Last night Martha Raddatz broke the media's code of silence and revealed to the American people that there is a country called Afghanistan, that American troops are there, and that we are at war. This shocking betrayal of omerta temporarily ruffled the presidential race as it forced Vice President Joe Biden and Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan to acknowledge these heretofore unspoken realities. In the epic two-year race for president, the candidates -- no, their seconds -- were forced to spend an entire ten minutes talking about it. How did they fare?

Ryan gave one of the clearest and most thoughtful comments on Afghanistan that I've heard from any American politician from either party in years (admittedly, that is a low bar). He made clear that the Romney/Ryan ticket is committed to a successful transition to Afghan leadership. It is remarkable for its moderation; for the fact that Ryan thinks and speaks in whole, complete sentences; and for its acknowledgment of the importance of finishing the job. It is worth quoting at length (Politico has a transcript).

We don't want to lose the gains we've gotten. We want to make sure that the Taliban does not come back in and give Al Qaida a safe haven. We agree with the administration on their 2014 transition...What we don't want to do is lose the gains we've gotten. Now, we've disagreed from time to time on a few issues. We would have more likely taken into accounts the recommendations from our commanders, General Petraeus, Admiral Mullen, on troop levels throughout this year's fighting season. We've been skeptical about negotiations with the Taliban, especially while they're shooting at us. But we want to see the 2014 transition be successful, and that means we want to make sure our commanders have what they need to make sure that it is successful so that this does not once again become a launching pad for terrorists.

By contrast, Joe Biden said:

But we are leaving. We are leaving in 2014. Period. And in the process, we're going to be saving over the next 10 years another $800 billion. We've been in this war for over a decade. The primary objective is almost completed. Now, all we're doing is putting the Kabul government in a position to be able to maintain their own security. It's their responsibility, not America's.

Biden appeared to go rogue on foreign policy. The position he outlined last night -- a complete withdrawal of all troops by 2014 -- is not the Obama administration's position, at least not its public position. President Obama has committed to an enduring international military presence beyond 2014. At the very least, it will include continued training for the Afghan army and police and an American counterterrorism capability. At the NATO Summit in Chicago earlier this year, ISAF's Declaration on Afghanistan promised NATO support to Afghanistan "up to 2014 and beyond," and promised to establish "a new training, advising and assistance mission." In the new U.S.-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement, signed in May 2012, Afghanistan agreed to "provide U.S. forces continued access to and use of Afghan facilities through 2014, and beyond as may be agreed...for the purposes of combating al-Qaeda and its affiliates."

The post-2014 mission could easily require more than 20,000 - 25,000 troops to remain in Afghanistan. Because media outlets regularly report 2014 as a "withdrawal" deadline instead of a transition deadline, it will take Americans by surprise that this is already U.S. policy. In the absence of any decisions to the contrary, bureaucratic inertia will leave tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan well beyond 2014. Biden is either unaware of this, or unwilling to acknowledge it. And (hat tip to The Cable), he also misstated the administration's view on the war's basic purpose and goals.

Biden's comments give credence to conservatives' fears that the Obama administration is being disingenuous about its true policy; that it has no real plans to leave a stay-behind force in Afghanistan after 2014 and is only lip-synching the responsible rhetoric to keep things calm while they hasten to withdraw. That's essentially what they did on Iraq. Ryan could have highlighted the botched efforts to get a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq and the deteriorating security there as a result, and warned the same thing may happen in Afghanistan if Obama/Biden is left in charge for another four years. He didn't, but the Romney campaign could take up that critique in coming days. If you liked Afghanistan before 2001, or if you think Iraq today is a good model for post-2014 Afghanistan, then you'll love what a second Obama term will bring us.

President Obama said last night that "the path we offer may be harder, but it leads to a better place." That is risibly inaccurate on national security issues -- this administration has done the exact opposite: It has taken the easy path that leads to a worse place. In particular, President Obama:

• wrote off Iraq rather than continue a glide path that was leading to the consolidation of our gains and the strengthening of representative government in Iraq. His insistence on an early end to combat operations and a timeline unconnected to political and military milestones (like the election and government formation) destabilized a fragile Iraq and led both it and us to a worse place: a Maliki power grab discrediting institutions, reinforcing sectarian lines that were giving way to cross-confessional cooperation, and encouraging Iraqi-Iranian collaboration.

