I know, I know, foreign policy. I know. Please, enough about the neocons. It makes me unhappy, but your average Republican voter is more likely to agree with Rick Santorum on foreign policy than with Ron Paul.

That is only partly true. In general, the average Republican voter will be more sympathetic to Santorum’s hawkish instincts, his antipathy toward Islamists of all stripes, and his eagerness to attack Obama for being “weak” (no matter how ill-informed or mistaken his criticisms happen to be). If the question turns to intervening in other states’ internal conflicts, getting involved in new wars, sending other governments aid funding, or keeping all of our overseas bases, Republicans will be much more evenly split between Santorum and Paul. When Santorum complains about the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for example, that is going to be popular with most Republicans, but Paul’s support for cutting off all foreign aid, including to Egypt, would be even more so.

Even though Santorum is far closer in his views to how Obama actually conducts foreign policy than Paul could ever be, he states those views with adversarial partisan contempt, which can be emotionally satisfying for voters opposed to Obama. That said, Santorum uses the usual talking points about Iran, for example, but then runs with them so far that no one outside of a limited circle of hawkish pundits and activists can listen to him without wincing. As Alex Massie said earlier, “he makes George W Bush’s record seem mild and benign,” which is what I’ve been saying for a while now. According to Santorum, Bush’s record was mostly all right, except that he thinks it wasn’t aggressive or bold enough. According to Santorum, Bush had a foreign policy that was too humble, and he aims to correct that.

My point is that Santorum doesn’t have to persuade hawkish Republican voters that he is “better” than Paul in their eyes (they already take that for granted). What he would need to do is to persuade Republicans less ideological than he that he is preferable to Romney on national security and foreign policy issues. Romney also has a record of saying inflammatory and ignorant things on foreign policy, but compared to Santorum he almost becomes the picture of sanity. This has something to do with Romney’s expectation that he might one day have to govern. For his part, Santorum has nothing to lose, and he thinks that his disastrous 2006 campaign in which he harped on “Islamic fascism” and the Venezuelan menace was a profile in political courage. It’s true that Romney and his advisers still think that Obama is vulnerable on foreign policy, which proves they aren’t paying much attention to public opinion, but Santorum would run a national campaign even more tone-deaf than Romney’s on these issues. If Obama is trouncing Romney on trustworthiness to handle international affairs, just imagine what he would do to Santorum.

Money can be made without creating a lunar colony, but it seems colonisation in and of itself is Mr Gingrich’s goal. And that presents a problem. We already know that short periods of near-zero gravity are extremely unhealthy for adults. They suffer significant losses in bone density and muscle atrophy after only six months on the space station. How about a lifetime on the low-gravity moon? And what about the children?! The human developmental process is designed for Earth’s gravity, meaning a moon pregnancy would involve serious risks. Any child that survived would be crushed by gravity if they tried to return to the Earth.

At this point one could mutter something about developments in technology that could overcome basic human biology, but even humanity’s mastery of technology cannot overcome the facts. The moon is a cold, airless, lifeless lump of rock a long way away. Only a lunatic would want to raise kids there.

On top of that, there is no need for any of this. Setting up such a colony, besides being bad for the colonists and a massive waste of resources, would serve no real purpose except to serve as a monument to our willingness to embark on useless, costly projects. Then again, Gingrich and his colleagues have shown that they are all too eager to support such projects right here on earth.

In case you believe in portents: On February 3, 2008, the New York Giants upset the heavily favored New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. Two days later, John McCain won a sweeping victory on Super Tuesday, clinching the nomination and completing his upset comeback against the far better funded and organized Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.

