Ross may be right that the NIE causes the issue of Iran policy to recede into the background during the election next year, but it seems to me that it still pretty badly compromises several of the leading Republican candidates.  In fact, the one leading Republican candidate whose foreign policy ideas on Iran aren’t completely absurd, and the leading candidate who stands to be vindicated the most by the NIE on the Republican side is (yes, that’s right) Mike Huckabee.  Certainly, Ron Paul has taken the most unequivocal (and correct) line that Iran does not pose a threat to the United States, so he may also benefit from this news, but Huckabee is in the best position to take advantage of his relatively more sane Iran position.  Like the others, he assumed that Iranian proliferation was happening and posed a threat, so he cannot be credited with some great prescience or insight on the proliferation question itself, but unlike his leading competitors he had a very different view of how to treat Iran.  In his CFR speech, Huckabee said of the Iranian regime:

While there can be no rational dealing with Al Qaeda, Iran is a nation state looking for regional power, it plays the normal power politics that we understand and can skillfully pursue, and we have substantive issues to negotiate with them. 

Negotiate!  No wonder neoconservatives were uninspired by his remarks.  He has since been derided for his “naive and unconvincing” foreign policy ideas by those most invested in the idea that Iran is not a rational state actor, but rather an apocalyptic land of crazy people.  They appear to have been demonstrably wrong in their judgement, while Huckabee and other more “realist” observers appear to have been right.  Compared to John “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” McCain, Mitt Romney, who is apparently on a mission to indict Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention, and Giuliani, whose campaign is advised by the likes of Norman Podhoretz and who has said  that we need to stay “on offense,” Huckabee’s recommended approach to Iran is a picture of sanity.  You will object that this may not be saying much, but it’s still the case that the one currently leading Republican candidate who espoused containment of Iran (albeit combined with continued support for the war in Iraq) was Huckabee.  He was the one whose foreign policy credentials were supposed to be non-existent and whose ideas were supposed to be unacceptable to “national security conservatives.”  Huckabee comes away from this latest news looking more responsible and competent–at least on Iran–than the other leading candidates.

Update: I keep forgetting that Republican voters don’t like responsible and competent foreign policy ideas.  60% of Iowans, according to Pew’s latest, choose one of the four other leading candidates as the best candidate on Iran, and 11% select Huckabee (graphic on page 8).  Of the top five, Huckabee is tied for fourth here.  The crazy guy leads the pack on Iran, followed by McCain.  Sometimes I just really don’t understand this party.  It’s even worse in New Hampshire (page 10)–69% select Romney, Giuliani or McCain as the best candidate on Iran, while Huckabee and Paul together get 8%.

Putin’s reelection, Larison says, “is a fact that should be viewed with some dispassion.” (Er, why exactly?) ~Michael Moynihan

Since Putin himself wasn’t being re-elected yesterday (it was the election for the Duma, and Putin headed United Russia’s list), as Moynihan knows, this sentence is strange enough, but the implication that non-Russians should have something other than fairly dispassionate reactions to an entirely unsurprising (and, yes, obviously rigged and inflated) United Russia election is stranger still.  The original article’s thesis didn’t really merit comment in my first post, because the thesis, particularly as it related to international affairs and Russian politics, was ridiculous.  I addressed his characterisation of Laughland’s TAC piece, because it seemed quite misleading and the article is not available online where it can be easily checked.  Here’s Moynihan’s opening line to his original article:

On December 2 voters in Russia and Venezuela will go to the polls, choosing to either accelerate the Sovietization and Sandinistaization of their respective societies or—an eventuality that seems less likely—to curtail the centralization of power in the hands of increasingly villainous chief executives. 

But a vote for United Russia wasn’t a vote for an accelerated “Sovietization” of Russian society.  Call it the entrenchment of Putinism or populist authoritarianism, or call it proof of illiberal democracy, but one thing it was not was an acceleration of “Sovietization.”  “Sovietization” is what you might expect from the Communists, who are now the lone opposition party.  The use of the word “Sovietization” in this context is absurd, and the statement in the concluding paragraph isn’t much better when he says, “Both Chavez and Putin are attempting to reset the clock on the Cold War…”  This takes symbolic use of Soviet nostalgia as proof of “Sovietization,” and seems to assume that this supposed “Sovietization” makes Russia into a threat and Putin into a villain, whom, it practically goes without saying, we are supposed to oppose.  The assumption behind the article seems to be that developments in the domestic politics of Russia and Venezuela pose some sort of threat to the West, presumably comparable to those posed by the USSR and its satellites.  This is basically fearmongering of the kind that has clouded our debates on foreign policy for years.  The generally awful results–for both America and the “beneficiaries” of our policies–of marrying power projection and “freedom agenda” meddling speak for themselves. 

