Fareed Zakaria criticized the foreign policy establishment sharply in his last column, which has provoked some predictable howls of protest. Peter Feaver accuses Zakaria of offering “whitewashed assessments” of Obama’s record to date. This is what the so-called whitewashing actually looked like:

The administration has signaled a willingness to start engaging with troublesome regimes like Syria and Iran. Clinton publicly affirmed that the United States would work with China on the economic crisis and energy and environmental issues despite differences on human rights. She has also offered the prospect of a more constructive relationship with Russia. Obama said he was open to the prospect of talking to some elements of the Taliban in an effort to isolate its hard-core jihadis.

These are initial, small steps but all in the right direction— deserving of praise, one might think. But no, the Washington establishment is mostly fretting, dismayed in one way or another by most of these moves. The conservative backlash has been almost comical in its fury.

Feaver wants “more robust and evenhanded engagement” when discussing foreign policy challenges, but does not engage with anything that Zakaria said. Is it true that the administration has done what Zakaria says they have done? Well, yes, actually, it is. Is it true that these are small but promising signs of moving in the right direction? It certainly seems that way. Has the Washington establishment been fretting? Fretting might be too weak of a word, but the anxiety Zakaria describes seems real enough. Has the conservative backlash been almost comical in its fury? Again, yes it has.

For that matter, there is nothing “cartoonish” about Zakaria’s judgment that Bush was a foreign policy failure. On the whole, this judgment is correct. Yes, one can point to successes in improving the relationship with India and some achievements in Africa and one can even credit Bush with mostly benign neglect of China, but when someone scores 40% on a test we do not regard him as anything other than a failure. Should we actually be glad that the government embarked on the “surge,” which has failed on Mr. Bush’s own terms? Feaver’s remarks on the “surge” are the sort of conventional assertions that one might think our best foreign policy thinkers would eschew in favor of something resembling analysis.

I agree that there are reasons to be skeptical of Obama’s Pakistan policy, or lack thereof, and I think that his handling of relations with India has so far been less than stellar. These are substantive policy questions that merit some serious consideration. Instead, what do we get from Feaver? Complaints about vetting and symbolism. Regarding Freeman, one reason Zakaria might not have raised the matter in this column is that he doesn’t see that appointment as a blunder. His interview with Freeman the other day on GPS was a model of that evenhanded engagement Feaver desires so greatly. If anything, the reaction to Freeman tends to support Zakaria’s description of unreasonable establishment dismay and comical conservative backlash. Given the number of foreign policy establishment figures who vouched for Freeman’s integrity and intellect during the controversy, one might suppose that one of the main causes of dismay in some establishment circles was the White House’s failure to defend the appointment rather than the appointment itself.

Feaver’s post seems an almost perfect example of the phony calls for “balance” in which matters of vastly different importance are supposed to offset and cancel each other. Bungling Zinni’s appointment as ambassador to Iraq was embarrassing, but on the whole that has not been the sort of thing that most of Obama’s critics have been emphasizing. Presumably, if one mentions that the administration is trying to thaw relations with Russia in order to advance certain policies that the Washington establishment supports, one must then “balance” this by mentioning that someone screwed up the translation on the gimmicky button they gave Lavrov and thereby negate the far more significant part of the story.