The American Conservative

Roger Cohen has written an odd op-ed on the missile defense matter. I call it odd because Cohen is unusual among New York Times columnists for not simply swallowing every conventional idea on foreign policy without protest. On occasion, he has even been known to question common assumptions, but not in this case. It is also strange that he gauges the Polish view of the Obama administration by the reaction of some Polish military and political figures rather than searching out what most Poles think. For example, Cohen states:

Poland is now one of the very few places in Europe that prefers former President Bush to Obama.

This is not true. It is not even remotely true. As that Economist article I mentioned the other day told us, Obama has a higher approval rating in Poland than Bush did last year. As I noted Saturday, almost half of Poland welcomed Obama’s decision to scrap the proposed missile defense program. Less than a third opposed the decision. No doubt the 31% that had a negative reaction looks back at the Bush years more fondly, but it is simply untrue that Poland as a whole prefers Bush to Obama. It’s as if a foreign columnist based his analysis of American public opinion regarding the Iraq war in 2006 on what top officials at the Pentagon were saying. When less than a third of the population opposed Obama’s decision and less than half of Poland viewed Bush favorably, it is ridiculous to speak as if most Poles loathe Obama or suddenly long for his predecessor. Cohen makes this mistake because he confuses a certain segment of Polish elite reaction for the views of all Poland. He accuses Obama of snubbing Poland, but most Poles do not feel slighted.

Via Andrew, Ben Smith brings a new Polish poll on the missile shield to our attention. By a 48-31% margin, Polish respondents say that Obama’s decision was good for Poland. This is in line with what I have been saying about Polish and Czech public opinion regarding the missile defense proposal for quite some time. The Wall Street Journal‘s latest news article this morning was blaring headlines from tabloids in Poland and the Czech Republic as if these responses were representative of the population as a whole. Evidently they are not at all representative. It’s as if foreign media picked up the latest stories from Newsmax and treated them as proof of what most Americans believed. One of the problems the American right seems to be having in understanding the Polish and Czech reactions is that they are taking their cues from the most nationalist segments of the population, and as a result they are given very misleading impressions of how most Poles and Czechs view things. If you believe that Vaclav Havel speaks for his people on this matter, his outrage over the cancellation would mean something, but he doesn’t speak for them, just as he did not speak for them when he backed the invasion of Iraq. The same is true of Kaczynski and the Poles.

How is it that most conservatives can bristle at American elites who ignore them and their interests and not see that most “pro-Western” or “pro-American” governments are staffed with people who are just as out of touch with their own nations on many issues? How do they not see that the sort of people from the coasts they find so unappealing and unlike them are very much like the Europeans who align themselves so slavishly with Washington? Why would anyone assume that such people represent the broad majority of their countrymen when it comes to foreign policy?

This statement from a number of major movement figures attacking the administration’s decision on missile defense is a useful reminder of how bankrupt movement conservative thought is when it comes to matters of national security and foreign policy. Had I set out to write a parody of hysterical conservative reaction to this decision, I would not have been able to come up with anything that compares to the genuine article. The first paragraph sums up their view:

The announcement that the Obama Administration will abandon Missile Defense in Poland and the Czech Republic represents a massive surrender of American Strategic Influence and a betrayal of two of our closest friends in the region. The move also indicates appeasement towards Russia, and a misunderstanding of the seriousness of the potential nuclear capability of Iran.

For starters, you have to enjoy all of the unnecessary capitalization. It isn’t merely missile defense, but Missile Defense that Obama has scrapped. All of the usual tropes are here: surrender, betrayal, appeasement. It doesn’t seem to bother these people that all of this is garbage. Former Polish President Kwasniewski specifically rejected describing this decision as a “betrayal,” and it is laughable that anyone would make such a charge. How can cancelling a system that hasn’t even been built and which at least half of Poland doesn’t want count as a betrayal of Poland? If this move were an attempt at “appeasing” Russia, it might start to rehabilitate the reputation of appeasement. It would mean that foregoing unnecessary provocations can repair frayed international relations, and it implies that critics of the decision would prefer a world in which relations with Russia continue to deteriorate and European security is steadily undermined. Iran’s nuclear capability is neither here nor there. Without a long-range missile program to deliver the nukes that Iran is nowhere near close to having, Iran’s nuclear capability might be real and still pose no threat to European security. The signatories of this statement haven’t a shred of credibility on these issues. Unfortunately, instead of being greeted with embarrassment and disdain by conservatives, this statement represents the common view of much of the American right.

