Given how many times Newt Gingrich rose from the proverbial electoral grave to become campaign-relevant again, I will not join the chorus claiming the fight for the Republican nomination is over. However, I will endorse another cliché: the primary season is at an important turning point, or at least it should be. It is high time the candidates focused on providing a compelling alternative to President Obama rather than providing a litany of reasons for detesting the other Republicans in the race.

The urgency is especially acute in foreign policy and national security. I have been fretting about this for some time now and I concede that the worst of my fears have not been realized; there won't be a crack-up within the party over foreign policy. Moreover, I endorse the conventional wisdom that the election will be won or lost on domestic policy and the economy.

However, that is no reason to settle for sloppy critiques and platforms in the area of foreign policy. Republicans must come to terms with the fact that this will be the strongest Democrat incumbent on national security and foreign policy they have faced in decades. This has more than a whiff of damnation with faint praise, since both President Clinton and especially President Carter were hobbled with substantial national security baggage during their reelection campaign. But for precisely that reason, I think Republicans have sometimes settled for an intellectually lazy critique because, given how weak the opposing party's record is, that seems to have sufficed.

Not this time. Obama has serious national security weaknesses and a record that warrants critique, but it is immune to superficial sound bite attacks. Soft on protecting America? The SEALs bought Obama immunity on that one when they took down Bin Laden. Naïve about the Iranian threat? Candidate Obama was demonstrably naïve about Iran and governed that way for the first half of his term, but since then has talked tough and marshaled strong sanctions.

Even issues where he has made bigger mistakes, like the failure to secure an agreement for stay-behind forces in Iraq, he may not be as politically vulnerable because they have been popular mistakes. The Iraq case illustrates my larger point well. Obama's hands-off approach to Iraq merits criticism (and I have supplied some here, here, and here, but it is hard to present the argument in a fashion that is brief enough to engage but fair enough to withstand administration rebuttals). Thus, Obama may have been hands-off personally, but the administration was not; Vice-President Biden devoted considerable time to the Iraq file, and with Ambassador Crocker on the ground, the administration had a good team in place. Moreover, the lion's share of the blame for the failure rests with the Iraqi leadership. I think reasonable people can question the way Obama handled the Iraq file, but it requires a nuanced line to explain how the administration missed the mark. Offer a sloppy critique, and the administration and its allies in the media swat it down with "But Bush negotiated the withdrawal agreement" -- and all too often the discussion ends there.

The Obama team's rare invocation of a Bush policy in the defense suggests two fruitful lines of contrast that the Republican nominee should develop:

1. Obama's foreign policy successes have come when he has followed Bush policies; his failures have come when he has struck out on his own. I have made this point before, but it bears reemphasis. Republicans need not fear giving Obama credit for his successes because to a remarkable extent they have come where he has governed like a Republican not like candidate Obama.

2. Obama has made relatively effective use of the tools and instruments of power that he inherited from his predecessor -- it raises the question, what new tools and instruments of power is Obama bequeathing to his successor? The SOF capabilities that produced the successful hunt for Bin Laden were honed on his predecessor's watch, especially by General McChrystal in Iraq. Likewise with tactics, techniques, and procedures associated with drone strikes. The financial levers that are squeezing Iran today were perfected by the Bush team. The key elements of Obama's Asia strategy -- the ones that have the best chance of yielding positive results -- were built under Bush and expanded under Obama. (Of course, in each of these areas, the Bush team took capabilities that were at an even more embryonic stage under Clinton's watch, so there is plenty of credit to be shared on both sides of the aisle. By the way, this is precisely how things transpired during the first Cold War, as the history of key programs like stealth technology demonstrate.) In some of these cases, Obama wisely kept many of the same architects who did the innovative work under Bush and expanded their influence and authority. So, the Republican nominee should ask, in what ways will Obama's successor have a larger and more powerful toolbox than the one Obama got to use?

Framing Obama's national security successes this way cuts sharply against the triumphalism that characterizes the White House communications operation. And, as the saying goes, it has the additional virtue of being true.

Republicans do not need to fear an accurate and fair evaluation of the record. But they will have to do the hard work of supplying it. Careless sound bites won't cut it this time around.

Update: When I said Ryan Crocker above of course I meant James Jeffrey. Crocker was an able Ambassador to Iraq under Bush and is now an able Ambassador to Afghanistan. James Jeffrey replaced Chris Hill in 2010 and, by all accounts, has worked assiduously to advance U.S. interests in Iraq.

Over at the indispensable Cable, word comes that the White House is now pushing the line that President Obama eschews the notion of "American decline," and has even become a devoted reader of Bob Kagan. As presidential reading lists go, this is a welcome development. If present trends continue, perhaps the White House communications shop will soon issue a story noting that President Obama is also a reader of Shadow Government? [ed. Dream on! Are you just saying this to bait the anonymous snarky responses that will soon appear in the "Comments" section? Or are you in denial that the President is much more likely to read Dan Drezner's blog? Who, by the way, is funnier than you -- and also doesn't believe in American decline.]

All kidding aside, this is a serious issue that merits some scrutiny. On the one hand, President Obama's rhetorical rejection of American decline is significant and welcome, precisely because presidential rhetoric plays a role in forming a nation's character and actions. As I have commented before, if a nation's leadership and citizens start believing the nation is in decline, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and infecting the nation's actions.

But presidential rhetoric is only a small part of the decline debate. Actions and policies are more important. So before junior White House staff start emulating their boss's reported new reading tastes and prompt a surge in Pennsylvania Avenue subscriptions to the likes of the Weekly Standard (to our friends at the Standard: may it be thus!), it is worth taking a closer look at this claim that the Obama administration rejects American decline.

This theme not inconveniently comes in an election year, as President Obama attempts to lay out his policy successes. As many others have pointed out, the White House seems reluctant to run on his major domestic policy initiatives such as ObamaCare or the $787 billion stimulus, judging by their almost complete absence from the State of the Union address. Instead, part of the campaign strategy seems to be pointing to foreign policy successes, such as in Obama's recent interview with Fareed Zakaria (himself a frequent apostle of American decline) where the president repeatedly claims that America's standing in the world is better than it was three years ago.

