And no, I’m not convinced by arguments that our intervention in WWI brought about WWII; our role, other than urging France and Britain to mitigate their vengeance, was fairly minor. ~Megan McArdle

It was a minor role, if deciding the outcome of the war was minor.  Here’s the thing: intervening in WWI was fundamentally a terrible mistake because it was not America’s fight and our involvement served no national interest.  It was not wrong primarily because it contributed directly to the creation of the awful post-war settlement and the consequences of that settlement, though it did do that by providing the Allies with the needed manpower to end the war on terms unfavourable to the Central Powers, but because we had no business being in that war.  The consequences of our entry into WWI being what they were, you would have thought that later administrations would not make the same mistakes (no luck there), but it was possible to know that intervention in WWI was wrong in 1917 (and the vast majority of Americans opposed entering the war).  With WWII, once the Japanese attacked and Germany declared war staying out of the war was no longer possible (obviously), which is why Roosevelt’s earlier policies that drew us into the war are so damning of his administration.  As in WWI, the wars in Asia and Europe were not our fights, but Washington saw to it that they became so. 

McArdle continues later:

Libertarians should be inherently more suspicious of the American government’s ability to make things better than other groups–but by the same token, it seems to me that they should be inherently more suspicious of repulsive states such as the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

All right, be suspicious.  How being more suspicious of Saddam Hussein would lead someone–allegedly on the basis of libertarian principles–to endorse a war of aggression is simply beyond me.  There’s suspicion, and then there’s irrational paranoia.  The idea that Hussein’s regime plausibly posed a threat to this country was fantastical.  The fact that a lot of people shared this fantasy did not make it any more reasonable.  In any case, how do you go from being suspicious of a regime to advocating aggression?  Isn’t the principle of non-aggression supposed to be at the core of libertarianism?  Or has that, too, now ceased to be trendy?

There’s a lot to be said for questioning the cultural conservative bona fides of someone endorsed by Chuck Norris, Ric Flair and Ted Nugent.  Reihan is correct, no doubt, that Huckabee’s embrace of these celebrities fits into a larger appeal to his natural base of supporters (it is probably true that the people who respond most strongly to Huckabee’s mix of populism and social conservatism are also going to be disproportionately fans of celebrities such as these), so that these “macho antics,” as he calls them, serve a kind of symbolic stabilising and reassuring function.  There is also something less forced and ridiculous about Huckabee’s embrace of Chuck Norris, who, lest we forget, is an evangelical Christian (you can visit the “Christian area” of his website here) and is now also a WorldNetDaily columnist, than there is about Giuliani’s newly-discovered faux love of NASCAR.   

P.S.  How is it that no one has made a Huckabee-related Dodgeball joke yet?  “Thank you, Chuck Norris.”  “No, thank you, Governor Huckabee.”  And so on.

Update: GetReligion noted Norris’ Christianity in an earlier post.  Peter Suderman sees the associations as part of “the VH1 effect”: 

This is, in large part, due to the way the pop culture obsessions of previous decades are quickly being recycled into icons of kitsch. Call it the VH1 effect. What was racy, nihilistic, or bloodthirsty in the mid 1980s is now fodder for our generation’s special brand of appreciative snark. Jerry Falwell might have gone nuts over a violent Chuck Norris film during the Reagan era, but the man barely causes shrugs from Tony Perkins in 2007.

Peter’s observation also points to something else more sinister: social conservatives’ apparent willingness to acquiesce in things they regarded as outrageous just twenty years earlier.  Some would call this keeping up with the times, but I should think that social conservatives ought to see it as a series of capitulations.  One result of these repeated capitulations to cultural degeneration is to desperately seek any rallying points that are available, which entails still more compromises.

It is not yet available, and it is rather difficult to get information about its contents, but an interesting new book is coming out next year on Orthodox theology: The Cambridge Companion to Christian Orthodox Theology.  I do know that it will have a submission from Prof. Papanikolaou of Fordham, who recently organised a conference on Orthodox readings of Augustine (whose papers will be published in a volume edited by Papanikolaou and Prof. Demacopoulos) and who has also written a work on the Trinitarian theology of Lossky and Zizioulas, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism and Divine-Human Communion.  I would have very much liked to attend the Augustine conference, but the timing was no good for me.  Another excellent (and expensive) collection of papers that came out in recent years, unrelated to Prof. Papanikolaou, was the volume Byzantine Orthodoxies, edited by Prof. Louth, which has a wonderful paper on the Arian controversy by Fr. John Behr and another on the Synodikon.

