The other main response to Zakaria at Foreign Policy came from Christian Brose:

The real sticking point is how a Syria or a Russia defines some of its “interests.” Damascus’s desire to dominate Lebanon is not an interest. Nor is Russia’s attempt to create a sphere of influence in its old imperial stomping grounds and prevent sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies. Such “interests” should be, in Zakaria’s words, “by definition unacceptable.”

Greg Scoblete replies:

I think this only serves to confirm Zakaria’s point. According to Brose, the U.S. is the arbiter of which interests are legitimate, and which are not. And the standard is not exactly uniform. The Russians can’t exercise a “veto” over nations directly on their border, but when the U.S. decides it wants to travel halfway around the world and depose Saddam Hussein on the grounds that he’s an intolerable threat to our interests, that’s acceptable. The Russians can’t have a sphere of influence immediately adjacent their national border, but the U.S. can claim the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Western Hemisphere as arenas of its primacy and veto the foreign policy decisions of governments therein. The Russians can’t corner the Central Asian energy market through cozy relationships with dictators and related thugs, but the U.S.-Saudi alliance is another matter – one born of a mutual and abiding respect for pluralism and human rights. Or something.

Most striking is Brose’s lack of any sense of irony when he complains that Russia “prevent[s] sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies” as part of his argument against Zakaria. A considerable part of U.S. policy overseas is to try to “prevent sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies” and to get them to do what Washington wants instead. More than a little of U.S. policy is dedicated to preventing sovereign nations from making free choices about their own domestic policies, and indeed we routinely discuss the alternatives means available for coercing other governments into making concessions to our demands regarding matters that are often entirely internal to those states. For Brose, this is all just diplomacy properly understood: “are we aligning our tools of engagement and coercion to get our desired result?” It goes without saying that our desired result is always legitimate.

If I read Brose right, other states do not get to have any tools of coercion, because their use of such tools is automatically unacceptable, and naturally this is all part of his “serious discussion” of diplomacy. These tools of coercion are apparently reserved only for us and those we deem fit to possess them. Our desire to have secure access to the Gulf and its oil is apparently a real interest, but we can’t let anyone else have spheres of influence, because we have increasingly defined the exercise of significant influence by other states to be something akin to aggression, whereas our actual wars of aggression are seriously considered either wars of self-defense or the fulfillment of some high-minded international obligations.

When Russia tries to discourage neighbors from joining a military alliance organized against it, this is gross interference, which is what you would expect Washington to say, since it is the one leading said alliance. On the other hand, we reserve the right to arbitrarily bomb and partition other states for no other reason than that we disapprove of how they are handling domestic insurgents (see war in Kosovo, recognition of Kosovo) or deem their legal development of nuclear energy to be the beginning of an intolerable threat. Depending on who violates it, state sovereignty is either obsolete or sacred. If Russia reduces its subsidy on natural gas to its neighbors, which it has been providing artificially cheap energy to for decades, it is engaged in cruel blackmail and intimidation because it actually requires the recipients to pay something closer to market price for the goods they are receiving. If we impose sanctions on an entire country for more than a decade and they result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, we are merely doing what is necessary for the greater good and it is all “worth it” if it works to undermine the country’s government (even though the sanctions did not actually undermine it). In all these things, I am not referring to the views of a handful of ideologues. Just as Zakaria has said, these are the views of a broad consensus of the Washington establishment, and they are not going to produce an effective foreign policy.

P.S. Damir Marusic, David Polansky and Chris Dierkes have more. Dierkes’ post is particularly good in criticizing Brose’s bizarre idea that Mr. Bush failed to exploit the post-invasion period to force Iran into making concessions.