Here, via Brad DeLong:

Some younger guy said he should be President, but some cranky older guy said that yet another guy named Petraeus should be President. Maybe the old guy was like Petraeus’s butler or something?

It was a draw, which is good for Obama at the perception level: McCain never successfully put it away against a competitor who’s widely considered to be a foreign policy neophyte.

Overall, McCain’s foreign policy vision was disquieting. His linking of Iran solely to Israel’s existence was pure demagoguery, his Iraq “victory” talk was nothing more than a drawn out soundbyte which betrayed serious delusions about Iraq’s future, and his defense of our pro-Musharraf Pakistan policy was at best unconvincing in the face of Obama’s cheap and disingenuous criticisms.

What surprised me most, however, was McCain’s incoherence on Georgia, an argument in which I thought he had the tactical (if not wholly practical) advantage over Obama. Obama’s reaction to the Georgia crisis as it was unfolding came off as McCain-lite—a muddled and uncertain saber-rattle. All McCain had to do last night was be forceful and single-minded to have Obama look out of his depth. Yet McCain bungled it:

I don’t believe we’re going to go back to the Cold War. I am sure that that will not happen. But I do believe that we need to bolster our friends and allies. And that wasn’t just about a problem between Georgia and Russia. It had everything to do with energy. There’s a pipeline that runs from the Caspian through Georgia through Turkey. And, of course, we know that the Russians control other sources of energy into Europe, which they have used from time to time. It’s not accidental that the presidents of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine flew to Georgia, flew to Tbilisi, where I have spent significant amount of time with a great young president, Misha Saakashvili. And they showed solidarity with them, but, also, they are very concerned about the Russian threats to regain their status of the old Russian to regain their status of the old Russian empire. Now, I think the Russians ought to understand that we will support — we, the United States — will support the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine in the natural process, inclusion into NATO.

At pains to show how much he knew, McCain was scattershot and unconvincing. Which is it, Senator? Is it that we must stand by fledgling democracies no matter what, as the neoconservatives demand? Is it a wholly energy-centered (and quite frankly insane) gambit which demands we try to snake a pipeline from the Caspian between a hostile Iran and an increasingly hostile Russia at the expense of both powers? Or is it that Russia is acting on old Imperial impulses and must be stopped for some reason?

It’s a shame that McCain didn’t turn to friends like Chuck Hagel and Tony Cordesman, and went to unqualified ideologues like Randy Scheunemann instead. He certainly had the opportunity to be the foreign policy “adult” this election.

Does Matt Yglesias really want this? Is he serious?

In November, there’s going to be an election. And in January, there’ll be a new President. And in the interim, progressive groups will probably come up with a lot of “ten ways to make everything awesome” proposals. And it’ll take 41 conservative senators to filibuster them all, and so they’ll all be filibustered. But if the government directly controls major financial institutions, that would give the new administration extraordinary leverage over the national economy. Suppose the new CEO of AIG decided he didn’t want to insure assets of companies whose executives make unseemly multiples of the national median income? There are all kinds of crazy things you could do. And of course not all of them would be good ideas. But some of them would! And the smart folks on our side need to be figuring out which ones they are. It seems doubtful to me that a progressive administration would ever be able to get away with this much nationalizing of everything, but what’s done is done and I think it creates a real opportunity for “socially conscious insurance underwriting” or whatever you care to call it.

I’m absolutely dumbfounded.

Having read David Leonhardt’s extensive piece on Obamanomics, I’m inclined to think that Obama would avoid such foolish market interventionism. Indeed, he explicitly says he’s opposed to it in the above-cited article:

“If you talk to Warren [Buffett], he’ll tell you his preference is not to meddle in the economy at all — let the market work, however way it’s going to work, and then just tax the heck out of people at the end and just redistribute it,” Obama said. “That way you’re not impeding efficiency, and you’re achieving equity on the back end.”

I always knew that people of terribly unsound economic judgment were bound to be part of the Obama bandwagon. I guess I never assumed Matt Yglesias was among them.

UPDATE: I should clarify, perhaps, that I’m not terribly thrilled with Obama’s gambit. It’s completely acceptable in contrast to Matt’s formulation, however.

Matt Yglesias has written a good summary of the situation in Basra. Normally this would be an excellent lead-in for me to launch into a longish post about the talk I was at this afternoon at the Brookings Institution, wherein Matt’s general analysis was repeated almost verbatim by a Marine captain, which visibly flustered Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, who were also on the panel.

Alas, I’ve only slept two hours last night, so a longer post is out of the question. I’ll try to do it tomorrow.

