Needless to say, I enjoyed last night. Partly because Obama's victory wasn't a nailbiter, partly because Karl Rove looked like a fool on Fox, and partly because most of the other elections I cared about went the right way too. (Watching McMahon, Akin, and Mourdock get spanked by the voters while Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Kennedy III won was deeply gratifying.) And while Sheldon Adelson may be a brilliantly successful casino mogul, last night also proved he's not much of a talent scout when it comes to picking politicians (first Gingrich, then Romney).

Two thoughts keep my sense of satisfaction within bounds. First, Obama is still going to face plenty of opposition, and I see no sign that the GOP is going to be any more cooperative in a second term than it was in his first. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell failed in his stated goal to make Obama a one-term president, but does anyone seriously believe he won't redouble his efforts to deny Obama any meaningful accomplishments? Which means continued wrangling on the budget, and anything else the GOP can think up.

Second, instead of empowering the president to take bolder steps on foreign policy, I fear that re-election will convince his team that they've basically got the right formula: drones, special forces, covert action, secrecy, etc., combined with a very cautious approach to diplomacy. This is certainly preferable to the follies of the Bush administration, but it also means that the U.S. will be engaged in lots of trouble spots but unable to resolve any of them. Two-term administrations also tend to suffer from battle-fatigue, especially if there isn't a deep bench of new players you can bring to key positions. So my fear today is oddly similar to my forecast back in 2009: The foreign policy agenda at the end of Obama's second term will look surprisingly like the agenda he faced when he took office. Iraq won't be a friend, Afghanistan will still be a mess (though we may be out), Iran will still be a challenge, Israel-Palestine will still be a headache, the world economy will still be stumbling, climate change issues will still be kicked down the road, and the United States will still see itself as responsible for addressing all of these problems while our allies around the world continue to either free-ride or to do their best to drag us into their troubles (or both).

Is it too early to talk about the foreign policy and national security agenda that will face the next president? No matter who wins on November 6, the feature that is going to dominate U.S. national security planning over the next four years is constraint. Even if we avoid going off the sequestration cliff, there is going to be considerable pressure on the defense budget. Forget all those promises that Romney made about ramping up defense spending, expanding the Navy, etc. If he does beat Obama and has to face reality (as opposed to his Etch-a-Sketch approach to campaigning) he'll figure out that budget math is real and unforgiving. And given the budget picture these days, that means limits.

Of course, foreign policy and national security tends to produce a lot of surprises; it's probably the least predictable part of a president's agenda. Remember that George W. Bush was totally blindsided by 9/11, an event that shaped almost everything he subsequently did in foreign and defense policy. Barack Obama didn't see the Arab spring coming, yet he's had to devote a lot of time and attention to figuring out what to do (or not to do) in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and elsewhere. No list of agenda items will cover all the possible topics, and it's a safe bet the next president will get to deal with something that hardly anybody anticipated.

That said, what do I see as some obvious items that the next president will have to address? Obviously, he'll have to manage the withdrawal from Afghanistan, keep relations with China on an even keel, cultivate reasonable ties with Mexico and other neighbors in the western hemisphere, and hope that the Eurozone mess doesn't get worse. But here's my list of the items that might take up even more of his time.

#1: Managing America's Asian Alliances

No matter how much you hear about the importance of cooperating with China, a serious rivalry is almost inevitable. I don't expect a shooting war -- and certainly not in the next four years -- instead, the key element of that rivalry will be a competition for influence in Asia. The United States is already trying to shore up ties with Japan, Korea, India, and various Southeast Asian nations, and China is going to try to limit with this process where it can.   

As I've noted before, leading this alliance is going to be much harder than managing NATO was during the Cold War. The geographic distances are much larger, which makes it easier for allies to shirk responsibilities when trouble occurs a long ways away. Relations among some of our Asian partners aren't that good, as the collapse of a South Korean-Japanese agreement on intelligence sharing earlier this year illustrated. Furthermore, our NATO partners had minimal economic ties to the former Soviet Union, while our Asian allies are tightly linked to China's economy and are going to want to keep those ties intact if they can. We can also expect big debates on burden-sharing: the United States will want the allies to bear as much of the burden as possible, while they will want to keep free-riding as much as they have in the past.

In short, maintaining a secure position in Asia will require a lot of expertise and adroit diplomacy, which is not always America's long suit. The next president will need a good team, and will have to devote some of his own time, attention, and political capital to the problem.

#2: Dealing with the Arab Spring. 

The Arab world is in midst of vast and unpredictable upheaval, which is likely to produce governments that are more responsive to popular sentiment than their predecessors were. They may not be perfect democracies, but rulers will worry a lot more about popular opinion than their predecessors did. But this process will take time -- measured in years, not months. As we've already seen in Libya and Syria, these events raise vexing national security questions for the United States. Are these events an opportunity to diminish Iran's influence, strike a blow for democracy, and further marginalize anti-American forces? Or is the collapse of the old order undermining traditional U.S. friends and allowing anti-American sentiment (and Islamic extremists) a greater voice in the region's politics? What if Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the Kurds get drawn into the vortex? 

Given what is already occurring, Obama or Romney will have to spend a lot of time worrying about this part of the world. But as Obama has already discovered (and Romney would quickly learn) they won't have a lot of leverage over these events, and not a lot of appealing policy options. What they'll have instead is a serious headache.

#3: Beyond the Two-State Solution. 

The next president may also have to face up to the fact that there isn't going to be a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, and begin to think seriously about what an alternative U.S. policy should be. Obama has already learned that trying to pursue the 2SS is "just really hard," and Romney famously told a group of fat cat GOP donors that he didn't think that goal was achievable. 

I've always seen the 2SS as the best outcome given where we were, but it is no longer realistic to expect it to happen. The Israeli right has no interest in it, the Palestinians are too weak and divided to put meaningful pressure on them, and the United States is too compromised by the Israel lobby to be an effective mediator. The "two-state solution" has become a fig leaf for politicians to hide behind, while realities on the ground make it less and less likely by the day.

But sooner or later, it will be obvious to everyone that it simply isn't going to happen. As I've argued before, that epiphany raises all sorts of awkward questions:  In particular, what outcome should a liberal democracy like the United States favor if "two states for two peoples" is impossible? Do we abandon our commitment to "one person, one vote" and endorse permanent apartheid? Do we abandon our deep commitment to a Jewish state and support a one-state democracy for all the inhabitants of Israel/Palestine? Or do we quietly encourage ethnic cleansing?  

