The American Conservative

Conflating American security with military interventionism is an old trick, but it doesn’t make it any more intellectually defensible. And again, it’s worth repeating: when those disposed to Krauthammer’s arguments held policy making positions, American power declined precipitously. ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete is responding to this Krauthammer article, which makes the preposterous claims that Obama has been proposing a series of “strategic retreats” and that so-called New Liberalism aims to undermine U.S. hegemony. This is rather like the imaginary “apology tour” Obama has been on these past few months–it hits all the right ideological notes for the people making the charge, but it is pure fantasy. Obviously I agree with Scoblete, and I have made the same point about the previous administration’s disastrous record of declining U.S. influence and power.

One thing that does concern me is that turning the old “weakness” smears around on the GOP will not encourage intelligent re-thinking on foreign policy and national security, but will instead foster a redoubling of the worst aggressive instincts that Republicans currently have. If everyone comes to accept that Bush weakened American power, which he did, the conclusion some national security conservatives will reach is that Bush weakened America by not being hard-line and aggressive enough. In this mad interpretation, the failure of the Bush years was not found in plunging us into an intractable, unnecessary war, harming allied interests with blank checks of support or encouraging reckless allies into self-destructive action, but in failing to follow through. This is also the rationale for the flurry of attacks against Obama, who has more or less maintained second-term Bush status quo on most aspects of foreign policy. If doing the same things as the Bush administration in its second term can be redefined as Obama’s “New Liberalism,” the more aggressive interventionists and hawks on the right can claim that they are guardians of a “conservative” foreign policy, which allows them to promote the self-serving, albeit completely absurd, idea that everyone except for them favors “weakness” and “retreat.”

What is a little amusing about the Krauthammer argument against Obama is that it obsesses over symbolism and superficial appearances while ignoring substance, which is one of the standard complaints against Obama. Bush used triumphalist, self-congratulatory rhetoric, but bungled the execution of many policies to the detriment of the United States. Obama has so far mostly eschewed the national self-congratulation and public displays of moral preening, but now what bothers Obama’s critics here is that he is not showy and superficial enough. For example, Fred Hiatt is worried that delaying a meeting with the Dalai Lama, a meeting which is pretty much purely for show, will send discouraging signals to dissidents everywhere despite Hiatt’s own admission that the administration is apparently interested in making substantive gains on their political rights.

P.S. While I don’t think the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize matters one way or the other, it is instructive that Obama’s acceptance of the award has received this kind of reaction:

What’s more, he’s etched in stone the phrase with which critics will dismiss his presidency.

As Ross says elsewhere in the column, accepting the Prize changes nothing about the realities around the world and makes none of the problems Obama faces any easier, so why should it change anyone’s expectations of what Obama will do? I keep seeing and hearing arguments to the effect that the Nobel Committee was trying to neutralize or corner Obama by making it harder for him to support additional troop deployments in Afghanistan and the like. It must be one of the few things on which Rush Limbaugh and David Frum both agree. This doesn’t make any sense. If Obama does not deserve the award, and if it has no real significance, why will Obama give it a second thought when he considers what should be done in Afghanistan or elsewhere? If his acceptance was grudging, why is he going to let the award constrain what he does? If the reasons provided for giving him the Prize mainly concern climate change and nuclear disarmament, why should the award affect a decision on Afghanistan troop levels or pressuring Iran on its nuclear program?

I am here in Princeton preparing for the panel, but I had noticed a couple items that I wanted to discuss briefly. Bill Frezza takes that ludicrous Bret Stephens’ op-ed from the other day, which I remarked on here, and he uses it as his starting point for an argument that is, if this is possible, even more bizarre. Frezza writes:

It was shocking. Only after reading it [Stephens' op-ed] twice did I realize it was just a forecast and not reality. Yet as Nobel Peace Prize winner Barak Obama pursues his strategy of global multilateralism, the inexorable logic of reciprocal disarmament smacks one in the face.

