The American Conservative

Earlier this month, Rep. Chaffetz voted against Afghanistan war funding. While expressing appropriate skepticism, Dan McCarthy wrote last week:

With Chaffetz voting against the Afghan War and Ann Coulter breaking with Bill Kristol, the Right’s foreign policy for the next decade is far from settled.

I have made my view of Chaffetz’s “antiwar” position pretty clear already, so I won’t rehearse that again, but I do find it a little odd that Dan gives Coulter any credit for her column bashing Kristol. Consider one of the main points Coulter makes in her column:

Then Bush declared success and turned his attention to Iraq, leaving minimal troops behind in Afghanistan to prevent Osama bin Laden from regrouping, swat down al-Qaida fighters and gather intelligence.

Coulter cites the main foreign policy blunder of Bush’s Presidency as if it were the appropriate, correct course of action. Afghanistan was the one place where those of us with “some vague concept of America’s national interest” could at least see some justification for military action, and Coulter approves of the diversion away from that for the sake of an entirely unnecessary war against a government that posed no threat to the United States. One of the main reasons why there is still a U.S. presence in Afghanistan is that the “minimal troops” available after Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq were insufficient to prevent the regrouping of Taliban militias that threatened the “American-friendly government” established in Kabul.

Those “minimal troops” were also so spread out in the countryside that they had to rely heavily on air power to protect themselves against attack, which resulted in many civilian deaths, and that in turn created waves of “accidential” insurgents. All of this significantly compounded the security problems in the country, which the previous administration was mostly content to neglect. It is this same policy of neglect that created the poor security conditions in recent years that Coulter praises and wants the current administration to emulate. For his part, Chaffetz objects to the war in Afghanistan largely because U.S. forces have their “hands tied,” which means that he dislikes stricter rules of engagement that are designed to prevent civilian casualties.

It is hard to get around the reality that Coulter’s column is full of pro-Iraq war lies. For example, she writes:

Iraq had a young, educated, pro-Western populace that was ideal for regime change.

Surely if there was one thing that everyone could agree on by now, it is that most of the population was not particularly “pro-Western” as Coulter means it, and most of the educated professionals who could get away from the chaos created by the invasion fled the country en masse. The war for regime change that Coulter cannot stop defending gutted the Iraqi professional classes and robbed the country of many of its best-educated people, which is one of the reasons why Iraq is and will remain an economic basketcase. For that matter, decades of war and sanctions had significantly changed Iraqi society for the worse. So when Coulter says these things about Iraq, she is simply repeating standard pro-war propaganda c. 2002-03. Coulter calls for Bill Kristol’s resignation, but she is still reliably spouting the nonsense that he and so many other advocates of invasion were using to sell the war in Iraq. It’s as if she has put up a giant, blinking sign saying, “You cannot trust a word I say,” and everyone seems to have missed it.

I’m not trying to overlook opportunities for the antiwar right, and I don’t like being the constant naysayer who has to keep pointing out that Chaffetz, Coulter et al. cannot be taken seriously, but just judging by their own arguments they cannot be taken seriously. The “to hell with them” hawks may be up for grabs, but they are unlikely to be won over by people who don’t harbor irrational fears about Iran and who believe that the Iraq war was a strategic disaster for the United States, because these people remain very aggressive hawks who perceive threats where none exists.

When you have a House member who votes against funding for the war in Afghanistan, but would never dream of voting against Iraq war funding and wants the President to “take out” Iran’s nuclear facilities, you do not have someone coming to these conclusions based on anything resembling a sober understanding of the limits of American power or the national interest. At the very least, there has to be some honest accounting that overwhelming Republican and mainstream conservative support for the Iraq war was one of the worst mistakes they have made in decades, and there has to be some willingness to face up to the obvious lies that they embraced or happily repeated and recognize them as untrue. Simply turning Democratic rhetoric around and dubbing Iraq the “good war,” as Coulter has effectively done, merits contempt rather than sympathy.

Noah Millman correctly dismisses Frum’s case for the Israel alliance as a “Cold War relic.” There is almost nothing in Frum’s argument that comes from the last twenty years, and much that has happened in the last twenty years weighs against continuing the alliance in its current form. First, as Millman says, the Cold War is long over, and whatever strategic advantage Israel provided back then disappeared along with the Soviet Union. If the “realist case for a strong relationship with Israel today revolves primarily around the claim that we have common enemies,” as Millman writes, it is not at all clear that there is much that supports this case. As dreadful as they are, Hamas and Hizbullah are not enemies of the United States, and we largely treat Iran as our enemy because our Gulf allies and Israel insist that we do. At present and in the future, the U.S. has many reasons to find a modus vivendi with Iran and to improve relations, not least because one of our most important regional allies, Turkey, has made improved relations with Iran a priority. The claim that “we have common enemies” is based in no small part on the conflation of all Islamic revolutionary, resistance and jihadist groups into one camp in which Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbullah, and the IRGC are all placed regardless of their differences with one another or the threat they pose to U.S. interests. Meanwhile, the cold-eyed realist would not be overly concerned about Israeli policies in the territories unless the U.S. was seen as the enabler and supporter of the immiseration of Palestinians, but of course the U.S. is seen this way, it does damage America’s reputation throughout the region, and it is becoming a greater source of tension with our major allies in the region. There is nothing that the Israel alliance provides that merited taking Israel’s side against Turkey in the wake of the flotilla raid, but that is what Washington did even at the risk of permanently damaging the alliance with Turkey.

