Like most foreign policy specialists, I have generally welcomed the way the presidential campaigns have begun to focus more on national security. Even if this election will be decided on economic matters or on base-turnout machines, it still is important for the campaigns to debate foreign policy. In that regard, Romney's speech yesterday at VMI was timely -- I would say, overdue.

Romney's speech was sound and sensible. One could quibble here or there -- a fair-minded Obama supporter can ask what more can Romney do than Obama has done to try to get the NATO allies to honor their defense budget commitments -- but as these sorts of speeches go, it was careful and precise. It didn't answer every question someone might have for the Governor, but it laid down some important markers.

In fact, it was so sensible that it made the Obama campaign's response -- or rather, "presponse," since they released it before the speech was given -- look rather nonsensical by comparison. The memo was written by two top Obama surrogates, former Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl. I have great respect for both of them, but I having a hard time reconciling the various contradictions in their critique.

On the one hand, they try to dismiss Romney as extreme and ideological, to the right of President Bush. On the other hand, in the very next paragraph, they try to dismiss Romney as merely echoing Obama's own policies. Is Obama extreme and ideological and to the right of President Bush?

They try to dismiss Romney as vague and lacking in specifics on he would do in the next four years.  But has there ever been an incumbent more reluctant to offer specifics about what he would do with a second term than President Obama? Is there anyone who can say with confidence how Obama intends to handle relations with China or with Russia going forward? Does anyone know what is the significance of Obama's promise to Medvedev to show Russia more "flexibility" after the election?  Has Obama outlined a coherent strategy for how to deal with Syria? Or what he will do if the current sanctions do not convince Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions? 

Given how dramatically the administration has retreated on Afghanistan from its "war of necessity" pose of 2009 to its "Afghan good enough" pose of today, does anyone really know what sort of commitment a second term Obama would honor in 2014 when the mission is scheduled to transition to a new phase?

These are difficult issues to debate. I had a chance to discuss them briefly with Flournoy on PBS New Hour last night and I am not sure I made my points as effectively as I should have. Of course there is some similarity between what Obama and Romney are proposing now on Syria or Iran. Obama's approach has backed us into a corner and there are only so many ways out of a corner. 

Moreover, Obama's approach on both countries has evolved significantly in the direction of policies Romney has consistently supported for a long time. On Iran, the administration shifted from an unconditional bilateral talks approach of 2009 -- an approach they stuck with for far too long and which caused them to squander the opportunities of the Green Revolution and the Fordow surprise -- and only ramped up the pressure track after the Europeans and the U.S. Congress led the way. On Syria, Team Obama started off calling Assad a reformer and shifted to supporting the insurgents much later. 

And on Iraq, there is no question that Flournoy worked diligently to secure a follow-on agreement and that Maliki was reluctant to compromise, as she claimed. But there is also no question that Flournoy did not get the help she needed from the White House and that all of the mistakes I listed (and more I could have but didn't) undermined the negotiations.

It is hard in a few minutes to get to the nub of these issues, but that is where the campaign debate should go. 

I have great sympathy for Flournoy and Kahl. They are both smart and knowledgeable and they have served the country honorably. But in their campaign surrogate role they are operating under extreme constraints and may not be free to speak candidly about Obama's record. They know better than anyone else the long list of missed opportunities and implementation errors that has dogged President Obama's Middle East strategy since the very beginning. They were insightful in identifying similar problems in the Bush era. If they applied to Obama the kind of sharp-eyed standards they applied when they were on the opposition bench, the results would be a withering critique of the last four years.  

Perhaps the Obama Team conducts that kind of sober self-assessment in off-the-record sessions. Let's hope so, because if they get the chance to govern for another four years, it would not be good for U.S. foreign policy if they governed according to the standards of their campaign memos.

Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has cast himself as the arbiter of military conduct and guardian of the military's prerogative to remain outside America's bruising political battles. He has said, "one of the things that marks us as a profession in a democracy -- in our form of democracy -- that's most important is that we remain apolitical." More than just staking out the high ground, he has chosen to police it, objecting to retired veterans criticizing the president. 

Gen. Dempsey also rebuked Congressman Ryan during budget season for suggesting the military leadership had concerns about President Obama's new goal post of another $400 billion in cuts to free up money for domestic spending. Gen. Dempsey turned up the volume in that exchange, invoking his impugned honor that Ryan would "collectively call us liars."

Which is why it is so odd that Gen. Dempsey has not held the president to the same standard. On several recent occasions, President Obama has asserted that his Republican challenger for president would force on our military money and weapons they don't want. 

In his convention speech -- an overtly political occasion -- President Obama said, "my opponent would spend more money on military hardware that our Joint Chiefs don't even want." No reaction from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During last night's presidential debate -- another overtly political occasion -- the president twice insisted Governor Romney was peddling "$2 trillion in additional military spending that the military isn't asking for."

Really? No one in the American military believes defense spending should be higher than the president's FY2013 budget request? The president of the United States was misrepresenting the views of many in our military, counting on their professional reserve to remain silent while he uses their credibility with the public for political advantage in an election. How does that not count as politicizing our military?  

The Budget Control Act would cut $50 billion a year for the next ten years from DOD's budget, something Gen. Dempsey has said would be a disaster of such proportions that the United States "wouldn't be the global power that we know ourselves to be today." Most of my military colleagues are concerned about the gap between demands and resources, and most believe the defense budget should not be further cut. Some believe near-term risk should be accepted in the military realm in order to solve the much larger vulnerability of our national debt; others believe civilians are asking the military to make yet more sacrifices so that politicians don't have to face up to the hard choices of entitlement reform. Which is to say that our military is not of one view on practically any subject, even those that touch on the center of their professional judgment.

To be fair, Gen. Dempsey is in an awkward position, caught between the commander in chief playing politics and the desire to stay out of the political mud-slinging. And this is a thin-skinned and stridently political president who it may be difficult to remain effective as the senior military advisor to if Obama takes umbrage at being corrected (which he surely will). But Gen. Dempsey has put himself in that position with his forceful interventions on the issue previously. Other generals have labored under no lesser burdens.

I'm very much in favor of our military staying out of politics; but if Gen. Dempsey is going to set himself up as the arbiter of the civil-military boundary, he needs to actually police both sides of it. And that means correcting the record when the president misleads the public or caricatures our military as having only one view about an important national issue that goes directly to their military judgment.

There has been a lot of commentary on the Obama administration's "pivot" (or "rebalance") to Asia here at Shadow Government. Most commentators have praised Secretary Clinton's activism towards Southeast Asia, but pointed out that the rhetoric of the pivot will look hollow without a real trade strategy and adequate resourcing for our forward military forces. This past month it looks like the wheels may have started coming off on the trade strategy axle.

In early September regional leaders met at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders meeting in Vladivostok, sans Barack Obama who was unwilling to skip town in election season, and courtesy of Vladmir Putin who was unwilling to schedule the meeting at a time the U.S. President could attend. President Obama's absence was not the end of the world: Bill Clinton skipped two APEC summits and managed to compensate the next year (for the record, George W. Bush missed none...but that was before we were "back in Asia" as the current White House likes to say). The real problem at Vladivostok was the hallway banter by the other delegates about TPP -- the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- that forms the core of the administration's strategy for building a regional economic architecture that includes us and strives for WTO-consistent trade liberalization and rule-making. The overall critique in Vladivostok was that the U.S. side is playing small ball on TPP, to the frustration of multiple stakeholders. The U.S. business community is worried at the lack of market access in the negotiations; the Australians and Singaporeans are hedging with Asian-only negotiations because of what they see as incrementalism by USTR; and Japanese officials are dismayed by administration signals discouraging Tokyo from expressing readiness to join TPP.