My new column for The Week on the Afghan elections and the folly of democracy promotion is now up.

As an advocate of scrapping the proposed missile defense system in central Europe since it was first announced, I was pleased to hear that the administration scrapped the system, which was supposedly designed to defend against a chimerical Iranian missile threat. By scrapping this system, the administration admitted that the long-range missile threat from Iran did not exist, which is what critics of the system had been saying for some time. They also implicitly acknowledged that the system was never really intended to defend against an Iranian threat. Instead, it was always another provocation aimed at Russia by providing a pretext for putting American soldiers in Poland and the Czech Republic on a permanent basis. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the Republican freakout over this decision if we do not take for granted that the missile shield was an anti-Russian move that was embraced by the governments in Warsaw and Prague in no small part because it was an anti-Russian move.

Lech Walesa’s response to the President’s decision was telling. Walesa was quoted by the WSJ in an article on the central European reaction. He said, “It’s not that we need the shield [bold mine-DL], but it’s about the way we’re treated here.” In the same way, Moscow might admit that the interceptors in themselves represented no significant military threat, but were a symbol of disrespect and hostility. In reality, the security of both allied nations remains as strong as it has been since they joined the Alliance. This makes the hysterics of Republican hawks simply comical, and it reminds us that they have virtually nothing worthwhile to contribute to foreign policy debate. Of course it is absurd for hawks to portray this as some kind of betratyal of Poland and the Czech Republic. There has been no betrayal. If Polish and Czech voters should be angry with anyone, it is their own governments that deserve their scorn for signing off on participating in an unnecessary system that did nothing to improve their security just because Washington wanted it so.

The one useful thing hawks have done in their silly responses to Obama’s decision is to abandon the weak security rationales they have used until now to justify support for this system and reveal that there is little more than anti-Russian paranoia behind their “support” for U.S. allies in eastern Europe. It goes without saying that we would defend our NATO allies in eastern Europe against attack. Indeed, what Obama has done by scrapping this system is to remove the bullseyes from the backs of Poland and the Czech Republic that the missile shield had placed on them. This reversal of foolish Bush-era policy has actually enhanced and improved security for Poland and the Czech Republic, because it does not expose them needlessly to new risks. The administration has also refused to pursue a policy that gained as much support as it did from the exploitation of anti-Russian nationalism in eastern Europe.

All that having been said, the administration is going to be disappointed. Having scrapped the shield, it has held out the false promise that this decision will make Moscow more cooperative in pressuring Iran. As I have said before, this is not going to happen. The decsion to abandon this shield was the right one as far as both allied security and Russian relations were concerned, and it should be defended on those grounds. Moscow is certainly pleased that the proposed shield will not be built, but it would be a serious mistake to expect Russian help in squeezing Iran on its nuclear program. Russia has no reason to do this. If the administration insists that Russian support for tightening sanctions or isolating Iran is the “payoff” for abandoning the shield, the decision will be judged to have been a quid pro quo that gained us nothing. If we see it instead not as a concession to Moscow, but rather as a concession to reality and common sense, it does not have to produce Russian cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program to be regarded as the correct and appropriate move.

P.S. Ackerman sums it up pretty well:

If Gates, the model of a pragmatic defense secretary who often discusses the need to reset defense policy around “real” and not “hypothetical” threats, doesn’t see an actual cost to U.S. or allied security, then none exists.

On any given day, hawks will mock Obama supporters because of the strong and obvious continuities in national security policy under Obama, and some of them will then turn around the next day to treat the unrealistic expectations of Obama-led change in U.S. foreign policy as a reasonable standard by which to judge the “success” of the Obama administration. “He did not magically eliminate decades of mistrust and suspicion in nine months–what a loser!” Joseph Loconte offers us a sample of the second line of attack:

Throughout the Bush presidency, opinion polling from the Pew Research Center trumpeted America’s “abysmal” approval ratings across the globe. The problem, pollsters suggested with numbing regularity, was that a “cowboy president” had inflamed the Muslim world—and America’s European allies—with his “unilateral” war on terrorism. The remedy, of course, was a new administration with a fresh approach: a president committed to multilateralism, smart diplomacy, and American soft power. Right on cue, a Pew report hailed Barack Obama’s election for inspiring “global confidence” in U.S. leadership and rescuing America’s reputation from eternal perdition.

