Jackson Diehl is still trying to justify the Iraq war:

Iraq, however, looks a lot like what Syria, and much of the rest of the Arab Middle East, might hope to be.

Iraq has a semi-authoritarian government ruled by a sectarian majority leadership. Iraq has suffered hundreds of thousands killed, millions displaced internally or sent into exile, and it continues to be classed among the unfree nations and non-democratic governments of the world. Is that what Syria might hope to be? I went through Iraq’s rankings from the Economist Intelligence Unit and Freedom House the last time someone at the Post made such an unfounded claim, and this is what I found:

The result of this “functioning democracy” is a state that is listed by Freedom House as not free, and it is categorized by the Economist Intelligence Unit as barely qualifying as a “hybrid regime” rather than an authoritarian state. In the overall EIU score for Iraq, it leads such models of free government Madagascar and Kuwait by just .06 and .12 respectively. Those two are in the authoritarian category. The EIU rates the functioning of the Iraqi government at 0.79 on a scale of 10. Other countries on the list that boast similar “functioning of government” ratings are Liberia, Togo, Tajikistan, and Equatorial Guinea. A better term for Iraq would be the Arab world’s most dysfunctional hybrid state. Kazakhstan outscores Iraq on civil liberties, and Russia ranks ahead of Iraq in terms of electoral process and pluralism. For political culture, it is tied with Jordan and Azerbaijan.

Considering how awful political conditions in Iraq are, and in light of how much the war cost Iraqis, there is no reason why any other nation would look to the Iraqi experience as a model. One of the problems Iraq war dead-enders have is that they refuse to acknowledge what Iraq has become, which leads them to say ridiculous things about how much people in neighboring countries must wish that their lands were invaded in the name of democracy promotion. Indeed, Diehl says just this about Syria:

Before another year has passed, Syrians may well find themselves wishing that it [an invasion] had happened to them.

Syrian protesters have suffered horribly under Assad’s crackdown, and thousands of them have been killed, but somehow I’m guessing that the vast majority of the population isn’t eager to experience the devastation of their country. One million Iraqi refugees still live in Syria, reminding Syrians every day of the costs of the Iraq war, so it is unlikely that there are many Syrians who see these refugees and think, “Oh, if only that could be me!” Something that Diehl fails to mention is that the Iraqi government is providing valuable support to keep Assad and his regime afloat. Perhaps he doesn’t read his own paper, which published this story over the weekend:

More than six months after the start of the Syrian uprising, Iraq is offering key moral and financial support to the country’s embattled president, undermining a central U.S. policy objective and raising fresh concerns that Iraq is drifting further into the orbit of an American arch rival — Iran.

It’s not as if this is the first time Iraqi support for Assad has been reported. The idea that post-invasion Iraq would serve a model for the political transformation of the region was always a fantasy, but it is even more so when the government of the so-called “model” country is lending support to its authoritarian neighbor to suppress local protests. There is no way of knowing how Hussein’s government would have reacted to a similar crackdown by Assad had there never been an invasion, but we can be reasonably sure that his regime would have been much less inclined to prop up an Iranian ally. Assad is likely receiving support from the Iraqi government today that he would never have received if the war had never taken place.

Eliot Cohen wrote the foreword to the Romney campaign’s white paper. While the foreword is mostly filled with boilerplate and generalities, some of the assumptions in it are useful for explaining why Romney and his team come to the mistaken conclusions that they do on many issues. Take this line from Cohen for example:

The easiest way, for example, to become embroiled in a clash with China over Taiwan, or because of China’s ambitions in the South or East China Seas, will be to leave Beijing in doubt about the depth of our commitment to longstanding allies in the region. Conversely, a United States that is self-confident and strong will find more developments breaking its way.