This all matters because of the other summitry gossip that is coming out of Asia. On November 18-20, the Cambodians will be hosting the East Asia Summit, which President Obama joined with great fanfare last year and which the president will be able to attend this year because it is after the U.S. elections. The main deliverable on economics at that summit will be a decision within the region to proceed with the RCEP -- an Asian "Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership" that includes the ten ASEAN states, Japan, China, Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand -- and does not include the United States. The Cambodians' current plan for the November summit is to hold an RCEP inaugural meeting while President Obama waits outside the room cooling his heels with Vladmir Putin (since Russia is also not included in the regional trade deal). Stunningly, our allies Japan, Australia ,and Korea all appear to be on board with this scenario.

At one level this resembles the silliness of a junior high school prom, but at another level it could be the moment people start writing the obituary for the "pivot." To prevent that, a returning Obama administration or a new Romney administration has to put more oomph into the current anemic U.S. trade strategy. The RCEP launch will be embarrassing, but since those talks have no prospect of hitting a WTO-compliant level of trade liberalization, the United States can retake center stage again by showing that it can form an even more impressive coalition of trade liberalizing states. This means getting Japan in to TPP; leveraging Canada and Mexico in the TPP process (which will also help us counter Brazilian efforts to separate South America from us); and beginning to move on a complementary trans-Atlantic FTA process. The "pivot" was never sustainable without like-minded allies in our hemisphere and Europe and now is the time to recognize that and develop a strategy accordingly.

The next administration will also have to demonstrate credibility by moving to secure trade promotion authority (TPA) from the Congress (just can't get around Article One Section Eight of the Constitution). Finally, the administration had better start thinking about new ways to engage on economic issues within the EAS that keep us in the regional dialogue without requiring a high-standard FTA with countries like Laos or Burma. Bob Zoellick was a master of that art at USTR when he pioneered the Enterprise for ASEAN Initiative -- a flexible framework that allowed a la carte participation by countries ranging from an FTA (Singapore) to establishing very basic economic dialogues (Cambodia).

In short, for trade to continue underpinning U.S. leadership in Asia, we will have to go global, be agile within the region, and give a shot of adrenaline to USTR. Otherwise, the "pivot" will be a minor footnote in the textbooks.

Governor Romney delivered a major speech at the Clinton Global Initiative on Tuesday, focusing on foreign assistance, global development, and how U.S. policy should evolve in these fields. He laid out a vision for placing development assistance squarely in the center of the nexus of trade, investment, and policy reforms. He sees the private sector and capitalism at the center of human progress (read "economic growth" for those in the business), and he also stressed the central place of institutions that support political freedom and rule of law (read "democracy and governance" for those who follow this stuff closely). He strongly endorsed 10 years of progress on public-private partnership in development -- a major factor in development since the Bush administration, adopted energetically by the Obama administration, and a central focus of the Clinton Global Initiative (so, no, he was not in favor of "privatizing foreign aid," just as no one would say that about Hillary Clinton when she talks about public-private partnerships through her Global Partnerships Initiative, as she does here).

Finally, he emphasized what serious development thinkers have been talking about but have only found limited appetite for within development bureaucracies -- a much larger focus on small and medium sized enterprises.

Governor Romney's speech is by far the most detailed speech by either of the major candidates on development in this electoral cycle and likely the most detailed speech of any candidate during the primaries in this cycle.

There has been a series of responses (including a GREAT post from my friend Paul Bonicelli yesterday and a thoughtful op-ed from Amb. Mark Green and Rob Mosbacher) to Governor Romney's speech, not surprisingly, as it outlined a bold plan for American assistance moving forward. 

In sum, serious thinkers about development and America's role in it have been positive in their praise as they recognize the depth of the thinking behind this speech and know that the most serious change and advancement in U.S. development policy have happened under Republican presidents. 

Governor Romney's strategy would place U.S. assistance on the cutting edge of development theory and practice. By linking greater investments in economic growth and the institutions that promote liberty with a renewed vigorous global trade agenda and pro-growth domestic policies under a Romney administration, along with the sorts of investments in assistance Gov. Romney described in his speech, we are talking about a very powerful combination of forces that are pro-development and help the United States share in that prosperity.

Development theorists and practitioners talk about "private sector led development," but when push comes to shove and the money is allocated, the temptation is always to fund pressing social service delivery projects or photogenic or politically connected causes. At the end of the budget allocation race, policy reform investments that support economic growth, and investments that support democracy and governance --the two sorts of investments that most development practitioners know matter -- often get left behind. 

Finally, Governor Romney's speech recognizes the changed world that we live in and the need to change our development policy, processes, systems, and priorities to reflect this changed world.  First, foreign aid can help but is dwarfed by trade, investment, remittance, and private philanthropy by foundations, individuals, church groups, and corporations. He cited the central fact that U.S. economic engagement has changed over the last 40 years with massive foreign direct investment flows going to middle, lower, and poor countries in massive amounts, the massive flows of remittances and, the massive amounts of private charity. At the same time his description of "corrupt governments" suggests a skeptical view towards various forms of budget support and an interest in aid transparency initiatives.

Another central change from the past is that the United Nations Development Program estimates domestic resource mobilization in low income countries will reach $394 billion by 2015. Compare that to global ODA of approximately $120 billion, and domestic resources are only going to get bigger over time as societies continue to move up the ladder of development. Foreign aid is a minority shareholder in the business of development already. Development practitioners can provide expertise, technical support, and strengthen the institutions that support private sector led growth and democratic governance, but ultimately over time/in due course (please note emphasis here, so no panicked misinterpretations, please) we want to be moving out of the direct social service delivery business and instead have governments themselves "pick up the tab" using domestic resources similar to the way that PEPFAR is evolving.

The global economic situation means that budget austerity is impacting foreign assistance around the world including the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Ireland, Italy, and possibly the UK. We should assume that the 150 Account (the account in the U.S. budget where foreign aid is housed) which has until now has defied gravity is going to be examined in the light of trillion dollar deficits and $16 trillion in debt. Regardless of the overall topline number, questions about aid effectiveness and development priorities are going to be at the forefront of any U.S. development conversation under any administration just as that conversation is happening in the rest of the "DAC" (the Major League Baseball Commission equivalent for foreign aid donor) countries. Pressing humanitarian needs (such as ending polio in our time) will always be a part of the U.S. foreign assistance policy as the U.S. still stands ready to respond in situations international disaster relief, but long term foreign aid's role needs to change with the changed global context.

Governor Romney sees foreign assistance as a form of "soft power." It is clear that Governor Romney sees foreign assistance as an instrument of American power and influence and one that we should use to ensure that the 21st century is an American century.

Note: While Dan Runde co-chairs the Romney Campaign's International Assistance Working Group, the blog post above contains Mr. Runde's own opinions.

Having been quite critical in these pages last week about the Republican candidate's exclusion of the war from his speech accepting his party's nomination for president, it seems only fair to praise him for the magnificent speech he gave on the anniversary of September 11th. Governor Romney's speech was warm, personal, and unifying -- a beautiful combination on a day of painful remembrance for our country.

