The American Conservative

The recession and prolonged joblessness have led to a rise in protectionist sentiment, and no politician has stood up forthrightly to advocate for open markets and unrestricted trade. Nor is there a special interest group — a Patriotic Americans for Free Trade, say — that could launch a major television campaign to shape public opinion. ~Matt Continetti

Yes, the poor supporters of free trade agreements are really struggling to get their message out there. If only their arguments could be heard, that would turn things around! More information about free trade agreements wouldn’t do much to reduce popular opposition to them. Indeed, the more one learns about the Korean free trade agreement, the clearer it is that it is a bad deal for the U.S. For one thing, people whose communities have been affected or devastated by off-shoring and de-industrialization aren’t likely to believe the argument that free trade is beneficial. Even if the disruptions and losses that they have experienced were “made up” somewhere else in the country, that’s happening somewhere else and it doesn’t do those communities any good.

As for opening up markets, passing the sort of bilateral free trade agreement proposed with South Korea probably isn’t going to achieve much of anything in terms of opening up the South Korean market:

Even in cases where topics are nominally covered by the FTAs, the truth is that the FTAs may be largely meaningless. This is especially true for intellectual property and market opening. The proposed FTA between South Korea and the United States is a good example of both issues. It contains very strong language with regard to increasing protection of intellectual property. But the Korean legal system has demonstrated that it may rule otherwise. Over the past 15 years, for example, patents granted by the Korean patent office to FormFactor, an American company, for its probe cards (a device for testing semiconductor wafer circuits), were nullified by the Korean courts. This was not particularly surprising; Korean courts rarely rule in favor of non-Korean companies. Obviously the language of an FTA is pretty meaningless if a nationalistic legal system refuses to uphold it. In these circumstances, it does not make any difference what kind of FTA a country concludes; it will not achieve anything close to free trade.

FTAs are also meant to open markets, meaning that in any particular market, domestic and foreign producers are able to operate under the same conditions. Indeed, these deals are supposed to grant a sort of local treatment to nonlocal entrants into the market. Clearly, to sell a product in a given country, a producer must be able to get its products in front of the customer. Yet these FTAs never guarantee that. Take autos, for example: To sell them, an automaker must find dealers who will put the cars in their showrooms, service them, and market them. But in most countries, auto dealers don’t sell multiple brands. So even if auto tariffs are slashed to zero, in many countries imports of foreign cars won’t rise much because there are no or few dealers who will actually put the cars on their lots.

Continetti’s claim that the delay of these free trade agreements is one of the things holding back the economy is to be expected, but it’s not true. Clyde Prestowitz explained the flaws of the Korean agreement back in April:

If the economic gains from the Latin deals are likely to be small, they at least can be said to be real for both sides. In contrast, it is not clear that the proposed FTA with South Korea will produce any net gains for the United States at all. The U.S. International Trade Commission has calculated that the result of the proposed U.S.-Korea FTA is likely to be an increase in the overall U.S. trade deficit. And this is without accounting for the fact that South Korea’s currency management policies can easily offset any tariff reduction that may be made. Of course, some U.S. companies might benefit from the arrangement, but for the United States as a whole, any increase in its trade deficit at this time of high unemployment will only contribute to a further increase in the unemployment.

Prestowitz has also argued that all of these bilateral trade deals on tariffs miss out on the most important barriers to exchange. To take just the most obvious example, free trade negotiations of all kinds ignore the role of currency manipulation:

But dueling FTAs is the least of the problems. Far more significant is the question of whether any of our free trade negotiations, be they in pursuit of FTAs or in pursuit of new global arrangements under the auspices of the WTO, have any relevance to the actual problems in the global economy.

Take the question of exchange rates. FTAs, as well as all the WTO negotiations, including the Doha round, focus on tariff reduction and protection of intellectual property. Yet manipulated exchange rates can have a far greater effect on imports and exports than the tariffs that are so laboriously negotiated. Brazil, China, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Switzerland all intervene in international currency markets to keep their currencies undervalued as a kind of indirect subsidy for their export-led economic growth strategies. Currencies can swing by 20 to 30 percent in the course of a few months, easily wiping out tariff reductions that might be equal to 2 to 5 percent of the cost of a product. Cordoned off as the domain of banks and finance ministries, one of the single most important determinants of trade is thus left out of discussions altogether.