If the US refuses to acknowledge the existence of evil, rejects unilateralism, and insists on an even-handed approach to international relations, what else can we expect the UN to deliver but an insistence that all sides in the Middle East give up their weapons of mass destruction, including Israel? If this harrowing forecast becomes reality, what might happen next?

War.

The small problem with this “inexorable logic” is that Obama has already ruled out any sort of Israeli disarmament. Having ignored this and all that it implies, Frezza goes on to explain why the Iranian government would welcome an Israeli attack and uses this in support of the attack:

The Iranian mullahs may be crazy but they’re not stupid. The biggest threat to clerical rule comes not from Israel or the US but from Iran’s own restive people. The surest way to crush domestic opposition is to unify the country around hatred for the infidel invader. A price would have to be paid, but Ahmadinejad might find a little death and destruction acceptable compared to the loss of power. Bloodying Israel’s nose by putting up a good fight wouldn’t hurt his standing either. If Ahmadinejad’s handlers believe that Israel will execute a careful surgical strike, which is likely given Israel’s interest in minimizing collateral damage, the mullahs may roll the dice.

So Frezza wants us to believe that a course of action that makes Ahmadinejad and Khamenei more secure in their positions of power and which will at most delay, not prevent, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is in the interests of Israel’s government. To listen to advocates of attacking Iran, one might have thought that it is the character of the current regime that makes an Iranian nuke so threatening. By Frezza’s own admission, an Israeli attack would strengthen the current regime and open Israel to retaliatory strikes, which would in all likelihood be seen by much of the world as justified self-defense against an unprovoked attack, and this is going to help Israel’s government? It is fair to say that Frezza’s article has an abundance of “[t]ortured logic rife with miscalculation.”

In recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, it had also broken the cardinal rule of post-cold war European security: that borders in Europe would never again be changed by force of arms. ~Ronald Asmus

The Russians might not have realized that this was such a “cardinal rule of post-cold war European security” when the United States and NATO blatantly violated it beginning in 1999. Kosovo was separated from Serbia by force of arms, and this de facto arrangement guaranteed by Western military forces became official when the United States and many western European states recognized the independence of Kosovo. So, yes, many of these Europeans were in a bit of a bind when faced with the consequences of their governments’ actions over the previous decade.

Of course the EU report disproves that Russian claims of “genocide,” which were clearly hyperbole and propaganda from the begnning. The idea that NATO began bombing Serbia because it was committing “genocide” in Kosovo was likewise laughable, but to this day Westerners continue to take this claim seriously. The report acknowledges that Russia had the right to protect its “peacekeepers,” but said that the Russian response was excessive. This is true, which adds to the responsibility of the Georgian government for the stupid decision to launch an attack that would precipitate a Russian response that it must have known would not be minimal and proportional. That doesn’t absolve Russia of responsibility for its excesses, but it makes the responsibility of the escalating party all the greater. It is also true that the separation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia violates international law, just as the partition of Serbia violated international law. As far as I can tell, virtually no one who objected to the partition of Georgia paid any attention to international law when Kosovo was illegally detached from Serbia. Indeed, many of the same people endorsed the latter move and claimed that it was a “one-time” exception that would not create a precedent. The trouble is that precedents were created whether or not Western governments wanted to acknowledge them or not. Official Russian propaganda claimed outrageous and false things, and I suspect one of the reason why Moscow framed its propaganda the way that it did was to mimic and thereby mock false Western claims over Kosovo. Then again, perhaps mockery was not the intent. Perhaps Moscow believed that the West would be more willing to accept military action if it were wrapped into the sanctimonious cant of humanitarian intervention.

In the end, holding out the prospect of NATO membership for Georgia was a dangerously provocative act that the West had no interest in backing up when it elicited the angry Russian response that inevitably followed. Recognizing Kosovo was madness, and Georgia paid the price for it. Trashing international law and ignoring state sovereignty when it suited us paved the way for other major powers to do the same to their weaker neighbors. The aggressive and confrontational foreign policy of at least the last ten years, including both Clinton and Bush administrations, brought about this state of affairs, and it will probably take decades to undo the damage that “humanitarian” and “well-intentioned” hawks have done to the international order.