That’s just not true. The easiest way to become embroiled in such a clash is to make the mistake of thinking that the U.S. must become involved in local disputes. Probably the next easiest way is to increase the U.S. military presence in the region, which is what Romney proposes. Expanding the U.S. naval presence in the western Pacific will create more occasions for incidents and accidents that might then escalate. The white paper does not specifically address the idea of intensifying U.S. surveillance of Chinese ships in the South China Sea, but it seems likely that this would be one reason to have an expanded naval presence in the region. This is just the sort of thing that is liable to provoke unnecessary clashes. What one person regards as self-confidence and strength is what another would regard as hubris. There was no lack of American confidence and strength in 2002-03, but the years since then have not exactly seen all that many developments breaking our way. It is troubling how much policy arguments coming from Romney and other Republicans exhibit this almost mystical belief in the power of resolve and confidence.

There has been some debate over how the U.S. should react to Chinese claims in the South China Sea. Lyle Goldstein cited the example of Georgia in 2008 as proof that the U.S. will not actually risk conflict with a major power over a minor client state, and he counseled non-intervention. James Holmes rejects the Georgia comparison. In fact, the example of U.S. policy towards Georgia between 2003 and 2008 is instructive for a different reason. What both of them overlook or fail to mention is that the August 2008 crisis developed in large part because of the mistaken belief in Tbilisi that the U.S. would provide Georgia with meaningful support in any confrontation with Russia.

While Goldstein focuses on the blow U.S. credibility suffered when that support was not forthcoming, the crisis was the result of creating the impression that U.S. support was guaranteed. Years of U.S. training of Georgian forces and promoting Georgia’s bid to join NATO encouraged the Georgian government to take extremely unwise action. The U.S. effectively promised more than it was really willing to deliver. That created unrealistic expectations on one side, but completely failed to deter the other. The flip side of removing doubt about the “depth of our commitment” is to give allied governments an exaggerated and false sense of that commitment, which could lead them to take provocative actions in the expectation that the U.S. will be there to bail them out if things get out of hand. That could leave the U.S. watching passively as the client suffers, or in a worse scenario it could force the U.S. into a conflict created by a reckless client.

We have just seen in the recent past how much trouble a policy of “clarity and resolve” can cause, because such a policy often creates the perception of “deep” commitments that the U.S. won’t or can’t honor. If it’s true that “others abroad take the doubts we express about ourselves here with the utmost seriousness,” our clients also take American rhetoric of strength and resolve more seriously than they should. That creates some difficulties for the U.S., but it can be truly disastrous for the client state.

I neglected to mention this in my previous posts, but it’s worth noting that Romney referred to “massive defense cuts” under the current administration that have never happened. The notion of Obama as military budget-cutter has been circulating for years. Robert Kagan is listed as one of Romney’s advisers, and he was among the first to use this criticism. The truth, as usual, is rather different from what Romney says:

There have been no “massive defense cuts” under Obama, although he has slowed the projected rate of increase and in April asked the Pentagon to identify an additional $400 billion in reductions over the next 12 years. When he took office, the defense budget was $513 billion, not counting $153 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the budget year that ended Sept. 30, the figure was $530 billion, with an additional $159 billion to pay for the wars.

For the current fiscal year, Obama requested $553 billion for the defense budget, exclusive of war costs. But in a deal worked out by Congress and the White House as part of a deficit-reduction plan in August, he was forced to come down to $513 billion.

It can’t be stressed enough that total military spending in real terms is higher than it was at the height of the Reagan build-up. Romney also wants to add 100,000 new personnel at a time when personnel costs are one of the main drivers of higher military spending. Todd Harrison’s analysis of the FY 2012 budget request sums up the growth of personnel costs over the last decade:

Increases in military pay and benefits account for 19 percent of the growth. Since FY 2001, overall active-duty end strength has remained relatively flat, hovering between 1,451,000 and 1,510,000. But during this time Congress repeatedly enacted pay raises in excess of the employment cost index (ECI) and added or expanded a number of benefits that increased the cost of military personnel on a per person basis by 46 percent in real terms. Military healthcare is a significant contributor to the growth in personnel costs, rising by 85 percent in real terms over the past decade.