Most importantly, Romney sounded like a strong and compassionate Commander in Chief, expressing his appreciation for the first responders on 9/11 and the military that has fought our wars since. It was a nice touch that he gave the address to the National Guard, the arm of our military responsible both for defending the nation and assisting civil government in dealing with national disasters. In the past ten years of war, Guard units have become part of the regular rotation of forces to Iraq and Afghanistan, and they have shattered the stereotype of weekend warriors not being the peer of their active duty counterparts. It also showed a real elegance of orchestration that the campaign tied in Romney's visit last week with hurricane victims in New Orleans and the important work our Guard does when help needs to be mobilized.

Romney alluded lightly to the significant differences the candidates have on the war in Afghanistan. He said "...nearly 70,000 American troops still remain in Afghanistan. Our goal should be to complete a successful transition to Afghan security forces by the end of 2014. We should evaluate conditions on the ground and solicit the best advice of our military commanders. We can all agree that our men and women in the field deserve a clear mission, that they deserve the resources and resolute leadership they need to complete that mission..." In four sentences he summed up the president's mistaken focus on ending rather than winning the war, and under-resourcing the war. And he did so without a sharp edge inappropriate to the occasion.

Romney's own words reflect a commitment to allowing conditions and commanders' recommendations to drive the timeline of our transition to Afghan responsibility for the war. To providing the resources and leadership our military efforts need in order to achieve our war aims. The most important of those resources is political attention, something President Obama has consistently shrifted short the wars conducted while he has been Commander in Chief.

When the Obama administration was winding down the war in Iraq, officials claimed our timeline was a function of conditions on the ground. It was flat out untrue. On Afghanistan, they aren't even attempting to pretend the readiness of Afghan security forces, regional political developments, and the ability of the Afghan government to continue the war effort have any affect on their exit timeline. Romney's commitment to the 2014 withdrawal date show both an appreciation for the coalition agreement but also leaves room for adjustment should General Allen believe more time is need.

Romney was rightly critical of the Veteran's Administration backlog of claims, the delays in providing mental health care, and the crisis of suicides among veterans. These are all serious problems that deserve focused managerial attention. I do believe, however, that the current Secretary of Veteran's Affairs, Eric Shinseki, both shares these concerns and is doing an admirable job addressing them. Much of the backlog and delay is the result of increased claims filed and demand for services, not mismanagement by the VA. If I were influential with the Romney campaign, I'd advise them to carry Shinseki over into the Romney administration to continue the direction he has begun.

The nicest part of the speech was Romney's description of calling families after visiting Massachusetts Guardsmen in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was really touching, the kind of tribute military people themselves actually appreciate. And it's a more difficult balance to strike than many people understand. Romney explained he thanked them for their sacrifice, and they responded by telling him it isn't a sacrifice, it's a privilege to defend our country. That perfectly captures the feel of the culture of our military. In a time when those of us not bearing the burden of fighting the country's wars are the 99 percent, military families appreciate we are polite enough to thank them for their service, but they also often feel that convention distances them from us, especially since it is so rarely coupled with effort to understand or help bear those burdens. Most Americans never catch that subtlety, but Governor Romney did. And he tried to bridge that gap, as a Commander in Chief should. President Obama often talks of veterans as though they are all disabled; Governor Romney today talked about our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in a way that celebrated their strength, their patriotism, and their honor, and held them up as an example for us all.

Full Disclosure: I am in a small way advising the campaign on European issues. I'm very much at the margin of the effort, in no way influential in policy formation. I don't speak for the campaign or the candidate, whom I've never even met.

With two months to go before the election, it's never too early to start one of Washington's favorite post-election parlor-games: assembling a dream cabinet. Who should be the next Secretary of State? Defense? National Security Advisor?

The answer is, of course, David Petraeus. Given my earlier advocacy for Petraeus as vice president, readers will be unsurprised by my suggestion that the president simply call up the good general and ask him what job he wants. Unfortunately, reproductive human cloning is neither legal nor fast enough to grow enough Petraeus' to fill the cabinet, so we will have to find a few others to fill some of the top roles.

These views are, of course, my own (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek at that). The Cable had an interesting article on the potential Romney cabinet last month based on "interviews" with "sources." Unlike the folks at The Cable, I was trained as an analyst at the CIA. This article is based on nothing but speculation and Google. Here is just a short list of folks whom we might see in Senate confirmation hearings next spring. These are not my endorsements so much as my guesses as to whom might get the pick.

National Security Advisor Michael Hayden, a retired four-star general and former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, is listed as one of the Romney team's advisors. He probably knows the defense and intelligence worlds better than most people alive, and would be a strong pick for National Security Advisor. Barring that, he would also make a good Director of National Intelligence. Also, he knows lots of things that he could tell us, but then he'd have to kill us. Con: His four stars were in the air force (go Army!). Plus, he's tied closely to the alleged wiretapping program at the NSA, making him a lightning rod for partisan attack, something a new administration may want to avoid.

Secretary of State John Negroponte. With five separate stints as an ambassador (to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines, Iraq, and the U.N.), as Deputy Secretary of State, and as first Director of National Intelligence, Negroponte has the kind of resume that you get when you've spent five decades in the federal bureaucracy. His wide experience makes him a candidate to head the State Department. Plus, he had the good sense to drop out of Harvard Law. Con: He spent five decades in the federal bureaucracy. Also, a new birther movement will spring up around the fact that he was born in London, making his loyalties suspect.

Secretary of Treasury Bob Zoellick. Another Romney advisor and former Deputy Secretary of State, Zoellick also served as U.S. Trade Representative, Undersecretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs, in several positions at the Treasury Department, and most recently as President of the World Bank. His selection as Secretary of State would be a sop to those fuzzy-headed softies who think economics are a legitimate concern for international diplomacy, rather than guns, power, and honor, as all real IR scholars know. Or he might be shunted off to head the Treasury Department, where the pointy heads belong. Con: the mustache. Zoellick is obviously a highly-trained covert operative hiding behind the mustached guise of an academic. The problem: It's too obvious. He needs better cover; perhaps a full beard.

Secretary of Defense John McCain. The Chuck Norris of Senators. Member of the Armed Services Committee, Vietnam veteran and POW. McCain was prescient on Iraq, calling for a surge long before anyone else. He has been a champion of American power and democracy abroad and, more recently, a principled opponent of "enhanced interrogation." He's the original Maverick and would make a heluva Secretary of Defense. Con: He's the original Maverick. He's conservative by disposition, not ideology, and therefore is sometimes inconsistent.

Secretary of Defense John Warner (in case the first one doesn't work out). Three-time chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner is far more interesting than his Senate title suggests. He is a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, a former Marine, and former Secretary of the Navy. Warner is one of the senior statesmen of the Republican Party and was a true eminence grise on foreign policy and is well-qualified to head the Pentagon. Plus, he was Elizabeth Taylor's sixth husband, which has to be worth something. Con: Before his distinguished service in the Korean War as a Marine, he served in World War II in the Navy (go Army). More to the point, he left the Senate in 2009 and may be uninterested in returning to public life. After two wars and decades in the Senate, how much more can your country ask of you?

These are only a few of the many stellar lights of the Republican foreign policy establishment waiting to go nova the moment Romney clinches victory. Who are your picks?

Charlie Kupchan and Bruce Jentleson have launched another round in our ongoing conversation about the Obama vs. Romney comparison on foreign policy. (You can read the exchange in chronological order: here, here, and here.)

After reading their latest, I think it may be time for me to declare victory. I had three principal claims in my initial response, and their piece (unintentionally) confirms all three.