No matter who the next president is, I'm sure they will try to avoid those awkward questions for as long as they can. But they may not be able to do so forever without looking like they are living in fantasyland.

#4: Living with a Nuclear-Capable Iran:  

No matter who wins, I suspect we'll see a new push for some sort of diplomatic deal with Iran. It's been reported (and denied) that Obama intends to do this after the election, and I wouldn't be surprised if a Romney administration made at least a gesture in this direction. But my guess that the United States is going to gradually adjust itself to a nuclear-capable (but not nuclear armed) Iran.

Here's why. I don't think Iran will cross any overt "red lines" in the next four years, meaning that it isn't going to try to fabricate or test a nuclear weapon or start enriching uranium to 90%. They won't do this because that is the one step that might trigger a U.S. attack. Absent such a move by Iran, I don't think either Israel or the United States will conduct a preventive strike. Israel doesn't have the capability to conduct a strategically meaningful attack, and most of the U.S. national security establishment thinks an attack would be foolish. I can't rule out war, however, because countries sometimes do stupid things and there are prominent voices who are still pushing it, but I'm betting that cooler heads prevail.

So the next president will be facing an Iran that is nuclear capable (meaning it has the theoretical capacity to build a bomb if it chooses to do so). Even if we don't reach a formal diplomatic deal (i.e., one that permitted Iran to enrich uranium to low levels and gradually reduced economic sanctions), he'll probably deal with it exactly the same way we dealt with other nuclear powers: i.e., via containment and deterrence. Note: this step will also mean negotiating security arrangements with key U.S. allies in a period where regional politics are going to be quite volatile (see #2 above). In short, plenty for the next president to do on this issue, too.

#5:  What sort of country are we becoming?

Finally, the next president needs to do some hard thinking about the kind of country the United States is becoming. The United States has fought four wars since 1990, and is currently conducting drone strikes and special operations in a half a dozen countries. We are deeply worried about cyber-war and cyber-security, but we are also using these weapons for offensive purposes in ways that we would regard as wholly illegitimate if someone did it to us.

In the same way, American experts now discuss "preventive war" in remarkably casual terms, as if it were just one of many strategic options. They seem to forget that by definition, preventive war means attacking countries that have not attacked us and are not about to do so. "Preventive war" was what Japan did to us at Pearl Harbor, and ambitious young policy wonks now prescribe it without much self-reflection and seemingly unaware that real human lives are at stake. 

Instead of the citizen army that we relied upon in World War I, World War II, and Korea, we now have a professional military that receives enormous deference from politicians, pundits, academics, and the public. U.S. politicians rarely have military experience -- Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, and Romney never served, and neither have any of their children -- and this fact inevitably affects their relations with the military establishment. Neither Obama nor Romney said a critical word about the military during any of their debates, even though the quality of military leadership and advice in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been deficient. U.S. politicians rarely talk about peace anymore; instead, they try to sound tough-minded and ever-willing to use force.

Since 9/11, we have created a vast array of intelligence and counter-terrorist organizations whose activities are largely hidden from the citizens who are paying for them and who will bear the consequences if their actions are misguided. Both common sense and much history teaches us that lack of transparency and accountability usually breeds bad behavior, and we may one day be shocked when we find out what's been done in our country's name over the past decade.

Who will play watchdog? Not most academics, who are too busy with ivory-tower exercises and for the most part discomfited by national security issues. Not the mainstream media, which depends on cozy relations with those in power. Not the DC think tanks funded by the defense industry and employing would-be or former officials eager to preserve their career options (and consulting businesses).

So, in addition to all those other challenges, I hope the next president will start unwinding some of the practices we adopted in the aftermath of 9/11, and move us back to being a country that is slower to anger, more interested in diplomacy, and not quite as trigger happy. But I wouldn't bet on it, becuase he'll be too busy dealing with the rest of his agenda, plus the inevitable surprises that will rise up to bite him.

What would I like to ask Obama and Romney at tonight's debate? Before I get to that question, let's start with the rather revealing list of selected topics. They are:

1. America's role in the world

2. Our longest war -- Afghanistan and Pakistan?*

3. Red lines -- Israel and Iran?*

4. The changing Middle East and the new face of terrorism

5. The rise of China and tomorrow's world

Well, if I were European or Latin American I'd be feeling mighty dissed. No discussion of the Euro crisis? Europe was the focus of U.S. strategy for most of our history, and now it doesn't even rate a mention in the presidential debates? NATO or Greece might make a cameo appearance here and there, but what's striking is how the Greater Middle East and Asia dominate the list of issues.

Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa aren't going to get much attention either, unless someone brings up Sudan or the "new face of terrorism" includes the drug war. Maybe Brazil will come up as a "rising power," but I'll bet it doesn't rate more than a sentence or two. Instead, Obama and Romney will be trading sound-bites over some very well-trodden ground. There's no shortage of vexing problems to discuss, however, because the debate will center around the region that we've been busily screwing up ever since World War II. In a sense, it's not really fair to ask either candidate how they would fix problems that are the work of multiple administrations and both political parties. When Marx wrote "the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living," he might have been describing the situation Obama inherited in 2009, or the problems that one of these two men will face in 2013. But since candidates always promise to be miracle workers, the intractability of these problems is not reason not to spent 90 minutes explaining how each will (not) solve them.

In any case, my crystal ball tells me this last debate will be the most rancorous and the least edifying of the three. Obama has run a rather hawkish foreign policy: intensifying the drone war against Al Qaeda and its allies, getting the United States and other key nations to tighten sanctions on Iran, escalating the war in Afghanistan, and giving Israel even more military aid and diplomatic support than his predecessors did. He even let Benjamin Netanyahu humiliate him repeatedly on the settlement issue, and just about the only thing he didn't do was promise to attack Iran on Israel's behalf. So Romney doesn't have much he can really criticize, unless he just starts making things up again (which he will).

Indeed, when it comes to substance, what's Romney going to argue? That he would have fought longer in Iraq, bombed Iran already, or killed Bin Laden deader? Hardly. The left in America might be genuinely disappointed in Obama (and with good reason), but it's hard to attack Obama from the right without without sounding like you want to take the country into a few more wars. And that is not what most of the electorate wants to hear these days.

