James Traub asserts a common assumption:

An ally is not a country that shares your values, but a country that shares your interests. The two categories overlap plenty, of course, because values play a powerful role in shaping a country’s interests abroad.

The first part of this formulation makes sense, but I don’t think the second part is true in most cases. Since the end of the Cold War, most U.S. allies have maintained or created formally democratic governments, and many have adopted neoliberal fiscal and trade policies to one degree or another, but it seems more likely that allied states cultivate the political and economic values favored by the U.S. because they believe it is in their interest to align themselves closely with the U.S. To the extent that the U.S. makes acceptance of these values a condition for a closer relationship, allied states have an incentive to shape their values in a manner consistent with their perceived interests. As long as allies can enjoy a close relationship with the U.S. without pursuing political and economic reforms, and in those cases where allied cooperation is more important to the U.S. than the ally’s embrace of the right “values,” there need not be much overlap at all.

Then again, there are many rising democracies around the world that probably share more values with the U.S. than they share interests. The more democratic and responsive to their own nations that these governments become, the more likely it is that we will see just how divergent their national interests and ours really are. After all, it’s not as if Germany’s interest in increased economic ties with Russia is driven by Germany’s political values, and India’s dealings with Iran and Burma are hardly shaped by India’s democratic values, and those interests tend to put these allied states at odds with the U.S. on many issues. For that matter, improving U.S.-Vietnamese ties have nothing to do with a change in Vietnamese political values and everything to do with shared opposition to Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea.

Jennifer Rubin adds to the manufactured outrage over Kucera’s entirely accurate report on Condi Rice’s book, and tops it off with a conspiracy theory:

What?! The Open Society Institute is George Soros’s piggy bank for funding a variety of his leftwing front groups. And yet, the Atlantic puts this extreme group’s advocacy up as if it were legitimate, nonpartisan journalism. In doing so, it turns itself into a mouthpiece, an unreliable one at that, for a group whose animus toward many of American foreign policy objectives (even in the Obama administration) is well known.

When one is shamelessly flacking for the propagandistic pro-Georgian party line, it is more than a little odd to complain about advocacy masquerading as journalism, but it’s important to emphasize that Kucera wasn’t engaged in advocacy of any kind. He was reporting on some interesting excerpts in a new book from a top Bush administration insider that confirmed what he and any other honest observer of the Caucasus already knew about the start of the August 2008 war. It’s also odd that Rubin would find something sinister in EurasiaNet’s connection to this group, since Soros has been a major backer of Saakashvili, which previously earned Saakashvili some unusual, scathing condemnation from a contributor to none other than The Weekly Standard. Richard Carlson took the (correct) view that Saakashvili was not what he was being made out to be by his Western friends:

The previous summer Soros had flown Saakashvili and his followers to a seminar he sponsored in Belgrade on how to stage your own “Velvet Revolution.” And perhaps Soros would deserve some credit–except for the undeniable fact that, ever since his anointing in a crooked election in January, Saakashvili has sounded more like a raging nationalist and authoritarian thug than a democrat strewing rose petals.

This was written in 2004, and it was no less true in 2008. Indeed, by 2008, Westerners had even fewer reasons to have any illusions about who and what Saakashvili was after he had ordered a brutal crackdown on protesters in 2007. As tensions between Russia and Georgia increased and then exploded with Saakashvili’s escalation that August, it became necessary for Western backers of Saakashvili to ignore this as much as possible. The excerpts from Rice’s book were interesting partly because they tended to confirm the picture of Saakashvili as the reckless nationalist that he is, and mostly because they acknowledged that it was Saakashvili who was responsible for escalating the conflict. Rice can insist that “in no way were the Georgians at fault,” but that contradicts the evidence and her own published statements.

In fairness to the Georgians, much of the fault for the August 2008 crisis belongs to the Bush administration to which Rice belonged and other Western governments that created the false impression that they would support Georgia in the event of a crisis. As Thomas de Waal wrote in his excellent book, The Caucasus:

In that sense, the main culpability for the conflict lies, strangely enough, with the one actor that did not fight and that sought to stop the violence: the West. The Western sin was in promising more than it could deliver….Often sympathetic to Georgia for other reasons, Western officials consistently delivered the easy part of the message–they supported Georgia’s territorial integrity; but they did not sufficiently convey the hard part–that recovering the two territories would be a very long haul that required building a new state and rethinking many old attitudes….The default policy of isolating the separatists persisted and only drove them further into the embrace of Russia.

