So Obama has come out with a lengthier, “tougher” statement on Iran, some of which is redundant because he has said it before and most of which is unnecessary. John is appropriately critical of the move towards what some are calling the “Biden-Clinton line.” Unfortunately, I am being reminded more and more of Obama’s response to the war in Georgia, which was initially quite sane and responsible and devolved in a matter of days to more or less the same reckless foolishness that McCain had shown from the beginning. Obama never said that we are all Georgians, but he hewed to the same line on policy as those who did, and eventually he came around to endorsing the official version of the war in which “Russian aggression” was all that mattered.

Then as now, I get the sinking feeling that all of this new “more forceful rhetoric” is nothing more than delayed CYA (which is all the good this statement will do anyone), and it reconfirms my old claim that Obama tends to yield to that side that can do more political damage to him. Even though the hawkish voices who have been berating Obama are relatively few and do not represent most people in the political establishment or in the country, they have been able to pull Obama in their direction in just a little over a week because they are more influential, better-connected, more vocal, more on message and more aggressive. While the numbers favor Obama on how he handled things in the last week, I seem to have been simply wrong in assessing the ability of the critics to pressure Obama. There is a unified chorus damning Obama for weakness and dithering. There is not much in the way of organized resistance to this chorus, and the administration itself is divided (as administrations often are). For the most part, even most of his reliable supporters qualify and hedge their defenses of his recent actions (cue Roger Cohen’s complaints about “reading prepared lines”), and while his response to date enjoys wide support I have to wonder how deep it is.

One of the potential problems in defending Obama’s earlier restraint in terms of what would be counterproductive for the protesters is that it can create the expectation that Obama must abandon restraint in the event that the protests are not succeeding. After all, to frame things in terms of what is counterproductive for the protesters seems to accept that the protesters’ success ought to be the primary goal of U.S. policy, which means that the administration would have to change its approach if the protests are not succeeding. This overlooks that the protests have never been likely to succeed, and it misses that Washington cannot let its Iran policy and all of the other interests that hinge on that be dictated by internal Iranian affairs. Despite the reality that Obama was initially giving the protests their best chance to succeed, the more time that passes with the regime still in place the louder calls for being “more forceful” will become. If these calls are heeded, it will ironically make the protests even less likely to succeed for the same reasons why “more forceful rhetoric” or “more aggressive” support would have been a mistake over the last few days. Nonetheless, the pressure to show “more aggressive” support will continue to grow and will cease only in the unlikely event that the protesters prevail.

Obama has moved in the direction of the hawks at least partly because the more hawkish people have allies in the Vice President and the Secretary of State, who have been pressing the President for “tougher” statements almost from the beginning of the protests. It is also a reminder that, as with the war in Georgia, Biden’s influence is a malign one, and it is a reminder that Obama may take longer to get to the mistaken position on foreign policy his opponents have taken, but he will still get there because he does not fundamentally disagree with them about projecting power to defend “values.” Evidently, national security ideology will out.

It seems that the elements in the administration urging restraint are losing ground, which eerily mirrors the weird lack of confidence many advocates of engagement have in their own proposals on Iran policy. Having spent years resisting arguments that Iran’s government is irrational, will never negotiate, cannot be trusted and will not be compelled to change course by additional punitive measures, many advocates of engagement seem to be willing to throw in the towel at a time when engagement is not only more likely to be successful but also even more imperative. Robert Farley has now coined a phrase that deserves the Newspeak award of the year: “non-interventionist coercive strategy.” Coercion is a kind of intervention.

As I said before, Nixon went to China after the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution. For that matter, detente advanced under Brezhnev, who had just smashed the 1968 uprisings in central and eastern Europe; Sadat made peace with Israel after the Arabs had almost overrun the country in 1973. There was a time when we understood that these sorts of governments needed to believe that they were secure before they could take the risk of negotiating with old foes on major national security questions. What is so strange is that the psychology of strength and weakness that hawks apply to U.S. foreign policy (usually wrongly) all the time would be quite appropriate to apply to the internal politics of an authoritarian state, but they don’t do this because they are too busy citing the authoritarians’ abuses to justify confrontational policies against them. If they stopped for a moment and applied their constant fear of “showing weakness” to an analysis of the internal politics of the authoritarian regimes in question, they would see that the presence of a viable, vibrant opposition is probably the surest guarantee that the regime will make no deals with Washington. Authoritarians are most likely to make deals on security and foreign policy issues once they feel secure and in place. The ones who cannot afford to make a deal are those who are vulnerable and fear appearing weak, which invites internal challenges.

P.S. By the way, it won’t fly to say that the administration’s language has been consistent between last week and the start of this week. Expressing “concerns” about something and saying that one is “appalled and outraged” by the same thing are two very different sorts of statements as a matter of conveying displeasure diplomatically. Everyone can see perfectly well that the rhetoric has escalated, and whether or not Obama has escalated his rhetoric because of the critics who have been demanding “more forceful rhetoric” or for some other reason, he has escalated it. More to the point, his critics will take this language as vindication that their early, misguided demands for “tougher” language were right and his caution was not. Whether or not he was affected by the drumbeat on the Post op-ed pages, he has started moving in the direction that those writers wanted. One could even try to defend changing rhetoric as circumstances change, but to deny that there has been any change is silly and, I’m sorry to say, something we have seen several times from Obama over the last two years.