Rich Lowry - Against the Hagel nomination

It has been a bad time for the Republican Party, and wouldn’t you know it? The worst addition to President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy team could well be a Republican.

Former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel is reportedly under serious consideration to replace Leon Panetta as secretary of defense. A self-styled foreign-policy realist, Hagel is out of the mainstream and terminally naive.

It would be one thing if Hagel were merely what he so often seemed when he was a regular on the Sunday talk shows — a tiresome purveyor of conventional wisdom overly impressed with his own seriousness. That would ma...