Millman also has a very reasonable conclusion:

In truth, I’m not sure what point is served by debating whether we should be “allied” with Israel. I’m not even sure what “ending” our alliance would mean, given that we don’t have any treaty obligations to them and we are hardly going to stop sharing intelligence or what have you. We’re allied with all sorts of countries with whom we have a variety of disputes – we don’t agree with everything our allies do or want to do, and sometimes we take a very hard line on their behavior. We were extremely forceful in getting the British and the French to withdraw from Suez in 1956. Heck, Pakistan is officially a major non-NATO ally and we’ve been dropping bombs on their territory! The real question is not whether America should continue to be Israel’s ally but whether America should be much tougher on its Israeli ally than it is, whether a tougher line would serve American interests or whether it would backfire.

Millman is basically right. We aren’t formally obligated by treaty commitments, so theoretically the alliance could “end” tomorrow if that is what Washington decided, but everyone realistically understands that some sort of alliance will remain for the foreseeable future. In many ways, the Israel alliance is like NATO: a once valuable and even necessary arrangement that served the security needs of all parties, but which now longer has much of a reason to exist. For the last twenty years, people in the U.S. and Israel have been trying to find a new reason for both the Israel alliance and NATO to continue, and each new model that has been tried has led to a dead end. Both of the alliances are largely obsolete, but neither is likely to end.

What does need to happen is to re-balance the relationship with Israel so that the political, diplomatic and financial costs of the alliance are matched by what the U.S. receives from it (which isn’t very much these days). At present, even the smallest moves in that direction are considered unspeakable betrayals. That is one reason why proponents of re-balancing the U.S.-Israel relationship are not interested in arguing for ending the alliance outright. It is difficult enough to argue for conditional reductions in economic aid that calling for a complete break would be rejected out of hand.

That is what makes Frum’s detour about Charles Freeman at the end of the same post especially ridiculous. Freeman outlined some of the costs that the alliance imposes on the U.S., and he may have understated the case, but he then made very modest recommendations for what the U.S. government should do to pressure Israel to halt settlements. My guess is that the “pathetically disproportionate” recommendations reflect Freeman’s understanding of what is politically possible here in the U.S. As it is, Freeman’s proposal to reduce economic aid to Israel to compel a halt to settlement activity is more than anyone in the administration or J Street is willing to advocate publicly. Had Freeman made a more radical proposal, Frum would not be congratulating him on his consistency or his boldness, but would instead be declaring him a lunatic.

Speaking of “Islamofascism,” Marc Lynch picks up on this recurring error in his very thorough review of Paul Berman’s Flight of the Intellectuals:

Many of the valuable debates that The Flight of the Intellectuals could have sparked are drowned out by Berman’s ludicrous efforts to construct an intellectual and organizational genealogy linking Nazi Germany and contemporary Islamism. His insistence on the usefulness of the concept of “Islamic fascism” — despite the fact that virtually all Muslims consider it a profound insult to their faith and identity — is one of the surest clues to his indifference to Muslim reality in favor of intellectual gamesmanship.

For the last three years at least, I have been railing against the complete stupidity of the term Islamofascism and all such related concepts. It is ludicrous to keep trying to tie modern Islamist movements to fascism, but there seems to be some sort of compulsion among anti-jihadists such as Berman to keep recycling this claim, if only to defy the “apologists” they think they are so brilliantly chastising. As I was suggesting in my 2007 column, the attempts to blur the differences between Islamists and then to link Islamists to Nazis are obviously not aimed at understanding the groups in question, but they are intended to vilify and tar all of them with ideological association with a movement everyone loathes. It is an exercise in propaganda and political mobilization instead of analysis, and so it is little surprise that the analysis written in support of it is so shoddy. Perhaps the most important thing the confusion between Islamism and fascism does is to grossly inflate the power and threat from Islamism to Western countries and to frame any remotely accommodating approach towards Muslim countries or Muslim communities in the West as “appeasement” and “surrender” on par with making concessions to Hitler.

Update: Thanks to commenter Norwegian Shooter for alerting me to this Lynch post that led me to his review.

Besides, does the most serious human being always win [bold mine-DL]? Did Al Gore? Did John Kerry?

Sarah Palin has something more than intellect. She has the ability to understand, connect with and energize her party.

