For one thing, most GOP senators appear to be holding their fire, at least until they get the text of the treaty after the spring recess ends. Skepticism has yet to cross over into out-and-out rejection. An informed source tells me the nuclear watchers in the caucus are more concerned about what next week’s Nuclear Posture Review from the administration will say about the future of nuke policy than New START. That’s admittedly relative and preliminary, but it’s something.

What’s more, Joel Rubin of the progressive National Security Network has been talking to Hill staffers about New START and he detects the same sanguine reception from Republicans. “I’ve come away with a strong impression that there’s broad bipartisan support for the treaty (or at least the concept of it, since it’s not officially up there yet),” Rubin emailed, “so while no one’s come out officially with a yea/nay (as they couldn’t have at this point), there’s a clear desire to get this through (maybe not by [Sen. Jon] Kyl, but even he hasn’t said yet that he’d vote against it).” His prediction? Half the Foreign Relations Committee Republicans — led by support Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) — vote the treaty out of committee.

President Barack Obama talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the Oval Office. (WDCpix)

On the eve of his first State of the Union address — a speech likely to be viewed as a response to a new Washington pessimism over his domestic agenda — President Obama is recording consistent support for his handling of foreign affairs and national security, according to an overview of recent polls. But despite this stable if mild support for his international agenda, dissatisfaction with his handling of foreign and security issues is growing.

Ahead of the speech, Obama’s top aides have delivered a thorough defense of his past year’s actions on foreign policy, contending — as national security adviser Jim Jones did in a Monday speech — that his first-year task was to revitalize international support for an America weakened by the Bush administration. An early burst of domestic enthusiasm for Obama as an anti-Bush even broke the Republican Party’s traditional opinion-poll advantage on national security earlier this year.

[Security1] More recently, a look at changes in major polls over the past several months yields a picture that favors Obama, if tepidly so, on foreign policy. The afterglow of his first 100 days is clearly gone. What remains are stable pockets of support for both his administration’s foreign policy in general and specific priorities of his.

A Pew Research Center analysis of Obama’s handling of terrorism recorded 51 percent approval in early January, essentially unchanged from 52 percent support in early November, even after the failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253. While the number of people who believe his government is doing a good or very good job of reducing the threat of terrorism is down 10 points since Pew’s November survey, it remains at a robust 65 percent. CBS places it at 60 percent.

Similarly, Obama’s decision to increase troops in Afghanistan registers 45 percent support, according to a Quinnipiac poll earlier this month, a number that has risen and stabilized from the high 30s and low 40s before Obama’s December 1 Afghanistan speech. Yet even though Obama has yet to attract significant GOP criticism of his Afghanistan strategy, his disapproval rating on Afghanistan, according to Quinnipiac, is also at 45 percent. Pew also has Obama at 45 percent on his handling of Afghanistan, up from 36 percent in November — but his disapproval on the issue has slid from 49 percent to 43 percent in the Pew poll.

And on a general handling of foreign policy, Obama’s numbers in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll on foreign policy have remained steady at 50 percent since September, down from a high-water mark of 57 percent in July. Pew has a lower number — 44 percent — down from a June high of 57 percent. Quinnipiac pegs that approval at 45 percent, down slightly from 49 percent in October and November. CNN/Opinion research puts him at 51 percent approval, down from a 58 percent high in September. CBS places it at 49 percent, statistically unchanged since November.

All of which comes as a mild surprise for a Democratic president, whose party has been greeted with greater public skepticism about international affairs since the Vietnam war. Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, a progressive security policy and messaging organization, said the breadth of polling on Obama’s handling of national security shows “the core Obama national security bet — that he can balance heightened international outreach and diplomacy with a willingness to show toughness on terrorism, Afghanistan — is paying off.”

That apparent success comes in contrast to his eroding numbers on crucial domestic policy questions. A CNN poll released Monday found only 36 percent of Americans believe the 2009 economic stimulus bill will aid the economy. Obama’s health care plan registers a 40 percent approval rating — and 54 percent disapproval — in the latest CBS poll, and is imperiled after months of furious GOP opposition and the election last week of Scott Brown to the Massachusetts Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy. His foreign-policy and national-security numbers are slightly ahead of his overall job approval rating of 48.8 percent, according to Pollster.com’s average of major polls.