Advocates for “open markets and unrestricted trade” might be able to persuade a few more people to see the merits of free trade if they didn’t endorse such flawed agreements that don’t do much to open markets or eliminate the most significant barriers to trade.

Despite their seeming shock, though, and despite the predictions of people like Robert Kagan that authoritarian and pseudo-authoritarian countries like Russia would follow a broadly “anti-democratic” foreign policy, it’s long been clear that the Russian government doesn’t particularly care whether a country is democratic but rather if that country is friendly towards Russia. ~Mark Adomanis

This is right. As Mark mentions later in the post, Russian opposition to Bakiyev and tacit support for the Kyrgyz opposition in 2010 was one example of how Moscow was willing to ignore the type of regime in a country and align itself with those forces that were more cooperative with Russia. It also marked the end of the so-called “freedom agenda” in post-Soviet space.

Kagan’s democracy vs. “autocracy” model of international relations is wrong in many ways, but it is particularly misguided in believing that Russia (or China) automatically prefers to support other authoritarian governments out of some feeling of solidarity with other authoritarians. Kagan looks back to an earlier world of Great Power rivalry and maps it onto the modern world, and he then assumes that the struggle between autocratic and absolute monarchies and liberal and constitutional movements in the 19th century has some relevance for what is happening now.

There hasn’t been much meaningful political solidarity among “autocrats” since 1853, and outside of the Gulf states we are unlikely to see coordinated international action by absolute or authoritarian rulers. How Russia relates to these states depends on what the authoritarian governments want to do, and whether that conflicts with their interests. What they prefer are governments that are not fiercely anti-Russian (or anti-Chinese).

Russia has viewed many of the so-called “color” revolutions with such suspicion because they were obviously anti-Russian nationalist movements aimed at aligning neighboring countries with the U.S. Their supposed or real democratic character was not all that relevant. The willingness of Moscow and Beijing to lend support to authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian regimes that are potentially in danger of being targeted for Western intervention is partly a negative response to U.S. democracy promotion, and it is also their way of defending the international status quo to limit the ability of Western governments to intervene in the internal affairs of other states. In that sense, their foreign policy will only appear “anti-democratic” in those regions where the “democrats” are Western clients or allies.

While protesters were killed and tortured, Secretary Clinton said the Administration was “waiting to see the outcome of the internal Iranian processes.” She and the president waited long enough to see the Green Movement crushed. ~Tim Pawlenty

We can all agree that the Green Movement was crushed, but what exactly could the administration have done that would have prevented or positively affected this outcome? Iran hawks view the Iranian regime in the worst possible light as ruthless, uncompromising tyrants, but they also seem to think that they would be responsive to a harsh scolding from foreign leaders. Oh, and sanctions. We shouldn’t forget sanctions. Pawlenty has a comical amount of confidence in sanctions as an effective instrument of foreign policy. If they have not been successful to date, he takes it for granted that all that will needed is even more sanctions.

The choice in the summer of 2009 in responding to the Iranian crackdown was between full-throated denunciation that would have changed nothing, and which could very well have made things worse for the opposition, and exercising restraint by saying very little in the knowledge that the U.S. could not lend any support that would have been constructive. On the whole, the Green movement didn’t want U.S. or foreign help. As Hooman Majd wrote in January 2010:

U.S. President Barack Obama has so far expressed only moral support for Iranians fighting for their civil rights and has rightly articulated the unrest in Iran as a purely Iranian affair. Lacking relations with Iran, Obama can do little to help the green movement, but plenty to hurt it. Coming out squarely on the side of the opposition in Iran is likely to undermine its credibility, and perhaps even lend credence to the government’s assertion that the movement is a foreign-inspired plot that will rob Iran of its independence.

As it was, Western expressions of support for the Green movement premised on the idea that the movement was intent on toppling the current regime were genuinely harmful to the movement’s chances.