Between his ship-building proposal and personnel increases, Romney is pledging to explode military spending and make it an even larger burden on the country than it already is. The 2012 election looks to be shaping up as a choice between the incumbent defender of steady increases in Pentagon spending and a likely challenger eager to throw tens of billions more dollars at the Pentagon.

Robert Merry can’t find enough good things to say about Andrew Jackson in a new article for The American Spectator. He imagines how Jackson might govern today:

On foreign policy, Jackson would argue that America must play a significant role in the world. We are a great nation and must stand tall. But he would warn against getting involved in unnecessary wars unrelated to vital American interests. And he would ferociously attack anyone who suggested, for example, that opposition to America’s Libyan adventure amounted to isolationism. He would insist on reasonable and accurate terms of debate.

All of this might be what Jackson would do if he were alive today, but I’m not sure how we could know this. Since Jackson was in the tradition of Jefferson, he might see no need to “play a significant role” in the world. Jefferson once wrote, “We wish not to meddle with the internal affairs of any country, nor with the general affairs of Europe.” Would Jackson disagree with that? I see no reason to think so, but to “play a significant role” the U.S. would inevitably be drawn into the affairs of many regions and possibly become involved in the internal affairs of some states. How would Jackson understand the phrase “vital American interests”? It is doubtful he would have defined them as expansively as many Americans do today, but that is another reason to doubt that he would have wanted the U.S. to “play a significant role.” A significant role doing what? To what end?

One reason why I have never liked using the term Jacksonian to refer to a distinctive foreign policy tradition in American history is that Jackson’s foreign policy did not represent a significant departure from the earlier tradition he inherited. There isn’t a specifically Jacksonian foreign policy, and a large part of what is defined as “Jacksonianism” involves treating Jackson’s character traits and the traits of populist nationalists generally as meaningful indicators of foreign policy views. It’s hard not to conclude that Merry’s description of what Jackson would have done is what Merry would like U.S. foreign policy to be, which is what he hopes Jackson would have also supported.

James Joyner has reviewed the Romney campaign’s foreign policy white paper. Joyner labels Romney’s foreign policy as “realist,” which is an indication of how vague and inclusive that term can sometimes be. It defines the U.S. role in terms of opposition to Russian and Chinese interests, resistance to “Bolivarian” governments in Latin America, and hostility to Iran, and it defines U.S. interests very broadly. It echoes a lot of consensus assumptions, and its most unusual elements include a restatement of Romney’s bizarre idea of reorganizing U.S. diplomatic structures along regional/military command lines.

The campaign document is longer and necessarily more detailed than the speech Romney delivered, but as I looked it over I didn’t find many improvements over what we heard yesterday. Romney’s answer on China policy is to expand the U.S. naval presence in the western Pacific, sell many more weapons to Taiwan, and block China’s regional ambitions. This takes things that the Obama administration is already doing and then escalates the most confrontational aspects. Then there was this amusing section:

Our objective is not to build an anti-China coalition. Rather it is to strengthen cooperation among countries with which we share a concern about China’s growing power and increasing assertiveness and with whom we also share an interest in maintaining freedom of navigation and ensuring that disputes over resources are resolved by peaceful means. It is yet another way of closing off China’s option of expanding its influence through coercion.

In other words, the goal is to organize a coalition of states opposed to Chinese claims in order to thwart Chinese goals, but it supposedly isn’t an anti-China coalition. I doubt that this is how the Chinese government will see it. Since one of Romney’s advisers is Aaron Friedberg, author of A Contest for Supremacy, I suppose it isn’t a huge surprise that his campaign frames China policy in mostly antagonistic terms.

The paper discusses the “Arab Spring,” the Middle East, and Israel at some length. One section that stood out was this:

The United States will work intensively with Turkey and Egypt to shore up the now fraying relationships with Israel that have underpinned peace in the Middle East for decades. The United States must forcefully resist the emergence of anti-Israel policies in Turkey and Egypt, and work to make clear that their interests are not served by isolating Israel.

