Fight Night

The final presidential debate -- on everyone's favorite subject, foreign policy! -- has been sliced and diced a-plenty in the last 48-hours.

But if you're dying to rehash President Obama's sharp one-liners -- the 80s called and, well, nevermind -- or Mitt Romney's discipline in staying above the fray -- a strategy his advisers clearly thought would help improve his chances of winning the war, even though he lost the battle -- then I present you my colleague Steve Dennis' and my take on the evening for Roll Call.

I said (er, Tweeted) it at the time and I'll say it again, despite all the chatter leading up to the debate that Romney would be moderating his position on foreign affairs the same way he pivoted towards the center on domestic policy in the previous two debates, I still found myself a bit startled that he passed on a clear chance to take the president on about the attacks on the consulate in Benghazi. Yes, he muffed it in the second debate, but I'm sure his debate coaches could have come up with a line nailing Obama for the security situation in Libya, if not the White House's descriptions of the attack afterwards, where there doesn't seem to me much "there" there.

It may be wise, however, to leave the task to surrogates -- like congressional Republicans, who continue to hammer the administration on a daily basis for what they knew and when. That appears to be taking a toll on the president and his ratings on international affairs and terrorism, according to the latest polls.

The biggest news out of the debate for Washington was the president's confident prediction that there will be no sequester. Preventing those draconian budget cuts -- particularly on the military side -- has been the obsession inside the Beltway for the last year. How Obama makes that a reality remains to be seen.

The Sunset of the Reset

The news this week that Russia was booting USAID -- the U.S. government's international development arm -- out of the country confirms something I wrote about earlier this month: President Obama's much-hyped reset with Moscow is over.

That's not the same thing as saying the reset was a failure, the election year argument that Republicans have been making. Those claims overlook some very substantial diplomatic and security gains the Obama administration made vis-a-vis Russia between 2009 and 2011 -- the New START bilateral nuclear arms reduction treaty, the 2010 U.N. Security Council resolution against Iran, the agreement that secured transit routes out of Afghanistan, to name the most prominent.

It's simply that, with Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency, shifting domestic politics in both countries and the rise of new conflicts like Syria, that feel-good phase of bilateral relations has run its course, gone the way of President Medvedev. In it's place is a new, more confrontational era in the U.S.-Russia relationship, but not one that promises to be entirely bereft of cooperation. Afghanistan, Iran even Asia are regions where Washington and Moscow have incentives to work together.

Sen. Dick Lugar, who has a decades-long perspective on the bilateral relationship, acknowledged that both countries seemed inclined to continue "kicking each other in the shins" these days. "The problem is, if there is too much kicking in the shins and so forth, people become unhappy with each other." For both our countries sake, he said, "we better move past that."  

Glimmers of Bipartisanship on Foreign Policy

Who says Congress can't get anything done during an election year? Granted, lawmakers may not be addressing the country's urgent fiscal challenges, but they do appear poised to further tighten the economic vise on Iran as punishment for the mullahs' continued intransigence on nuclear enrichment.

The European Union's oil embargo and United States sanctions barring transactions with the Central Bank of Iran have only been in force for a few weeks, but members on both sides of the aisles are already itching to go further. The House and Senate are now trying to hash out the final details of a consensus piece of sanctions legislation, based on bills the House passed in December and the Senate in May. New measures under consideration would effectively cut off Tehran's energy and financial sectors from the rest of the world.

Those involved in the current negotiations -- half a dozen or so offices in addition to the lead negotiators Sen. Tim Johnson, D-SD, and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-FL -- are optimistic a compromise bill is going to be ready for a vote next week. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has signaled he's prepared to make floor time for it. Ros-Lehtinen has even suggested it could move by voice vote in the House, a sign of just how broad the support is in the chamber.

Congress may also succeed in passing legislation granting Russia permanent normalized trade relations in time for Moscow's formal accession to the World Trade Organization in August. Without it, U.S. companies cannot get preferential access to Russia's newly opened markets under the WTO framework. The legislation has the support of leading Republicans and Democrats in both chambers (CQ subscription required), but Moscow's surly behavior on the world stage in recent months -- its stance vis-a-vis Syria being the most glaring example -- hasn't won it any friends on Capitol Hill, and passage in both chambers is still something of a wild card.

A Tale of Two Treaties

Ratifying treaties is one of the few direct levers of influence Congress -- specifically the Senate -- has over U.S. foreign policy. So it's interesting to see how members have approached that duty in recent years.

