Coming on the heels of $400 billion already cut from defense by the administration in its first two years [bold mine-DL], the Pentagon is looking at the prospect of trying to maintain a defense capability second to none, with global responsibilities and new threats on the horizon (Iran, China), shorn of $1.3 trillion over the next decade it expected to have just three years ago. ~Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly

Via Scoblete

The brazenness of Schmitt and Donnelly’s claim in this quote is impressive. There have been militarybudget increases in real terms every year for the last fifteen years. There have been no reductions in the overall amount spent. The statement that the Pentagon has been “shorn” of an additional trillion dollars is completely misleading. Schmitt and Donnelly are resorting to the familiar, tedious tactic of treating relatively smaller increases in spending as if they were actual cuts. This has been one of the favorite hawkish arguments for the last two years, and it’s no more credible now than it was when they started.

Alex Massie wrote a good rebuttal to Erica Grieder’s original post on “isolationism” and military spending last week, and this is part of her response. First, I have to repeat that the military spending reductions in the debt deal that will probably never materialize do not in any way represent a “return of isolationism,” so that’s just wrong.

On the larger question of whether the American public or the Republican Party rank-and-file would be willing to accept a less activist and interventionist foreign policy, I would say that there has been a significant shift in the public mood away from interventionist policies, but it is not all that large a shift. There are more elected Republicans willing to oppose military intervention than there have been in over a decade, and there are more presidential candidates calling for reductions in military spending and a faster conclusion to the war in Afghanistan than we’ve seen in other elections, but the party will still end up nominating one of the standard-issue hawks.

Grieder tries to find support for her argument by looking at the 2012 presidential field. She says this about Rick Perry:

Rick Perry has met with some neocons this summer, but in the preceding ten years he has rarely bothered to have a view on foreign policy, an indication of his disinterest in the subject.

If Perry has not been interested in the subject, this is probably because for the past decade he has been acting as governor. Governors have little reason to spend their time thinking or speaking on foreign policy issues. Perry had ruled out a presidential campaign in the foreseeable future, and he changed his mind only when a large opening appeared in the 2012 field. Perry’s previous interest in foreign policy or lack thereof is not nearly as important as his positioning now that he seems ready to launch a presidential campaign. Indeed, I would say that his lack of interest is probably matched by a lack of specific knowledge, and that is what will make it even easier for his advisers to mold his views to match theirs. Compared to then-Gov. Bush, Perry is already positioning himself as a much more aggressive interventionist than Bush did, and his previous endorsement of Giuliani’s doomed presidential bid suggests that Perry sympathizes with Giuliani on these questions.

Grieder concludes:

It’s possible that the eventual Republican nominee will be less interventionist than Mr Obama, if only for cyclical reasons.

Given the current state of the field, that doesn’t seem possible. If we take for granted that neither Jon Huntsman nor Ron Paul is going to be the nominee, that really just leaves Bachmann as the potentially “less interventionist” nominee, but on every other issue besides the Libyan war she is as hawkish and interventionist as any candidate in the field. Regardless, being “less interventionist” than Obama doesn’t count for much. Obama’s hyper-activity in bombing other countries makes that comparison almost meaningless. If the Republican nominee proved to be “less interventionist” than Obama by some measure, that just indicates how often Obama has opted to use the military abroad.

Update: Joshua Keating reviews Perry’s recent foreign policy statements and concludes that he is positioning himself as a “conventional Republican defense hawk.”

Even when the straw poll and the caucuses haven’t predicted the nominee, they have played a large role in shaping the outcome in recent years. ~Jim Antle

Antle is right that the Ames straw poll has sometimes had a significant role in determining the shape of past nomination contests, but George Will wouldn’t dispute that point. The straw poll has a disproportionate effect on the field of candidates, and Will finds the entire exercise to be absurd. Will’s complaint is that the straw poll shouldn’t have the influence that it does. He seems especially annoyed that the straw poll will probably doom Pawlenty’s campaign:

If Paul and Bachmann, in either order, capture the two top spots, Pawlenty’s campaign may be mortally wounded. If another candidate propelled by an intense faction — former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, a favorite of evangelicals who in 2008 were 60 percent of Republican caucus participants — also finishes ahead of Pawlenty, the Ames circus will have destroyed the only one among the six candidates who bought space — and therefore are permitted to speak — at the event who has a realistic chance to be nominated and defeat Barack Obama.

When the “circus” produces acceptably boring results as it did in 1999 and 2007, when Bush and Romney respectively won, there are not many complaints about its circus-like nature. In those cases, it was treated as a test of campaign organization and enthusiasm for the candidate. This year, Pawlenty reportedly has the best campaign organization in Iowa, but he has so far been notoriously bad at inspiring enthusiasm. It remains to be seen if his organization can get very many people to support the candidate.