We should view the Russian election results from yesterday with “some dispassion” for many reasons.  First of all, it is really none of our business and railing against it will change nothing, but more than that the proper approach to Russia that is clearly dominated by Putinism is to try to find some way to cultivate good relations with Russia, since it is obviously in the American interest to have good relations with a Eurasian power with which we have common security interests and whose continued political and economic stability we have an interest in supporting.  Continually lecturing the Russians on the deficiencies in their political system seems a good way to promote anti-Russian sentiment at home and give the impression that Westerners are intent on meddling in the internal affairs of Russia, which gives the Putin regime many pretexts for claiming that the West is trying to subvert and weaken Russia through the promotion of liberal political forces.  If Russian liberals are closely associated with the West and receive vocal support from Westerners, as they now are, they will never gain any traction inside Russia, and the attempted promotion of Russian liberals by outsiders will simply strengthen anti-Western attitudes within Russia that are also detrimental to the cultivation of good U.S.-Russian relations.  One of the points I was trying to make is that articles that try to revive Cold War mentalities, or articles that pretend that a new Cold War is upon us, as Moynihan’s certainly seemed to do, partake of an imprudent alarmism and vilification of other states that have very real damaging effects on the quality of foreign policy thinking in this country.  There are already voices in Washington who would like to imagine Russia as our enemy, and those who would like to avoid renewed confrontation and tension between our two countries should all do what we can to challenge what these voices are saying. 

Moynihan cites Laughland’s past works, which I was not defending in my post, but which he takes as vindication of his claim that Laughland is  writing as an apologist in this particular case.  Indeed, he can’t be bothered to find the article he was criticising.  The article in question was not an apology for Putin.  It was a corrective against the steady stream of vilification that we have become used to (and to which Moynihan’s article was another contribution), for the reasons I laid out before.  Moynihan needed to cite someone in the West as a “supporter” of Putin’s regime to show some relevance, and so he read into Laughland’s TAC piece the support he wanted to see in it.     

Another TAC piece from earlier this year by an author Moynihan will have a harder time trying to demonise was this cover article by Anatol Lieven:

And in contrast to the launching of the Cold War, for the U.S. to take these risks is not remotely justified by vital American interests. In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union was the heartland of a revolutionary ideology that threatened to suppress free-market democracy, freedom, and religion across the world and, by dominating Western Europe and East Asia and fomenting revolution in Latin America, to pin the U.S. within its own borders, surround it, and eventually stifle it.

Today’s Russia is like many U.S. allies past and present: a corrupt, state-influenced market economy with a partly democratic, partly authoritarian system. Russia has no global agenda of ideological or geopolitical domination but mainly wants to exert predominant influence (but not imperial control) within the territory of the former Soviet Union and the centuries-old Russian empire [bold mine-DL]. Moves by the state to dominate the oil and gas sector are unwelcome to Americans but entirely in line with world practice outside the U.S. and U.K. Russian corruption is extremely serious, but on the other hand, the fiscal restraint of the Putin administration holds lessons for the present U.S. administration, not the other way around. Like India, Turkey, and many other democratic states, Russia has used brutal means to suppress a separatist rebellion.

Like Turkey for several decades when it was a member of NATO, Russia combines an increasingly independent judiciary and respect for the rule of law with selective repression (both formal and covert) against individuals seen as threats to the state or the ruling elite. The media scene is rather like India until the 1980s—a combination of state domination of television with a free and vocal, but much less influential, print media.

Above all, when it comes to the main lines of its foreign and domestic policy, the Putin administration has the support of the vast majority of ordinary Russians, while the Russian pro-Western liberals we choose to call “democrats” are supported by a tiny minority—mostly because of their association with the disastrous “reforms” of the 1990s. Thus, far from rallying democratic support in Russia, American attacks on Putin in the name of democracy only foment the anger of ordinary Russians against the United States.  It does not help when criticism of Russia’s record on democracy and freedom comes from that notorious defender of human rights Dick Cheney or when these statements are immediately followed by warm and public American embraces of even more notorious ex-Soviet democrats like President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.

