James Joyner responds to my post on Kagan:

The question, though, is whether American policymakers should care if Georgia’s fate is controlled by Russia.

All right, then the answer is no. 

Joyner goes on to say that “I nonetheless believe the United States has a strong interest in seeing Georgia, Ukraine, and other Eastern European states continue their path to democratization rather than devolving back into Russian satellite states,” which is all very well, but what I don’t understand is why anyone believes this.  I believe the contrary, so should we just call it even and leave things as they are? 

Joyner adds:

Poland, Latvia, Slovakia, and others have made remarkable strides since joining the West via membership in NATO and/or the EU.

Well, it’s mostly joining the E.U. that has had something to do with making those strides, and it has even more to do with not being ruled as communist-ruled parts of the Soviet empire, but the heavy dependence of Baltic states on Russian energy has not stopped them from thriving and I see no reason why it would necessarily matter that much if Russia “held sway” over the Baltic states once again.  Yet again, it is simply taken for granted it is “very much in our interests” that eastern European and ex-Soviet states “revamp their institutions, modernise their society, and otherwise become more Western” without any explanation of how or why this is “very much in our interests.”  Pursuing these things to the detriment of U.S.-Russian relations and regional stability seems to me to be very much not in the national interest, and taking on additional security commitments we either cannot or will not fulfill seems very risky.  I simply don’t see the positive rationale behind incorporating Georgia or Ukraine into NATO, and I didn’t see any rationale for incorporating other states during the last three expansions.  It made more sense to bring Romania into NATO than it does to bring in Georgia, but it never made any sense to bring in Romania in the first place.  Repeatedly saying “we have an interest” to do something does not persuade when it appears clear that there is no measurable or concrete benefit for the United States that outweighs the risks in doing it.  Usually the “we” involved is not the commonwealth or the American people, but an entirely different “we” whose interests are not necessarily those of our country or people, yet the ones who will bear the risk and the cost of the venture will be American citizens who will be called on to pay for the commitments that are being blithely made in the name of “our interests,” which is all the more remarkable when we recognise that these interests belong, in fact, to a relative few. 

P.S. Joyner also refers to “natural allies” at the end, and argues that we should not turn our back on them, but I completely disagree with the idea that there is such a thing as a “natural ally.”  Allies are those with whom one has a common interest and a common set of goals, and I have yet to understand what interest or goal we share with the governments of Kiev and Tbilisi that would necessitate granting them the highest allied status our government can bestow.

I really don’t see anything in Obama’s past on Israel that would offer me similar reassurance. ~Philip Klein

Klein and I continue to go back and forth about the pressing question of whether Obama is “pro-Israel” enough.  My point in making the comparison with McCain’s aides and their connections to the firm that did work for the Burmese junta is that there seems to be a willingness to ignore what Obama says about his own views, while McCain’s public statements are taken much more seriously.  No one assumes that McCain’s associations with the employees of junta collaborators mean anything, because he has publicly and repeatedly denounced the junta.  Somehow when Obama categorically rejects negotiations with Hamas, and has co-sponsored legislation condemning Hamas and Hizbullah, that doesn’t count.  Perhaps if he brings Khaled Mashal’s head on a platter to the next AIPAC meeting, that may prove satisfactory, but even then he will probably be criticised for failing to send Mashal’s dismembered limbs to the four corners of the world as a warning to others. 

Obama was a co-sponsor of the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006 (passed by unanimous consent), but that doesn’t seem to matter.  If McCain has publicly denounced the Burmese junta or has proposed legislation against the Burmese rulers, that counts.  If Obama makes public statements offering unequivocal support of Israel and co-sponsors legislation backing Israel’s military response in Lebanon, among other things, we’re supposed to discount that because some advisor, 109th or so in the pecking order of informal advisors, met with Hamas officials in an entirely separate role.  There are different standards of evidence being applied, and Obama is being labeled as being insufficiently “pro-Israel” not because of anything he has said or done, but because of things his associates, however far removed from him, have said or done (which have, in some cases, been rather remarkably distorted or exaggerated in their own right).   