And considering her likely opposition — Romney, Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee or Haley Barbour — tell me she has no chance. Go ahead and tell me. It’s enough to make one snicker. ~Roger Simon

It’s risky to make absolute statements about anything, and it’s even more perilous to make them about the possible outcome of a nomination contest that still won’t start for another 16 months, but I am fairly confident when I say that Palin has no chance of winning. There, I’ve told him.

I’ve gone over the reasons why she has no chance in as many ways as I can. There are structural reasons (the GOP does not reward insurgents and favors establishment-backed candidates) and organizational reasons (her organization remains minimal and insufficient). Her unpopularity with non-Republicans is enough to give even her most enthusiastic admirers pause, and many of her admirers don’t think she is qualified for the office. As I was suggesting recently, there is probably a higher bar to nominating a woman for President in the GOP than in the Democratic Party, and there would probably be resistance to using a presidential nomination for the sake of achieving a symbolic “first” by choosing a woman. On this point, I would add one more observation: Republicans have an excessive, some might say absurd, admiration for the office of the Presidency, and they are especially enamored of executive power in wartime, and nominating Palin for that office simply goes against too many of their presidential-cultist and militarist instincts that not even Palin’s own militarism will be enough to compensate.

Simon’s question about the “most serious human being” unintentionally points to the reason why Palin has no chance. In 2000, Republicans were presented with a Western “reform” governor with few real achievements to his name, minimal relevant experience, and no obvious qualifications for the position or expertise in any major areas of policy. He was publicly exuberant about his religiosity, practiced an “aw shucks” campaign style, littered his speeches and debates with colloquial language, and seemed not to be embarrassed that he knew little or nothing about most of the rest of the world. Like Palin, Bush was far from being stupid, but both of them seem to take delight in their lack of knowledge, as if it confirmed that their down-home facade was who they really are. Ten years ago, we were told by admiring pundits that voters weren’t interested in wonks or experts, but wanted someone who was “one of them.” Of course, Bush was the farthest thing from being “one of them” as he could be, but in his aggressive pursuit of mediocrity he managed to convince a surprisingly large number of people to entrust him with incredible power. When it became known that Bush liked to make decisions from his “gut,” this seemed to enthrall millions of people and put their minds at ease, as if “gut” decisions were more desirable because they were irrational. And, yes, he won election by slimmest of margins, and then he won one of the weakest re-election mandates in modern presidential history, and almost immediately Americans began to regret that outcome.

We have already given one obviously unqualified Western governor a chance to wreck the country in the last decade, and not even the Republican Party that continues to defend and like Bush is so clueless and self-destructive that it would go to the country with a female version of the disaster we just experienced. The other possible contenders Simon mentions are all flawed and unattractive in different ways, but none of them so fully embodies all of the flaws that made Bush such a poor President as Palin. Most of the public already knows this, and given a chance to choose anyone other than Palin the GOP will turn gratefully to one of the others so that they might have at least a fighting chance in two years.

Gingrich’s full statement (via Chait) is even more ludicrous than the initial reports made it sound. Gingrich begins:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.

Is New York in any way comparable to Saudi Arabia? To ask the question is to acknowledge that the two have nothing in common. Later Gingrich complains that non-Muslims cannot enter Mecca, as if the site of the World Trade Center and Mecca are in some way analogous, but since when do we in the U.S. argue that we should treat religious minorities only as well as religious minorities are treated in the most repressive countries? If we took this seriously and applied it thoroughly, not only would there be no mosque permitted in that part of lower Manhattan, but there would not be one permitted anywhere in the United States.

Naturally, Gingrich isn’t so far gone as to call for that, so he simply insists that it not be permitted in this location, which confirms that the random inclusion of Saudi Arabia in the debate is simply designed to score points and inflame passions rather than provide support for an argument. From what we know of the promoters behind this project, Saudis have little or nothing to do with it, but Gingrich is hoping to conflate anyone involved with this project with Saudis. He is relying on his audience to remember that most of the hijackers were Saudis, to generalize from those 15 Saudis to all Saudis, and to identify all Muslims with the most extreme adherents of the most extreme forms of Islam. The purpose of this is not to resist “an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization,” because our civilization is in no danger of being destroyed by any such offensive, but to rile up people here and convince them that all Muslims are out to get them, which will in turn make them more receptive to the agenda of growing the security and warfare state that Gingrich et al. favor.

Gingrich complains that the original name of the building, Cordoba House, is itself an insult. References to Cordoba can mean many things. For Western ecumenists, Ummayad Cordoba represented a high-point of convivencia and therefore served as a model of multi-religious co-existence. What is usually not mentioned is how the cultural and intellectual life there stagnated later under the Almoravids and Almohads, nor do many remember the Mozarabic Christian martyrs of the early centuries of Islamic rule in Spain, and Gingrich doesn’t mention any of this, either. Then again, Gingrich is not really interested here in historical accuracy or understanding. Cordoba has also represented for Arab nationalists one of the high points of Arab culture, and for pan-Islamists it represented one of the most far-flung parts of the briefly-united caliphate, and it is only this latter meaning that Gingrich chooses to give to the name of the organization and the building project. Gingrich simply assumes bad faith on the part of the promoters, and that determines the entirety of his argument.