I agree with Jesse Walker that the success of non-interventionism inside the GOP remains a very long shot. It seems to me that Andrew has misread Drudge if he detects an undercurrent of antiwar sentiment there. Today’s Drudge headline highlights a Times story reporting declining morale among our soliders in Afghanistan, and the story emphasizes that the soldiers see the war as futile and lacking clear objectives, but there are plenty of ways for a reflexively pro-war audience to reconcile this with continued support for the war. Of course, the war in Iraq has been futile and lacking in clear objectives practically since the beginning, but that has not stopped two-thirds of Republicans and an even higher proportion of self-described conservatives from backing it to this day. Furthermore, as Walker notes, Republican leaders certainly aren’t moving in that direction.

Andrew’s original post referred to a “looming foreign policy war” on the right. That would be very welcome to the extent that it meant that conservatives were beginning to think twice about their foreign policy assumptions, but if it happened right now it would probably be short and not to the advantage of non-interventionists. After all, if there were a “foreign policy war” on the right, who would be on our side? Andrew invokes Hagel and Huntsman, which reminds us of how politically lopsided such a fight would be. I have said in the past that Huntsman might provide a sober, informed foreign policy perspective because of his diplomatic background and experience overseas, but Huntsman already scrapped any ambitions for higher office and party leadership when he accepted the post in Beijing. Hagel abandoned any thoughts of a presidential run and he is now persona non grata on much of the right…because he had the sense to oppose deepening our involvement in Iraq. For that matter, Hagel is a long way away from being a reliably good guide on foreign policy, as I have said many times, and my guess is that Huntsman would prove to be far more conventionally hawkish on policy once we learned more about his views. Ron Paul has done great work making the case against empire and war, and for his troubles he is reviled by much of the rest of his party.

What does seem clear to me is that most of the public will continue to reject conservatives and the GOP in part because of their disastrous foreign policy views. Until most conservatives and Republicans see that they are at odds with most of the public on these questions and recognize that they are in the wrong, it is hard to see how non-interventionism or even a humble “realism” will make much headway on the right.

Those of you in the Princeton area may be interested in the panel in which I am participating this Monday. “The Future of Conservatism” panel will include myself, David Frum, Ross Douthat and Virginia Postrel, and it will be held at 4:30 on Monday in McCosh 50 at Princeton. Thanks to the Princeton Committee on Public Lectures for making this event possible.

So, at first glance, the fact that Obama won’t be meeting with the Dalai Lama when the latter is in Washington this month seems like a betrayal. The question, as it often is with Obama, is whether the president is playing a very subtle, long game to achieve his ideals, or abandoning those ideals altogether out of weak-kneed realism. ~Michelle Goldberg

Those can’t be the only options, and that can’t be the real question here. If every Obama decision has to be classified as either idealism by other means or “weak-kneed realism,” there will be a great deal of confusion, because there is good reason to think that neither description applies in most of these cases. When Obama refrained from speaking out on behalf of Iranian protesters this summer, I don’t think it was a long-term cunning plan to help the Iranian opposition by not overtly helping them. It was nonetheless the right decision for the U.S. and the one that better serves the interests of the Iranian opposition. Had Obama met with the Dalai Lama, what aspect of Chinese policy in Tibet would have changed? Nothing would have changed, because repeated meetings between our Presidents and the Dalai Lama have made no significant difference in how Beijing treats Tibet. Domination and control of Tibet are part and parcel of the new Chinese nationalist narrative, and it is hard to imagine what our government would really be able to do to change that. These meetings and the postponement of this meeting are occasions for moral posturing that accomplishes little or nothing.