What this means in practice is anyone’s guess. If Romney and his advisers take for granted that Israel has done nothing to contribute to the deterioration of these relationships, as I assume they do, they aren’t going to be very effective in persuading Turkey and Egypt to repair their relations with Israel. After all, the Turkish and Egyptian governments and publics think Israel has contributed significantly to the worsening of relations, and both governments have become increasingly independent of Washington in their dealings with Israel. How would Romney and his team repair the damage when they have little or no respect for the Turkish and Egyptian positions? When they say they will “forcefully resist” such policies, what do they define as “anti-Israel” and what does “forcefully resist” mean? Are they willing to jeopardize U.S. relations with these other states, and if so how far are they willing to take it? I suppose these details are beside the point. The purpose of this section is just to drive home how completely a Romney administration will align itself with Israel no matter what.

On Iran, Romney favors more sanctions. Of course he does. Even though the paper acknowledges that the previous rounds of sanctions have not had the desired effect of changing regime behavior, Romney’s team proposes another “tougher” round. There’s no reason to think that these will alter the Iranian regime’s behavior more than previous sanctions have. The paper also revives an old Romney favorite left over from his previous presidential campaign, which is the idea that Ahmadinejad should be indicted for incitement to genocide. In addition to being based on a popular misconception of what Ahmadinejad was saying, this amounts to nothing more than a diplomatic stunt. The focus on Ahmadinejad in the section on Iran is a good example of the bad habit of personalizing policy toward other states, and in this case the focus is on a relatively powerless figure who is on the way out in two years anyway. Perhaps most annoying of all is the “anything but Obama” rhetorical position that Romney will lend support to the Iranian opposition. This is support that Iranian opposition figures don’t want, and it is “help” that would do them no good, but when it comes to specifics we find that Romney’s proposals for concrete support are extremely limited:

He would work to improve the flow of information to the Iranian population about its own government’s repressive activities.

The paper says Romney will not “remain silent” during Iranian crackdowns, which means that the Romney team is willing to offer rhetorical encouragement and little else. In practical terms, they are not proposing to do very much more than the current administration has done. That is understandable. There is not very much constructive that the U.S. can do, which is what makes the argument that the U.S. should have “done more” in 2009 so silly.

The section on Russia is revealing both for what it says and what it omits. Apart from the false claim of a “recent history of aggressive military action,” there is no reference to Georgia, and absolutely no discussion of revisiting NATO expansion for Georgia or Ukraine. If Romney and his advisers are interested in resuming that ill-judged project, they aren’t saying so explicitly. Curiously, one of the most concrete gains of the “reset” in the form of increased supplies for Afghanistan goes entirely unmentioned. The U.S. has received some aid from Russia on sanctioning Iran, which the paper bizarrely claims never happened, and it recycles the tired and misleading claim that the administration did not extract Russian concessions on reducing tactical nuclear weapons in the context of a strategic arms reduction treaty. Romney’s Russia policy is explicitly an undoing of the “reset,” including a review of implementing the latest arms control treaty:

He will implement a strategy that will seek to discourage aggressive or expansionist behavior on the part of Russia and encourage democratic political and economic reform. He will review the implementation of the New START treaty and other decisions by the Obama administration regarding America’s nuclear posture and arms-control policies to determine whether they serve the best interests and national security of the United States.

So Romney will revert to the same sort of antagonistic approach, complete with lectures on Russian internal affairs, that led to the worst U.S.-Russian relations in a generation. For all of the complaining that the current administration neglected to push for Russian concessions on tactical nuclear weapons, the paper never so much as hints that Romney sees new arms control agreements of any kind as desirable or important. If Romney is the nominee and manages to win, we can expect relations with Russia will become more difficult because that is the way that Romney and his team want them.

Joyner claims that the policy outlined in the paper is not “frightening,” but a better way to describe it is “not as frightening as it could be” given its basically misguided, confrontational approach on a number of issues.

P.S. Joyner also noted that Romney’s proposal for increased ship-building would be “ridiculously expensive.” Ali Gharib points out that this proposal would return the number of ships built each year to Cold War levels.

