Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s essay on the history of military intervention and its non-interventionist critics includes an interesting discussion of Richard Cobden and John Bright, who were the leading British opponents of the Crimean War:

Within a matter of years, this had ceased to be an abstract question: the Crimean War against Russia, ostensibly fought out of disinterested loyalty to Turkey, was the test case for Manchester noninterventionism. Cobden so despaired of this foolish and needless conflict that he retreated into silence once the guns began to fire. Bright did not. In opposition to the war, he delivered what have been called the greatest speeches ever heard in a parliamentary assembly.

Wheatcroft quotes from Bright’s speech, and this one sentence particularly deserves to be cited again:

It is not my duty to make this country the knight-errant of the human race, and to take upon herself the protection of the thousand millions of human beings who have been permitted by the Creator of all things to people this planet.

While they appear only very briefly in his The Crimean War, Orlando Figes pays some attention to the depressingly familiar treatment meted out to Cobden and Bright during the war:

Palmerston became so popular, and his foreign policy became so closely linked to the defence of ‘British values’ in the public mind, that anyone who tried to halt the drift to war was likely to be vilified by the patriotic press. That was the fate of the pacifists, the radical free-traders Richard Cobden and John Bright, whose refusal to see Russia as a threat to British interests (which in their view were better served by trading with Russia) led to the press denouncing them as ‘pro-Russian’ and therefore ‘un-English’. (p. 149)

As Anatol Lieven wrote earlier this year, Charles Kupchan identified the pro-war hysteria in Britain leading up to the Crimean War as a classic example of how democratic politics could lead to unnecessary war:

Thus in the 1850s, the rise of democratic politics and the mass media in Britain, by bringing chauvinist pressure to bear on foreign policy, helped destroy what had been for the previous four decades a somewhat competitive but peacefully managed relationship between Britain and Russia.

Conor Friedersdorf wonders what happened to Howard Dean:

He’s praising drone strikes and special ops because they’re less likely to attract the scrutiny and criticism from American citizens. It’s a position one doesn’t expect a prominent Iraq war dissenter to take — you’d think he of all people would understand that it’s vital for the American public to scrutinize the foreign policy decisions of its leaders regardless of the political party in power.

Conor reaches the conclusion that partisanship explains Dean’s support for the Libyan war, and that’s not entirely wrong, but it is possible to exaggerate the importance of partisanship here. As Scott Lemieux remarks, Dean was a Democratic “centrist” by reputation before he became the unlikely tribune of progressive antiwar sentiment. When he was still a presidential candidate, Dean made a point of saying that the real problem with invading Iraq was that the administration had ignored the “greater” threats from Iran and North Korea. Dean happened to oppose the Iraq war, but this was partly a matter of taking advantage of a political opening in a field dominated by pro-war candidates. Very much like Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war, it was an isolated judgment that seems to have nothing in common with the rest of his foreign policy thinking. When trying to understand the weaknesses and limits of the antiwar movement in America, a good place to start is the frequent habit it has of endorsing and backing candidates who happen to be aligned with that movement on one issue almost by accident.

The EconomistreviewedWhere China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia, a new book on Burma written by Thant Myint-U the grandson of former U.N. Secretary-General U Thant:

But the book’s main analytical and polemical point is tellingly made: in the absence of a Western counterbalance, Myanmar is falling almost inexorably into the Chinese sphere of influence. There is an age-old dream of linking India and China through Burma. The Victorians even fantasised about a raised railway from Calcutta (now Kolkata), soaring above the jungle.

The dream is at last coming true, as the solution to China’s “Malacca dilemma”—its strategic worry about dependence on imported energy coming through the chokepoint of the Malacca Straits. A new port, oil and gas pipelines, and roads are already under construction, giving China for the first time direct access to the Bay of Bengal, and a new route for as much as 20% of its oil imports. Dams are springing up on Myanmar’s rivers, to generate hydropower to keep the lights burning in Yunnan.