Given that he doesn't have many tangible things to complain about, Romney is left trying to portray Obama either as 1) someone who doesn't love America as much as he (Romney) does); or 2) as someone who has been too tough on U.S. allies and too soft on U.S. adversaries. But when asked to spell out specifics, Romney's actual policy positions turn out to be close to carbon-copies of Obama's. And the one genuine difference -- Romney's pledge to ramp up defense spending -- can't be squared with his pledge to cut taxes and balance the budget too. So instead of a wonkish discussion of real issues, we'll got a lot of rhetorical posturing at tonight's debate, complete with pious references to America's special role, its glorious past, its bright future, its noble spirit, etc., etc. But if we're lucky, neither of them will try to sing.

Second, it won't be an edifying debate because neither candidate is going to say what they might really think about the key issues shaping policy in the Greater Middle East. Like almost all American politicians, they will try to outdo each other in affirming their "unshakeable" support for Israel (yawn), but they aren't going to be any more candid about the other issues currently afflicting that troubled region. Will Romney argue that Obama should have tried to keep Ghaddafi and Mubarak in power, against the wishes of their people? Of course not. Can Obama explain that he supported the democracy movement in Egypt but not in Bahrain because he didn't want to tick off Saudi Arabia? Will either candidate openly discuss the bipartisan debacle in Afghanistan, and point out that our military leaders gave very bad advice when they recommended a "surge" in 2009? I don't think so.

Be prepared for some pretty silly conversations on China, too. According to the latest survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, U.S. citizens think the most important foreign policy issue facing the country is "protecting the jobs of American workers." Indeed, 84 percent of respondents in both parties identified this issue as important. So Romney will talk a lot about getting tough with China on trade, currency, and intellectual property, even though there's not a snowball's chance that he'd really launch a trade war once in office. Obama, for his part, will talk about his "pivot" to Asia, and try to convince listeners that he can somehow be China's best friend and China's main rival at the same time.

Bottom line: This is a debate that will tell you more about the warped nature of American politics than it will tell you about the true foreign policy challenges facing the nation.

So if I were moderator Bob Schieffer, what questions might I ask? Here's my top-ten list of questions that I don't expect to hear tomorrow night.

 Mr. President, Governor Romney:

1. You have both pledged to end the war in Afghanistan by 2014. But the Taliban has not been defeated, there are no peace negotiations underway, the Afghan army remains unreliable, attacks on U.S. and NATO forces by Afghan soldiers have been increasing, and the Karzai government is still corrupt and ineffective. Given these realities, was the decision to send nearly 50,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009 a mistake? What could we have done instead, to avoid the current situation?

2. Gentlemen: Neither of you ever served in the U.S. military. Governor Romney, you have five grown sons, and none of them has ever served either. President Obama, you have two daughters, one of whom will be eligible to enlist in four years. Have either of you ever encouraged your children to serve our nation by enlisting in the armed forces? If not, why not?

3. Both of you claim to support a "two-state" solution between Israel and the Palestinians. But since the last election, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has increased by more than 25,000 and now exceeds half-million people. If continued settlement growth makes a two-state solution impossible, what should United States do? Would you encourage Israel to allow "one-person, one-vote" without regard to religion or ethnicity -- as we do here in the United States -- or would you support denying Palestinians under Israeli control in Gaza and the West Bank full political rights?

4. Gentlemen: Is the United States doing enough, too little, or too much to address the threat of climate change? If you are the next president, what specific actions will you take to deal with this problem?

(Follow up: Both of you favor increased domestic energy production through new technologies such as hydraulic fracking.  But won't lower energy prices just encourage greater reliance on fossil fuels and make the climate change problem worse?)

5. Governor Romney, President Obama: Do you agree with former president George W. Bush's claim that terrorists want to attack America because they "hate our values?" Do you think some terrorists hate us because they angered by what they see as illegitimate U.S. interference in their own countries?

6. Do you believe Japan has a valid claim to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands? If the current dispute between China and Japan leads to a military confrontation, what would you do?

7. Both of you are men of faith, and your religions both teach that all humans are fallible. If so, then U.S. leaders must have made mistakes in their handling of foreign policy, and maybe even committed acts that were unjustifiable and wrong. Are there any other societies who have valid reason to be angry about what we have done to them? If so, how should we try to make amends?

8. The United States has the world's strongest conventional forces and no powerful enemies near its shores. It has allies all over the world, and military bases on every continent. Yet the United States also keeps thousands of nuclear weapons at the ready to deter hostile attack.

Iran is much weaker than we are, and it has many rivals near its borders. Many U.S. politicians have called for the overthrow of its government. Three close neighbors have nuclear weapons: Pakistan, India, and Israel. If having nuclear weapons makes sense for the United States, doesn't it make sense for Iran too? And won't threatening Iran with an attack just make them want a deterrent even more?

(Follow up: You both believe all options should be "on the table" with Iran, including the use of military force. Would you order an attack on Iran without U.N. Security Council authorization? How would this decision to launch an unprovoked attack be different from Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941?

And finally, an individual question for each candidate:

9. Governor Romney, when you visited Great Britain last summer, you were criticized for saying that there were a number of "disconcerting things" about Britain's management of the Games. Yet the Games turned out to be a splendid success. How did you get this one so wrong?

10. President Obama: if you could go back to 2009 and begin your term over, what one foreign policy decision would you like to take back?

I think a few questions like that would liven things up considerably, don't you?

A recurring theme in this year's presidential election is (fear of) American decline, with both candidates seeking to convince voters that they will reverse recent trends and foster an American resurgence. President Obama portrays himself as having repaired some of the self-inflicted wounds imparted by the Bush administration, and he pledges to do still more if reelected. For his part, challenger Mitt Romney promises voters that electing him will ensure that the next 88 years will be an "American Century" just like the last one. Both pitches seek to exploit the lingering fear that America's best days are behind us.

This is hardly a new concern. Americans seem to have been fretting about losing their mojo ever since World War II. We worried that communism was on the march in the 1950s, saw Sputnik as a grave challenge in the 1950s, and feared becoming a "pitiful, helpless giant" (to use Richard Nixon's phrase) in the 1970s. During the 1980s, Americans grew anxious about "Japan as #1" and thought we might succumb to "imperial overstretch" that same way Britain had. There was a brief burst of triumphalism following the collapse of the USSR, but it barely lasted a decade. Since 2000, the combination of 9/11, the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the lingering effects of the financial collapse have reanimated the perennial fear that we are in an irreversible descent.