First, I claimed that there were legitimate critiques of Obama's record from the Republican perspective -- i.e. not merely the critiques from the left, such as he shouldn't have kept his campaign promise to conduct a fully resourced COIN strategy in Afghanistan, or that he hasn't bragged enough about his accomplishments, or that "leading from behind" was bad spin. Obama partisans can usually be cajoled into making a critique of Obama from the left, but this hardly shows them to be fair and balanced. The test is whether they can admit a critique from the other side of the aisle, or whether their worldview denies the possibility of wisdom from the other party. I outlined just four Republican critiques, and challenged Kupchan and Jentleson to concede at least one or rebut them all. In their 2200 word response, they write about many, many things, but they avoid entirely answering the four specific critiques I raised. I know they saw the critiques, because they refer to them in passing. But Kupchan and Jentleson do not say whether they consider them valid or whether there is an Obama defense that neutralizes the critiques. My inference, based on my respect for them: If there was a strong rebuttal available, they would have provided it.  

Second, I claimed that they substituted a cartoon version of Romney's foreign policy platform, trying to turn legitimate foreign policy debates into a Manichean struggle between Obama's essential goodness and, in their words, Romney's "Dangerous Mind." In their latest response, Kupchan and Jentleson go back to an older, more tired version of this Manichean worldview, this time attacking a cartoon version of Bush's foreign policy. But the cartoon fits only if one ignores inconvenient facts. Consider just two examples:

Far from relying "too heavily on power and bravado alone," it was the Bush administration that developed the G-20, the multilateral Proliferation Security Initiative, the free trade pacts with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia, the TransPacific Partnership, the strategic outreach to India, the 6-Party Talks on North Korea, the P5+1 framework on Iran, and so on -- all initiatives the Obama administration and Kupchan and Jentleson boast as proving their own smarter approach to global relations.

If we have left behind "a reasonably stable country" in Iraq that is "headed in the right direction," then surely the credit for that rests with the 2007 Bush surge, which President Obama vigorously opposed and tried to block. For my part, I think Kupchan and Jentleson paint a bit too vividly a rosy scenario for Iraq. I think the situation there is far more precarious. But if they want to declare victory in Iraq, they have to share credit with the Bush surge. And if they want to declare the Bush surge a failure, they can't claim Iraq is headed in the right direction now.

Third, I claimed that Obama's foreign policy successes came mainly in places where he followed in the tracks of his predecessor -- tracks that Romney would likely follow, as well -- whereas his foreign policy failures came mainly in places where he struck out on his own.  As my analysis of the first two claims makes clear, Kupchan and Jentleson prove my point rather nicely. For the most part, they avoid talking much about the areas of genuine Obama innovations on the foreign policy front (with the exception of the Russian reset) and instead dwell mainly on approaches and initiatives that hail back to the Bush era, and they invariably describe them as glowing successes.

Given their particular areas of expertise, I would have liked to see more discussion of the situation in Syria. They mention Syria just once, when they concede that Russia has now taken an oppositional stance on Syria (sounds a bit like they are saying Russia is our foe on that geopolitical issue....maybe a geopolitical foe...perhaps the top geopolitical foe blocking U.S. action through the UN?). But surely it deserves more discussion than that. Isn't Syria a critical case for the effectiveness of any Obama doctrine on American foreign policy, one that they claim "restored confidence in American power and purpose"?  

Kupchan and Jentleson are among the best foreign policy thinkers on the Democratic side of the aisle and their two pieces together present a clear picture of how Democratic experts would like to frame the foreign policy debate. That frame does not fit the facts very well, but we won't know until November whether it fits the public mood well enough to scare voters away from Romney.

From time to time, Josh Gerstein of Politico has observed that the mainstream media has glossed over things the Obama administration has done without subjecting it to the firestorm of protest that greeted a comparable (often less egregious) action by the Bush administration.

Some of the items are quite serious: the targeted drone strike on an American citizen or the creative interpretation of the UNSCR on Libya or the prominent role in sensitive national security policymaking given to domestic political advisors. Others are less so: the frequent gaffes like misspelling "Ohio" or the priority given to golf games or the record-breaking prominence of fund-raising.

The issue is not necessarily that President Obama deserves condemnation for any of this. Rather, the issue is that the Obama administration seems to have no idea how generous the media's double-standard is.

A recent report made me think that it is not only the Bush administration that is the victim of this double standard. The Clinton administration has some grounds for a complaint, too.

In a lengthy article exploring the extraordinary influence over policy wielded by Valerie Jarrett, the New York Times reports on an incident I have never heard about before:

"Ms. Jarrett cuts an elegant figure in the West Wing, with her pixie haircut and designer clothes. Aides say she can be thoughtful in little ways that matter, enlisting the president to rally staff members after political or personal setbacks. But she can also be imperious -- at one event ordering a drink from a four-star general she mistook for a waiter -- and attached to the trappings of power in a way some in the White House consider unseemly for a member of the staff.

A case in point is her full-time Secret Service detail. The White House refuses to disclose the number of agents or their cost, citing security concerns. But the appearance so worried some aides that two were dispatched to urge her to give the detail up.

She listened politely, one said, but the agents stayed." (emphasis added)

This is a remarkable anecdote, and it immediately called to mind one of the signature anecdotes from the Clinton White House. I wrote about it in my book because it took on iconic status as a symbol of the poor civil-military relations of the early Clinton era. Early on in the Clinton tenure, Lieutenant General McCaffrey was over at the White House for a meeting. As I described it:

"While there, he greeted a young Clinton staffer who allegedly replied, "I don't talk to the military." McCaffrey presumably related this back at the Pentagon, for the story quickly spread throughout the Beltway community as apparent confirmation that the new commander in chief -- who once wrote that he loathed the military -- was surrounding himself with advisors who were viscerally anti-military. The White House, which was already reeling from the backlash against the president's proposal to lift the ban on gays serving openly in the military, quickly scrambled to undo the public relations damage of the petty snub. In a highly choreographed move, the president invited General McCaffrey to jog with him at a summit meeting, and the distinguished military officer agreed, thus graciously conferring absolution on his commander in chief."

Now civil-military experts can spend a lot of time in the bar debating how much of the McCaffrey story really happened the way it is usually reported, and if it did, how significant it really was. But there is no debate about how much attention the anecdote got (a google search on "I don't talk to the military" and clinton generates some 3,690,000 hits).

Is there any doubt that if George Stephanopoulos had confused a 4-star general with a waiter it would have gotten huge play? (Yes, I know there were also reports about the Clinton team asking the White House military aides to serve canapes and drinks at social functions. That, too, got lots of attention, and in some ways might seem a better analogue to the Jarrett incident. But those particular military aides were substantially more junior and, in fact, had social duties as an important part of their regular functions, in addition to their core mission of carrying the "nuclear football," so I give the Clinton White House more slack on that.)

The context is different. As Tom Ricks has noted, the Obama White House has very fraught relations with the military, but they are nowhere near as fraught as Clinton's were in 1993. Moreover, the Clinton-era snub seemed intentional whereas it was (apparently) only inadvertent in the Obama-era case.

Still, if the Jarrett anecdote gets no more commentary than the brief discussion I am giving it here, I think my fellow Clinton White House veterans can be excused if we start a new meme: "what if the Clinton White House had done this?"

