Instead, as one longtime observer of US-Russian relations reminded me the other day, in Gates, a veteran Cold Warrior, you have “an establishment figure with the longest institutional involvement in our failed Russia policies of anyone in DC.” ~Katrina vanden Heuvel

Well, yes, as I noted earlier, but even without Gates you have Biden and…Obama, who are both entirely on board with our failed Russia policies. Looked at this way, why wouldn’t they want someone like Gates at the Pentagon? Bill Richardson probably guaranteed that he would not get the State appointment when he made it clear earlier this year that he had at least half a clue regarding Russia when he said, “The problem, though, is that we don’t have the kind of influence and strength in our relationship with Russia to persuade them.” Keeping Gates on is one way to make sure that we won’t have these things in the future.

In the same post in which Freddie has given James and his realists a hiding, he said:

Ah, but of course, if there is one iron-clad rule to our foreign policy debate, one insisted on by realists, liberal internationalists and cons, paleo and neo [bold mine-DL], it’s that there is no “moral equivalence” between America’s actions and those of our antagonists.

Now this is odd. Paleos have been accused of many things over the years, but holding any identical view with these other groups with respect to U.S. foreign policy is not usually one of them. I suppose it does depend on what actions we’re talking about, but on the whole I think Freddie has rather badly misunderstood paleos if he thinks that we assume our government’s actions can never be morally equivalent to those of other states or of our enemies.

I think Freddie would find that this is one of many iron-clad rules of conventional debates that we do not follow, and I’m surprised that he doesn’t already know this about us, but it’s important to understand why we don’t. It isn’t to be contrarian, and it isn’t simply to play a senseless game of “well, what about [fill in with some past wrongdoing by U.S. government to score cheap point]?”, but it is to keep perspective that our government’s use of coercion and force is extremely dangerous and prone to abuse, just as it is with every state, and justice and a respect for truth demand that we try to keep our government from abusing such power and acknowledge when it has abused it. This is tied to our hostility to various triumphalist ideologies and armed doctrines and our critiques of nationalism, all of which have done more to justify dehumanizing other peoples than just about anything else.

If we’re discussing aggressive warfare, for example, I would make the case that over just the last twenty years the U.S. government has outdone pretty much every other state in waging such wars, at least if we’re talking about the sheer number of unprovoked military campaigns launched. These are illegal and unjust acts, and they are just as illegal and unjust when our government does them as when they are committed by other states. For all of the conventional talk of Russian aggression these days, for instance, Washington has been responsible for more aggressive wars just during my lifetime (at least three) than Moscow. That’s a rather troubling thought, isn’t it? I would agree with Freddie that it is hard to imagine someone from any of those other groups saying as much, but then that’s one of the reasons why paleos disagree with all of those people as often as we do.

As a realist and self-proclaimed “moderate hawk” (a gosling, perhaps?), James is also not happy with the term Hamiltonian to describe his foreign policy views. I can hardly blame him. Offhand, I’d say a chastened Hamilton looks rather like Hamilton post-duel, but that would be cruel.

On a more serious note, James said this:

Of course, people get antsy when you won’t cough up a grand ideology to match your grand strategy, but that’s sort of the point; and now I’ll make what looks like an about-face and suggest that, for someone not tethered to realism or neoconservatism as a matter of ideological principle, the Iraq war was not terribly chastening, even if it was formative, because some of us suspected from the beginning that there was really only one Iraq, and that the perfect storm of possibility, capability, timing, interest, and passion developed there in a way that simply won’t appear in any other country any time soon — especially given the way Iraq went down. Yes, for a minute there it looked like we could tip the extremely weak and craven regime in Damascus out of power, but in all the really serious cases — North Korea, Iran, Burma, or even Zimbabwe or Sudan or Somalia or Pakistan or Venezuela or Cuba! — the Iraq model of foreign policy simply won’t, because it can’t, apply. Iraq was a world-historical one-off that should offer a host of wisdom about what sort of businesses the US should and shouldn’t be in. But in the main I think the “lessons learned” in Iraq are ones we already knew or should have known, and that includes the lessons that could have made the occupation of Iraq far more successful.

