An Honest Question

What good are Palin’s libertarian-conservative bona fides if she’s Joe Lieberman on foreign policy? Don’t get me wrong: I am quite delighted to see a Republican running for high office who is a Bush Doctrine virgin.

But to my infinite frustration, a moderate degree of hawkishness such as my own — I supported the Iraq war on international-legal grounds; I supported independence for Kosovo on grounds of honor for the US and expediency for Europe; I am a philosemitic friend to Israel, but think the challenges facing the US and Israel are not identical — is inadequate to the folks who have captured the hawk wing of the Republican and Democratic parties alike. John McCain is their prince, but Joe Lieberman is their king; and I must repeat that I feel a complete dunce for not realizing that none other than Joe Lieberman would be training Palin in all catchphrases pertaining to ~~national security~~ international insecurity.

All of which would be not so important if I really cared more about the great things Radley Balko cares about and sees in Palin:

Palin actually has staked out unorthodox positions on a number of interesting issues, and they’re issues that McCain and the Republican base that has embraced her would probably find troubling. Palin’s taken a lot of heat, for example, for her (relatively loose) ties with the Alaska Independence Party, an organization that favors a vote on whether the state should secede from the union. Palin has also been friendly with the state’s Libertarian Party. Palin’s willingness to engage pro-liberty, deeply anti-federal political organizations—even fringe ones—is refreshing. But it’s wholly at odds with John McCain’s "country first" nationalist fervor.
…Palin’s persona thus far seems to be more in the tradition of Alaska’s frontier, individualistic conservatism than John McCain’s Weekly Standard-style national greatness conservatism. It’s a philosophy that’s skeptical of government, instead of what Repubilcans stand for now, which is to embrace government, so long as Republicans are running it. [via Alex]

And I do, I do care very much about those things. That’s why I keep claiming that McCain and Palin still have time to come clean on Bush and make an equally clean break, and get conservative Republicanism where it needs to be. But even if they managed to do this, getting into a war with Russia over Ukraine or Georgia would be so awful — in my estimation, at least — that our welcome and vital gains at home would seem almost beside the point. I’m not sure I can argue strenuously enough what a calamity it would be for us to fight a war with Russia, but I will try by saying simply that it would be a REAL world war, very much unlike the War on Terror. It would be submarine warfare, it would be Hugo Chavez transformed from a clown into a killer, it would be Syria giving up peace with Israel; it would be a nightmare in Alaska and a catastrophe for world markets and an embarrassment for NATO and possibly the death of the EU. It would be Iran uncontainable. China’s peaceful rise would be thrown into crisis and confusion. Need I say more? And these strike me as among the least outlandish and grisly possibilities. I refer again to Daniel:

With respect to Dr. Trifkovic, I think his hope that ”The Weekly Standard cabal and their ilk will be hard-pressed to make President Palin obey a bunch of Manhattanite intellectual pseuds, let alone to internalize their foreign policy schemes that are evil, stupid, and harmful to our troops’ safety” was misplaced. She has already embraced these schemes, and I see no reason why she would reject them were she one day to become President.

[…] Palin also said, “We will not repeat a Cold War,” but seems to have no clue that she is proposing to do just that. To be fair, I should add that her statement about a war with Russia was tied to NATO membership for these countries, so her remarks are no worse than the standard McCain view that these countries should be incorporated into NATO, but that still makes them quite awful.

Again, I have no problem in principle with NATO membership for Georgia — the Georgian people, unlike the Ukrainian people, are fully on board, and Georgia, whatever Saakashvili’s many errors and problems, is a legitimate candidate country on paper. But in practice it’s a horrible idea, and Ukrainian membership is even worse. EU membership for both is a much better idea, and also not America’s problem to solve. I wouldn’t be so unsettled by Palin’s treatment of both countries as prospective NATO members, at any rate, if she didn’t so breezily repeat the simple falsehood that Russia started the war. I have no interest in accusing her of lying for the benefit of a small group of anti-Russian agitators; I’m much more interested in the likelihood that a small group of anti-Russian agitators are telling her that the notion of Russian aggression is something like what Machiavelli called the ‘effective truth’, and that if she doesn’t promote that notion there’s something wrong with her. For Joe Lieberman to be a Democrat sympathetic with Republican foreign policy is one thing; for Joe to be Palin’s Henry Kissinger is something else entirely, and, given the stakes, my provisional disposition at present is that all the Balkoism in the world wouldn’t make up for a co-Vice President Lieberman.

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