Cain Seeks to Satisfy Foreign Policy Snobs

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Alex Pappas and Jamie Weinstein of the Daily Caller report:

Almost every day, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is handed a one-page briefing from his chief foreign policy adviser on news from around the world.
It’s one of several things his campaign says the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO, who has never held elective office before, is now doing to bone up on foreign policy — especially as he faces a big test in November at a GOP debate on national security issues.
“He’s really getting up to speed a lot more so than people give him credit for,” J.D. Gordon, Cain’s foreign policy and national security adviser who prepares the briefings, said in an interview with The Daily Caller on Monday.

When Alex sent me the article this morning, I replied: “Good Lord! A one-page briefing? Just read the NY Times at breakfast!” The article continues:

“I have no idea what Mr. Cain’s views are other than being generally pro-Israel,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as a deputy national security adviser for President George W. Bush.
“He needs to say a lot more to be a serious candidate for Commander in Chief,” Abrams said. “He has been far too casual about this subject and does not seem to be taking seriously his need to explain his views.”

This is what I’ve previously described as the Cult of Experts, “a widespread attitude within the foreign policy/national security elite that expertise is essential in all such matters.” Expertise being the foreign policy specialist’s stock in trade, he esteems others insofar as they are themselves experts, or else demonstrate a seemly deference to such expertise.

But how’s that workin’ for ya? It was experts like Ken Adelman who assured us Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” And as I’ve pointed out, John McCain brought a lifetime of national-security policy expertise to his 2008 campaign, and what good did it do him, politically?

Nevertheless, the thing is what it is, and Cain must therefore spend time acquiring sufficient awareness of these issues in order not to look foolish during the Nov. 15 CNN debate at sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and AEI. Let’s hope Cain’s briefings include the latest from Vanuatu, “Linchpin of the South Pacific.”

66 comments

  1. And as I’ve pointed out, John McCain brought a lifetime of national-security policy expertise to his 2008 campaign, and what good did it do him, politically?

    Well it helped get him the nomination.  He might have won the presidency if he did not act like a clown on crack when the economy started to melt down.   But ultimately he lost because he was a republican and the people wanted to try democrat that year, and Barack Obama managed to give a good enough impression to sway indies. 

    But if Herman Cain is so incurious about the world that he needs a one page sheet each day to get knowledgable…well then we are looking at Romney being the nominee.  This report does not reassure, it is giving more ammo to his critics.  Because while the economy is job one, foreign policy is important (see Obama screwing up Iraq above).  Not that Romney is some super expert on it, but I suspect he reads the papers (and the kids at church must give reports all the time on their mission trips).   I like Herman but I hope this is not true. 

  2. Cain is lost in space on foreign policy. That doesn’t make me a snob for pointing it out. Now, he can learn a few lines to parrot, but he is still out in the stratosphere beyond general common sense by not knowing some real basic stuff.

  6. It’s not personal expertise we want to see, a good mgr will bring in the right people.  It’s DETERMINATION and WILL  to expend his own political capital to do The Right Thing

    Which is: BOMB IRAN- and keep them out of the Iraqi oil fields!!!

    Only Trump, Bachmann, and Bolton ever say what I want to hear- Tehran’s weapons programs are the biggest security threat on Earth, imho- and they need to be stopped.

  7. Not having a clue on what the right of return was very troubling.  That means he has not paid attention to the process at all.  That is one of the largest stumbling blocks to “peace”, at least that is the excuse that they use.  It is a fundamental part of the conversation.  

    He is not up to the job.  I don’t take pleasure in saying that, but he makes it clearer and clearer everyday.  

    Look no presidential candidate can be expert on everything (well, the exception being that Obama thought he was) but they need to be able to prove that they have basic understanding of the issues and a record of surrounding themselves with good people.  Cain’s campaign staff is woefully lacking.  That says a great deal.  

  11. You need to have a long talk with your boy RSM, he seems to be suffering under the delusion that he’s got it all sewed up. Fine with me, I prefer Bachmann anyway, but somebody needs to make sure he’s really up to it, just in case he does get the nomination. Every time I see something like this it reads more and more like a lame excuse. If he can’t handle Iowa, newsflash, he can’t handle a general election campaign.

    http://www.facebook.com/THEHermanCain

  13. Considering the “foreign policy experts” we’ve already got were taken by surprise by, among many other things:

    Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait
    Turkey’s refusal to co-operate with Desert Storm
    The rise of Somali piracy
    The expansion of Al Qaeda into the Arabian Peninsula
    The Drug War in Mexico
    Mubarak’s overthrow
    Ghadhafi’s overthrow and counterattack and overthrow and counterattack and… eventually… final overthrow
    The nuclear arming of Korea
    The impending nuclear arming of Iran
    The Russian invasion of Georgia
    Our inability to even keep bases in Iraq
    Karzai offering to side with Pakistan against us

    I’ll worry about Cain’s foreign policy cred when it can be proven we’ve ever actually had any.

