Jacob Heilbrunn

The New York Times is marking the passing of the three amigos, as they were apparently dubbed by the now-disgraced Gen. David Petraeus, with an elegiac article about their contributions to foreign policy debates. The piece suggests that the three comrades--Senators Joseph Lieberman, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham--represented a bipartisan era in foreign affairs that is passing away. With Lieberman's retirement, so we are told, an era is over.

It's a venerable theme. The notion is that once upon a time there was a golden age when the two parties cooperated with each other to further the national interest. The true story, of course, is more complicated. Fights over foreign policy have always existed. Consider the XYZ affair. President John Adams had asked Thomas Jefferson to act as an envoy to the French. Jefferson refused and focused his efforts on strengthening the nascent Republican party. So much for bipartisanship. Consequently, Adams sent his own three amigos--Elbridge Gerry, John Marshall, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney--to negotiate secretly with the French to put an end to attack upon, and seizures, of, American merchant ships. Adams had to contend with the neoconservatives in his Federalist party--Alexander Hamilton and others--who were champing at the bit for war against the French. At the same time, the irenic Republicans mistrusted Adams' peace feelers, fearful that they were bogus. Even as these disputes percolated, a Quasi-War erupted with France, one that was ended by the Convention of 1800.

The examples of domestic divisions over foreign affairs could be multiplied. It was really after World War II that the myth of bipartisanship took off. It wasn't rooted completely in fancy. Republicans such as the young Congressman Richard Nixon supported the Marshall Plan and Arthur Vandenberg, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, jettisoned his previous isolationism. But during the cold war disputes raged over foreign policy as well. It was hardly a time of comity.

The sight of Lieberman, McCain, and Graham seemed, however, to offer a reminder of better days. But did it really? The truth is that McCain was in some ways less a Republican than a neocon by the late 1990s. McCain began his political career as a traditional Republican realist but then became progressively more enamored of what amounted to neoconservative views, which, after all, had their origins in the Democratic party in the early 1970s, when a group of cold war Democrats became disaffected with their party's drift toward George McGovern. For his part, McCain's unusual saga began in Bosnia where he endorsed American intervention. McCain became increasingly more hawkish toward Iraq and Russia. Now Syria is in his target sights.

But are McCain and Graham about to suffer a loss of prestige? According to the Times, what is at stake may be as much about GOP foreign policy as it is about bipartisanship. At a moment when the GOP has become increasingly isolated as President Obama pursues a more cautious course abroad--no intervention in Syria, withdrawal from Afghanistan--Lieberman's retirement could pull out a vital neoconservative strut:

For Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham, the loss of Mr. Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent who is the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, goes beyond personal deprivation and could profoundly affect their ability to influence foreign policy. Though he frustrated many Democrats with his interventionist ideas, Mr. Lieberman gave Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham, both Republicans, a veneer of bipartisanship that lent credibility to their policy goals.

If this theory is true, it could have significant implications for Republican Party foreign policy, which has been mesmerized by neocon doctrine for at least a decade. Perhaps the problem with American foreign policy is that there has been too much conformism and not enough dissension in recent years. Might a form of emancipation take place in which a more sober view of American interests replaces the ebullient neocon nostrums?

Flickr: Gage SkidmoreIn the end it wasn't even close. President Obama defeated Mitt Romney in the swing states and the Democratic party retained control of the Senate. The results should be a reality check for the GOP--if it's interested in realism. With unemployment exceeding 7 percent, enthusiasm for Obama personally is tepid, but he appears to have created a new multiracial Democratic party that could provide the basis for a kind of Rooseveltian electoral coalition in future elections. He is now only the second Democratic president following World War II to win a second term. His legacy, however, already looks to be far more influential than Bill Clinton's.

Obama will be able to consolidate his health-care victory from his first term as well as the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform. Those are two big victories for him. The GOP has also lost the chance to alter the composition of the Supreme Court--Obama may get up to three nominations in his second term. The looming fiscal cliff could also break his way. The fact that the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012 gives him a strong hand in negotiations with the GOP. Republicans would be foolish to underestimate Obama's resolve--fresh off his election, he can campaign across the country for his version of tax and deficit reduction rather than remain stuck in Washington, a Ronald Reagan model that his surrogates are indicating he intends to follow. But another factor is that Obama, says Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus, is more seasoned and ready to compromise:

No matter how strong his base of Democratic voters, Obama needed compromise-loving independents to stick with him too.