The Green movement is not the only thing Pawlenty gets wrong in his remarks on Iran. He seems to believe that the administration had a serious engagement policy with Iran, but it was never a genuine attempt to engage with the Iranian government on the nuclear issue or on anything else. It was mostly done for the benefit of other states in order to organize a new round of sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, and to that very limited extent it achieved its misguided goal. When Brazil and Turkey attempted to mediate the dispute, the administration slapped them down. Further, he absurdly concludes that the reason that U.S.-Saudi relations have been in a nosedive this year is Saudi dissatisfaction with the Iran engagement policy, when it is fairly common knowledge that the Saudis and all of the Gulf states have been reacting to Obama’s treatment of Mubarak.

Pawlenty then veers into the realm of sheer fantasy:

When [Assad goes], the mullahs of Iran will find themselves isolated and vulnerable. Syria is Iran’s only Arab ally. If we peel that away, I believe it will hasten the fall of the mullahs.

There is no reason to suppose that Assad’s fall would hasten the collapse of the Iranian regime. It might present a serious blow to Iranian influence in the region, and it could curtail Iran’s ability to wield influence in Lebanon, but that wouldn’t make Iran much more isolated. There’s no way of knowing what would replace Assad in any case, and it is possible that a future Syrian government would find some advantage in continuing the economic and military ties between Syria and Iran that Assad has increased. Regardless, Iran would still have diplomatic and economic ties to many other significant powers, not least of which include Russia, China, and India. Such a setback in foreign affairs would not trigger regime collapse, and it is foolish to expect this.

After his awful speech today, Pawlenty is receiving praise for his “principled” stand from the usual suspects. Now that Republicans are dividing more sharply over foreign wars, and a substantial part of the party base is growing weary of the policy of perpetual war, it is becoming a mark of “principle” for politicians who have spent the last two years pandering to national security hawks to keep pandering to them. Pawlenty is supposed to be the generic, broadly acceptable candidate, but practically the only people expressing any strong interest in his candidacy are neoconservatives. He has been dubbed “the most serious candidate on foreign policy” at Commentary, which should be sufficient warning to stay away from him. Pawlenty’s call for a return to the worst of first-term Bushism may be part of the reason why he is doing so poorly in every early primary and caucus state.

One of the stranger things about the GOP presidential contest is that Mitt “No Apology” Romney has managed to let Tim Pawlenty outdo him in ignorant hawkishness. After spending the better part of the last two years berating Obama on foreign policy, and despite going out of his way to embarrass himself by jumping on board with the anti-START crowd, Romney is now lumped in with the rest of the field because he expressed modest reservations about permanently occupying Afghanistan. Considering public discontent with both Libya and Afghanistan, this is probably the best thing that could happen to Romney. If Pawlenty becomes the most aggressive hawk in the field, Romney will able to appear almost reasonable by comparison. Pawlenty could do what McCain did for Bush on foreign policy in 2000 by providing a neoconservative foil for a slightly more realist-oriented campaign, but only if he lasts long enough to remain a major contender. As things stand right now, Pawlenty won’t be Romney’s problem, and by fully embracing a Bush-like agenda of hegemonism and democratism he might be driving away voters that would otherwise support him.

My essay for World Politics Review on Libya and the “responsibility to protect” doctrine is now available (subscription required). The other essay contributions can be found here.

Update: David Rieff’s article in the new issue of The National Interest makes some important complementary arguments on how the R2P doctrine is becoming nothing more than a new form of militarized humanitarian intervention from which it was supposed to be significantly different:

Instead, as the Libyan case illustrates, R2P’s most immediate relevance is that it can be used quickly and effectively as a legal and moral justification for military intervention. Evans is correct when he insists that the doctrine’s ambitions are far larger. Where he is wrong is in continuing to claim that, in practice, there has been all that much movement away from the “droit d’ingérence.” Some of his recent speeches suggest that Evans himself realizes this. Having greeted the passage of Resolutions 1970 and 1973 with profound satisfaction, noting on March 24 that the Security Council had “written exactly the right script,” Evans has since worried publicly that as NATO action failed to dislodge Qaddafi, its military operations began to stretch the UN mandate to protect Libyan civilians to its “absolute limit.” For Evans, the great danger is that this mission creep will accelerate the risk “of buyers’ remorse from those who did not oppose Resolution 1973, and of a backlash when the next extreme [responsibility-to-protect] case comes before the Security Council.”