  15. Gee Stacy, you get your news from the NYTs?  Can’t miss Bill Cunningham’s on the street fashion page can you? 

  16. Whatever foreign policy experience McCain may have had was buried by his petty obsession with retaliating against George Bush at every opportunity during the Iraq War and his pathetic eagerness to throw himself in front of every news camera he could find… neither of which helped him in the end.

    People say how glad they are Gore wasn’t President on 9/11; I think we may have dodged a comparable bullet when that petulant, arrogant man lost the nomination in 2000.

  17. I’m back now. I couldn’t find the Anne Hathaway twister club.

    I did find a club that makes gourmet pretzels out of Team Romney’s gooey excuses for Obamaneycare and past Global Warming schemes. Just add a little mustard.

  18. Screw the ‘experts’, but as Mark Steyn wrote yesterday:
    Cain’s boast that he can’t name the president of
    Beki-beki-beki-beki-beki-beki-stan gets closer to it. It’s a cute
    line, notwithstanding that parochial braggadocio is easier to carry off
    when you’re a soaring hyperpower rather than a multi-trillion-dollar
    sinkhole whose citizens’ future is increasingly mortgaged to foreigners
    of one degree of unsavoriness or another.

    But the ’stan shtick is a glimpse of the greater truth – that there
    are whole areas of public policy in which he simply has no interest.
    None. You ask him a question and from the recesses of his mind swim up
    half-recalled phrases from some panel discussion he caught once long
    ago, and he hopes he grabs the conservative line
    (“I’m proud to stand by Israel,” “we don’t negotiate with terrorists,”
    “life begins at conception,” whatever) but just as often he doesn’t
    (with Gretchen Carlson this morning: “No, abortion should not be a part
    of the political discussion”).

    His fans say he’s being set up with “Gotcha” questions. But these
    aren’t the Hoogivsastans way out on the fringe of the public policy map.
    They’re the first stops on the central thruway of American politics,
    and have been for most of Cain’s adult life. And it’s becoming harder to
    avoid the obvious truth that he hasn’t given them a moment’s thought.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/281130/when-stan-hits-fan-mark-steyn?page=3

  19. Talking about the NYTs check this out:  http://althouse.blogspot.com/2011/10/bizarre-denial-from-nyt-it-depends-on.html

    So Cain and McCain are both “fringe”?  Okay.  Not sure what foreign policy experience Obama had (other than being raised in Indonesia and visiting his family in Kenya once).   I am calling bullshit on NYTs, but then again, that is like pointing out there is compost at a mushroom farm. 

    I wonder about 2000, would Al had gone full retard if he won in 2000 or moved more in the other direction?  A scary experiment I am glad did not happen.  As far as Bush vs. McCain…they would have been different versions of the same old bullshit.  McCain being in charge may have prompted a more conservative swing in the House and Senate that may have worked better than it did under Bush.  Or Not. 

  20. I think I prefer the Anne Hathaway Naked* Twister club. 

    * NSFW excerpts from BB Mountain (car cowgirl scene not the tent scene that Andrew Sullivan likes)

  21. I have to agree.  Sadly.  I wanted to see Herman do well, but he simply doesn’t have what it takes and it will be huge mistake to put him on the ticket.   The real argument in the next election will be Obama’s competence.  We must have the grown up in the room.  Cain isn’t  that guy.

  22. To update William F. Buckley . . .

    I’d rather entrust our Iran policy to the first 400 people listed in the Amarillo, TX telephone directory than to Zbiginiew Brzezinski or the Council on Foreign Relations.

    Heck, the so-called experts roughly have it backwards: they believe that deciding on the appropriate policy is very complex and difficult, but that once the policy is decided, it’s a simple matter of sending in the experts.

    Actually, determining the appropriate Iran policy is relatively easy – undermine and/or destroy the Iranian regime by any feasible means. The hard part is implementing that policy as cheaply as possible (hat tip: Newt), while pretending that the U.S. played no role in the Iranian regime’s misfortune. But out “experts” can’t seem to manage the implementation part, in part because past experts took away many of their options. 

  23. Yeah…all the other candidates are foreign policy experts….oh wait….

    The only one who edge on FP is Gingrich, but he isn’t an expert, but a pontificator on the subject.

  27. Valid criticisms. Right now, Cain is not ready to excel on the network talk show circuit and/or debate formats that emphasize indepth policy knowledge. And, let’s face it, the ability to handle those situations has become one of the criteria for determing whether a candidate is perceived to be “presidential,” and that he has “gravitas.” 

