Cathy Young modifies Jackson Diehl’s defense of the Iraq war:

There have been predictable cries of outrage at the claim that anyone would welcome a U.S. invasion. But that’s not an outrageous notion unless one wears left-wing blinders: For all the hardships in Iraq, polls consistent [sic] show about half of Iraqis supporting the 2003 invasion.

When we look more closely at recent numbers, we find that the reason that “about half of Iraqis” say this is that Kurdish opinion is overwhelmingly supportive (87-9%). It’s not surprising that the people who suffered by far the least from the effects of the invasion will take a positive view of it. Among the rest of the population, far more see the war as a humiliation of their country than a liberation (48-33%), and more see the invasion as wrong than right, and that is in the present now that the worst of the violence has been over for several years. Earlier in the war, when the occupation was in full swing, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis was opposed to the invasion. The people who can’t grasp this are the ones wearing blinders.

Young concludes:

Today, democracy promotion tends to be viewed as naïvely arrogant: who are we to bring freedom to other countries? One answer is that “we” — the United States and other industrial democracies — are, for all our flaws, the possessors of the only working model of a free society, as well as a civilization with unmatched economic, cultural, and military power. There is no arrogance in seeking to advance the universal values of liberty and human rights — as long as we do so with a sense of realism, and of our own limitations.

It is the use of that “unmatched economic, cultural, and military power” to drive political changes in other countries that is arrogant. There is no question about the arrogance required to believe that “we” have a special role to export our institutions and “values,” nor is there is any doubt that one has to be quite arrogant to assume that “we” know how to do this. If we proceeded with a “sense of realism” and of our own “limitations,” we wouldn’t presume to try.

The Civic Platform-led government of Donald Tusk recently won re-election, becoming the first sitting Polish government to retain power since the end of communism. As Guy Taylor explains, the government’s intelligent, more conciliatory foreign policy contributed to this by increasing Poland’s influence and improving its relations with neighboring countries:

The result is that Poland has assumed the dual role of Western Europe’s strategic face in Eastern Europe and Eastern Europe’s champion in the union. Tusk’s dexterity in carrying out both functions also gave Poland leverage toward what during his first term was dubbed as a “mini-reset” in relations with Russia, said Kobzova.

“There’s definitely a desire within the new government to continue warming ties with Russia, especially in terms of boosting trade,” she said. “They are completely aware of Russia’s problems, but they realize that by criticizing Russia on their own, they’re not going to achieve anything.”

By instead embracing a strategy in which Poland’s posture toward Russia reflects that of the whole European Union, Kobzova added, the Tusk government has also succeeded in improving relations with Berlin.

One of the standard lines that we hear from many Republican candidates, elected representatives, and pundits is that Poland has been “betrayed” in recent years because of the thaw in U.S.-Russian relations. It is worth remembering that the supposed American “betrayals” of Poland, especially as they relate to missile defense issues, aren’t perceived that way by a lot of the Polish public, and the current Polish government has had an interest in pursuing conciliatory policies toward both Germany and Russia. As the Polish president’s foreign policy adviser put it a few months ago, “We are now accommodating our real interests, not overblown ambitions.” Would that U.S. foreign policy could be so sensible.

Both houses of Congress passed the three trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea yesterday. Clyde Prestowitz explained last week why there is nothing worth cheering about here:

Of course, the Colombian and Panamanian agreements don’t matter much one way or the other because the economies of the two countries are so small. But the Korean deal will not produce thousands of new American jobs.

Indeed, the Korean FTA is far more likely to increase the trade deficit to the detriment of the U.S. economy:

What neither the administration nor the Times is reporting is that the International Trade Commission has estimated that despite this increase in U.S. exports, the overall effect of the agreements will be to increase U.S. imports by more and thus to increase, not reduce, the U.S. trade deficit. One can understand why the administration might not want to highlight that point, but it is baffling and suggestive of ideological free trade bias that the proud New York Times does not report it.

