I liked George Bush.

To answer the original question, I'm still up in the air on Trump, Carson, Rubio, and Cruz. No one else interests me in the least; my stance on the rest of the candidates ranges from passive dislike (Chris Christie) to passionate loathing (Hillary).

Trump has charisma and has always been a guy who knows how to get things done. I see his pompous bluster as a campaigning device and not how he would perform once in office. After all, the man is not an idiot. His biggest drawback, at least in my mind, is that he's still essentially a democrat in a lot of his views. Biggest pro: he seems genuine about coming up with an immigration fix, and if no one does in the next 15 years, then Republicans will never win another presidential election because Texas will be lost to the left forever.

Carson is genuine and a good man, but he lacks the charisma of other candidates and seems like he may be in a little bit over his head. I don't appreciate how badly he's been smeared over various random tidbits he's said publicly (ex: urging people to attack armed gunmen isn't victim blaming, it's exactly what police officers will tell you to do), but his lack of experience is even greater than first-term Obama, and I don't like how that turned out.

Rubio seems to have a good handle on things, and Cruz actually seems to have the intelligence to back up his silver tongue. I'm still not sure which one I'll support, but I think ultimately the Republican nomination will be one of these two.

Last Rites wrote:

Not at all. At worst, W.'s foreign policy demonstrates that interventionism in one part of the world (the Middle East) in the form of a long-term military commitment with no clear end goal is a poor doctrine. Obama's non-interventionist approach to the same region demonstrates at least as big a failure-- no, American soldiers aren't dying in war, but isn't the typical modern liberal mantra that all lives are important regardless of "arbitrary borders" that break us up into countries? Even if the answer is "no," the current administration still has a lot of blood on its hands because of what it's done above and beyond W. to destabilize the region.

The biggest argument in favor of interventionism is the Munich Lesson, which I am typically willing to adhere to. I do agree with you that non-interventionism is not desirable.

Well, ​without George W. Bush's rather foolish intervention, there wouldn't have been the problems we now see in Iraq. What Obama's example seems to show there is not that intervention is good, but once you intervene you should take proper responsibility for the mess you cause and not precipitously leave just for the sake of leaving. Also, I don't think it can be said that the interventionists have many solutions in Syria and Iraq today. Indeed, there is some evidence that the support they did give in the early days of the Syrian war helped to prolong the war and lead to the place we are now. Non-interventionism is generally a better path than interventionism, but it must be admitted that an even better one is a realist foreign policy that intervenes cautiously when necessary, but only in the national interest and with an understanding of the clear limits of intervention.

 The Munich example is quite complex, actually. ​Britain ended up going to war against Hitler and we managed to defend our island, but we probably wouldn't have defeated him if he hadn't have gone to war against the Soviets and the Americans. Good foreign policy decisions are not made from such flukes - it was a bad decision to go to war over Poland. We were even less ready to take on Germany in 1938. What is more, we had to ally with Stalin and the Soviets, a force as bad as the Nazis, and had to leave Poland (whom we originally went to war to save) and Eastern Europe in Soviet hands for forty years. And, for all this, Britain and her empire emerged from the Second World War extremely weakened. 

Anyway, the Munich lesson is one of the most misused of all foreign policy examples. Interventionists see Munichs everywhere. Everyone is a new Hitler, so that the downsides of intervention (which are usually more than the positives) are forgotten. There should be a foreign policy corollary to Godwin's Law here. Very few international crises are like Munich, especially the myth of Munich.

Last Rites wrote:

W.'s misstep isn't an argument against interventionism as a doctrine. At most, it's an argument against interventionism specific to the Middle East. Indeed, I think if you look at any of the typical examples of "missteps" in U.S. interventionist foreign policy the lesson to be learned is not "stop intervening" but "stop intervening without clear goals and plans" or "stop intervening on such a massive scale."

But one can say the same about any one incident in international relations - that you cannot generalise from it. This goes for those attacking Obama over the Syrian and Iraqi today. Indeed, in this latter case, as the interventionists don't really seem to have a solution either, it seems that they are on even shakier ground. At least those who opposed Bush's invasion did have a suitable alternative.

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At the heart of the Munich lesson is Britain and France's unwillingness not only to avoid engaging in conflict but also to risk provoking it. Germany was no more militarily ready for a prolonged conflict in 1938 than either of the allied countries, but Hitler accurately judged their soft attitudes and was thus able to take advantage of Chamberlain and co. The end result of Britain's involvement in WWII is irrelevant to the lesson because that's precisely what the lesson addresses: take action against a rising enemy quickly before you find yourself forced into action against that enemy later once he's much stronger.

I'll concede that the Munich Lesson is perhaps exaggerated at times- after all, there are not new Hitlers everywhere- but the lesson need not apply only to enemies of Nazi Germany's size and might. The principle does not change because of scale.

I will concede I don't know how ready France was (though I do know she was riven with internal conflict at the time), but I don't think it is correct to say that Britain was no less ready for war in 1938 than Germany. Germany had been rearming, and though it would have been weaker in 1938 than it was a year later, Britain was much weaker still than Germany. Britain, through a general public antipathy to new wars, echoed by many on the right and the left (this latter is sometimes forgotten), had few troops available and had been doing little to rearm. The need to rearm was a constant theme of Churchill and the anti-appeasers. Even in September 1939 Britain was far from ready, in terms of troops numbers or rearmament, to properly commit to the war.