——-

The United States in particular gave many confusing signals. The fact that U.S. troops were there supposedly to train Georgian troops for peacekeeping and antiterrorism functions, not for combat against Abkhaz and South Ossetia, was a distinction lost on many observers, including most Georgians. President Bush consistently praised Saakashvili, yet the commitment was only rhetorical. [p. 222-223]

De Waal wrote elsewhere in a review of Ron Asmus’ A Little War That Shook the World:

Asmus honestly concedes that there were plans to launch a military operation in South Ossetia in 2004-a plan scotched in Washington-and for a “preemptive Georgian military move” on Abkhazia in the spring of 2008, as the Russians were increasing their military presence there. Presidents Bush and Saakashvili had a misunderstood conversation in which the latter apparently believed he had been given the go-ahead for military action. It took high-level diplomatic intervention to dispel the impression. U.S. officials delivered repeated messages in private that they would not support a military campaign, but they never said so strongly in public. Here, it seems, was the flashing amber light that made Saakashvili think that if he did launch a quick military strike, he would be allowed to get away with it.

To this day, anti-Russian hawks such as Rubin pretend that this isn’t what happened. That is what is really behind this phony controversy over Kucera’s article: the adamant refusal on the part of anti-Russian hawks to acknowledge that Saakashvili was largely responsible for the disaster in 2008 and that Bush administration mistakes contributed to Saakashvili’s disastrous decision to escalate, because they will not admit that our “ally” could act so recklessly and they want to resume failed Bush-era policies toward Russia and Georgia.

Andrew responds to my earlier post on Obama and neoconservatives:

But on the core question of advancing our national interests in the Middle East by insisting on a settlement in Israel-Palestine, Obama is trying very hard against an implacable and fanatical opposition of evangelical end-timers and neocon neurotics. And Romney, in contrast, wants to go to war with Iran, do whatever Israel says, and increase offense spending. I call it offense because I see no way that putting a base in Australia somehow defends the homeland of the United States. It does nothing of the kind. It just projects global power.

In fairness to Obama, he plainly admitted that this is what the U.S. is doing in the western Pacific when he said that the U.S. will “project power and deter threats to peace.” Naturally, I agree with Andrew that this has nothing to do with defending the United States, and Justin Logan is right to observe that the “pivot” to Asia will encourage East Asian allies to become even greater free-riders than they already are. However, the first thing to understand about this is that this is the direction the administration wanted to take from the beginning. Administration policy towards Asia was expressed in the slogan, “America is back,” which prompted some critics to note that America had never “gone” anywhere, but it made clear that they wanted the U.S. role in the western Pacific to increase. This has informed their mishandling of the basing dispute with Japan, and it has been driving the push to check Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea.

Andrew asks, “Why shouldn’t China have a sphere of influence in the Pacific?” That’s a good question. Why indeed? Because apparently no regional power is permitted to have a sphere of influence in its own region, but the U.S. insists on having spheres of influence in every region. It doesn’t seem to bother very many people that this is fundamentally destabilizing and a recipe for making wider international conflict more likely. The assertion that the U.S. is a “Pacific nation” sounds somewhat reasonable until one realizes that Obama and Clinton are referring to a U.S. role in the western Pacific, at which point it becomes no less ridiculous than the continuing insistence that America must be a “European power” twenty years after the USSR ceased to exist.

Romney’s ship-building enthusiasm and anti-China rhetoric are more aggressive and confrontational than what Obama is doing, but not that much more. On Israel and Palestine, it is marginally better that the hard-liners are out of power blocking presidential efforts to reach a settlement instead of being the ones making policy, and I shudder to think what the Russia policy of a Romney administration would look like. Obama has never challenged “neo-imperial assumptions” because he shares them. Provided that we understand this, and so long as there are no illusions about what a second Obama term will bring in terms of continued hegemonism and overstretch, I have no problem accepting that Romney would clearly be even worse.