Prestowitz repeats his argument that preferential trade agreements of the kind represented by these three deals are of little value because they fail to address the real barriers to trade today:

The deals won’t create the predicted jobs because they don’t deal at all with two major issues – currency manipulation and national export led growth strategies. Global tariffs are already quite low and can easily be outweighed in importance by movements in currency values. Countries like South Korea that manage and manipulate their currencies and that also use official administrative powers to accumulate trade surpluses as a matter of national security policy simply do not allow their imports to soar in uncontrolled fashion.

Meanwhile, the Colombian FTA is mainly going to benefit U.S. agribusinesses and large landowners in Colombia at the expense of small Colombian cultivators. That isn’t just a problem for Colombia’s rural poor. Earlier this year, Prestowitz described the probable effects of the adoption of the Colombian deal:

Big, subsidized U.S. agriculture will have free run of the market. Far from finding new licit jobs, displaced Colombian small-scale farmers may well be forced to find more illicit jobs in coca growing and cocaine making.

While it is frequently billed as a “reward” to an allied government, the deal seems more likely to contribute to undermining Colombian stability through the dispossession of poor cultivators and possibly boosting narco-trafficking.

Walter Russell Mead repeats a common misconception about Coptic history:

Egypt’s Copts welcomed Islamic forces as liberators in the 7th century AD; the Orthodox Church considered the Copts to be a heretical sect and under the Byzantine emperors the Copts faced persecution.

The second part of this sentence is true. The first part is untrue. It is one of the strange legacies of the Islamic conquests that Byzantine propaganda about the disloyalty of heterodox Christians is so readily accepted by many modern people. The evidence most commonly cited to prove non-Chalcedonian disaffection comes from the works of polemicists engaged in post-conquest theological disputes. Modern discussions of non-Chalcedonian loyalties often take for granted that heterodox Christians must have been eager to embrace the rule of non-Christians, which overlooks that non-Chalcedonians understood the Roman Empire to be their empire. Non-Chalcedonian objections to their Chalcedonian rulers concerned their theology. They blamed the imperial, Chalcedonian church for bringing disaster upon their empire, because they shared the assumptions of their time that theological error and sin invited judgment and punishment. They no more “welcomed” the Islamic conquests than they had “welcomed” the Sasanian occupation earlier in the century. Once their lands were conquered and the possibility of rejoining the empire receded, non-Chalcedonian communities accommodated themselves to their new rulers, but this wasn’t because they regarded the invasions as liberation.

When I saw the news that Christie was endorsing Romney, I thought that it wasn’t at all surprising. It makes sense that one relative moderate would endorse another, but I see that Alec MacGillis got there first. MacGillis repeats the question that I was asking back when Christie was the establishment’s idea of a superior candidate: “why were conservative financiers like [Paul] Singer so eager to have Christie in the race, when they already had a business-minded private-equity titan in Romney?” MacGillis offers some answers, including the familiarity these financiers had with the New Jersey governor, but I think the flocking of former and possible Christie backers to Romney’s camp and the personal endorsement of Christie show that there was never a good answer to this question. Had Christie’s boosters had their way, they would have made it that much harder for either Christie or Romney to prevail, and they would have been stuck with one of the candidates they probably can’t abide for one reason or another. It was a strange case of irrational exuberance if ever I saw one.

Christie’s endorsement of Romney may give us some idea of where he falls on the foreign policy spectrum. Christie spoke of “earned exceptionalism,” emphasized the priority of the national interest, and he called for being “more discriminating” in what the U.S. tries to accomplish overseas. All of this encouraged some people to see a foreign policy of restraint and prudence in Christie’s remarks that probably was never there. Christie’s remarks were generic enough that parts of his Reagan Library speech could be cited to support different interpretations, so we can’t know for certain what he meant. What we do know is that he’s endorsing Romney, which means that there was nothing Romney said in his alarmist speech last week with which he disagreed enough to turn him to another candidate, and it is probably not too much of a stretch to conclude that Christie agrees with the substance of the foreign policy Romney’s team outlined in their white paper. That suggests that conservative realists and non-interventionists aren’t missing anything by not having Christie in the race.

Jamie Fly and Robert Zarate have a terrible idea (via Scoblete):

The Obama administration should instead take this opportunity to advance a democracy-centered approach to Moscow.