The reviewer mentions Thant’s view that Western sanctions on Burma have been self-defeatingly futile. Obviously, I agree. This is also what Nader Mousavizadeh was arguing back in January 2010:

The two-decade-old policy of isolating Burma now looks like a carefully constructed attempt to weaken Western influence and open the door to China, while devastating Burma’s legitimate economy and doing nothing to improve its people’s human rights.

So it seems quite clear that Western policy towards Burma has failed in several ways, and it has deprived Western governments of whatever influence they might have been able to have. The reviewer notes that the leaders of the Burmese junta would prefer not to be so heavily dependent on China, but they have very few alternatives:

Yet the West, with its fastidious refusal to have any truck with them, seems to leave them little option but to cleave to China.

This is worth bearing in mind when considering how best to respond to Syria’s crackdown now.

Matt Duss debunks the myth that the Iranian government is filled with suicidal maniacs:

According to Mehdi Khalaji, an Iran analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who spent years studying Shia theology in the Iranian seminary city of Qom, Ayatollah Khamenei — who, unlike Ahmadinejad, actually controls Iranian foreign policy — is much more concerned with the here and now. “Not one of [Khamenei’s] speeches refers to any apocalyptic sign or reveals any special eagerness for the return of the Hidden Imam,” Khalaji wrote in a 2008 report, Apocalyptic Politics: On the Rationality of Iranian Policy. “As the theory of the guardianship of the jurist requires, the most significant task of the Supreme Leader is to safeguard the regime, even by overruling Islamic law.”

The myth relies heavily on placing absolute importance on the peculiar religious ideas of the current non-clerical president, attributing them to the clerical leadership, and then studiously ignoring the many times that the leading clerics have rejected the building and use of nuclear weapons as contrary to the teachings of Islam. Only the most potentially alarming religious teachings, however badly misunderstood or misconstrued, seem to have any relevance for understanding what the Iranian government might do. The idea that the Iranian government might face more constraints on developing nuclear weapons because of its religious pronouncements never even comes up.

According to the “myth of the martyr state,” a particular form of fanatical millennarian belief is so strong in the government’s leadership that it will override all normal state interests and the natural desire for self-preservation. As Duss explains, there is simply no reason for believing that this is so:

“Given the novelty of the martyr state argument,” Grotto continued, “and how unequivocally its proponents present it, one would expect to encounter an avalanche of credible evidence. Yet that is not the case.” Finding both that “references are scarce in this line of writings, and certain references are cited with striking regularity,” Grotto determined that the “martyr state” view essentially rests upon a few neoconservative op-eds and a report by a right-wing Israeli think tank, whose claims have been bounced endlessly around the internet.

Perhaps the most famous and ludicrous of the op-eds in question was Bernard Lewis’ 2006 classic that warned of the coming nuclear apocalypse that might begin on August 22 of that year. Lewis expressed the core of the myth:

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead — hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.

If the last few years should have taught us anything about the Iranian leadership, it is that the current rahbar is a deeply cynical political operator interested in preserving a regime that he controls. Ahmadinejad has become an annoyance, and one that the clerical leadership will be glad to see gone after 2013, so speculation based on Ahmadinejad’s unconventional opinions is even less relevant than it used to be. It is easy to imagine a cynical leadership exploiting religious fanaticism so that others take all the risks, but engaging in self-destructive behavior is something else entirely.

For some reason, Michael Rubin hates the president of Kyrgyzstan (via Nathan Hamm):

Yes, that’s right: Let’s wish Otunbaeva, the former communist functionary who was one of the coup leaders who overthrew her predecessor and has since cozied up to Vladimir Putin in Russia a truly long life. May it be as long as Muammar Qadhafi’s will be.

One of the “coup leaders”? It’s true that her predecessor, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was overthrown in what could fairly be called a coup, and she was instrumental in organizing opposition to Bakiyev, but under the circumstances Otunbayeva and her allies have done a reasonably good job of preparing Kyrgyzstan for its transition to a more accountable, elected government. A large number of people in post-Soviet politics throughout the old USSR and eastern Europe were at one time or another communist functionaries. Some genuinely changed to become democrats, others simply adopted the right rhetoric without believing it, and others have chosen to pursue some more recent form of authoritarian politics. By all accounts I have seen, Otunbayeva is one of the first group.