I should say a word about why I find this worth bothering about, since Obama is obviously not my preferred candidate and especially since, if I am right about him, I would tend to disagree with him to some extent on U.S. policy towards Israel.  What I find interesting is that those who are looking for greater “even-handedness” or even the most modest of changes in U.S. policy towards the conflict latch on to the same threads that Klein uses to argue the same line, and both are inclined to interpret these small episodes (e.g., speaking on behalf of Khalidi, remarks about Palestinian suffering, the dinner with Said, etc.) as significant.  I think they are not.  What I find troubling about this is that Obama’s entire public record in national office, brief as it is, gives no “pro-Israel” person the slightest reason for doubting his devotion to their view of things, but somehow he has to provide further “reassurance” above and beyond what he has already done.  If Obama is insufficiently “pro-Israel,” when he is perfectly in agreement with the consensus view shared by almost every elected official in Washington, what kind of heavy-handed, unfair treatment can critics of Israel expect?  If his obviously mainstream and “pro-Israel” advisors are suspected of being anti-Semites, what hope do any actual critics of Israel have of being heard?    

Something else that has been consistent in the episodes that Klein thinks represents a credibility gap for Obama: his stated positions are routinely to the “left” (as these things are defined) of the positions that some of his advisors, in other contexts, say he will actually pursue.  That suggests that, if anything, Obama will be even more “hawkish” and more “pro-Israel” in practice than his public remarks imply.  It seems entirely plausible to me that he is suckering progressives with honeyed words about settlements and ending the war in Iraq, only to adopt different positions once he has power.  The people who should be worried about Obama’s lack of credibility are those who have flocked to him out of the misguided notion that he represents meaningful change in U.S. foreign policy.  I can accept the idea that Obama may be misleading the public, but the idea that he will become more pro-Palestinian or more antiwar than he is right now seems very bizarre; since he isn’t pro-Palestinian at all at the present time, I truly can’t imagine how he would become more so in office.  Lame-duck efforts to “solve” the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians afflict all Presidents of both parties, and Obama might fall victim to the same temptation, but that would mean that he is as “anti-Israel” as George W. Bush, which, I hope Klein would agree, makes him pretty “pro-Israel” by his standards.

Klein says elsewhere in his response:

But what Obama actually said was, “nobody’s suffering more than the Palestinian people,” which suggests not merely that he wants to recognize that Palestinian people are suffering, but that he thinks that Palestinians are suffering more than Israelis. Israelis who have lost loved once to suicide bombings would disagree.

It doesn’t suggest that, but if it did we could go round and round about this.  Palestinians who have lost loved ones to Israeli missile strikes would also disagree that their suffering is any less, but that is a dead end.  The point is that this is not what Obama meant, and it doesn’t take much research to show this.  It is worth mentioning that he uttered this line in the context of criticising the Palestinian Authority and remarking on the effects of the stalled peace process, since he said shortly after this, “if we could get some movement among Palestinian leadership [bold mine-DL], what I’d like to see is a loosening up of some of the restrictions on providing aid directly to the Palestinian people.”  In other words, he was rebuking the Palestinian leadership for failing to serve the Palestinian people.  How had they failed?  They had not been pressing ahead with the peace process, and so “no one was suffering more than the Palestinian people” because of what the Palestinian Authority had done, or rather failed to do.  Whatever else you want to say about this view, this was clearly not a case of belittling Israeli suffering or suggesting that Palestinians had suffered more, on the whole, than Israelis.  It seems to me significant that Obama has used this line once and, so far as I know, never repeated it, and has since emphasised the mutual suffering of both sides.

As Klein acknowledges, ” I included in my article Obama’s clarification that he meant that nobody has suffered more from the failures of Palestinian leadership.”  So perhaps we can agree that the isolated line does not mean very much, and can be read in a way entirely consistent with conventional “pro-Israel” views? 

Klein asks:

Larison doesn’t think that it’s likely as president Obama would move in a more pro-Palestinian direction than he has signaled on the campaign trail. But why not?  

Two basic reasons: it’s not a popular move, for one thing, and for another Obama has never indicated that he intends to do any such things, and everything in his public record, including his pledge not to pressure the Israeli government into making any concessions, tells us that he will not.  I suppose anything’s possible.  McCain might withdraw all forces from Iraq in 90 days and dissolve NATO, but I’m not going to put any money on it.  The better question is why Klein thinks that it is even remotely likely that Obama would do this.

Klein is free to be as suspicious of Obama as he wants, but I hope we can agree that there is essentially nothing that Obama himself has actually said or done that should give him any concrete reason to have suspicions that Obama is lacking in support of Israel.

Scott relates a worrisome, but unfortunately very predictable, remark by Robert Kagan:

The most alarming thing he said in a generally fluid presentation concerned Georgia and the Ukraine. “Would the United States really want to live in a world where Russia held sway over Georgia and the Ukraine?” (I’m not sure the quote is verbatim, but the “really want to live in a world” is.) Kagan said this in the context of discussing potential “flashpoints” with other great powers, Russia and China.