What may be most striking in Gingrich’s statement is his claim that “they” (i.e., Muslims) are lecturing “us” about tolerance, but what is happening is that “we” are being held to “our” own standards. Perhaps the most irritating thing about the arguments Gingrich and Palin are making is that they do not want to critique the idea of religious tolerance, but they don’t want to face up to what it might mean in practice.

Former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich on Wednesday announced his opposition to a planned mosque near ground zero, becoming the latest Republican leader to place the project on the national political stage. ~The New York Times

Whatever else one wants to say about the proposed Islamic center or the Cordoba Initiative, one thing that ought to be obvious right away is that this is a matter to be decided by New Yorkers, especially by the people who live in the immediate vicinity. The local community board supported this project almost unanimously, which should make the protestations of a politician parachuting in from the other side of the continent as irrelevant as they are ridiculous.

I do see how the building project might be seen as provocative at first, but it is actually quite hard to see how the project is an insult or such an “intolerable mistake” that it merits denunciations from national political figures who have zero connection to the place. Because of the 9/11 attacks at that location, many people seem intent on treating what happens there as something that affects the entire country, but it doesn’t. It is conventional to refer to it as “sacred ground,” as Palin does, but it is actually the site of an atrocity, not a place where miracles were performed or one where relics are laid to rest. Commemorating the people who were murdered there is right, but treating it as a locus sanctus with its own religious (or in this case anti-religious) significance is frankly very strange. Conservatives certainly don’t have to like an organization advised by the likes of Karen Armstrong, but they should be able to see that opposing this project doesn’t really make any sense.

As I said earlier this year:

The greatest danger all along has been that we would destroy or corrupt our institutions and our values out of an irrational exaggeration of the threat posed by jihadists, and that we would make this even worse through a widely shared blindness to the consequences of our national security and foreign policies. One reason anti-jihadist commentary has seemed less and less persuasive to me over the last decade is that anti-jihadists have done nothing to avoid these dangers and have done all that they could to make them worse.

Anti-jihadists keep making the same errors over and over. Instead of exploiting differences between jihadists and non-jihadists, among different kinds of Islamists, and between different groups of jihadists, anti-jihadists have been perfectly content to roll all of them into a single “Islamofascist” menace. That artificially inflates the strength of actual jihadist enemies by lending credibility to their propaganda, and as a result it makes jihadist causes more appealing. In this case, anti-jihadists are compounding their error by confusing the equivalent of Muslim ecumenists with hard-line Islamists. That is exactly what Gingrich does when he claims that the project is a “a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites” in the face of demands from aggressive Islamists. It’s not just that anti-jihadists are conflating any and all Muslims together here, but they are vilifying as aggressors some of the least aggressive Muslims around.

It is telling that the best Palin can come up with to justify her opposition to the project is that the organization’s lead cleric, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, referred to U.S. policies as accessories to the crime in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. That was not the most politic thing for a Muslim cleric to say at the time, but he was not saying that the “blame be placed on the innocents.” Rauf seems to have been saying that the U.S. government contributed to the chain of events that led to the attacks. To the extent that U.S. policies provoked blowback in the form of the attacks, he was basically correct. No less significant is the fact that Palin refers to the blockade of Gaza as justifiable in the same article in which she refers to the building project as intolerable. According to Palin, the immiseration of over a million people through deliberate economic warfare and collective punishment is perfectly all right, attempts to bring an end to that immiseration are wrong, and building a structure on legally purchased private property with the approval of the large majority of the area’s residents is intolerable. Perhaps the only thing worse than these warped judgments is the pretense that Palin is the voice of “common moral sense,” when she is actually representing the lowest common denominator of shameless demagoguery.

While I was traveling last week, I missed the spat that erupted between the Romney and Palin camps. Steve Kornacki reviews Romney’s track record competing against different women over the years, and he reasonably concludes that Romney comes off looking like a heel whenever he competes against a woman for political office. That seems fair enough, but what seems to have been lost in the discussion is that Romney defeated all of his women opponents. It is quite a leap from saying “Romney treats women opponents badly and wins every time” to saying “Romney cannot possibly defeat Palin,” but somehow Andrew gets there.