• under-resourced the war in Afghanistan, both in warfighters and in time to achieve our objectives, instead establishing an end date unconnected to conditions that caused Pakistan, the Karzai government, and other actors crucial to the success of our strategy to begin hedging against our abandonment of them.

• abdicated his responsibility to produce budgets from a Senate his own party controls. He couldn't get a deal last summer to prevent the Budget Control Act from coming into effect, and now impotently calls for Congress to "come together and agree on a responsible plan that reduces the deficit and keeps our military strong," taking no responsibility at all for the role his choices have made in poisoning the legislative waters. He says "there's no reason those cuts should happen." No reason other than his threat to veto any changes to the Budget Control Act and unwillingness to work with the Congress to find a solution.

• uses drones to kill bad guys by the hundred yet they continue to be minted in copious numbers because we have policies that alienate the very populace whose support we need to reduce the supply of violent extremists. It's amazing that John Kerry would think it appropriate in warming up the crowd to say "ask Osama bin Laden if he's better off now than he was four years ago!" Perhaps the administration's supporters should ask themselves whether their addiction to drone strikes is creating the conditions for more bin Ladens to emerge.

The most important national security problem facing our nation -- the crushing load of debt that will crowd out discretionary spending by our government -- was addressed in the context of cutting military spending. The president who has doubled our national debt in three years now claims "I will use the money we're no longer spending on war to pay down our debt and put more people back to work rebuilding roads and bridges and schools and runways, because after two wars that have cost us thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars, it's time to do some nation building right here at home." That is, defense is the bill payer for his domestic programs. He claimed "I'm still eager to reach an agreement based on the principles of my bipartisan debt commission," but he has taken no action at all to bring the Simpson-Bowles Commission's recommendations into effect -- they weren't in his budget, they weren't in his proposals during the debt limit negotiations last summer.

In the one area of foreign policy the president highlighted, trade policy, he shamelessly mischaracterized his record. The three agreements he has signed were negotiated by the Bush administration and stalled for three years before Obama signed them. And he still persists in characterizing trade as a zero sum activity -- we need to "export more products and outsource fewer jobs." Surely someone in the administration has read David Ricardo and can explain comparative advantage to the leader of the free world?

Governor Romney made both an ethical and a tactical error in omitting reference to the 90,000 Americans, 352,000 Afghans and 30,000 Allies fighting in Afghanistan in his acceptance speech. President Obama rightly capitalized on the mistake to speak touchingly about the compact we should have with the men and women who fight our wars. It burnished his image as an effective commander in chief. What the president and his supporters seem not to understand, though, and it plays to Romney's advantage, is that there is an actual difference between ending wars and winning them. The president keeps emphasizing he brought the troops home from Iraq and is bringing them home from Afghanistan, but he is silent on whether we achieved the objectives for which we fought.

The president threw in lots of cats and dogs, box checking stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, supporting Israel, reasserting our power across the Pacific. If only his policies supported those platitudes. The biggest howler in the speech, the place where the president's claims seemed at greatest variance with his record, was "from Burma to Libya to South Sudan, we have advanced the rights and dignity of all human beings, men and women; Christians and Muslims and Jews." Yet he continues to issue tepid platitudes while twenty thousand Syrians have been murdered by their government.

This is an administration that seems not to appreciate the difference between saying something and achieving it. They are hoping that killing Osama bin Laden will deflect attention from their policies that have made America more resented in crucial sections of the world than we were in the Bush administration, that view defense spending not in the context of threats and opportunities we face in the world but as a funding source for their domestic priorities, that consider trade in more mercantilist terms than do the Chinese, that end wars instead of winning them, and that shun responsibility to advance our values in the world.

President Obama's national security team has been aggressively marketing itself as the "new realists," by which they mean to contrast themselves with the ideologues of the previous administration who, as Team Obama never tires of telling us, recklessly started a war on false pretenses -- the wrong war -- and committed to a strategy that couldn't work, while ignoring the right war in Afghanistan that would be wound down in 18 months with the application of two-thirds the resources the military asked for due to the systematic application of "smart power."   