So Publisher’s Weekly has reviewed Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and given it generally good marks.  It is a brief review (located all the way at the bottom of the page), and the points that it highlights mostly sound like a conventional right-liberal/conservative analysis of fascism.  I don’t say that dismissively.  I think right-liberal and conservative analyses of fascism that identify it as a leftist ideology are absolutely right, but this is also not a terribly new interpretation.  Recognising the similarities between American progressive eugenics and Nazi eugenics or between the New Deal and fascist corporatism is all well and good (as we all know, the latter derives from Old Right critiques of Roosevelt), and if these things can be popularised more that will be a real contribution.  I remain skeptical that it will make the kind of fine distinctions that such a subject needs, but then I am hardly a Goldberg fan.  Still, goodness knows that it can’t hurt to acquaint a modern audience with a somewhat more rigorous understanding of fascism in an era where such nonsense words as Islamofascism prevail.   

If the book does describe JFK’s “cult of personality” as something that “reeks of fascist political theater,” as the review claims, I think Goldberg will have a hard time making that claim stick.  The Fuehrerprinzip and a cult based around the Leader are defining elements of fascism, but what really distinguishes fascist cults of personality is the staged mass “political liturgy.”  Unless we keep that distinction in mind, there is nothing to distinguish democratic, communist or authoritarian cults of personality from the fascist version.    

From what the review tells me, it is pretty much what I expected.  Back in March I wrote:

Goldberg’s argument will probably end up making a certain amount of historical sense, because he will largely be echoing what other students of this question have already said. 

There may be something new in the book that makes it the “very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care” that Goldberg has said that it is.  He has said that previous writers “never carried the argument out as far as I have in the American context nor, needless to say, have they accounted for more recent American politics.”  For that reason I will gladly take up the challenge, even though I think my criticisms of the book–based on the description available to the public–have already been among the more informed and, for the most part, among the more generous.

But Georgia, on the other hand, presents a set of dilemmas which are lesser in scope, which have a smaller impact on U.S. policy because of the willingness of much of the U.S. media to ignore developments in Georgia which do not suit dominant U.S. paradigms and ambitions. Of course, objectively speaking, the geopolitical risks and moral embarrassments involved in supporting the Saakashvili regime in Georgia should be condemned more than those involved in supporting Musharraf because they are to a great extent gratuitous: they are not compelled by truly vital U.S. interests.

The risks for the U.S. in Georgia are essentially twofold. The first is already occurring: the Saakashvili administration could become so authoritarian at home that it will reduce the entire U.S. democracy promotion agenda in the former Soviet Union to a farce. The second is much more serious: It is that faced with growing domestic discontent, Saakashvili will seek to rally the nation behind him through an attack on one of the two Russian-backed separatist territories, Abkhazia or (more likely) South Ossetia. The president could gamble that faced with the humiliation of seeing a favored client crushed by Russia, the U.S. will feel impelled to come to Georgia’s aid.

If Saakashvili ever does make that grave decision, it will be the last one he makes as Georgian president. For in practical military terms, there is almost nothing that the U.S. could or would do to help Georgia in these circumstances. Nonetheless, this would indeed represent a humiliation for the U.S., as well as a very great and totally unnecessary crisis in U.S.-Russian relations. It would also have serious implications for Russian behavior in other areas of truly vital U.S. interest, like Iran.

Fortunately, in the case of Georgia the danger of this happening is to some extent mitigated by the fact that—at least judging by the remarks of European officials—recent events have made it much less likely that Georgia will join NATO. Therefore one reason for Russian hostility to Georgia will fade, or at least not grow further.

Above all, Georgia illustrates a fundamental historical truth about client states: a great power should only adopt them when it has no other choice to defend vital interests, or when they are strong enough to act as an effective buffer against a real enemy. Pakistan meets the first of these criteria; Georgia meets neither. Georgia might qualify as at least an important interest if there were a real chance of the energy of Central Asia (and not just Azerbaijan) flowing through Georgia to the West. But for a long time to come, a mixture of geographical reality, legal ambiguity, and Russian, Iranian and Chinese power seems almost certain to prevent this from happening. ~Anatol Lieven

Via James Poulos

James has his own thoughts on Georgia here.