Well, that’s one answer to my question, and it is just as unsatisfying as I thought it would be. It’s true enough that the Iraq model won’t ever really apply again, because the many contingencies that made this war possible will not recur. There will never be quite the same confluence of a pompous Baathist dictator, unchecked American power, a decade-long, U.N.-approved siege of an entire country, an equally long propaganda campaign to get the public used to attacking Iraq and an opportune moment to wrap a random invasion in the mantle of antiterrorism and non-proliferation. That doesn’t rule out making similarly awesome blunders in different ways in another part of the world. The next great blunder will probably not be a preventive war, but will be some other inadvisable form of power projection in a region Americans poorly understand (i.e., any region outside of the United States). The central problem with the argument for the war in Iraq was not the particulars of the case regarding WMDs, Al Qaeda or even the supposed Iraqi threat to its neighbors, but that it took for granted that our government essentially has the right to shape and dominate the politics of other parts of the world and to use force to quash resistance to its efforts.

Bearing that in mind, several items on James’ internationalist agenda seem to me to have the potential to be quite calamitous in their own ways, and most of them partake of the same mistaken pursuit of hegemony. To the extent that his agenda does not endorse the pursuit of greater hegemony, it assumes that the means exist to accomplish some remarkably ambitious goals. As Freddie objects, James’ agenda includes quite a few items that entail the United States managing, dominating or otherwise dictating terms to the rest of the world:

I count one two three four five of the eight that are simple questions of imposing American wishes onto foreign shores, and I’m not confident the other three can possibly be undertaken by this America without become [sic] yet more excuses for military aggression, destructive espionage and adventurism.

James protests that there has to be something in between what he calls “foreign policy autism” and “globo-cop faux imperialism.” Indeed there is something, since no one actually defends the former and I am fairly sure James wants nothing to do with the latter. More important, there are many different alternatives between the (non-existent) foreign policy autistic and the “faux-imperialist,” and some of these would involve not confusing management of/interference in other states’ affairs with engagement with other states. The trouble that I and Freddie are having with realist internationalists is that they tend to treat their alternative as the only thing available besides reckless jingoism and terrapinesque withdrawal, which is a foreign policy debate way of saying, “We’re the only other game in town” or “Don’t throw your vote away.”

There are items on James’ agenda with which I am somewhat sympathetic. Not wanting Russia to be our enemy is good, albeit entirely negative. Wanting India to be the leading power in its region is not necessarily a bad idea, but it is something that will happen with or without our “help” and it is not obviously in the American interest to entwine ourselves too closely with India, or else we could wind up as an outside guarantor of Indian interests in a way that commits us to supporting New Delhi in future conflicts. There is a separate problem that “managing” China’s rise and helping build up India are create a dangerous dynamic where India becomes our front-line state in an anti-China containment policy (indeed, this has been more or less the stated reason for improved relations with India over the last decade), which tends to make it more likely that China’s rise will be undermined and that in any case it will not be peaceful.

Looking at some of the other items, Europe may or may not take on the role of a “global assertive power,” but once we get beyond euphemisms about “burden-sharing” what this means is that the U.S. will try to get Europe to become stronger internationally than it already is to supplement continuing U.S. power projection rather than replace it. Contra James, I think building up Europe as a “robust, self-respecting, great-power” will ensure that Russia becomes more hostile to the West. When we talk about preventing Pakistan from doing or becoming anything, we have to bear in mind that Washington has little leverage or is unwilling to use it. In South America, we would not need to support Morales, but simply stop pretending that Morales and Chavez matter and cultivate normal, productive relations with the states that do matter.

As I have been, Freddie is understandably frustrated by the narrow range of options that are considered viable alternatives, especially when we are told time and again that the only other real alternative to this and the perpetual war crowd is to shrink inside our shell. Clearly, there are other alternatives, including those offered by different kinds of conservative and libertarian realists, that are much more restrained in their goals.

So one of two things happened. Either Clinton has embraced Obama’s vision for fundamental change, or Obama has succumbed to “conventional Washington thinking.” ~Philip Klein

Notto be a broken record, but of course it is the latter. Well, except that he didn’t “succumb”–he embraces the conventional thinking, just as he does wherever he goes. As his political universe has changed and expanded, the conventional thinking he has had to embrace changed as well. This is what his friends and admirers call pragmatism, and it is a function of the temperament that Obamacons invoke when pressed to explain their support. This has been reasonably clear for at least the past several months. When running against conventional Washington thinking suited him as an outsider and challenger candidate, he did that. Now that he is firmly ensconced in Washington, conventional Washington thinking will be all right. This isn’t an accusation or even that much of a complaint–I have given up complaining about Obama’s conventional ways. At this point, it is merely a description. As I said immediately after his election:

If you have a high opinion of the Washington establishment and bipartisan consensus politics, Obama’s election should come as a relief. If you believe, as I do, that most of our policy failures stretching back beyond the last eight years are the product of a failed establishment and a bankrupt consensus, an Obama administration represents the perpetuation of a system that is fundamentally broken.

