Who Needs Nuance in Foreign Policy?

Posted by Deuce Geary on September 27th, 2008

You’ll understand better why I posted the video at the bottom of this post if you read the post first.

Sarah Palin’s credibility on foreign policy is going to take some time to gel, but the instantaneous criticism that she had no foreign policy experience was a little ridiculous. I mean, if everyone feels that strongly that a candidate has to have foreign policy experience, that pretty much limits your field doesn’t it? You’d never have had an FDR or Reagan, and the left’s criticism of Palin’s foreign policy credentials also would have disqualified Bill Clinton. They were all governors. (Ace has a good post on the “foreign policy experience” of governors generally.)

Some conservatives are getting awfully nervous about Sarah Palin. Some of the criticism is reasonable, some is not.

I think Rich Lowry of The Corner has taken a reasonable approach. I think he was right in his assessment of Palin’s performance regardng the “Bush Doctrine” question from Charlie Gibson: that “the truly pro-Palin position is to think she can, should, and will do better than this.” I also agreed with him when, in a follow-up, he wrote:

The debate about how many versions of the Bush doctrine there are is serving as fog to distract attention from the fact that, on any reasonable reading, Palin didn’t know. I don’t see why we all have to be so resistant to admitting this. Let me try to demonstrate: She is totally new to these issues and has a lot of learning to do. There. Is that so hard?

Kathleen Parker calls on Palin to quit (but she bases her view of Palin’s inadequacy on her supposed inability to handle the present financial crisis, rather than foreign policy). Kat-Mo at Ace of Spades HQ does a pretty good take down of Parker’s piece. Read it all, but this should give you the gist:

Parker gets a load of the Big Financial problem in our face and decides that Palin is incapable of handling the crisis and she should leave the national politics of crashing markets to the idiot national politicians that got us here in the first place.

Brilliant idea.

Another conservative going overboard is Rod Dreher, who says he is “well and truly embarrassed for her” because of her explanation of why Alaska’s proximity to Russia and Canada givers her some foreign policy credibility. (She certainly wasn’t articulate, but her answer wasn’t totally off the wall, either. She has the experience most governors have with foreign countries: trade missions.) At least Dreher doesn’t agree with Sullivan that Palin should bow out.

Anyway, all of this reminded me of a movie scene involving foreign policy by a “regular guy” president. Bear with me on this before you view the video, because if you’re unfamiliar with the story, the video might not make sense.

The scene is from the movie Harrison Bergeron, based on a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., which takes a look at the absurdity of radical egalitarianism: a government that doles out “handicaps” to those with more talent, intelligence, beauty, or other advantage, in order to level the playing field. The theory is that by preventing envy, society avoids revolutionary violence.

All of this is accomplished through a shadow government — totally unknown to the general populace — whose intellect is not handicapped. The shadow bureaucrats advise the actual government flunkies, and do all the actual technical work, but generally don’t intervene to change policy. In this scene, Harrison, who has been recruited into the shadow government, walks in as one such bureaucrat is advising the president regarding a tense military standoff with Morocco.

I know it’s satire, but it makes me wonder if maybe a little lack of sophistication won’t be such a bad thing.

And the line about the president being a “steelworker from Scranton” is priceless in light of a certain other VP candidate’s attempt to build his “heartland” credentials by emphasizing his early boyhood spent there.