I think that's part, but not all, of the problem. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drained public faith that the United States can and should do good in the world, leading to a surly mood toward foreign policy on the left as well as the right and stirring up the nativism that is never far from the surface of American life. It has long been true that a politician can make waves by attacking the U.N., but can only hurt himself by defending it; now the same has increasingly become true of foreign policy itself. Serious figures in both parties today steer clear of the foreign relations committees. If John Kerry does become secretary of state, the new SFRC chairman will be Robert Menendez, a Cuban-American whose international portfolio to date consists largely of hostility to the Castro regime. And the defeat of Howard Berman, a bipartisan figure whose active role on international affairs left him vulnerable to a Republican challenger, leaves Eliot Engel, no heavyweight, as the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. On the positive side, the chairmanship of the committee has passed from Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, another Cuban-American, who championed deep cuts in foreign aid and State Department spending, to Ed Royce, generally considered a moderate.
But the Republicans have a very specific problem of their own: They can't make a serious dent in Barack Obama's foreign policy. This is in part because their nativist base doesn't care, but also because by carrying out the war on terror more or less as George W. Bush did, Obama has neutralized the traditional argument that Democrats are soft on bad guys. Congressional Republicans haven't subjected Obama's prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, or his response to the Arab Spring, to the searching scrutiny that previous presidents have had to endure because they don't have a meaningful alternative to offer. They do, however, exploit whatever small opportunities they can find to cast Obama as a danger to national security -- for example, by blocking any effort to transfer detainees from military prisons.
And this brings us to Benghazi, the great foreign-policy "debate" of 2012. The furor over the deaths of Amb. Chris Stevens and three other Americans, which has lead to multiple congressional investigations, has almost nothing to do with broad questions of policy and everything to do with probing for weak spots in Obama's armor. The fact that the assault has been led by John McCain, the GOP's most respected spokesman on foreign affairs, only makes its triviality more appalling. McCain seems to have an Ahab-like obsession with Obama, or at least with Obama-as-commander in chief. Benghazi is his harpoon.
The hullaballoo over Benghazi has proved embarrassing even to serious conservatives. Gary Schmitt, a national security expert at AEI, agrees that very few Republicans now care about either foreign policy or Congress's role in shaping it. And he acknowledges that McCain and others have drawn no attention to what he himself considers the deep story on Benghazi: Obama's unwillingness to shoulder the burden of "nation-building and deep engagement" in the Middle East, his self-evident wish to put the whole mess behind him, and the cold shoulder he has turned to the insurgents in Syria. "There should be a debate about whether we're going to let Iraq define policy for the next 20 years," Schmitt says. "But nobody seems to be joining in that debate."
Presidents need to be pushed back by an active, if not obstreperous, Congress -- a fact that Democrats learned only after years of timidly acquiescing to Bush's Global War On Terror. Today's congressional Republicans will do almost anything they can to make President Obama fail, but they can't be bothered to devise a practical alternative to his policies, foreign or domestic.
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