Bakiyev was a corrupt authoritarian ruler, and his seizure of power was one of the worse examples of the “freedom agenda” in action, and he precipitated his own loss of power with a brutal crackdown on protests. If that had happened this year, we would probably be reading overwrought commentary about the “Central Asian Spring.” Bakiyev’s downfall was a welcome development, and the incitement of his supporters to carry out attacks on the Uzbek minority in the country was a reminder of why Kyrgyzstan was better off without him. For her part, Otunbayeva has promised to step down from her interim position after the next presidential election.

Kyrgyzstan’s “cozying up” to Moscow is a reflection of basic political and economic realities: Kyrgyzstan is heavily dependent on the Russian economy in the form of remittances and trade. The relationship with Russia is simply far more important to Kyrgyzstan, and it would be absurd to expect any Kyrgyz government to pretend otherwise. The use of Manas air base has been the main U.S. concern in Kyrgyzstan for the last decade, and Kyrgyzstan will honor the existing, Bakiyev-era contract to let the U.S. use it through 2014, which is when the bulk of U.S. forces is supposed to be out of Afghanistan anyway. Despite the unpopularity of the U.S. use of Manas, and the association of the U.S. with Bakiyev’s rule, Otunbayeva did not end U.S. access to the base. This would have been very popular at home and satisfactory to hard-liners in Moscow, but she didn’t do it. Are there other cooperative foreign leaders whose early deaths Rubin desires?

Ed Husain doesn’t think Assad is danger of being overthrown, but adds this:

Already, calls for military intervention are being made by Syrian opposition activists in meetings at the White House and US state department.

If that’s correct, that is a cause for concern. If a lot of Syrian activists begin calling for military backing, that will remove one significant obstacle on the path of escalation. However, everything I have seen so far points in the other direction. Syrian oppositionactivists in Syriahave usually beenexplicitly rejectingmilitary intervention. If there have been activists here in the U.S. agitating for military action, it appears that they are speaking for themselves and not representing what most of the Syrian opposition wants. That is just as well, since there appears to be no interest on the part of the administration or any European allies to start another war.

Jeffrey Lord makes an unusual claim:

Ron Paul is what might be called a “Neo-Liberal.”

This is a silly argument in many, many ways, and by the end Lord’s article has devolved into the most baseless and despicable smearing. That’s not surprising. This is what Lord does: he imputes vicious attitudes to those he criticizes, and he never has the evidence to support it. It is best just to stop reading after the first two pages.

Let’s start with the term neoliberal itself. The word neoliberal means a few different things, and there is only one definition that could conceivably apply in any way to Ron Paul. In the domestic political context, American neoliberals have been those on the left or center-left concerned to criticize and change the existing agenda of the 1980s Democratic Party on crime, welfare, trade, and foreign policy. Neoliberalism was a main part of the American “third way” represented by the Clinton administration, which entailed a more activist foreign policy, support for expanded free trade, and the adoption of relatively pro-business and pro-finance positions compared to where the party had been in the past. Because there was some overlap between neoliberals and Democratic “centrist” hawks, progressive critics of the Iraq war began using neoliberal as something of a curse word to refer to liberal interventionists specifically and pro-war Democrats in general.

Finally, neoliberal can refer more broadly to policies designed to promote economic globalization and the word can also fairly be used to describe supporters of multilateral trade talks and organizations. Properly speaking, none of these definitions fits Paul, and it is only in his support for free trade that he has anything in common with neoliberals, and that similarity is not all that meaningful. While Paul favors commerce and trade, he is also wary of any agreement or multilateral organization that infringes U.S. sovereignty, and he has typically opposed most privileged trade agreements as barriers to free trade (which, in fact, they are).

Lord’s only real evidence in support of this incorrect label involves complaints that many progressives in both parties have sometimes also endorsed a foreign policy of neutrality and non-intervention. By the same token, many progressives from both parties favored overseas expansion and entry into European wars. Lord forgets to mention this second part.