As Scott says, this isn’t a terribly troubling thought for Americans.  Obviously, I understand why Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians and Georgians are not interested in having Russia hold sway over their countries.  They want to preserve their national independence, and they view Russia as the historic oppressor or occupier that must never be allowed to regain control.  I get it.  I can even understand why they, or at least some of them, would actively seek the protection of other great powers to prevent that happening, but what has never been clear to me is why Americans should be willing to harm our relations with the Russians for the sake of countries in which we have no particularly important interests and which Russians consider part of their sphere of influence, if not, in fact, historically theirs.  Georgians and Ukrainians may not want to live in the world Kagan paints, but an overwhelming majority of Americans would not be concerned one way or another.  To ask the question Kagan asked is to answer it right away in the affirmative.

The idea that places on the very borders of other great powers constitute “flashpoints” is evidence of the sort of reflexive, unthinking hubris that Kagan and others in his circle express all the time.  Why are these places “flashpoints”?  Because the government has made the independence of countries that border on other great powers our business, when properly speaking none of the disputes in question has anything to do with the United States.  Imagine the hysterical reaction if someone close to one of the major officials in the Chinese government said, “Does China want to live in a world in which the United States holds sway over Colombia and Haiti?”  The absurdity of the question would be apparent to all.  What if one of Medvedev’s advisors said, “Does Russia want to live in a world in which the United States holds sway over Panama?”  I suspect he would be laughed out of the room, or the question would be dismissed as irrelevant.  Our foreign policy “intellectuals” take for granted that everything outside (and perhaps quite a few things inside) other great powers’ borders are automatically our business, and if these other powers attempt to exert even minimal influence on their immediate neighbours it is evidence of their “imperialism.”  Meanwhile, we may launch any number of strikes and wars against states on the other side of the planet in the name of self-defense and bristle at the suggestion that this has anything to do with empire.  It’s a dangerous game to treat other great or rising powers in this way, as if their modest goals for wider influence in their region and in the world represent some dire threat that needs to be checked and rolled back.  This is the sort of thing that plunged Britain into an arms race and then into conflict with Imperial Germany when the two had no obvious or necessary conflicts of interest.  The greatest danger to continued American predominance is almost certainly the boundless ambition and recklessness of the people who are most enthusiastic about preserving hegemony.

Count me as another skeptic of the claim that Huckabee is preparing a secret army of evangelicals who wish to punish the land by helping to defeat McCain and bring about the fiery maelstrom of an Obama administration.  Had Huckabee wanted to take down McCain and weaken him for a contest with Obama, he had many opportunities before this, and he would have been cheered on by a lot of conservatives in the process earlier in the year.  One of the many reasons movement conservatives still dislike Huckabee so powerfully is that he helped make McCain’s nomination possible and seemed to enjoy doing it, partly because I think he was doing it to poke movement conservatives in the eye for their previous resistance to his candidacy.  The people who have to worry about a long-term “Christian problem” are the movement conservatives who quite plainly told evangelicals where they could put their religion and their social conservatism.  McCain may or may not win over enough social conservatives, and low turnout may hamper his efforts to get elected, but the people who are going to pay more over the long haul for snubbing and ridiculing Huckabee will not be McCain, but rather those who seemed to be appalled by what Huckabee represented.  These were the people who declared that, while McCain was bad, Huckabee was unthinkable as the nominee. 

The one major candidate who consistently showed respect to Huckabee, and by extension to his voters, was McCain, despite the fact that Huckabee was the greatest threat to McCain’s success down the stretch.  Huckabee and his supporters have no interest in sabotaging McCain’s victory.  It is Huckabee’s enemies within the movement who have every reason to hint that he is actually disloyal and will be working against the nominee.  Of course, it’s possible that Novak found someone who believes that Huckabee shares his apocalyptic vision of the ’08 election, but for the reasons Ross laid out this is pretty meaningless.

This Grady column was entertaining, since she had to do quite a few backflips and contortions to make the comparison between the 1960 West Virginia primary and today’s anything but a horrible omen for Obama.  As the story usually goes, his West Virginia win suggested that anti-Catholic sentiment would not drag Kennedy down and aided him on his way to the nomination, so the obvious point of comparing the two would be to say that the candidate who is likened to JFK on a regular basis is in serious trouble because of deep resistance to his candidacy in this part of the country and the Humphrey-like figure (that would be Clinton) is on the verge of a significant victory.  Just by drawing the comparison people are giving today’s primary significance it may not even deserve, since the winner in 1960 did go on to become President (never mind about how he won the general election).  For that matter, when Clinton says that “it is a fact” that no Democrat since 1916 has won the White House without winning West Virginia in the general, she happens to be telling the truth for a change, and it seems certain that West Virginia will go for McCain if Obama is the nominee.     