The inconvenient truth behind this claim is that most the Obama administration's foreign policy successes have come from adopting policies and strategies from the Bush administration. While as Jackson Diehl among others has pointed out, most of the Obama administration's signature initiatives have been failures. On the explicit question of American decline, rather than offering a full-throated rebuttal in his interview with Zakaria, Obama seems curiously ambivalent. On the one hand he strongly affirms American global leadership and repeats Madeleine Albright's description of the United States as the "indispensable nation," but on the other hand he says it is "inevitable" that China will overtake the United States as the world's largest economy.

Besides being a gifted journalist, Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker has also emerged as one of the White House's favored conduits for channeling the Administration's mindset and messages. For example, earlier this week Lizza published an article based on exclusive access he'd been given by the White House to internal decision memos on domestic policy. And it was also Lizza who received extensive access from senior administration officials for his famous profile of the White House's foreign policy last spring. Most notorious is the "leading from behind" phrase that the White House has regretted ever since, but the context it came from in the article is revealing and bears recalling (emphasis added):

Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the President's actions in Libya as "leading from behind." That's not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It's a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.

This deliberate message from the White House probably bears a closer resemblance to President Obama's strategic mindset than election year sit-downs with journalists or campaign lines from State of the Union addresses. Why? Because it also reflects many of the administration's actions. Such as the drawdown decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan that seemed to reflect political timetables more than conditions on the ground and commitments to maintaining American credibility. Or the recent "pivot" to Asia, which as many of us have pointed out is a welcome assertion of American presence in a strategic region but loses its potency if it is under-resourced, and presented as a retreat elsewhere because of our diminished capabilities. Or the administration's persistent refusal to make any serious cuts and reforms to the domestic entitlements that are fueling our runaway debt -- while the only spending cuts the White House has actually implemented are to the defense budget, which as Gary Schmitt points out is what we can least afford. And yes, even "leading from behind" our European allies during the Libya intervention.

Given the above actions the administration has taken that do diminish America's power and credibility in the world, is America actually in decline? No -- not yet anyway. Bob Kagan is correct. Our nation has too many strengths and is too resilient to be set back that much in such a short time. America's problems are considerable, but I would still rather have our challenges than the problems facing any other nation, whether China's brittle governance, imbalanced economy, demographic troubles, and resentful neighbors, or the European Union's currency and debt crisis, democratic deficit, and anemic defense capabilities. Rather, the worry is that the Obama administration's combination of actions and inactions are setting the United States on a trajectory towards decline -- a trajectory that if it continues unabated will be hard to arrest.

In his 2009 Inaugural Address, President Obama laid down a marker to those who would threaten the United States:

"We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense.  And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken -- you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you."

In 2011, he fulfilled this promise by ordering a daring raid on al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, resulting in the death of the architect of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  Given that the greatest responsibility of any commander in chief is keeping the American people safe, this action, combined with the president's continuance and expansion of many of the counterterrorism policies initiated by the Bush administration, were the president's greatest accomplishments in 2011.

However, lurking beneath these successes are the President's greatest failures of 2011. 

The president's counterterrorism accomplishments over the last three years have been supported by his policies toward the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  His willingness in 2009 to extend his campaign timeline for withdrawal from Iraq and his initial stewardship of the gains achieved by President Bush's 2007 surge of forces created the opportunity for a significant victory in the war on terror.  As the events of the last two weeks indicate, that outcome, unfortunately, is no longer certain given the administration's inability or unwillingness to negotiate a U.S. military presence in that country after the end of this year.

Similarly, in Afghanistan, the president initially appeared intent on achieving a military victory against the extremists that threaten Afghanistan's stability.  His 2009 surge of forces has produced significant gains, especially in the south.  But the president now seems more focused on winning reelection than winning the war.  The surge forces will be out of the country by October of next year and the press is rife with reports of secret reconciliation talks with the Taliban that could undermine the Afghan government and reverse the gains made by the Afghan people since the brutal days of Taliban rule.

Compounding these two failures in 2011 was the president's inability to leverage the momentous developments of the Arab Spring.  As people seeking their freedom took to the streets in country after country, President Obama stood by, letting others, many of whom do not share America's interests, take the lead.  Fundamental change in the sclerotic Arab world has the potential to reverse the trends that led to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the extremism that continues to threaten our way of life.  Unfortunately, the leader of the free world refused to lead.

Great leaders shape the strategic landscape rather than allow themselves and their countries to be buffeted around by world events.  President Obama deserves credit in 2011 for policies that led to the deaths of many who plotted to kill Americans, but because of his unwillingness to consolidate gains in Iraq and Afghanistan and embrace the revolutions of the Arab Spring, 2011 will likely be remembered as a year of missed opportunities rather than strategic successes.

The administration's most important success in 2011?  I'll go with the obvious: the Seal Team 6 takedown of bin Laden.  Never discount the vital national interest in visiting harsh justice upon those who mastermind mass slaughter on the American homeland -- even 10 years delayed.  The victims and their families deserved it.  The country yearned for it.  And the rest of the world needed a stark reminder that no matter how much time passes, no matter how far they run, the long arm of American retaliation will eventually reach out and touch those who opt to wage war against the United States.  Republican or Democrat in the White House, it makes no difference.  The message is the same, always the same:  Don't tread on me.

It was the president's finest hour.  His least charitable critics will demur.  In retrospect, they argue, he had to take the shot.  To have passed it up would have subjected him to intense criticism and ridicule.  A political catastrophe that would have sunk his presidency. 