Lord conveniently ignores the long history that links the pre-FDR Democratic Party and the Democratic-Republicans before them to the Anglo-American Country political tradition that opposed centralized power and rejected foreign wars. If there was any clear tradition of conservative political instincts in the United States, it must be the Country tradition that was mostly represented up until 1912 by members of the Democratic Party. Between 1869 and 1921, there was probably no more politically conservative President than Grover Cleveland, and Cleveland happened to be one of the most outspoken anti-imperialists of his age. Cleveland was for sound money, opposed the annexation of Hawaii, and fiercely opposed the Spanish War and the annexations that followed it. That Lord thinks William Jennings Bryan was “left-wing” tells us more about the uselessness of such labels than it does about Bryan or his support for neutrality.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft reminds us that one of the early examples of antiwar argument in the English-speaking world came from one of the writers most closely associated with the Country tradition of Bolingbroke and the Tory Opposition of the early eighteenth century:

In the first years of the eighteenth century, the War of the Spanish Succession saw Jonathan Swift publish The Conduct of the Allies, denouncing the conflict, the way it was waged by the government in London….

Isaac Kramnick explained Tory opposition to the war in Bolingbroke & His Circle:

Tory opposition to the war became a political outlet for their grievances against what the Tory writers called the “modern Whigs.” The modern Whig with his war and his new financial order was undermining the country. Land taxes, national debt, the Bank, the moneyed corporation, stockjobbers, the Dutch-Emperor alliance, redcoats trudging through foreign lands–all were sponsored and defended by the “modern Whig.”

Many of Ron Paul’s arguments have strong precedents in the Country tradition. This is an Anglo-American conservative tradition of which Lord seems quite unaware. The idea that Ron Paul is a neoliberal is simply nonsense, as is the rest of Lord’s article.

Update: Lord attempts to defend his terrible article to Jack Hunter by pretending that non-interventionists do not accept wars of self-defense. This is absurdly and painfully wrong.

Michael Brendan Dougherty has a long profile of Jon Huntsman in the next issue of TAC. As Michael explains, Huntsman’s record on fiscal and social issues is actually quite conservative, so much so that it will probably shock some of his new admirers, but there are some obvious exceptions. One thing that caught my attention was the Huntsman campaign’s belief that these exceptions aren’t all that important:

“The ‘moderate’ label will fade away as people get to know his record,” says Whit Ayres, a Huntsman campaign pollster, “There are a few instances here or there, like on civil unions where he strays from what’s thought to be conservative orthodoxy, but Republicans don’t select their presidential nominee by going down a list of litmus test issues and disqualifying people.

Well, yes and no. Some Republicans do exactly this, and they tend to be the ones in influential positions that they can use to build up or tear down particular candidates. Ever since Huckabee and McCain won the vast majority of primary contests in 2008, I have been very skeptical of the ability of movement and party elites to prevail on the rank-and-file to reject candidates they consider to be too heterodox and/or “moderate,” but they can successfully disqualify candidates before they become well-known. Romney in 2008 showed how weak carefully constructed “consensus” candidates can be, and his first campaign revealed the limits of having the approval of these elites. On the other hand, had Romney never received this approval after he re-invented himself, it is doubtful that he would be as competitive as he is now.

Over the last few years, Huntsman has made a point of doing the opposite of what Romney did between 2005 and 2008. He has not been cultivating movement conservatives, and he has acquired the reputation of being the mainstream media’s favorite candidate. This is similar to McCain’s 2000 campaign, but McCain had two things that Huntsman currently doesn’t: a high national profile, and the very vocal backing of many neoconservatives and hawks. Huntsman’s foreign policy views are often quite sensible, which is unfortunately one of the reasons why he has no comparable cheering section among movement and party elites. On top of all this, strong partisans count his service as ambassador in Beijing as a liability and take it as proof of his “moderate” status.