McCain’s victories on Super Tuesday were not part of an “upset comeback.” McCain was the de facto front-runner in most respects in early 2007 before his campaign appeared to collapse in the summer and fall of that year. By the end of 2007, McCain had recovered. McCain had already won New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida by the time Super Tuesday came along. McCain’s “comeback” was his recovery from his campaign’s near-bankruptcy and the political disaster that was his support for immigration amnesty, and that “comeback” had already occurred before New Hampshire voted. Giuliani did not seriously contest New Hampshire or South Carolina, and his plan to bet everything on Florida completely failed. McCain could not have come back from behind Giuliani because he never trailed Giuliani, except in some meaningless national polls. McCain wasn’t coming from behind Romney on Super Tuesday, since he had just defeated him in two straight contests before that.

It is true that Romney was better-funded and organized than McCain last time, but he was also the challenger and came up short. In order for there to be an upset this year, we would need to believe that the worse-funded and organized Santorum or Gingrich could do what Romney and all his resources could not against McCain. If that still seems incredible, that’s because it is.

Mitt Romney doesn’t seem to realize he is campaigning for two jobs, not one. He is doing quite well in the race to become the Republican nominee for president, and must still be considered the strong favorite. But ever since Barry Goldwater captured the GOP nomination in 1964, the Republican nominee has been more or less the titular head of the conservative movement, the most important single component of the Republican party. It is that race that Romney is doing so poorly in, as evidenced by the willingness of many conservatives to vote against him.

One reason that Romney isn’t doing very well in this second role is that he isn’t really trying. He already tried this kind of campaigning in 2008, and it didn’t win him the nomination. Last time, Romney assiduously cultivated conservative pundits, activists, and interest groups, he repeatedly swamped CPAC with his supporters, and by this time four years ago Romney had been accepted as the official movement conservative alternative…just in time for him to drop out of the race. Remember that Romney had won eleven primaries and caucuses by this time four years ago, and then he gave up because he didn’t think he was ultimately going to defeat McCain, and he wasn’t interested in throwing more of his own money down the drain. In Romney’s experience, being the de facto leader of the so-called movement doesn’t win you the nomination. McCain won it despite his history of contempt for movement conservatives, and after Bush won he dismissed the movement’s importance. As Dan McCarthy said a few years ago:

There hasn’t been a “conservative movement” for a long time: there’s a Republican auxiliary that calls itself conservative and a movement. It’s arguable, though, whether Bush redefined it or merely pushed the absurdity to its logical conclusion.

Romney campaigned in 2008 on the assumption that the institutions and activists of the auxiliary were essential to winning the party nomination. He discovered that this was not true, and Romney, ever flexible, has adapted his 2012 campaign accordingly.

His victories in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri last night, added to his performance in Iowa, show one thing is certain: outside Nevada, Mitt Romney has a problem in any state that holds a caucus.

This is interesting because it is a complete reversal of Romney’s experience four years ago. Except for Utah, Michigan, and Massachusetts (all states where Romney had strong personal and/or political ties), every state that Romney won in 2008 was a caucus state. The knock on Romney last time was that he could usually out-organize everyone at a caucus, but he had no ability to win over larger primary electorates. All of Romney’s caucus-winning last time didn’t do him much good. If you had told Romney before voting starting this year that he would have dominated two of the three meaningful primaries and lost all but one caucus, he would probably have been satisfied by that. The reason for the change is straightforward enough. Four years ago, Romney ran as the movement conservative alternative to McCain, and his support from some conservative activists and his campaign organization propelled him to success in the contests were activist support and organization can have a disproportionate effect on the outcome. Assuming that Romney can continue to win meaningful primaries by significant margins as he did in New Hampshire and Florida, he probably doesn’t have to worry if he loses a few caucuses. The more important test for Romney is how well he does in Southern primaries starting next month.

Romney is currently in the McCain position. And Santorum is in Romney’s position four years ago.