“Nature of the regime” arguments aren’t very interesting, because they start from the assumption that regime type, not national interest, dictates a state’s behavior. That may occasionally be true, but in most cases it isn’t. Therefore, changing the nature of a foreign regime isn’t going to resolve any outstanding international issues, and organizing a “strategy” around trying to bring that change about is usually not going to succeed. If it did eventually succeeed and Russia became a more liberal democratic state, it wouldn’t change Russian policies as much as democratists think it would. Most Russians would still be nationalists, they would still view power projection in their vicinity by other major powers with suspicion, and they would still dislike their “pro-Western” liberals.

Fly and Zarate’s argument maintains that U.S. rhetoric and actions had nothing to do with the deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations before 2009, and then they proposse that the U.S. resume doing all of the things that contributed to the worsening of relations. Hectoring Russia over its internal politics? Check. Selling weapons to Georgia? Check. Tying human rights issues to trade? Check. The only thing missing from the list of hawkish favorites is NATO expansion, which was a policy that greatly contributed to the breakdown in relations.

Fly and Zarate’s conclusion is that the “reset” has failed. One reason they reach this conclusion is that they are opposed to good relations with Russia under its current form of government. As they see it, any “reset” with the current regime is a failure from the ouset, because they regard it as fundamentally misguided. Even if the “reset” has delivered greatly improved U.S.-Russian relations, and it has, they are going to declare it a failure, because they never wanted it to happen and they regard its success as a kind of failure.

What drives them crazy about the “reset” is that the U.S. and Russia can have a constructive relationship in spite of the latter’s illiberal, authoritarian government. According to their “nature of the regime” nonsense, that shouldn’t be possible. This is why they move the goalposts on what the “reset” was supposed to accomplish by pointing to all of the undesirable things in Russia (e.g., corruption, lack of political pluralism, rights violations, etc.) that have not been magically fixed by two and a half years of constructive engagement. The reality is that U.S. policy has been ineffective in aiding the cause of political reform in Russia for over ten years, and to a large extent U.S. efforts in this area in the past have helped to set back the cause of political reform through our association with it.

Herman Cain wants you to know that he doesn’t know much about the rest of the world:

I’m ready for the ‘gotcha’ questions and they’re already starting to come. And when they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say, you know, I don’t know. Do you know?

And then I’m going to say how’s that going to create one job?

It’s hardly breaking news that Cain hasn’t bothered to learn much about foreign policy issues. He has already been asked, and completely failed to answer, “gotcha” questions on such obscure topics as the war in Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If voters want someone well-informed on international affairs, they won’t be supporting Herman Cain, but we already knew that. What I find interesting about this statement is that it puts a lower priority on one of the main things for which the President is actually constitutionally responsible (formulating and executing foreign policy) than it does on something that he can at best indirectly affect through preferences on fiscal policy and regulation (“creating” jobs).

Cain may have the electoral politics of this right. The vast majority of voters doesn’t vote on foreign policy, and many of those who do aren’t demanding that candidates know much in detail about the rest of the world. How many voters who were likely to vote for Cain will be put off by this exchange? You can probably number them in the dozens nationwide.

Yes, obviously, the economy matters the most to almost all voters, and presidential candidates and incumbents prosper or fail depending on the state of economy, but I would say the most important aspect of presidential competence concerns his handling of national security and foreign policy issues. Cain treats it almost as if it were irrelevant, and he does this because he assumes correctly that treating it this way does him no harm with almost all voters. No wonder we have so little accountability for foreign policy blunders.

P.S. I should add that the thing that has sent Perry into a tailspin in the last few weeks wasn’t his ridiculous non-answer on a foreign policy question, but the combination of his “heartless” remark and his inability to spit out a halfway decent attack on Romney’s many changed positions. As long as Cain can keep delivering short, digestible slogans and zingers, he will probably not have many problems in future debates. The professionals and activists who care about these issues weren’t likely to back him anyway.

Greg Scoblete finds another untrue statement in Romney’s foreign policy speech from last week. Romney said:

If America is the undisputed leader of the world, it reduces our need to police a more chaotic world.