 There is also the problem​ of hindsight here. Hitler's moves before he annexed the whole of Czechoslovakia were seen, not without some reason, as being based on legitimate grievances. Looking back we can say he was bent on aggressive conquest, but it wasn't necessarily apparent at the time. The lesson is a bad one because it teaches that the way to conduct foreign policy is to try and predict apocalyptic consequences from the every incident or issue in international relations. It forgets that in the vast majority of cases one's opponents or rivals are not another Hitler, and therefore it greatly inflates the benefits of intervention as opposed to its downsides. At best, one should take from Munich a certain circumspection and caution about what might just happen - noty discounting that a situation may turn very bad - but to apply it as a general lesson to one's foreign policy dealings would be a mistake. 

In the end, when Britain did go to war, she was still not ready, and is unlikely to have defeated Germany except for circumstances out of her control (and even then she failed to save the nation she went to war over from domination, first by the Nazis then by the Soviets). That is not the way to conduct foreign policy.

Last Rites wrote:

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Well, no... If the Iraq lesson Bush gave us is "don't intervene" then the debacle in Syria could be equal evidence of the failure of non-intervention. But I take neither position, for you and I agree that generalizations cannot be drawn from single events. One must study events to draw more specific conclusions- that carefully planned, specific, and limited intervention to achieve clear goals is likely to succeed, for example, or conversely, that non-intervention is no more viable than it was 100 years ago when European nations tore each other apart and the U.S. failed to stand idly by. In a world connected by quick aerial transportation, satellites, internet, and countless other technological wonders, isolationist foreign policy is not only foolish but impossible to implement.

Okay, but you ignored the point about the lack of answers from interventionists in Iraq and Syria. At least the non-interventions had a plausible alternative to the 2003 invasion.

There's no doubt Britain was crippled by popular sentiment to avoid conflict, and I don't dispute that its military was in something far short of an ideal place, but you ignore Germany's own shortcomings. Technologically, its aircraft were far inferior to British warplanes, and the Panzer III was no better than anything the British could field. The infamous and deadly German tanks (Panther, Tiger) were not introduced until much later, and the capable panzer IV was not available in large numbers in 1938. And even then, the British Matilda proved difficult to defeat with the IV's low-velocity main gun. Often forgotten, too, is Germany's lack of motorized supply and transport. The advantage of fully motorized troop movement was a significant one for Britain's military. Combine that with a substantial force of British troops that could have been returned to Europe from various colonies and dominions, total naval superiority, and a German adversary who was not yet the beneficiary of executing various smaller campaigns and it does not seem so far-fetched to theorize that a dedicated British and French force would have been able to bend Germany to its will, though perhaps not without a protracted fight.

Obviously, the most important element missing from the above is popular support for waging an aggressive war. And Chamberlain's poor leadership, of course.

I'm not sure that the technology you refer to is the deciding factor. Britain simply didn't have the troops or the armaments - the actual guns and munitions. Germany already had been rearming. After Hitler took over the whole of Czechoslovakia, Britain began to rearm and build up its troops (though this did not begin in earnest til April 1939), but this was still far from complete in September 1939. It just simply isn't true that Britain would have been in a better position to fight Germany in 1938 than 1939. If Germany was weaker in 1938, Britain was weaker still. The lack of preparation was why there was the phoney war in 1939-1940. It seems likely, also, that Britain and France would have to have defeated Germany quickly, before the superior economic and industrial might of Germany really told. It seems very unlikely Britain and France could have done this. It does, in fact, seem far-fetched that Britain, because of a little alleged superiority in tank and aircraft technology (the naval superiority would have been less important given the fact that Germany was not fighting a war on two fronts) could have used it meagre troops and munitions (there weren't that many troops the colonies could spare) to quickly defeat Germany.

And it is very much unlikely Chamberlain could have turned public opinion around. The public was very much against another war, many of the Tories were against war, and (as is often forgotten) much of the left too did not want more wars.

 
You've ignored me. The principle of the Munich lesson is irrelevant to the size of the adversary or scale of potential conflict. It suggests intervention might be a more effective tool than diplomacy, but it does not speak to the scale or method by which a nation must intervene.

In Britain's case, it was never ready for war with Germany, but the gap between its readiness and Germany's was smaller in 1938 than it was in 1939, which is the lesson.

No, I didn't ignore you. I just put my main answer in the middle of those two passages. If the Munich lesson is that very bad consequences can occur from seemingly inconspicuous events in international relations, then, yes, I agree that it is correct. We should keep this in mind and always be a little circumspect and cautious. But if the lesson is to be made more than this, if it is to be interpreted as a likelihood that such consequences may occur, so we are constantly seeing Hitlers everywhere (if we suffer from what Peter Hitchens has aptly called Perpetual Munich Syndrome - as the likes of John McCain or Lindsay Graham seem to), then it is not just wrong as a lesson but positively pernicious, as it will tend to give us an inaccurate picture of international relations and greatly inflate the benefits of intervention relative to the disadvantages.