Among mainstream conservative columnists, George Will and Peggy Noonan have received some attention for their willingness to reject the most conservatives’ criticism of Obama on Iran, and their disagreement with the “more forceful rhetoric” position has been noted as evidence that the debate over this is not necessarily breaking down along predictable ideological or partisan lines. On the other hand, Steve Benen thinks he has discerned the pattern: “this is a situation featuring neocons vs. everyone else.” Benen is partly right, but this doesn’t explain things fully. For one thing, not every neocon has attacked Obama on this question of rhetoric.

For what it’s worth, in that bloggingheads segment I linked earlier Frum makes a point of refusing to join the bandwagon criticizing the President for insufficient rhetorical support. On at least one point, Frum is correct: we don’t need more “empty talk” on this subject at the highest levels of our government. Empty talk is exactly what most of the President’s critics want, and more than that they want empty talk that could endanger protesters’ lives. Most disagreements among neoconservatives are not as great as some would have it. The “good” neocons that Andrew has been talking about share the same goal of regime change with the “bad” neocons who think the protests will be crushed, but it is actually the so-called “good” neocons who have the most invested in discrediting Obama’s handling of the situation. The “bad” ones don’t really care about whether Obama fervently cheers or ignores the protesters, because they believe the protesters are bound to fail anyway, and in any case they are focused squarely on eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, which the protesters’ leaders have no intention of abandoning.

Those whom Andrew calls the “good” neocons are working from all the same faulty assumptions that have informed their arguments for years, and to the extent that others share these assumptions they are also likely to side with the so-called “good” neocons in finding Obama’s response lacking. These people are generally hawkish, but more than that they think that showing “toughness” and “resolve” is vital at all times. These assumptions all derive from a dubious proposition, which is that foreign pressure and coercion undermine authoritarian and Islamist regimes among the people they rule, when there is good reason to think that such pressure helps these regimes to consolidate power and use foreign pressure and coercion as distractions to rally their subjects to their side. We have heard how sanctions supposedly weaken a regime, despite all evidence from the Iraq, North Korea, Burma and Cuba sanctions experiences that they make the regime relatively stronger vis-a-vis its opposition. As recently as the Gaza campaign, we heard how bombing campaigns will alienate a population from extremists and turn people against them, despite what common sense tells us about how people respond to attack by outsiders. Instead of turning against extremists, they not only rally to them in the short-term, but tend to become radicalized against the outsiders who are launching the attacks, and the more indiscriminate and destructive the attacks the more radicalized they are likely to become, which worsens the long-term chances of ousting the extremist rulers.

Even the least coercive kinds of outside pressure, condemnation and criticism, will often have counterproductive effects in the same way. This is particularly the case in countries with proud and nationalistic people, who tend to conflate their country and regime and will frequently identify with both. Americans should be able to understand how this works. The more nationalist of our two parties, the GOP, is full of Jacksonian nationalists who bristle at any foreign criticism of America, no matter how accurate or justified it might be, and Americans as a whole are more nationalistic than our European friends for all sorts of obvious reasons. What could easily be recognized as a criticism of or response to specific policies is always treated by these people as raw, unthinking anti-Americanism. Instead of making Americans more willing to look critically at government policies, foreign criticism and condemnation tend to make most Americans automatically dismiss the criticism as little more than “anti-American rhetoric” and the most nationalistic among us are inclined to attack other Americans as “anti-American” for criticism of foreign policy. If this is true here, why would it not be true in other countries? Leave aside the question of whether our government’s involvement in the 1953 coup makes our government unusually ill-suited to comment on internal Iranian affairs, and just consider how angrily we would react against a traditionally hostile foreign government’s statements about our domestic political controversies.

What we can conclude about most forms of foreign policy idealism is this: the obvious, common sense similarities among all nations must be ignored when they tell us that other nations will react just as poorly to coercion, threats and insults as we would, while acknowledging the equally clear differences in national history, religion, and culture must be rejected when these differences get in the way of convenient ideological narratives about how everyone wants to be free in exactly the way that we mean it. When debating how best to fight other nations, they are to be treated as essentially different, but when it comes to understanding political conditions in other countries everything unique and specific about those countries must be discounted and ignored, and anyone who pays attention to them must be mocked as a “cultural relativist” for daring to believe that culture is significant as something other than part of a propaganda effort to demonize and vilify another people.