Pawlenty is the last of Will’s“plausible” candidates, and it is no good for Will’s assumptions about the presidential election when the last candidate still deemed “plausible” proves to be a flop. This should alert us to some serious problems with the criteria Will and many others have been using to assess the “plausibility” of various Republican candidates. Pawlenty was treated as a “plausible” candidate from the moment he began preparing for a run, and as soon as he formed his exploratory committee he was given default major candidate status. He never earned this status, and has mostly managed to lose it after just a few months. If the Ames straw poll hastens the end of his campaign, it will do him and the rest of us a great favor by putting an end to the charade. After all, if Pawlenty can barely get out of the gates without faltering, how “realistic” was it to expect that he had a chance at the nomination?

What is stranger still is the argument Will uses against the curious GOP straw poll practice:

In 2011, a purchased, or at least rented, small portion of the nominating electorate of the state that ranks 30th in population can profoundly influence the coming political choices of voters in the 49 other states.

Will’s argument could just as easily be made against the Iowa caucuses, in which a fairly small number of activists will even more profoundly influence the political choices of the rest of us. Iowa is an unrepresentative, small state, but it has a hugely disproportionate influence over the nomination process for both parties. Its influence is not usually as decisive in the GOP contest as South Carolina has been in recent cycles, but it is significant all the same as part of the winnowing process. The Ames straw poll simply adds another hurdle for candidates to clear before they can be considered competitive in Iowa. What seems to bother Will about the poll this time is that the winnowing process may not yield what he considers an acceptable result.

It has been three years since the start of the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. The anniversary of the war’s beginning is a good occasion to reflect on how far U.S.-Russians relations fell during the Bush years, and how much they have been repaired in the last two and a half years. At present, inveterate opponents of the “reset” policy are doing their best to undermine this improved relationship. The “reset” was designed in no small part to undo much of the damage caused by Bush administration policy and the aftermath of the 2008 war, and in many respects it has been such an obvious success that its critics are usually reduced to whining about how it has failed to solve things it was never intended to fix. Russia still has a culture of “legal nihilism,” it is a one-party, illiberal authoritarian state that suppresses and criminalizes dissent, and real political opposition is not permitted. The “reset” has not changed any of this, but it was never supposed to, and there is no way that U.S. policy towards Russia can change this.

The “reset” has thawed relations between the two governments, and improved U.S.-Russian relations have contributed to the warming relations between Russia and several of its neighbors. It has taken a relationship that was at its post-Cold War nadir in late 2008 to one of its higher points in the last twenty years, and this has resulted in better Russian cooperation than the U.S. has enjoyed in more than a decade. It is common to dismiss Russian cooperation on Iran and Afghanistan as something that their government would have provided anyway, as The Washington Post does again today. The reality is that Russian help in supplying the war in Afghanistan has increased significantly. Nikolas Gvosdev explained last month:

Initially conceived as an alternative transit route for nonlethal supplies, the NDN has grown in importance over the past two years and now accounts for more than half of all U.S. military transit to Afghanistan. That is in part due to the unreliability of supply routes from the Pakistani port of Karachi, which are plagued by security concerns as well as temporary closures by the government in Islamabad. But it is also due to the Russian government’s decision to allow the transfer of military equipment as well as food and fuel across its territory. For the past year, Moscow has permitted U.S. planes to transit Russian airspace carrying troops and weaponry, with up to 4,500 flights authorized annually.

Civilian nuclear cooperation and arms control agreements have also been important products of “reset” policy. Most critics of the policy ignore the latter or take it as proof that the policy is misguided because they are reflexively opposed to continued arms reduction, negotiating with Russia, or both. More recently, the U.S. and Russia negotiated an agreement on adoption rules that will allow resumed adoptions from Russia by Americans, and there has been some progress on liberalizing travel requirements with the ultimate goal of visa-free travel between the two countries. Considering how poisoned the relationship had become by late 2008, it is remarkable how much improvement there has been.

When thinking about the “reset” policy, it is important to remember why it had become necessary and what the alternative to it was. This brings us back to the 2008 war. The 2008 war had several causes, but an important one was the push to bring Georgia into NATO. Washington’s displays of support for Georgia between 2003 and 2008 encouraged Saakashvili to believe that Georgian membership was only a matter of time, and this impression was further reinforced at the Bucharest summit in early 2008 despite significant European opposition to bringing Georgia into the alliance. Georgia’s evolution into a U.S. client state over those five years gave Saakashvili additional reasons to believe that the U.S. would be there to support him in confrontations with Russia, and it was this belief that led to his escalation of the conflict in South Ossetia that triggered massive Russian retaliation. Moscow had been hoping to goad Saakashvili into rash action, and he obliged. The disastrous results are there for all to see.

