Obama: The Heir To Reagan

Daniel Larison writes:

Via Andrew, Ben Smith brings a new Polish poll on the missile shield to our attention. By a 48-31% margin, Polish respondents say that Obama’s decision was good for Poland. This is in line with what I have been saying about Polish and Czech public opinion regarding the missile defense proposal for quite some time. The Wall Street Journal’s latest news article this morning was blaring headlines from tabloids in Poland and the Czech Republic as if these responses were representative of the population as a whole. Evidently they are not at all representative. It’s as if foreign media picked up the latest stories from Newsmax and treated them as proof of what most Americans believed. One of the problems the American right seems to be having in understanding the Polish and Czech reactions is that they are taking their cues from the most nationalist segments of the population, and as a result they are given very misleading impressions of how most Poles and Czechs view things. If you believe that Vaclav Havel speaks for his people on this matter, his outrage over the cancellation would mean something, but he doesn’t speak for them, just as he did not speak for them when he backed the invasion of Iraq. The same is true of Kaczynski and the Poles.

How is it that most conservatives can bristle at American elites who ignore them and their interests and not see that most “pro-Western” or “pro-American” governments are staffed with people who are just as out of touch with their own nations on many issues? How do they not see that the sort of people from the coasts they find so unappealing and unlike them are very much like the Europeans who align themselves so slavishly with Washington? Why would anyone assume that such people represent the broad majority of their countrymen when it comes to foreign policy?

And:

This statement from a number of major movement figures attacking the administration’s decision on missile defense is a useful reminder of how bankrupt movement conservative thought is when it comes to matters of national security and foreign policy. Had I set out to write a parody of hysterical conservative reaction to this decision, I would not have been able to come up with anything that compares to the genuine article. The first paragraph sums up their view:

"The announcement that the Obama Administration will abandon Missile Defense in Poland and the Czech Republic represents a massive surrender of American Strategic Influence and a betrayal of two of our closest friends in the region. The move also indicates appeasement towards Russia, and a misunderstanding of the seriousness of the potential nuclear capability of Iran."

For starters, you have to enjoy all of the unnecessary capitalization. It isn’t merely missile defense, but Missile Defense that Obama has scrapped. All of the usual tropes are here: surrender, betrayal, appeasement. It doesn’t seem to bother these people that all of this is garbage. Former Polish President Kwasniewski specifically rejected describing this decision as a “betrayal,” and it is laughable that anyone would make such a charge. How can cancelling a system that hasn’t even been built and which at least half of Poland doesn’t want count as a betrayal of Poland? If this move were an attempt at “appeasing” Russia, it might start to rehabilitate the reputation of appeasement. It would mean that foregoing unnecessary provocations can repair frayed international relations, and it implies that critics of the decision would prefer a world in which relations with Russia continue to deteriorate and European security is steadily undermined.

Iran’s nuclear capability is neither here nor there. Without a long-range missile program to deliver the nukes that Iran is nowhere near close to having, Iran’s nuclear capability might be real and still pose no threat to European security. The signatories of this statement haven’t a shred of credibility on these issues. Unfortunately, instead of being greeted with embarrassment and disdain by conservatives, this statement represents the common view of much of the American right.

The only conservative thing that Ronald Reagan ever did was to begin nuclear arms reduction in Europe, just as the only conservative thing that George W Bush ever did was to remove American troops from Saudi Arabia after 9/11, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil.

Those acts stood in the tradition of Republican calls for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War, of refusal to enter the Second World War until actually attacked by either side, of Eisenhower's ending of the Korean War, of his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, of his denunciation of the military-industrial complex, of Nixon's pursuit of began détente with China, and of the ending of the Vietnam War by him and Ford, an old America First Committee stalwart.

That tradition now subsists in Barack Obama and his Administration. Which is more than welcome. But whatever happened to the Republican Party?