Perhaps.  And yet.  The risks of giving the "go" order were substantial too.  The odds that bin Laden was not actually in the compound may have been as high as 50 percent. Several of the president's most senior advisors argued against the operation.  The potential geopolitical ramifications of a stealth raid deep inside Pakistan, the world's fastest growing nuclear weapons state and a breeding ground for Islamic extremism, weighed heavy.  As did the political and strategic costs of failure.  Images of the carnage at Desert One in Iran, and of Mogadishu's Black Hawk Down, could not but have haunted Obama's thoughts.  And still he went.  A quintessential presidential decision.  Lonely.  Courageous.  Necessary.  Good on him.

The bin Laden hit was part of a larger pattern of counter-terrorism successes that rightly should inure to the administration's credit.  Add to it the president's call to serve as judge, jury and executioner of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki on a remote highway in northern Yemen -- constitutional niceties and the qualms of Obama's liberal base be damned.  And more generally, the ten-fold escalation in drone strikes against al Qaeda targets in Pakistan that unquestionably have wreaked havoc on the organization's capabilities and morale.  Yes, the threat we face from bin Laden's evil spawn remains.  But the president has combatted it well, with a steeliness of spine, a quotient of ice in the veins, that deserves respect and appreciation.  His administration has kept the nation safe from further terrorist attack, despite the best efforts of a vicious and implacable foe.

As for the most important thing the administration got wrong in 2011?  Perhaps too predictably, I'll venture Iraq.  I don't believe the president ever really had the intention of maintaining a significant American military presence there.  Deep in his bones, he long ago resolved that the war was a huge blunder, a blot on America's moral character and a dangerous distraction from the real threats and challenges facing the nation. No amount of progress on the ground could convince him otherwise, or wash clean the stain of the war's original sin in his eyes.  Obama's mission from the get-go was to put Iraq into the nation's rear-view mirror, a goal from which he never really wavered.  The trick was to do it in a way that didn't immediately sacrifice all the hard-fought gains of Bush's surge, to create the prospect of a "decent interval" that would limit the potential for political blowback.

To placate those -- especially among the military's top brass -- who saw the strategic sense in consolidating a long-term partnership, the president authorized, albeit belatedly, negotiations to extend the U.S. troop presence.  But his heart was never in it.  As had been the case from the beginning of his term when it came to les affaires d'Irak, the president's involvement in the effort to get to "yes" was notable only for its absence. Anyone who'd ever spent any time working Iraq policy post-2003 could have told you from the start: A negotiation structured to limit the president's personal engagement in the muck and the mire of shepherding a deal through was in fact a negotiation structured to fail. And so it did.

Iraqi leaders certainly sniffed out long ago that Obama viewed them as the bastard step-children of Bush's failed policies, whom he hoped to kick to the curb at the first available opportunity.  They knew he had no intention of ever taking any real risks for them.  Predictably enough, when it came to the thorny issue of immunity for U.S. troops, they weren't about to take any for him either. 

Read on

The President has finished up a grueling trip to the Asia-Pacific region and can generally feel good about what he accomplished. Like everything this President does, however, the trip was very heavy on political spin. His team could not stop talking about their "pivot" to Asia. Whether this is a foreign policy strategy or just rhetoric in an election year, it deserves careful and considered deconstruction. Our colleague Dan Blumenthal began the critique last week by rightly pointing out that the pivot doesn't work when you hollow out defense spending. And Dan is not alone; Tom Donnelly also pointed out some of the flaws with the pivot concept. Now that the trip is over, more can be said.

PROS:

The Indo-Pacific region is the fastest-growing economic zone in the world; home to six of the eight known nuclear weapons states or proliferators (US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea); and scene of both 21st century economic integration and 19th century balance-of-power rivalry. The United States is a Pacific power with interests, influence, allies and territory right at the center of the region. Polling by the German Marshall Fund of the United States shows that Americans, by a considerable margin, believe Asia is more important to their country's national interests than Europe. At the same time, Asians have real questions about American staying power in their region (as they have on-and-off since Vietnam).

The president's success in signaling high-level American attention to the region should be reassuring to nervous friends and allies. Enactment of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (after years of deferring to the Democratic Party's labor base) and progress on negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership put momentum behind the goal of a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific that President Bush put forward. President Obama's conversion to these policies and the cause of trade liberalization has come late, but it is welcome nonetheless.

It also appears that despite embracing dangerously deep defense cuts overall, the Obama administration has decided that force structure reductions will mostly come in Europe and not Asia. Secretary of Defense Panetta sent that signal on his first trip to Asia, and it helped to blunt the growing concerns about American defense capabilities in the region.

Finally, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deserves credit for spending more time on and in Asia than most of her immediate predecessors. For all those reasons, whether it is called a "pivot" or not, the administration's increasing focus on Asia has big pros.

CONS:

But is a "pivot" the right way to frame this? First of all, without resources the big talk will quickly seem hollow to friends and foes alike. The United States is facing the prospect of up to a trillion dollars in defense cuts over the coming decade. Defense cuts of this magnitude cannot but undermine U.S. capabilities, and with them our ability to reassure and deter, in Asia. Defense spending cuts may come out of Europe and Southwest Asia, but when Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan get hot in the decade ahead, where will the forces come from? If we hollow out our force structure in Europe and Southwest Asia, we set up a situation where forces will eventually be drained out of East Asia. Our friends and adversaries know this.

In addition, the "pivot" spin makes the United States look like a spastic superpower that swings around focusing on only one region at a time. During the Cold War, the United States managed a grand strategy that was global in scope with skill; are we not capable of doing so today, when our freedom of maneuver and our relative power are in fact greater? It is unbecoming of a global power; unnerving for our European allies (whose support we also need to manage China's ascendance); and carries the unfortunate connotation that we may "pivot" again based on a new, reductionist, one-region-at-a-time concept of grand strategy.