And Obama has spent plenty of time in the last few weeks talking with Clinton, a supremely pragmatic president who regularly enraged his party's liberal base whenever he thought a lunge to the right might help him pass legislation through a Republican-held Congress.

Nevertheless, second term presidencies are usually a disaster. What might trip up Obama? Foreign affairs. He has boxed himself into something of a corner on Iran and the possiblity that he will bomb Iran should not be discounted--a move that could trigger fresh upheaval in the Middle East and send oil prices soaring. It's also the case that China's economy is faltering. So is Europe's. Fresh blows to the halting American recovery cannot be precluded.

What about the GOP? It's soul-searching time. A good case could be made that the author, in many ways, of the GOP's problems is William Kristol. Kristol saddled John McCain with Sarah Palin. He's the biggest backer of Paul Ryan, a Washington creature, who is being talked up as a potential presidential candidate in 2016--when was the last time a Congressman won the presidency? And Kristol, of course, has dominated foreign policy debate in the GOP by ceaselessly purveying neocon malarkey about American militarism abroad, but Romney's bluster about a new American century went nowhere. Had Romney shunned the neocon bluster and campaigned as a Massachusetts moderate, he would have posed a much greater threat to Obama than he did.

The temptation, of course, will be to blame Romney, and Romney alone, for the defeat. This is nonsense. Yes, Romney was always an unpromising candidate, but of the Republican primary candidates Romney was the most formidable. The campaign he waged was far superior to John McCain's in 2008. But ultimately the positions that Romney was forced to adopt undid his campaign. He never really recovered from pandering to a base that never fully accepted him. From calling himself "severely conservative" to the Todd Akin disaster, Romney was crippled by the radicalism of the GOP. Texas Senator John Cornyn observed:

It’s clear that with our losses in the Presidential race, and a number of key Senate races, we have a period of reflection and recalibration ahead for the Republican Party.  While some will want to blame one wing of the party over the other, the reality is candidates from all corners of our GOP lost tonight.  Clearly we have work to do in the weeks and months ahead.

Ultimately, the problems afflicting the party are so obvious that they barely require enumeration, from the neocon control of the foreign-policy debate to moralistic flapdoodle about women. This should have been an election that the GOP had a strong shot at winning. Its self-destructive tendencies mean that it didn't. The bottom line is that the Karl Rove model for creating a Republican majority that he boasted about in 2004 is broken. There is no evangelical coalition that can put the GOP over the top. On the contrary, it almost singlehandedly destroyed the GOP's hopes of capturing the Senate. The GOP can reboot or it can follow the model of the Democratic party that lost three straight presidential elections before turning to Bill Clinton in 1992. What will it choose?

Usually it is Mitt Romney who is accused of being a shape shifter. But last night President Obama radically altered his persona from the first to the second debate. The result was not a triumph but certainly a comeback for Obama, who succeeded in stopping Romney from painting him as a hapless weakling. Instead, as both contestants bleated on about the importance of the middle class (which will need to see a cut in entitlements, whether or not either candidate wants to say so or not), Obama got in a number of jabs about Romney as plutocrat. Romney's job was to try and move to the center; Obama's, to heighten the differences between the two and portray himself as the last defender of social programs that Romney would savage. The viciousness of the debate was further testament to the polarization of the electorate that has taken place. The debate lacked the kind of decorum that has marked previous ones, and the very attempts to score it show just how far American politics continues to devolve into theater. The hostility on both sides was barely kept in check, with Romney seething with anger and Obama casually contemptuous of his challenger.

Perhaps the main problem for Romney was that the new Romney had already debuted at the first debate. So the media focus was on Obama. Romney committed some blunders, but he hung tough. It was a brutal contest whose brutality will probably be exceeded in the  upcoming third debate over foreign affairs next week. If last night was anything to go by, the final debate could be very treacherous ground for Mitt Romney.

Romney veered close to the edge of disaster when he brought up Obama's greatest weakness, which is his handling of Libya. Romney was so fixated with nailing the president as soft on terrorism that he engaged in the "never" mistake—stating that Obama never indicated that an act of terrorism took place—without being dead certain that he was right. He was repeating propaganda, not facts, and he ended up hoisted by his own petard. Here was Romney:

I – I – I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Get the transcript.

MS. CROWLEY: It – he did in fact, sir.

Bluntly put, Romney got carried away in alleging that the president refused to state that the attack on the consulate in Benghazi was an act of terror. He was rebuffed by both Obama and the debate moderator Candy Crowley, who did a good job of corralling the two combatants. Romney's better tack would have been to question why Obama got America mired in what amounted to a new war in the Middle East. There remains much that is unclear about Libya, but a similar mistake during the third debate could prove devastating to Romney.