In an effort to portray Obama’s first year on the international stage as an expectations-defying success, Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, turned a Monday speech on Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy into a robust defense of Obama’s first-year accomplishments abroad. Speaking at the Center for American Progress, Jones said Obama’s major task in 2009 was restoring and strengthening U.S. partnerships, alliances and multinational fora to tackle a host of international challenges, from stabilizing the faltering global economy to rallying an “unprecedented level of international consensus” on Iran to abandon any nuclear-weapons ambitions.

“The challenge of restoring the reputation of the United States as a nation willing to commit to leadership, willing to commit to a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect,” Jones said, “is probably the defining feature of our foreign policy.”

One challenge for the next year will be winning congressional support for that international engagement amid a larger and emboldened Republican minority typically suspicious of such efforts. Jones returned Saturday from a trip to Russia to discuss a nuclear-weapons reduction treaty under negotiation. But that treaty will require 67 votes for approval in a Senate, necessitating the cooperation of an obstinate minority committed to inflicting political damage on Obama. Senate support is also crucial for Obama’s international efforts on global climate change, another priority Jones cited on Monday. Anecdotal evidence on even baseline Republican support for either is grim: James Jay Carafano, a leading foreign-policy scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, recently tweeted that a cap-and-trade system for carbon-emissions reductions is itself a “real national security threat” and that a pundit was “dead wrong” to assume the GOP will support the new treaty with Russia.

Still, the Republican opposition has yet to congeal around a foreign-policy alternative to Obama, despite a flurry of well-funded projects connected to former Bush-era figures like the Cheney family. Not only has the Bush legacy tarnished the Republican brand, but in May, for the first time in its history of national-security polling, Democracy Corps found that the Democratic and Republican parties were at parity on public confidence to keep America safe, erasing a decades-long Republican opinion advantage.

“The poll numbers suggest that the Cheney-led fear-mongering is not working,” Hurlburt said in an email. “Why? Because its chief practitioners are discredited, and because Obama’s had a consistent message — we face real threats and have better ways to face them — and a good team of messengers in [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates, [Secretary of State Hillary Rodham] Clinton et al. that the public takes seriously.”

Eaton, a former infantry officer, had a 30-year Army career that including deployments to Somalia, Bosnia and Iraq. After retiring from the Army in 2006, he criticized Rumsfeld that March in a widely read op-ed for failing to understand counterinsurgency and, indeed, the nature of the Iraq war more broadly. Later he signed on with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign before supporting Barack Obama in the general election.

At NSN, Eaton’s official title will be a senior adviser, but he’ll be the public face of an organization set up after the Democratic defeats of 2004 to bridge the policy and messaging divides between the progressive and national-security communities. NSN employees describe him as a “bonding agent” between progressive politicians and the military: while NSN has had no shortage of national-security experts on its roster, Eaton is the first retired flag officer to sign up. With progressives divided over what to make of the Afghanistan war, Eaton’s new role should be one to watch, as NSN has taken a cautious position in favor of the administration’s strategy. He starts on Monday.

NSN’s original leadership has been absorbed into the Obama administration. Founder Rand Beers, the former White House counterterrorism chief, is now an undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security, where original communications director Moira Whelan serves as deputy in the Office of Gulf Coast Rebuilding. Ilan Goldenberg now has a large part of the Iran and Israel portfolios in the Department of Defense’s policy directorate.

(Full disclosure: I’ll be taking part in a National Security Network-sponsored panel discussion on Afghanistan at this year’s Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh next month.)

