You can give a nudge. ~David Cameron

Cue James’ pained cries of outrage.

As a practical matter, James at first seems to be right when he says:

But if paleos want to dial the US down from global hegemony, as they should, they’ve got to recognize that other countries — specific other countries — do indeed need to dial their participation up.

I say that it seems right at first, because it would be far easier to hand off the interventionist and guarantor role to other powers than it would be to simply shut down our myriad bases, dissolve NATO and attempt to play the part of a normal country.  Without some other poor fools being suckered into responsible natons leading the way in taking over the obligations we needlessly maintain, many Americans would be reluctant to leave the other nations to their own devices, so finding a replacement would make the transition go much more smoothly.  However, that’s the trap: there is no other power or combination of powers both capable and willing to fill this role, so we are supposed to think that we are stuck with it.  There is also an assumption that seems to be widely shared that there will always have to be some outside power capable of acting as an emergency protector.  It is probably more correct to say that some power or alliance of powers will tend to take on such a role, but I am much less certain that there is a need for one. 

One of the main reasons why no other powers attempt to shoulder more of the burden of their own defense is that they believe it to be unnecessary, because they have become dependent on U.S. security guarantees and, in the last resort, our nuclear deterrent as well.  If they have come to rely on us for things that they obviously ought to be providing for themselves, is it any wonder that there is no urgency in taking more of an interest in international conflicts far away?  Among our Asian and European allies alone, you find enormous wealth and human capital that could be directed towards securing stability in their own regions and near-abroads.  One of the reasons these resources are never directed toward such ends is that the U.S. does enough that it is not a priority for their governments.  Once what is optional becomes necessary, the priorities of those governments will have to change, but the only way to make it necessary is to begin the process of weaning (I cannot think of any other way to describe the process) our allies off of dependency on the U.S.  The only way do that is to start doing it, rather than waiting on the dependents to take over responsibilities that we refuse to give up. 

On the whole, I think the “developing” world would fare much better over the long term if its internal political and military conflicts were left to the nations directly involved to resolve.  There would, of course, be a place for foreign investment, humanitarian aid and diplomatic mediation, but the best way for nations to achieve some sustainable stability and prosperity is to make their own way without the promise/threat of foreign meddling.  Had U.S. history been marked by extensive foreign interference in our internal affairs, there would have been great distorting and stunting effects on our political life.  Whatever degree of independent political life we enjoyed on account of fortune, timing and favourable geography, interventionists tend to want to deny to other nations–and almost always with the intention of benefiting them!  That needs to stop, and the best way to do that is to stop meddling.

The recent Madhuri Dixit film Aaja Naachle has an impressive concluding number that retells the story of Layla and Majnu (or Leila and Medjloom, in Sayat Nova’s poetry), the romance of the lovers Layla and Qays.  Watchthewhole thing.  Here is my translation of Shat mart kose from earlier in the year, in which Sayat Nova drew on the imagery of Layla-Majnu.

If, however, Obama is now linking a U.S. troop presence to “stability,” that’s a very big deal. ~Michael Crowley

Quite right, as I was sayingthe other day.  Crowley continues later in his post:

This still begs the questions of what Obama would do about those “more volatile areas.” He says here that he would withdraw from them “later.” Just how much later is the key question. 

Remarkably, his supporters seem to be more than willing to take him at his word in his clarifications and simultaneously to accept the explanation that his earlier statements were simply poorly-phrased or obscure.  As someone who has made a point of defending Obama’s actual record and policy positions against unfounded and often unfair portrayals of his views and who thinks that you can discern his views from what he says, I take very seriously that the candidate means what he says when he seems to tie withdrawal to the stability of Iraq.  If that is his position, as it seems to be, that does seem to contradict the message he has been sending for the last year and a half.  

Josh Marshall:

Now, I can already hear a lot of people rising to the bait and saying, ‘No, we need specifics, a timetable, a date certain, because we’ve been hearing this for years — that we’ll be out as soon as we can, as soon as this that or the other happens.’

And I’d agree.

But this makes the point. Most people who are so keyed into specifics and hard deadlines are that way because we’ve had five years of a policy of deliberate deception in which vague promises of bringing the troops home in the pretty near future are hung out in front of the public’s collective nose as a means of obscuring the real policy of keeping American troops in Iraq permanently as a way of securing oil reserves and projecting US power and in the region.