Instead, because the outcome is not in doubt and the repudiation of Obama is unmistakable, we get an argument that Clinton can learn from Humphrey how to “bow out gracefully.”  But why would she “bow out gracefully” if, as polls suggest, she is going to win perhaps as much as 75% of the vote and net more than a dozen delegates?  Another problem with the comparison is that, as Grady relates, Kennedy campaigned extensively in the state and fought to win; today was Obama’s second visit to the state during this election cycle.  The reason Obama did not make an effort is that his deficit of 30 or 40 points is much greater than Kennedy’s was, and probably could not have made much of a dent in it had he expended the effort and money.

As displays of galling dishonesty go, these responses (via Sullivan) to Obama’s remarks in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg are right down there among the scummiest misrepresentations of someone else’s views.  From the interview:

JG: If you become President, will you denounce settlements publicly?

BO: What I will say is what I’ve said previously. Settlements at this juncture are not helpful. Look, my interest is in solving this problem not only for Israel but for the United States. 

JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?

BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions [bold mine-DL], and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that, and some of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that’s the safest ground politically.

I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we’re going to be stuck in the same status quo that we’ve been stuck in for decades now, and that won’t lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article.  

At most, Obama was referring to the general conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.  In the context of the interview, I had originally taken his remarks to refer to settlements, and given what he says in the rest of the paragraph I still think that is probably what Obama was talking about.  The remarkable thing is that this description of the conflict would not even be controversial outside of the U.S. debate over Israel policy, and it has considerable support inside that debate.  Naturally, there are people who think that illegal settlements are sacrosanct and unquestionable, and they will take any indication that Obama is critical of them to be an indication of his hostility to Israel, because they define hostility to Israel as “whatever I disagree with,” but I wonder how much longer such shoddy and weak arguments can keep prevailing. 

Now read the responses.  The RJC:

Senator Obama manages to excuse the inexcusable actions of anti-American militant jihadists by putting the blame for their actions on America’s foreign policy.

So when he calls these actions inexcusable, he is excusing them, get it?

Next, Boehner and Cantor:

“It is truly disappointing that Senator Obama called Israel a ‘constant wound,’ ‘constant sore,’ and that it ‘infect[s] all of our foreign policy.’ These sorts of words and characterizations are the words of a politician with a deep misunderstanding of the Middle East and an innate distrust of Israel.”

This is plainly and clearly a lie, and an unusually clumsy one. 

So what did the politician with this “innate distrust of Israel” say about Israel in this interview?  He said:

I think the idea of Israel and the reality of Israel is one that I find important to me personally. Because it speaks to my history of being uprooted, it speaks to the African-American story of exodus, it describes the history of overcoming great odds and a courage and a commitment to carving out a democracy and prosperity in the midst of hardscrabble land. One of the things I loved about Israel when I went there is that the land itself is a metaphor for rebirth, for what’s been accomplished. What I also love about Israel is the fact that people argue about these issues, and that they’re asking themselves moral questions.

And again:

When I visited Ramallah, among a group of Palestinian students, one of the things that I said to those students was: “Look, I am sympathetic to you and the need for you guys to have a country that can function, but understand this: if you’re waiting for America to distance itself from Israel, you are delusional. Because my commitment, our commitment, to Israel’s security is non-negotiable.” I’ve said this in front of audiences where, if there were any doubts about my position, that’d be a place where you’d hear it.

And again:

Israel is a vibrant democracy, the only one in the Middle East, and there’s no doubt that Israel and the Palestinians have tough issues to work out to get to the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security, but injecting a term like apartheid into the discussion doesn’t advance that goal. It’s emotionally loaded, historically inaccurate, and it’s not what I believe.

And again:

I think that the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea, given not only world history but the active existence of anti-Semitism, the potential vulnerability that the Jewish people could still experience. I know that that there are those who would argue that in some ways America has become a safe refuge for the Jewish people, but if you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens. That makes it a fundamentally just idea.  

Update: Jim Geraghty jumps on the bandwagon of misreading Obama, treating the reference to the “wound” and “sore” as a reference to Israel.  This is simply wrong, as the full quote above shows.