Jennifer Rubin has interviewed Romney, who reminds us that he really hates successful diplomatic engagement:

“You have to go back, “ he begins, “to when we pulled our missile defense sites out of eastern Europe. I wouldn’t have done it. But if we were going to do it, he should have gotten something of huge foreign policy significance. He didn’t.”

He’s under no illusions about Vladi­mir Putin. He is convinced that Putin dreams of “rebuilding the Russian empire.” He says, “That includes annexing populations as they did in Georgia and using gas and oil resources” to throw their weight around in Europe. He maintains that the START treaty was tilted toward Russia. “It has to end,” he says emphatically about “reset.” “We have to show strength.

Obviously, what the U.S. “got” in exchange that was very significant was the establishment of a relatively more constructive relationship with Russia, which has yielded benefits for the U.S. whether Romney is able to admit it or not. Romney considers the improved relationship with Russia as something that is in itself undesirable, and he wishes to revert back to the bad old days of late 2008 when the relationship was in its worst shape in decades. Let him campaign on that. That is what his sort of “strength” leads to: frozen bilateral ties and a dismembered client state.

Does Romney have any comment on the missile defense sites that are being installed in Romania, Poland, and even Turkey? I realize that he likes his talking points from 2009, but he might want to look into what has happened since then. If Romney still believes New START puts the U.S. at a disadvantage, is he proposing that the U.S. withdraw from the treaty? Given that Romney’s understanding of the issues related to the treaty is shoddy at best, I’d be interested to see him answer that question. Does Romney know what the word annexation means? If he did, he wouldn’t apply it to what Russia is doing in South Ossetia and Abkhazia right now. They do have de facto control in these areas, and they have recognized the nominal independence of the separatists to keep them as Russian satellites, but there are no other examples of the empire-building that Romney thinks is going on. Perhaps Romney agrees with the slogan that ignorance is strength?

Naturally, Jonathan Tobin was very pleased with Romney’s bad speech. He especially liked some of its worst parts:

But in addition, he also specifically addressed the threats from the rising military power of China and the desire of Russia’s autocrats to recreate the Soviet empire. Such bold talk will dismay some who think Obama’s belief in engaging these rivals makes sense, but given the utter failure of the administration’s hopes to get those two powers to act sensibly on threats like Iran, Romney’s position makes perfect sense.

Actually, Romney didn’t specifically address these things. Instead, he gestured in the direction of looming threats that he is greatly exaggerating or making up. Romney claims that China is bent on achieving global superpower status, for which he presented and has no evidence. There can’t actually be more than one autocrat per state, or else he isn’t much of an autocrat, but then that is another reason why applying the term autocracy to modern authoritarian states such as Russia is misleading and wrong. As for the idea that Russia is bent on recreating an empire, Soviet or otherwise, Thomas de Waal made a useful observation in a recent op-ed on the need for a new European Ostpolitik:

The issue is not a Russian imperial threat. With the exception of a few sensitive spots, such as Abkhazia and Crimea, Moscow is in long-term retreat from its former colonial space, and is mostly pre-occupied with domestic problems, such as the volatile north Caucasus. Russia had concerns about Nato expansion into Georgia and Ukraine, but that ill-conceived project has now run out of steam.

On the bright side, Romney’s discussion of policy towards Europe and Russia in his speech was so minimal that he never had the opportunity to suggest reviving the ill-conceived project of continued NATO expansion. Romney is the Republican front-runner, he will most likely be the nominee next year, and he has built up the largest foreign policy team of any candidate*. He really ought to be delivering more in his speeches than he has, and he ought to be expected to deliver more. Unfortunately, it is an indication of how low the bar has been set that Romney’s address today can be well-received and treated as a “serious” and “good” speech by people on right and left.

* Granted, it is a team staffed entirely by Bush administration veterans.

