Former vice president Dick Cheney continues to be the most effective opponent of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy.

Last week, receiving the “Keeper of the Flame” award from the Center for Security Policy, he again laid out a case for why President Obama is misguided on Iran, relations with Russia, missile defense and our allies in Eastern Europe, and the mysteriously slow-moving Afghanistan strategy process.

As for Iraq, the defining policy issue of his own Administration, Cheney implied that President Obama’s only real responsibility is to keep from speeding up the measured pace of the drawdown put in place by President Bush.

To conservatives, Cheney’s calling out Obama is a soothing balm. No one else these days is as effective saying things like:

• “I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith.”
• “Time and time again, [President Obama] has outstretched his hand to the Islamic Republic’s authoritarian leaders, and all the while Iran has continued to provide lethal support to extremists and terrorists who are killing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
• “Having announced his Afghanistan strategy last March, President Obama now seems afraid to make a decision, and unable to provide his commander on the ground with the troops he needs to complete his mission.”
• “The White House must stop dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger.”
• “Terrorists and their state sponsors must be held accountable, and America must remain on the offensive against them. We got it right after 9/11. And our government needs to keep getting it right, year after year, president after president, until the danger is finally overcome.”
• “[I]t certainly is not a good sign when the Justice Department is set on a political mission to discredit, disbar, or otherwise persecute the very people who helped protect our nation in the years after 9/11…. There are policy differences, and then there are affronts that have to be answered every time without equivocation, and this is one of them. We cannot protect this country by putting politics over security, and turning the guns on our own guys.”

What separates Cheney from President Obama’s other critics on the right is Cheney’s calmness and deliberation. Cheney and Obama are alike in this way (and probably no other). They both, from the outside, have a chilliness to them. But while Obama’s coolness evokes a sort of insouciance, Cheney’s tends toward intensity. 

Cheney’s seriousness and his experience make him uniquely suited to address these issues, and are the same qualities that appealed to George Bush when seeking a vice president.

But with Cheney unlikely to be a political candidate again, he could overshadow whoever emerges as the Republican standard-bearer over the next few years. With McCain out, too, none of the leading contenders for Republican leadership comes close to equaling Cheney’s command of international policy.

This, unfortunately, could result in GOP candidates relying on the same sort of “vagueness and platitudes” Cheney hears from President Obama.

“I can promise you this,” Cheney said last week, “There will always be plenty of us willing to stand up for the policies and the people that have kept this country safe.”

It’s refreshing rhetoric to Republican ears, but who among the next generation of GOP leaders will take up the script?