    In that respect, Cain is not ready for prime time, but I’m also trying to ascertain how Cain will perform in the oval office, off camera, listening to experts argue, and then having to make a decision. I suspect that other successful past presidents would have been lousy on talk show circuit, too.

    And one might argue that a Republican president who follows SCOAMF will be given a little extra latitude to simply be an executive and a day-to-day leader, rather than a t.v. celebrity and pseudo-intellectual. Obviously, any latitude extended to a GOP president will be very limited, of course.   

  28. That is about right.  Gingrich is supposedly the smartest guy in the race. 

    Amazing he makes such boneheaded decisions all the time. 

  29. Is 1 page enough? Considering the POTUS, his staff, generals and admirals get about 1 page per country, region, and trend – 1 page a day to learn what is going on in the world is PURE FREAKING AWESOME !!!

    Foreign policy is 75% money, 5% diplomacy, and 20% Marine Corps MEU offshore and looking for a fight.

    And recall that Cain, and every GOP and conservative nominee needs only 1 vision for foreign policy: America Wins Every.Single.Time. Subject doesn’t matter.

    1 page – Hell’s Bells I wish the POTUS could get through 1 page before getting the urge to apologise and bow.

  30. Newt’s biggest issue is his lack of personal discipline.  Staff could help with that.  At least to an extent.  

    If I had to vote tomorrow, I would have to go Newt I think.  

    Personally, I think our choices suck.

  31. Correct, seeing what is the right thing to do is often easier getting it done. Harder still is realizing that as much as we’d like to, doing the right thing isn’t possible.

  33. I don’t seem to remember hearing too much from the Romney or Perry camps on foreign policy specifics either, other than ‘Israel is our biggest ally in the Middle East’, which to most people is self-evident (Dems need not apply).  Our professional politicians have been wrong more often than not in their short-term prognostications-see the ‘Arab Spring’ as an example.

    Herman may not be up to speed yet on who is the President of Azarbaijan, but he knows enough not to bow to him.

  34. No one has to be an “expert” on foreign policy – that’s just a straw man argument defending Cain’s apparent complete lack of interest in foreign affairs. 

    Most of the business and professional people in my small, rural town at least know what the “Palestinian right of return” IS, and many of the farmers, too, just from years of paying attention to the news.

  35. “Actually, determining the appropriate Iran policy is relatively easy – undermine and/or destroy the Iranian regime by any feasible means.”

    There’s only one feasible means for doing that — lifting sanctions, after which the mullahs would be lucky to make it six months before their necks got stretched — and no major party candidate seems to want to go anywhere near it.

  36. The bottom line is Cain isn’t really serious about contending for the nomination.  He still lacks organization in most states, even the early states.  His schedule is more like Gingrich’s than Romney or Perry.

    New Hampshire votes in ELEVEN WEEKS.  It’s a bit late to start building an organization.

    I know there was this romantic fantasy about a grassroots populist campaign that just rises up to take the nomination without the nuts and bolts of political organization, Palin fanatics used to promise it all the time.  But it’s not real, it doesn’t happen that way. 

    There are just too many people out there, including GOP primary voters, who may love you like a family member but won’t get out and vote without a couple of reminder calls and perhaps a visit from a neighbor.

  37. “‘Israel is our biggest ally in the Middle East’, which to most people is self-evident”

    I’ve been waiting for years for someone to make the case that Israel is a US ally at all. Fortunately I haven’t been holding my breath.

    And no, don’t try to play the “you’re anti-Israel” card. I’m about as pro-Israel as it gets.  Taking a welfare check and voting with the US on a few meaningless UN resolutions does not an “ally” make.

  38. Actually I don’t think that would work.
    I assume your asserting that the Mullahs are able to blame the economic pain caused by the sanctions on us deflecting the fault for the considerable economic failure that was happening before the latest round of sanctions.

  39. Perhaps ally isn’t the right word but they are the only country in the region that remotely share our values and certainly the only one that doesn’t hate us for what we are and are not.

  40. If we could be certain that’d work, I’d support it. Roughly how would that play out internally in Iran, from the lifting of sanctions to the stretching of necks?

    Alas, I don’t think we can be confident about any one particular approach to realizing such an aim.

    I was being a little flippant above: while it ought to be easy enough to reach a quick consensus on the meta-goal of regime change in Iran, agreeing on the strategic “policies” to achieve that larger goal would be very complicted and contestable; it’d be difficult to predict the outcomes of various prospective strategic-level choices.

    In better focus, maybe my point should have been as follows:

    A. It’s not demonstrably clear that the so-called experts are superior at making the big picture policy decisions, compared to non-experts. In theory, the most valuable attributes to making such decisions are wisdom, prudence, open-mindedness, among other qualities, most of which might be in short supply among the experts, who are often ideologues.