Many people object that Obama does not meet with enough dissidents and exiles and he does not say enough on their behalf, but other than making himself feel and look better what do such meetings and speeches achieve? Goldberg floats the idea that Obama may be able to do more for Tibet by not antagonizing Beijing by meeting with the Dalai Lama first, but this holds out the hope that another state is going to be willing to budge on something that it regards as non-negotiable. As a matter of diplomatic protocol, it seems appropriate to meet with Chinese government leaders before meeting with the de facto leader of Tibetan resistance, but when Obama finally does meet him what will he have proved by doing so?

I don’t entirely agree with David Lindsay at PostRight when he says that Obama was “right to snub” the Dalai Lama, because it doesn’t matter to me whether Tibet was a feudal theocracy or a democratic paradise in 1959. No one needs to endorse the Han supremacism embodied in Chinese policy towards Tibet (and Xinjiang) to recognize that these are China’s internal affairs and nothing is going to be gained for Tibetans and Uighurs by publicly meddling or complaining about things that Beijing believes are none of our concern. Tibetan autonomy or independence would most likely be better for ethnic Tibetans, but we cannot successfully conduct relations with other major powers by continually encouraging the fragmentation and dissolution of their nation-states.

Just when I think the WSJ op-ed page couldn’t get any crazier, Bret Stephens writes another column. A few days after Eli Lake reported that Obama and Netanyahu had confirmed tacit U.S. support for Israel’s nuclear arsenal, reinforcing a policy that has been in place for forty years, Stephens conjures up a vision of the future a few months from now in which the Security Council demands Israeli nuclear disarmament and, even more incredibly, the United States acquiesces in this demand. At some point in the future, the other members of the Security Council might support such a resolution, but Washington would never abstain. There is not the slightest chance of this happening. Obviously Stephens’ vision of the future is silly, but that doesn’t automatically make it trivial. It matters because there is a sizeable part of the public willing to believe such claims, and it is part of the ongoing campaign to make Obama appear as someone who sells out U.S. allies.

The administration has made itself more vulnerable to this sort of attack by repeatedly emphasizing an interest in global nuclear disarmament, when the reality is that demands for nonproliferation and disarmament will never apply to U.S. allies in any meaningful way. On the proliferation front, India has already received the exemptions it desired on processing and enrichment in connection with the U.S.-India nuclear deal. Israel has evidently received assurances that all of this talk of a world without nuclear weapons is no cause for them to worry about the status of their arsenal. This is primarily a political problem, because the administration has given the impression that nonproliferation and disarmament are top priorities and Obama has expressed this in universal terms, which his otherwise hapless critics can use to distort how he wants to handle allied nuclear arsenals.

On the whole, Obama’s hawkish enemies ought to be satisfied with the President on matters of policy. Their party political need seems to keep outweighing this consideration, so they are forced to invent policies Obama does not support and will not pursue. Hence the plainly ludicrous claim that Obama will one day make Israel give up its nukes. It’s similar to how GOP unsuccessfully tried to campaign against Obama last year: he was portrayed as the foreign policy naif, the new McGovern, the Pentagon budget-slasher, etc. , but he was none of these things (or no more so than his opponent). It’s as if these hawks remain trapped in the late 1970s, and what is more they remain convinced that the public has not changed in any meaningful way since then. Right on cue, you have Elliott Abrams invoking “Scoop” Jackson and his staffers as the model for the anti-Obama resistance. Republican hawks write and act as if the New Democrats had never existed, and they seem to think that no one will notice that conventional Democratic foreign policy thinking is far closer to “Scoop” Jackson than it is to McGovern.

I suppose there is some method to all of this. Just as every “emergency” security measure eventually becomes a permanent, non-negotiable minimum of government power, and just as every new program becomes “vital” and its repeal quickly becomes unthinkable and politically toxic, the logic of aggressive foreign policy means that there must be ever-increasing projections of power. Merely maintaining the status quo and perpetuating virtually every policy overseas are no longer considered enough, and will be portrayed as “retreat” and “surrender.”

If U.S. hegemony is not advancing, hawks seem worried that the unnecessary and dangerous nature of all this power projection will become clear. This is why there has to be a constant buzz of alarm and fearmongering about “emerging” threats that are not really serious threats. The public has to be kept in a state of some anxiety and agitation about the rest of the world, which they would otherwise not think about very much, or else they might begin to resent the waste of resources and needless trouble that hegemony entails.

