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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51424.html
When George W. Bush left office in 2009, liberal Democrats and a fair number of moderate, traditional Republicans proclaimed the good news: the GOP neo-cons were dead, chased from Washington in disgrace.
But as Republican presidential hopefuls begin to develop foreign policy platforms, a clear and surprising pattern has emerged: they’re back, and so far winning the fight for the direction of the party.
In spite of the tarnished reputation of the neo-cons and the movement by many in the tea party wing of the party towards a more isolationist foreign policy that is open to real cuts in defense spending, all but one of the leading 2012 candidates - in early speeches and campaign books - appear to be toeing a hawkish, interventionist line and promising increased spending on the Pentagon.
When Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour broke with that consensus abruptly Tuesday night in Iowa, he set himself apart from the field and put himself in position to fill a potentially significant opening in the 2012 GOP debate. Former Governors Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, have only differed largely in their attempts to outdo one another in commitment to what Bush called the “freedom agenda.”
“They’re all basically mainstream in their agreement about the [Obama] administration being too friendly toward enemies and too harsh toward allies,” said Randy Scheunemann, who was John McCain’s top foreign policy hand in 2008 and has worked for Sarah Palin and informally advised other contenders.
The apparent unanimity reflects the settlement of a long dispute inside the Republican Party, as many in the aging band of “realist” statesmen defected to support Obama in 2008.
“Once upon a time, there was a debate within the party between realists of the Brent Scowcroft variety and the neo-cons,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former adviser to Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush. “It seems like realists have lost that debate.”
“The party is reasonably united,” Abrams told POLITICO. “There is a consensus about the need for American leadership of the world.”
Practically speaking, the change inside the party has meant that none of the several Republicans moving seriously toward presidential runs joined former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton in calling for Obama to stand with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (though Bolton, on many other policy issues, is a neo-con of the first order). They have been, when asked, bullish on the notion of a no-fly zone over Libya, and competitive in their devotion to Israeli security.
The GOP response to the unfolding situation in Libya is particularly illustrative.
Pawlenty recently blasted President Barack Obama for an “incoherent” response and said he supported a no-fly zone.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum echoed that sentiment, calling for air strikes and telling a Des Moines radio host that Reagan bombed Libya. “If you want to be Reagan-esque, it seems the path is pretty clear,” said Santorum.
Romney was more cautious, but echoed the theme that Obama has failed to show leadership.
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“The president and his team look like deer in the headlights. Instead of leading the world, the president has been tiptoeing behind the Europeans,” Romney said in New Hampshire stop earlier this month.
Gingrich, Palin, and Mike Huckabee also joined the chorus for imposing a no-fly zone on the troubled North African country, and took aim at the Obama administration’s handling of the situation.
Barbour alone, in his comments Tuesday night, broke with that consensus.
“I don’t think it’s our mission to make Libya look like Luxembourg,” he told reporters in Davenport, warning of “nation-building.”
“At the end of the day, we might have some role in Libya but it should not be to send American troops in there and knock heads and make Libya what we would like Libya to look like. Because it, no offense, is not ever going to look like what we’d like it,” Barbour said.
A few weeks earlier, in Egypt, a similar dynamic unfolded as the administration grappled with how hard to push Mubarak, a U.S. ally for 30 years, to leave office. Even tempered by fears about a potential Islamist government taking power, most of the Republican presidential wannabes stuck to a pro-democracy political script — and slammed Obama for a lack of leadership.
Gingrich called the administration “amateurish,” while Pawlenty compared Obama’s response to the Tower of Babel and said that the situation was the result of the United States cozying up to autocratic regimes.
“It’s important to not be sitting — only supporting the authoritarian regimes for decades. That’s why we — 10 years ago, 20 years ago we should have been pushing President Mubarak to make these changes, even if incrementally, so that the people of Egypt could see the United States was pushing for those values and that we were getting results,” Pawlenty said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Barbour hasn’t suggested any difference from his peers on the “Arab Spring,” but he suggested for the first time Tuesday that he might test the intersection of Republican foreign policy and the anti-spending impulses of the Tea Party movement.
And even as the other major candidates who have begun to shape their platforms appear united around a hawkish internationalism, some Republicans believe that space is open for the taking.
“We’re sweating government cutting $61 billion out of the budget, and we’re spending almost three times that occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. You can’t quite take it off the table,” said Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist.
“There’s running room there — but you’ve got to be strong on defense, supportive of Bush and his positions, and you pivot out of that,” he said, adding that he understands why Republicans are leery of taking that risk.
For many Republicans, the debate over American operations abroad is tied to questions of spending, and the link between those two has been the subject of heated debates on the right this year. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol — a central voice in the current, hawkish GOP foreign policy — joined the presidents of the two central Republican think tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, in a “Defending Defense” manifesto urging that “anyone seeking to restore our fiscal health should look at entitlements first, not across-the-board cuts aimed at our men and women in uniform.”
Norquist’s group, and others with Tea Party ties, fired back that the focus on smaller government shouldn’t hold the Pentagon blameless. “True fiscal stewards cannot eschew real spending reform by protecting pet projects in the federal budget,” they wrote. “Any such Department of Defense favoritism would signal that the new Congress is not serious about fiscal responsibility and not ready to lead.”
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The exchange sparked a rolling debate on Capitol Hill, but among the leading Republican 2012 contenders, the matter appears to be largely settled on the pro-defense spending side. Romney and Gingrich, for instance, have publicly backed a Heritage Foundation plan under the rubric of “Four Percent for Freedom,” which would commit four percent of gross domestic product to baseline military spending – subtracting the cost of the two wars, which would put the current spending well over 4 percent.
2008 nominee McCain had refused to sign on to a similar rubric in 2008.
“Given what’s happening in the world, we should not reduce our commitment to national security,” Romney said in Concord, N.H., recently. “In particular, we should not cut the number of our men and women in uniform.”
As for Barbour, there seems to be a clear opening, as his only competition to be a less hawkish foreign policy voice is among second and third-tier candidates, and those who don’t seem to be running at all.
Rep. Ron Paul continues to oppose nearly all American foreign commitments. Donald Trump, who is flirting with a run, suggested to Newsmax the U.S. should be building roads in Alabama, not Afghanistan.
Huckabee, who has not taken steps toward a bid, recently cited “doubts” about the absence of an “endgame” in Afghanistan. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, in a similar position, has raised questions about the cost of American commitments.
And Santorum broke with his fellow Republicans on the question of democratiztion, saying he’s not “fixated” on democracy.
Ambassador Jon Huntsman’s foreign policy views are largely unknown, though members of Washington’s “realist” foreign policy camp harbor secret hopes that he’s one of them.
Barbour is striking a different note.
“Anybody who says you can’t save money at the Pentagon has never been to the Pentagon,” Barbour said. “We can save money on defense and if we Republicans don’t propose saving money on defense, we’ll have no credibility on anything else.”