Finally, by suddenly framing this entire trip as a swing against China, the White House risks unsettling the careful ground work done by American diplomats and military officials over the past year. The Australian base agreement is a good first step toward constructing a dispersed but robust forward presence as we prepare to cope with more missile threats to our forces. But as Teddy Roosevelt said, it is better to speak softly and carry a big stick. Now friendly countries like Indonesia are recoiling against U.S. strategy because of the last minute verbal assault on China. The "pivot" is even more jarring because the administration spent the first year framing Asia strategy in terms of a new U.S.-China bipolar condominium, articulated in the November 2009 Obama-Hu joint statement that trumpeted respect for each others' core interests and followed U.S. decisions to postpone meetings with the Dalai Lama and arms sales to Taiwan. Supporters of a strong U.S.-India relationship in Delhi were actually told by senior Obama administration officials at the time that the United States no longer believes in the concept of the balance of power. You cannot blame them for being a bit confused now. The pivot can be dizzying.

At the end of the day, we suspect the "pivot" is a convenient political frame for the White House to try to explain that the Obama administration remains muscular and strategic, despite its accelerated retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan. When domestic politics intrude on the framing of foreign policy in this way -- especially when it happens so suddenly-- the result can undercut what would otherwise be solid building blocks for a regional strategy in Asia. Still, kudos to those like Secretary Clinton who have remained consistent in their focus on Asia and to those U.S. officials who worked hard to reverse misguided early policies against trade liberalization and an ill-conceived U.S.-China bipolar condominium. Their work paid off on this trip. Meanwhile, let's be clear: superpowers manage rising powers with leadership and steadiness -- not pivots.

There has been much ado in the media and from the Obama administration about a great strategic shift from the Middle East and South Asia to East Asia. Obama and senior administration officials are making the case for this shift by claiming that we have accomplished our Iraq and Afghanistan goals, and that the time has come to focus on the "real problem": China. This week, the president announced the basing of 2,500 marines in Australia and a pushed for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional free trade agreement that excludes China. The U.S. military has also released some details on its new AirSea battle concept -- an answer to the dense network of submarines, mines, anti-aircraft capabilities, and missiles that China has created to keep the United States out of China's periphery. All of these moves are to be commended. However, they do not and should not add up to a new "pivot." Here are some reasons why:

1) There is no way for the U.S. to project the necessary influence into East Asia if Aghanistan and Pakistan are on fire. One major reason is that if India is tied down in a competition with Pakistan, China, and Iran in Afghanistan, it cannot become the kind of East Asian power we wish it to be. The Bush administration's India strategy was designed to help India break out of its squabbles in South Asia and exert influence in East Asia. A hasty pull-out of Aghanistan will reverse that sensible strategy.

2) China is exercising more influence in the Middle East in ways harmful to our larger goals (e.g., support of Iran). To compete with China in East Asia, we must retain our influence in the Middle East and South Asia and check destabilizing Chinese diplomacy.

3) The deployment of U.S. Marines to Australia and the highlighting of a military concept to respond to China's military build-up are necessary but insufficient first steps. These developments cannot make up for the fact that our military has faced deep cuts in its budget and will face more. No matter what administration officials say, these cuts will affect our posture in Asia profoundly. We need more ships, more aircraft, more missile defense. To be a bit flippant, we are putting Marines in Australia without sufficient equipment to get out of Australia. Our allies and China need to see and feel our presence. That can only be accomplished with more sea patrols, surges in exercises that promote freedom of navigation, and so on.

4) The AirSea battle concept is a serious effort to meet the China challenge. But based on information released about it, the concept suffers from two flaws. First, the resource question -- how would we shut down Chinese military operations without sufficient platforms and munitions? Second, AirSea battle fails to take into account China's nuclear ambitions. China is already a nuclear-armed country with every incentive to continue its build-up of nuclear forces. That is because we have agreed on a bilateral (with Russia) rather than multilateral basis to cap our nuclear forces. Since China is bound by no important arms control treaties, and because we are openly talking about major conventional strikes on the Mainland, China has every reason to seek nuclear parity with us over time.

5) The TPP is a great idea. In particular, securing Japanese agreement to an FTA would be a great success . The question is, are we serious? It took the better part of Obama's term to ratify the FTA with South Korea. Are we really to believe that he will take on his base and sign more major FTAs?

There is no dispute that we need to take serious steps to balance China's power. But we cannot do so by "pivoting" away from two critical areas of the world. We need India to have peaceful borders in order to compete with China, and we need to diminish China's influence in the Middle East. And finally, the Obama Administration needs to resource its stated Asia strategy, which it so far shows little sign of doing. 

President Obama flew west, met with Asia-Pacific leaders, and trumpeted his intention to strike a high-standards trade deal with other committed trading partners in the region, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

That paragraph could describe either this last weekend or Nov. 2009, when the president first revived the TPP (it was initially launched in Sept. 2008 under the Bush administration and set aside by the new Obama team). Perhaps that's why the story about the weekend's APEC leaders' gathering in Hawaii was buried in the inner pages of the Washington Post and failed to make the front page of the New York Times. The papers may have learned, with this president, to duly note the statements of grand intentions, but to save the gaudy headlines for actual accomplishments.

There has been some movement over the last two years, of course. The nine nations currently involved in the TPP negotiations have been meeting and hammering out a "framework" for the agreement. The Obama administration, over that time, moved from a tentative "intent to engage in discussions" to a full-fledged embrace of the TPP. New countries are now clamoring to join in the negotiations.