As I said before, my money is that he’ll cozy up to this wing by sounding protectionist trade themes. ~Dan Drezner

Drezner did say this before, and it didn’t make sense the first time. Not only does Pawlenty favor all pending free trade agreements, he believes the U.S. “should start new bilateral talks with our trading partners,” and in his speech today he took a very aggressive neoliberal line on massively increasing inequality in Egypt opening up the Egyptian market. Pawlenty said:

We act out of friendship when we tell Egyptians, and every new democracy, that economic growth and prosperity are the result of free markets and free trade—not subsidies and foreign aid. If we want these countries to succeed, we must afford them the respect of telling them the truth.

That may be, but Pawlenty is not taking account of how much worse the backlash against such policies could be. When the would-be new democracy in question has an electorate that expects the next government to solve Egypt’s economic woes practically overnight, force-feeding the people neoliberal policies is a very good way to ensure an immediate populist backlash and the permanent marginalization of supporters of economic liberalization. It hardly helps that Egyptians correctly associate such reforms with the circle around Mubarak’s son, and they correctly perceive privatization policies as an important source of corruption and cronyism under Mubarak. Pawlenty may offer up thin pseudo-populist gruel on the debate stage when the debate turns to trade, but according to his speeches he appears to be a true believer in the virtues of free trade under any and all circumstances.

P.S. Earlier today, Drezner helpfully reported Pawlenty’s speech live on Twitter.

There are, I think, two inter-related explanations for this. The first is that ideology is a form of power and states wield it when they think it helps them advance more mundane geo-strategic interests. To take the U.S.-China example – America’s liberal democratic ideology is still fairly attractive globally, whereas not many people want to live in a single party communist autocracy that jails artists and Nobel Prize winners. Throwing this in China’s face puts them on the defensive in the eyes of global public opinion and, by extension, makes it harder for China to plead its case on other issues of strategic importance. This is why many people who want to take a “harder line” with China over its growing “assertiveness” in Asia usually begin by urging American politicians to call out Beijing’s human rights abuses.

The second explanation is that ideological parries are easy and demagogic. It’s difficult, time consuming and complicated to suss out which states have legitimate claims to various pieces of aquatic territory and then to rally people around those issues. It’s quite easy, by contrast, to call China (or any other state) “evil” and leave it at that. ~Greg Scoblete

Greg was responding to my earlier post on ideology. I agree that ideology is an instrument of state power, and ideology as such wouldn’t exist except for the desire to acquire and exercise power, but this is what still leaves me puzzled. It doesn’t help the U.S. gain much of anything to stoke hostility towards China, and it isn’t clear to me that it is all that useful to the U.S. to try to encourage regime change in China. America won’t benefit from conflict with China, and it won’t benefit from prolonged instability in China and East Asia. If deploying liberal democratic ideology were actually being used to advance some concrete U.S. interest, that would be one thing, but instead it seems to have become an end in itself that requires the U.S. to put its interests at risk for the sake of prior ideological commitment.

It’s true that “not many people want to live in a single party communist autocracy that jails artists and Nobel Prize winners,” but it seems to me that this doesn’t really explain the value of promoting liberal democratic ideology to compete with China for influence. Other nations don’t have to want to live under a Chinese-style system to accept Chinese investment and influence, and they don’t. In practice, democrats around the world are going to be interested in pursuing their respective national interests, and insofar as China supports or does not interfere with those there is nothing about China’s domestic regime that obviously limits the influence it can have. After all, it isn’t as if China’s neighbors would be less alarmed by its moves in the South China Sea if it were a democratic state. It is fundamentally what China does, not its reigning ideology or its internal repression, that makes its neighbors wary of its intentions.

Drawing attention to internal Chinese repression may be gratifying to activists in China and in the U.S., but it’s not obvious that this puts China on the defensive in a constructive way. Many rising democratic powers and developing countries are understandably wary of infringements on their sovereignty, and they are not likely to want to encourage scrutiny into the internal affairs of any other country lest the same scrutiny be directed at them as well. Throwing the record of internal repression in the face of the Chinese, as Greg puts it, will produce a mixed reaction among other states, especially now that U.S. democracy promotion has become so closely associated with military intervention.