A quick review of the 2008 results mostly confirms this. McCain did not do very well in Minnesota or Colorado four years ago. Missouri was the exception, where McCain narrowly defeated Huckabee in 2008. The worst news for Romney is that he fell short of his 2008 percentage in Missouri by four points, but this is offset by the complete irrelevance of the Missouri primary for the selection of delegates. Romney is running into similar difficulties in these states that McCain encountered last time. The main difference is that these early February contests took place on the previous cycle’s Super Tuesday, which is why Romney’s strong 2008 showings in Minnesota and Colorado availed him nothing. Romney was cleaning up in caucus states at this time four years ago, and McCain was beating him in every large non-Southern primary. While McCain effectively clinched the nomination with his other wins around the country on February 5, it appears that Romney will have to wait until next month to do the same.

Rod comments:

We can say definitively, I believe, that Republicans really dislike Mitt Romney.

I would like to believe that. They certainly should dislike him, but one weird thing about Romney in this election is that his unfavorability among Republicans nationally is not that high. According to Gallup, both Paul and Santorum have slightly higher unfavorable numbers and lower favorable numbers, and overall Romney’s fav/unfav is 66/25. There are Republicans who deeply dislike Romney, but there aren’t that many of them. Romney’s problem is that he generates so little enthusiasm among the ones that like him.

Romney has tried to position himself squarely in the center of the Republican electorate, and he has been successful, but in some states that makes Romney the lukewarm water that Republican voters want to spew out of their mouths. Romney’s support has come mostly from “somewhat conservative” and moderate voters. If there had been any exit polling done, my guess is that it would have shown that there were a lot more “very conservative” voters and caucus-goers last night than in many of the previous contests.

Update: Michael Tomasky compares Romney’s numbers from 2008 and last night to support his argument about Romney as a weak front-runner, which is fine, but just look at how much turnout declined compared to four years ago:

Missouri: Four years ago, Mitt Romney got about 172,000 votes out of 589,000 cast. Last night, Romney got around 64,000 out of roughly 233,000 cast.

Minnesota: Four years ago, Romney drew 26,000 votes out of 63,000 cast. Last night—just 8,000 out of around 47,000 cast.

Colorado: In 2008 Romney won 42,000 votes out of 70,000 cast. Last night he got 23,000 votes out of 65,000 cast.

The lack of enthusiasm I was talking about is probably part of this. Four years ago, these events all took place on Super Tuesday when the race still seemed to be competitive. This year, there are three non-binding events that don’t coincide with the larger primary elections elsewhere in the country, and for the last week it seemed that the main competition to Romney in Gingrich was pretty much beaten after Florida and Nevada. No wonder turnout was down. A lot of people concluded that these votes wouldn’t have much significance, and I’m not sure they were wrong.

What would be so terrible about giving those good nations someplace else to meet? And by good, I mean democratic. A league, or concert, of democracies wouldn’t replace the U.N., but it would offer some much-needed competition.

We’ve had to go around the U.N. before, and usually we go to NATO. That’s what President Clinton did in the Balkans and what President Obama did in Libya.

Critics of the Libyan war hold that the U.S. and NATO exceeded the U.N. mandate they were given, but it doesn’t mean that they went “around” the U.N. “Going around” the U.N. is another way to say “waging illegal warfare.” We have heard some version of this proposal in the past, and it’s as misguided as ever. This wouldn’t just be a matter of having “someplace else to meet.” Democratic governments can already hold their own conferences and summits if they wish, and they can form talking-shop organizations from now until the end of time. A “league of democracies” would be a parallel organization intended to legitimize interventions that the U.N. would not approve.

Goldberg complains that the structure of the U.N. is based on might rather than right (hardly unusual in international politics), but the league he proposes would not be meaningfully different. The most powerful members of the “league” would dictate policy to the others, and the weaker members would follow (look at NATO for an example of how this would work in practice). Creating this league would be an expression of frustration with an international system that prevents Western governments and their allies from interfering in the affairs of other states as easily as they would like.