Russia today is by no means a pretty picture, but to compare it in terms of repression and state control with the Soviet Union—or indeed with contemporary China—is grotesque [bold mine-DL]. We should remember that as late as the summer of 1989, a Soviet leader who envisioned Russia as it now exists would have been received with incredulous joy by the West as representing a future beyond our most optimistic dreams. And at that time a Western policymaker who advocated such megalomaniacal, horribly dangerous projects as drawing Ukraine and Georgia into an anti-Russian military alliance, and taking responsibility for their security, would have been regarded as completely insane.

That is the voice of intelligent realism speaking.  It is worth noting this last point about comparisons with the USSR being grotesque, since this is exactly what Moynihan was doing.  It was against just such grotesquerie, and the hostility to the Russian government that it represented, that I was objecting.

P.S.  Later in the piece, Lieven said this, which is especially relevant to the Laughland piece, since it was Putin’s pragmatism that Laughland was trying to stress:

In fact, we should be very glad that the Putin administration is as pragmatic as it is in its international policy and as relatively law-abiding at home. During the 1990s, given what was happening to both Russian living standards and Russian national power and prestige, I and many other Western observers in Russia feared an eruption of outright fascism, with catastrophic results for Russia and the world.

This is one reason that present U.S. attacks on the Putin administration are so over the top. The other is that the post-Cold war era should have begun with a presumption of Russia’s innocence on the part of the West. After all, two years before it collapsed the Soviet Union had already withdrawn peacefully from Eastern Europe on the informal promise that these countries would not be incorporated into NATO. This withdrawal removed the original casus belli of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, which began not because of anything that the Soviet state was doing within its own borders but because of its domination of European states beyond its borders in ways that were clearly menacing to Western Europe and vital American interests there.

This last sentence drives home the point that the success of United Russia on Sunday likewise has nothing to do with a restart or return of the Cold War, since the Cold War, if we are to be precise about what the name means, referred to U.S.-Soviet great power rivalry centered in Europe. 

Maybe some voters who are inclined to hold Romney’s Mormonism against him will feel guilty when Romney cites the principle of religious tolerance. ~Marc Ambinder

Perhaps, but for them to feel guilty they would have to have done something they actually thought was wrong.  Not voting for Romney because of his Mormonism is not intolerance, and it is a measure of how distorted, or rather inflated, the concept of tolerance has become that strong disagreement over religion can be equated with religious intolerance.

But I think it’s bogus to assert that the reason for Governor Romney’s upcoming speech is a rival’s poll numbers. Rather, it’s the fact that a rival appears to be running an overtly sectarian campaign — something that is just not good for America. ~Charles Mitchell

I”m holding off commenting more about the speech for a while, but I did want to address this claim of sectarianism, which I think is excessive and a sign of how increasingly panicked Romney supporters are becoming.  I will say also that I think Huckabee’s rise is not a major factor behind the decision to give the speech.  It is not just Romneyites who have been accusing Huckabee of making a religious appeal, but they are virtually alone in claiming that Huckabee is running a “sectarian campaign.”  His recent advertisement, entitled “Believe,” has received criticism from almost all quarters for its graphic that reads, “Christian Leader.”  According to Huckabee on ABC’s This Week, where he appeared yesterday, the purpose of the ad was simply introductory.  Huckabee is an ordained minister, and he has been in the forefront of various Christian conservative endeavours, such as the promotion of so-called “covenant marriage,” both of which give him some legitimate claim to the description “Christian leader.”  Observers are assuming a sectarian and anti-Mormon motive behind to this part of Huckabee’s ad, when this is both unproven and seems directly contradictory to everything Huckabee says publicly and the general tenor of his campaign.  Might his ad have the effect of directing voters who do not want to support a Mormon towards Huckabee?  Yes, it might, but if you wanted to run a “sectarian campaign” you would make the appeal much more straightforward.  Huckabee isn’t running such a campaign, because I suspect he knows that this would grate on the sensibilities of a lot of voters.  He probably also believes that strongly affirming his beliefs isn’t the same, or at least doesn’t have to be the same, as ridiculing someone else’s. 