But enormous obstacles remain:

• Core structural issues of the TPP remain undecided. Will the TPP be a ragged quilt of existing agreements stitched together with new patches? Or will it be a new seamless fabric designed to cover existing and future participants? If the latter, it offers two great virtues: simplicity for businesses trying to trade across the region, and a clear high standard that any newcomers will have to meet (think China). But the United States has held out for the former. It already has FTAs with a number of the TPP participants and the idea of refighting all of those market-access battles is daunting for an administration that took almost three years to pass three already-completed FTAs.
• Will new members make significant commitments? Reports from APEC that Canada and Mexico want to follow in Japan's footsteps as new applicants to the TPP were described as a coup for President Obama. Perhaps. It certainly would heighten the economic significance of the TPP, if and when it is concluded. But the new entrants will make an already elusive agreement even more difficult to reach. Japan is more than reluctant to liberalize its agricultural sector. New Zealand has previously objected to Canada's illiberal approach to dairy imports. It is not hard to imagine an extreme in which one has a very large number of participants who engage in endless talks that never conclude (this has recently been known as "Doha" in the WTO context).
  Read on

The Nov. 23 deadline for a "Supercommittee" budget agreement is fast approaching, and no such agreement is as yet in sight. The Pentagon appears to be panicking over the prospect of sequestration, and with it a reduction of some $600 billion in defense-related spending over the next decade. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's warnings have become ever more dire. He has said that sequestration will "invite aggression from U.S. adversaries", that it will result in a "hollow force" of "ships without sailors" and "brigades without bullets."

The Secretary should know better. Not because sequestration, if implemented, would not be a disaster for DoD, but because the absence of an agreement, which would trigger a sequester, does not mean that sequestration will ever come to pass. It is important to note that the sequester would only come into force for the Fiscal Year 2013 budget; in other words, nearly a year must still pass before any cuts are mandated. And the Congress thus has nearly a year to legislate the sequester into the dustbin of history. 

It has happened exactly that way before, as Mr. Panetta knows only too well. He was a veteran of the House Budget Committee in 1988 when the Congress reached a budget deficit agreement that wiped out a $20 billion sequestration that was supposed to have been "automatically" triggered by the 1985 Balanced Budget Emergency Deficit Control Act, popularly known as Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. And he was chairman of the House Budget Committee in 1990, when he played a major role in the enactment of Congressional legislation that again circumvented the 1985 Act by lowering sequestration levels from the "automatic" $16 billion that the Act would have mandated to just over $4.5 billion in budget reductions. Again in 1991, with Mr. Panetta still serving as House Budget Committee chairman, a smaller sequester of some $190 million was rescinded in subsequent legislation that year when the purported savings were found to be the result of a miscalculation.

It is arguable that the long term health of America's defense posture would be better served if the Supercommittee fails to produce an agreement than if it does. It will be much harder for the Congress to rescind a budget deal to which all sides agreed, than to rescind a sequester that was the product of an absence of agreement. Even under the best of circumstances, it is unlikely that Defense could avoid cuts of $200-300 billion in a deal that totals $1.2 trillion; and those cuts will be difficult, if not impossible to restore. On the other hand, the Congress can be expected to rescind sequestration precisely because of the warnings that the Pentagon's top leaders have issued. And once the Congress returns to square one, the prospects for protecting the Defense budget will radically improve.

In an earlier post, I raised the possibility that Obama may not live up to his campaign promise to leave Iraq more responsibly than we entered it. I am hardly alone in wondering about this, but I haven't seen many attempts to document the ways that the exit is resembling the entry.

A few caveats are worth mentioning up front. The exit is still a work in progress and so there is plenty of time for things to go better (or worse) than might be forecasted now. Any judgment I or anyone else makes on the subject is provisional at best. Moreover, most of the critiques of the entry into Iraq owe more to partisan (or academic) mythology than to actual fact. But they have wide currency -- indeed, in some quarters, they are accepted as self-evident truths -- and so it is worth investigating the extent to which they might apply to the exit.

One of the earliest entry critiques was the charge that President George W. Bush hurried up the confrontation with Iraq in 2002 so as to distract from economic scandals and thus score an electoral advantage in the midterm elections. This allegation was made at the time by two people who later became high-level White House officials in the current administration. First, current WH spokesman Jay Carney, then a reporter for Time, raised the possibility that Karl Rove was orchestrating the Iraq timetable for political advantage. The second j'accuse was even more famous, Illinois State Senator Obama's speech explaining why he opposed the Iraq war. Prominent in his speech was this remarkable accusation:

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Roves to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income -- to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

At a time when the economy is suffering from some of the worst years since the Great Depression, the echo is unmistakable, and many critics believe that the Iraq decision was dictated by the 2012 election calendar. President Obama would have a hard time getting reelected based on the awful domestic conditions, but a campaign based on "ending the wars" might resonate with voters. The administration even has a couple of Enrons of their own to fuel the wackier versions of a conspiracy theory.

If you find it plausible that Bush let the difficult economic circumstances and the 2002 electoral calendar shape his approach to entering Iraq, shouldn't you find it more plausible that Obama has let his far more daunting economic troubles and the higher stakes 2012 electoral calendar shape his Iraq exit?

Then there is the charge that President Bush failed to command the process and instead out-sourced his Iraq policy to his Vice-President who spoke triumphantly about the mission but ham-handedly interfered with the delicate diplomacy running up to the confrontation. Well, President Obama adopted an even more hands-off approach to Iraq and formally tapped Vice-President Biden to be in charge of Iraq policy. Biden certainly has been the most triumphalistic) Administration figure about Iraq. And, sure enough, critics have charged that Biden fumbled the account. One of those critics is me, for I am on record worrying that Biden may have stepped on the delicate diplomatic negotiations for a more enduring U.S. military presence back in August.

Shouldn't critics who say that the failure of the UN process in the run-up to the 2003 invasion "proves" that Cheney was really the one calling the shots, and misfiring while doing so, likewise believe that the failure of the renegotiation process in the run-up to the exit "proves" that Biden misfired, too?

Finally, there is the charge that President Bush put in place the wrong team to handle his Iraq policy and these early failures doomed the effort.  Even Secretary Rumsfeld concedes in his memoir that picking Lt.Gen Ricardo Sanchez to head up the military side was a bad choice and Rumsfeld's critique of the civilian head, Ambassador Bremer, is scathing.  The team struggled to work together and to understand the situation in Iraq.  The crucial early period was squandered, sowing the seeds that reaped the bitter fruit of the sectarian violence of 2004-2006. By all accounts, the Bush administration finally got the right personnel in place when the President tapped General Dave Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to implement the new surge strategy and their ability to achieve unity of effort contributed considerably to the surge's success.