Put another way, the sovereignty and theoretical equality of all U.N. member states get in the way of coercing some of those member states to behave in certain ways. The league would presumably do away with such ideas, since the league would have been created for the sake of violating sovereignty of states that are considered inherently inferior by virtue of their arbitrary and abusive forms of government. The U.N. was founded to oppose threats to international peace and security. Its membership was as broad as possible because the League of Nations proved unable to function when many of the most powerful states in the world did not join or withdrew from it. The democratic league would be founded to create threats to international peace and security by constantly finding new occasions for international intervention.

On many major international issues, the world’s democracies disagree with one another almost as often as the U.S. and western European governments disagree with Russia and China. For that matter, there are very few other democracies with such a low opinion of the U.N. that they would be interested in forming a parallel global organization. If the U.S. tried to set up a parallel, competing organization, it would find that most of the major democracies in the world would not want to undermine the U.N. and wouldn’t bother joining.

A “league of democracies” would presumably be directed at the clients of major authoritarian powers, which would push those powers to band together despite their often divergent interests. Traditionally non-aligned democracies would not sympathize with what the “league” was trying to do, because they would correctly see a “league of democracies” as an organization created to provide an alternative source of legitimacy for Western intervention that they oppose. A formal “league” would just be the old “coalition of the willing” on a more permanent basis, and the rest of the world would regard the league’s interventions as the illegal wars they were. If the league is lucky, it wouldn’t provoke other states to form a balancing coalition against it, but it could just as easily lead to the emergence of a pair of mutually antagonistic groups of states engaged in frequent proxy battles fought mostly in poor and weak countries.

If such a “league of democracies” had already existed last year, many of the world’s largest democracies probably wouldn’t have belonged to it. They would have still been against regime change in Libya, just as many of them are against any form of foreign intervention in Syria. The “league of democracies” would have been badly split by Kosovo and Iraq. The only way for the “league of democracies” to function the way its advocates want it to (i.e., as an unaccountable interventionist alliance) is to make it almost exclusively North American and European.

The most irritating part of the case for a “league of democracies” is the breezy assumption that it would do “good things” because its members have a better form of government. Democratic states are hardly infallible, and some of the most powerful democratic states have had a rather shaky record on doing the right thing in the last ten years. For the most part, talk of a “league of democracies” crops up whenever the U.N. cannot be relied on to endorse a certain policy that some Western governments want to have endorsed, which could be an indication that the problem rests as much with the questionable policy as it does with the structures of the U.N. This also misses that there is not always a consensus within each democratic state on what should be done. What Goldberg considers a “good thing” to do abroad is probably going to be perceived quite differently by a large part of our population, to say nothing of how it will be perceived by electorates in other democracies.

The essential problem is that Britain and her allies have two incompatible objectives [bold mine-DL]: they want to hasten the downfall of President Assad, while also bringing the country’s bloodshed to an end. You can’t do both at the same time [bold mine-DL].

Accelerating the end of a regime as ruthless as Syria’s will inevitably entail more violence. If you choose this option, you are effectively placing Assad’s political demise ahead of the need for peace.

This is what I was saying in the earlier post. Western governments would like to see Assad removed and to stop the violence, but there is a good case that they cannot have both. Elliott Abrams has made it clear that removing Assad is the higher priority for him:

The goal today is more simple, and more old-fashioned: to defeat our enemies.

Of course, the people who will probably end up suffering the most from this defeat will be Alawite and Christian civilians, who have never done us any harm.

Ten years back, America often found itself isolated, struggling to pull together “coalitions of the willing” packed with small client states. Lately, we have been finding ourselves in the majority, along with the democratic world, while Russia and China front a dwindling coalition of the unwilling.

Right, because the coalition that intervened in Libya was a global, pan-democratic one filled with members of the Non-Aligned Movement. Oh, wait, that’s not true. It was a much smaller coalition than the one that supported the invasion of Iraq made up entirely of U.S. allies and client states that pursued a policy opposed by the largest democracies in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. There’s no question that some of the democratic governments that opposed military intervention in Libya came around to support the recent resolution on Syria (e.g., Germany, India, etc.), but this is partly because the resolution was watered down as much as possible and because the resolution made no suggestion of authorizing military intervention. If it had been a more punitive resolution, India would have sided with Russia and China. The section of the vetoed resolution that affirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria seems to have been worded specifically to satisfy Indian concerns. It is much easier to have a consensus when governments don’t have to commit to anything controversial.