At most, the ad very vaguely alludes to his past work as a minister (which you would only recognise if you already knew this about him), but never mentions any of that explicitly, and it seeks to identify the candidate with his target constituency, Christian conservatives.  Unless it is now supposed to be illegitimate for a Christian to describe himself as such, I fail to see what Huckabee has done wrong.  Some Christian conservatives are rubbed the wrong way by such overt appeals to Christian identity, but then I suspect Ross was not won over by George Bush’s claim that his “favourite philosopher is Jesus Christ” or by the story of his religious awakening.  The voters won over by these appeals see nothing the matter with a candidate stating and embracing his religious identity, and they think it is entirely appropriate to judge candidates based on this, because they do not think religion is something to be kept out of the public eye, nor do they think it is somehow shameful to speak about it in public.  If a person’s religion informs his “values” and shapes his judgement about matters of public policy, it should be something that voters take into consideration. 

The basic argument against this, and it is the one that Chait has made, is that this is unfair to candidates who are unrepresentative of the body politic in their religious affiliation, which is essentially a complaint that there is a majority religion and that candidates in a mass democracy are likely to come to from that majority religion in nationwide elections.  Short of completey removing religion from public discourse or awaiting the day when there are no majority religions, it seems inevitable in a mass democracy that religious identity will have an impact on elections, just as other kinds of identity have and must have in a political system that is, for good or ill, inherently identitarian.  Secular voters respond to secular candidates and react against publicly religious candidates in the same way, because they are interested in being represented by someone like them who shares their worldview.  Secular Americans treat an entirely non-religious politics as the norm and the neutral ground upon which publicly religious candidates intrude, but having that kind of politics is a preference that can and will be contested.     

In any case, it seems to me that the intended message of Huckabee’s ad seems to be not simply, or even necessarily, “You should vote for me because I am a Christian,” but rather, “Because my faith defines me, I have principles that will not change or waver.”  This ad does implicitly criticise Romney, not because he is a Mormon, but because Romney is an opportunistic fraud.  If you want to damage Romney with the voting public, you would never need to say a thing about his religion–just remind them of the man’s utter lack of scruples when it comes to public policy positions.  In the end, that will be more than enough.

P.S.  Incidentally, I agree with the argument that identity is a terrible basis for selecting candidates if you are actually interested in selecting the person best qualified for the office, because it will often cause voters to choose inferior candidates, but then democracy and selecting the most meritorious candidates have never gone together.  If you aren’t a fan of democracy (and I’m definitely not), this is probably one of the reasons why, but it is an unavoidable part of the process.

It’s good news for Venezuela and good news for the general sanity of outside commentary on Venezuela that the constitutional referendum in Venezuela did not pass.  Perhaps now we can start to shelve silly talk about the “Cold War’s return”?  As Alex Massie notes, this was an unexpected outcome.  I certainly expected the referendum to pass.  I assumed that if Chavez could do one thing right, it would be to rig his own power-enhancing referendum to make sure that he wins the chance to keep being re-elected (and that those “re-elections” would also be thoroughly rigged).  However, I had to remind myself, as I have written in the past, that Venezuela really is a democracy.  Unlike some, I do not bestow this label as a form of praise, but as a description.  Venezuela is a populist, illiberal democracy, but a democracy all the same.  Sometimes demagogues and populists overreach and do not receive the popular support they expect, and this seems to be one of those times. 

I would add that this makes the prospects of the Venezuelan-Bolivian military threat to Argentina and the rest of South America, feared by some, less likely, but I suppose there isn’t much point in discussing the changing likelihood of an impossibility.

On the surface of it, Romney shouldn’t have to give a Mormon speech any more than Obama should have to give a Muslim speech. ~Patrick Ruffini

Except for the small matter that Obama isn’t a Muslim.  The remarkable thing is that Obama has spoken more openly and directly about his experience living among Muslims and about his Muslim ancestors, while Romney has avoided discussing his religion whenever possible.  The perceived connection between Obama and Islam is probably far more damaging to him than Romney’s Mormonism is (because public opposition to a Muslim presidential candidate is even greater), but he and his supporters keep talking up his time in Indonesia, apparently oblivious that every time someone mentions Indonesia and his great understanding of the “Islamic world” many voters hear, “Obama is a Muslim.”  One tries in vain to explain to these people that he lived there, but did not actually convert.  I attempted to explain the facts at a recent Thanksgiving gathering, but the Obama-is-a-Muslim meme is already becoming engrained.  They know that he lived in some Muslim country “over there” and that is enough to confirm their worst suspicions. 