Whereas 30 years ago controversy over treaties was the exception, now it seems to be the rule. One of the main reasons for that is the strong segment of the Republican party that is unabashedly skeptical of any international pact that could subject the United States to foreign standards or regulation. So even something like the Law of the Sea Treaty (CQ subscription required) -- a United Nations convention that has been ratified by more than 160 countries and has the backing of traditional GOP constituencies like the oil industry and the Chamber of Commerce -- is facing serious headwinds (CQ subscription required) in the current Congress.

Two-thirds of the Senate have to vote to approve ratification of a treaty for the U.S. to move forward with it, and 31 Republicans have already signaled their opposition to the Law of the Sea, which would regulate countries' and companies' use of the deep seas. Essentially, opponents do not like the prospect that U.S. would be accountable to an international panel for its deep sea exploration and navigation. Many of the same Republicans voted against ratification of the New START arms reduction treaty with Russia in 2010, though the Senate ultimately approved that pact by a narrow margin.

One treaty, however, looks poised to buck the trend of air-tight votes. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities -- which would raise international standards for the treatment of the disabled -- has a bipartisan group of senators backing it, from conservatives who have opposed most other treaties to liberal members of the Senate Democratic leadership. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearing on the treaty was a relatively innocuous affair and the committee has now scheduled a vote on Thursday July 19. It could actually win Senate approval by July 26, the disability advocates because it marks the 22nd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That would be lightning quick by the standard of today's Congress.

UPDATE, 7/17:

Three more Republican senators announced their opposition to the treaty, pushing the total that have expressed public objections to 34 -- just enough to block ratification (CQ subscription required) should it come to a vote.

McGurked

President Obama's nominee to be the next ambassador to Iraq withdrew his name from consideration Monday afternoon, after it became clear that support for him had cratered (CQ subscription required) in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The New York Times has the letter,which alludes to the adultery scandal -- conveniently preserved on National Security Council emails -- that swept up Brett McGurk and his now wife (then mistress), a former Wall Street Journal reporter.

In the immediate aftermath, I saw some on Twitter comment that McGurk was a victim of the overly intense media scrutiny of political figures' personal lives. In general, I'd agree that the MSM obsession with political sex scandals borders on the pathological, exaggerating beyond all reasonable sense of scope and scale the import of any given incident.

In this particular case, however, I don't think that's the issue. McGurk's nomination MAY have survived had someone not leaked a trove of unfortunately worded emails online, but it was never going to be an easy road. As I reported at the beginning of the month (CQ subsciption required), a number of lawmakers had serious doubts about McGurk, both based on his policy choices and his qualifications.

Rumors about his personal life had also been floating around, but the publication of the emails only played into the notion, already embraced by some, that McGurk did not have the judgement or maturity or gravitas to head up the United States' biggest diplomatic footprint overseas. 

Ground May be Shifting on Syria in Congress

White House officials may be in agreement on the question of military intervention in Syria -- they're against it, for now -- but there is no such consensus on Capitol Hill.

The split between the hawks, led by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, and skeptics like Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, has been evident for months. But now some of those in the middle, who have mostly kept their heads down up to this point, are starting to stir. And in the wake of the Houla massacre over the weekend, they are suggesting that a more proactive U.S. stance may be necessary.

Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is the most prominent voice to publicly muse about future intervention in Syria, which he says will have to be led by Turkey. Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democratic moderate from Nebraska, also issued a release this week saying that unless Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad leaves power voluntarily (doubtful), "military intervention is inevitable.”

It will be interesting to see, when both chambers are back at work next week, whether this indicates the start of a groundswell amongst the plurality of members who have staid on the fence on Syria up until now.

Another Casualty of the Culture Wars

It's hard to find anyone who disagrees with the notion that modern day slavery or "human trafficking" is an awful practice, even on Capitol Hill, where members disagree about pretty much everything. That's why a law to help combat the practice has been such a novelty over the last decade -- every time it comes up for re-authorization, it sails through Congress with unanimous backing.

Not this year. In a piece I wrote for last week's CQ Weekly magazine, I look at how the bipartisan consensus that has supported the bill's passage in the past crumbled last fall thanks to a dust-up between Obama administration officials at the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. For five years, the Bishops Conference had overseen a grant program to assist trafficking victims in the United States. HHS decided not to renew the grant in late September because the group refused to reimburse subcontractors for reproductive health services that conflicted with the Catholic faith -- i.e. birth control and abortion.

In the midst of all the election year politicking and posturing, the talk of wars on women and religion, it doesn't take much more than the mention of the a-word to get politicians twisted in knots. Suffice to say, House Republicans are now completely at odds with Senate Democrats, and even some Senate Republicans, over how to proceed on the bill. That does not bode well for its passage given all the other legislative issues competing for floor time.