Emphasizing Chinese repression may be useful for building domestic support for more confrontational policies, and Greg is right that this is the easy, demagogic aspect of making ideological appeals, but this assumes that more confrontational policies actually serve U.S. interests. This prior embrace of confrontational, hard-line policies as a means to advance U.S. interests is itself an ideological commitment, and one that doesn’t seem to have much grounding in reality. I suppose that solves the puzzle, but it’s not a very satisfying answer. It suggests that the people promoting an ideological struggle with China are quite willing to increase the chances of conflict with China, because they badly misjudge which policies will best serve U.S. and allied interests.

History repeatedly warns us that in the long run, weakness in foreign policy costs us and our children much more than we’ll save in a budget line item. America already has one political party devoted to decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal; it does not need a second one. ~Tim Pawlenty

Pawlenty delivered a speech on foreign policy to the Council on Foreign Relations today, and this was one of the many silly things that he said. Obviously, Pawlenty is a presidential candidate and a Republican partisan, so he’s bound to portray the incumbent and Democrats in a poor light, but this is still an odd thing for him to say. The more typical hawkish argument is that all “serious” mainstream people endorse American “leadership,” and it is only the kooky fringe on either side that finds anything wrong with U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, that is the whole point of using the term “isolationist,” which Pawlenty used frequently today, because it can and will be deployed against both progressives and conservatives/libertarians when either side begins voicing opposition to the latest blunder overseas. To argue that the other party is devoted to “decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal” may satisfy people who write this sort of nonsense about what they think the Obama Doctrine is, but it’s so obviously untrue that it badly undermines Pawlenty’s already limited credibility on this subject. It would be a welcome change if even one party were dedicated to prudence and restraint, but at the moment the leadership of both parties remains intent on recklessness and aggression.

As for the lessons of history, it would have been useful if Pawlenty could define what he means by weakness or given an example of one of the many times that History has warned us of this. The things that Pawlenty would deride as signs of weakness (i.e., not supporting popular uprisings abroad, diplomatic engagement, reduction in military spending) have not had the effect that he claims. For some hawks during the Cold War, not supporting the Hungarian uprising in 1956 counted as weakness, but it would have been a disaster for the entire world had the U.S. intervened. In the ’70s, hawks concluded that detente was a terrible mistake, but it essentially cost the U.S. nothing in the short or long run. The cuts in military spending from their 1980s levels did not lead to greater costs for the U.S. down the road. Virtually every grim warning of the dangers of “appeasement” at least since the start of the Cold War has proved to be little more than groundless alarmism, the fear of “appeasement” has plunged the U.S. into unnecessary and damaging conflicts, and many of the efforts at engagement have yielded important gains for the U.S.

The Logevall/Osgood article from last year that I have mentioned before is relevant once again. Pawlenty receives some criticism in the article for his use of the appeasement charge, but what makes the article valuable is that it reviews past accusations of appeasement and assesses whether they had any merit. They conclude that they didn’t:

As the current debate over U.S. foreign policy again turns on the lessons of the past, Americans would do well to take a closer look at the country’s long wrestling match with Munich’s ghost. Such an examination would show, first, that “Munich” has retained its power in American political discourse for more than seventy years largely because of electoral calculations. Second, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the success or failure of American foreign policy since the 1930s has to a great extent hinged on the willingness of presidents to withstand the inevitable charges of appeasement that accompany any decision to negotiate with hostile powers, and to pursue the nation’s interests through diplomacy. Sometimes these negotiating efforts failed; sometimes the successes proved marginal. But those presidents who challenged the tyranny of “Munich” produced some of the most important breakthroughs in American diplomacy; those who didn’t begat some of the nation’s most enduring tragedies.

Pawlenty takes for granted that engagement is both weakness and an endorsement of other regimes’ behavior, and he repeated that again today. He is fully in thrall to the Munich mythology and its distorting effects. It is fortunate that he continues to languish at the back of the Republican field. We may never have to find out what blunders a President Pawlenty would make because of this flawed understanding.