Not surprisingly, Romney was at his strongest in focusing on Obama's performance on the economy. He landed some tough blows against Obama, particularly when it came to the trillions in budget deficits that he's accumulated over the past four years. But Romney should have pursued more aggressively his contention that "government does not create jobs." By spitting out those phrases toward the end of the debate, he risked making himself sound petulant and peevish. Romney also did not do a good job of detaching himself from the record of George W. Bush, which he had to counter. The question about the distinction between Bush and Romney amounted to a softball for Obama, who is continually drawing a direct link between the two. At the next debate Romney could face a simple question from the audience: "Why have you appointed so many neocons as advisers who led America into disastrous wars of choice in the Middle East?"

The bottom line, however, is that the election has tightened and that the debates may no longer significantly affect the results—barring a major gaffe by one of the candidates. Romney has recovered his dignity and become a plausible candidate after floundering for months. But the overall odds, as National Interest editor Robert W. Merry has often pointed out, remain stacked in Obama's favor—he's not mired in a losing war, the economy is haltingly recovering. All Obama needed was a draw last night, and he got more than that.

Image: Malwack

So where did Mitt Romney come down in his big speech, "The Mantle of Leadership," at the Virginia Military Academy, on the side of the neocons or realists? He didn't. Instead of choosing between neocons and realists, he chose not to choose. His speech was a blend of great-power chest-thumping that artificially inflated the differences between him and Obama, on the one hand, and cautious prescriptions that did little to suggest the course he would pursue as president, on the other.

Rhetorically, the speech was pure neocon. Romney talked about returning to the great traditions of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. He talked about spreading freedom abroad. And he painted a Manichean portrait of the Middle East, suggesting that Obama has failed to appreciate the urge for freedom and liberty in the region, while foolishly distancing Washington from Jerusalem. Romney sought, above all, to suggest that Obama is a new President Carter, that once again America is under siege abroad. According to Romney,

The attacks against us in Libya were not an isolated incident.  They were accompanied by anti-American riots in nearly two dozen other countries, mostly in the Middle East, but also in Africa and Asia.  Our embassies have been attacked.  Our flag has been burned.  Many of our citizens have been threatened and driven from their overseas homes by vicious mobs, shouting “Death to America.”

It is telling that Romney uses the passive voice, in an effort to make the protests sound as threatening and ubiquitous as possible. But as the New York Times notes, there is no monolithic Arab world. What Romney does not acknowledge here is that the riots did not come out of the blue but were prompted by a viciously destructive anti-Islam movie that was made in America—or, at a minimum, that the film provided a handy pretext for anti-American uprisings.

Romney also is intent on depicting a battle between freedom and repression in the Middle East that is directly analogous to the Cold War. He stated,

^{In short, it is a struggle between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair. We have seen this struggle before.  It would be familiar to George Marshall.  In his time, in the ashes of world war, another critical part of the world was torn between democracy and despotism.  Fortunately, we had leaders of courage and vision, both Republicans and Democrats, who knew that America had to support friends who shared our values, and prevent today’s crises from becoming tomorrow’s conflicts.}

But this is nostalgia masquerading as foreign policy. The upheaval in the Middle East would not be familiar to Marshall. Europe consisted of countries that had long feudal traditions, then experienced the Enlightenment, before becoming democracies themselves, at least in the case of Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, Greece and Italy. To liken them to Arab countries in the Middle East, which mostly consists of kleptocracies, is unpersuasive. In his quest for clarity, Romney is unwilling to acknowledge complexity.

But what Romney would actually do in the Oval Office is uncertain. Substantively, Romney, apart from calling for more shipbuilding programs, didn't really propose much that would represent a sharp break with current policies. He was rather vague in his speech about what kind of assistance he would render to the Syrian rebels. Whether Romney would actually confront China sharply is also questionable. When it came to Iran, Romney said, "I will put the leaders of Iran on notice that the United States and our friends and allies will prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. I will not hesitate to impose new sanctions on Iran, and will tighten the sanctions we currently have." This would seem to describe the Obama administration's stance perfectly. Romney makes it sound as though he has fundamental differences with Obama, but it is difficult to discern a practical one when it comes to Iran and other foreign-affairs issues.

His most likely move as president is unclear. A case could be made that the Republican nominee Romney is being supremely realistic in backing both realism and neoconservatism in his approach to foreign policy. As president, however, the real Romney would have to emerge.

Image: Talk Radio News Service