    B. Also, in theory, the experts should be really good at implementing the big picture goals – that’s what they were trained to do, at least when they’re not too busy playing demigods. The problem is that we live in a hyper-complex modern world that rarely lends itself to simple solutions, especially when the problems are socioeconomic in nature. Again in theory, the experts can work through that challenge via incremental, piecemeal trial-and-error (which is supposed to be one of the redeeming virtues of pragmatic “progressive” Social Democracy as compared to utopian/centralized socialism); unfortunately, that doesn’t work either, which in the domestic context brings us to (Hayekian, not Randian) libertarianism. But what do we about potential existential threats from abroad?

    I’m not sure, myself, but the so-called “experts” aren’t exactly instilling much confidence in their authority, either.   

  42. As you know, a relationship is a two-way street. I’ll let someone else explain to what extent Israel reciprocates our affections, and vice versa (I’m not a policy minutiae guy, either), but it’s very clear to me that we’re right to pine after her (Isreal’s) affections. Part of the reason why Israel is our ally is because we want and need her to be.

    If we defined our true allies based on whether they gave us much back to us and we give to them, then technically we’d have no allies.

  45. Blame for economic failure is part of it.

    Another part of it is anecdotal, based on my interactions with Iranians since the 1980s.

    It might be going a little far to say that every Iranian wants to be an American, but so far as I can tell, most Iranians want to be free to have the things Americans have and do the things Americans do.

    Right now, it’s Uncle Sam telling them that they can’t have iPods and Levi Strauss jeans and Ford Focuses … and that plays right into the hands of a regime that wants them to buckle down, cover their heads, and recite the Quran.

    Let it be the mullahs instead of us telling them “no, you can’t watch the Simpsons, no, you can’t have an Xbox, no, you can’t ride a Harley,” and the green revolution will quickly become unstoppable.

  46. I can’t remember whether it was Disraeli or Clemenceau who said “people have friends — nations have interests.”

    The problem with the US-Israeli relationship is that it’s very much a one-way street.

    The Israelis always act in what they perceive to be their interests, and always expect the US to support them in doing so even when those interests conflict with US interests (example: Buying sensitive US weapons technology on a promise not to pass it on, then turning right around and selling it to Communist China).

    One problem with that is that it distorts Israel’s own estimate of what its interests are. They get over-confident in how much they can demand from, or impose on, their regional counterparts.

    The flip side of the coin is that it creates a dangerous dependency with the opposite effect: Sometimes when a big move is called for, they are afraid to risk the relationship with the US to make that move.

    Absent the US crutch, I strongly suspect that Israel would have either reached a tenable accommodation with the Palestinian Arabs or completely expelled those Arabs from Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem by now.

  47. I don’t think the Iranian people are that easily fooled. For one I imagine there is flourishing black market in the goods you reference. The Iranian economy has been in trouble for a while and the drop in oil prices during the recession certainly didn’t help. One of the reasons much of the unrest at the time of the disputed election was the government withdrawal of subsidies for food and fuel etc. That was occurring before Obama asked for any sanctions. The Mullahs and the rest of the governing structures have been blaming all of the countries troubles on the US and Israel for decades but I don’t think the people are buying it anymore if they ever did. I haven’t read as much about internal unrest and resistance lately, I suspect this has more to do with the effectiveness of repression than Obama ratcheting up sanctions a couple notches. Iran should be a fairly wealthy country but due to limitations of Islam as a governing system they are not. Further more stealthy support for proxy forces ain’t cheap and the rampant corruption that any can see is diverting far more resources than is healthy for a aspirational third world country.

  48. “That was occurring before Obama asked for any sanctions.”

    The sanctions have been in place since circa 1980.

    Just as with Castro in Cuba, their primary function has been to make the mullahs look like the good guys, make the US look like the assholes, and justify a “defense” budget at least four times anything within reason to keep the skeer up (here, not there).

  49. Yeah, to hell with elitist snobs such as Mark Steyn and snarky blog commenters who demand that a Presidential candidate have that fancy “knowledge” thing about foreign affairs, just because the first duty of any president is to be commander in chief.

    RSM got a thrill up his leg.  Actually qualifications don’t matter, because RSM’s sure Cain smiled directly at him at the end of the new “smoker” commercial.

  50. That was my point the people rebelled against their system in the presence of sanctions in 09 and 2010 they weren’t rebelling because the regime hadn’t somehow made us lift the sanctions. They rebell against the regime because it offers them nothing but more of the same. They didn’t chant Obama Obama lift the sanctions they chanted Obama Obama are you with us or with them. Your notion that we inflict sanctions on Iran so we can justify the “war machine” is somewhat unhinged but that’s OK, you wear it well.

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