Update: Fallows and Ackerman are impressed and a bit dismayed by how Romney said practically nothing about actual policy. If Romney’s goal was to engage in a good deal of hawkish posturing, the speech was a success, but otherwise it fell fall short of what we should expect from the leading presidential candidate of a major party. Once again, I am more than a little amazed that the reputedly wonky, technocratic Romney shows so little interest in policy substance when it comes to these issues. I didn’t get to this in my column, but Ackerman’s view of the region-wide democracy-promoting official is similar to mine:

This is a stupid person’s idea of a smart proposal. Who is our Man Who Moves Entire Regions By The Force Of His Words?

Second Update: James Lindsay comments on what Romney is missing:

Finally, Romney may eventually develop a foreign-policy strategy but he doesn’t have one yet. A good foreign-policy strategy names goals, identifies trends, sets priorities, and identifies means. Romney’s speech today did none of that. It especially skirted the question of where the world is going and how that affects U.S. interests and opportunities.

My column on Romney’s Citadel foreign policy address for The Week is online. Here is an excerpt:

At times, Romney’s speech sounded like a technocrat’s brief for divinely-ordained U.S. hegemony: “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the world, or someone else will.” It seems presumptuous at best to claim knowledge of God’s foreign policy preferences, but the most misleading statement here is that another state will assume the role of a global hegemon if the U.S. does not fill it. There is no one state or group of states aspiring to the international role that the U.S. currently has, and no other is capable of filling that role if it wished.

Probably the most remarkable thing in the speech was how little Romney paid to the other major powers in the world. He poses some questions about future scenarios in the beginning of the speech, but he never answers any of them. Today’s speech lifted quite a few arguments that Romney had already made two years ago in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. The main difference is that the “nations or groups of nations” he identified as the main international threats back then have now become threatening “forces.” There’s nothing the matter with recycling his own material, but it is still bad material.

Gene Healy’s commentary on Chris Christie’s Reagan Library speech is a classic example of seeing what one wants to see in a politician:

Christie has never been accused of being subtle, but you can read the speech as a subtle rebuke to neoconservatives and armed humanitarians on the left.

A Christie-Obama race would have pitted our lean, ambitious president—who’s proven so profligate with American blood and treasure—against this brash bulky figure, arguing that we need to check our appetites and tighten our belts.

Unfortunately, Christie’s decision to stay out of the race just encourages this sort of hopeful speculation about what Christie might have meant, because there will be no Christie campaign advisers and policy statements to contradict it. What we know about Christie’s current staff and the people who were most eagerly pushing him to run ought to tell us that Christie was not going to be the candidate Healy imagines. If he was rebuking neoconservatives subtly or otherwise, they seem not to have noticed.

One of Christie’s main complaints in the speech is that somewhere in the world something is happening that the U.S. may not be influencing as much as it could be:

You see, without strong leadership at home—without our domestic house in order—we are taking ourselves out of the equation. Over and over, we are allowing the rest of the world to set the tone without American influence.

It goes without saying that Christie regards this as a problem that needs to be fixed. The idea that other nations might go through political upheavals and changes without our input or direction seems to bother him.

Whatever changes he might want to make to entitlements, Christie made it clear in his speech that he wanted no belt-tightening for the military or any other part of the government connected to national security:

I understand full well that succeeding at home, setting an example, is not enough. The United States must be prepared to act. We must be prepared to lead. This takes resources—resources for defense, for intelligence, for homeland security, for diplomacy. The United States will only be able to sustain a leadership position around the world if the resources are there—but the necessary resources will only be there if the foundations of the American economy are healthy.

Christie takes for granted that the U.S. must devote enormous resources to all of these things to “be prepared to act” and “to lead,” and he laments that our domestic problems are hindering our ability to “do good for other countries.” Presumably, his insistence that the U.S. should continue trying “to stop the spread of nuclear materials and weapons and the means to deliver them” is a nod towards perpetuating a dangerous, confrontational policy towards Iran. As I said last week, he recycles the ridiculous isolationist charge by setting up an opposition between “leading” and “turning our back on the world.” The choice he presents us is one between hegemony or nothing.