Today in a column in The National Review, Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser John Bolton split with his candidate’s calls to arm the Syrian rebels, concluding that, “neither U.S. military assistance to the opposition nor current administration policy, which has stumbled from failure to failure over the past year, will advance legitimate American interests.”

Instead, Bolton urges observers not to be swayed by the “emotion” of Syrians being killed by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. “The television images from Syria will not change permanently until the underlying strategic terrain changes permanently,” he says. Bolton proceeds to lay out his own set of policy proposals to remove Assad from power and ultimately overhaul U.S. foreign policy by taking intentionally provocative actions against Russia, China and Iran.

First, Bolton, who served as George W. Bush’s ambassador to the U.N., suggests that “we should cut Syria off from its major supporters” in Iran, China and Russia. He proposes:

We should resume full-scale, indeed accelerated, efforts to construct the limited missile-defense system designed by George W. Bush to protect American territory not against Russia but against rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. [...] We should also announce our withdrawal from the New START arms-control treaty, and our utter disinterest in negotiations to prevent an “arms race” in space. Let Moscow and Beijing think about all that for a while.

Indeed, Bolton acknowledges that such actions “would likely break the famous ‘reset’ button [with Russia] beyond repair.” And his tearing up of the START treaty, constructing an expensive and provocational missile-defense system, and kicking off an “arms race” in space would undeniably leave Moscow and Beijing scratching their heads.

Bolton again reiterated his standard lines on Iran, calling for regime change and an end to diplomatic efforts on Iran’s nuclear program.

As for Syria itself, Bolton has said the U.S. should have turned toward Damascus once Baghdad fell in 2003. But his only solution now is to find and support “Syrian rebel leaders who are truly secular and who oppose radical Islam; who will disavow al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups; and who will reject Russian and Iranian hegemony over their country.”

Bolton’s hawkishness is nothing new but the New York Times’s David Sanger suggested that Bolton may have a prominent role in crafting Mitt Romney’s foreign policy positions. Sanger reported that the Romney campaign’s foreign policy rhetoric last month, “sounds more like the talking points of the neoconservatives — the ‘Bolton faction,’ as insiders call the group led by John Bolton.”

The House of Representatives this morning took a hard line against efforts by Democrats and libertarian Republicans to limit the president’s power to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects captured in the U.S.

An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by Reps. Adam Smith (D-WA) and Justin Amash (R-MI) would have barred military detention of terrorism suspects arrested in the U.S. regardless of their nationality. Smith outlined the argument for his amendment last night:

What we’ve learned in the last 10 years is one power [the president] does not need the power to indefinitely detain or place in military custody people in the United States. Our justice system works.

But House Republicans hit back hard at the bipartisan amendment, attacking it as providing additional rights to foreign terrorists. This morning, the House defeated the Smith-Amash amendment in favor of a competing amendment sponsored by Reps. Jeff Landry (R-LA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Scott Rigell (R-VA). Their amendment, which passed this morning, prohibits the government from denying U.S. citizens their constitutional rights.

Amash slammed the all-Republican sponsored amendment as doing nothing but providing political cover for House Republicans who disingenuously claim to care about civil liberties, telling his House colleagues last night:

The first part of the amendment does nothing. In other words, if you have constitutional rights, then you have constitutional rights.

While the battle in Congress over the detention provisions in the NDAA may have come to an end with the defeat of the Smith-Nash amendment and the passage of the competing Republican amendment, legal and political challenges may await the NDAA in the very near future.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in New York issued a temporary injunction, finding that the detainee provisions in the current NDAA are unconstitutional.

And the White House, in a statement [PDF] released on Tuesday evening, listed a series of objections with the pending NDAA including: restrictions on the implementation of the New START treaty; limits on reductions for the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal; and new restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo detainees. Moreover, the White House objected to the overall size of the bill, which surpasses President Obama’s request by $3.7 billion and exceeds the Budget Control Act spending caps by $8 billion, and threatened to veto the NDAA if sent to the President in its current form.

A powerful member of the House Armed Services Committee spread false accusations against President Obama’s nuclear weapons reduction policy, claiming on a conservative radio show yesterday that no other countries in the world would join the United States in reducing their nuclear arsenal.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) made the allegation while appearing on Secure Freedom Radio hosted by Frank Gaffney, one of the nation’s leading Islamophobes profiled in the Center for American Progress report Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.