Most people in the broad “middle” seem to be relieved by Obama’s moves in the last few weeks, so I have to conclude that they don’t have much of a problem with conventional Washington thinking, either. The majority is not just getting the government they deserve, but apparently it is also the government they want. When it fails them, as it is going to do, I don’t want to hear them complaining about the problems of the status quo.

Barack Obama has rightly recognised the ability of Kashmir to unsettle India and Pakistan, and distract both from fighting terrorism. He has said that he wants to help to resolve it. India’s traditional position is that outside intervention is unjustified and unwelcome; Kashmir, it says, is purely a bilateral dispute.

But at this point, that stance looks myopic. India is right to call for pressure on Pakistan – but that makes sense only if it is done in a way that recognises how fractured that country now is, and how its own urgent need for stability gives it different priorities from the West. One of the few things that India, and other countries, can help do is to move towards agreement over Kashmir. Obama is right that if it is not solved, this will be the cause of wider terrorism. ~Bronwen Maddox

This is an odd thing to conclude. When India is struck by gruesome terrorist attacks in one of their major urban centers, the imperative thing they must do is to yield on an issue many of them consider basically non-negotiable? This would be perceived in India as rewarding the jihadis who attacked Mumbai and their sponsors, whoever they may have been, as well as rewarding the Pakistani military for playing their old double game of sponsoring cross-border terrorism while claiming to oppose extremism at home*. Westerners have an odd habit of identifying the solution to a foreign problem in the one place where at least one of the nations involved is least likely to give any ground. Indo-Pak talks on Kashmir had already stalled, and they are even less likely to be revived now. It is therefore obviously the key to the region’s problems, because some new settlement of the dispute is now completely out of reach.

Maddox has made Obama’s interestin Kashmir seem much more even-handed than it is. The Ahmad Rashid argument for including Kashmir in a grand bargain is that it will provide Pakistan with recognized, secure borders, which he believes will make the Pakistani government more willing to collaborate in the west, and this is essentially the same as Obama’s position. Neither Rashid nor Obama is particularly interested in whether Kashmir distracts from India’s other antiterrorism efforts; they are concerned that the status quo in Kashmir distracts Pakistan from fighting in the west. One reason that Indian reaction to the suggestion of mediation has been so negative is that it is clear that India is being pulled into the “grand bargain” only insofar as it helps to put the Pakistani government at ease; the grand bargain is indeed a bargain for Pakistan, but it is not at all clear what India would get from cooperating.

Indeed, to the extent that India’s antiterrorism is primarily an effort to fight cross-border terrorism from Pakistan and PoK and terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir, Kashmir is at the center of India’s “war on terror.” The Indians might just as easily reply to any suggestion of American “mediation” of the Kashmir dispute that the U.S. should give up on Afghanistan and forget about Al Qaeda, and even that would not really begin to explain how unrealistic a suggestion it is for India to “move towards agreement over Kashmir.”

* I am assuming for the moment that elements of the Pakistani military were not involved in sponsoring these attacks.

Ross:

But the conservative coalition ought to naturally produce realists from its ranks, for their sake and its own, because realism’s cold-eyed pursuit of the national interest is the most logical and productive elite-level expression of the Jacksonian, don’t-tread-on-me nationalism that holds sway among a large swathe of the conservative base. Neoconservatism can and should speak for part of the American Right, but it can’t speak for the whole of it; it’s [sic] Wilsonian impulses will always be a bridge too far for many conservatives whose instincts run instead toward “to hell with them” hawkery. This “more rubble, less trouble” tendency within the Right’s coalition needs to be channeled in a constructive direction by the right-wing elite, or else it runs toward jingoism and folly of various sorts.

Reading Ross’ earlier post in light of his more recent comments, I am a bit puzzled. Proposing that a “coalition of the introverts” (i.e., an America First coalition on the right) would be unsuitable to govern, Ross nonetheless seemed to concede in his later post that the most logical, if perhaps not the most productive, expression of don’t-tread-on-me nationalism would have been Ron Paul-style “Jeffersonianism.” Leaving aside certain direct symbolic appeals to libertarian populist, don’t-tread-on-me sentiment (e.g., the frequent appearance of Gadsden flags at Ron Paul events and the flag’s popularity among Ron Paul supporters), it is not clear why realists/”Hamiltonians” offer the better elite expression of the “Jacksonian” nationalist view.

