Praise for Obama from Pat Buchanan

Buchanan: Is Hagel out of the mainstream?

Hagel is a realist, it seems; and so is the president who wants him, Barack Obama.

PB writes,

Set aside the nonsense about homophobia and anti-Semitism.

What, at bottom, are Hagel’s views?

Where does he part company with much of the Senate GOP?

What are the substantive disagreements?

First, Hagel believes in direct communication with our enemies, be it Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran or Cuba.

Second, he believes war is a last resort to be undertaken only after all diplomacy has failed, and war should not be undertaken unless vital interests are imperiled.

Third, he believes a Pentagon budget as large as all the defense budgets of the other 190 nations combined is bloated and too big to carry when, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen said, the deficit and debt are the greatest strategic threats to the United States. . . . 

Hagel speaks for the realist school of foreign policy, and he can speak for the nation.

For he reflects the views of a president who just won another decisive vote of confidence from that nation.

And Buchanan defends them both on all three points.

Before the election, too, PB regularly praised Obama’s foreign policy moves over those urged by the controlling interest in his own party, the neocons.

That did not prevent him, of course, from favoring Romney once he was nominated, though he criticized his neoconism quite soundly, before that.