How seriously should we take this issue? Let's start by acknowledging that measuring the power of different countries is a very imprecise business, even among professional IR scholars. We don't have a clear consensus on how to define or measure national power, so we end up using various crude approximations like GNP or more complicated indices that combine GNP, population, military strength, technological capacity, etc. But such measures ignore geography, "soft power," national cohesion, quality of life, etc., and all the other intangibles that can help states to secure their interests and provide both safety and prosperity for their citizens.

Matters get even more complicated when we shift from power to "influence." Power is most usefully conceived as capability -- no matter how it is measured -- and stronger states can generally do more things and affect others more than weaker states can. But having a lot of power doesn't translate directly into influence, which is the capacity to get others to do what you want. Sometimes very powerful states can't convince weaker states to do their bidding, because the weaker powers care more about the issue in question and are willing to make greater sacrifices to get their way. And sometimes even very powerful states lack the capacity to dictate or shape events because the tools they have available aren't up to the task. Having a lot of power doesn't enable a country to defy the laws of physics, for example, or guarantee that it can successfully engage in large-scale social engineering in a distant foreign land. Among other things, this is why it is pretty silly to criticize the Obama administration for failing to "control" the Arab spring, as if any U.S. president has the capacity to control a vast and fast-moving social upheaval involving hundreds of millions of people.)

When we think about power, there's an inevitable tendency to look at trends over time. The question we tend to ask is whether Country X is getting stronger or weaker. Here in America, this approach is usually accompanied by a nostalgic yearning for some by-gone era where the United States was supposedly near-supreme and could do whatever it wanted. Leaving aside the obvious point that things were never really like this, the history of the past century does tend to make Americans more worried than they ought to be.

Why? Because there have in fact been a couple of historical moments when a combination of good fortune and skillful policy put the United States in a highly unusual position of primacy. The United States produced about 50 percent of gross world product in 1945 and had unmatched military power, mostly because the other major economies were mostly in ruins. This was a decidedly unnatural condition, however, and there was nowhere to go but down once the rest of the world recovered from the war. Similarly, the breakup of the USSR and the collapse of Japan's bubble economy in the early 1990s briefly put the U.S. back on top by a significant margin, and all the more so because other potentially powerful countries (e.g., Japan and the EU) had been free-riding on the US and were punching below their weight.

The point is that relative decline from these two lofty perches was essentially unavoidable, and especially because some less-developed countries like China, India, or Brazil were ideally positioned for rapid growth after 1990. America's relative decline was accelerated by Bush's blunders and the financial crisis, but it would have happened anyway regardless of who had been in the Oval office.

There is another way to think about America's power position, and it ought to give comfort to those who worry that the country is slowly sliding into a position of vulnerability. Just compare the U.S. to other countries today, and ask yourself which states are in the best position to defend their true vital interests (as opposed to all those optional objectives that great powers habitually take on). Which states are masters of their own fates to a considerable extent, instead of having to worry constantly that others might threaten their independence or territorial integrity? Put differently: If you were going to be put in charge of any country's foreign policy, which country would you pick?

From this perspective things still look pretty good for the United States. It still has the world's largest and most diverse economy, and its per capita income is much higher than China's, which means there is more wealth available to mobilize for shared national purposes. It has no serious enemies nearby. It has thousands of nuclear weapons, which means that no state could attack us directly without risking its own destruction. U.S. conventional military forces are far larger than needed to defend American soil, and that remarkable level of territorial security allows U.S. leaders to take on lots of discretionary projects in places like Afghanistan or Yemen or the Phillipines or Africa or Colombia or Libya and to have endless debates about whether we ought to be taking on even more.

The U.S. economy isn't doing great, of course, but it is performing better than most of the other industrial powers. And despite the current level of partisan rancor and a level of government dysfunction that ought to embarrass us all, there's virtually no risk of major political upheaval here.

If all we were trying to do was defend Americans against major threats and foster continued economic advancement, running U.S. foreign policy would in fact be relatively easy. The main reason American foreign policy looks difficult is because Washington keeps taking on really difficult objectives, like occupying Iraq, trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern, Western-style state, attempting to coerce Iran into giving up all nuclear enrichment in exchange for precisely nothing from us. And that's just for starters. No matter how strong you are, you can make your job more difficult if you consistently try to do things that are both very, very hard and not necessarily all that important.

Now consider how the world looks to some other countries. If you were a member of China's leadership, you'd be deeply fearful of an economic slowdown that might trigger a major challenge to communist party rule. You have border disputes with many of your neighbors (some of them close allies of the mighty United States), and there's a least some risk that some of them might turn hot. You're dependent on trade that flows through a variety of maritime choke points. You have more power and more influence than your Maoist predecessors did, but you don't have any powerful allies and you don't have an attractive ideological model to offer the rest of the world. From a geopolitical perspective, you'd be thrilled to switch places with the United States, which has no serious rivals, no border disputes with anyone, and still has lots of allies around the world.

And if you were Japanese, Spanish, Iraqi, Iranian, Bahraini, Israeli, Greek, Egyptian, Vietnamese, or Indian, you'd have even more to fret about. So the next time you hear someone bemoaning American "decline," tell them to get a grip and be grateful for the country's good fortune. And while you're at it, remind them that most of our foreign policy problems are voluntary: They result from projects we've chosen to take on rather than ones that have been forced upon us by necessity. That's another sign of U.S. power: we have the luxury of choosing how much or how little to do (though it seems to be mostly the former).

In short, Bismarck may have been right when he said God had a "special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States." Which is not to say we can't make it harder for Him.

The Republican Party is big on leadership these days, and especially fond of demanding that the United States "lead from the front."This was a central theme in of John McCain's recent sally right here at Foreign Policy, as well as Condoleezza Rice's speech at the GOP convention in Tampa. Among other things, it reminds us that the Republican Party's foreign policy gurus aren't very good strategists. (The Bush administration's disastrous handling of foreign policy showed this all too clearly, but it's nice to have a reminder).

In fact, the idea that the United States should always try to "lead" is completely bone-headed."Exerting leadership" is not the central objective of foreign policy; it is a means to an end but not an end in itself. The central purpose of foreign policy is to maximize the nation's security and well-being. If exerting "leadership" contributes to these ends, fine, but there will be many occasions when the smart strategy is to hold back and pass the buck to someone else. Blindly declaring that the United States must always go to enormous lengths to lead, and must constantly strive to reassure allies who need us far more than we need them, is mere jingoistic hubris. It's an applause line, but not a strategy.