Besides, wo we really think, given the state of affairs and the public mood, that if a presidential candidate were a Muslim that he wouldn’t have to address it publicly in some way?  Of course he would.  The perception that both candidates belong to non-Christian religions are clearly political liabilities, as poll after poll on Muslim and Mormon presidential candidates shows, but the difference is that the Obama-is-a-Muslim meme is a lie, while Romney is something like a fifth-generation Mormon and proud of it.  Obama shouldn’t have to give a major speech to debunk unfounded rumours.  If Romney wants to be competitive, not just in the primaries but also for the general election, he needs to confront the reality, troubling as he and others may find it, that at least a quarter of the electorate is currently opposed to considering voting for him for no other reason than his religion.  As polling on this reveals, this sentiment is more or less evenly spread across the political spectrum. 

Ruffini adds in an update:

The anti-Mormon bigots and the anti-Muslim rumormongers seem to exist on about the same level — and neither candidate should let these fringe elements define their campaign.

Well, if you want to define somewhere between 25-43% of the electorate as “fringe elements,” I guess you can do so, but I’m not sure how someone wins an election by ignoring such huge levels of built-in opposition.

As you may have noticed, I have had a few things to say about Romney and the “Mormon factor” in this election, so I suppose I should comment on the news (via Noam Scheiber) that Romney will be giving the long-awaited speech that is aimed at allaying fears and doubts about his religion.  I have noted before that Romney has an impossible balancing act to maintain when he addresses this question, which may be why he has carefully evaded it for months, but it is also the case that Romney cannot keep evading the issue so long as he wishes to define his campaign and his “values” in terms of being a “person of faith.”  The impossible balancing act is stressing the political irrelevance of the theological differences Mormonism really does have with Christianity while simultaneously claiming that this very same religion, whose distinctive substance is supposed to be irrelevant, informs and shapes his “values” that he will rely on to make judgements about policy.  Another part of the balancing act (which is where it becomes really dangerous politically) is to declare that it is “un-American” to judge a candidate based on his religion without insulting the millions of voters who consider a candidate’s religion an important part of selecting their preferred candidate, while also paying homage to the “separation of church and state” without actually endorsing the idea that the separation of church and state has any constitutional basis (which a fairly large number of religious conservatives doesn’t accept).  His speech will have to go something like this: “My faith, which is very important to me and has made me who I am, should not be important to you, but it is important that we have a person of faith leading this country, and that person happens to be me.”

I agree that the timing of this couldn’t be worse, but I wonder whether the timing makes that much difference.  The extensive opposition to a Mormon candidate wouldn’t have disappeared had he given the speech earlier.  However, by giving the speech now he may be exacerbating what is already a bad situation for himself.  Had he done it three or four months ago and laid the issue to rest, at least as much as he could, he could have reduced the publicity surrounding the speech and tried to contain the damage.  Now that there is just a month left until the caucuses, he is using valuable time and exposing himself to the backlash that we knew was coming at a time when he cannot afford to shed any more support.  In the end, Romney has always been in an impossible position: a sizeable percentage of his own party will never vote for someone of his religion, and these are the same people he needed to win over to become the unchallenged social conservative consensus candidate, which is why Romney’s campaign has always been a fool’s errand as I’ve said from the beginning.  My guess is that Romney gives the speech on Thursday and his campaign in Iowa begins to implode, as his shallow support there evaporates.

Rod wrote:

Yesterday over lunch, a (white) Republican friend and I were talking about how much we like Barack Obama as a political figure, even though we don’t like his politics much. My friend said he thought it was depressing how more black voters say they’re for Hillary than Obama. To him, it’s a sign that they’d rather stick with a Democrat who can be relied upon to mouth the same old liberal lines on race, rather than go with a black candidate who promises to move the national conversation forward. I told him that I saw the reticence of black voters to go for Obama over a white candidate a sign of political maturity, i.e., that they’ll chose a candidate based on his or her positions, not skin color. But I think my friend had the more interesting point.