Update: Here is the full text of Pawlenty’s speech.

I wish you could think of another way to describe this wing of the party, other than McCain and Lindsey Graham. I love John, but that’s like saying we’re embracing Nelson Rockefeller on economics. ~Tim Pawlenty

That’s what McCain gets for having passed Pawlenty over in 2008. More seriously, it is obvious that Pawlenty does hold the same views as McCain and Graham and represents their “wing” of the party. It is understandable that he would be embarrassed to be associated with them. Who wouldn’t be? Think about what Pawlenty has said here. He thinks that being associated with McCain and Graham on foreign policy is akin to being accused of being a Rockefeller Republican on economic policy. Clearly, Pawlenty fears for his reputation as a conservative, and he seems to be aware that his foreign policy views might give some voters reason to question that reputation.

Pawlenty goes on to confirm that he subscribes to the frankly irrational view that the U.S. must persist in misguided or unnecessary interventions for the sake of “credibility.” When Jeffrey Goldberg pressed him to judge Reagan’s decision to withdraw from Lebanon, Pawlenty said:

I guess I would go back and say that my view, without referencing a particular president, is that once the United States commits to a mission, it’s really important that we prevail. Because when you don’t, it diminishes the respect and credibility and awe that other people view the United States with. And our goal here is to avoid as many future conflicts as possible by having our relative position be so strong and so unquestioned and so certain that nobody dare challenge us.

Of course, our relative position in the world is regularly undermined by fighting unnecessary wars until “we prevail” in countries where what “prevailing” means is usually unclear and ill-defined. It is hardly making other major powers nervous or awe-struck to see the U.S. wasting resources and plunging into new conflicts on a regular basis. I would like Pawlenty, or anyone else who thinks withdrawing from Lebanon was a mistake, to explain what it would have meant for the U.S. to “prevail” in the midst of the Lebanese civil war. I doubt that anyone can explain what that would have looked like, and no one could explain why it would have been in the American interest to stay longer than Reagan did.

The issue isn’t whether anyone is challenging the U.S. The U.S. has made it a bad habit over the last twenty years to make other states’ internal conflicts our business. Pawlenty is mixing up the desire to persist in unnecessary interventions to save face with the need to maintain credible deterrence against attack. They aren’t the same things. There is a strange belief that the U.S. has to demonstrate staying power when it blunders into strategically unimportant countries and avoidable conflicts. According to this belief, the U.S. invites attack if we do not show that we are mindlessly stubborn enough to remain committed to an intervention long after it has served its purpose or proved to be a terrible mistake. This is simply false, and it comes from an inability to admit that the goals set for the intervention were either unrealistic or not worth the cost required.

Conor Friedersdorf has a useful summary of some recent commentary on Libya, and he and Reihan have an interesting conversation on Libya and war powers. I would like to challenge one claim that he made. Conor cited Colin Dueck’s recent op-ed as an example of a “resurgence of foreign policy realism on the right.” As far as Libya is concerned, this is somewhat misleading.

Prof. Dueck correctly argues that skepticism on Libya and Afghanistan is not proof of “isolationism,” and describes Republican discontent with both wars in terms of Jacksonian nationalist sentiment. As far as this argument goes, Dueck is on solid ground. I don’t dispute that a candidate advancing “a muscular, unapologetic” foreign policy is much more likely to win the GOP nomination, and Dueck is also right that most Republicans support what he describes as “a foreign policy posture of American leadership, strong national defense, energetic counter-terrorism, and firm support for U.S. allies.” Of course, much of this hinges on what Dueck thinks “leadership,” “defense,” and “firm support” mean.