The United States would be well-served by a more selective approach to "global leadership." It is not a foreign policy achievement when the United States gets stuck dealing with an intractable quagmire like Afghanistan -- at a cost of a half a trillion dollars and 2,000 lives -- or when it finds itself waging drone wars in half a dozen countries. A real achievement would have been to find a way to shift the burden of this problem onto others, and especially onto the backs of potential U.S. adversaries. We congratulate ourselves on finally tracking down Osama bin Laden, but the real winners over the past decade have been countries like China, which have concentrated on building up power at home while the United States bled itself white in a series of pointless foreign adventures.

Furthermore, America's reflexive urge to be in charge has other negative consequences. It has allowed our most important allies to free-ride for decades, to the point that they are increasingly liabilities rather than assets. NATO's European members spend a mere 1.7 percent on average on defense these days (and that number is going down), and none of these countries can mount a serious military operation anywhere without a lot of American help. Why? Because Uncle Sucker has spent the last 50 years doing it for them. Much the same story is true in Asia, where countries like Japan want lots of American protection but don't want to spend any money defending themselves. Washington ends up with not with allies but with dependents, and we see it as a victory whenever some new country requires our protection.

This demand that the United States constantly "lead from the front" also makes it easier for other states to drag us into their quarrels. Georgia tried to sucker us into its dispute with Russia a few years ago (and if McCain had been in charge, it would have succeeded), and Israel is still trying to get America to bomb Iran on its behalf. Countries like Vietnam and the Philippines are trying to push the United States to confront China over issues like the South China Sea, and everybody seems to think the United States should "do something" about Syria. Perhaps we should, but first you need to explain why doing any of these things will make Americans safer or more prosperous here at home, and then you need to convince me that the countries who have a lot more at stake aren't up to the task. And if some other country wants me to spend American money and risk American lives, they'd better have a lot of skin in the game, too. Finally, if weaker countries want to demand my protection, they'd better be willing to follow my advice on other issues. Otherwise, they're on their own.

Don't get me wrong: in some cases the United States should be actively involved and it should exercise a leadership role. It is still the world's most powerful country, and a return to isolationism would have destabilizing consequences in some areas. But our overall approach to grand strategy should begin by recognizing that the United States is remarkably secure, with no great powers nearby, and most of our current adversaries are much, much weaker. This favorable geopolitical position is an enormous asset; it means that other states tend to worry more about each other than they do about us, and it means many countries will remain eager for U.S. support. Which in turn allows Washington to "play hard to get," and extract lots of concessions from others in exchange for our help. Those who pompously insist that America must always take the lead are throwing this diplomatic asset out the window, and guaranteeing that other states will take advantage of us instead of the other way around. And it should enable us to spend a lot less on national security, thereby easing our budget problems and allowing investments that will ensure our long-term productivity.

It is worth remembering that the United States rose to great-power status by staying out of trouble abroad and by concentrating on building a powerful economy here at home (which is what China is doing today). It also helped that the other great powers bankrupted themselves through several ruinous wars. The United States fought in two of those wars, but we got in late, suffered far fewer losses, and were in a better position to "win the peace" afterwards. The world has changed somewhat since then, and America's global role is and should be more substantial, but there is still a valuable lesson there. But don't expect Romney & Co. to absorb it.

Pandering to special interest groups is a time-honored American political tradition, especially in an election year. The practice is hard-wired into the U.S. system of government, which gives interest groups many different ways to pressure politicians into doing their bidding. Whether we are talking about the farm lobby, the NRA, the AARP, Big Pharma, Wall Street, or various ethnic lobbies, it's inevitable that politicians running for office will say and do lots of stupid things to try to win influential groups over. Especially in a close election.

Which of course explains why Mitt Romney flew to Israel over the weekend, and proceeded to say a lot of silly things designed to show everyone what a good friend to Israel he will be if he is elected. He wasn't trying to win over Israelis or make up for his various gaffes in London; his goal was to convince Israel's supporters in America to vote for him and not for Barack Obama. Most American Jews lean left and will vote for Obama, but Romney would like to keep the percentage as low as he can, because it just might tip the balance in a critical swing state like Florida. Pandering on Israel might also alleviate evangelical Christian concerns about Romney's Mormon faith and make stalwart "Christian Zionists" more inclined to turn out for him. Of course, Romney also wants to convince wealthy supporters of Israel to give lots of money to his campaign (and not Obama's), which is why a flock of big U.S. donors, including gazillionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, accompanied Romney on his trip.

Once in Israel, Romney followed the script to the letter. He referred to Jerusalem as Israel's capital (something the U.S. government doesn't do, because Jerusalem's status is still supposed to be resolved via negotiation). He said that stopping Iran's nuclear program was "America's highest national security priority," which tells you that Romney has no idea how to rank-order national security threats. One of his aides, neoconservative Dan Senor, even gave Israel a green light to attack Iran, telling reporters that "If Israel has to take action on its own, the governor would respect that decision."

But this sort of pandering is a bipartisan activity, and it's not like Barack Obama isn't keeping up. The administration has been sending a steady stream of top advisors to Israel of late, including Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and last week Obama signed a $70 million military aid deal for Israel, in a public signing ceremony. His message: "Romney can fly around and give speeches, but I'm delivering real, tangible support."

The good news, such as it is, is that both Romney and Obama are probably lying. No matter how many times each of them talks about the "unshakeable commitment" to Israel, or even of their "love" for the country, they don't really mean it. They are simply pandering to domestic politics, which is something that all American politicians do on a host of different issues. Of course, they will still have to shape their policies with the lobby's clout in mind (as Obama's humiliating retreat on the settlement issue demonstrates), but nobody should be under the illusion that they genuinely believe all the flattering stuff that they are forced to say.

Why do I say that? Well, consider what former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in a July 2000 interview, conducted as part of an oral history project conducted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center.

"...Every president I worked for, at some point in his presidency, would get so pissed off at the Israelis that he couldn't speak. It didn't matter whether it was Jimmy Carter or Gerry Ford or Ronald Reagan or George Bush. Something would happen and they would just absolutely go screw themselves right into the ceiling they were so angry and they'd sort of rant and rave around the Oval Office. I think it was their frustration about knowing that there was so little they could do about it because of domestic politics and everything else that was so frustrating to them."

