes, it reminds you that there's a time to be pragmatic about these things."

The maneuvering also reflects the increasingly difficult politics of the Iraq war as the country heads into a general presidential campaign in which the candidates must broaden their appeal for votes. In a debate, the clearest differences between McCain and Obama on Iraq would be their prewar positions: McCain was in favor, Obama opposed. Somewhat less clear, however, would be their approach to the Iraq end game.

The general thrust here is to paint McCain as making a huge concession to the realities of public opinion on Iraq, which has long questioned the decision on invading, but has not demanded an immediate withdrawal.

By contrast, the Times makes it seem if Obama's one of the Democratic Party's "wise men," suggesting that he's practically the party's leading foreign policy moderate:

Obama also has modified his positions as a presidential candidate, toughening his stand on normalizing relations with Cuba, for instance, by insisting on democratic reforms.

On Iraq, the senator from Illinois has made it a point in public comments to guard his prerogatives as president. At campaign stops and in interviews, he has regularly emphasized his promise to start bringing home troops as soon as he is elected, and to bring home one or two combat brigades each month, so that the approximately 19 combat brigades are out within 16 months.

Less noticed is his promise that he will listen to military commanders and react to events on the ground -- caveats that give him wide latitude.

Obama says he wants to keep a "follow-on force" in Iraq that would fight terrorists, protect U.S. forces and facilities, and train Iraqi forces. Obama has not provided an estimate of how large that force might be.

If there's anyone who's bowing to reality it's Obama.

As Peter Wehner has argued, the Illinois Senator has advocated more troops when the war was going badly (an opportunistic attack on the administration), and he's called for an immediate withdrawal when things have turned around under General Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy. In other words, Obama's been consistently wrong.

So the issue should not be about public opinion jockeying to get closer to public preferences on the war. The question is which candidate possesses the requisite foreign policy judgment in a time of great international challenges?

Just last year Obama proved himself to be one of the most strident Iraq opponents in Washington, for example, when he called the war "a complete failure" on the campaign trail.

Obama's foreign policy calls for diplomacy with Iran "without preconditions," which is tantamount to giving Iran anything it wants and demanding nothing in exchange: "Oh, sure, Mahmoud, you can keep your nuclear program if you'll just cut back a little on IED deliveries to Iraq ... thanks buddy!"

Obama has proposed a "global antipoverty act" that would commit the U.S. to spending a 13-year total of $845 billion above and beyond America's current level of foreign aid. This would amount to a massive new tax on Americans and redirect the United States to a foreign policy of social work.

There are considerable foreign policy differences between John McCain and Barack Obama.

McCain will not blame America first, and then try to make up for it through appeasment and profligate foreign aid largesse.

McCain will stand up to our enemies. He'll tell them America will not tolerate your nihilist mayhem and the slaughering of innocents. We will never surrender.