U.S. policy towards Russia and its “near abroad” in the last decade increased tensions in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, and at one point those tensions spilled over into war. The folly of pursuing NATO expansion was compounded by the embrace of anti-Russian nationalist governments on Russia’s borders. All of this encouraged Georgian confrontation with Russia, and needlessly antagonized Russia on many issues. Recognition of Kosovo’s independence over Russian objections was just one more provocation that later provided Russia with the pretext for its recognition of the separatist republics. Despite all the pro-Georgian rhetoric one hears from American critics of the “reset” (who were also supporters of the failed Bush-era Russia policy), one of the lasting legacies of Bush-era Russia policy was the harm done to Georgia. During and after the war, Georgia suffered greatly, ethnic Georgians were forcibly expelled from the separatist republics, and its chance of “reintegrating” those territories was most likely lost forever.

In all of this, U.S. interests were not being served. Indeed, they were nowhere to be found. The “reset” was a modest effort to repair a relationship with Russia that the previous administration had needlessly wrecked. Russian and American interests do not always converge, but when they do the “reset” has laid the foundations for a constructive relationship that is largely free of the old cycle of mistrust and recrimination. Whenever one hears overwrought criticism of the “reset,” just remember that the critic is really arguing that U.S.-Russian relations should sink back to the level where they were in Bush’s second term.

The governments that make up the Arab League earned the world’s respect in March by condemning Gaddafi’s threats to slaughter Libyan civilians wholesale. They have brought shame on themselves by watching Assad’s savage campaign to exterminate his political opponents in Syria in silence until Sunday. Even then, they stopped short of clearly condemning Assad in a statement that expressed concern and distress over Syria’s violence. The March resolution turns out to have been more personal — aimed at Gaddafi, not bloody repression — than it was principled. ~Jim Hoagland

I’m sure we are all shocked by the suggestion that Arab League governments were more interested in payback against a hated adversary than they were in the protection of Libyan rebels. Who would have thought that their call for Western intervention was an example of cynical opportunism? Obviously, the governments that were helping Bahrain’s government crush protesters were not objecting to Gaddafi’s actions on principle. They were objecting to them because they were his actions, and because of them they saw an opening to exact retribution. Inexplicably, the U.S. and its allies agreed to carry out their vendetta for them.

It is tedious to have to keep saying this, but there were no “threats to slaughter Libyan civilians wholesale.” Gaddafi was specifically threatening those taking up arms against his government, and he had earlier offered amnesty to those armed rebels willing to put down their arms. As Doug Bandow commented in April:

Moreover, he was using brutal military force to restore regime control, not to commit mass murder or genocide. Nasty, but hardly unusual. Casualties climbed because the rebellion spread.

I don’t expect supporters of the Libyan intervention to agree, but seeing such false claims repeated so matter-of-factly on a regular basis is obnoxious.

Hoagland continues:

This retreat from international humanitarian standards greatly hampers all other international efforts to pressure Damascus. Moral indignation by outsiders, to say nothing of military action like that undertaken by NATO in Libya, best succeeds when there is local political cover and cooperation.

It is a mistake to call the Arab League’s reverting to form a “retreat” from these standards, as this implies that there had been some sort of advance toward those standards earlier. The Arab League provided some local political cover for attacking Libya, but except for Qatar and one or two others there has been negligible support from the governments that requested intervention. The Libyan war was something of a fluke. Had it never happened, the Arab League would not want to put significant pressure on Syria, but as the war drags on it provides a very useful excuse for all governments to react more cautiously.

Thomas Lippman writes that the U.S.-Bahrain ten-year defense agreement was supposed to be renewed this year, but the extension of the agreement had already happened (via Andrew):

One might think this would have been an important agenda item when President Obama met with Bahrain’s crown prince, Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, in June. But nothing was said.

That, it turns out, is because President George W. Bush and Bahrain’s regime in 2002 secretly added five years to the defense pact’s term, extending its expiration date to October 2016. There have been no renewal negotiations because none have been needed.

The terms of the extension have never been made public. The agreement’s existence is classified. Not even Congressional Research Service analysts, who write detailed reports for Congress and often have access to classified material, were aware. A comprehensive CRS report on the situation last month said flatly that the defense pact would be up for renewal in October. In effect, White House secrecy on this issue put the research service in the position of reporting misleading information to Congress.

Leaving aside the question of whether this agreement should have been renewed had it come due this year, this information ought to trouble us. First of all, there was no need for this extension to remain secret. It’s not as if Bahrain’s close security relationship with the U.S. is something that has been hidden, so why keep this information from the public and Congress? Sometimes secrecy may be essential to the making of foreign policy, but in this case there seems to be no reason for it all.