The vote on the resolution represents “foreign policy success” only if the goal of the resolution was to sour U.S.-Russian relations and harden Russian and Chinese opposition to any U.N. action. In the last year, both of these governments have gone from acquiescing to Western-backed intervention to opposing the most anodyne symbolic resolution. It’s hard to see how that counts as an improvement by Steinglass’ standards.

But there is something profoundly disorienting about a self-proclaimed realist making this kind of argument. Is Walt saying that the West should have not pursued its strategic goal of ousting Gaddafi out of deference to the fine points of a Security Council resolution? (From a narrow national-interest perspective, the Libya campaign seems to be a model: a limited investment to secure the ouster of a troublesome national leader without any committment to prolonged nation-building in the aftermath.) And since–from Walt’s perspective–international relations is all about interests, why can’t one simply turn on and off the rhetoric about multilateralism and law? It’s all rhetoric in any case, isn’t it? Surely Walt doesn’t believe that uber-realist Russia and China are actually offended by the abuse of multilateral institutions?

Walt might object that ousting Gaddafi didn’t actually serve the national interest, since Gaddafi had ceased to be particularly “troublesome” as far as U.S. and allied interests were concerned several years ago. As another example of undesirable and unintended consequences of elective military action, he might point to the significant problems that the aftermath of the intervention is creating for another state (Mali) with which the U.S. cooperates on counter-terrorism. Walt’s view is best understood by looking at the last two lines from the passage that Bosco cites:

But a commitment to multilateralism and international law is not something you can invoke when it suits you and ignore when it doesn’t, at least not without paying a price [bold mine-DL]. Powerful states like the United States can (and do) act with impunity on occasion, but they shouldn’t be surprised when such behavior backfires later on.

Put another way, it doesn’t really work to promote a “rules-based international order” unless the governments that claim to support that order are scrupulous in their adherence to the rules, and that includes not exceeding U.N. authorization. Enforcers of a new international norm lose credibility when they pick and choose which other rules they are going to respect, and they stoke the resentment of more skeptical governments when it appears that they acted in bad faith in how they presented the international intervention they were asking other states to support. The more basic objection that he is making is not that Walt invests multilateralism and international law with so much importance, but that the advocates of the “responsibility to protect” do at the same time that they interpret international law and U.N. resolutions as broadly and loosely as necessary. Such overreaching has consequences that undermine the very norms that the overreaching was intended to uphold.

If the opposition itself has chosen the military option — and this seems increasingly the case — then the question is this: Can a ragtag army of perhaps 10,000 Syrian rebels defeat an army that while, far from invincible, enjoys an overwhelming advantage in numbers, equipment and firepower? The opposition may have millions on their side, with Syrians continuing to protest en masse throughout the country. But it’s difficult to see anything less than a disastrous stalemate without the international community helping to tip the balance.

This is a view that still doesn’t make much sense to me. Is the goal of interventionists to facilitate the defeat of Assad’s regime, or is it to protect the civilian population? There may be cases where those two are compatible, but Syria doesn’t seem to be one of them. What would be the result of funding and arming the FSA? It would build up the militarily weaker side in a civil war, it would endorse a militarized solution to the crisis, and that would ensure that the war would be prolonged and intensified. Hamid claims that the civil war will intensify anyway, which may be true, but his proposed course of action would guarantee that outcome.