The Obama echo is striking.  Midway through his first term, Obama may have finally assembled a solid team with General Ray Odierno and Ambassador Jim Jeffrey.  But he started out with a choice that left many people, including myself, scratching our heads: picking Chris Hill to be the Ambassador.  Ambassador Hill certainly had a distinguished career, but he had no direct experience with Iraq and so was starting from square one.  Sure enough, within months credible reports were circulating about the poor civil-military coordination on the ground.  Perhaps the nadir was the description from one of his former subordinates of Ambassador Hill's alleged wasteful distraction to grow a lush lawn on the embassy compound.  Perhaps the complaints were petty, but the more fundamental charge that the Obama team squandered valuable time that undermined future success rings nonetheless.  

Shouldn't critics who traced the difficulties of the entry to the inability of the Bush team to work together effectively find similar connections between the difficulty of the exit and the troubles inside the Obama team?

As President Obama prepares to meet other G-20 leaders in Cannes later this week, he previewed his pitch with an op-ed in the Financial Times. It read a bit like a half-time locker room pep talk to a team that had gotten knocked around on the field.

"C'mon guys! We saved the world once, we can do it again! Heck, I've been through much worse than this and I did great. Here's the game plan..."

Perhaps it is inevitable that such pep talks exaggerate past accomplishments and take on a tone of forced cheerfulness (particularly when the coach is entering his contract year). The danger, though, is that this approach can undermine credibility and invite scorn (David Nakamura in the Washington Post today describes the potential for such a reaction).

Unfortunately, the world appears distinctly unsaved at the moment.

• The president trumpets the success of coordinated stimulus in 2009. Yet U.S. unemployment hovers around 9 percent and roughly three-fourths of the country thinks it's on the wrong track. European stimulus practitioners, like the United States, have encountered severe budget problems. China faces serious concerns about the repercussions of its bank-lending approach to stimulus.
• The president trumpets his passage of the recent FTAs as a pro-growth achievement. That's fair, but it's hard to justify his four year delay. What's more, the repeated pledge of earlier G-20 meetings to conclude the much more significant WTO Doha Round seems to have been dropped altogether. The U.S. role has recently been to explain to fellow countries just why their proposals won't work.
• The president tactfully applauds his European counterparts for reaching agreement last week on a plan to address the euro crisis. That will likely get him a warmer reception than his past admonishments. Unfortunately, after a brief post-summit euphoria, significant doubts have emerged about the European plan. The most telling and concise critique has come from the Italian bond market, which has pushed and held bond yields above 6 percent on Friday and today. Europe is still teetering.

The president concludes with a call for renewed efforts to achieve balanced, sustainable growth. Last week's developments in Europe are doubly troubling in this regard. While previous Treasury efforts under G-20 auspices to push for redressing global imbalances have been laudable, they largely came to naught. China and Germany resisted proposals for how to identify problematic imbalances. Now that Europe is seeking China's funds for its bailout, the odds of it joining in any concerted effort to press China on rebalancing (e.g. via currency appreciation) seem remote.

The most glaring difference of approach lies in the area of spurring economic growth. The president repeats his enthusiasm for his American Jobs Act, which attempts to boost demand through another round of stimulus. Europeans have taken an approach more akin to that of Congressional Republicans: focus first on fixing structural problems.

There are a couple reasons one might opt for a structural reform focus over a stimulus approach. A skepticism about the efficacy of stimulus and a concern about the impact of untended growing structural problems can argue for the primacy of reform (see Ed Lazear's excellent Wall Street Journal piece along these lines). Or one can note that the coffers are beyond empty and decide that stimulus is no longer affordable.

In either case, the President is likely to meet the same sort of skepticism in France that he has at home. It's not clear that a pep talk will do much good.

Ramesh Ponnuru makes an interesting argument that President Obama is not as good at politics as he believes in part because "Obama never had to fight for and win the votes of people who don't agree with him."

Ponnuru goes on to observe that most of Obama's base believes that the president has sincerely compromised, or at least sincerely offered to compromise -- and in response Republicans have cynically pocketed every compromise and demanded more. Thoughtful Obama supporters have said essentially that to me numerous times over the last year. When I reply that thoughtful Republicans believe the opposite -- that Obama has cynically exploited them at every turn - the Obamaites shake their head in disbelief. By their words and body language, they are telling me that they simply cannot understand how Republicans could believe that Obama has failed to take Republican concerns adequately to heart.

As one might imagine, when I talk to my Republican friends, they express a similar disbelief: How can people not see that Obama has cynically politicked for partisan gain on issue after issue?

So what's going on here? I think there are two related things. First, contrary to the views of purists in either wing (Tea Partiers on the right and Wall Street Occupiers on the left), our system suffers from a paucity of cross-party friendships. There is too little coziness among intellectual combatants, not too much.

I work in one of the most monolithically partisan professions in America (the academy) yet I had the opportunity to serve in both Democrat (the Clinton) and Republican (the Bush) White Houses. As a result, I have close friends and colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I've had to cooperate regularly with partisans from almost every spot on the American political spectrum, from those far to the left of the Democratic Party to those to the right of the Republican Party. I can also think of people I respect at every spot on the spectrum. That's not true of everyone I've met, of course, but I have learned important things about politics and policy from many them. I even regularly break bread with people whose life work seeks to undo things that I have tried to build -- which helps increase both mutual understanding and my heartburn.

The result of this is sometimes to moderate my own views, which is what purists fear. But it's just as often to sharpen the content while softening the edges. That is, having friends on the opposite sides of issues does not mean I have to change my mind about certain policy convictions. But it does make it harder to demonize them.