I’d say that the fall of the Soviet Union discredited several ideas on the left and the right: on the left, the idea that the state should own most of the means of production; on the right, the idea of isolationism, or non-interventionism. It is now patently obvious that if the US had not drawn a proverbial line in the sand through Germany, the Soviets would now own large blocks of Western Europe that would be struggling in the same way that Eastern Europe now does. ~Megan McArdle, responding to Bryan Caplan

Yet it is the fall of the Soviet Union on account of its own internal weaknesses that suggests just how unnecessary interventionist policies really are from the perspective of the American interest.  Had it been taken over by the USSR after the war, western Europe would have been more, not less, indigestible than eastern Europe and might well have hastened the break-up of the Soviet empire.  One might say that it is “patently obvious” that had the United States not entered WWI, at least one of the great totalitarian nightmares of modern history would probably have never come to pass.  Looked at this way, U.S. interventionism hasn’t really been a credible foreign policy since its inception, and the upheavals of the end of WWI and the interwar period ought to have made it disappear forever.  However, even if it were the case that the Cold War was exceptional and required a different response, the Cold War ended twelve years before the invasion of Iraq.  It isn’t as if the ’90s offered overwhelming proof of the efficacy and wisdom of intervention.  Furthermore, our experience in the Cold War argued for continued containment of Iraq rather than an adaptation of the irresponsible doctrine of rollback.  In short, there is almost nothing about the Cold War or post-Cold War experience that explains why some libertarians supported an aggressive  invasion of a Near Eastern country ruled by third-rate dictatorship.  If libertarians were wrong to be non-interventionist in the ’70s and ’80s (I don’t think they were, but let’s just suppose), it is remarkable how a good number of them could then turn out to be wrong by becoming supporters of intervention in Iraq.

Well, let’s remember that all law establishes morality [bold mine-DL]. That’s what law does. The law of speeding is saying that it’s immoral to go at 85 miles an hour. The morality is that we have established a 65-mile-an-hour limit. So that’s what all law does: It establishes that it is wrong for me to murder you. ~Mike Huckabee

Via Ambinder

Set aside for the moment the crazy idea that speeding is immoral.  If we take Huckabee’s remarks as they stand, he seems to be saying that it would not be immoral to murder someone unless the law says so, which makes his opposition to abortion rather puzzling.  Surely legalised abortion stands out for pro-lifers as a prime example of how law and morality do not coincide and how law can be turned to perverse ends.   A few moments earlier he was mocking a federalist position on abortion and marriage as a kind of moral relativism, yet according to him “all law establishes morality,” which would have to mean, everything else being equal, that one state statute is as good as another.  Since he claims that “all law establishes morality,” by what standard would he judge the justice of any particular law?  The inevitable conclusion of Huckabeean morality is that coercive power has to be made as far-reaching and uniform as possible to “establish” the same morality in as many places as possible.  On the national stage, it would lead to a call for consolidation and homogenisation, and on the world stage it has to lead eventually to a call for global government.  Think about what this says about Huckabee’s understanding of the relationship between coercive power and morality.  I will grant that law can codify or enforce moral norms, but the idea that law establishes morality, which makes the public authority the source of moral law, is such a heinous and blasphemous idea that I can scarcely believe that it comes from a preacher.  He makes it clear that he believes that morality is purely conventional:

So if I go over that law and murder you anyway, then society is going to punish me because I have violated a moral code, which we have all agreed to [bold mine-DL].

In short, Huckabee holds absolutist positions on life that are entirely inconsistent with his understanding of morality.  “We” are not all agreed that abortion is immoral, yet according to the standard that Huckabee has set up here it will not be immoral until and unless a law criminalises it.  This is a strange conflation of illegality and immorality that seems to leave no room for a moral critique of the state’s actions and no basis for conscientious dissent against immoral government policies.

James Forsyth’s view of the prospects for the Annapolis peace conference make a good deal more sense than making comparisons to Munich.  The Economistalso thinks it will probably lead to very little.  Bret Stephens is pretty clearly vehemently opposed to the idea, but at least grants that the gathering, or meeting, or whatever it is, is “pointless.”  That is why the crazed reaction of Melanie Phillips (linked above) that talks of the “betrayal of the Jewish people” is particularly bizarre.  You can’t betray an entire people with a photo-op, no matter how freighted with significance it is supposed to be.  Granted, Ms. Phillips has been getting awfully agitated of late about Annapolis and Israel, but what puzzles me is why she is so bothered by a conference that will almost certainly change nothing at all.  Cal Thomas joins the chorus that the conference represents the “selling out” of Israel, which is absurd.  Andy McCarthy’s objections to the participation of the Syrians may be misguided, but at least it has a certain coherence by comparison. 

