While they may be tired of foreign wars, Americans may welcome a positive outcome in Libya. | REUTERS GOP candidates duck, cover on Libya

It’s the 2012 Republican field’s first real moment in the foreign policy spotlight — the dilemma over how to respond to the apparent success of President Barack Obama’s intervention in Libya.

So far, the strategy for nearly all the candidates is: don’t.


For the most part, the GOP has offered only a slow and muted response to the collapse of Muammar Qadhafi’s regime, which seems to spell the end of a dictator who has plagued the United States for decades.

The only candidate to lay out a clear position on whether the NATO-led Libya mission was a good idea is former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who said through a spokesman that he still believes the mission was “not core to our national security interest.”

The others who have spoken have issued only carefully parsed statements, applauding Qadhafi’s demise but stopping short of passing judgment on the months-long mission that led to his downfall.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry called the end of Qadhafi’s “violent, repressive dictatorship” a “cause for cautious celebration.” But his ginger, forward-looking statement didn’t offer a larger view of the action in Libya and didn’t mention either President Obama or NATO.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney also responded with something of a dodge, simply noting that “the world is about to be rid” of Qadhafi and calling on the new Libyan government to hand over the mastermind of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing — an issue that might have some domestic resonance but is scarcely linked to events in Tripoli.

It’s questionable whether Republicans will be able to hold Libya at arm’s length for long. The United States is now involved in deciding the fate of the North African nation, and it’s all but inevitable that would-be commanders-in-chief will have to say whether or not they think that’s a good thing.

The political stakes are lower than the substantive ones. Few believe the 2012 election — let alone the GOP primaries — will hinge on foreign affairs. But the Libya operation promises to sort the Republican contenders in policy terms in a way that no other event has done, to date.

To some conservative foreign policy thinkers, the right response — politically and substantively — is to go further than Perry and Romney, applaud the outcome in Libya and call for more of the same.

Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol offered this response as the right tack for a GOP hopeful: “Congratulations to the president, our NATO allies and above all to the brave people of Libya. Now let’s help the brave people of Syria make the Assad regime the next to go — and soon.”

Brian Hook, a former assistant secretary of state and adviser to Tim Pawlenty’s campaign, said Republicans shouldn’t let Obama off the hook for moving so slowly into military action.

But he, too, urged Republicans to look to the next challenge — and not back away from foreign engagement.

“We need to hold Obama responsible for a Libya policy that not only weakened NATO but prolonged the war and the bloodshed,” Hook said. “But now, we all need to turn the page and focus on the difficult transition that Libya will need to make out of a civil war, and we need to be providing as much assistance as we can to make that possible.”

There are only a few candidates in the field, though, who can plausibly make that argument, which lines up with the aggressive, nation-building foreign policy championed by former President George W. Bush. The hawkish Pawlenty would have been one of them.

Among the remaining candidates, both Romney and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum rebuked the Obama administration for not acting swiftly enough in Libya and deferring too much to U.S. allies in Europe. The two candidates might have to walk back their criticism a bit, if the mission proves a true success.

Neither of them expressed flat-out opposition to the idea of intervening in Libya. Instead, they urged the administration to take more “decisive action against [Qadhafi],” as Santorum put it in an April foreign policy address.

Romney knocked Obama for not having a “clear and convincing foreign policy” on Libya but never came close to saying that he was opposed to the mission.

But at least three Republican presidential candidates have done just that: Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul, the libertarian Texas congressman who has a lengthy record of opposing American military action abroad.

Paul can be reliably counted on to stick to his isolationist guns; it was little more than a week ago at the Ames straw poll that he once again called for the United States to bring its troops home.

Bachmann and Huntsman face a potentially tougher challenge as they explain their resistance to an intervention that — for the moment — looks to have achieved its main goal.

Huntsman’s decision to stand by that position is consistent with his general campaign approach, which has involved staking out a series of positions dramatically at odds with much of his own party.

But Bachmann, despite her place on the opposite end from Huntsman on the Republican ideological spectrum, was more or less in sync with Huntsman when she was asked about the Libya mission at a debate in June.

The Minnesota congresswoman said flatly that there was “no vital national interest” in Libya, explaining: “We were not attacked. We were not threatened with attack.”

And she expressed concern about potential instability stemming from the Libyan rebellion, warning that Qadhafi’s fall could also “empower Al Qaeda of North Africa and Libya.”

She reiterated her hesitancy about the intervention on Monday, saying in a hedged statement that while she hopes the outcome in Libya is for the best, she also “opposed U.S. military involvement in Libya, and I am hopeful that our intervention there is about to end.”

The pure politics of the Libya mission are unclear. While voters started out supportive of the mission, a June Gallup Poll showed that only 39 percent of voters approved of the U.S. action against Libya, compared with 46 percent who disapproved.

Among Republicans, those numbers were almost exactly the same: 39 percent approving, 47 percent disapproving.

One Republican policy thinker supportive of intervention acknowledged: “Americans are tired of foreign entanglements, and their focus is rightly elsewhere.”

But while Americans may be tired of foreign wars, they may be inclined to welcome something like a positive outcome in Libya.

In a frustrating accident of timing for his supporters, it’s Pawlenty — the former Minnesota governor who recently dropped out of the race — who would have had the easiest time reacting to Qadhafi’s fall.

Of all the Republican candidates, Pawlenty had the clearest, most unequivocal and hawkish view of military policy, having called early for a no-fly zone over Libya and Qadhafi’s ouster. He also spoke in Kristol-esque terms about the need to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Pawlenty ended his presidential campaign on Aug. 14, the day after coming in third at the Iowa straw poll, behind the staunchly anti-interventionist Bachmann and Paul.