TOM BACHTELL

Earlier this month at the National Press Club, in Washington, two expert September 11th political opportunists joined in an embrace, when Pat Robertson, the televangelist who attributed the terrorist attacks to American sinfulness, endorsed Rudy Giuliani, the Republican Presidential front-runner whose every campaign sentence, according to Senator Joseph Biden, consists of “a noun and a verb and 9/11.” Robertson explained his support for the pro-choice, pro-gay-rights candidate by stating, “The overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the bloodlust of Islamic terrorists”—bringing to mind no one so much as the foreign-policy commentator Borat, who told a rodeo audience in Virginia, “May George Bush drink the blood of every single man, woman, and child of Iraq.”

As the tide goes out on President Bush’s foreign policy, the mass of flotsam left behind includes a Republican Party that no longer knows how to be reasonable. Whenever its leading Presidential candidates appear before partisan audiences, they try to outdo one another in pledging loyalty oaths to the use of force, pandering to the war lobby as if they were Democrats addressing the teachers’ union. Giuliani has surrounded himself with a group of advisers—from Norman Podhoretz to the former Pentagon official Michael Rubin—who, having got Iraq spectacularly wrong, seem determined to make up for it by doing the same thing in Iran. Giuliani approaches foreign policy in the same mood of barely restrained eagerness for confrontation with which, as mayor of New York, he went after criminals. He has essentially promised to go to war with Iran in order to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, and he recently suggested that waterboarding is only torture when the wrong people are doing it, and blamed the “liberal media” for giving it a bad name. He has said that he would improve America’s miserable image around the world by threatening State Department diplomats with unnamed consequences unless they defend United States foreign policy more aggressively. “The era of cost-free anti-Americanism must end,” Giuliani snarled in the polite pages of Foreign Affairs, which had invited candidates to lay out their views.

Mitt Romney, perhaps sensing that his military bona fides might be in question, has declared his readiness to out-Cheney Dick Cheney and “double Guantánamo.” In an ad, he strolls across the lawn of a large suburban home, like a financial adviser in a Charles Schwab commercial, and intones, “It’s this century’s nightmare—jihadism. Violent, radical Islamic fundamentalism. Their goal is to unite the world under a single jihadist caliphate. To do that, they must collapse freedom-loving nations, like us.” John McCain, who does not believe that the definition of torture depends on who’s doing it, has staked his campaign on a long-term victory in Iraq through the strategy of the surge, which is destined to end around the time the parties gather to nominate their candidates, next summer. For Fred Thompson foreign policy is mostly immigration policy—he just wants the borders patrolled with heavy force.

In 1968, when the Democrats tried to hold on to the White House during a disastrous war, the Party self-destructed at the Chicago Convention. But in 2008, in Minneapolis, the Republicans will nominate a candidate on a promise of four more years of the same. The one piece of Bush’s foreign policy that the leading Republicans haven’t taken up (again, with the occasional exception of McCain) is his “freedom agenda.” In this, they are probably responding to the true feelings of the Party’s base, for which the war on terror is more about nationalism, Christianity, and raw fear than about idealistic blandishments of democracy promotion.

Conservative foreign policy has always had a strong streak of isolationism that only direct threats can vanquish. Without the Cold War, Robert Taft’s world view would have dominated the Party; without September 11th, Pat Buchanan’s might have done the same. In this election, the isolationist candidate is the Texas congressman Ron Paul. He frequently attacks the core rationale of Bush’s foreign policy, and receives enthusiastic applause for doing so, which indicates that Republican views about the war in Iraq might be more heterodox than the leading candidates and their strategists assume. But his brand of anti-interventionism reduces the Republican debate to hawks versus cranks. “They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years,” Paul said at a debate in South Carolina. “I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.”

The room for genuine discussion in the Republican field is so limited that after Romney implied during a debate last month in Dearborn, Michigan, that war with Iran would need a legal basis and might require congressional approval Giuliani spent the next week ridiculing him, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page reacted as if John Kerry had just mentioned a “global test”: “Egad. Call in the attorneys? Perhaps it is Mr. Romney’s experience in business that taught him to want lawyers at his elbow, given that no CEO can survive without them these days. Or perhaps it is our hyper-legalized politics.” You can be sure that Romney (who immediately afterward released his jihad-in-the-burbs ad) won’t make the mistake of worrying aloud about the Constitution or the legality of war again anytime soon.

But Romney’s gaffe betrays the Republican campaign’s dirty secret: some of the candidates have responsible views and serious proposals. Romney, in the Foreign Affairs series, admitted that “the American people—and many others around the world—have increasing doubts about the United States’ direction and role in the world,” and he rejected ideological dogma in favor of the kind of mild Republican internationalism last seen during the Presidency of Bush’s father. McCain’s statement in Foreign Affairs went on at length about a “League of Democracies” that “would not supplant the U.N. or other international organizations but complement them by harnessing the political and moral advantages offered by united democratic action”—an idea advanced by some liberal supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Off camera and in private, a few of the Republicans seem to understand that Bush has driven the country into a ditch. But, because the thirty per cent of Americans who remain die-hard Bush supporters have a death grip on their party, those candidates won’t say so, choosing to repress their constructive impulses and sound as shallow and jingoistic as possible while campaigning. Perhaps they’re counting on changing course and governing differently once elected. It would be dangerous to assume that they can pull it off—we’ve been there before. ♦