Sensible views notwithstanding, Huntsman dodges questions on the Iraq war, which is one of a handful of the most important foreign policy issues of the last decade. It is an issue that should still be a major test of a candidate’s judgment, and Huntsman’s answer on this is essentially that he doesn’t want to talk about it. This is how Michael reports it:

“Listen, I don’t want to re-litigate the Iraq War,” he says, admitting that he wishes to simply get past this question. “I visited [Iraq] three times as governor, and I’m very, very proud of all our troops in the National Guard. I was their commander in chief. And to this day, all I can say is that I’m grateful for the role that they played and the sacrifices they made, including families who lost and made the ultimate sacrifice. I’ll say no more.”

This is a very unsatisfactory answer, and it is even more when this area of policy is supposed to be one of Huntsman’s strengths. If he supported the war as most Republicans and almost all elected Republicans did when it started, that would hardly be surprising, but it would be worth hearing what Huntsman thinks the U.S. should have learned from it. I’m sure there aren’t many Republican candidates interested in re-litigating the Iraq war (except the opponents who got the question right the first time), but Huntsman has more of an obligation to answer the question than many of the others do. After all, Huntsman endorsed one of the most stubborn Iraq war hard-liners for President in the last election.

Even more troubling is Huntsman’s recommendation for U.S. policy in Iraq now:

Whatever he makes of the original rationale for the Iraq War, Huntsman does believe that the presence of 50,000 U.S. troops “makes it rather difficult for Iran to have a direct shot over to Syria.” It’s an irony. With America having knocked Saddam out, Huntsman concludes that, for now, we must now play the disruptive role he had played in the Shia crescent.

Why? When the Iraqi government is publicly siding with Assad, does anyone believe that an American military presence would stop Iraq’s government from facilitating Iranian activities inside Syria? Why should the U.S. provoke a new insurgency by keeping a large number of soldiers in Iraq beyond the current deadline? As it is, Sadr has even threatened to target military trainers. Keeping U.S. forces in Iraq after the end of this year was an awful idea when Pawlenty endorsed it earlier this year, and it remains so now.

America’s unconfirmed ambassador to Syria keeps busy:

The United States’ top envoy in Damascus defied the Syrian government Tuesday by making an unannounced visit to the restive town of Jassem, where he met with members of the opposition movement, State Department officials confirmed.

As gestures go, these visits by Ambassador Ford are probably the right thing to do. Meanwhile, there is still concerted opposition to Ford’s confirmation in the Senate. This doesn’t make very much sense. Opposition to Ford’s appointment last year was misguided, but at least it was consistent with overall hostility to engagement with Syria. The previous policy of engagement is obviously finished, and Ford’s presence in Damascus now represents something quite different. In spite of this, there is still enough resistance to Ford’s appointment that he will never be confirmed. Josh Rogin reported yesterday:

Though Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) reversed himself and now supports keeping Ford in place as ambassador, there are still multiple GOP senators who have no intention of letting Ford’s nomination get through the Senate.

Given these dynamics, Ford’s unauthorized visit to Jassem represents a win-win scenario for the State Department. On the one hand, it bolsters the State Department’s case that Ford is a crucial link to the Syrian revolution. And if he gets thrown out of Syria, State can avoid a messy confirmation fight they are almost sure to lose.

Spencer Ackerman posed some questions to Ford’s opponents:

What principle is possibly at stake here? What interest could possibly trump having Ford in Damascus?

Had hawkish Republicans had their way, Ford would never have gone to Damascus, and the U.S. would have even fewer options in Syria. As it happened, Ford received a recess appointment, which is why his confirmation has come up again in now. Bizarrely, the opponents of confirmation are the ones supposedly most interested in pressuring Assad and wielding U.S. influence, but they seem intent on reducing what little influence the U.S. has inside Syria. Opponents of engagement understandably made Ford’s appointment into a symbol of the policy they rejected, but now it seems that some of them are insisting that his appointment still be viewed as a symbol of that policy after it has been abandoned. Withdrawing Ford now to make a point about a policy that no longer exists seems like the most pointless form of score-settling.