Fortunately, we don’t have to argue over what to call the conflict in Syria. Hamid acknowledges that Syria is “already in civil war.” During the debate over Libya, interventionists were eager to avoid using that label to describe the internal Libyan conflict over control of the state. Skeptics and opponents of intervention have an understandable aversion to picking favorites in other nations’ civil wars on the grounds that it is not our place to determine the outcome of an internal conflict in another country. Advocates for intervention in Syria can’t seem to make up their minds whether their priority is achieving the political result of opposition victory or limiting the violence in Syria for the benefit of the entire population. To justify intervening, they invoke the latter, but many of their proposals seem focused on the former.

Indeed, the reason why some interventionists are proposing military aid for the FSA is that the armed rebels will most likely fail without that aid. The danger that interventionists see is not really that there will be a “disastrous stalemate,” but that the opposition will lose. Interventionists are invoking the specter of the Lebanese civil war as a warning of what might happen if there is no support for the opposition, but what they propose seems more likely to put Syria through an experience very much like Lebanon’s. Even if it is a more limited, indirect intervention in support of Syrian rebels, that seems guaranteed to deepen the conflict and risk the fragmentation of the country into enclaves, which could in turn hasten the beginning of forced expulsions and massacres of populations.

Update: Pillar made some good related points in his post yesterday:

I agree with Pape that intervention in Syria would be unwise, but not just for now and not only because the struggle there has so far not shaped up in a way that has yielded, as he puts it, “a viable, low-casualty military solution.” Sectarian divisions in Syria would make the aftermath of even a low-cost regime-toppling intervention messier than Libya. The whole Alawite power structure, not just Assad and his family, would see themselves fighting not only for power but for their lives. Stirring this sectarian pot would, as happened with the Iraq War, set in motion more disturbances elsewhere in the region.

The United States should refrain from any such pot stirring and concentrate on areas in the region where its own current policies already are tipping the scales and associating the United States with local clients.

The week that the nation is be celebrating Ronald Reagan’s 101st birthday — that would be February 6 — Rick Santorum has selected that exact moment to present himself as the anti-Reagan?

What terrible offense did Santorum commit? He described Gingrich’s silly moon colony idea as “fiscal insanity,” which is what it is. When others pointed out Gingrich’s past criticisms of actual Reagan policies that he made while Reagan was in office, Lord thought that it was an outrageous “smear” being conducted by Romney’s lackeys. To paraphrase Lord’s response: “How dare anyone suggest that Gingrich was critical of Reagan! What job was Romney offering Gingrich’s critics that they would say such a thing?” Now that Santorum has the temerity to criticize a preposterous Gingrich proposal with no relation to the space program as it existed under Reagan, we’re supposed to believe this is proof that Santorum has taken up the “anti-Reagan” mantle because he doesn’t believe in wasting an enormous amount of money on a lunar colony. That is the litmus test Lord wants to use to determine a candidate’s conservatism?

What’s more, Lord accuses Santorum of insulting the memory of the astronauts killed in the Challenger explosion. I’m no fan of Santorum, but that’s a completely unfair and obnoxious charge to make. It’s even more offensive when Lord describes Santorum’s criticism as evidence of “a crabbed, timid, fainthearted, decidedly un-conservative and un-American state of mind.” So Santorum isn’t just being anti-Reagan, but also un-American? That’s delusional. If Lord’s two positions have anything in common besides a desire to defend Newt Gingrich at all costs, I don’t see it.

Finally, so that it is not tarred as a Western plot, any deal would have to include a serious American-led effort to broker the return to Syria of the Golan Heights, which Israel has controlled since 1967.

Although there appears to be little political will for such an approach in Israel at the moment — the government sees no need to make concessions to Mr. Assad’s weak, teetering government — expending American political capital on a more promising peace process makes sense. Unlike the now defunct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, talks with Syria could actually succeed (they broke down over a few hundred meters of land in 2000).