Update: A friend who follows civil-military affairs just as closely as I do but with a better memory than mine, pointed out to me that the Jarrett incident was reported at the time. It is possible I saw one of those earlier reports and just forgot about it -- my 90-plus-year-old parents like to say that their forgettery overwhelms their memory, and perhaps I am heading into the same zone. But I think it is more likely that I didn't notice at the time and, certainly, the incident did not get extensive coverage the way the McCaffrey incident did.

In my post, I suggested two possible reasons for this, both of which I think are true. First, the McCaffrey anecdote was intrinsically more toxic and also fit more readily into an existing narrative of a President who "loathed" the military. Second, there is an undeniable double-standard, with the press giving the Obama Administration a pass for things they would have framed far more negatively in previous Administrations; as the Politico editor put it, the mainstream media is "quite smitten with the Obamas" and their coverage obviously reflects that fact.

My friend suggested yet a third reason: Gen Chiarelli, the Vice Chief of Staff for the Army, whom Jarrett confused with a waiter, went out of his way to defuse the incident. I think this was an important factor, and perhaps co-equal with the other two. At least initially, the McCaffrey incident went viral (if that term applies to those early days of the internet) because someone spread the story back in the halls of the Pentagon. The most likely person to spread that story was General McCaffrey himself. After it became notorious, McCaffrey collaborated with the Clinton White House in tamping down the furor, but it is plausible that McCaffrey did less than Chiarelli did in the initial stages to minimize the incident.

Mitt Romney's choice of Paul Ryan for the VP slot has focused most attention on fiscal issues, in particular entitlement reform, and well it should. This election will be about the bad economy, the urgent need to restore economic growth and job creation, and the coming fiscal nightmare if we don't get our house in order.

But what of foreign policy? Some commenters have addressed it, most of them critics of the GOP ticket who have said that neither Romney nor Ryan has sufficient experience to manage it. They have also insisted that what Romney and Ryan have said recently demonstrates their inadequate understanding of statecraft.

It is no surprise that the ticket's defenders take exception to these criticisms and characterizations. As one of these defenders, my view of their fitness for commander-in-chief and commander-in-chief-in-waiting is based on what I perceive to be their principled views on the role of the United States and their understanding of the realities of the international arena. They are not running for secretary of state or defense or for national security adviser, nor are they trying to win an agency post like arms control czar or head of USAID. They seek the office that sets the tone, lays out the objectives, and staffs the agencies that formulate and implement policy. So what they believe fundamentally about foreign policy is the first thing to address if we wish to understand what kind of foreign policy leaders they would be. We can think about experience separately, understanding that they can't help having no more experience presiding over the most powerful nation-state in the world than have most contenders for the office, including President Obama. As Peter Feaver points out here, let's please not absurdly hold them to a higher standard than candidate Obama was held to four years ago. Once we understand their thinking, we can speculate with some confidence on the types of appointments and policies they will pursue and the objectives they will seek to fulfill. We already know that Governor Romney is a manager and leader of considerable skill; Congressman Ryan has been a chairman of a major committee in the Congress during a crisis when his leadership skills have been tested (and he passed), which is more than the current occupant of the White House could boast in 2008.

I do not claim to have much first-hand knowledge about Romney and Ryan's views, just as I did not about President Obama's views when he was a first-term senator with no experience other than his time in the Senate. I rely primarily on three things to make my assessment of them as I did for Obama: 1) what they have said and done that shows what they believe about the United States' role in the world; 2) what they believe about the world itself; and 3) how they have operated in it, whether in the public or private sector.

Governor Romney's speeches and comments since he has been running for president for several years reveal a leader committed to the notion of American exceptionalism. He asserts regularly that the United States must lead the world if we are to enjoy peace and stability and if freedom and prosperity are to expand. His comments imply that he knows that the world is a dangerous place, and that while pursuing the ideals of cooperation and collective defense is commendable, in many cases only force wielded by a free nation or coalition thereof can secure not only our interests but those embraced by all signatories to the U.N. Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights. We need not wonder what his foreign policy would be generally and so we can therefore extrapolate to the specifics of, say, arms control and the defense of the safety of our citizens and property. His appointments would comprise a coterie of officials who share his views. I imagine some combination of Reaganites and Bushites (both 41 and 43) would be called upon, and there is a lot more agreement among them on these things than disagreement. Plenty of them have the skill to man the posts in service of a President Romney's goals. To put a fine point on it, he has little experience running an energy or a farm policy, but I imagine he has some clear ideas about those things, too, and would set out goals and make appointments to attain them. That would be him exercising leadership, and for all he would draw upon his experience as a governor, a business leader and administrator of one of the world's largest global concerns, the Olympics.

Gov. Romney has also demonstrated some sound instincts. In this respect I'd like to address the recent controversy related to his recent visit to Israel. Gov. Romney said that Israel's strong economic performance relative to its Palestinian neighbors could be traced in part to cultural factors. For this he was called racist and naïve. But this is a perfectly rational comment and it underscores the main theme of my comments here about big ideas and broad principles. Romney did not say Palestinians were inferior biologically and unable to engage in commerce leading to prosperity; nor did he say they did not have ambition or a work ethic. He simply alluded to a fact that should be uncontroversial: the cultural factors animating the citizenry of the State of Israel (both Jew and Arab) are conducive to democracy and economic development. Israel's is a democratic government that protects civil rights and property rights. The same cannot be said about the Palestinian territories under both Hamas and Fatah rule. In each of those cases, whether the Arabs generally have a culture that is conducive to democracy and development -- and I believe they do -- is irrelevant when the culture of the leadership of both public and private sector elites tramples upon it. The fact is that those who have the ability to control society through state power, education, and religion use that power to retard development, enrich themselves through corruption, and do all with impunity. Palestinian Arabs in Israel and the world over practice politics as democrats and prosper; Palestinian Arabs living under the culture that Hamas, Fatah and their parasitical and corrupt clients have fostered do not. How is it racist or naïve to make this case? I think it shows that Romney gets what causes human flourishing; and getting that means he knows not only what he wants to do in terms of domestic policy but also what a fundamental pillar of his foreign policy would be. That is, the United States will be a promoter of individual liberty at home and be its champion everywhere and protector when it is in our interests.

Turning our attention to Congressman Ryan, he's had fewer chances so far to speak at length about foreign policy; his main focus as a member of Congress has been on the fiscal health of the United States. But those who know him argue that he approaches and understands foreign policy much the same way he does fiscal and domestic policy, that is, by means of principles he has imbibed from the American Founders. He starts first with, no surprise, that the United States is an exceptional nation because it is first an idea before it is a place. He has been saying this for several days now since Romney named him and it reflects what he has said as a congressman and it fits with his work at Empower America. He and Romney are perfectly compatible when it comes to what they believe about the United States and what they believe about the international arena. The only question that remains is are they intelligent enough to establish goals based on their principled beliefs and are they smart enough to choose the right people to help them devise and implement policy. I see no reason to believe that they are not, certainly no more reason than was the case with the former junior Senator from Illinois. The difference is the principles and goals, and for that, of course, I'm grateful.

A friend with a better memory than mine had an interesting reaction to my post about Secretary Clinton's opposition to an artificial timeline to end the Afghan surge. He said it reminded him of an earlier episode in 2007 involving timelines, the Iraq surge, and then-Senator Clinton.

Back then, Congressional Democrats were vigorously opposed to the Iraq surge, and were mounting a coordinated effort designed to block it, thwart it, or at the very least bring it to an early end. Politico called it a "slow bleed" strategy, because it involved trying to hobble the surge with all sorts of restrictions that might have a superficial appeal but that had knowable secondary effects that would undermine the surge.