But antiwar people are “rising to the bait” because it is intolerable to make U.S. withdrawal contingent on things that Washington cannot control and which are also unlikely to happen in the next several years.  To withdraw as soon as possible is very different from withdrawing as soon as Iraq is stable.  The first implies getting out relatively quickly, while the other creates the possibility of deferring withdrawal indefinitely.  Furthermore, once you have committed to making sure that Iraq is stable before leaving, you have made yourself a hostage to events and to the internal politics of another country.  It gives America’s enemies every incentive to sponsor proxy forces to create chaos in Iraq, which Washington will then feel obliged to quell, and so we will remain bogged down for a decade or more.  Then the longer we stay, the more remote the possibility of leaving becomes, since the advocates of remaining will be able to say, “Not even Obama was willing to risk instability in the region, so why should we do it now in 2029?”  And so we have come full circle, with the very people who denounced defenders of regional stability as despot-lovers urging us to remain in Iraq in perpetuity for the sake of stability, and somehow they have been so successful in their efforts that even the putative antiwar candidate feels compelled to go along.

But as editors at the Atlantic magazine, they are really part of the newly emerging neoliberalism in various new institutions and projects in Washington. They draw on the ideas and thinking of this neoliberal crowd, the future heart of the Democrat party, rather than the conservative and free market think tanks and institutions that form the intellectual base of the Republican Party. ~Peter Ferrara

Ross and Reihan can defend their case on their own, I’m sure, but a few points need to be made here.  The meaning of neoliberalism here is vague, and I expect that it is deliberately vague so that it can include what Ross and Reihan are proposing, but if it is meant in any way other than referring to the support for global free trade that goes by that name it seems to me that it is not correct.  Certainly, it is misleading in another way, unless you want to conflate the neoconservative tradition, from which Ross and Reihan are consciously drawing, with the domestic neoliberalism of the last twenty years.  It would also be misleading when you consider Ross and Reihan’s own description of neoliberalism as “very much an ideology crafted by the upper-middle class, reflecting their concerns and their prejudices in its mix of tough-on-crime posturing…liberal internationalism…fiscal conservatism…and social liberalism.”  It is the last one in particular that distinguishes Ross and Reihan from neoliberals in a significant way. 

Meanwhile, it is doubtful that neoliberalism is actually the heart of a future Democratic Party, and as I noted in a piece for TAC last year the progressive wing of the party had already started declaring the demise of neoliberalism in the wake of the ’06 midterms.  Perhaps they were premature in their declarations, but even to the extent that progressives are not going to repudiate certain aspects of the neoliberal legacy neoliberalism represents the Democratic Party’s past much more than it represents its future, or at least that’s the way it appears right now.  In some respects, the neoconservative and neoliberal traditions do converge or run on parallel tracks, but from what I find in GNP I do see some important differences with neoconservative social policy as well.  In their emphasis on family formation and stability and particularly in their natalist proposals, Ross and Reihan’s vision represents something noticeably different from both neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which is to say a policy agenda that actually concerns itself with the interests of families in both economic and cultural terms.     

As I have outlined before in a column earlier this year and in many blog posts, I do not share Ross and Reihan’s confidence in meliorism oriented towards conservative goals and I share Ferrara’s doubt that operating through the welfare state for conservative ends is possible.  It seems to me that Ferrara does score some hits when he questions the efficiacy of the GNP agenda as policy, especially concerning tax credits, and he is right to insist on entitlement reform, but it also seems hard to deny that Ross and Reihan are correct that, as an electoral matter, Republicans have won landslides and majorities in Congress when they have run to reform the welfare state rather than abolish it.  Ultimately, Ferrara doesn’t seem to disagree that this should be the approach, but dislikes the specific proposals in the book. 

There are redeeming features in the GNP vision, some of which echo the concerns of many dissident conservatives, and one example of this is the book’s paired goals of “economic independence and cultural solidarity.”  On the whole, I would say that the goals of a wide distribution of wealth and power and cultural solidarity are goals that Bolingbrokean paleos share with the authors, and where we have differed over the years has been over the question of how to secure the independence that comes from such a wide distribution of property.  The danger of social stratification according to class, which in turn reinforces itself through stratification of access to education and wealth, is a real one, and Ross and Reihan correctly examine the role of mass immigration in exacerbating income and social inequality. 

