The Shadow Government's (Mostly) Constructive Advice for Obama Posted by David Shorr

In the patriotic spirit of wishing President Obama a successful foreign policy year in 2010, our conservative friends at Shadow Government offer a set of nine suggestions advertised as constructive. I'm pleased to report that the product largely lives up to the advertising -- one of the pieces impressively so. I heartily recommend Kori Schake's argument for cutting the defense budget. Kori's call for congressional conservatives to provide political cover for Obama is strikingly bipartisan, but her deeper point is an important one:

We must stop equating inputs such as "amount spent" to outputs. Americans rightly expect to have the world's finest military. We should reinforce our comparative advantages and develop new ones to expand our supremacy. But equating that to an industrial age metric like "coal burned" makes us less creative, less responsive to changing circumstances. We must be more cost effective in our defense spending as in all other government spending. 

This critique of the way national security is talked about (and consequently thought about) is an invitation to a healthier, depoliticized, and reality-based debate. To the extent we can recast the discourse and figure out less crude, more thoughtful ideas about what will defend the United States and our interests, yay. Kori may have a suitable partner in the Project on Defense Alternatives. With merely a cursory glance, I can't assess PDA's recommendations, but they are certainly in the spirit of Kori's idea of subjecting the defense budget to greater rigor.

Other's may want to weigh in on the merits or demerits of other offerings from the Shadow Government, but I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't respond to two of the pieces that aren't even close to being constructive, both relating to Iran. From John Hannah, we have essentially a rehash of neocon ideological fervor over regime change. No doubt there's a delicate balance to be struck between solidarity with Iranians demanding reform and ongoing diplomatic engagement with the current regime. But Hannah's advice is indistinguishable from the failed and discredited Bush-Cheney policy.

At least Hannah's advice wasn't a self-serving mischaracterization of President Obama's 2009 efforts. That task fell to Jamie Fly:

Obama has bolstered his disarmament agenda by arguing that U.S. nuclear reductions and ratification of treaties like the CTBT will somehow convince Iran and North Korea to forgo their nuclear ambitions. In reality, Iran may go nuclear in the near future, setting off a wave of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. North Korea has rebuffed all Obama administration attempts to lure it back to the negotiating table and may be proliferating its nuclear wares to other rogue regimes. 

President Obama spent 2009 talking about disarmament and pursuing engagement with rogue regimes. If he wants to rescue his disarmament agenda in 2010, he should focus less on the supposed threat posed by the U.S. nuclear deterrent and more on the real problem -- the regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang.

Okay I gotta ask, is there some kind of purchase-a-term-paper web site out there where they download this stuff? I mean, how many times have we heard this superficial BS? If Jamie really believes Obama pushed Iran and North Korea to the back burner and doesn't see the dangers posed by their nuclear programs, he was asleep all last year. Now it's time for me to repeat something I've explained umpteen times. No one in the administration believes that virtuous behavior by the United States will spur a revelation in Pyongyang or Tehran about the error of their ways. The point is that the pressure on them will be augmented when the US boosts its moral authority.

Fly doesn't believe in moral authority, that's fine. But we tried the "example of force" approach for eight years, and the neocon diehards are the only ones who don't recognize what an utter failure that was.

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