One of those restrictions was getting the Bush administration to announce a timeline for ending the surge, which Congress could then use as a device to lock in an Iraqi withdrawal. The Bush administration did not want to establish such a public timeline in 2007, while the surge was still unfolding, and instead promised to unwind the surge at a pace based on conditions on the ground.

This promise was not good enough for Congressional Democrats, and one of them, Senator Hillary Clinton sent a letter to the Department of Defense demanding that it release internal analyses and plans that considered various alternative timelines. Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman wrote back:

"Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia... Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks."

 

Senator Clinton angrily claimed that this response was "impugning the patriotism of any of us who raise serious questions" about the way the administration was running the Iraq war. Clinton's letter was remarkably ad hominem in its attacks on Edelman, alleging he had his "priorities backward" and calling his claim that withdrawal talk would embolden the enemy "outrageous and dangerous."

In the light of this 2007 episode, now-Secretary Clinton's views on the Afghan surge timeline are all the more remarkable and newsworthy. Here, according to David Sanger, are her views today:

"Clinton thought [the deadline to start pulling the surge troops back out] was a mistake and still does; an internal deadline would have been fine, she believed, but a public one simply telegraphed to the Taliban and the Pakistanis when the United States would be leaving. The Taliban read the newspapers too, she pointed out.

In the end her concern -- also voiced by Gates -- seems prescient. The effort to explore the possibility of 'reconciliation' talks with the Taliban sputtered along in low gear for years. It is impossible to know for certain how the pullout plan affected the Taliban's calculations, but interviews with Taliban taken prisoner by NATO suggested that the insurgents knew time was on their side, and they were simply waiting for the Americans to begin a significant withdrawal.

In other words, according to Sanger, Secretary Clinton opposed announcing the Afghan surge withdrawal timeline for the very same reasons that she denounced as "outrageous and dangerous" earlier as a Senator.

Secretary Clinton has been a comparative bright spot in the Obama administration, and so I bring up past performance with some reluctance lest it impugn future success. Comparing these two surge timeline debates probably says more about the quality of politics five years ago than it does about the quality of her contribution to Obama policymaking today.

And I cannot disprove the hypothesis that Clinton's simply views evolved in the interval. Perhaps she sincerely believed in the wisdom of public timelines in 2007 and changed her mind in ensuing years; perhaps she sincerely believed that raising concerns about those timelines was tantamount to questioning one's patriotism in 2007 and has a different view today. (I reject absolutely the notion that in raising doubts about the Afghan surge timeline she was seeking to impugn the patriotism of those in the Obama administration, most notably the president himself, who wanted it.)

Yet I think it is more likely that Senator Clinton was pursuing a partisan agenda in 2007, whereas Secretary Clinton today is motivated more by weightier concerns about the overall success of the Afghan mission.

If so, then wouldn't it be laudable if Secretary Clinton offered an apology to Edelman?

Even if no such gracious gesture is forthcoming, Republicans can benefit if they take to heart the central lesson of this little morality tale: positions that look appealing when one is sitting on the political opposition benches can look appalling when one is sitting in the Oval Office.

This weekend, the New York Times assured us that there was relatively little difference between President Obama and Gov. Romney on international affairs. "Romney and Obama Strain to Show Gap on Foreign Policy," read the web headline Saturday. Peter Baker writes:

"...once the incendiary flourishes are stripped away, the actual foreign policy differences between the two seem more a matter of degree and tone than the articulation of a profound debate about the course of America in the world today."

The story builds around a debate between campaign surrogates at the Brookings institution, at which Marvin Kalb, the moderator, concluded that differences "were more about words than substance." What would a real disagreement look like? The story offers an example of a significant contrast from times past: the debates over the Iraq war.

There is a political implication of such reporting, at a time when Gov. Romney is meeting with world leaders abroad: No reason to oppose the incumbent on foreign policy grounds. They are all the same. Nothing to see here. Move along. [Disclosure: I advise the Romney campaign on some foreign policy matters].

At the risk of drawing my Shadow Government colleagues away from their Olympic Beach Volleyball, let me pose a question to them: How should one measure foreign policy differences? Or, as we economists are wont to say: What's your metric?

I might be willing to accept these bland statements about continuity in foreign policy if only we had not spent the last few years elevating every presidential utterance into the start of a new era in foreign policy. Consider as Exhibit A the "pivot to Asia." After a period of shameful neglect, the implication went, the Obama administration was finally returning attention to a strategically critical region.

If only the same skeptics who covered the Brookings debate had covered those administration speeches, they might have asked some probing questions: Other than tone and words, what has really changed? Is this a dramatic new commitment of military resources? (No.) Is this a newly launched regional trade agreement? (No. The TPP was actually launched under the Bush administration). Will we now have bureaus at State, DoD, and NSC to watch East Asia and the Pacific, when formerly we dozed? (No. Those were there before, fully staffed and awake).

What of the story's example of real policy differences from days gone by: the Iraq war. Did President Obama order all American troops to leave on January 21, 2009? Or did the withdrawal basically follow the timetable set out in a status of forces agreement negotiated before the last presidential election?

I do not mean to suggest that nothing ever changes in U.S. foreign policy. Far from it. Alliances, left untended, can fall into disrepair (I think the Libya campaign did nothing to strengthen NATO, for example). A lack of presidential leadership on issues like trade can leave institutions to crumble (the Word Trade Organization) and can leave partners feeling snubbed (Korea and Colombia, enduring needless years of delay; and now potentially Russia). My Shadow Government colleagues have provided numerous other examples over the years.

We either attach weight to amorphous factors like tone, and words, and leadership, or we do not. If we are going to score a foreign policy shift only when the country refocuses its grand strategy around alliances with Uruguay and Mongolia, then so be it. I look forward to the future headline, "Reporters Strain to Show Gap Between Bush and Obama on Foreign Policy."

American decline is in the news again. Now even the embarrassed Australians have joined the debate, with an awkward "clarification" of Foreign Minister Bob Carr's reported comments to Mitt Romney about how to reverse America's decline. Meanwhile yesterday President Obama's remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars conference continued what appears to be an election-year conversion to the anti-declinist view (more on this below) as he rejected accusations of decline and called the 21^st century another "American century." Governor Romney will likely present his own take in his VFW remarks today.

All of this came to mind as I recently read Jim Mann's engaging new book The Obamians profiling the Obama administration foreign policy team. Like Mann's other books, this one is generally thoughtful, balanced, and insightful. Yet what emerges from Mann's book is an unflattering (perhaps more unflattering than the author intends) reminder of just how many strategic mistakes the Obama administration made when it first took office. Taken at face value the book portrays the combination of hubris and naiveté that consumed the Obama team during their first year in particular. Most of their signature policy initiatives from that time became strategic failures: the embrace of China around a "G-2" partnership; the support for Medvedev as a pillar of the Russia "re-set"; the ideological commitment to unconditional negotiations with the Iranian regime that prevented support for the Green Movement or tightened sanctions during a more opportune window; the failed push for Israeli-Palestinian peace based on unprecedented pressure on Israel; the belief that the war in Afghanistan could be simultaneously escalated (with a troop increase) and ended (with a politically-driven drawdown date).