Where I tend to agree with Ross and Reihan is in their critique of “leave us alone” politics, but we find fault with it for different reasons.  While the latter does represent a real constituency, this sort of politics typically expresses itself in policies that make an idol out of a certain kind of deregulation without also taking any interest in distribution or decentralisation.  From the decentralist and distributist perspectives, this simply enables a different kind of concentrated wealth and power, corporate power, to emerge alongside and in collaboration with concentrated government power.  The “leave us alone” politics wars (often only rhetorically) against one kind of dependence to help create another, and the harm that this does to the nation’s social fabric is dismissed as inevitable or as positively desirable upheaval.  This relates to one of the central insights of George Grant into the problems of American conservatism, which has precedents in old-fashioned Jeffersonian suspicion of concentrated wealth and power, and this is that reducing the size and scope of government will simply expose the people to an economic oligarchy unless those concentrations of power are not also decentralised.

The Libertarian’s percentage is greater than the difference between the Democrat and the Republican. We await the Obama campaign’s denunciation of Barr as a “spoiler” who’s taking away votes from their candidate. ~Robert Stacy McCain

This last line is meant as a joke, but it would certainly be very foolish for Obama’s campaign to draw attention to the Georgia numbers.  As I discuss in more detail in an upcoming column for the magazine, Barr’s polling in Georgia can be misleading for those who think that it holds out the chance of Obama winning the state.  Polls that include Barr see McCain’s numbers go down or it sees the undecided vote go up, but Obama’s numbers remain static in the 41-44% range.  If I am Obama trying to explain to my donors why the campaign is frittering away money on advertising in a state as unwinnable as Georgia (the impossibility of winning is driven home by McCain’s continued lead despite Barr’s inclusion in the poll), I would try to avoid mentioning specific numbers, much less cite polls that prove that the advertising is a waste of resources.

Those who engage in fearmongering about Iran usually save contradicting themselves for separate sentences, but not Robert Kaplan:

A nuclear arsenal will allow Iran to become a Middle East hegemon like the Great Persia of antiquity, yet it will also encourage countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to develop their own bombs.

Pretty clearly, if an Iranian nuclear arsenal inspired other regional states to acquire their own bombs, Iran would not become a Middle East hegemon of any kind, much less a hegemon like “the Great Persia of antiquity.”  Achaemenid Persia at its height ruled over all of what is today’s Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt, as well as ruling over significant chunks of the Caucasus, Central Asia and modern Pakistan.  If several of those states acquire nuclear weapons in response to an Iranian bomb, and two already have them, what are the odds of Iranian regional hegemony beyond what it currently enjoys?  You can legitimately raise the concern that an Iranian bomb would trigger a regional arms race, but you can’t also say that Iran would also dominate the region as in the days of Cyrus and Xerxes at the same time. 

Kaplan continues:

Iran will represent the heretofore unseen and unconventional combination of being a nuclear-armed state which supports sub-state armies in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip.

It is such an unseen and unconventional combination that only the Americans, Soviets and Pakistanis have done it before them.  Unlike those powers, Iran has apparently not yet mastered the powers of invisibility.

Kaplan then takes a detour through Crazytown:

But what if the Europeans don’t get the message?  Or what if Iran continues its cat-and-mouse negotiating mixed with intransigence? Israel’s future in this regard is indeed bleak.  For even if a moderate Republican realist like John McCain, or even worse, a liberal-left internationalist like Barrack Obama, is elected president, each is likely to subsume Israel to larger geopolitical considerations, rather than hold it up as an icon to be both supported and worshipped in the post-9/11 era [bold mine-DL], as George W. Bush has done.

God forbid the President of the United States put other geopolitcal considerations ahead of the supposed interests of a small Mediterranean ally.  For that matter, if I were to say that George W. Bush held Israel up as “an icon to be supported and worshipped” someone would say that I was exaggerating unfairly and that I was engaging in hyperbole.

Kaplan isn’t finished yet:

Because an air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities will roil world financial markets and thus provide Obama with even more of an edge over the Republican party, Israel may be less inclined to attack Iran before the election [bold mine-DL]. On the other hand, after the inauguration, Israel will be in the hands of a new American president who will show it much less sympathy than Bush [bold mine-DL].