This hagiographic storyline, however, is evaporating like a morning mist. A newer Pew survey suggests that most Islamic countries distrust the United States under the leadership of President Obama about as much as they did under President George W. Bush. Yes, majorities of the Muslim populations interviewed still believe that America plays a mostly destructive role in the world. Most view the United States as “an enemy” and “a military threat” to their own country. Most disapprove of the American-led effort to combat terrorism. Large numbers, in fact, voice strong support for terrorism and Osama bin Laden. Western Europeans, though expressing positive personal views of Obama, show little enthusiasm for key U.S. foreign policy objectives. In other words, anti-Americanism is alive and well in the age of Obama.

This is sloppy, weak stuff even by the standards of Weekly Standard-issue hawks such as Loconte. There may have been Obama voters who thought that simply changing the tone and style of the President and replacing one man with another would eliminate global antipathy, or perhaps some imagined that stories of his Muslim grandfather and his middle name would make people forget that Obama backed the bombing of Lebanon and Gaza and has continued the extremely unpopular drone strikes in Pakistan. However, no one paying any attention to the substance of the policies Obama endorsed believed any of this. No one with a modicum of respect for the intelligence of other nations ever believed this. Those who bristle at aggressive policies and U.S. hegemony were never going to become more favorably disposed towards them just because of a change in management.

After all, if policy has by and large remained the same, why would antagonism created by policy lessen? “Unilateralism” is not the important part of U.S. foreign policy that bothers Muslims around the world–it is the invasion of Muslim countries, the occupation of their lands and the killing of their co-religionists that incenses many of them. If Obama engages in most of the same actions, but does so on a more “multilateral” and consultative basis, what has actually changed as far as these publics are concerned?

If Europeans have little interest in “key U.S. foreign policy objectives,” the problem may be with the objectives Washington has rather than with the Europeans or Obama. Not supporting the expansion of NATO, for example, is not evidence of “anti-Americanism.” In truth, Europeans who refuse to give security guarantees to more of Russia’s neighbors are doing America a favor–they are refusing to let us make dangerous guarantees that would ruin us if we honored them. For that matter, an unwillingness to commit troops to Afghanistan under the auspices of NATO is not proof of anti-Americanism, either. It is a grudging acknowledgment of the absurdity of a European defensive alliance waging a prolonged counterinsurgency in central Asia to “defend” the world’s remaining superpower against Pashtun tribesmen.

Loconte bemoans how little Pakistanis trust the U.S., but then why would they? For years we backed a deeply unpopular dictator and resisted his removal from power as long as we could. It is our military campaign and that of the Pakistani army urged on by our government that has been creating a massive refugee population in western Pakistan. Pakistanis might reasonably conclude that we are using their country as little more than a firing range, and their attitudes would worsen accordingly. Add to that a hefty dose of conspiratorial paranoia that the U.S. is working to sell out Pakistan to India, and you have a nation that is obviously not going to be placated by a few pleasant speeches. A foreign nation’s distrust of the U.S. may sometimes increase in direct proportion to the closeness of our government’s relationship with theirs, especially when that close relationship has the practical effect of subordinating their perceived national interests to our stated objectives in their country and region. Loconte digs no deeper into why a mere 13% of Pakistanis believe that Obama will “do the right thing” in world affairs. All that matters to him is scoring the lame partisan and ideological point that Pakistanis have not rushed to embrace policies that are doing serious damage to the political stability and physical security of their country just because Obama is President.

It is no surprise that the majority Muslim nation with the most positive view of the United States’ role in the world out of the five polled is Indonesia, which is the one country that does not have a close political-military relationship with Washington as Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan do. Deep distrust in Turkey is pretty easily understood. Loconte willfully fails to understand it, absurdly citing Washington’s strong support for Turkish E.U. membership. Any close observer knows is no longer very important to most Turks and was in any case counterproductive and actually worked against Turkey’s prospects for admission. As if Turkish entry were not controversial enough, the last administration gave its opponents the added ammunition that it was something Washington was trying to force down Europe’s throat.