That, I believe, is essential for fruitful democratic politics -- and that is what's largely missing today. It's often said, but it happens to be true: When I talk to long-time Members of Congress, they sometimes wax nostalgic about a time when the Members did not rush back home to raise money in their district but hung around Washington to socialize with their fellow political leaders, including those from across the aisle. There were plenty of partisan fights and deep ideological divides in those days, but they were laid on top of an underlying foundation of personal connections and personal trust that was more substantial than it is today.

Second, a consequence of living in such a bipartisan world is that many (in my case most) policy discussions happen with people who fundamentally disagree with you. If you are going to make any intellectual headway in those discussions, you have to be able to understand their position before you can hope to change their mind. This is what is supposed to be (but rarely is) the hallmark of scholarly persuasion: describing the other side's position fairly enough that an objective observer cannot detect what your position is. None of us, myself included, live up to that ideal -- but it is possible to get a good deal closer to it than what we see today.

For professional politicians, one worthwhile goal may be to describe the policy arguments of your opponents in a manner that they would recognize the arguments as (more or less) their own. This is a rare thing to witness; the best example in the Bush administration can be found in President Bush's 2001 speech on stem cell research. It is, I would argue, the closest thing we've seen in recent times to a model of responsible and civil debate, whatever you think of the merits of his decision.

So I would ask: When was the last time President Obama described the views of his opponents in such a fashion? You'll be hard pressed to think of a single example. And until he can do this more consistently, his capacity to persuade the undecided, let alone those who disagree with him, will be quite limited. And if he cannot effectively persuade people who aren't already Obama cheerleaders, it's hard to see how he can lead effectively.

The bungled handling of the requirements of the Child Soldier Prevention Act last week is a clear and disturbing sign that the U.S. policy apparatus around global children's issues remains seriously broken. Back in 2009, I urged Secretary Clinton to fix these problems by appointing a high-level Ambassador for Children. To her credit she has appointed Ambassador Susan Jacobs as her Special Advisor for Children's Issues. This was an important step forward, but not enough. Ambassador Jacobs sits in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, limiting her remit to children who are either adopted internationally or abducted across borders. These issues, especially adoption, desperately needed more attention and I wish the Ambassador well in her efforts. The sad recent death of Steve Jobs, adopted as an infant, was a reminder of the positive outcomes adoption can have for children. While important for thousands of needy children and American families, adoption issues are a small part of the equation for adequately protecting the world's children.

No high level attention exists for the millions of other vulnerable children -- street children, child trafficking victims, unaccompanied minor refugees and the most neglected of all, children affected by war (including both forced conscription and gender based violence). Several bureaus and offices at State and USAID have some responsibility for each of these groups of children, but with no high level official responsible for tracking both policy and foreign assistance directed to all of them, they continue to fall through the cracks, all while disjointed policy decisions persist. This is the second year in a row that the Obama Administration granted waivers to every country identified in its own Trafficking in Persons Report (2011) as using child soldiers and under sanction threat. Josh Rogin reported on the debacle both years. I have no inside knowledge of the process either year, but to someone involved in this type of policy debate in the past it looks like the decision memo for the Secretary was cleared at low levels. The regional bureaus' standard desire for waivers won over efforts by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) and the Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons to use the diplomatic pressure Congress had given them with the CSPA. The result was the administration again playing catch up with an angry NGO community and Members of Congress who are fighting back.

National security waivers, like those included in the CSPA, are important for the Secretary's discretion to weigh counter-veiling U.S. interests in each country impacted by legislation. Some of the waivers given this year may even have been justified. Yemen, for example, makes sense for a waiver based on important counter-terror cooperation. In the justification memo for the waivers, the arguments for the importance of our counter-terror efforts in Yemen are clear. Unfortunately, there is not a single mention of anything we are doing to address the issue of child soldiers in Yemen, probably because we are doing nothing. Youth can become the fiercest and most undisciplined soldiers and also the most susceptible to recruitment into terror networks. Linkages between child soldiers and counter-terrorism are clear to someone looking for them and seeking to find creative solutions to both threats.

The second CSPA mishandling reveals that no one is ‘minding the store' when it comes to global rights-based child protection issues. There are special challenges to dealing with child rights and interests. Someone who understands those special security issues and vulnerabilities needs to be specifically tasked with monitoring and advocating for the full range of children vulnerable to abuse and neglect. There are several options. The Secretary could choose to create a separate office, like the Office of Global Women's Issues, responsible for child protection issues. Concerns about a proliferation of such offices within the State Department makes this a big ask. Another option would be to handle children's issues much like disability issues. In 2004, an Advisory Committee on Disability Policy was formed with participation from external experts and jointly chaired by State and USAID. This led to the appointment of the new Special Advisor on International Disability Rights who sits in DRL with the mandate to rally attention and cooperation around disability. Something similar for child protection would help avoid mistakes like the handling of the CSPA. It also would provide a natural ally and advocate within the Department for efforts such as the Child Soldier Initiative led by retired Lt. General Romeo Dallaire of Rwanda fame, or organizations focused on advocacy for children affected by armed conflict such as Invisible Children or the Network for Young People Affected by War.

Everyone, in theory, supports greater child protection. Specific challenges, however, are easy to forget and ignore. We do so to the detriment of U.S. interests and the future of our world. Inspired by my own view of these foreign policy disconnects, I have launched a new platform for cooperation and support called Each Inc. to help address the dire need for more attention to child protection globally. The private sector is waking up to the issues and Congress clearly wants to do more. Secretary Clinton is the perfect leader to implement the important changes required to avoid a third strike on the CSPA next year and better protect the world's most vulnerable children. I hope she does.