Of course, Kornacki acknowledges that Romney is undefeated against women, but thinks that the way that Romney defeated all of his rivals in the past could cost him in a presidential campaign. It could be that Romney treats Palin roughly and ends up looking so bad that he becomes radioactive to a huge majority of women voters in the fall, but what Romney’s record tells me is that he has no scruples about doing whatever is necessary to win a nomination or an election. There also seems to be the suggestion that it is Romney who is at a disadvantage in any intra-Republican contest in which gender becomes a significant issue. That is an odd thing to assume. Palin’s “Mama Grizzly” routine works well enough when the perceived attackers are coming from outside the GOP, but my guess is that it will fall flat and will come across as mere whining when she uses it to fend off Republican rivals.

Do we really think that most Republican primary voters are more likely to nominate a woman for President than Democratic voters were two years ago? Do we really think that Republicans would prefer the less qualified candidate because she is a woman? Wouldn’t many Republicans want Romney to succeed to prove that the GOP is not dominated by religious conservatives who will not support a Mormon candidate Wouldn’t that impulse to show religious tolerance overwhelm any impulse to promote Palin beyond her ability just to get credit for nominating the first woman nominee? If the 2012 nomination contest comes down to a head-to-head fight between Romney and Palin, there appears to be every reason to think that Romney prevails. Whether he emerges from that contest so sullied by his own tactics that he cannot win a general election is a very different question.

The Republican Party would do well to reclaim its realist roots and cast a skeptical eye at counter-insurgency and nation-building operations. But if they wish to hang the Afghan albatross around President Obama’s neck, they must first ask themselves how their own president, who supposedly staffed his administration with seasoned “realists” and vowed during his first presidential campaign not to engage in nation-building, wound up leveraging American and NATO lives, money and prestige on just such an endeavor. ~Greg Scoblete

Greg makes a pretty good case that Republicans ought to turn against nation-building schemes. They have no strong postwar tradition of supporting such things, and they don’t seem to be particularly good when they try to administer them. Many Republicans did attack nation-building in the 1990s, and it has become customary to marvel at the sudden conversion of most Republicans to the cause of nation-building when Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. The change in Republican attitudes was striking, but it confirmed that the complaints against Clinton’s nation-building exercises were not exactly what they appeared to be. The main objection that Republicans had to nation-building was not that it was always impossible. Many of the same people who scoffed at nation-building in the Balkans were among the first to argue in 2002-03 that “we” had “done it before” after WWII. Most skeptics of nation-building on the right back then did not say that the United States should not attempt to remake other nations after our image. They were offended by using the military for “social engineering” because the military was not trained for it and because it was a distraction from the “real” threats that loomed on the horizon (by which they meant China, Iran, Russia, Iraq, etc.).

The most significant flaw in Republican foreign policy thinking over the last twenty years has been this obsession with those so-called “real” threats. The greatest foreign policy error Republicans made in the last generation was their almost universal support for invading Iraq. Most did not support it because they actually expected regional political transformation to result from the establishment of a “beacon” of democracy in the Near East, and most did not support it because they believed that constructing a functioning Iraqi state was possible or desirable. Some of the most vocal and ardent supporters of the invasion made these arguments, but these were not the arguments that swayed most Republicans. Most Republicans backed the invasion because they believed the incredible notion that Iraq’s government at the time represented an intolerable national security threat that had to be eliminated, and many of them also believed the even more incredible notion that Hussein was sheltering members of Al Qaeda, and they believed this because “the President in wartime” had told them so. It was this hysterical exaggeration of a foreign threat and the accordingly excessive reaction that made the worst foreign policy blunder of the last 30 years possible, and it was that automatic deference to executive power that stifled so much of the vital skepticism that conservatives are supposed to value so highly. In the wake of all this, some prominent Republicans and conservatives have started making some unexpected criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, and the main mistake they have identified is…nation-building! As I have tried to argue before, hostility to nation-building is a pretty shaky foundation on which to establish a different kind of conservative foreign policy. Opposing nation-building is all very well and good, and the instinct to oppose it is usually a good one, but unless Republicans sober up and begin assessing foreign threats calmly and reasonably this will simply lead to repeats of the Iraq experience: overly-ambitious missions based on irrational fears and faulty assumptions, and supported with insufficient resources.

Greg calls for the GOP to “reclaim its realist roots,” but as I was discussing last week the people that Noah Millman has called militarists continue to dominate the party and the realists appear to be an increasingly marginal faction that is dying off. The division over START ratification is one example that shows the fairly sharp generational split between the older realist national security hands such as Scowcroft and Baker and the younger, rising political leaders in the party. Put simply, there are almost no Republican supporters of a basic treaty governing nuclear arms control under the age of 60. On Iran, it is once again the militarists who seem to be gaining at the expense of realists, especially when so many realists long ago bought into the idea that an Iranian nuclear weapon is “unacceptable” and when such a prominent Republican realist as Richard Haass has succumbed to regime change fever.