I appreciated Kevin Sullivan’s lengthy response to my earlier post on Iran sanctions. Sullivan and I are at odds on several points, but where we may disagree most of all is here:

The notion that the United States and the greater international community have somehow failed to reach out to the Islamic Republic in an effort to normalize relations and ease economic sanctions is totally false and unfounded.

It depends very much on what we mean by “reach out.” No one will deny that there has been a history of engaging in talks with and making gestures of goodwill to Tehran as another means of pursuing unobtainable objectives. Indeed, I never claimed otherwise in my first post. Obama is alternately praised or cursed for his “engagement” of Iran, but the administration crafted its policy of engagement with the hope that it will yield Iranian disarmament. This is something that will not happen, which is not an argument against pursuing full normalization of relations. On the contrary, recognizing the futility of trying to disarm Iran is the beginning of working to integrate Iran as a pillar of regional security. For most participants in the debate, the thought of rapprochement is unthinkable until Iran abandons nuclear weapons ambitions. As I see it, rapprochement is the only way to adapt to Iran’s eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons without setting off the regional arms race many fear and without resorting to the use of force that will trigger broader conflict and which will fail to achieve its objectives in any case.

Most of the “reaching out” in the past has been carried out through symbolic gestures and rhetorical nods. Apologizing for the U.S. role in the 1953 coup did not end or modify the policy of dual containment that the Clinton administration pursued. Sending mid-level officials to Geneva, as the Bush administration did in its second term, did not remove the threat of “pre-emptive” use of force against Iranian nuclear facilities, and it did not halt covert support for Jundullah in eastern Iran. Were an historically hostile regime to make such half-hearted, minimal gestures to Washington, very few Americans in or out of government would find them credible.

There is a similar assumption afflicting Russia policy debate, as if there has been a time in the last eighteen years when U.S. policy towards Russia was not in some important respect confrontational and provocative. The argument is much the same: we have repeatedly sought good relations with Russia to no avail. As with Iran, the examples of our goodwill towards Russia are few and not very meaningful. If we recognize this, Russian skepticism and distrust are much easier to understand. Western hawks on Russia love to cite Bush’s silly remark that he had looked into Putin’s soul, as if this kind of empty public banter meant anything to Moscow at the same moment when Bush was pushing to scrap the ABM Treaty and expand NATO to their borders over their strenuous objections. Our government makes some minimal move, and this is supposed to override all the other substantive complaints the other government has.

Even when our government does something that does address the other government’s concerns, Washington always expects unreasonably great reciprocation from the other side. Having scrapped the missile defense system in central Europe, Washington expects Russian aid in pressuring Iran, which it was never likely to do under any circumstances. In short, even when we budge on points of contention, we give an inch and expect the other state to give up a mile, and then we recoil in frustration when the other state does not respond to our efforts to “reach out.” So, yes, we have “reached out” to Tehran many times over the years, but always haltingly, inconsistently and never with any intention of accepting Iran’s core security interests. It is no surprise that this sort of engagement has yielded nothing of consequence.

P.S. I would add that most of the “international community” has no interest in pressuring Iran on this or any other matter, much less compelling it to abandon its nuclear ambitions. This is a preoccupation limited almost entirely to the U.S. and our European allies. What makes effective sanctions regimes against Iran so politically difficult to create is the broad indifference of much to the world to the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons, because most nations in the world can see quite clearly that it is nothing to them whether or not Iran has a nuclear deterrent. Rising Asian powers and emerging-market countries simply do not see Iran as a threat, so when we are talking about engaging or “reaching out” to Iran we are speaking primarily of the U.S. and our major European allies. Even most of the latter engage in significant commerce with Iran.

