Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Jennifer Rubin has an op-ed in the WaPost today bewailing the possibility of a libertarian/Paleo-conservative GOP candidate for President. The upshot would be a fiscally conservative candidate who wants to decrease American overseas involvement, running to the right of Obama on fiscal issues and to the left on national security issues. Rubin says that three candidates in the debate in South Carolina last week were taking that position -- Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, and Ron Paul. She also indicates that Haley Barbour probably would have taken that position and Mitch Daniels might as he has called for defense cuts just as President Obama has.
Rubin seems to think this would be a disaster for the GOP:
A nominee sporting such an outlook, I would suggest, will tear the GOP asunder. Religious conservatives (who take seriously the unique role and obligation of the United States in the world) and defense hawks would be aghast to hear a Republican nominee trying to match (or even outbid) Obama’s defense reductions. And those Republican lawmakers who are bravely resisting the drumbeat in favor of slashing defense would be undercut by their party’s standard-bearer, leaving them vulnerable to attack by Democrats eager to throw the presidential nominee’s positions up in their faces.
In sum, there are substantive and political reasons for Republicans to resist the temptation to abandon modern conservatism’s foreign policy (one that is grounded in moral values as well as a canny assessment of the danger of inaction). Whether they will do so depends in large part on the quality of the candidates and the strength of their arguments. If the internationalists are not forceful and effective in debunking the isolationists, as well as successful at the primary ballot boxes, the country and the party will suffer.
Do you think such a candidate would be disaster for the GOP? For the nation?
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Comments:
Aug '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Hang On
Well, aircraft carriers are aircraft carriers, but they are also so many square feet of 1/4-inch steel, so many miles of electrical wiring, etc. It depends on what level of granularity you take it down to and then you're at a commodity level. Why could that not be done with aircraft carriers? There are going to be highly specialized and secret components, but what about everything else? · May 9 at 1:58pm
I'm willing to bet that an aircraft carrier has an enormous amount of value-added over its raw commodity inputs. Some of this would be comparable to the value-added in the construction of a commercial container ship or cruise ship, but much of it is unique to military demands and thus incommensurable with anything for which we can observe a market price.
Mar '11
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
OK, here is far out example of what I mean by out of the box military thinking.
The Libya policy has been a disaster. The US could solve it without any more military force. Announce the following:
1: Name the top 100 people in Libya. Guarantee asylum for the top 90 people (and their immediate families) in Libya in some remote place. First come, first served.
2: Put a price on the head of all bad guys left. $1-$5 million apiece ought to do it.
Voila! For pennies on the dollar, mission accomplished.
Imagine what the same offer would do to Syria. Plenty of Allawites would bail, if they had somewhere to go. And plenty of people with guns would sacrifice their own lives if it meant their families received millions as a result.
May '11
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Joseph Stanko
Dan IV
As far as hands-on budget-cutting experience, you can't get much better than Johnson. · May 9 at 4:13pm
Perhaps, but there's a reason the moderators kept skipping him: he has no chance of winning. None. He's Ron Paul but with less money, name recognition, or supporters. · May 9 at 4:26pm
Believe me, name recognition will not be a problem for whoever the eventual nominee is.
Jun '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Bryan G. Stephens: I would disagree on the total waste. Our nuclear systems have cost a lot. They stopped a much more expensive war from breaking out.
ay 9 at 1:16pm
You proved my point and you didn't even know it.
What did they cost us throughout the Cold War when nuclear concerns were the world's only concerns? We were in an extended state of soft war for almost half of a century, with half the world, engaged in history's most egregious example of overkill, and we're still paying for it. Can you honestly say that 45 years of escalating expense on nuclear deterrence and our arsenal - a fraction of which could quite literally end all human life - saved us from something more costly? Left over from those halcyon days is the military's penchant for long-term contracting at exorbitant per unit prices, contractor time and budget overruns that would send people to jail in the real world, and a dual set of pressures on and from Congress to keep the blank checks coming. We can't keep doing this.
Jun '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Hang On
Well, aircraft carriers are aircraft carriers, but they are also so many square feet of 1/4-inch steel, so many miles of electrical wiring, etc. It depends on what level of granularity you take it down to and then you're at a commodity level. Why could that not be done with aircraft carriers? There are going to be highly specialized and secret components, but what about everything else? · May 9 at 1:58pm
Exactly. Does anyone really think the F35 program is worth this much, when we're talking about building an airplane?