The hope of a clean sweep of democratic revolution toppling authoritarian regimes is receding, as an increasing number of Egyptian protesters wonder if they weren’t hapless pawns in the soft coup that the Supreme Council of the Armed Force (SCAF) carried out against President Hosni Mubarak. The past six months show that regime change doesn’t mean revolution. ~Dilip Hiro

What happened in Egypt in February was not regime change. Perhaps it is because many in the West have unduly personalized policies toward authoritarian governments that we often associate policies of regime change with removing individual dictators from power. For that reason, some confuse Mubarak’s fall from power with a change in regime, but the Egyptian military regime never went anywhere, and it is has shown few signs that it has any intention to change meaningfully from within. To be blunt, it was pretty obvious six months ago that Egypt had experienced a coup rather than a revolution, but because the coup produced the immediate result the protesters wanted everyone seemed willing to pretend that it was better not to call it a coup. What Hiro is calling regime change is just the deposition of a ruler and his family. The “foundations that supported the previous regime” are what have made up the military regime all along, and we cannot accurately refer to a change of regime so long as the Egyptian military continues to hold most or all of the political power in Egypt.

The Globe and Mailprofiles Mohammed Busidra, the man who is positioning himself to become the main power-broker in post-Gaddafi Libya:

While secular and military figures have fallen into factional fighting, Mr. Busidra, 53, has brought together Libya’s disparate moderate Islamist leaders into the country’s only united political force. He has written a constitution that they have agreed upon, and is organizing Libya’s mosques into a political machine. This has made him, in the view of many people here, the figure who will wield the most political power, and likely control the country’s leadership, in the event of the dictator’s demise.

“We have to prepare our country politically now, to prevent any political vacuum from occurring when the criminal Gadhafi is gone,” Mr. Busidra said in the first interview he has given since early March. “And I can assure you, when we Islamists establish a party, which will be on a national basis, I think we will win comfortably.”

This assessment is shared, sometimes with alarm, by many of his opponents.

“The Islamist opposition are much better organized and financed than us because they are focused entirely on politics,” says Mohammed Bujamaya, founder of the Liberal Gathering, one of several secularist proto-parties struggling for recognition in Benghazi. “We are tied up with the crisis, while they have their figures outside of Benghazi and sometimes out of the country, scheming.”

Busidra claims to distance himself and his group from Salafists and rejects incorporating shari’a into Libya’s future constitution, and he has a large network of allies:

Mr. Busidra’s network is formidable: It includes the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood; the February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade, which is the largest fighting force among the rebel armies and is led by the influential cleric Ismail Al-Sallabi; the even more popular cleric, Mr. Sallabi’s Doha-based brother Sheikh Ali Sallabi; and a half-dozen other imams and leaders well known in Libya, including more moderate former members of the long-banned Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Mr. Busidra’s circle is opposed to the extreme Islam of al-Qaeda and other radical groups.

His group was among the earliest supporters of the protests that began in February:

But Mr. Busidra’s group has a number of advantages over any political competition. For one thing, their names – especially Mr. Busidra’s – are virtually synonymous with the February 17 protests whose brutal repression by Mr. Gadhafi’s forces marked the birth of the Libyan revolution. Mr. Busidra, already a well-known preacher, gained popularity in February when he issued a fatwa making it a sin not to join the protests.

The afterword of Mark Mazower’s No Enchanted Palace includes some valuable comments on the “responsibility to protect” doctrine and humanitarian interventionism:

Humanitarianism likes to see itself in terms of pure virtue, a kind of antipolitical gesure of compassionate brotherhood. But it is generally the same states that once, as imperial powers, intervened across the globe in the name of freedom that now lead the charge against the human rights abuses and the “organized hypocrisy” of the sovereignty claimed by many new and shaky states. Forgetful of their colonial past, Western states see in their liberalism only the benign face of a universal aspiration. Yet the states they target are generally those that have emerged recently from out of the rubble of those empires, and the critique of “failed states,” couched in the comforting humanitarian language of our times, can sound uncomfortably like the old civilizational arrogance of Jam Smuts’s generation. In fact, the old questions that haunted the minority rights regime of the League of Nations have not gone away. Who will decide when to intervene and where the right to protect shall be applied? Will it really be universal? Will it be extended beyond Africa–to the Gaza strip for example, or Colombia, or northeastern India? A world of sovereign states may lead to political leaders committing crimes against their own people, but intervention is a political and military act with numerous political drawbacks too, as Afghanistan readily demonstrates. (p. 200-201)

Mazower wrote an essay for World Affairs Journal on the “rise and fall of humanitarianism” back in 2010 that elaborated on these comments, and I discussed the essay and reactions to it here, here and here.