Joshua Kucera found that Condoleeza Rice’s account of the August 2008 war in her new book acknowledged that Saakashvili could be and was provoked into starting a war over the separatist republics. This is what some of us have been saying about the war for the last three years. Kucera began his article this way:

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says Georgian President Saakashvili alienated potential NATO allies by “letting the Russians provoke him” into starting a war over South Ossetia. That’s in her new book where, as with the controversy over Uzbekistan, she portrays herself as the voice of reason, in this case trying to contain the impulsive Saakashvili while also restraining the more bellicose members of her own administration.

There is no question that this is what Rice wrote. The quotes from her book confirm this. Remarkably, it’s also an accurate account of what actually happened in 2008. Saakashvili did alienate potential NATO allies by letting the Russians provoke him into starting a war over South Ossetia. Whether Rice really was trying to be a restraining influence on Saakashvili or not, we can say without a doubt that she was unsuccessful.

As Kucera says in his follow-up post, such an admission by the former Secretary of State is newsworthy because it is so much at odds with the standard talking points one hears on this in the U.S.:

The post said that Rice said that Saakashvili allowed himself to get provoked by Russia, and that it was Georgia which made the first large-scale offensive of the war, the shelling and invasion of Tskhinvali. While that stops short of “blaming” Georgia, it does contradict the narrative that Tbilisi still promotes, which is that Russia was the unilateral aggressor, and so is newsworthy as such. Nothing that Rice says to the Weekly Standard actually contradicts what my post said she said.

The question to ask Rice is not whether she is offended by a slightly misleading title on The Atlantic‘s version of this article, but rather why she doesn’t hold Saakashvili responsible for making what proved to be disastrous decisions that greatly harmed his country and brought U.S.-Russian relation to their lowest point in the post-Cold War era. By her own account, Saakashvili blundered by responding to Russian provocations with escalation, so why is he not at least partly responsible for the war that followed? Isn’t Saakashvili responsible for his own actions, or is he permitted to get away with the excuse that “Putin made him do it”?

Herman Cain defends himself on his Libya answer:

Who knows every detail of every country on the planet? Nobody!

If Cain had been asked something fairly obscure about, say, the chief export of one of the countries that he would deem insignificant, this defense might hold up. Had he been quizzed on the recent winner of the presidential election Kyrgyzstan, he might be forgiven for not knowing Atambaev off the top of his head. That wasn’t what happened. He was asked a general, open-ended question about his view of a recently-concluded American military intervention. That makes this is a particularly pathetic defense. Cain didn’t need to know every detail about Libya. The main thing that he needed to know was what he thought about U.S. intervention in that country. I suppose that might require knowing a few things, but even that seems to be too much for this candidate. What is most annoying about this is that Cain can’t admit that his original answer was so poor.

There are quite a few people who know some details about many countries, and I’d wager that almost all of them are far better prepared for the office Cain is seeking than Cain is.

Victor Davis Hanson outdoes himself:

In short, a bankrupt Greece of only 11 million people, residing in one of history’s most dangerous neighborhoods, has few strong friends other than the United States. The same is true of Christian Armenia, which likewise is relatively small and near to historical enemies in Turkey and Russia.

The line about Greece is rather strange, and the remark about Armenia is even more so. In the last decade, relations between Turkey and Greece have been improving, and the U.S. has consistently pursued policy in the Balkans contrary to the wishes of most Greeks. Our government has pushed to bring Macedonia into NATO despite Greek objections. Armenia has a very close relationship with Russia, which has not been an enemy of Armenia in many decades, and the U.S. has generally sided with Turkey and Azerbaijan in the region since the time of the Karabakh war. Of all the countries in the world to choose as evidence that the U.S. takes the side of small, weaker nations, Armenia is one of the worst examples he could pick. The U.S. doesn’t take Armenia’s side over Karabakh, and Armenia is much more closely aligned with Russia and Iran in any case. Hanson also claims that Armenia and Kurdistan are democratic states, which tells us that he doesn’t pay much attention to the internal politics of either place. Freedom House does not consider Armenia an electoral democracy, and anyone familiar with Armenian elections would understand why.