Jun '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Bryan G. Stephens
As far as all the ones we got now with lots of experience:
How's that working out for ya'? · May 9 at 3:24pm
As Mr. Cain himself said to win the debate!
May '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Casey Taylor
You proved my point and you didn't even know it.
What did they cost us throughout the Cold War when nuclear concerns were the world's only concerns? We were in an extended state of soft war for almost half of a century, with half the world, engaged in history's most egregious example of overkill, and we're still paying for it. Can you honestly say that 45 years of escalating expense on nuclear deterrence and our arsenal - a fraction of which could quite literally end all human life - saved us from something more costly? Left over from those halcyon days is the military's penchant for long-term contracting at exorbitant per unit prices, contractor time and budget overruns that would send people to jail in the real world, and a dual set of pressures on and from Congress to keep the blank checks coming. We can't keep doing this. · May 9 at 7:04pm
I did not prove your point at all. Winning was expensive. Nukes saved us from a more expensive war. That is my point. It had nothing to do with the inventory today. You are stealing a march, I think.
May '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Casey Taylor
Hang On
Well, aircraft carriers are aircraft carriers, but they are also so many square feet of 1/4-inch steel, so many miles of electrical wiring, etc. It depends on what level of granularity you take it down to and then you're at a commodity level. Why could that not be done with aircraft carriers? There are going to be highly specialized and secret components, but what about everything else? · May 9 at 1:58pm
Exactly. Does anyone really think the F35 program is worth this much, when we're talking about building an airplane? · May 9 at 7:19pm
Yes I do. We have to have aircraft to defend us. If the F35 program was not asked to do so much it would cost less. Of course, we would need an F37, 38, and 39 as well. I imagine that doing all of those systems would cost more, in total, than just the F35.
Personally, I would have liked more F22s.
And, a trillion dollars is not what it used to be.
Dec '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Casey Taylor
Does anyone really think the F35 program is worth this much...
The airframes of the current aircraft inventory the F35 is slated to replace -- most of the F15s, the F16, the F18, and the Harrier -- were for the most part designed and developed in the 70s. We can almost toss the F14 into that group as it was only recently retired.
I wonder what the combined costs of all of those programs would be in 2011 dollars, including all costs required to bring them to their current technological level. Together these aircraft represent almost all of our non-bomber combat aircraft.
The vast majority of our combat aircraft are getting physically very old and their designs are very old.
Continuing maintenance costs are also an issue. F14 maintenance costs per flight hour just before retirement were at least four to five times those of the F18s that replaced them.
Further, newer designs are already in service elsewhere in the world, with others under development.
We need a replacement very, very badly and the F22 program has been terminated. We have no other option.
How much is a superior world class Air Force worth? I think it is priceless.
Jun '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Bryan G. Stephens
I did not prove your point at all. Winning was expensive. Nukes saved us from a more expensive war. That is my point. It had nothing to do with the inventory today. You are stealing a march, I think. · May 9 at 8:13pm
No, Sir. Winning certainly is expensive, but it need not be 45 years and nearly 13,000 forward-deployed nuclear weapons expensive. And despite protestations to the contrary, it wasn't the U.S.S.R. trying to play nuclear catch-up with us that sunk them. Just the money spent exporting ideology to South America and Africa dwarfed our own worldwide intelligence efforts, and the combined inefficiencies of a collectivist/command economy, the maintenance of a country that spanned 1/6 of the world's land surface, and the sucking maw of that economic black hole, the Warsaw Pact, are what drove them into the ground. Just because we spent a whole bunch of money over here, they spent a whole bunch of money over there, and 45 years into it yay we won, doesn't mean that money couldn't have been better spent.
Edited on May 10, 2011 at 7:55amJun '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Bryan G. Stephens
Yes I do. We have to have aircraft to defend us. If the F35 program was not asked to do so much it would cost less. Of course, we would need an F37, 38, and 39 as well. I imagine that doing all of those systems would cost more, in total, than just the F35.
Personally, I would have liked more F22s.