If all that reclaiming “realist roots” accomplished was to persuade Republicans to turn against the war in Afghanistan entirely, or to settle for George Will’s preferred recipe for future blowback, what would have really been gained? It isn’t going to make them less hawkish on Iran policy, and it is hardly going to make them more skeptical about using force to solve international disputes. Indeed, rejecting a nation-building role in conflict zones will make the immediate costs and risks of military action lower than they would be otherwise. Far from making them less obsessed with the “threats” from Russia and China, it will allow them to reject the one policy where the cooperation or at least tolerance of both major powers is most obviously valuable, which will give them even greater incentives to stoke tensions with one or both.

In practice, if the GOP “reclaimed its realist roots” I wonder how much would change for the better. Republican realism sounds good by comparison with what we have had for the last decade, but most actual Republican realists, especially those in elected office, did little or nothing to challenge the endless hyping of foreign threats and the frequent recourse to military intervention abroad in the ’90s. Back in 1999, many of the defenders of the war against Yugoslavia were such Republican realists as Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar. At the time, they supported yet another completely unnecessary war for the sake of the “credibility of NATO” and, of course, regional stability, which resulted in confirming the worst Russian fears about NATO expansion and significantly destabilizing the region with a massive refugee crisis and the spread of ethnic unrest into neighboring Macedonia. How many realists not affiliated with the Cato Institute expressed serious reservations about NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia before the August 2008 war? As sympathetic as I am to many realist arguments, and as much as I appreciate the efforts of the most sober realists to try to steer Republican foreign policy thinking in a constructive direction, until Republicans reject confrontational and aggressive foreign policy goals it will not matter very much if they adopt realist means and rhetoric.

Noah Millman made an interesting observation that McCain’s “we are all Georgians now” declaration ought to have provoked opposition or at least mockery from “Jacksonians” who are proudly American and nationalistic in their conception of what it means to be American. Millman wrote:

Now, Jacksonians don’t have to be militarists, and if they weren’t they might serve as such a check. Jacksonians care deeply about national honor; to serve as a useful check on Wilsonian impulses, they would need to oppose the commitment of the national honor when there is no important national interest. So, when conflict between Russia and Georgia erupts, and John McCain (hard Wilsonian militarist extraordinaire) says we’re all Georgians, you’d need to hear the response – “no we aren’t: we’re Americans, and don’t you forget it!” Sounds like a Jacksonian response to me – but that’s not what we heard.

On the face of it, that sounds right, but as Millman noted there was no Jacksonian backlash against McCain’s pro-Georgian enthusiasm. Why not? There is no way to be absolutely sure, but a likely reason is that when McCain’s “Jacksonian” supporters heard this (if they were paying attention to the August war at all) they took it in the spirit in which it was offered: as a fanatical statement of hostility to Russia. Accordingly, what McCain really meant was, “We are all anti-Russian.” Unfortunately, a great many conservatives and “Jacksonians” would be only too willing to agree. Whenever surveys are done asking ally/enemy questions, a large plurality of conservatives and Republicans still identifies Russia as an enemy.

For many “Jacksonians,” especially those who grew up during the height of the Cold War, Russia remains an easy default enemy, and old anti-Soviet sentiment translates easily into anti-Russian feeling. In other words, sympathy for Georgia functions as an expression of antipathy to Russia. To the extent that “Jacksonians” believe the myths that the U.S. “won” the Cold War and specifically that it was Reagan who “won” it, they see the independent states along Russia’s borders that once were part of Russia before the revolution as monuments of a sort to America’s Cold War “victory.” This is partly why so many conservatives and Republicans find anti-Russian nationalist leaders so attractive: they are reminders of what came from the end of the Cold War, and with the “color” revolutions Ukraine and Georgia potentially represented the second wave of democratization in the post-communist world that could further confirm the “victory” over the USSR. There is also some desire on the American right to recapture the cohesiveness and unity that anticommunism once provided, and I suspect the utterly irrational belief that Russia today is headed towards some “neo-Soviet” empire is a product of the desire to have the old enemy against which conservatives of various stripes could rally.

One might think that nationalists in the U.S. would not take an interest in the fates of small nations on the other side of the world, but there are a couple reasons why proxy and so-called “front-line states” are considered so important. First, supporting the cause of front-line states is part and parcel of endorsing America’s superpower status and embracing a global “leadership” role. “Jacksonians” may bristle at nation-building, but it isn’t because they want to forego the role of hegemon. They are offended by nation-building mostly because they see it as a distraction and waste of military resources that could be better used somewhere else. After all, the hegemon has better things to do than funding reconstruction projects in Central Asia. By “better things,” they usually mean launching new military strikes on yet another state that has done little or nothing to us. The other reason is that supporting front-line states is another way of endorsing American power projection in a given region and affirming their hostility to other major powers or expressing their anti-jihadist views. In any given region, “Jacksonians” ask who is more “like us,” identify with that group, and conclude that we are on their side against their enemies.

