ST. PAUL, Minn.--The GOP foreign policy message men here are almost as on-message as the Sarah Palin defenders. But at an International Republican Institute Panel today, éminences grises bickered just a little bit about Iran and North Korea. Yet the most revealing moment was when moderator Jim Kolbe, a former Arizona congressman, asked the panelists what they would tell the new president if summoned on his first day to help set priorities. Each recommendation got at a critique conservatives have harbored toward the Bush administration:

• Brent Scowcroft, the über-realist national security adviser to George H.W. Bush (who has been neutral in the McCain-Obama contest) said, “The first thing to deal with is Iraq.” Not surprisingly, stability (not democracy) is the first goal.
• Richard Burt, a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former ambassador to East Germany, started with the Middle East: “Don’t wait, as did your two predecessors, to work on Israel and Palestine. It won’t transform the strategic situation, but it’ll certainly help, especially with moderates in the region.”
• John Lehman, a former Navy secretary, brought his experience on the 9/11 Commission to bear. “Get your appointees in the top 100 national security slots as soon as possible,” he counseled. “Bush had only 30 percent of the key slots filled on 9/11.”
• Richard Williamson, the special envoy to Sudan and Reagan administration operative, hinted at the Bush bubble described by rebels like Paul O’Neill and John DiIulio: “Listen to a variety of perspectives, and not just from people in government.”
• Pete Hoekstra, the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, insisted that the president should lead. He didn’t say it, but the implication was that, in the post-Iraq years, on issues from North Korea to Libya, he has followed other countries’ diplomatic initiatives.
• Lawrence Eagleburger, Reagan’s secretary of state, thinks that U.S. resources are stretched too thin, and that U.S. foreign policy is too dilettantish: “The United States has spent too much time, resources, and attention on too many plans and needs to reduce its activities internationally. Do we need troops in Haiti, for example?”

Some of these people offered gentle criticism during the Bush era (Scowcroft and, to a lesser extent, Eagleburger expressed doubts about the war; Lehman had a 9/11 Commissioner’s frustrations with the president’s refusal to implement his recommendations), but it’s hard not to wonder: where were these people during the last eight years?

It's the sort of thing that almost makes you long for the days of the samurai. Those guys had swords, and strong beliefs, and, well, cojones. Certainly not like modern-day Japanese prime ministers. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe quit last year after less than a year on the job. And now his predecessor, Yasuo Fukuda,  announced his resignation last night here in Tokyo, also after a little less than a year.

It wasn't just that Fukuda left so quickly. Japan has gone through periods before when there was plenty of turnover among senior politicians, such as the 1990s, when no one had any bright ideas for pulling Japan out of its seemingly endless recession. Fukuda's departure was different. It was ignominious. Pitiful. Wimpy.

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Senator John McCain—who has spent years making the rounds among VIPs and diplomats at the international conferences of Davos, Munich, and the others—is regarded elsewhere in the world as an old hand at foreign policy. In my reporting abroad, if people disagree with him they at least respect his experience. But what about Governor Sarah Palin, whom his campaign elevated Friday to a heartbeat away from the presidency? How does the campaign maintain that the world has nothing to fear?

Several lines of (sometimes contradictory) argument have been floating around at the Republican convention here to answer concerns about Palin. One is that she’s no less qualified than Barack Obama to deal with foreign affairs, since service on a Senate committee doesn’t count as experience. Another is that experience is about character more than knowledge—which staff, at any rate, can provide—and victory over the powerful Alaskan political machine shows the character she’ll bring to the presidency. A third line of thought is that judgment is more important than experience (this undermines McCain’s critique of Obama), and while she’s been around less than Obama, at least she supports the surge, which conventional wisdom now says worked. (Obama has danced around the question of its success.) Finally, and half-heartedly, Palin is said to know Russia, since Alaska is right next door. Here is a McCain spokesman struggling to make some of these points:

Senator Fred Thompson, the former senator and presidential hopeful—perceived for much of his campaign to be a less-than-strenuous student of politics and the world—tried some of these arguments on Newsweek editors at a lunch yesterday. And he made some concessions to Palin’s unfamiliarity with the world (she didn’t have a passport until two years ago): “No nominee I’ve ever heard of has had all the boxes checked. You talk about a ‘balanced ticket.’” But he did something I didn’t expect Republicans here to do: he set a high bar for Palin. Could she just answer a tricky debate question about foreign policy by saying she’s still learning? No.

"She has to be fully prepared and has to know the names of the foreign leaders," he said. "That’s rule number-one. She’s going to be tested in every conceivable way, and she’s got to be able to handle it. You should assume that smart people have some walking-around knowledge. She’s the governor of a large state; she’s not out hunting moose all the time. She’ll start at a better place than most people give her credit for. It’s not like teaching a toddler to play piano."

If Thompson is right, maybe Palin has something up her sleeve for the debate against Joe Biden everybody thinks she’s going to lose.

P.S. On the subject of veep picks, Thompson had some choice words about being on a congressional delegation abroad with the famously garrulous Joe Biden (“my friend”): “Traveling with Biden is one of the most unrewarding experiences you can have, because he monopolizes the conversation wherever you are, with whoever you’re speaking to, in whatever country you’re visiting.”

You and Obama have criticized John McCain's response to the invasion of Georgia. Is the problem here with ideology or tone?
The Russians need to be made to see that there are consequences. They isolate themselves from the world and suffer as a result—in political terms (with NATO), economic terms (the Russian stock market sank) and strategic terms (Poland rushed to complete a missile defense agreement it previously would have been reluctant to conclude). Making the rhetoric inflammatory—as opposed to showing Russia the cool realities—is not helpful.

Was John McCain's sharp response to the Georgia invasion wrong?
When McCain said before the invasion that Russia should be thrown out of the G8, that was not a productive proposal. It had the paradoxical effect of making the same statement after Russia invaded Georgia even less effective, because it clearly wasn't tied to Russian behavior.