What was true of these presidents was also true of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and if Romney ends up getting elected, I'll bet the same thing will happen to him too. He just won't admit it publicly.

The obvious danger in this conspiracy of silence is that it prevents the foreign policy community from having an honest discussion about the whole Middle East situation, including the "special relationship." Although public discourse on this topic is more open and wide-ranging than it used to be, mostly because some journalists and academics are freer to write honestly about this topic, it is still nearly impossible for politicians or ambitious policy wonks to say what they really think. If you want to get elected, or if you want to work on a campaign and maybe serve in the U.S. government, you have to either 1) be fully committed to the "special relationship," 2) pretend to be committed by mouthing all the usual platitudes or 3) remain studiously silent about the whole subject. And I can't think of any other diplomatic relationship that is such a minefield.

This situation wouldn't be a problem if U.S. Middle East policy was filled with success stories or if Israel's own actions were beyond reproach. But no country is perfect and all governments make mistakes. The problem is that politicians and policymakers can't really have a completely open discussion of these issues here in the Land of the Free.

There's also a tragic irony in all this. In his book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that the two presidents who did the most to advance Arab-Israeli peace were Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush. Carter negotiated the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and Bush 41 led the 1991 Gulf War coalition and assembled the 1992 Madrid Peace Conference. According to Ben-Ami, Carter and Bush made progress on this difficult issue because each was willing "to confront Israel head one and overlook the sensibilities of her friends in America."

In other words, each was willing to do precisely what Romney is now telling you he won't.

But what thanks did they get? In 1976, Carter received 71 percent of the Jewish vote and Gerald Ford got 27 percent, a typical result given the tendency for American Jews to favor the Democrats. In 1980, however, Carter got only 45 percent, the lowest percentage ever recorded for a Democratic candidate since World War II. Similarly, George H. W. Bush got 35 percent of the Jewish vote in 1988 (compared with 64 percent for Dukakis), but his share plummeted to only 11 percent in 1992. Their Middle East policies are not the only reason for these shifts, but these two elections are the main outliers over the past fifty years and the (false) perception that Carter and Bush were insufficiently supportive of Israel clearly cost both of them some support.

Which is what Romney is hoping for. The losers will be the American people, whose Middle East policy will continue to be dysfunctional, and Israel, which will continue down its present course towards becoming an apartheid state. And of course the Palestinians will continue to suffer the direct costs of this unhappy situation. But that's democracy at work. If you don't like it, then you'll need to convince politicians that they will pay a price at the ballot box for this sort of mindless pandering. Until they do, it would be unrealistic to expect them to behave any differently.

By Justin Logan

The past week or so has seen a number of articles discussing Mitt Romney's foreign-policy message, with a surprising number of aides whining to the press that the candidate isn't paying their issue enough attention. Today, Politico reports that the Romney campaign has decided that "they must do more than simply hammer the incumbent on jobs" and consequently Romney is considering an overseas tour in late July in an effort to:

move away from a campaign message devoted almost singularly to criticizing President Barack Obama's handling of the economy...

[...]

[The trip's goal will be to] project Romney above the campaign's daily nitty-gritty and cast him as a plausible commander in chief at ease with foreign leaders and the general public in distant capitals...

This is insanity. Whether or not Romney follows through on this is going to say a lot about the candidate's judgment.

According to Politico, Romney is considering expanding his trip to Great Britain and Israel to include Germany and Poland, but having apparently ruled out a visit to Afghanistan.

Let's start with that last one, Afghanistan. Here it seems the Romney people have realized that Bill Kristol's suggestion, that he "go and look serious," is absurd. Going there at all is a huge lose. It's a zero-sum tradeoff between saying things the public will like and saying things Kristol and his foreign-policy team will like. The public loathes the war, but the Kristol and the Romney foreign-policy staffers like it a lot. So if he went and said anything the public wants to hear -- like that he wants America to leave soon -- he'd get trashed in the media by his foreign-policy team again. And if he gave a sop to his foreign-policy team, the public would worry he's Bush redux. So they're smart to stay away from Kabul.

But what about the rest of the trip? On Israel, the Politico piece quotes an "informal foreign policy adviser to Romney's campaign" saying that "there are a lot of donors and potentially a few voters in places like Florida for which [sic] it sticks in people's craw that Obama hasn't been there yet." There is probably considerable fundraising upside from super-wealthy donors who affiliate strongly with the Israeli right, and perhaps some marginal vote to be won, although that last part is less persuasive. Obama could easily reply that Israel's defense minister shot back to a question this week asking whether Obama is a "friend of Israel" with the succinct answer, "Yes, clearly so."

And what about the rest of the trip: Poland, Great Britain, and Germany?

It's tough to say what political advantage Romney thinks the trip to Poland will gain him. There was a lot of conjecture about a domestic political rationale for Bill Clinton's support for NATO expansion, but if Dick Morris can be trusted on the matter, "Neither I nor the president ever believed there is such a thing as a Polish vote."

There's also a danger that defending Romney's Poland-related policy preferences will allow Obama to go on offense. For example, Romney has made a mountain out of the molehill that is the New START treaty, which the Poles supported enthusiastically. So while the missile defense issue that Romney apparently wants to bring up could put him on the side of the Poles, Obama could just as easily point out how he shepherded through a treaty that the Poles support and Romney opposes.

Apparently the logic for Britain is that the Olympics will be held there, and for Germany it is that the Euro may collapse there. These rationales hold up better on substance, but still don't make much sense. Romney presided over the successful Salt Lake City Olympics, which might reiterate the image of Romney as successful leader. On Germany, if Europe implodes, it is going to be hugely consequential for the United States, but this is too wonky a discussion to have in front of the median voter. So there is a substantive reason, but it's tough to see a political logic for it.

Sometimes foreign-policy wonks have trouble divorcing what they are interested in from what voters are interested in. For the most part we live in a bubble of public intellectuals, insulated from the collapse of the national economy. For a refresher, let's have a look at what voters were interested in as of May:

Most Important Issue in the Presidential Election

(Percentage among registered voters)

Economy and jobs: 62

Federal budget deficit: 11

Health care: 9

Same-sex marriage: 7

Foreign policy: 4

Immigration: 2

Maybe missile defense has ticked up a few points since then, but if Romney's going to win this thing, he's going to win it on jobs, the economy, and the deficit. I like discussing foreign policy as much as anybody, but going to Poland and Israel isn't going to win the election for him. As Daniel Larison sensibly concludes at the American Conservative,

"Unlike Obama, Romney is running against a sitting president during a time of very slow (and possibly stalling) economic recovery. That makes the decision to spend any time out of the country even harder to understand."