If Kaplan could cite some instance where either McCain or Obama deviated even a micron from Mr. Bush’s Israel policies, that would help make this interpretation seem a little less absurd.  A skeptic might say that the kind of sympathy that has greatly empowered Iran and backed Olmert’s blunder in Lebanon is sympathy Israel might want to avoid in the future, but then McCain is indistinguishable from Bush on this score, and Obama’s sole difference with the administration with respect to policy goals in the region relates to the Iraq war, which did so much to undermine Israeli security.  Viewed that way, Obama might be fairly described as being even more pro-Israel than Bush.

Update: Meanwhile, Haaretz reports on a Telegraph article that any Israeli strike against Iran wouldn’t succeed anyway because both our government and Israel’s don’t know where many of the nuclear facilities are:

Senior United States defense officials fear that a much-anticipated Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would fail to destroy them due to lack of intelligence about their location, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

The British newspaper stated that evidence of the CIA and Mossad espionage agency’s dearth of knowledge on the matter emerged during recent Israel-U.S. talks.

Wasn’t one of the lessons of the Iraq debacle supposed to be that we should avoid initiating military operations on the basis of shoddy and/or incomplete intelligence?   

While Webb had made his sentiments perfectly clear some time ago, he made his refusal to be a VP candidate official today.  (Hat tip: Jim Antle)  This is good news for Virginia and for the Senate Democrats, and it’s probably good for Obama for reasons I have stated before.  This is also good news for the country, because Webb will be much more effective in advancing both foreign policy realist and economic populist causes in the Senate than he ever would have been able to do as Vice President. 

On a Webb-related note, Sen. Webb has an article in the 6/30 issue of TAC on foreign policy in the Near East (sorry, not online).  Here is an excerpt:

Journalism has its flaws, particularly when one comes to a situation with a preconceived political bias.  But good journalism, coming from honest, perceptive journalists, has a far better track record with respect to the challenges of the Middle East than do the policies of our political leaders.  Sometimes it is easier to comprehend harsh realities when one is able to observe them closely without direct involvement and without having to feel accountable for their end results.  And sometimes politicians are so blinded by their policy positions and by the filtering process through whicfh they receive their information that they will never fully understand the realities of the problems they are trying to fix.

In any event, I came away from this experience [in Beirut] with a strong feeling that the United States should tread softly in the Middle East, that it should never give up its military or diplomatic maneueverability by occupying territory in a region so fraught with multilayered conflicts.

There is much more in the article in addition to this.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I would much prefer to have an independent-minded Sen. Webb who can produce the insights in this article rather than see Jim Webb be obliged to defend the next dubious intervention in Sudan or God-knows-where as a member of the Obama administration. 

Update: I should note that the article in the magazine is an excerpt from Webb’s new book, Time to Fight.

Here is the poll I was looking for, and there are some interesting things to be found in it.  While it is true that only 12% of Americans agree with the statement that the U.S. should “withdraw from most efforts to solve international problems,” that is actually tremendously strong support for a degree of withdrawal from the globe that even most non-interventionists wouldn’t support.  There are, after all, humanitarian, financial, commercial and diplomatic means to address international problems that would not necessarily violate the counsel of Washington and Jefferson to avoid permanent and entangling alliances.  It is a caricature of the non-interventionist and neutralist positions that they would involve some kind of autarchic separation from the rest of the planet, and even then 12% would embrace such a policy. 

That 12% of the American public supports withdrawing even from many of these efforts is an impressive indication of how uninterested Americans are in the role of hegemon.  Only 10% of Americans endorse the statement that the U.S. “should continue to be the preeminent world leader in solving international problems.”  The Washington consensus on American “leadership” in the world is shared by one in ten Americans.  This is unsustainable at home.  

The majorities in Argentina and the Palestinian territories that prefer American withdrawal from most international efforts and the strong support for that option in Russia, Armenia and even Ukraine give another clue as to why hegemony is also unsustainable around the world.  What these nations have in common is a great antipathy to the way that the U.S. has exercised “leadership” in the world, since it has tended to come at their expense, or they associate their own problems with U.S. “leadership.”  The few nations that have large constituencies that support U.S. hegemony tend to be those that probably believe they have some stake in continued American preeminence (e.g., South Korea, the Philippines, Israel) or those rising powers, such as India, that see an advantage in aligning themselves with the hegemon.  In the other countries in the survey, support for U.S. withdrawal from international efforts typically exceeds support for hegemony, and we can expect the former to grow stronger the longer Washington persists in its pursuit of preeminence.