Gaffney asked Turner if the real reason President Obama wanted to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world is because “this is a radical ideologue at work?” Turner agreed, going on to declare that during Obama’s tenure, the United States would be the “only country” that would reduce its nuclear arsenal. He concluded by dissembling about the New START treaty, an agreement between the U.S. and Russia to reduce the number of deployed nuclear weapons, by claiming that Russia would “not [be] required to lower their number at all”:

GAFFNEY: We have a president who is genuinely a radical ideologue when it comes to these things. [...] Is it not a better explanation that in fact it is the same thing we see so dramatically at work with the idea that we might reduce our nuclear arsenal to the level of Pakistan’s that really this is a radical ideologue at work?

TURNER: Right. And this is not about the budget. We’re not going to see significant savings from this. [...] It’s interesting, the president in Prague made a speech that was supposed to be a cornerstone of his presidency, where he called for a world without nuclear weapons and the road to zero. In his presidency, he will only have achieved eliminating our nuclear weapons. If you put a scoreboard on the wall, and you put the countries that have nuclear weapons or are pursuing nuclear weapons, and you start with the Obama presidency and the numbers of inventory they had, and then you get to his reelection campaign and put the numbers they have at the end, the only country on that board that’s going to have a lower number is the United States. In START, Russia was not required to lower their number at all.

Listen to it:

During the New START ratification debate back in 2010, Republicans regularly tried to float this false claim that the treaty wouldn’t force Russia to reduce its nuclear weapons. As the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation wrote, “The treaty enhances U.S. security by verifiably reducing U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles.” And the State Department fact sheet on the treaty notes that the limit for deployed warheads for both countries “is 74 percent lower than the limit of the 1991 START Treaty and 30 percent lower than the upper deployed strategic warhead limit of the 2002 Moscow Treaty.”

One expert called claims that Russia won’t have to limit its nukes “ridiculous.” “That’s the whole purpose of the treaty, to reduce the number of warheads,” said Robert Norris of the National Resources Defense Council.

The Obama administration is now reportedly considering reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal further and Republicans, like Turner, are doing anything they can to prevent it, even if it includes making claims about America’s treaty obligations and nuclear security that have no basis in reality. But as CAP’s Lawrence Korb and Alex Rothman noted this week, “the Pentagon’s own strategic thinkers have noted that the strategic landscape has changed and that the U.S.’s Cold War-sized arsenal may exceed the country’s current needs.”

The Republican candidates for president haven’t talked about foreign policy too much. Given that economic issues have been dominating the campaign narrative, it’s perhaps understandable that national security is largely absent from the debate. But also, the Republicans don’t really have much to criticize. Indeed, foreign policy has received scant attention during the televised GOP presidential debates. But that’s about to change. This Saturday, Nov. 12, CBS News and the National Journal will host the first debate focused solely on foreign policy at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. (CNN, Heritage and AEI will host another one on Nov. 22).

So what are the candidates likely to say? When they do talk national security, it’s usually trite and unfounded attacks on President Obama like he has made America weak, thrown Israel “under the bus” or goes around the world apologizing for America. Mitt Romney will probably tell voters that Obama thinks “there is nothing unique about the United States.” Rick Perry will most likely sound off about how “the world has never been as dangerous” because of Obama. Look for Newt Gingrich to oppose whatever the president supports, even if that means the former speaker betrays a position he held as little as 13 seconds prior. And as for Herman Cain, he’s still trying to figure out whether China has nuclear weapons, let alone tackle the president’s foreign policy positions.

Seeing that these GOP candidates aren’t likely to accurately represent the president’s foreign policy during these debates, ThinkProgress has released a new report — “Obama’s Foreign Policy Successes” — detailing key foreign policy victories during the Obama administration, from killing Osama bin Laden and ushering Middle East democracy to ending the war in Iraq and reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles. Read the full report here.

The Russian Duma voted to ratify the New START treaty today, thereby ensuring that the treaty will enter into force. While this was more or less a forgone conclusion, START’s completion represents a significant achievement for the President. In fact, the past two years have seen remarkable progress on nuclear non-proliferation that has not simply moved the ball forward on non-proliferation but as Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association noted, “has put the United States back in the role of global nuclear risk-reduction leader.”