James makes a good point about this Newsweek article (the same one that seems to have bothered Philip Klein so much) that voters are not going to see Obama as “the Other” and most people aren’t going to think of the negative campaign against Obama as an exercise in “othering.”  What some of us in the ivory tower call othering and identity construction, more would simply call “not being able to identify with” such and such a candidate, or they would say that “he doesn’t share my values.”  Put in a less weaselly way, people will simply say, “He’s not one of us” or “he doesn’t belong.”  The irony is that most of the people whom we feel compelled to “other” are those who are, in some way, actually “one of us,” but who must for one reason or another be recast as an interloper or an alien.  What some people dismiss as the “narcissism of small differences” is actually the policing of very fine lines of identity; intra-party and internecine fights are more intense because more is at stake in the competition, namely the definition and direction of the group in the future, while a group can recover from, may even benefit from, a defeat at the hands of diametrically opposed foes.

Philip Klein keeps describing Obama as a candidate with “the the thinest [sic] records of any presidential candidate in the modern era,” but this seems demonstrably false when it comes to foreign policy.  When Candidate Bush or Candidate Clinton was running the first time around, did either one have thicker portfolios on their foreign policy views?  No.  Indeed, Bush’s actual knowledge, to say nothing of his “record,” was so risibly thin that he had to staff his campaign with as many veterans of past Republican administrations as he could find to ease the minds of observers that someone would be around to explain just who “the Grecians” (as he called them) were.  I have tremendous problems with Obama’s foreign policy vision, but it seems obviously wrong to say that he has the “thinnest record” of any candidate in the modern era.  Thinner than Jimmy Carter’s record on foreign policy as Governor of Georgia?  Thinner than George W. Bush’s (non-existent) record?  As limited as his national political experience is, it is hard not to conclude that he has several years more foreign policy-related experience in his brief time in the Senate than many of the governors who have been elected President.  Now, given the actual record of the last sitting Senator to win the Presidency, that doesn’t necessarily mean much in practice, but since Klein seems intent on using this “thinnest record” line to justify his obsession with proving Obama’s pro-Hamas sentiments, it might be worth noting that this claim is bogus.

Mr. Obama sternly rejected the Hamas endorsement, but the latest Gallup polls suggest he has a significant and growing problem in keeping Jewish voters in the Democratic fold. The latest Gallup polls show that in a contest with Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama would secure 61 percent of the Jewish vote to the Republican’s 32 percent. In 2004 and 2006 elections, by contrast, Jewish voters favored the Democratic Party by a 75 percent to 25 percent margin. This suggests that support for the Democratic Party standard-bearer among Jews could be approaching its lowest levels in decades. The Republicans’ best showing was achieved by Ronald Reagan in 1980, when he won 40 percent of the Jewish vote.

Jews comprise just 2 percent of the American population. But they could play a large role in a close election because they are geographically concentrated and are more likely than other groups to turn out to vote. States with large Jewish populations — such as California, New York, Florida and New Jersey — account for 128 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio also have large numbers of Jewish voters. Consider two states: Florida, a critical swing state, has 400,000 Jewish voters and Pennsylvania 200,000. In these states, a shift among Jews from one party to the other can determine the overall final result. ~The Washington Times

The Times makes a point of connecting Obama’s “problem” with Jewish voters to his views on Israel and Near East policy.  When a quote from Gen. McPeak was dug up recently, in which he said something very much like this in the context of explaining the political obstacles to changing U.S. Israel policy, he was branded an anti-Semite and opponent of Israel.  The Times is less direct, but is ultimately making the same point: to secure these voters, national politicians have to toe a very specific line on certain policies.  The reason you won’t hear anyone screaming over this statement from the Times about electoral realities is that it isn’t being said by someone attached to Obama.  Even though Obama does not propose to do anything substantively different from the current administration with respect to Israel or Hamas, he has been tagged as being somehow less reliable.  The very pressure that McPeak was describing is being brought to bear on the Obama campaign right now, and until Obama gives in to it by somehow adopting an even more party-line position (which would be hard, since he already holds this position) it will continue.

For the record, Obama runs just five points behind Clinton against McCain among Jewish voters.  McCain has improved on Bush’s level of support in 2004, while both Democrats have lost ground from 2004 and 2006 for one reason or another.  The main thing that would seem to explain that would probably be the Democrats’ opposition to the war in Iraq, but if someone were to suggest that this was the case he would be inundated with outraged protests about stereotyping and so on.

Update: Jeffrey Goldberg makes a related point:

The Hamas episode won’t help Obama’s attempts to win over Jewish voters, particularly those in such places as –- to pull an example from the air –- Palm Beach County, Florida, whose Jewish residents tend to appreciate robust American support for Israel, and worry about whether presidential candidates feel the importance of Israel in their kishkes, or guts.