I think Rod has the better of the argument here, not least since it isn’t clear as a matter of policy where Obama sharply differs from Clinton with respect to those “same old liberal lines on race” and it also isn’t clear that huge numbers of black Democratic voters are as tired of the “same old liberal lines on race” as white Republicans and conservatives are.  Obama does have a different rhetorical style from most other black politicians when it comes to matters of race, as Shelby Steele has described here, but I submit that this style is part of the reason why Obama is an appealing figure to Rod and Rod’s friend (and many other whites around the country) and why he fares worse among black Democratic voters than you might expect, given that he does have the best chance of being a major party nominee for President of any black candidate in history.  Besides the voters’ own preferences, there are complicating factors of Obama’s perceived unelectability on account of his race (an issue that bothers the campaign enough to have Obama’s wife address it publicly) or the anxiety among some black voters that he would be targeted by assassins.  For this latter group, Obama’s problem, ironically, is that he is too viable of a candidate to “risk” supporting, because that would expose him to the presumed backlash that these voters fear.  Added to these things has to be Obama’s professorial, high-minded style and the more limited support Obama has among blue-collar voters, combined with the aversion of Democratic constituencies (shared by most constituencies of either party) to politicians who aren’t interested in winning spoils for their side but who want to “fix” politics all together and cooperate with the other party.  For a Democratic Party base that is, not surprisingly, quite angry about the last few years, Obama’s desire to transcend the “smallness of our politics” sounds like another way of saying that he won’t fight.  Top that off with his lack of experience fighting close or competitive major elections, which suggests that he isn’t prepared to fight a general election even if he were willing to be more combative, and you can see why Obama struggles to get a majority of black voters behind him.   

Another element would have to be the well-known sense of affection for, and political loyalty to, former President Clinton among most black Democrats, which ends up benefiting his wife.  I suspect that one of the many reasons why Obama is so intent on stopping Clinton from appropriating the mantle of the Clinton Administration is that most black Democratic voters probably view that period favourably, so he has to sever the connection between her and any perceived accomplishments of the administration while tying her to the political fights of the past that Obama and some of his supporters believe the public doesn’t want to relive.  Generally, I think this assumption that Democratic voters don’t want a symbolic return to the ’90s is mistaken.  As much as the Clinton era disappointed progressives, and even though the decade did see the rise  of the Republican majority in Congress, it was the only time in the last sixty years when a Democrat won two presidential terms in his own right.  I think Democratic voters as a whole are ultimately going to look favourably on the chance for a “second” Clinton presidency, even if it means ignoring their doubts and reservations about this Clinton, in exchange for the chance at another eight years of controlling the White House.  (In this respect, the Democratic response to Clinton is similar, though not identical, to the lemming-like consensus that built up around George W. Bush in 1999-2000 that was only briefly challenged by McCain, and McCain’s fate that year is telling for Obama’s hopes.)  If most black voters don’t have doubts and reservations about Clinton in the first place, it makes that much more sense that they would end up supporting her.  In this, they are responding like most other Democratic voters. 

P.S.  There is probably also a question in the minds of many voters, and not just black Democrats, about what Obama’s “moving the national conversation forward” would actually mean.  If it is nothing more than bloviating about unity, I think most people will find that unsatisfying.  Unless there is some significant difference in policy, it seems to me that this “compliment” for Obama is a concession that one of the chief reasons to prefer him is the difference in his style of rhetoric.  In the end, the complaint or expectation that black Democratic voters should respond more favourably to what is basically a rhetorical smokescreen to cover up for the candidate’s lack of preparation for the office he is seeking gives these voters even less credit.

Keeping Alex Massie’s caveats about Economist editorials in mind, this part of the latest Lexington column on Obama seems right to me:

He sometimes looks more like the junior professor he once was than a political heavyweight, and his policies are sometimes half-baked, as when he contemplated sending troops into Pakistan, a sovereign state, and a particularly fragile one, to kill or capture al-Qaeda chieftains [bold mine-DL].

My view is that most of his foreign policy is half-baked, and even when it is complete it is filled with all manner of unappetising ingredients.