So what was accomplished?

Set the goal: Obama’s Prague speech in April of 09, which set the goal of the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons, essentially went there. He said what past leaders, with the exception of Reagan, had been reluctant to say: that nuclear weapons ultimately make the world a more dangerous place.

Reset and START: The US and Russia have more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, therefore the White House effort to reset relations with Russia has been critical to paving the way for nuclear arms reductions. The successful negotiation and ratification of the New START treaty that verifiably lowers nuclear arsenals and nuclear delivery vehicles lays the groundwork for future cooperation.

The Nuclear Posture Review: While not going as far as some hoped, the NPR that came out last spring significantly moved the ball forward by reducing the role of nuclear weapons in our military posture.

Nuclear Security: The Administration organized for the first time a Nuclear Security Summit in Washington this past April to secure loose nuclear materials in Washington. The summit brought together the largest number of heads of state to the US since the creation of the United Nations and saw real commitments from countries to reduce vulnerable nuclear materials.

NPT Review Conference: In May, the Administration was able to forge a consensus agreement at the five-year Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which stood in stark contrast to the acrimony that occurred five years ago during the Bush administration.

Nuclear stockpile: The Administration has allocated an enormous sum to fully modernize the nuclear stockpile, ensuring its reliability for decades and eliminating any possible need for new explosive testing.

Iran and North Korea: The administration was able to forge an international consensus at the UN to levy sanctions against Iran and North Korea. On Iran, it seems clear that sanctions have served to hinder Iran’s nuclear development.

The extent of the accomplishments lays the groundwork for future progress. Action can now begin on a new round of arms reduction talks with the Russians, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and further action on nuclear threat reduction and nuclear security programs. As the chairman of the international affairs committee in the Russian senate, Mikhail Margelov, remarked upon START’s passage:

The arms race is a thing of the past… The disarmament race is taking its place.

Some may point to the knock-down drag out fight in Congress over the START treaty as evidence that ratifying future treaties will be too hard to do. But this ignores the extent of the defeat suffered by the nuclear-right. The Administration was able to get the treaty through despite opposition from the leadership of Senate Republicans, every Republican Presidential candidate, the Tea Party and the Heritage foundation. How did that happen? Because opposition to START was nuts and the country knew it. Fights over future treaties will be similar, making them hard but doable.

The hard right Heritage Foundation, one of the pillars of the conservative movement, made defeating START one of its top institutional priorities. Yet 13 Republican Senators ended up bucking Heritage and voted to ratify the START treaty. Heritage ended up so far to the right that it was unable to convince any significant number of Republicans to follow its nonsensical substantive attack on START that the treaty would lead to massive nuclear proliferation and eventually to a nuclear war.

Heritage fellows held event after event, wrote article after article, report after report, blog post after blog post, attacking the treaty. Heritage Fellow James Carafano in columns for the Daily Caller urged the Tea Party “tackle defense issues.” This summer it launched a 501c4 called Heritage Action for America and chose two issues to focus on: spending and stopping START. Josh Rogin reported in July:

Heritage Action for America was established as 501c4 organization, which means it can do direct lobbying on the Hill and broad grassroots lobbying around the country. Killing START is one of the group’s two keystone efforts, along with a drive to push a repeal of the new health-care bill in the House. The organization is now circulating a petition to its 671,000 dues-paying members featuring a video of Romney criticizing the treaty… And Heritage Action is not stopping there. The group has a detailed plan to target lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and persuading wavering senators to oppose the treaty. Votes up for grabs include moderate Republicans like Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, but also conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson, D-NE, and Evan Bayh, D-IN.

Heritage even produced a video that warned that if START passed it would lead to a nuclear attack in 2018.

Yet despite all this effort, a quarter of the Republican caucus bucked Heritage’s advocacy campaign and its lobbying efforts to support the treaty. As the facts came out and it became increasingly clear that none of their anti-treaty arguments held any water, Republicans increasingly relied on process complaints to oppose the treaty, rather than substance. In the end, few Senators, with the exception of Jim DeMint, really embraced the Heritage line. The pressure they exerted on Republican members was in the end outdone by the coalition of progressive groups that pressed to ratify the treaty.

