Fred Thompson was making sense on MTP this morning, pointing out in answer to a question about overthrowing the government of Pakistan that:

Well, when you say we allow the head of a country to stay the head of a country, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s kind of a mouthful. I don’t think we ought to look at it like whether or not we allow someone to stand or not. The question is what’s our relationship going to be with him? What kind of support are we going to, to give?

Exactly. It’s not our job to micromanage the details of Pakistan’s government, and it’s not a job we’d be any good at even if we tried. With Pakistan, as with every other country in the world, we have common interests, conflicting agendas, things we need or want from them, things they need or want from us, and things we wish were different.

Nothing good can come from having politicians pronouncing that events elsewhere in the world are acceptable or unacceptable, unless we’re actually prepared to (and able) to change them. Superpowers can’t bluff.

The idea that the American president is an omnipotent force able to stop bad things anywhere in the world, and to prevent any country from doing something that negatively affects our foreign policy, is an extremely dangerous conceit. And when combined with our national tendency towards a manichaeist foreign policy, it becomes a poison in our political discourse.

Both Obama and Clinton did a good job during last week’s debate trying to change this. Obama, in particular, had an excellent response to an idiotic question from Brian Williams (”What would make it crystal clear in your mind that the United States should attack Iran?”), and also tried to defuse the hysteria surrounding foreign policy setbacks, and the tendency to view unfortunate events like Iran getting a couple of nuclear bombs in apocalyptic terms:

What we cannot continue to do is operate as if we are the weakest nation in the world instead of the strongest one, because that’s not who we are. And that’s not what America has been about historically, and it is starting to warp our domestic policies, as well. We haven’t even talked about civil liberties and the impact of that politics of fear, what that has done to us in terms of undermining basic civil liberties in this country, what it has done in terms of our reputation around the world.

I think that’s exactly right, as well. Throughout the Cold War, a commitment to a responsible foreign policy worthy of a superpower was a bipartisan affair (and it was the mainstream GOP which had the most difficult part of that bargain, since they were forced to marginalize the John Birchers, and the “rollback” folks, and the Douglas McArthur/Curtis LeMay view of the world).

It would be a Good Thing if this were still the case — if responsible leadership was an American idea instead of merely a Democratic one. But try as Obama, Clinton, and many others might, it won’t work unless they are joined by sane people in the Republican Party. So here’s a round of applause for Fred Thompson.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 12:46 pm, 4 November 2007 and filed under 2008 Elections, War and Peace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.