If Jacksonians tend to support wars when they are declared/launched far longer than any other group because of strong cultural habits and traditions of military service, but are themselves unconcerned and usually uninformed about international affairs, the typical elite complaint about them is that they are not zealous enough for this or that grand mission that Wilsonian and Hamiltonian elites have planned for them. This is what had Fukuyama (who must now be also be classed among the “Hamiltonians”?) agitated several years ago. To be blunt, jingoism and folly are the provinces of the Wilsonians and Hamiltonian elites who by and large pushed for or acquiesced in the Iraq war. These elites have not channeled Jacksonian nationalism in a constructive direction, but on the whole exploited it in a crisis and pushed the Jacksonians in rather destructive directions, and I do not see what will change in this dynamic in the future. “More rubble, less trouble” and “to hell with them” hawks are expressing the frustration of Jacksonians who have been conned or misled into foreign adventures on what were supposed to have been national security grounds that later gave way to woolly-minded nation-building projects. Had they not been incited by elites to support the adventure based on exaggerated threats abroad, they might not have been hawks in the first place. Before they said “to hell with them,” Jacksonians said, “Why bother?”

It is also taken for granted here that Jacksonian nationalists are not to have elites from their own ranks, because they are otherwise ruled unfit for government, and so they must be led, channeled, and directed by others. Even though the Wilsonians erred very badly, as Wilsonians will, and, as Ross said, “many of [Hamiltonianism’s] practitioners, starting with the buffoonish Chuck Hagel, did not exactly distinguish themselves during the debates over the Iraq War,” these groups are still going to be permitted a leadership role in formulating center-right foreign policy thinking? On what grounds? If realists/Hamiltonians failed to lead and failed to distinguish themselves during one of the most important foreign policy debates of the last 20 years, why should Jacksonians or anyone else want to be “channeled” anywhere by them in the future? If up and coming realists were chastened by Iraq, what exactly have they learned that would distinguish them from the older realists who failed?

Ross:

Nor do I think that a Jeffersonian-Jacksonian “coalition of the introverts” could govern the nation responsibly unless the United States actually withdrew from its current quasi-imperial role, which almost certainly isn’t going to happen.

Following up on my earlier remarks, I should make another point here. There may be some political and even psychological reasons why a “Jeffersonian-Jacksonian” coalition would not succeed (the people who are called “Jacksonians” tend instinctively to support military action and executive power, and “Jeffersonians” tend to question both as a first impulse), but to the extent that both are interested in an America First politics I am not exactly clear why such a coalition could not govern responsibly. Unless, that is, we are defining responsible government here in such a way that includes aggressive, illegal warfare and military overstretch as responsible but excludes respect for other states’ sovereignty and international law as reckless. What Ross is saying in this aside is that such a coalition probably would not govern the empire, or quasi-empire, terribly well, because such a coalition would see no reason to keep the empire. If you have already decided, as the “Hamiltonians” have apparently decided, that the empire is non-negotiable and essential but in need of better management, the idea of giving up on it would seem inherently irresponsible. This has nothing to do with governing America as such, and has everything to do with America attempting to govern large swathes of the rest of the world. It is unlikely that America will give up on having a quasi-imperial role, in no small part because what Bacevich calls the “power elite” does its best to define the good of the nation in terms that maintain the national security state and U.S. hegemony, to which their own interests are closely tied.

Mead’s divisions of American foreign policy thinking into the odd quartet of Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian and Jacksonian, and Noah Millman’s smart plotting of the four on his chart, have never been very satisfying. Years ago, I outlinedmy problems with the use of the term Jacksonian to talk about foreign policy, because there is nothing particularly Jacksonian about Jacksonian foreign policy views. As I have spelled out before, Andrew Jackson’s foreign policy, to the extent that he had one that could be identified with his administration, was more or less the same as Jefferson’s in that both favored contintental expansion and neutrality and did not entangle themselves in foreign conflicts. Even more than Jackson, Jefferson countenanced unconstitutional acts and diplomatic skullduggery to pursue expansionist goals; had many modern “Jeffersonians” been alive then, they would probably have been on the side of my distant cousin William Plumer in denouncing him. The severe limitations of these terms seem clear.