President Obama became the first Democratic President in history today to have an arms-control treaty ratified on his watch. The New START Treaty was approved in the Senate by a vote of 71-26. Thirteen Republicans, a quarter of the Republican caucus, broke with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). This is the first time an arms control treaty has ever passed without the support of the minority leader. As Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said yesterday, “In today’s Senate, 70 votes is yesterday’s 95.”

A year ago, President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for his vision of moving toward a world without nuclear weapons. The ratification of the START treaty is a small but important step toward this goal. It ensures that nuclear stability is maintained and lays the groundwork for future negotiations with Russia, paving the way for deeper cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. While the START treaty has been called a modest treaty, the implications of its failure would have been anything but and would have caused dangerous upheaval in the post-Cold War nuclear order.

Republican opposition looked increasingly petty toward the end of the START debate, with most complaints relating to Senate process. Leslie Gelb, president-emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that opposition to New START “seriously damages [Republican] credibility on national security.”

The ratification of the New START treaty is a huge victory for President Obama and huge blow to Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and the Republican Senate leadership. START also confirms what progressives have been saying on other issues — namely, that when the White House stands and fights and refuses to give ground it can win.

The treaty fight turned into a game of chicken in the last six weeks in which Kyl was determined to delay, and Democrats were determined to hold a vote. The question was always who would swerve. Kyl seemed supremely confident that the White House would lose its nerve, but it didn’t and pressed on. What makes this an even more humiliating defeat for Kyl is that he didn’t swerve — he, with Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and at the end Lindsey Graham (R-SC), pressed for delay up until the very end — instead he drove head on. But in the collision, we discovered he was driving a smart car and START supporters were driving a tank. He just got run over and embarrassingly for him, before the impact, many of his colleagues jumped out of the car.

That turned this into a stinging defeat for Senators Jon Kyl and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (as well as the Heritage foundation). They were thoroughly repudiated by more than a quarter of the Republican caucus — a shocking display of disunity after two years of almost uniform obstruction. It was indeed an epic collapse and in the end made the Senate leadership incredibly irrelevant.

Kyl was driven by radicalism not just politics. Fred Kaplan and Adam Serwer have penned excellent analyses where they argue that choosing to fight over a modest treaty was a huge mistake for Senate Republicans, since by doing so made it a much bigger victory than it would have been if they just all supported the treaty. That is no doubt correct from a political perspective. But it misses the fact that Senator Kyl and many Senate Republicans actually have extremely radical views on nuclear weapons policy.

While Kyl called the START treaty “benign” in the summer, he has doggedly pursued nuclear weapons modernization. And while he got increased funding commitments the issue that he fought hard for over the last decade was the building of an entirely new nuclear warhead, which was defeated by past Democratic congresses. If START had been delayed into the new year, it is clear that Kyl’s cost for supporting the treaty would have gone up significantly and likely would have been the Reliable Replacement Warhead that Kyl so fervently craved. So in the end it was a bad political move by Kyl to oppose the treaty, but he was driven by a far right nuclear radicalism, not just a desire to defeat the President.

The White House and John Kerry threw down and caused political pain for Republicans. Over the past year, the White House and Senator John Kerry desperately tried to enlist the support of Senator Kyl. They made a massive preemptive concession by budgeting $80 billion to the nuclear weapons complex and they bent over backwards to get him on board – even flying people out to Arizona to meet with him. Kerry also did everything he could to head of process complaints. He held a huge number of hearings – with more Republican witnesses than Democrats. He delayed the committee vote until after the August recess in response to Republican demands. I worried at the time that this would just make it easier for Kyl to delay further.

But after Senator Kyl blindsided the White House and Kerry in November and said he would oppose a vote this year, they went on the offensive. Many expected the administration to relent and allow the treaty to be delayed until next year where its likelihood of passage would narrow significantly. Indeed, many reporters were already writing START’s obituary following Kyl’s statement. But the White House came out swinging and drew the line in the sand, saying no matter what a vote was going to happen this year. Case in point was Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ statement last week eviscerating Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) for demanding to read the entire treaty. DeMint quickly caved.