Neutrality seems to sit badly with “Jacksonians” and this is bound up in national pride that is rooted in an Americanism that links American greatness with the ideological causes of the 20th century for which Americans fought. It is therefore against their instincts in specific cases to declare that the conflicts between front-line states and their neighbors are none of their business. They are even less likely to say that we should not take sides. Neutrality is really only an option if all sides seem equally alien and irrelevant to advancing American influence in the region. The strong moralizing element in American attitudes towards the rest of the world makes it difficult to find fault on both sides, and it makes it even harder to blame the front-line client state and the U.S. for the client’s predicament. There is an unambiguously good side in these conflicts as far as American nationalists are concerned, and one’s response to the conflict is a measure of moral integrity as well as support for American clients. To defend the other side or to argue that both sides are to blame is to engage in the unforgiveable crime of “moral equivalence.” This leads such people to conclude not only that critics of the client state are in league with evil, but that they are also anti-American.

In a bizarre way, fidelity to Georgia becomes a test of one’s loyalty to the U.S. “Good” and “real” Americans will back up Saakashvili because he is on “our side” and because he has the right enemies. To do otherwise is to “sell out” an ally, “appease” Russia and become “pro-Russian” and therefore anti-American. This is how nationalists end up conflating American goals with the goals of other nations without seeing any contradiction. When front-line states are not involved, there is much greater indifference. “Jacksonians” were uninterested in the Balkan interventions for the most part, because the belligerents did not include a traditional American rival. There was ample hatred for Serbia in the U.S. in the 1990s, but for the most part “Jacksonians” could agree that we had no “dogs” in those fights (and this happened to be true). When they believe that we do have a “dog in the fight,” “Jacksonians” become quite insistent on more and deeper U.S. involvement, and they usually portray our own government as weak and cowardly if it fails to provide as much aid as they think is necessary.

All of this is ultimately a product of the sort of nationalism that defines itself in terms of opposition and according to what it is not. Their being American entails being against some other nation or ideology. The specific nations will come and go, the ideologies will change, but the need for an enemy is central to the self-conception of this kind of American nationalist. Part of this involves a constant exaggerating of foreign threats, which makes a fallen world seem vastly more dangerous than it is. Militarism comes naturally to people who believe the world is filled with threats and the only way to hold them at bay is with overwhelming strength. If there are not enough demonstrations of strength, nationalists argue that the country is getting soft and weak. These nationalists are aggressive because they are convinced that threats are everywhere and growing and aggression is necessary for a very broadly defined “self-defense.” They will not blink at attacking other nations without good reason, but they always act as if it is America that is the aggrieved party. Almost all nationalists do this, but it is especially noticeable when the disparity of power between the U.S. and its targets is so great. Arguing that such attacks are unjust, immoral and illegal will get anti-militarists nowhere with nationalists. Believe me, I have tried, and they don’t accept my description of what happened, and sometimes they do and just don’t care. The only way to get through is to persuade them that militarism is a threat to America, and I’m not sure that will make any sense to them.

So, no, we are not all Georgians, but American nationalists feel obliged to express solidarity for an American client state in order to confirm support for American power overseas and to show their enmity for our clients’ enemies, which they have adopted as their own or already saw as enemies earlier. This is why so many critics of nation-building have been perfectly happy to subsidize Israeli settlements or Georgian economic development and military modernization. If the nations being built are culturally and politically close enough to us, nationalists don’t have that much of a problem with being ensnared in their intractable conflicts or with wasting American resources and jeopardizing concrete U.S. interests. American nationalists happily treat costly strategic liabilities as valuable allies, so long as they have the right enemies and so long as they adopt a suitably confrontational posture.

So it is difficult to see how there can be a counter to militarism on the right when the things that fuel militarism go unchallenged and unopposed. Almost a year ago, I identified nationalism as a major distorting force that had been ruining conservatism by making it too inclined to centralization at home and aggressive policies overseas. Nationalists tend to favor national consolidation as desirable in itself and as a way to facilitate the growth of national power in the world, and they tend to idolize the President in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, and both of these things make them friends of unaccountable and arbitrary government. An important step in countering militarism would be dramatically decentralizing political power, followed by steadily reining in the executive branch and reasserting the role of Congress in the making of foreign policy. These would be worthwhile things to do for many other reasons, but they are absolutely necessary if anti-militarism is to have any chance of competing within the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

Another necessary move would be to reclaim the language of national defense and security from the militarists. One would think that this should be easy, as militarists have done so much to undermine American security over the decades and have presided over unprecedented attacks on American soil, but it requires a careful separation of those policies that would actually enhance American security from the cheap demagogic rhetoric that talks endlessly about strength, credibility and resolve. An anti-militarist right would have to keep emphasizing that the security of the people and territory of the United States is constantly undermined the more that we fritter away resources and soldiers on the other side of the planet, and over the long-term interventions overseas will create more enemies than we can possibly afford. It would also have to avoid the pitfalls of the mindless chest-thumping, “we’re #1!” rhetoric that so many contemporary defenders of American exceptionalism seem to demand.