Scoblete observes:

If America acts in the manner described by Romney – which is a role it has followed arguably since 1990 – it means a constant resort to policing the world by force. Since the later half of the Cold War and its aftermath, when American power was at its apex, when America was “indisputably” the leader of the world, the pace of American military interventions and conflicts soared.

Romney is trying to have things both ways with this line. On the one hand, the U.S. must “lead” the world and back this up with military supremacy, and an integral part of this “leadership” is the regular use or threat of military force in response to various crises, but this will somehow make it less likely that the U.S. will have to “police” other parts of the world. In short, Romney insists that America must act as a heavily-armed global sheriff to avoid being the world’s policeman. This is an attempt to appeal to pride in superpower status at the same time that it deliberately minimizes the hyper-activist role Romney wants the U.S. to play. The insistence on being the “undisputed leader of the world” means that the U.S. will continue shouldering the burden for the defense of dependent allies that could provide for their own defense, which suggests that Romney has no interest in increased burden-sharing. Romney’s idea of recreating the transitory unipolar moment will not produce the result that he says it will, and it is an attempt to return to a point in the past that cannot be recovered.

References to a “more chaotic world” comes up in Romney’s speech at a couple different points. The first time he mentions this, he is describing the present and contrasting it with the Cold War:

Today, our world is far more chaotic. We still face grave threats, but they come not from one country, or one group, or one ideology. The world is unfortunately not so defined [bold mine-DL]. What America and our allies are facing is a series of threatening forces, ones that overlap and reinforce each other.

We can hear a trace of nostalgic regret that the world no longer appears to be defined by a simple bipolar division. Even though current threats are far less grave and dangerous than those that the U.S. and our allies faced during the Cold War (and some of the “threatening forces” aren’t very threatening at all), the supposed greater diversity and complexity of the world make things “more chaotic.” Thus Romney and his team conclude that the world is “more chaotic” despite the fact that the world is relatively more orderly and peaceful than it was before the end of the Cold War. International conflicts are relatively rare today, and the “policing” undertaken by the U.S. and our allies involves intervening in the internal affairs of other states. If the U.S. tries to remain the “undisputed leader of the world,” that will necessarily involve the U.S. in more crises and require much more “policing” of the world.

Update: On a related note, David Bosco picks up on some remarks by the Indian national security adviser, Shiv Shankar Menon, who describes international affairs as being close to a state of “primeval anarchy.” What does he mean by this? He said:

[W]e seem to be entering a phase of increasing militarization of international relations. Look at recent developments in the Middle East, where conventional air power, covert and Special Forces, and internet social media have been used in new tactical combinations with old fashioned propaganda and international institutions to change regimes and create political outcomes…

…We live in a time where international law remains underdeveloped, international governance is non-existent or weak, and international society is fundamentally anarchic. As a result the role of force in international relations has been magnified.

By “recent developments,” Menon is referring for the most part to the intervention in Libya. The “primeval anarchy” that this Indian official perceives is U.S. “leadership” engaged in the enforcement of the “rules-based order” that it ostensibly promotes. If the world appears “more chaotic” to Mr. Menon, it is because the U.S. and its allies are creating disorder through their “policing.”

Jim Antle makes the understatement of the week:

And by seeming open to preventive war in Iran, Huntsman may not be the ideal candidate for foreign policy restraint.

Worse than that, it undermines the main argument for why Huntsman should be taken seriously as a candidate: his reputation for greater foreign policy experience and understanding. In a mostly hawkish field that ranges from the ridiculously alarmist (Santorum) to the irresponsibly alarmist (Romney), Huntsman is supposed to possess the sobriety and sanity that other “mainstream” candidates lack. His “I can’t live with a nuclear-armed Iran” line may be nothing more than lip service, but the fact that he is willing to indulge one of the most dangerous ideas in current foreign policy debate badly weakens the one thing that distinguishes him from the other candidates.

As Heather Hurlburt points out, Huntsman’s position on Iran is simply an ill-informed one:

The Iran attack call is interesting because, contrary to what you might think, the U.S. military and many nonpartisan and bipartisan national security figures think such an attack would be a disaster for our security, for our economy and for our ally Israel.

Huntsman’s willingness to consider starting a war with Iran is all the more striking when he brings it up in the middle of an otherwise reasonable speech.