Unless I'm missing something big here, every minute Romney spends overseas is a minute he's spending away from winning the election. So tell me what I'm missing.

Justin Logan is director of foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Today's jobs report has got to be a real downer for the White House, because it gives Mitt Romney more ammo to make the case that he would be a better steward of the U.S. economy than Obama. I don't think that view is correct, by the way, but winning elections isn't really about who's right or wrong.

If Obama does lose in November, will it be because he made too sharp a departure from the policies of his predecessor, governed the country like some sort of 1960s radical, and in so doing lost the broad support of the American middle? Hardly. If he loses, a good case could be made that his mistake was to act too much like George W. Bush and not enough like Barack Obama the candidate. 

To be more specific, he spent too much time and money on Afghanistan, too much time sanctioning Iran (thereby driving up oil prices), too much time picking drone targets, and too much time on a Middle East peace effort that he abandoned as soon as AIPAC & Co. howled. Getting bin Laden was an achievement, but as I noted at the time, it wasn't going to win him any more votes than Bush 41 got for liberating Kuwait in 1991. He got a Nobel Prize because people liked his speeches, but his actual behavior was not that different from Bush's second term. At the same time, he did too little to stimulate the U.S. economy, and too little to constrain an unapologetic financial industry. And I'd argue he spent too much time and political capital getting a modest health care reform bill passed, one that will neither fix the U.S. health care system nor win him many votes in November. (I applaud the ambition, but I'd have gotten the economy rolling first and then done health care). Some of this clearly isn't his fault (i.e., Europe's economic doldrums are not his responsibility), but voters aren't likely to make distinctions like that if economic growth remains sluggish.

As readers here probably know, I'm among those who were genuinely excited by Obama's election and hoped that he would succeed in guiding America onto a different path. Nor have I forgotten what a difficult situation he faced when he took office, and it's unrealistic to expect politicians to be perfect. I'll almost certainly vote for him in November, if only because some of Romney's foreign policy advisors have track records that should worry all of us. And he may still pull it out, because he's a lot more likeable and a lot less gaffe-prone than his GOP rival. But it's going to be close, and a bit more bad news on the economic front will make Barack a one-term president.

Are you tired of the 2012 presidential election? Bored by the endless series of gossipy articles and blogs dissecting every bump and turn in the road to the White House? Me too. I know that a professional political scientist is supposed to find this sort of thing fascinating, but by the time November rolls around, I'm more likely to be in the "just shoot me" phase.

The problem, of course, is that the United States has the unappealing combination of a relatively short presidential term and an unusually long election process. We elect the president every four years (unlike France, where the term used to be seven and is now five), and we now devote a year to the primary process. It's actually more like two years, if you count the exploratory phase of campaigning and fundraising. So in a sense the U.S. spends at least a quarter of each presidential term actively discussing and debating who the next president will be. (It's even worse for members of the House of Representatives, who have to start running for re-election even before they've unpacked their offices).

Other countries are not nearly so foolish. Parliamentary systems like Great Britain specify that general elections have to be held on regular intervals (i.e., every five years or so) though snap elections aren't unusual. But I can't think of any country that spends a year or more actually running the campaign. In Canada, for example, the Elections Act mandates that the minimum length of a campaign be 36 days, and the longest campaign ever recorded (in 1926), was only seventy-four days. In Australia, elections generally last about two months. Apart from the United States, the longest election period I could find in a brief search was Germany, at about 114 days for unscheduled elections. Needless to say, this period is still far shorter than the U.S. norm.

Our stupefyingly long election process is good for political journalists, I guess, and one could argue that it helps us weed out candidates who are obviously unqualified (not a proposition I'd be eager to defend, by the way). But overall, it seems to me that the combination of a short presidential term and a long electoral campaign creates all sorts of potential difficulties, including a number of foreign policy problems. To wit:

First, it is invariably a distraction, with oodles of ink and media time being consumed by mostly trivial discussions of who's up, who's down, who's just made a gaffe, etc., instead of having a serious discussion of real policy issues. (And if you've been watched any of the GOP debates, you'll have noticed that "serious discussion" wasn't in abundance in those events).

Second, the campaign invariably consumes a lot of the incumbent president's time, which is probably the single scarcest commodity in politics. President Obama and his inner circle already have too much to do, but he'll spend a good chunk of the next eight months raising money and giving speeches that are less about fixing the nation's problems than about trying to get re-elected. I don't blame him for that; I just wish he only had to it for a few weeks. And of course some issues (e.g., trade policy) have to go on the back burner during an election year, for all the obvious reasons.

Third, the longer the election campaign is, the more it costs to run and greater the influence moneyed interests will have. And that means both incumbents and rivals will have to pander to special interest groups, including groups with foreign policy agendas. That's normal in a democracy, but surely it would be better if politicians didn't have to do this for a full year. Among other things, pandering to special interest groups encourages politicians to say lots of silly things about different issues, in effect polluting public discourse in ways that can have lasting effects.

Fourth, a long electoral cycle also lengthens the period in which foreign actors can try to use our internal preoccupations to advance their own ends. In some cases (e.g., Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's recent visit), the election campaign provides foreign governments with an opportunity to press the president to shift his policies in the way some foreign leader might want. In other cases, foreign adversaries may conclude they can take advantage of a distracted America to shift the status quo in subtle or not-so-subtle ways, knowing that the last thing an incumbent president really wants is a major crisis on the eve of an election. This doesn't happen all that often, perhaps, but the longer the election campaign is underway, the greater the chance for outside forces to try to exploit it.

Finally, when you consider that a new administration has to make some three thousand appointments (some of them requiring Senate confirmation), and that this transition process itself takes months if not years, then the actual period when the United States can conduct a fully-staffed, energetic and more-or-less coherent foreign policy is no more than a year or two in each administration. One could even argue that this has larger systemic consequences, because it means that the world's most powerful country spends at least as much time picking its leaders and getting their advisors appointed as it does allowing those leaders to actually govern. Among other things, this situation makes it harder to implement and sustain policies that might take a long time to bear fruit.

