Obama’s Neoconservative Right Flank

Back on March 31, a new neoconservative think tank called the Foreign Policy Initiative launched with a conference on the subject of “Afghanistan: Planning for Success.” Yesterday and today, the FPI has been holding another star-studded series of panels on the need for a muscular foreign policy in general and an Afghan surge in particular. Matt Duss has a good summary of the tone:

[Brig. Gen. Mark T. Kimmitt, USA (Ret.)] said that “the support of the American people is the center of gravity for the next ten years” — a interesting indication of how long he believes the U.S. will be involved in Afghanistan. Asked about possible frustration on the part of the military with the amount of time being taken by the Obama administration to decide on a new strategy, Gen. Kimmitt defended the pace of the administration’s decision-making process.

Sam Stein reports that former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.), a likely 2012 presidential candidate who can be counted on to say the most politically opportunistic, disagreed with Kimmitt and characterized the Obama administration’s deliberation as “Hamlet in the White House,” its overall policy stemming “from the sense that is growing in a lot of foreign policy circles that America is in decline.”

No real surprises are coming out of the conference. But FPI was created, almost expressly, to be a loyal opposition group bucking up the administration on the war in Afghanistan as the popular of that war slackens. The sudden arrival of predictable liberal-bashing seems to be swallowing up the message.