This kind of strategy (via Yglesias), vague as it is, would work hand-in-glove with “dignity promotion”. And as a statement of purpose, it’s better and more hard-nosed than what Obama’s team offered. Nevertheless, passages like these give me pause:

Arrogant talk of helping rising powers become “responsible stakeholders” should be replaced with words of respect derived in part from America’s enduring position of strength. There is no obvious reason why China should be considered a strategic competitor rather than partner, and talk of inevitable conflict is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There’s an underlying assumption here that it’s American haughtiness which is leading to international instability. I couldn’t agree less. I’d say, rather, that words of respect ought to be derived from America’s recognition of the limits of its strength. There’s no obvious reason why we should assume a priori that China wants to partner with us rather than compete with us. We may want to cooperate with them because we realize that our era of dominating East Asia is at an end.

What’s required is candid assessment of our positions of strength and a retrenching of sorts. A healthy dose of “Smart Power” could help us reclaim a certain legitimacy in the world, to be sure, but we must not forget the uncompromising, bleak nature of the international system. There’s nothing to indicate that we, the human race, are past the bloody-minded scramble for supremacy that has marked every single epoch of our existence to date.

Spencer Ackerman’s done the legwork and interviewed a slew of Obama’s foreign policy advisors to get a sense of his administration’s direction and priorities. Spencer’s thrilled, I’m less so.

This is why, Obama’s advisers argue, national security depends in large part on dignity promotion. Without it, the U.S. will never be able to destroy al-Qaeda. Extremists will forever be able to demagogue conditions of misery, making continued U.S. involvement in asymmetric warfare an increasingly counterproductive exercise—because killing one terrorist creates five more in his place.

Dignity promotion sounds like something USAID or the World Bank should be doing. It’s a valid goal, one which an Obama’s administration ought to pursue by generously funding agencies tasked with achieving it. And as a means of fighting terrorist organizations, it makes far more sense than the balls-out military approach which has been so spectacularly failing these past 7 years.

But in his drive to transcend the mindset that got us into Iraq, Obama seems to be staking far too much on this new approach. We should be thinking about our relationships with China and Russia, about the extent of our commitment to Taiwan, Georgia and the Ukraine, and about energy security for us and our allies in the face of rising competitors. Dignity promotion gives short shrift to big picture geostrategic thinking by promoting nebulous notions of global welfare above those of individual state actors. We ignore the fact that China and Russia are playing a zero-sum self-aggrandizing game at our own peril.

Here’s Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve.

Let me be the last person on the internet to heartily recommend Julian Sanchez’s excellent LA Times op-ed on the true dangers of unchecked government spying. Here’s the crux: spying on you and me doesn’t matter. Spying on political opposition is what we ought to be worried about.

It’s an especially salient read in light of the recent Obama flap.

Marko Hoare thinks McCain would be best for South-East Europe. He dismisses Hillary as a continuation of Bill Clinton’s unfocused performance on the world stage, and warns that Obama is pandering to Serbian and Greek domestic lobbies which are fairly right-wing (as such lobbies tend to be).

I’d like to examine this argument in more detail, and I’ll try to post something longer over the weekend. Briefly, though, I would argue that Hillary is America’s best hope for a smart yet assertive foreign policy; McCain scares me for a variety of reasons; and yes, Obama is the least convincing of the three. I’ll stick to writing about Obama for this post, and hopefully get around to expanding on my thoughts later.

I find Obama most troubling of all, because though I believe that he is the most capable and intelligent candidate, I get the sense that his gifts for oration and inspiration can get the better of him sometimes.

In his letter to the Serbian Unity Congress, he states:

I support and shall help in every possible way development of the dialog between all sides in Kosovo because I believe that peace and stability can be reached only by solutions acceptable for all sides.

Unlike Dr. Hoare, I don’t see this as a pander. I think he has a genuine concern that America’s recent moves in the region are sowing the seeds of a broader future conflict. He is calling for Kosovars and Serbs to get together and work out their differences in good faith. It’s a nice sentiment, and a nice template for solving conflicts in theory. In the practice of international relations, however, we’re frequently not dealing with good faith interlocutors, and a harder-nosed realpolitik is oftentimes called for.

I worry that Obama’s proven ability to motivate people in the domestic setting is making him believe that he can replicate this on the world stage. I worry Obama believes that the Balkan tragedy of the 1990’s came about because the Great Powers didn’t insist on negotiations hard enough. I worry that he thinks that the Russians, who are saying very similar things to what he’s saying above on Kosovo, are being honest and sensible, rather than duplicitous and deceitful. I worry that Obama, listening as he does to the Samantha Powers of the world, has an idealistic and naive idea of how the United States ought to behave.