Turks overwhelmingly opposed the invasion of Iraq, they correctly see Iraqi Kurdistan as a haven for PKK terrorists, they fear the potential for Kurdish separatism encouraged by the example of Iraqi Kurds, and they generally see the alliance with Washington as an increasingly one-sided arrangement that has ceased to benefit them. Turkish “anti-Americanism” is also a function of the further democratization of Turkey: the broad mass of Turkish voters has finally been permitted to elect and retain a government that better reflects their views and interests, which means that the artificial and automatic deference that the old Kemalist elite gave to Washington’s regional policies is a thing of the past. Egyptians understandably take a poor view of the government that helps prop up their dictator. Iraqi negative attitudes are self-explanatory. When it has been our standard procedure to trample on, ignore or abuse these Muslim nations, most of which are technically our allies, what sense does it make to complain about the “anti-Americanism” of foreign nations?

We should also remember that nations have divergent interests. Even if Washington were not so oblivious to public opinion in allied countries, approval of U.S. policy would not automatically follow. No matter how attentive to their other concerns Washington might become, Turks are not going to endorse harsh anti-Iranian policies, nor will they cheer the next Israeli military campaign against one of its neighbors, because they take a significantly different view of the relevant issues. If we stopped subsidizing Mubarak’s government tomorrow, most Egyptians would not suddenly become more sympathetic to U.S. effective support for the status quo in Palestine or the continued military presence in Iraq. I could go on, but you get the idea.

In an otherwise unremarkable column about the instant morality of sports, Henninger made the following preposterous claim:

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to let a prosecutor investigate CIA interrogations that were ruled inbounds years ago is like a baseball commissioner reversing a hotly disputed World Series home run. Fans everywhere would burn down the stadium.

This is bizarre in a number of ways. Henninger isn’t even using the correct sports analogy. In this case, the analogy would have to be some kind of action that had once been illegal but was permitted under a looser interpretation of the rules. You would then have to have some regulating authority declare later on that the new interpretation of the rules was basically invalid and that the old rules had always applied, opening the door to some kind of retroactive penalties. The closest comparison I can think of is when the NCAA voids the wins of coaches involved in recruiting violations, which is an appropriate disciplinary action for cheating college programs and exactly the kind of strict enforcement of rules that Henninger is implicitly rejecting in his criticism of Holder.

In practice, there are rarely dangerous actions in any sport that were once banned but are now permitted. In American football, the trend has been towards tighter and tighter restrictions on what defensive players can do to receivers and quarterbacks. There really is nothing in the sports world that directly compares to investigating the torture regime, because there is no professional organization that started allowing routine violent abuses during games. You have never heard NFL officials claim that there need to be more crippling tackles on defenseless players to preserve the game of football. Of course, contests premised on fairness cannot reasonably be compared to practices that are by their nature gross injustices against human dignity, but that doesn’t bother Henninger. The very thing that Henninger finds attractive and worthwhile in the instant and mostly reliable morality of sports (which apparently does not apply to teams from Massachusetts) is what he plainly does not want to have applied when it comes to national security, and what is most striking is that he isn’t even aware of the contradiction.

For Henninger and those like him, the torture regime is the natural response to a world with blurred lines, gray areas and extraordinary measures that must be taken against unconventional enemies. If sports ruled the world, as Henninger’s title reads, people who openly defy and violate the Geneva Conventions would be hauled before international tribunals and sentenced to many years in prison, and their apologists in the press would be hounded from decent society as the enablers of criminality that they are. As we all know, this has not happened and will not be happening, in part because of people like Henninger, who pretend to decry chaos and rule-breaking while regularly endorsing it in practice when it is done in the name of anti-terrorism and security.

