Okay, one last thing on Edwards’ speech. I got to talk to one of Edwards’ advisors after the speech and he clarified to me that some of what I felt the speech was missing wasn’t actually “missing” per se. Rather, it’s going to be in a different speech. Michael Signer’s blog post here lays out the concept, which I hadn’t understood going in:

This speech is the second in a five-part cycle of speeches in which Senator Edwards explains his vision of renewing America’s moral authority and our leadership of the world. The cycle began two months ago, when he presented a major speech about how to solve global poverty. Today, he’s presenting a military and national security policy that will explain how we can rebuild the military from the Bush years, so our strength will support our moral leadership of the world in a new century of new challenges. This Friday, he’ll talk about restoring our sacred contract with our veterans, servicemen and women, and military families. And in the coming months, he’ll complete the cycle with two more major speeches. The fourth speech will be on civil liberties, and how America can stay stronger by respecting the rule of law and human rights. The fifth and final speech will provide his overarching foreign policy vision for the challenges of the coming years, including a rising China and India, an increasingly undemocratic Russia, spreading nuclearization, and the Middle East. Together, the five speeches will comprise an overarching vision for an America that is at once strong, secure, and just–that once again is a moral leader for the world.

In short, the speech was strongest on military reform issues because that’s what the speech was supposed to be about and we’ll have to wait for the fifth and final speech to hear about the “overarching foreign policy vision.”

Lockheed Martin does work, as my friend Pete might say:

Right now, the Pentagon is paying Lockheed billions to build a new fleet of F-22 Raptor stealth fighters. The Air Force and Navy have justified the program, which has become something of a boondoggle, by pointing to the spread of U.S.-built F-16 and F-18 fighters around the world. Indeed, a few years back, Lockheed was circulating a promotional pamphlet for the F-22, which stressed the need to maintain U.S. “air superiority” by pointing to countries around the world that were either adversaries or potential adversaries. It turned out that most of those countries were worrisome because they had… fleets of U.S.-built F-16s. Arms sales really are the gift that keeps on giving.

Excellent. It seems to me that the role of defense contractors in pushing policy in a bad direction gets weirdly neglected.

It turns out that when Edwards got asked a question about nuclear proliferation he had a perfectly good answer. He said he’s like to associate himself more-or-less with these sentiments, that we should commit ourselves to not building new nuclear weapons, need to lead an international effort to close the holes in the NPT, and I wish it had been in his prepared remarks because then I’d have them in front of me and I could quote him in more detail. Totally solid, though unremarkable, answer.

Okay. The speech is very impressive on several of the more technical aspects of military policy — stuff about the budget, the larger context of the national security budget, civil-military relations, that kind of thing. It’s also genuinely great to see a high-profile politician taking on the “war on terror” concept. That section of the speech even got my hopes up that as he outlined an alternative strategy he might really truly win me over by mentioning a phrase like “political grievances” but instead he kind of lost me with a segue into “new efforts to lead the fight against global poverty.” On the other hand, fighting global poverty is a good thing, and Edwards’ has gone farther down the right path on this subject than anyone else.

Problems!

Edwards seems to me to have on display here a tendency to say something very smart and then to some extent take it back. After a strident call for withdrawal from Iraq, he said that, well, he actually might keep some troops in Iraq. After a great attack (“some politicians have fallen right in line behind President Bush’s recent proposal to add 92,000 troops between now and 2012, with little rationale given for exactly why we need this many troops”) on his rivals, Edwards winds up punting a little while later — “we might need a substantial increase of troops . . . proposals are worth close examination . . . need to avoid throwing numbers around . . . I will carefully assess the post-Iraq threat environment . . . determine the exact number of troops we need.”

The idea for a “‘Marshall Corps’ modeled on the military Reserves, of up to 10,000 expert professionals who will help stabillize weak societies, and who will work on humanitarian missions” seemed under-explained. The real worry for me, though, is on the nuclear proliferation front. Edwards didn’t really address this topic squarely at all. He did say we need better intelligence, and he said military force should be used “to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons” and it was a bit unclear to me what that means for, say, Iran.

All-in-all, I’m not in love, but I was impressed. Obama was much better on proliferation, but Edwards is doing a great job of pushing the envelop on topics like the need to get fence-sitters on our side, the need to move beyond “war on terror” rhetoric, etc.

Speech hasn’t started yet. Worse. After being informed second-hand that there was room for me in the press section of the event, it turns out that there . . . isn’t room for me in the real press section; I’m in some overflow space. My new plan is to do everything in my power to ruin Edwards’ shot at the White House.

I’m off to see John Edwards’ speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. Readers will recall that I have some doubts about Edwards on the national security front, so I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say. This genre of speech — the “major foreign policy address” by a presidential candidate — tends to be dull, but Edwards’ 2008 campaign has shown a flare for dramatic gestures so maybe this one will be different. You can see a webcast here. This looks promising to me.

Oliver Kamm and Andrew Sullivan both detect a certain lack of quality in speculation as to the nature of Gordon Brown’s foreign policy views that puts a lot of emphasis on his admiration for Cape Cod as a source of the belief that he’ll pursue a “pro-American” line.

All true, but also all tending to indicate a certain blinkered quality to the “anti-Americanism” frame. Francophilia is, I think, something we all understand as being distinct from admiration for French foreign policy and a desire to see France’ hand strengthened abroad. The Francophile loves Paris, or the countryside in the South; admires French literature and painting; is charmed by the way French women throw their scarves so stylishly and with seemingly so little effort. As to whether or not you think France’s heavyhandedly neocolonial approach to Francophone Africa has been a good thing, this is neither here nor there.

The reason is that one’s feelings about French national power have, at the end of the day, almost nothing to do with one’s feelings about France. Similarly, it’s not a dislike of America that leads many people to be uncomfortable with exercises of unilateral American military might. Having a foreign country deploy so much lethal force so cavalierly and with so little regard to world opinion or international institutions is, simply put, frightening and it’s this frightening quality that drives negative views of the US; not negative views of the US that make unilateral militarism scary.

Mark Steyn’s not happy that when James Kitfield talked to a bunch of foreign policy experts from both parties and several ideological tendencies (Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Francis Fukuyama, etc.), he didn’t make time to give equal weight to the views of crazy people. Fair enough. Then this:

But, if the jig is really up, you could just as easily make the case that it dates back to what Mr Kitson considers that golden age “less than a decade ago” – ie, America’s holiday from history, when the wise old foreign-policy stability fetishists had nary a word to say about resurgent Islam, freelance nuclearization, and the demographic decline of the west which makes traditional great-power clubs like the G7 about as relevant to the future as dinner theatre in Florida.

It’s obviously quite false to say that the 1990s-vintage foreign policy establishment had nothing to say about nuclear proliferation. But note that the “demographic decline of the west” is paired here quite simply with “resurgent Islam” — not Islamism or Islamic radicalism or any other kind of qualified version of the worry. The thing we should have been worrying about is simply a resurgence of Islam. I’ll count it as a damn good thing that the country wasn’t run by people whose idea of the key foreign policy issue of our time was finding a way to get Christians to outbreed the Muslim hordes.

Democrats abandon withdrawal timetable. Like Nancy Pelosi, I don’t really see what choice the leadership had, but I’m not happy about it:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was so disappointed with the outcome that she said she might vote against the Iraq portion of the package, which will be split into two parts when it comes before the House. “I’m not likely to vote for something that doesn’t have a timetable,” she said.

I think the GOP has made it clear that they don’t intend to compromise or relent on this issue. They’ll either pay a price in 2008 and pave the way for an end to the war, or else they won’t; what they’re not going to do, however, is end the war themselves.