Vice President Biden has been central to making that case. Biden advocated breaking up Iraq into three sectarian cantons (this was called ethnic cleansing when it was allowed to occur in the Balkans). He was the administration's point man on negotiations with the Iraqis, which appeared to have little effect on the 18-month political stalemate between elections and forming a government that has trended authoritarian. Recall that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki issued the arrest order for his vice president immediately on return from Washington, which signaled to Iraqis the move had White House endorsement. Biden was the rain maker for negotiations over a continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq which resulted in... no continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq.  

Biden also advocated a "counter terror" strategy for the war in Afghanistan, leaving Afghans to the Taliban and killing bad guys with drones and special forces, whether in Afghanistan or beyond. To President Obama's credit, he did not choose this approach; but at issue is whether Representative Paul Ryan's views on foreign policy are, as has been argued by the administration's supporters, dangerously neo-conservative, penurious to diplomacy and foreign assistance, and profligate in military spending. And whether they should be more disqualifying than Vice President Biden's manifestly bad choices.

Paul Ryan's most forceful statement of his views emphasizes the limits on our foreign policy that our national indebtedness will occasion. This is a principled position the Obama administration wholly lacks, running deficits of a trillion dollars a year.  Paul Ryan's budget reduces defense spending, but unlike President Obama, he does not reduce only defense spending. The Obama administration has cut defense in order to fund other spending priorities; Paul Ryan argues for cuts to defense as a contribution to putting our country back on sound financial footing. There is a difference, and it is a difference of principle.

Representative Ryan does seem to have a predilection for basing his policy choices on "foundational principles." Just as his arguments for putting our entitlement programs on sound footing are tied to the bigger ideas of what kind of future we want our country to have, his arguments for our foreign policy are tied to what kind of world we want to live in -- the bigger ideas of advancing freedom and helping build institutions that preserve it. Colleagues on the left find this dangerous because they believe those ideas got the country in trouble the last time a President cared about advancing freedom. But the idea of advancing freedom has long been fundamental to American foreign policy, building support domestically for engagement with the world and reducing resistance internationally to what the U.S. seeks to achieve.

Idealism matters to Americans because, in truth, nearly all our wars are voluntary and our citizens are difficult to motivate to war. We are much more comfortable making the world safe for democracy, ending fascism, and advancing our values than we are risking our sons and daughters for causes that are difficult to square with the kind of society we want to live in ourselves. Americans understand we have interests that do not always coincide with our values, but it's distasteful to us when they contradict each other, makes for unsustainable policies (ask Hosni Mubarak, or the Saudi sheiks who rightly fear our commitment to them is also limited).  

Predictability matters in foreign policy. It reduces the miscalculations that often cause wars, it allows other states and organizations to anticipate our choices as they make their own. Neo-realism, as practiced by the Obama administration, seeks to keep all their options open -- to intervene in Libya if it looks easy, to avoid Syria where what needs doing looks hard. But it raises the cost of achieving our interests when they are not imbued with our values: it is more difficult to get and keep the support of our American public, it reduces the willingness of others to assist our efforts, and it creates more uncertainty in our international dealings when countries cannot anticipate our positions.

The Obama administration's "new realism" results in policies without principles that guide difficult choices. They made a stirring case for intervention in Libya because of impending humanitarian catastrophe, yet do nothing while humanitarian catastrophe consumes Syria. They argued the surge not only was not working in Iraq but cannot work, then adopted the same approach (plus a wholly unrealistic timeline) for Afghanistan. They castigate the previous administration for extra-judicial activity (renditions) then adopt drone guidelines in which only a profile (not identification) is required to commit extra-judicial killings. They argue imports steal American jobs and slow-roll free trade negotiations, then rely on exports to pull our country out of its economic recession. 

Without foundational principles, American foreign policy looks no better than any other country's self-interested machinations. While our country often falls short of its values, that we even attempt to apply our domestic principles to our foreign policy ennobles it.  We hold these truths to be self-evident. Not evident just for us.  Not evident just for Christians, or the peoples of the book, or monotheistic religions, or atheists. That's what makes America exceptional.

Representative Ryan isn't a dangerous ideologue, he's a mainstream voice arguing we ought to give our values significant weight as we decide how to behave in the world. It is a principled and cost-effective choice, nicely consistent with what one would expect from a responsible chair of the budget committee.