I haven’t taken the time to comment on the reports that Thatcher was firmly opposed to German reunification and made rather accommodating statements to Gorbachev about the status of communism in eastern Europe, but I should say a few things. First, it is true that Bush was right and Thatcher wrong on German unification, but Thatcher was coming out of a British foreign policy tradition that prized division in Europe in order to prevent the rise of any single continental power. This had more or less been British strategy for nearly three centuries by the 1980s. Thatcher was also the product of a Britain that had been coping with the political consequences of German unification for seventy years before 1945. The combination of united German preeminence in Europe and British hostility to a single power dominating Europe made two states that otherwise had no reason to fight each other into enemies. The first Bush administration was not loaded down with this baggage and had different priorities. The interests of Britain and America in 1989-90 were not necessarily identical, and it would have been appropriate for Thatcher to distinguish the interests of her country from those of the United States.

If the Cold War froze many conflicts, there was good reason to fear that a thaw of these conflicts would lead Europe back to renewed warfare, and Britain would feel obliged (yet again) to enter into these continental wars to prevent the continental hegemony that it has usually feared. As Matt Steinglass notes, it was reasonable to fear revanchism and nationalist revivals in places other than the Balkans. If you see the world wars as the disastrous results of attempting (and failing) to integrate united Germany into the European state system in the first half of the twentieth century, German unification in 1990 would have seemed very risky and probably not worth it. As it has worked out, German unification has advanced peaceful European political and economic integration and the elimination of at least one major WWII-era division appears in retrospect to have been appropriate and wise, but this was not necessarily an obvious or easy conclusion to draw at the time.

Conor is wrong to conclude that this episode teaches us not to trust our politicians. Perhaps we ought not to trust them, but this is not a reason for distrust. If Thatcher was not the starry-eyed anticommunist idealist that later hagiographers would like to make her out to be, so much the better for Thatcher. This is a reminder of how broad of an umbrella anticommunism had in the political coalitions that formed because of it. There were zealous anticommunists who wanted to see the communist system in eastern Europe and the USSR dismantled because it was an abhorrent tyranny, and then there were far, far more anticommunists who were anticommunists principally in their desire to prevent the expansion of Soviet power and to secure their own countries against Soviet military threats. When that power seemed to be faltering, the instinct of the latter was not to press our advantage as hawks and neoconservatives would have done. Instead the response of these anticommunists was to try to manage Soviet decline in order to prevent violent and destructive implosion into which they would have been inevitably drawn. On balance, their instinct was the more prudent and wise one. If Thatcher was overly cautious, she had good reason to be.

One reason that I am not disappointed with Thatcher at all as a result of these reports is that I am leery of criticism made twenty years after the fact, especially when the criticism is being made with the certain knowledge that the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and eventual dissolution of the USSR occurred largely peacefully. People who want to find fault with Thatcher over this are generally the sort of people who think that Bush’s speech in Kiev in the summer of 1991 was some unpardonable betrayal of freedom and goodness. These people are foolish. The speech was, on the contrary, a sober and serious one that deserves to remembered for what Bush actually said and not the caricature that his hawkish critics have made of it ever since. Thatcher’s statements and actions in 1989-90 ought to be viewed with a similar respect for context and with an awareness of the uncertainty that Western governments experienced in coping with the collapse of a huge imperial system.

Andrew has responded to Bret Stephens’ latest, and he makes a number of good points, but I am left wondering something: why does every debate concerning aggressive war center on pragmatic considerations of whether it will “work”? Why give any deference to proponents of so-called “pre-emptive” war that isn’t pre-empting anything? Why should we permit them to set the terms and define the limits of the debate? Obama isn’t “making” Israel go to war against Iran, not least because the “threat” from Iran is vastly exaggerated and Israel’s security would not be significantly undermined if Iran did acquire a nuclear weapons capacity. When Iran is far away from acquiring such weapons, how much smaller is the Iranian “threat”?

It is true that America has no interest in another war in the region, and an attack on Iran would expose our forces and allies to serious retaliatory strikes, and it is also true that Muslims worldwide would be incensed at the sight of yet another U.S.-led and/or backed war against their co-religionists. It is true that the economic consequences of such an attack, no matter which state carried it out, would be severe and politically ruinous for the incumbent in the White House. Andrew is also right that deterrence and containment will be enough for U.S. and allied security in the event of any Iranian acquisition of a nuclear bomb. That said, why do we object to aggressive war this way? Why don’t we simply insist that aggressive warfare is the crime that the Allies defined it as over sixty years ago?