The Turkish-mediated process was also making some progress on this issue before Operation Cast Lead sent the Turkish-Israeli relationship into the downward spiral from which it has yet to recover. Unfortunately, there is no chance that Turkey will return to a mediating role between Israel and Syria (its relations with both having deteriorated significantly), and an American-led process would go nowhere even if it weren’t an election year, which it is. Bringing in the question of land would create a needless complication for Noe’s proposed deal-making, which already has many obstacles in front of it. It wouldn’t disabuse anyone of the the belief that removing Assad from power is something that Western governments want, and when this part of the deal fell through (as it would) it would risk unraveling the rest of Noe’s proposed settlement.

Noe’s concern to defuse the crisis through negotiation is commendable, but his plan puts off Assad’s departure from power until next year at the earliest, and the incentives he proposes (disarming the Free Syrian Army, relaxing sanctions, negotiating for the return of the Golan Heights) would be unworkable and/or too politically risky for Western governments and Syrian opposition groups. If his proposed deal were accepted and successful, it could reduce violence in Syria, and it could offer Assad a way out without plunging the country deeper into civil war, but it assumes that Assad is interested in taking a deal that would guarantee the end of his rule. The “weapons-free safe zones” Noe envisions for the disarmed FSA would be particularly hard to sell to the armed Syrian opposition. That said, Noe’s proposal is focused on defusing the crisis rather than escalating it by turning the Syrian opposition into Western proxies.

During the debate over intervention in Libya, it was widely recognized that other abusive states, such as Syria, had patrons that Libya lacked, which was why intervention in Libya was politically feasible in the first place. Libya’s strategic insignificance was the key to building international consensus to authorize action against Moammar Gadhafi. Syria is a very different case, as the fall of the Assad regime is as unwelcome to Russia and Iran as it is desired by many in the West.

This is not only a recipe for deadlock at the U.N., but also for a clash of interests between Assad’s patrons and Assad’s enemies that could lead to a larger crisis. As we hear more calls in the U.S. and Europe to support anti-regime forces, Western governments and Syria’s Russian and Iranian patrons are on a path to make Syria’s internal conflict into a proxy war. That seems likely to escalate and prolong the suffering of Syrians and to destabilize the region.

I noticed that Joshua Foust and M.K. Bhadrakumar have made some similar arguments today. Bob Wright also made some similar observations about Western reactions to the double-veto.

The Russian and Chinese governments had already heard Western governments promise that they didn’t intend to seek regime change in Libya (which is also what they’re saying about Syria now), and those promises were intended just to get skeptical governments to drop their objections to some form of international response. Small wonder that these governments don’t believe Western diplomats when the latter say that they are explicitly ruling out something.

Let’s turn thequestion around: can you name any country that suffered military humiliation that didn’t, in consequence, turn to parties, forces or individuals who promised to redeem the national honor through new action? Germany, Japan and Italy weren’t “humiliated” by Wold War II; they were thoroughly and comprehensively defeated. France after 1870? Germany after 1918? Heck – America after 1975? The only example I can think of, honestly, is Serbia after 1999.

Even the Serbian example isn’t quite right. It’s true that Milosevic was forced from power after losing Kosovo, and Serbia has tried to cultivate better relations with the EU since 2000, but even President Tadic has taken an uncompromising position on Kosovo’s independence despite the likelihood that this will likely keep Serbia from joining the EU for a long time. Serbia will almost certainly never recover control of Kosovo, but despite the de facto partition of their country their government appears to be unwilling to yield on something that they regard as a matter of sovereignty.

In the Iranian case, an attack that destroys most or all of Iran’s nuclear facilities isn’t likely to lead to the toppling of the regime (because, as Noah mentioned elsewhere, Iranians are going to see an attack as unjustified aggression). Even in the unlikely event that the regime collapsed because of “humiliation,” that certainly wouldn’t make a successor regime more accommodating on the nuclear issue. If the regime survived, it would see a nuclear deterrent as a guarantee against future attacks, and a successor regime would see that its security and survival depended on being able to prevent the sort of attack that brought down its predecessor.