That the Republican Party is at sea on foreign policy grates the party leadership for two reasons. First, Obama's approach has essentially stolen pages from the Republicans' playbook: He's morphed into a less ideological, more disciplined version of George W. Bush -- keeping Gitmo open, escalating the drone war, surging troops into Afghanistan, toughening sanctions on Iran.
And second, Obama has borrowed from the Republican realism of the George H.W. Bush administration: He has avoided risky and open ended military campaigns, valued multilateral diplomacy, and always made sure that he had the means to carry out his ends.
What Obama has abandoned is the Republican crusader sprit of aggressively championing American values -- muscular interventions, turning American policy into a morality play of good against evil, and touting the American exceptionalism of the Iraq years. And worse, the American public seems to have embraced Obama's policies as the right course for the times.
Hagel is the poster child for this realism. As a Republican renegade who supported the Iraq war and then turned against it, he is a man the crusaders love to hate. He is a decorated combat veteran with a mind of his own, with an interest perhaps in trimming the Pentagon's budget -- a man who will urge caution and deliberation before projecting military force abroad and who believes in trying diplomacy first (with Iran, for instance) before going to war.
And for key Republicans like Sen. John McCain, that's frustrating in the extreme. Not only can't the Republicans identify a foreign policy issue that separates them in a practical way from the Democrats, the world seems inhospitable for grand rescue operations. (see: Syria, Iran, the Arab winter, and Afghanistan.)
Opposing Hagel is a political and philosophical imperative for the Republican Party, which has lost its footing in foreign policy and can't find an effective way to attack the president's. But whether Republicans can use the Hagel confirmation hearings to showcase their new approach, or whether they will simply fall back on their old habits, remains to be seen.
We're Still Here
Finally, opposing Hagel is mandatory station identification.
Obama is only one of 17 U.S. presidents to be elected to a second term (and only 14 served out the entire eight years). And yet, you'd hardly know it. Whatever mandate or electoral bounce normally accrues to second-term presidents, this one seems more alone and powerless than ever.
Obama's clear choice for secretary of state, Susan Rice, took herself out of the running because of Republican and Democratic pressure over Benghazi. The grand deal for avoiding the fiscal cliff collapsed. The president's candidate for defense secretary is facing a tough nomination fight -- and whether it's gun control, the debt ceiling, or immigration reform, Obama will face other tough fights from Republicans who want to remind him that he can't have his way without their cooperation and support.
The threat to Hagel may have diminished somewhat, with influential New York Sen. Chuck Schumer announcing his support. But what if he doesn't make it through?
I really admire Hagel's service, his guts, and his view that when it comes to using American military power the fact that we can doesn't always mean we should. I think he's just what the doctor ordered these days.
Still, I won't believe the sky is falling if Hagel isn't confirmed or that it would mean a catastrophic defeat for Obama and for U.S. foreign policy or a validation that the neoconservatives and pro-Israeli community are now 10 feet tall. The fact is, as we saw with Susan Rice, the White House will find a suitable fallback. Indeed, as Charles de Gaulle implied in his comment that the cemeteries of France are filled with indispensable people, nobody really is. Nobody, that is, except perhaps Barack Obama, the most controlling foreign-policy president since Richard Nixon. It's likely that Obama will make all the key decisions on foreign policy during the next four years -- with or without Chuck Hagel at his side.
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