Dueck has authored a lengthy article outlining his vision of a conservative realist foreign policy, in which he distinguished realists from hawks and nationalists, and much of it is very sensible. On Libya, it seems that Dueck has run afoul of at least one of his own requirements for conservative realism. In his 2010 article, Dueck wrote:

Seventh, with regard to military intervention, the U.S. should be much more careful than it has been over the past 20 years about intervening abroad, and at the same time much more capable, overwhelming, and relentless when it chooses to do so. From Somalia to Iraq, the pattern must be broken of initially inadequate interventions in peripheral locations of questionable centrality to U.S. security. Picking fights in unpromising locations only encourages the impression of weakness when these fights go badly. Once American forces are committed, however, there can hardly be anything more important than winning the wars the U.S. is actually fighting. This means, among other things, building on the dramatic improvements in recent years in American capacities when it comes to counter-insurgency. If the United States is going to intervene militarily abroad, it must be adequately prepared for the constabulary and reconstruction duties that inevitably follow, or it will only invite humiliation.

Nothing better describes the Libyan war than an “inadequate intervention” in a “peripheral location of questionable centrality to U.S. security.” If Libya is peripheral to U.S. security interests, it is hard to take seriously the claim that the U.S. must see the Libyan war through up to and including being prepared for “the constabulary and reconstruction duties that inevitably follow.” Dueck greatly overrates the harm to U.S. security that would be done by pulling the plug on a mistaken intervention, and he sets himself up for endorsing escalation of an “inadequate intervention” once it has begun. As it happens, escalation is exactly what Dueck favors in Libya.

Dueck wrote in his op-ed:

I believe the answer in this case [Libya] is not to pull the plug on operations, but to escalate U.S. airstrikes, in order to speed Gadhafi’s overthrow; we cannot simply walk away, now that the United States has picked a fight, without bolstering impressions of American weakness overseas. But if frustration with this Libyan operation amounts to isolationism, then we need to find a new foreign policy lexicon.

Certainly, “we” can walk away. It does not convey weakness to acknowledge that irrelevant, unnecessary conflicts are irrelevant and unnecessary and to adjust accordingly. Rather, this suggests a measure of wisdom and indicates that some learning has taken place. Is it better to bolster an impression of American foolishness and an inability to extricate itself from unnecessary conflicts?

Dueck was also one of the signatories of the open letter from the Foreign Policy Initiative urging the House GOP not to cut off funds for the Libyan war. The letter stated:

The United States must see this effort in Libya through to its conclusion. Success is profoundly in our interests and in keeping with our principles as a nation. The success of NATO’s operations will influence how other Middle Eastern regimes respond to the demands of their people for more political rights and freedoms. For the United States and NATO to be defeated by Muammar al-Qaddafi would suggest that American leadership and resolution were now gravely in doubt—a conclusion that would undermine American influence and embolden our nation’s enemies.

This passage is filled with mistaken assumptions. Success in Libya is not “profoundly in our interests.” It is much less important than that, just as the outcome of the Libyan civil war was much less important than interventionists claimed in March. The success of the Libyan war probably will not influence how other regimes in the region respond to popular demands for political reform. The start of the Libyan war certainly hasn’t stopped Assad’s regime from cracking down with great brutality, and it obviously hasn’t inspired any fear in the Sudanese government, which is reportedly engaged in an assault on the Nuba minority in South Kordofan.

Correcting a major policy blunder is not a sign of weakness. The supposed virtue of ruling out any ground forces in Libya was that it would make it much easier to cut U.S. and allied losses if the campaign dragged on too long. Dueck argues for the intensification of an air campaign that by itself is unlikely to yield the desired outcome, which is itself another form of “inadequate intervention.” At the same time, he has put himself in the position of supporting the escalation of an illegal war that is at most tangential to American interests.

This may be where Dueck’s position on Libya most clearly clashes with his earlier article. He stated in his article:

The proper and true end of American foreign policy is neither gross international power, nor the export of democracy, but rather the preservation of a republican and constitutional system of government inside the United States.

That’s a reasonable and admirable definition of the proper end of U.S. foreign policy, so how is it that Dueck signed a letter that effectively urged Congress to do nothing in the face of an illegal war that offends against our republican and constitutional system of government?

Update: Dueck had an article at National Review last week arguing along the same lines as he did in his op-ed. I disagree with most of the article, especially the idea that the withdrawals from Somalia, Lebanon, and Vietnam were mistakes, but there is one thing Dueck says that is absolutely right:

The management of the Libyan campaign has been a case study in how not to use force overseas.

Here is Tom Switzer’s review of Dueck’s book, Hard Line.