The most significant assumption Stephens makes in his op-ed is that Israel has a perfect right to do whatever it thinks necessary to guard against any possible threat, no matter how chimerical or far-fetched, and that it is the task of the United States government to change Iranian behavior to prevent an unprovoked Israeli attack. No other state is granted this sort of exceptional treatment in its dealings with regional rivals as Israel is, and Washington exempts no other state so completely from the requirements of international law as it does for Israel. At no point does Andrew challenge Stephens’ baseless claim that Iran is just a year or two away from possessing a nuclear weapon. ElBaradei has made it clear that this is fiction. Why does Andrew take seriously that Stephens is interested in the “disarmament” of Iran when Iran has no nuclear weapons of which it can be disarmed?

A new poll (see chart) by the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank, shows that western Europe is now much more pro-American and pro-NATO than the ex-communist east. Until last year, the eastern countries swallowed their misgivings about George Bush, while the west of the continent writhed in distaste at what many saw as his administration’s incompetence and heavy-handedness. ~The Economist

This is quite misleading. The difference between eastern and western European reactions to the Bush administration and its foreign policy decisions could never be found among the actual voters in either part of the continent. What was different in France, Germany and (later on) Spain was that their governments sooner or later represented public discontent with U.S. policies, while the governments of so-called “New
Europe” sided with Mr. Bush against their own peoples.

In fact, what this article reminds us is that approval of both Bush and Obama is higher in countries such as Poland and Romania than it is in Germany and France, and Obama’s approval has increased in all four countries. The relationship with eastern European countries only appears “wobbly,” as the article puts it, because the relationship with western Europe is much better than it was and has improved more than in the east. There was some real, sizeable minority support for Bush in eastern Europe, but in western Europe he had very few sympathizers. Obama has greater support in both regions, which hardly amounts to a weakening between the U.S. and eastern Europe. To the extent that Obama has met with any significant criticism from eastern Europe, such as the “open letter” from earlier this summer, it has tended to come from many of the same political leaders who aligned their governments with Washington over the Iraq war, which means that they are once again taking a position that a vast majority of their fellow citizens does not hold.

If it is true that there are some questions in the Marshall Fund survey that yield better “pro-American and pro-NATO” results in western Europe than in the east, this may have something to do with the differences in the fortunes of the two regions. Having felt the full impact of the financial crisis and having fewer resources to draw to cope, eastern European publics are probably not going to respond well to the demands of Atlanticism, especially when Atlanticism these days seems to be defined by a willingness to send soldiers to places far removed from the Euro-Atlantic zone.

Eastern Europeans may have been under the silly impression that NATO was primarily a defensive alliance designed for collective security in Europe and that “out-of-area operations” were not going to become the main raison d’etre for the Alliance in the future. This more skeptical turn in the east may also be a product of the weariness many small ex-communist states may be feeling after having dutifully backed every U.S. initiative abroad without seeing any tangible gains for themselves. As militarily irrelevant and politically weak states, they were embraced for the token support they could and did provide, and they have been taken for granted ever since because their contributions were always nominal and mattered to Washington only inasmuch as these provided diplomatic and political cover for its invasion of Iraq.

The article mentions the “open letter” and discusses Obama’s rethinking of the missile defense installations, but as I said when the letter was first published these installations have been very controversial in the proposed host countries. Czech and Polish voters are evenly split over the question, and in the past clear majorities have been opposed to accepting the installations. Viewed in this light, it is clear that scrapping the proposal would not necessarily have to be a “a climb-down to suit Russian interests,” but could be an acknowledgment of the politically divisive and controversial nature of the plan within the host countries. Instead of pushing ahead with a security policy decision that ignores the opinions of at least half of Poland and the Czech Republic, Washington could instead show some respect for the diversity of opinion in these countries and recognize that building “defense” installations against chimerical Iranian missiles is not worth aggravating and worsening relations with two NATO allies over the long-term. That would work to strengthen a relationship founded on some kind of real respect for our allies, but that would require distinguishing between what eastern European nations want and what their leaders want to do in their name.