Anti-militarists will need to find some way to express admiration and national pride that does not devolve into boasting of supremacy and self-congratulation. There should be recognition and respect accorded to the nation’s real accomplishments and virtues, but absolute resistance to hyperbole, arrogance, lazy anti-Europeanism, and hogging all of the credit for the joint successes shared with our allies. We shouldn’t go out of our way to denigrate past American wars, not least because it will not change any minds and simply makes resistance to future wars weaker than it should be. Still, when the subject comes up, we should definitely not mythologize past conflicts, and we should remind people of the terrible, often unnecessary costs they imposed on the U.S. and other nations.

Conservative anti-militarists face a great difficulty. They must also in large part be anti-nationalists, or at least opposed to the kind of nationalism that now prevails on the right. However, as soon as anti-militarists express their opposition to nationalism, the nationalists they are trying to persuade will conclude that they are anti-American and will not hear anything else they say, and in an age of mass politics the more nationalist force tends to win more support. If anti-militarists do not reject nationalism, anti-militarists are stuck reinforcing all of the habits and assumptions that have made militarism so politically successful and enduring, and so they might wind up achieving nothing. Perhaps one could find some middle way by which anti-militarists explain to nationalists that militarism objectively undermines national greatness. It is this greatness they should be interested in preserving rather than focusing on making them feel good about themselves by constantly repeating how exceptional, unique and wonderful we are.

Angle has managed to embrace the one Founding Father with a disturbing tolerance for the political violence of the French Revolution. “Rather than it should have failed,” enthused Jefferson, “I would have seen half the earth desolated.” Hardly a conservative model. ~Michael Gerson

Perhaps Gerson remembers the following words:

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

This is hardly a conservative idea, either, and it is even less so when Bush said later that “we have lit a fire as well as a fire in the minds of men,” which is eerily enough the same phrase Dostoevsky used to describe the destructive power of revolutionary ideas in The Possessed. A little later, Bush said, “It [the fire] warms those who feel its power; it burns those who fight its progress. And one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.” Bush didn’t exactly say that half the earth would be desolated, but untamed fires tend to destroy everything in their path. How exactly was any of that conservative or responsible?

Of course, all of these pyrotechnics are supposed to happen elsewhere in the world. Even when constitutional liberties are infringed and undermined in the name of security, as they were repeatedly by Gerson’s former boss, we are supposed to pretend that the threats to liberty are all external and far away. Now the man who helped craft some of the most dangerous revolutionary rhetoric in recent American history wants to lecture others about an excessive fondness for the same. What’s more, Gerson wants to pose as some sort of dour, “responsible” skeptic of violent political change when he helped author many of the speeches that justified a war for regime change in Iraq! The speechwriter for the neo-Jacobins wants us to believe that he is horrified by the excesses of the Jacobins.

Jefferson’s support for the French Revolution is certainly one of the darker blots on his reputation, and it is one of the things that keeps conservatives sympathetic to the Jeffersonian persuasion from being stronger admirers of Jefferson himself. What is remarkable here is that Gerson is pretending that he is some latter-day Burke expressing revulsion at violent revolution when he happily served in an administration whose practical policy and stated goal was to try to export revolution all over the world. Perhaps the most important point to be made here is that Gerson worked alongside the people who ushered in violent political change that devastated an entire country, and they also trampled on the rights of American citizens and subjected suspects to indefinite detention and abuse. For her part, Sharron Angle has indulged in some careless and probably ultimately meaningless rhetoric about resisting tyranny at home. Angle’s rhetoric may be reckless or it may be empty, but so far she has not used her rhetoric in the service of an administration given to starting wars and violating the Constitution.

Of course, the encroachments that prompted the Founders to rebel against their government were incredibly small compared to the intrusions and violations Americans accept every day as a matter of course. What they counted as tyranny, almost all of us regard as the normal operation of a modern government, and some such as Gerson tolerate an even greater degree of government outside the rule of law. Had Gerson lived at the time of the War for Independence, he would probably have preferred remaining part of a centralizing empire, since that is clearly what he wishes for the United States today. His “responsible, governing agenda” will inevitably involve concentrating more power in the capital, expanding the reach of the state into the lives of citizens and entangling our country even more deeply in conflicts around the world for the sake of our “global commitments.” Whatever their mistakes or flaws, the people Gerson has targeted for condemnation are unlikely to do these things, and if they are sincere they will resist them most or all of the time. We had eight years of Gerson’s sort of “responsible” governance, and it was a period marked by unnecessary war, illegal surveillance, detention and torture, executive power grabs, centralization of power, and the creation of staggering unfunded liabilities. The Republican Party was a captive of Gerson’s wing for almost all of the Bush administration’s tenure, and it continues to be defined by the extremism that prevailed during that time.