It’s a matter of trust. And the Israelis don’t have it when it comes to President Obama. In the most recent Jerusalem Post poll, the number of Israelis who see Obama as pro-Israeli is just 4 percent. That’s not a typo; it was down two points since June. Fully 51 per cent say Obama is more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israeli. ~Richard Wolffe

I confess that I find these numbers mystifying. If Bush had an 88% “pro-Israeli” rating, and his administration was partly responsible for Hamas’ acquisition of elected power in Gaza, one could conclude that public perception of an American President’s “pro-Israel” leanings has absolutely nothing to do with the susbstance of the policies he pursues. How could it have been “pro-Israeli” to encourage Olmert to wage his failed, counterproductive war in Lebanon? Yet this is what Bush did. To be fair, Obama supported the same failed, counterproductive war, just as he supported the operation in Gaza, and despite some slightly tougher rhetoric his stance on settlements is not really any different. How can Israeli opinion change so dramatically when the two men are virtually indistinguishable in their predictable, guaranteed support for Israel and most of its current policies?

I would have thought that one would need to be under the influence of mind-altering drugs to see Obama as “pro-Palestinian.” The idea that he is “pro-Palestinian” is so painfully, absurdly wrong that I don’t know quite what to make of it. I suppose it is possible that systematic misinformation could lead to such results, but even this would require a gullibility and willful blindness on the part of the general population that it seems unlikely. Wolffe remarked at one point that “it’s hard to be a mediator when one side feels you are overwhelmingly one-sided,” which is quite amusing when you consider that Wolffe is referring to the Israeli side believing that the U.S. under Obama is “overwhelmingly one-sided” in favor of the Palestinians. This is as close to the opposite of current political reality as one can get. How can anyone contend with public opinion so completely unmoored from reality?

Like Jay Cost, I am fatigued by the permanent campaign, but he isn’t making any sense when he says this:

And so, in this case, what would otherwise have been a “mere” rejection of Chicago and Mayor Daley has now become a rejection of the entire country [bold mine-DL]. Why? Because of his decision to perpetuate the permanent campaign while holding the power of the executive.

This is wrong in several ways. If the President lends his support to an American city’s Olympic bid and that bid fails (as most informed observers outside the Chicago delegation guessed it would from the beginning), the “entire country” has not been rejected. This is ridiculous. While we invest it with some national symbolic importance, the Presidency does not embody “the entire country.” Though we may forget this at times, the Presidency does not even embody the entire federal government. There is something rather creepy in Cost’s assumption that a rejection of Obama, if that is what happened, is a rejection of America.

Why don’t we see the decision instead an affirmation of Lula, an embrace of Brazil, an endorsement of Rio de Janeiro? Because Obama’s critics and fans alike insist on making it about him and us, and they do this even when they are complaining that Obama inserts himself into everything. The problem here is as much our national self-absorption and continental provincialism as it is Obama’s politicking: most people criticizing Obama for this trip could not imagine losing out to the Brazilians, and it is even more unthinkable when the President involves himself. This is a product of an American feeling of entitlement, as if our city’s bid had to be the prohibitive favorite just because it was ours. After all, why would it be a “shock” that the IOC gave the next Games to a major city in an emerging-market country in South America instead of giving the U.S. yet another chance to host the Olympics? Everything pointed to Rio all along, but for many of Obama’s critics this seems incredible.

More to the point, while Obama went to Copenhagen when he didn’t have to go, it was the breathless obsession with this trip that both critics and admirers indulged in that has created the impression that the IOC’s decision represented, as Larry Kudlow absurdly said earlier today, “a crushing blow for the United States.” As far as I could tell, Rio had had the win locked up for some time, and today’s vote was mostly a formality. If Obama is “just the President,” as Cost says, we should be willing to ignore him whether or not he inserts himself into all sorts of things. Obama persists in campaign mode to the extent that he does because journalists, pundits and viewers respond to it and keep giving him reason to continue.

P.S. I should add that if Obama had ignored Chicago’s bid and it went down to defeat as it was always going to do, we would have heard endless groaning from the usual suspects about how Obama refused to “stand up” for America or some such nonsense.