It’s silly beyond words to treat the U.S. relationship with Israel an an example of supporting “tiny, vulnerable nations,” but there is no mystery surrounding U.S. reasons for backing smaller nations against larger regional powers. If a great power is interested in acquiring clients and satellites, it is presumably doing this to increase its own influence in a given region. The larger regional powers are naturally going to resent this intrusion into their part of the world, and their smaller neighbors are going to accept the great power’s presence to balance against the regional powers. When the U.S. backs “tiny, vulnerable nations,” this is not because of some innate desire to help the weak and persecuted, but because in so doing the U.S. is able to project power with the support of local states and nations.

Update: It is worth noting that Paul Kane, who wrote the controversial Taiwan op-ed to which Hanson refers, has explained what he was trying to do. Kane’s explanation shows that his real argument has nothing to do with Hanson’s subject, and Hanson was one of many to miss Kane’s point.

It’s not really news, but an AP story today confirms today that the nuclear issue is one thing that most Iranians can agree on:

Iran’s opposition groups — galvanized by the disputed re-election of Ahmadinejad in 2009 — have remained mostly silent on the nuclear standoff in what’s interpreted as a highly unusual nod of support to the ruling system. Former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has openly challenged the ruling clerics in recent years, joined the chorus denouncing the IAEA report.

Iran hawks often try to combine their opposition to Iran’s nuclear program with rhetorical support for the Iranian opposition. Some of the more aggressive hawks talk about directly supporting the opposition (which the opposition doesn’t want) or, as Romney said Saturday, backing armed insurgents to try to topple the regime (which the main opposition groups aren’t trying to do). It has become a standard talking point for Iran hawks that the administration “failed” to support the Green movement, but in the same breath they urge the adoption of some of the harshest anti-Iranian policies that the Green movement firmly opposes, because these policies also harm the Iranian people and because they would make things even more difficult politically for the Green movement inside Iran. As the story shows, the recent Western agitation over the IAEA report has provided the regime with a useful distraction from its domestic failures. Obviously, launching military strikes against Iranian facilities will allow the regime to exploit Iranian popular outrage and nationalist sentiment to the fullest extent.

Matt Steinglass tries to make sense of the obsession with Iran’s nuclear program:

It seems to me that the American and Israeli obsession with Iran’s nuclear weapons programme proceeds from a misguided messianic-apocalyptic streak in both countries’ political cultures.

That’s possible, but I doubt this is the main reason. The debate over Iran policy is already unduly distorted by loose talk about messianic-apocalyptic worldviews. The explanation for the obsession is more straightforward. Michael Cohen touched on it in his recent exchange with Robert Farley:

But lastly, and most importantly, Farley ignores the importance that Israel applies to being the only nuclear power in the region. He says, “Israeli nuclear weapons have not granted it the ability to dominate the Middle East,” but this is simply incorrect. Israel can act practically in an unfettered manner across the region. It can bomb nuclear power plants in Iraq and Syria; it can invade its neighbors (most recently Lebanon); and it can maintain the occupation of several million Palestinians. Israel can do all these things, in part, because of a vast military superiority that includes nuclear weapons. If Iran suddenly were to have a nuclear bomb, it would not only shift the balance of military power in the region, it would limit Israel’s military flexibility and its own perception as a regional hegemon. No longer could Israel operate with virtual impunity.

The desire to retain “military flexibility and its own perception as a regional hegemon” is why Israel is obsessed with Iran’s nuclear program, and the American obsession is closely related to that, but it seems likely that everyone is exaggerating how much an Iranian nuclear arsenal would limit that flexibility. It isn’t clear that a nuclear-armed Iran would be able to stop Israel from doing any of these things. What it would almost certainly do is discourage the U.S. or Israel from launching attacks against Iran, which is the “flexibility” that some hawks in both countries want to retain. As Thomas Barnett wrote earlier this week:

Iran’s Bomb means closing the door on a U.S. invasion, but nothing else. Iran’s limited proxy wars are neither enhanced nor inhibited by possessing the Bomb, as America will stand by both Israel and the Saudis.