Beyond these specific mistakes, what also springs from the book is the overriding sense of how President Obama and his team internalized a belief in America's decline as they sought to frame American foreign policy. This animated their worldview and became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as they consciously chose to cede American leadership to other actors on the world stage and downplayed American influence and capabilities. It is one thing to understand and act on shifts in global power balances, such as the relative decline in the EU and the relative ascendance of China and India. But it is another thing altogether to deliberately position the United States as a declining power.

In Mann's description, part of the Obama team's belief in America's diminished power came from what they saw as fiscal resource constraints. He cites Obama administration officials lamenting that, unlike the supposedly ample budgets of the Clinton years, the U.S. now has very little money to devote to national security concerns, and thus can exercise less global influence than during the 1990s. That today's national security budgets face considerable pressures is true, but Mann's account and the Obamians' attitudes gloss over two important points. First, in comparison with the allegedly halcyon days of abundant resources during the Clinton administration, the Obama national security team actually has substantially more money -- roughly twice as much -- at its disposal. For example, the FY 2000 defense budget (during Clinton's last year) was $295 billion, whereas the FY 2011 budget is almost twice that at $549 billion -- which rises to over $700 billion when the Iraq and Afghanistan accounts are included. The percentage increase in the diplomacy and development budgets, known as the "Function 150 account", over the same time span is similar. The combined budget for the State Department and USAID in FY 2000 was around $23 billion, whereas the comparable FY 2011 budget was over $48 billion (the FY 2010 budget was even higher). The international affairs budget actually hit a 30-year low in 1997, in the midst of the Clinton presidency. In short, it is easy to view history through greenback-colored lenses and assume that previous eras had abundant resources -- and forgot that the 1990s were characterized by severe reductions to both the defense and international affairs budgets from the post-Cold War "peace dividend."

Second, Mann fails to probe a primary reason why the Obama national security team feels the fiscal pinch. National security is not a budget priority of this White House, especially in comparison with domestic entitlement programs. The only line in the federal budget that the Obama administration has targeted for specific reductions is Defense, while leaving relatively untouched the main drivers of the fiscal crisis and the largest portions of the federal budget: domestic entitlement programs. What the Mann book elides is that these budget realities reflect deliberate policy choices and priorities of the White House.

Recently this White House seems to have realized that they may have prematurely bought into the decline notion -- at the very least, they have realized that it is not helpful to Obama's reelection prospects for voters to believe the administration embraces decline -- and they responded with a time-honored Beltway gambit, touting an author making the opposite argument on the president's reading list. However, this election-year conversion follows three years of damage to America's global standing, and the bills for this erosion will come due in the coming years. (Curiously, Mann portrays Secretary Clinton as differing from Obama in still affirming American preeminence).

Finally, if the United States does face the real prospect of decline, should American leaders be resigned to this fate -- or should they resolve to resist it? The picture that emerges from the Mann book is of an Obama administration that chose the former path. American power and influence is diminishing, they seem to believe, and one task of statecraft is to manage this new reality.

Perhaps so. But I recently came across a quote from an American statesman from a previous generation that displays a fierce resolve against succumbing to decline. Bill Clements served as Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Nixon and Ford Administrations from 1973-77, and he famously admonished his staff: "Let us never send the president of the United States to the conference table as the head of the second-strongest nation in the world."

This resolve is all the more remarkable when considering the historical context. During the years of Clements' Pentagon service the United States faced the most sustained erosion of its global standing since becoming a world power. It had just lost its first war in Vietnam; seen its first president ever to resign from office; was enduring the triple economic whammy of oil price shocks from the OPEC embargo, inflation, and stagnant growth; and was witnessing its foe the Soviet Union make strategic advances around the world. American decline was not just a fear, it was a fact. Yet Clements did not resign himself to merely managing this decline, but urged his staff and colleagues to work to renew American power.

This should be remembered today. Some data points of decline may be unavoidable, but how we respond is a choice.

(For those interested in further commentary on the decline debate, check out the National Intelligence Council's blog on its upcoming Global Trends 2030 report, which this week considers various angles on the question of American decline).

Well, President Obama has been speaking non-stop about outsourcing. In his campaign video that I'm being subjected to endlessly in Northern Virginia, he's even trotted out a new word: "insourcing." 

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's just toeing the line drawn by his union supporters. Otherwise, there is something clearly awry with his Council of Economic Advisors.

But stop the presses: Obama is guilty of outsourcing, too. And while president. He's outsourcing security at our embassy in Iraq (and probably others but I've only wasted time checking one).

President Obama is outsourcing our national security. Literally. Take a gander at this part of the website provided by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Almost all firms are foreign and those that aren't employ lots of third-country nationals. He is advertising for outsourcing firms with your tax dollars...which means Barack Obama is promoting outsourcing with your tax dollars.

Rather than delve into this too deeply let me just say two things: These firms are all very good at what they do. Very good. Second, this is who should be doing this work. This is not a job for the U.S. military. They are not security guards. Rather, outsourcing these jobs is the right thing to do, and who cares what their mailing address is or where their employees come from? Obviously, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agree with me because they have kept this Bush-era policy for more than three years. Three years of government outsourcing and President Obama still carries on -- and I applaud him for it.

Yes, it's a blatant attempt at avoiding discussion of the Obama economy. But this outsourcing rhetoric has the benefit of putting Obama's economic literacy on display -- and it's worrying. There is a very serious conversation to be had about what the president's economic policies have translated into for American leverage around the globe and we will get to that in future posts. (In the meantime, if you want more finesse and grey matter on the subject you can read about it here.)

The frightening thing about this outsourcing discussion is that the president appears to believe his rhetoric. I assume it's just politics but it's dishonest politics, even so. The reason for outsourcing is to achieve greater economic efficiency. Of course, the national security realm is hardly the area that you want to see that pushed as a first order priority. But don't forget, there are Americans who can do this security work, and who are better trained than anyone else. They are just more expensive.

So, why isn't Obama doing anything about this dangerous outsourcing of thousands of jobs with taxpayer money on his watch? There can only be three answers here.

The first is that he's just not paying attention. Fair enough. Why would the president of the United States focus on security guard contracts? But this is the biggest embassy on the planet and withdrawal from Iraq and downsizing the embassy there is the centerpiece of his foreign policy. He paid enough attention to remove his nominee for ambassador to that post. He also talked about the embassy security guards in his campaign. (Remember Blackwater? He and the his party carped on the subject for so long the company actually had to leave the country, which is another "feature" of the president's policies and anti-capitalist populist rhetoric that merit a separate post.)

But back to why Obama is perfectly aware of his outsourcing. This subject has been the centerpiece of his re-election campaign thus far. After three-plus years of promoting various economic policies this is the one he has chosen to highlight. The only one. He has spent millions of dollars to tell people that he cares about this. And yet, those outsourcees still have their jobs.

Remember all that talk about jobs created and saved? He saved some jobs alright -- outsourced ones. And remember I've only looked at just this one embassy. It's too silly to look for more, though I'm certain other examples exist. This could potentially involve thousands of people. In January, the State Department estimated the embassy would cost $3.5 billion, annually, to run. Think of how many jobs you could save or create with all that cheddar.

The cynical explanation for all this is that the military is not represented by the SEIU or AFCSME. When the union bosses want something this president delivers. He knows who butters his bread. This is just a case where the union bosses haven't had much to say. They just don't care, so he doesn't care.

Before the president's advisors take me literally, I am not advocating that the military be unionized and turned into the TSA. The State Department already is unionized and that's quite enough.