I have a few additional thoughts beyond the ones I posted earlier on the implications of the historic drone strike that killed al-Awlaki and another U.S. citizen who had linked up with Al Qaeda:

* Shadow Government's house historian, Will Inboden, has chastised me for making this point before, but I am slow to learn from history (and historians) so I will make it again anyway: I think Obama's embrace of drone strikes and most of the rest of the Bush Administration Global War on Terror institutional edifice further solidifies the Bush-Obama/Truman-Eisenhower parallel. (The observant reader will note that I made this point exactly one year ago and am now making it again. Coincidence? Or is it because this is the week that my American Grand Strategy seminar studies the Truman-Eisenhower transition?) Obama, like Ike, campaigned on the premise that his predecessor had thoroughly botched the most important grand strategy challenges of the day and that he (Obama/Ike) would dramatically alter course if elected. However sincere that campaign critique may have been, once elected the new Administration ended up embracing most of the very same controversial elements -- in this case, Obama's embrace of secret legal memos to authorize unilateral uses of force outside of a formal UN process. Of course, containment policy remained a subject of bitter partisan debate after the Eisenhower Administration, but the parameters of that debate were narrowed considerably by the simple fact that Eisenhower embraced more than he replaced of the strategy he inherited from his predecessor. Obama has done the same and I expect a similar effect on the parameters of future debates over the war on terror.

* While the continuity is mostly to be praised, not all of it is beyond critique. My former colleague John Bellinger has argued that Obama may be following Bush too closely in one respect: relying on secret legal reasoning rather than going to Congress and the international community to shore up the political foundations undergirding the most controversial legal aspects of the war. Circumstances eventually forced Bush to secure more explicit Congressional authorization for controversial features of his detainee policy, but Bellinger argues it would have been preferable to lock in Congressional and international buy-in earlier. The Obama Administration is following the Bush precedent and, ultimately, may be forced to deal with Congress and the international community as Bush was. Bellinger argues that Obama would be better served by initiating the legal conversation now, rather than delaying the inevitable. Former Congresswoman Jane Harman proposes an intriguing first step: declassify the legal memo that authorized the strike that killed al-Awlaki. My guess is that this would trigger more debate than consensus, for, as another former Bush official, Jack Goldsmith, has argued, many of the opponents of drone strikes have no interest in establishing a legal framework that would permit the strikes. The opponents want to stop the strikes, period. But Goldsmith also rightly points out that that debate is inevitable so perhaps Bellinger and Harmon are on to something.

* Speaking of legal memos, I think this strike may have killed the movement to prosecute Bush-era officials involved in detainee policy. An important part of Obama's political base has never been satisfied with the previous investigations that exonerated Bush officials, and has long called for prosecuting those who acted under the legal protection of official Justice Department memos and, indeed, has called for going after the lawyers who wrote those very memos. The Obama Administration has stopped short of launching the full witch-hunt the left is demanding, and it is hard to see how they could initiate it now. Any action against Bush officials who wrote the legal memos or who acted consistent with those memos would seem to open up a precedent that exposed all of the Obama team to the same risk once Obama's successor is in office. Perhaps there is a crafty legal strategy that would snare all Bush "witches" whilst allowing all the Obama ones to evade the net. But my guess is that the Obama team will not want to put that risky strategy to the test. 

Is the Obama administration's relationship with Israel close or cold? According to Eli Lake, writing in the most recent issue of Newsweek, it is both. Lake, in reporting the apparent delivery of "bunker-buster" bombs by the US to Israel, provides additional substance to an argument often made by defenders of the administration's approach to Israel: that despite any strains in the political relationship over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, U.S.-Israel military and security ties have never been stronger. 

That the military-to-military relationship is strong is not in dispute -- it has been growing broader and deeper for many years, and the Obama Administration has maintained this trajectory. That the strength of this relationship attests to the good health of the U.S.-Israel alliance, however, is questionable.

The ties between the US and Israel are based on many things, not least a deep historical and cultural affinity. However, those ties are also based on shared strategic interests. The United States provides military assistance to Israel not out of charity, but because it is in our interest to do so (indeed, this is the rationale behind most foreign assistance). Israel is a powerful, competent, and cooperative partner in a region of the world that is vital to American security and prosperity. Our assistance not only protects Israel, but also provides for our common defense against threats such as Iran's nuclear and missile program and transnational terrorist groups. These threats and Israel's cooperation in dealing with them are not merely hypothetical, as demonstrated by the Israeli strike on Syria's clandestine nuclear program in 2007. We seek to safeguard Israel's security in order to advance our own.

Providing for Israel's security, however, involves more than good military-to-military ties. It also requires a good political relationship, for two reasons. First, the threats faced by the United States and Israel (and our other allies) in the Middle East have both political and military dimensions, and often the former are more important than the latter. Frequent, close, and candid political contacts are vital in any alliance for dealing with potential threats (and capitalizing on opportunities) before they metastasize into matters that must be dealt with by generals. Second, many of the steps the United States would like Israel to take (or, in some cases, refrain from taking) would be eased by the assurance of strong U.S. backing for Israel, whether at the United Nations or in regional and global capitals. As is the case throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, our political and security relations with Israel are inextricable.

Many observers have suggested that our military support for Israel should be traded for Israeli concessions in the peace process (indeed, this was the implicit bargain offered by the United States to Israel in November 2010 -- military hardware in exchange for an extension of the settlement freeze). This sort of zero-sum thinking has a simplistic appeal, but does not stand up to the rigors of the real world. A more patient and nuanced approach views our security relationship with Israel -- and indeed our regional security efforts -- and advancing the peace process as mutually reinforcing. The reasons are simple: first, an Israel both consumed with external threats and worried about the reliability of U.S. backing is one which will hunker down, not take risks for peace; second, to the extent Israel and its neighbors are focused on similar threats, such as Iran and terrorism, our efforts to counter those threats can serve as a rare point of cooperation, even if implicit, among them and improve the regional political atmosphere.

The United States should not be uncritical of Israel, nor should we expect that we will not have differences, including publicly, with Israeli leaders. The reality of any alliance is that however extensively overlapping our interests, they are not identical. But we should treat those differences -- as we do with other close allies -- as obstacles to be overcome as we pursue a close and cooperative military and political relationship. We should not allow them to define the relationship, much less highlight them in the vain hope of winning the esteem of Israel's foes.