As usual, Nikolas Gvosdev has written an excellent analysis of the foreign and economic policy divergences between emerging-market democracies and the leading European and North American democracies. (Via Kevin Sullivan) Gvosdev makes many of the points I have been making on Iran policy, democratization, and the increasing anti-hegemonic effects of globalization for the last year and more, but I would like to go in a slightly different direction this time.

Hawkish critics of Obama want to make two contradictory arguments against the administration. On the one hand, they say that he is too accommodating and too willing to believe that there are common interests among major powers that will lead to cooperation on supposedly “global” issues. This is one of the standard complaints against the administration by Robert Kagan in any one of a half-dozen articles and op-eds in the last year. The complaint goes something like this: “Doesn’t Obama realize that states have divergent interests? How can he be so naive as to expect cooperation from other great powers?”

To take their criticism seriously, we would have to believe that his critics accept the reality and inevitability of multipolarity, and we would have to believe that they also accept the relative decline in American power that this entails. Of course, they don’t really accept either of these things. For the most part, they do not acknowledge the structural political reasons for resistance to Obama’s initiatives, and they recoil from any suggestion that America needs to adjust to a changing world. They locate the fault for any American decline entirely with Obama, because he fails to be sufficiently strong in championing U.S. interests. “Decline is a choice,” Krauthammer says, and he accuses Obama of having chosen it. Such critics are not bothered by the reality that the Iran sanctions they want Obama to pursue are not possible without the cooperation of other states that they argue (correctly!) he will never be able to get. Naturally, this has no effect on what they think Iran policy should be. It simply becomes fodder for their next anti-Obama article.

At the same time, they obsessively ridicule Obama’s supposed conceit that all of America’s international problems were going to start disappearing once he became President, and they are always ready to point out that Obama has not somehow magically eliminated the divergent state interests that prevent him from succeeding in his foreign policy initiatives. They insist Obama is blind to structural barriers and divergent state interests, and in the next breath they mock him for not having dissolved them through force of personality. Here the complaint goes something like this: “The world still doesn’t love us, and Obama promised us that they would! Wah!” Once again, America is in decline and Obama is supposedly to blame, but this is simply because of “the arrogance of the president and his top advisers.” Oh, yes, and because Obama simply “doesn’t care whether [the nations of the world are] with us or against us.” At this point, we can probably cue up the moronic arguments about his rejection of American exceptionalism.