One of the themes I have harped about on this blog has been the issue of opportunity costs.   When a great power gets itself over-committed in a lot of costly and time-consuming commitments (and when it mismanages its economy in various ways), then it won't have the surplus it needs when an unexpected challenge (or an unforeseen opportunity) arises. 

Case in point: the current floods that have ravaged Pakistan in recent weeks.  The situation is by all accounts horrific, and could have significant long-term consequences for millions of people.  It is precisely the sort of event that calls for a vigorous and generous U.S. response.

As everyone knows, the United States is widely despised among broad swathes of Pakistani society.  Some of this hostility is unmerited, but some of it is a direct result of misguided U.S. policies going back many decades.  As the U.S. experience with Indonesia following the 2004 Asian tsunami demonstrated, however, a prompt and generous relief effort could have a marked positive effects on Pakistani attitudes.  Such a shift could undermine support for extremist groups and make it easier for the Pakistani government to crack down on them later on.  It is also the right thing to do, and the U.S. military is actually pretty good at organizing such efforts.

The United States has so far pledged some $76 million dollars in relief aid, and has sent 19 helicopters to help ferry relief supplies.  That's all well and good, but notice that the U.S. government sent nearly $1 billion in aid in response to the tsunami, and we are currently spending roughly $100 billion annually trying to defeat the Taliban.  More to the point, bear in mind that the United States currently has some over 200 helicopters deployed in Afghanistan (and most reports suggest that we could actually use a lot more).  

So imagine what we might be able to do to help stranded Pakistanis if we weren't bogged down in a costly and seemingly open-ended counterinsurgency war, and didn't have all those military assets (and money) already tied up there?   It's entirely possible that we could do more to help suffering individuals, and more to advance our own interests in the region, if some of these military assets weren't already committed.   

Of course, Obama didn't know that there would be catastrophic flooding in Pakistan when he decided to escalate and prolong the Afghan campaign.  But that's just the point: when national leaders make or escalate a particular strategic commitment, they are not just determining what the country is going to do, they are also determining other things that that they won't be able to do (or at least won't be able to do as well).  

Thus, another good argument for a more restrained grand strategy is that it might free up the resources that would allow us do some real good in the world, whenever unfortunate surprises occur.   As they always will.

Lots of ink will be spilled and plenty of pixels will be generated in response to yesterday’s special Senate election here in Massachusetts, and I don’t have any deep and novel insights to offer. After all, this is a blog about foreign policy, not domestic politics, and foreign policy appears to have played little or no role in the outcome. 

I also think it is a mistake to read too much into an outcome that could easily have gone the other way for reasons that have nothing to do with the issues and structural forces at work (i.e., had Coakley bothered to campaign in a serious way). The other reason to take a deep breath and relax is the pendulum-like nature of American politics: remember how cool and popular George Bush looked in that flight suit on "Mission Accomplished" day? Remember how hapelss he appeared a couple of years later? One other observation: this election also preserved the surprising and dubious tendency for "liberal" Massachusetts to not elect women to high office. What's up with that?  

That said, I think there are two important lessons that Dems should draw from yesterday’s result, and especially any Dems who happen to live and work at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The first lesson is the politics didn’t stop on Inauguration Day. The Obama administration ran a great campaign, and did an excellent job of framing issues and defining their candidate throughout 2008. Once in office, however, they turned immediately from politics to policy -- and there is a difference -- while the GOP did exactly the reverse. Instead of continuing to frame issues and establish a clear narrative about what they were accomplishing, the Dems have let the GOP attack machine construct a wholly fictitious but effective narrative that clearly helped Brown in Massachusetts. (Again, the fact that Coakley offered no clear story of her own was a huge liability too.)

The second lesson, and one I’ve harped about before, is about the dangers of trying to do too much, and without a clear strategy. In retrospect, Obama and the Dems would have been better off had they attempted a lot less in the past year, and gotten some of it done a lot quicker. Did Obama really need to jet off to Europe to try to get the Olympics for Chicago, or show up at a climate change summit that wasn’t going to yield an agreement? Was it a good idea to raise everyone’s expectations about Middle East peace, when your team hadn't thought through its strategy and when you didn’t have the political courage to do what was necessary to bring it about? Why talk about getting rid of nuclear weapons when everyone knows that isn’t going to happen for decades? And why betray your own base by doubling down in Afghanistan, largely in the hope of deflecting GOP criticism?

Back last spring, when Obama seemed to be launching a new initiative every other day, political theorist and former Clinton advisor William Galston warned that "If he's right, our traditional notion of the limits of the possible -- the idea that Washington can only handle so much at one time -- will be blown to smithereens. If he's wrong, he may be cruising for a bruising on a lot of things." I think it is way too soon to write the Obama presidency off, but he took a few lumps yesterday. The real question is his administration’s learning curve, and whether he starts replacing the people who’ve given him bad advice over the past year.