This system might have worked well in the 19th century, when the United States was largely isolated from the other great powers, but it's hardly an ideal position for the self-designated "leader of the free world." Sad to say, I don't have a ready remedy for this problem. If I had a magic wand, I'd have a national primary election day and I'd institute various measures to raise voter turnout and prevent both parties from being so easily captured by narrow extremists. But I don't have such a wand (you can all heave a sigh of relief) and I don't know how you could conjure up the necessary support for this kind of far-reaching change. The bottom line is that this self-inflicted wound will persist for the rest of my lifetime (and beyond) and the problems alluded to above are going to get worse instead of better over time.

If you are someone who is inclined to favor hawkish responses to foreign policy problems, then your choice for president should be Barack Obama. Not because Obama is especially hawkish himself, or interested in prolonging costly and failed commitments in Iraq or Afghanistan. For that matter, his administration is making a modest and fiscally necessary effort to slow the steady rise in Pentagon spending, and they seem to understand that war with Iran is a Very Bad Idea. (It is of course no accident that military action there is being promoted by the same folks who thought invading Iraq was a Very Good Idea. But I digress.)

So why should hawks vote for Obama? As Glenn Greenwald and Greg Sargent have argued most forcefully, it's because Obama can do hawkish things as a Democrat that a Republican could not (or at least not without facing lots of trouble on the home front). It's the flipside of the old "Nixon Goes to China" meme: Obama can do hawkish things without facing (much) criticism from the left, because he still retains their sympathy and because liberals and non-interventionists don't have a credible alternative (sorry, Ron Paul supporters). If someone like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush had spent the past few years escalating drone attacks, sending Special Forces into other countries to kill people without the local government's permission, prosecuting alleged leakers with great enthusiasm, and ratcheting up sanctions against Iran, without providing much information about exactly why and how we were doing all this, I suspect a lot of Democrats would have raised a stink about some of it. But not when it is the nice Mr. Obama that is doing these things.

The key to making this work, as Andrew Bacevich suggests here, is to insulate the vast majority of the American population from the effects of this effort. Obama understands that there's no stomach for big, costly, and inconclusive wars like Iraq and Afghanistan (he's right, and there's also little to be gained from them). But he and his advisors are betting that the American people will tolerate active efforts to hunt down and kill perceived bad guys, provided that the costs are low and occur far away and mostly out-of-sight. And it is in this context that one has to view recent proposals to give U.S. Special Forces greater presence, autonomy, and capability, an idea that remains controversial within military circles.

In other words, we are engaged in a grand strategic experiment: can the United States make itself more secure by dispatching troops and drones to various corners of the world, with the explicit mission of killing anyone we think might be a "terrorist?" At first glance, this approach certainly looks better than the debacle in Iraq, and it consistent with the "laser-like focus on Al Qaeda" that some of us recommended way back in 2001. But it is not without its own dangers, of which the following strike me as especially paramount.

The first danger lies in the secrecy with which these activities are now shrouded. We don't really know who is being targeted for attack, or what the error rates are. Is it really true that U.S. forces have targeted not just suspected terrorist but also the people who seek to provide medical or rescue assistance after an attack, on the assumption that the rescuers are in cahoots with original targets? How often do we make honest mistakes? How reliable is the information on which targeting is being conducted?

The second danger -- "blowback" -- follows from the first. What if we end up creating more new terrorists than we kill? What if aggressive efforts to hunt down Al Qaeda in Pakistan ends up destabilizing the nuclear-armed Pakistani state and convinces lots of people there that the United States is inherently hostile? Are we going to understand that such hostility didn't emerge solely because these people "hate our values," but rather because a cousin, brother, or fellow countrymen was targeted by an American drone, and maybe in error? The less we know about what U.S. forces are doing, the harder it will be for us to understand why some people don't like us that much.

A third danger is imitation. There is every reason to assume that other states, as well as some non-state actors, will decide to follow us down this particular path. The United States used to say that it opposed "targeted assassinations," but now we we are legimitizing this practice and others are bound to get into the act too. Similarly, by paying less and less attention to the old norm of sovereignty, we are making it more difficult to object when other states start interfering in each other's internal affairs. If we can send drones and/or special forces into any country we choose, why can't other states violate national borders in order to advance some policy objective of their own? What are we going to say then?

Fourth, is this a temporary expedient or a slippery slope? A case can be made that Obama's approach is a smart response to the dangers posed by Al Qaeda and its progeny, and that his policies reflect a temporary necessity. In this view, groups like Al Qaeda arose in a particular historical and political context, and they are gradually being attrited by an increasingly precise and effective strategy. If you believe this, then you might also believe that eventually the war on terror will be won, and that eventually we will be able to ratchet back these activities, shut down Guantanamo, rescind the Patriot Act, get rid of those demeaning scanners at airports, and cut back or quit those drone strikes. One could even argue that what we are really seeing is a last flurry of activity as we exit Iraq, prepare to exit Afghanistan, and start pivoting toward East Asia.

I'd like to believe that, but as Bacevich suggests, it is at least as likely that we have entered a new phase in American strategy from which it may be difficult to extricate ourselves. The problem is that we have these new capabilities (i.e., drones), and Obama and Bush have established the precedent of a "don't ask, don't tell" approach to warfare that keeps most of what we are doing in the dark. My fear is that future presidents are going to find those capabilities and that precedent very hard to resist. When hammers (drones?) are cheap, it's tempting to buy a lot of them and you'll tend to see a world full of nails. Drug lords in Mexico causing trouble? Let's just take 'em out. Tired of Hugo Chavez and his shenanigans? We've got an app for that. Sickened by the carnage in Syria? Let's give Assad and his underlings the same treatment we gave Ghaddafi. And so on. But most actions generate unintended consequences, and I suspect that trying to be the global policeman -- or in the minds of some, the global vigilante -- on the cheap may be a decision we'll eventually regret.

According to the Census Bureau, about 53 percent of Americans are over the age of 35 and thus eligible to be President. Taking into account the roughly 11.3 million naturalized citizens (who are barred from the presidency by the Constitution) that's easily more than 150 million people.  

According to Rasmussen Reports, about 34 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans.  A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation (150 million x .34) yields roughly 51 million GOPers who are legally eligible to serve as President.

My question is: given that the GOP has (in theory) a pool of 51 million people from which to pick, is this the best they can do?