In other words, the Administration refused to back down and used the bully pulpit to make the case for the treaty. It hosted Colin Powell and demonstrated a show of force by bringing Henry Kissinger and others to the White House. This put Republicans on the defensive and led to a public backlash. More than 50 newspaper editorial boards came out to support the treaty eviscerating Kyl for putting politics ahead of national security. Senate Democrats took to the airwaves to attack Kyl and Republicans were seen as being irresponsible on national security. This heat on Republicans was critical to the collapse of opposition to the treaty.

Finally, this victory shows progressives can fight and win on national security issues and on nuclear policy. Republicans made all the standard arguments on missile defense, not trusting Russia, and on disarmament, but still lost. Granted progressives had the high ground when fighting on START, but progressives did not run when facing Republican attacks.

It is hard for many observers and activists to realize this, but there is no longer a post-Vietnam hang over for Democrats on foreign policy. Instead, it is becoming increasingly clear that Republicans have a post-Iraq credibility problem. The START victory shows that Democrats have nothing to lose politically, and in fact have much to gain, when debating and fighting with Republicans on foreign policy.

The Senate just voted 67-28 for cloture on New START. This ends debate on the treaty and means a final vote is likely tomorrow. 11 Republicans voted for cloture and in a press conference after the vote, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) said three other senators Judd Gregg (R-NH), Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Ron Wyden (D-OR) are all for the treaty. Senator Kerry remarked, “In today’s Senate, 70 votes is yesterday’s 95.”

With the support of Senator Gregg that would mean 12 Republicans look set to vote for the treaty. This means more than a quarter of the Republican caucus broke with the Senate Republican leadership, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ), both of whom came out strongly against the treaty this past Sunday. The vote is a big blow to the leadership, especially to Senator Kyl, who was long seen as the Republican point man on the treaty. Kyl even held a desperate press conference today in one last attempt to whip his own party, prompting Josh Rogin to report:

Everyone here on Capitol Hill is beginning to see the ratification of New START as increasingly inevitable — everyone, that is, except for Sen. Jon Kyl.

Senator Lindsey Graham was so outraged that Republican Senators would side with Richard Lugar (R-IN), instead of Kyl, that in a press conference today, Graham actually apologized to Kyl on behalf of his Republican colleagues:

To Senator Kyl, I want to apologize to you for the way you’ve been treated by your colleagues.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post rebuked Graham:

Senators who are voting to ratify New START because they believe it’s the right thing to do should feel apologetic to Kyl for defying his wishes, even though the evidence is overwhelming that Kyl’s objections have been thoroughly addressed? Yeah, right: It’s an absolute outrage that these Senators are prioritizing their own sense of what’s right for the country and the world, over the influence, standing and fragile ego of a single fellow Senator.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the third highest ranking Republican, stated on the floor of the Senate this morning that he would vote to ratify the New START treaty. In supporting START, Alexander did not just issue a one-line statement. Instead, he fully justified his vote and in doing so obliterated many of the GOP talking points used against the treaty.

I will vote to ratify the New START treaty…because it leaves our country with enough nuclear warheads to blow any attacker to kingdom come. … I will vote for the treaty because it allows for inspection of Russian warheads and because our military leaders say there is nothing to interfere with the development of a missile defense system. I will vote for the treaty because the last six Republican Secretaries of State support its ratification. In short, I am convinced that Americans are safer and more secure with the New START treaty than without it.

Watch it:

Alexander’s decision to support New START should ensure that there are at least nine Republican votes for the treaty, therefore guaranteeing ratification. The vote may come later this afternoon.

His endorsement is quite a blow to Senate GOP leaders Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, who both came out strongly in opposition to the treaty on Sunday. The statements of McConnell and Kyl led to a wave of pessimism about START’s prospects, as no arms control treaty has passed without the support of the minority leader. Yet just 24 hours later, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) said he would support the treaty and Sens. Judd Gregg (R-NH), Thad Cochran (R-MS), and Bob Corker (R-TN), who voted for the treaty in committee, indicated they were likely to vote for START.

Rich Lowry of the National Review writes, “Republican opposition to New START is collapsing. One Senate source just told me the vote for ratification could go as high as 75… This is a dismaying rout.”