It’s safe to say that Goldenberg, 31, has his own take, though he declined comment for this post. His writings for the past several years on the liberal security-matters blog Democracy Arsenal indicate that he’ll press both the Israelis and the Palestinians to honor their commitments toward reaching a two-state solution, and he’ll seek creative outreaches to Iran. Here, for instance, Goldenberg endorses a U.S. push for an Israeli-Syrian peace accord as “the type of game-changer that improves America’s image in the region, generates positive Israeli political momentum towards [peace], weakens Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah and in the long-term could potentially improve the likelihood of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.” Here‘s Goldenberg pushing back on the idea that American Jews uniformly backed Israel’s Gaza war. Here‘s Goldenberg praising the appointment of “serious heavyweight” peacemaker George Mitchell as the administration’s Arab-Israeli special envoy. And here‘s Goldenberg advocating early and urgent engagement with Iran, before the forthcoming Iranian presidential elections, since “there is nothing that makes Iranians more suspicious than the idea that the U.S. has a vested interest in the outcome of their elections.”

What’s more, Goldenberg — full disclosure: a friend — made this interesting observation about emerging trends in progressive national security thinking last November:

[W]hat you now see forming is a broad consensus among liberals, liberal hawks and realists.  There is relatively universal agreement among these groups that we need to begin withdrawing from Iraq, focus more on Afghanistan, opt for direct diplomacy with Iran, reengage with the world, improve our image, strengthen our alliances, close Guantanamo and deal with global warming and energy security.

That is a pretty broad consensus and it’s one that politically was first pushed hardest by the left.  On the traditional right-left spectrum, you would have to call this a solidly left of center consensus that  has in fact been Obama’s foreign policy platform for the last two years.

Goldenberg might have mentioned that his efforts as part of NSN were a large part of pushing that consensus leftward. Before NSN, there wasn’t a progressive organization that could call together policy wonks and politicians to work out both messaging and substantive, principled policy thinking. It’s no coincidence that two of its other early heavy-hitters, former White House counterterrorism chief Rand Beers and ex-Hill staffer Moira Whelan, are now at the Department of Homeland Security. (Beers is awaiting confirmation as an undersecretary; Whelan is communications director.) Goldenberg isn’t the most senior person on the Obama Middle East team by a long shot. But the difference between where the Democratic Party was in 2004 on national security and where it is today — both substantively and stylistically — testifies, in part, to his ability to have real impact.

Goldenberg is scheduled to start at the Pentagon next week. His last day at NSN is said to be Friday.

I would agree with a lot of what Gelb said. It’s particularly noteworthy that Gelb has proposed a timeline of three years for a possible withdrawal, which I feel is a key component of a plan to start splitting the Taliban from Al-Qaeda, jump-starting Afghan self-governance, and forming a true coalition government. Our goal with regard to Afghanistan should be to keep America safe, and I think Gelb is starting to outline a policy that could protect our security interests without a commitment of 30,000 or 100,000 ground troops.

On Afghanistan, there is an ideological struggle about what war strategy should be — but it’s confined to the left. A coalition of progressive activists called Get Afghanistan Right has argued against the buildup of U.S. troops, while an alternative progressive coalition convened by the National Security Network has supported it.

As concerns the National Security Network, that’s a bit wide of the mark. NSN’s coalition is officially agnostic on the plus-up, at least until it sees the new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy from the Obama administration. I should know, because I wrote about this a few weeks ago. While they’re pushing back against the opposition to the troop increase, that doesn’t (yet) mean they’re officially in favor of it.

It’s not hard to understand why Spanta, who met with the Obama administration’s strategy review yesterday, said what he did. President Obama said in his first news conference that the measure of success in Afghanistan and Pakistan was the destruction of Al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens there – not a democratic Afghanistan — and Defense Secretary Bob Gates has derided the idea of creating a “Central Asian Valhalla.” Combined with Obama administration antipathy with the Karzai government he serves, it’s natural that Spanta would view such talk as indicating a reduction of support to him and his colleagues.

So Spanta made a case for continuing development, security and governance assistance to Afghanistan, saying that a counterterrorism mission wouldn’t succeed without such provisions for the needs of the Afghan people. “I would link what we discussed with our American colleagues with the need for a democratic Afghanistan,” he said. And there he may find a receptive ear. There’s support for the proposition that development and governance aid are necessary preconditions for counterterrorism success from the progressives at the National Security Network and the shadow-Pentagon Center for a New American Security.

Speaking of CNAS, I’m typing this from the St. Regis Hotel, where CNAS is about to host a press conference with Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak.

The progressive National Security Network has you covered.