And, a trillion dollars is not what it used to be. · May 9 at 8:17pm
The fact that a trillion dollars isn't what it used to be is symptomatic of the illness that's killing us.
Of course we need aircraft, no one here is making the argument that we don't. What we don't need is the process that gives us the F35, at a fourfold cost overrun, with a staggeringly insane per-unit cost. The same process that gave us the Bradley and the Osprey, and would have given us the Comanche and Crusader systems, each of which was obsolete before fielding and cost an enormous amount of money, to no good end. The Osprey may redeem itself, but there's a good bit of doubt on that score.
Aug '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Nickolas
How much is a superior world class Air Force worth? I think it is priceless.
Calling anything funded by taxpayer dollars priceless is asking for trouble. Do you really mean that there is no price that is too high?
How high would the price have to go before that world class Air Force is no longer worth it? If the price were bankrupting the country or seriously abridging our individual liberties, I bet you'd think that price was too high. Now, I'm not saying that's what the price actually is, only that there are prices you would find too high, so it can't be priceless.
If we let the politicians know that we consider something they can spend money on priceless, we can expect them to take us literally.
Edited on May 10, 2011 at 7:41amJun '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Nickolas
The vast majority of our combat aircraft are getting physically very old and their designs are very old.
Further, newer designs are already in service elsewhere in the world, with others under development.
We need a replacement very, very badly and the F22 program has been terminated. We have no other option.
How much is a superior world class Air Force worth? I think it is priceless. · May 9 at 9:17pm
I agree with you for the most part, but the issue with defense spending isn't necessarily about what we end up with, it's how we got there and how much it cost to arrive. Too, the problem is the same in the macro as it is in the micro: the same process that brings the Army to spend $1695/weapon renewing its contract with Colt for the M4 when anyone can buy (retail!) a third-generation upgrade of the same rifle for less than $900, is exponentially worse when it's for programs as important as jets and carriers.
May '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Casey,
If you think the money would have been better spent on something besides our nuclear inventory, please make that case. So far, you have said we spent 45 wasting money.
My statement is that the threat of nuclear war was enough to start a larger, conventional war from breaking out with the West and the USSR. I think we had to have enough nukes to make that threat real to the enemy, and that means erring on the side of "too many".
What would you have done? What systems did we not need, nuclear and conventional?
Jun '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
I understand your argument, I just don't think the military should be exempt from cost accountability. It's not the systems we end up with, necessarily, it's the volume and duration of deployment of those systems. Though we would certainly all be better off without nuclear weapons.
At the height of the Cold War we had nearly 13,000 nuclear weapons deployed in and around Europe - just in Europe! - and I can guarantee you that we could have done the same job, had the same posture, with less than half of that. Informing my position, in part, is the CIA's assessment of the Soviet threat over the duration of the Cold War. A good overview of that can be found here.
Reagan himself, by the way, recognized fairly early in his presidency how stupid and wasteful our nuclear program had become. In his second term, you'll recall, he offered to eliminate the whole thing. Here's a transcript of the Reykjavik conference. Document 16 is germane.
Paid a little more attention to Eisenhower. Not gone to Vietnam. Specific programs? Email me. There's too many.
May '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
I don't think cost accountability with military spending is our problem with the debt. In fact, wastes like the Dept. of Education are not the problem.
The problems are Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Fix those, then worry about the rest.
Jun '10
Re: Libertarian/Paleo-conservative Disaster in the Making?
Bryan G. Stephens: I don't think cost accountability with military spending is our problem with the debt. In fact, wastes like the Dept. of Education are not the problem.
The problems are Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Fix those, then worry about the rest. · May 10 at 3:07pm
We're in almost complete agreement. The military and Homeland Security together ate up $813 billion last year, which is A LOT of money, but less than half of the military budget is medical and retirement spending, so that budget is flexible in ways that the entitlements are not. We have to fix the Big Three, and that's where our major efforts need to be focused.
HOWEVER. (<--- Big dramatic caveat)
Two things:
1.) Every military dollar wasted through graft or incompetence is a dollar not spent on military medicine, protective gear, or training. This is quite literally a life or death issue for our servicemembers.
2.) Conservatives will simply not be taken seriously by the electorate if we aren't ready and willing to fight fraud, waste, and abuse wherever it is, most especially in the one area historically associated with us, national defense.