McCarthy and Phillips seem to agree that Syria’s participation renders the Bush Doctrine void, which would have to be a relief for sane people everywhere.  A foreign policy doctrine that insists that Syria is our mortal foe makes no sense.  To the extent that this conference helps weaken this idea about Syria, it may have done some good after all.  If it finally drives home the obvious–Secretary Rice really doesn’t know what she’s doing–we might be grateful for the clarification.

Even though it is distracting me from the far more important writing of the day (discussing the ins and outs of Battlestar Galactica: Razor), this weekend item (via Sullivan) from Michael Kinsley caught my attention, since it falls under the general category of Obama Supporters Who Are Intent On Making Obama Lose.  It is a fascinating phenomenon–it’s like an entire coterie of people who would have advised Michael Dukakis to wear the military helmet from the tank ad all the time.  Once more, we are presented with Obama as Globalised Leader or, as Kinsley puts it, World Man:

Obama also has valuable experience apart from elective office, and he also has to be careful about how he uses it. This is his experience as a black man in America and as what you might call a “world man” — Kenyan father, American mother, four formative years living in Indonesia, more years in the ethnic stew of Hawaii, middle name of Hussein, and so on — in an increasingly globalized world. Our current president had barely been outside the country when he was elected. His efforts to make up for this through repeated proclamations of pal-ship with every foreign leader who parades through Washington have been an embarrassment. Obama’s upbringing would serve us well if he were president, both in the understanding he would bring to issues of America’s role in the world (the term “foreign policy” sounds increasingly anachronistic) and in terms of how the world views America. Clinton mocks Obama’s claims that four years growing up in Indonesia constitute useful world-affairs experience. But they do.

Now, I have already said what I think of Obama’s claims in this area, especially when he chooses to describe those “formative” years as his “strongest experience in foreign relations.”  By this logic, if we want a really top-notch foreign policy “America’s role in the world-understanding” President, we should select our candidates for President strictly from the world of American expatriates, since they presumably have even more such experience overseas (and probably more relevant expertise at that).    Kinsley has the distinction of being one of the few prominent Obama apologists advancing this line of argument who is not originally from another country.  That in itself is telling–most of the people who see Obama’s global appeal are themselves looking at Obama with something like an outsider’s perspective, and so assume that Obama’s associations with the rest of the world are among his political virtues, rather than understanding that these represent some of his greatest political hurdles with the American electorate.  They think, understandably enough, that his experience abroad is valuable because they believe their experience is valuable (and it may well be in many cases, but it is far from clear that this applies to Obama with respect to the specific position he is seeking).  Here I think they make the mistake of assuming that having lived abroad for a few years and having a rather exotic family tree make for sound foreign policy judgement, when they simply provide at best just one piece of an intricate puzzle. 

At bottom, the urge to cast Obama as a man of the world, as globalisation incarnate, reveals the heart of the problem with Obama and Obamania: Obama is good because he is the antithesis of whatever Bush is (except that he really isn’t the antithesis).  If Bush made stubborn “unilateralism” his trademark, Obama is the essence of paralysing consensus-building.  He frames his policies in terms of how they differ with Bush, but frequently they serve as a strange mirror image of the Decider’s most utopian fantasies, and he seems to reach policy views based to a huge extent on how they diverge from Bush’s policies, almost without regard for the merit of his own proposal.  If Bush won’t talk to X regime, Obama will; if Bush has ruled something out, he will rule it in, and vice versa.  Obama has the odds in his favour–Bush is wrong so often that taking the exact opposite position from him will yield many of the right answers–but he gives the impression of being entirely reactive.  This is why he frequently responds to critiques of his foreign policy ideas by huffing and puffing about the poor judgement of others, as if their follies on Iraq make his crazy remarks about Pakistan responsible.  Goodness knows it is tempting to assume that literally everything the President has done or will do is wrong, but the entire Obama campaign has taken on the appearance of an extended knee-jerk reaction.  Now his supporters express their enthusiasm for an anti-Bush who will undo the damage that the incurious Mr. Bush has wrought…based on the reality that Obama has been outside the country quite a lot, while Bush had not been, and on Obama’s mixed and international heritage as opposed to Bush’s dull WASP pedigree.  It is the ultimate replacement of substance with style: you can apparently take or leave Obama’s ideas, but his biography and symbolism (the “candidate of life experience,” as Kinsley terms it) are supposed to make us exalt him.  Sorry, it’s been tried before, and John McCain lost, and he is losing again.  (One might also quibble with the strange view that John McCain’s time as a POW gives him some unique moral authority, considering that he has never seen an aggressive war he didn’t want to support.)