It isn’t wrong to say that Israel does not have the ability to dominate the Middle East. That phrase “across the region” exaggerates how much Israel can do outside its borders. Israel has enormous freedom of action in its vicinity, but despite having the only nuclear arsenal in the region it has never had the ability to dominate the entire region. Indeed, we wouldn’t be having this debate if it did. What Israel does have is the ability to use force outside its borders without fear of sparking a wider war, but this has just as much to do with its conventional superiority over all of its neighbors. It’s worth recalling that Israel could invade its neighbors before it acquired nuclear weapons (Egypt in 1956), and maintaining its occupation of Palestinian territories doesn’t require a nuclear arsenal. It is likely that Israel will still be able to do these things in the event that Iran acquires nuclear weapons.

If that is so, why do so many people overstate the importance of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons? Farley offers an explanation in his latest column:

The answer is that everyone has a strong incentive to lie about their importance. The Iranians will lie to the world about the extent of their program and to their people about the fruits of going nuclear. The various U.S. client states in the region will lie to Washington about how terrified they are of a nuclear Iran, warning of the need for “strategic re-evaluation,” while also using the Iranian menace as an excuse for brutality against their own populations. Nonproliferation advocates will lie about the terrors of unrestrained proliferation because they do not want anyone to shift focus to the manageability of a post-nuclear Iran. The United States will lie to everyone in order to reassure its clients and maintain the cohesion of the anti-Iran block.

None of these lies are particularly dishonorable; they represent the normal course of diplomacy. But they are lies nevertheless, and serious analysts of foreign policy and international relations need to be wary of them.

Conor Friedersdorf can scarcely believe Herman Cain’s recent Libya remarks:

Like Rick Perry’s inability to remember one of the three federal agencies he would eliminate, the moment must be seen to be believed — do watch above, no description is adequate — and is damaging not because presidential candidates must know small details like the leader of Uzbekistan, but because Cain clearly hasn’t thought at all about a war his country was fighting while he ran for president. Presumably he was briefed on it prior to Saturday’s foreign policy debate.

Obviously, Cain doesn’t care or know very much about these issues, and in the past this has almost been a point of pride for him. After all, as he said during his Uzbekistan remarks, how will knowing any of this create a single job? It’s easy to point and laugh at Cain, and it’s even easier to deride the cable news and talk radio conservative celebrity culture that allows Cain to flourish as a candidate when he has no business doing so. The party as a whole has helped to make Cain’s candidacy possible by lowering the bar for knowledge about foreign policy and national security issues so much that he could bluff his way through most of this year by saying that he would defer to experts. Aside from Huntsman and Paul, the GOP field doesn’t have any members who could discuss foreign affairs for any length of time without falling back on a lot of cliches and slogans, and much of what Romney and Santorum think they know about foreign policy is simply wrong.

Romney and Santorum are more practiced in rehearsing the cliches and slogans, and they have been doing it for years or decades to make it sound halfway credible, which is why their alarmist nonsense doesn’t get them laughed out of the room. Some of the things that Santorum has said about Venezuela over the years have been so absurd that they ought to be immediately disqualifying, but because he says them with authority and conviction he gets a pass. Cain failed to do the basic work that ought to be required of any major party presidential candidate, but there is so little accountability for the “serious” and “credible” candidates on this score that he could be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t take much preparation. Journalists seem to have a high tolerance for nonsense on these issues, but they cannot abide a bungled answer.

Conor concluded his post by saying that Cain is not a quick study, and he may be right, but what I think Cain’s answer showed was that he put little or no time into preparing answers for this question because there was no incentive for him to do so, and he believed (erroneously, as it turns out) that there would be no penalty for flubbing the answer. He had every reason to believe that conservatives would bend over backwards to defend him when he demonstrated just how little he knew. Over the last several years, he must have observed quite a few Republican candidates and officeholders saying preposterous, baseless things on these issues, and in Palin he saw someone wildly out of her depth treated as a political hero because of her ignorance. Palin became a ridiculous figure very early on during her time in the national spotlight, but so long as she kept mouthing the right slogans she was taken seriously and encouraged to consider higher office. As long as candidates can be relied on to back Israel, hate the current vilified countries, favor increased military spending, and endorse the latest war, they normally aren’t expected to know very much. Cain probably thought that was how it worked in the nominating contest, too, and he has now been disabused of that notion.