Betting on the Wrong Donkey.

• Author: Preble, Christopher A.
• Position: Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security - Book review

Kurt M. Campbell and Michael E. O'Hanlon, Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 224 pp., $26.00.

ONE ALMOST wonders if Kurt Campbell and Michael O'Hanlon wish that the Democrats had lost the congressional elections of 2006.

Before then, the Democratic Party had suffered a series of embarrassing electoral defeats and national security often proved its downfall. Bill Clinton explained the problem thusly: The electorate "would choose 'strong and wrong' over 'timid and right' every time."

But sensing that "Republican missteps [had] created a potential opening for intrepid Democrats and moderate Republicans", Campbell and O'Hanlon offered in the spring of 2006 Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security. The book, they explained, was a primer to help Democrats "think about the difficult decisions associated with military power and national security."

But a funny thing happened on the way to the voting booth--millions of Americans elected the very soft-power Dems who Campbell and O'Hanlon so roundly scorned. Particularly notable were a group of political neophytes who all rode to victory over GOP incumbents on a wave of anti-war sentiment--such as Dave Loebsack of Iowa, Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire, New York's Kirsten Gillibrand, and Pennsylvania native and Iraq War veteran Patrick Murphy.

The fact that this groundswell occurred-and the reason why Campbell and O'Hanlon failed to anticipate it--explains what is wrong with this book, what is wrong with the elite foreign-policy community the authors represent and ultimately what is wrong with the state of public discourse on matters that are crucial to the nation's future.

While the American public is crying out for a genuinely new approach to foreign policy, Campbell and O'Hanlon emphasize repeatedly that their proposals do not "represent a radical contrast with previous policy." But given that previous policies have so often failed, how can their wholehearted embrace of the conventional wisdom hope to attract wide popular support?

Emblematic of the authors' limited appreciation of the country's current state of affairs is their frequent use of a curious descriptor of their views: "hard-headed." They describe their book as offering "bard-headed ideas and intellectual ammunition [to policymakers] prepared for a new approach to foreign affairs and national security" (my emphasis). The term hard-headed has several connotations, but the most common are "obstinate" and "stubborn." Perhaps they mean "hardnosed?" Their ideas, meanwhile, are not new; they are merely a recapitulation of familiar themes. To continue to feed the same stale ideas to a country hungry for a change of course--even as these policies continually fail--is, indeed, hard-headed.

Which brings us back to the spring of 2006, when Hard Power was released. Campbell and O'Hanlon sensed an opportunity to erase the Democrats' longstanding vulnerability on matters of national security. That would only occur, they predicted, "if [Democrats] demonstrate more competence and confidence in their own ideas", rather than simply basing their strategy "on a comparison with George W. Bush."

However, given that a number of long-shot Democratic candidates won office in November 2006 on the basis of their opposition to the Iraq War and President Bush, it is likely that many will use the same playbook the next time around. Thus, as a domestic political strategy, Hard Power seems flaccid.

CAMPBELL AND O'Hanlon claim to be "new thinkers, but on the defining national-security issue of our time--the invasion and occupation of Iraq--the former was inexplicably silent and the latter horribly wrong.

In February 2003, O'Hanlon published an article supporting the invasion. Since then, he has paid lip service to eventual troop reductions, but only those that occur after the security situation on the ground improves. It has not, and thus O'Hanlon has become a leading advocate for still more troops in Iraq, a position staked out in this book and then promoted in a series of op-eds in defense of the president's so-called surge.

Campbell, for his part, said almost nothing about Iraq during the run-up to war. While acting as a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), he seems to have been more focused on events in northeast Asia, his area of specialty during the Clinton Administration. But it is strange that a leading figure at one of the pre-eminent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington would take a pass on the...