The third explanation is that the president is full of it and just wants to distract from discussion of the economy under Obamanomics. The monthly job report should tell you all you need to know about how well Obama is performing his "insourcing" duties, or his grasp of economics, for that matter. The president is making an absurd economic claim that he himself is spending billions -- much of it your money -- contradicting. And were he to "fix" it, it would put people's lives in danger. Obviously, this is a bit of a stark example. But it also highlights just how bogus this line line of argument is. Sometimes the examples are very simple: Labor is expensive and companies move manufacturing to a new location where it's cheaper. Sometimes jobs are moved to India. Sometimes they go to right-to-work places like South Carolina. In this case, American labor is expensive so the embassy has called upon third-country nationals. It's all outsourcing. We've seen the president move heaven and earth to try to block the opening of a new factory in South Carolina. Yet, here he is promoting outsourcing at the U.S.' largest embassy abroad and most likely at others.

So next time you hear Mr. Obama expound on outsourcing (or God help us, outsourcing vs. insourcing) remember that the president has turned to outsourced labor to protect the forward edge of the unclenched fist, the reset button, smart power, etc. etc.

The metaphorical derecho of the Supreme Court's controversial decision on health care followed by the physical derecho that knocked out power in D.C. combined to drive another story out of the headlines. But as things slowly return to normal, that story is worth returning to, because it helps clarify what "normal" has been. The story is the mushrooming revelations about the Obama administration's suboptimal national security policy-making process.

The most shocking charges have come in a series of excerpts from Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran's new book. The book makes a string of damning charges: that the Obama team sought to suppress intelligence that ran counter to its policies; that the president was actually disengaged from the policy process and not the forceful decider his spinners were claiming; that the team let petty personal feuds trump wise policy; and so on. This comes on the heels of other deeply sourced accounts that reported that the White House political office was in the room when the national security team was deciding on targets for drone strikes, and the extent to which someone leaked details about covert operations that made Obama look strong on national security.

I agree with Paul Miller that the excerpts from the Chandrasekaran's book have a tabloid feel to them, and may indeed contain as much distortionary spin as any White House press spokesman's daily briefing. It is not too hard to cherry-pick vignettes that ring false. For instance, this brief account strikes me as misleading:

But in more than two hours of discussion, the 14-member war cabinet -- which included Vice President Biden, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton -- never asked McChrystal why he wanted so many more marines in Helmand. The civilians didn't know enough about Afghanistan to focus on that issue. They were also concerned about micromanaging the war, of looking like President Lyndon B. Johnson picking bombing targets in North Vietnam.

From his seat along the wall, Obama's top adviser on the Afghan war, Douglas E. Lute, believed that those around the table were missing a crucial point. Instead of arguing about counterinsurgency strategy -- whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai would improve and whether the Pakistanis would crack down on Taliban sanctuaries -- they should have focused more on how the forces would be employed. That would have revealed how the military had misused the first wave of troops Obama authorized.

Lute may or may not have felt that way, but the book makes it sound like that was the end of the matter. But Lute was uniquely positioned to address this problem by virtue of his privileged access to the president and to Jones and his control over the paperflow for the review. So I think it is more likely that the account describes a problem that provoked Lute into taking some remedial action. Only reporting the problem without reporting the remedial action paints a distorted picture.

Yet, even after discounting for such likely distortions, the picture that remains is disturbing. It would seem to put to rest the myth that this administration has been vastly superior to historical norms in terms of bureaucratic process. And it makes some of the gushing words of the myth-purveyors almost cringe-worthy when reconsidered in context.

Take, for example, our own FP's David Rothkopf:

To achieve these goals has required more than just changing the guy in the Oval Office or the folks around him. It has required more than just taking old Bush policy papers, reading their conclusions and doing something different. It has involved a degree of disciplined policy formation and program management that actually, deliberately began by taking a page or two out of the Bush handbook ... not the George W. Bush handbook, however, but that created by his father and his national security team, led by General Brent Scowcroft.

Current National Security Advisor Tom Donilon explicitly acknowledges that the Scowcroft model and structure was a source of much of the initial organization of the Obama team, with the NSC staff organization, principals' meetings, deputies' meetings and working group meetings following George H.W. Bush era precedents.

But even a proven structure won't work if the president and his team do not have the discipline to work within it. The George W. Bush process did not; the president enabled the creation of back channels that were taken advantage of by both the vice president and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and the result -- even in the eyes of top Bush officials -- was muddled and sometimes profoundly flawed execution.

Barack Obama however, made up for his lack of prior foreign policy experience, by both picking very experienced advisors and then by insisting upon a rigorous process.

Or David Ignatius:

The foreign policy challenges of the past two months were also the first test of the new national security adviser, Tom Donilon. True to his reputation as a political "Mr. Fix-It," he was low-key, to the point of near-invisibility -- and he'll need to present a stronger public face to succeed in that job. But he ran a smooth and seamless policy process, without the competing voices that have sometimes been heard over the past two years.

Donilon's advantage, it appears, is that he is master of the house at the National Security Council. His predecessor, Gen. Jim Jones, also tried to run an orderly process, but he had to look over his shoulder at Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff who operated in a sort of prime ministerial role. Emanuel often used Donilon (who was Jones's deputy) as his personal foreign policy operative, which confused lines of responsibility.

"What we have now is a tightly aligned, single process for foreign policy," a senior White House official said when asked what difference the departures of Emanuel and Jones had made.

Or Edward Luce:

‘The truth is that President Obama is his own Henry Kissinger -- no one else plays that role,' says a senior official. 'Every administration reflects the personality of the president. This president wants all the trains routed through the Oval Office.'... 'By getting the process right, we are improving the quality of decisions.'... At the end of each meeting, the president summarizes what everyone has said and the arguments each has made with a real lawyer's clarity," says a participant to the NSC principals meeting, which includes Mr Gates and Mrs Clinton. 'When the president finally makes a decision, it is with the full facts and usually shows a high calibre of judgment.'

It didn't take a lot of insider knowledge at the time to recognize that those puffed-up descriptions probably exaggerated the quality of the national security policy process. Now, thanks to a wave of books drawing on extensive insider leaks, it is possible to see just how unduly flattering the early praise was.

When the pundits return to national security issues -- as surely they must at some point in the coming months -- perhaps they will return with a bit more realistic awareness of the process problems that have plagued this administration, just as they plagued previous ones.

###

Update: A friend sent me a note suggesting that I was guilty of distortion myself when I cherry-picked the Chandrasekaran piece, particularly when I ended the quote where I did. He points out that the very next paragraph would seem to rebut my claim. It reads:

After the meeting, Lute and his staff assembled a list of follow-up questions for McChrystal. Lute, a three-star general, asked McChrystal to provide more explanation of the location of the bubbles. At the war cabinet's next meeting, McChrystal talked briefly about the need to "demonstrate momentum" in Helmand. To Lute, the answer seemed unsatisfactory, but nobody around the table pressed McChrystal any further.

My friend is right that I should have included that extra paragraph, but I think my basic point still stands regardless: Surely Lute was perfectly positioned to follow up further and press the matter again with McChrystal? Yet the (entire) excerpt makes it seem like he did not, like his unsatisfactory initial exchange was the end of the matter. Now, giving Chandrasekaran the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he did investigate further and found no evidence of any follow-up. If that is the case, given the extensive reporting in the piece, it is a pretty damning incident, indeed. For my money, I suspect that Lute and others took some remedial action that is not covered in the reporting.

Either way, my overall thesis seems on solid ground: The Obama national security process has been no where near as idyllic as the boosters have claimed.