Even to the extent that we grant that these terms refer to a mentality or persuasion rather than an identifiable foreign policy paradigm, we are still stuck with terms that obscure rather than clarify. One could say that Jefferson’s stated concern for neutral shipping rights, to which Wilson paid lip service over a century later, made him more “internationalist” than the Federalists including Hamilton, but no one would say that Wilson was a Jeffersonian because of their shared rhetoric of freedom of the seas. Hamiltonian is the most vexing term of all, because it takes realist internationalists (e.g., Scowcroft, Lugar, etc.) and gives to them the name of a Treasury Secretary, whose view of foreign affairs was limited for the most part to a desire to maintain commerce with Britain.

Millman complicated and confused matters by defining the dominant factors for realism and idealism respectively as interests and values. By and large, we Jeffersonians–if that is the proper name for our view–do not make values the dominant or even a significant factor in our thinking, but on the contrary focus almost exclusively on national interest somewhat narrowly defined. On the whole, we look at so-called hard-headed realists and find people who become rather soft-headed for different reasons than liberal interventionists or neoconservatives do. These realists value stability and tend to pursue what they think will guarantee it. The trouble that they encounter is that they can frequently misjudge what guarantees and what threatens stability, because they are inclined to accept conventional assessments concerning ideologies that stabilize and destabilize. Realists are defined as realists most of the time not because they question the desirability of, say, global democratization–because they generally do not question it–but mainly because they question its practicability. They sometimes disagree about means, but almost never disagree with more aggressive and “idealistic” groups about ends.

Realists, no less than other members of what Bacevich calls the “power elite,” have misinterpreted reality and inflated threats over the decades. The chief thing most realists have had going for them in the postwar period is that they are less prone to overreaction and ideological responses to events, but they are hardly immune from them. If there are no “Hamiltonians,” it is not just because the term Hamiltonian doesn’t mean very much, but because most realist internationalists are inclined to follow conventional thinking at any given time and so they effectively merge into the other groups from which they are supposed to be so distinct. This is not true of all realists (Kennan is an outstanding example of the exceptions to this rule), but it is true of so many that I think it is fair to put it this way. Liberal hawks, neoconservatives and most realists are all preoccupied with values to a large degree, so much so that a genuine language of Realpolitik can scarcely be found outside of what we are calling right-“Jeffersonian” and non-interventionist circles.

This is an awful lot of deck-clearing to get to the more important points, but it seems to be necessary. As I was saying the other day, the so-called “neo-isolationist” option is not understood well at all, so we need more precision in our terminology and our definitions and we need fewer terms that refer to vague tendencies. To take a specific example to illustrate how misleading so much of this terminology is, just consider the relationship of the drug war to U.S. foreign policy. The genuinely hard-headed realist would almost certainly not pursue the drug war in Afghanistan, which is clearly a case of privileging of values over interests, yet this is what current-and-future Defense Secretary Gates, the main Scowcroftian in the new administration, wants to do with NATO forces there. Adding drug interdiction to NATO forces’ mandate is rationalized as a means to secure the country, but what this actually represents is the establishment tendency, shared by such realists, to pursue broad, comprehensive solutions that try to address multiple problems simultaneously while sufficiently supporting none of the constituent parts of the plan. This is why any comprehensive Indo-Pak-Afghanistan solution or a comprehensive Middle Eastern peace process is ultimately misguided and why pursuing either will make it more difficult to resolve any of the individual issues. This tendency derives from an assessment of U.S. power and capabilities that is increasingly unmoored from the real world, and it is justified with a good deal of mushy thinking about the need for American “leadership” and America as the great force for good. Genuinely hard-headed realism would be an interesting change from the legalistic-moralistic view of foreign policy that the Hamiltonians also hold.

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai have justifiably attracted global attention. As Ross rightly observes, these attacks represent an escalation of ongoing terrorist campaigns throughout India, some of which are indigenous while a great many others are sponsored from outside the country. Just the major attacks this year that have made international headlines–Ahmedabad, Delhi, Assam, and now Mumbai–are reminders of the frequency of political violence that Indians endure that Westerners, for all of our talk of being under existential threat, can scarcely imagine happening in our own countries.

It’s good to hear that Scott’s daughter is safe, and for my part I wish all the residents and visitors in Mumbai a return to peace and stability. More remarks to follow.