Kevin Sullivan comments on the Michael Cohen article on the non-return of isolationism:

In other words, “Isolationism,” at least in its present context, is a political word having very little to do with any real policy, and once the dust settles on the Republican primary process the Washington foreign policy consensus will reemerge – leaving little time or tolerance for debate on matters abroad.

I agree entirely that the isolationist charge is used for scoring political points, but it is also essential to policing the debate once election season has passed. The charge acquires its political utility at election time partly because of its use in vilifying dissenting views the rest of the time. That was part of my argument earlier this month:

As part of what Andrew Bacevich called the “ideology of national security” in The Limits of Power, the specter of isolationism is useful for “disciplining public opinion and maintaining deference to the executive branch in all matters pertaining to foreign relations.” Because of that, the isolationist label is always inaccurate and misleading, which is just the way that defenders of activist foreign policy want it.

On a related issue, this is why Prof. Bacevich and others refuse to accept the isolationist label and correctly regard it as a dismissive insult.

Where I disagree with Cohen is this reference to a “non-return,” which implies that there was a genuine isolationist policy to which Americans might conceivably return. Cohen insists that realist arguments shouldn’t be labeled isolationist, and he’s right. Contemporary non-interventionists are interested in an even more restrained foreign policy than most realists, but even they don’t subscribe to something that could correctly be described as isolationism. Finally, it’s important to recognize that many of the people attacked as isolationists immediately before and after WWII were also misidentified. Neutrality in foreign wars isn’t isolation from the world.

I’ll cite Chase Madar’s article from TAC‘s January issue once again:

The interwar years were in fact marked by intense American extraversion: cultural, economic, and political. A quarter-million American tourists spent over $300 million traveling Europe in 1929, while Ernest Hemingway, Joseph ine Baker, and T.S. Eliot took their acts abroad. Overseas missionary activity exploded. By 1930, the United States had more foreign direct investment than France, Holland, and Germany combined. Even with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, trade between the U.S. and Latin America tripled in the decade before 1941. The United States, emerging from the Great War as the world’s largest creditor nation, negotiated British, French, and German war debts with the Dawes Plan in 1924 and the Locarno Convention of 1925. This is isolationism?

One of the ironies of this legend is that those interwar senators retrospectively tagged as isolationists—known in their time as “Peace Progressives”—were among the most outward-looking politicians of their era. The Peace Progressives were mostly Western and Midwestern Republicans, most prominent among them Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, William Borah (“The Lion of Idaho”), and Hiram Johnson of California. They successfully rolled back longstanding U.S. military occupations in the Caribbean and Central America, and their efforts arguably averted war with Mexico in the 1920s. Borah took the lead in forging multilateral arms-reduction treaties with Great Britain and Japan.

American isolationism doesn’t exist now, and for the most part it didn’t meaningfully exist then. As Madar notes:

In a splendid article published earlier this year in Foreign Policy Analysis, political scientist Bear F. Braumoeller refutes “The Myth of American Isolation” all over again for a new century, with special attention to the 1930s. Braumoeller helpfully adduces a few example of what real geopolitical isolation looks like: Tokugawa Japan, Cold War Albania, and contemporary North Korea.

Braumoeller also doesn’t accept that the U.S. was aloof from international security politics:

Rather than arguing that America was not economically isolationist in the interwar period—a point with which few scholars now have substantial quarrels—it will demonstrate that America was not isolationist in affairs relating directly to international security in Europe for the bulk of the period. The United States did far more than espouse the pious hope that the pursuit of prosperity would bring an end to war: it used legal, economic, and military instruments in the direct pursuit of specific and ambitious security goals throughout the period between Versailles and Pearl Harbor.

The United States is granting Libyan rebel leaders full diplomatic recognition as the governing authority of Libya, after five months of fighting to oust longtime ruler Moammar Gaddafi, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday.

The decision–announced at a meeting here of 30 Western and Arab nations–paves the way for the rebels to access some of Libya’s frozen U.S. assets, which total more than $30 billion. ~The Washington Post

At least this ends this absurd situation where the U.S. wages war against Libya on behalf of an alternative regime that it can’t bring itself to recognize. It’s worth noting that very little has changed since early June. Back then, the administration was in no rush to recognize the TNC as the Libyan government, and the reasons for non-recognition would appear to be just as true today. As Joshua Keating reported:

Administration officials tell Richter that the council “may not control enough territory or population to qualify as sovereign,” but more to the point, transfering recognition from an established government, no matter how despotic, to a rebel group goes against long-standing U.S. policy.

Very little has changed in terms of the territory or population under the TNC leadership’s control, and whatever control that the authorities have over the territory their forces occupy is often nominal. Long-standing U.S. policy certainly hasn’t changed. The only thing that seems to have changed in the last six weeks is that more governments have chosen to recognize the council. Even so, it’s still true that there is no ” international, or even regional, consensus recognizing the Transitional National Council as the legitimate government of Libya,” to use Keating’s words. Perhaps this is because the council could not function without massive outside support, and it has no business being treated as if it were the Libyan government.

The Post story explains what changed:

For weeks, U.S. officials have stopped short of full diplomatic recognition even as they inched up support for the Libyan rebels’ cause. The main concern was over how capably and inclusively the rebel leaders would govern, said a senior U.S. state department official who was not authorized to speak by name.

The United States decided to change its position after a presentation to the international contact group by Mahmoud Jebril, the foreign representative of the transitional council, who walked through the rebels’ post-Gaddafi plans for governing Libya.

Well, if he made a presentation, that should settle it. The capacity for inclusive governance is already on display in some of those western village mountains.

Dov Zakheim makes several good points in this short piece on Libya, but unfortunately the U.S. will not now “terminate this mindless, costly and counterproductive exercise.” Now that the U.S. recognizes the council as the Libyan government, it is unlikely that the administration is going to want to halt the war. Instead, the new Libyan government is going to become the collective ward of the U.S. and NATO, not least because so few states outside NATO are going to acknowledge it as the government, and our government and our allies are going to be expected to keep propping it up.

Update: Massie describes the war very well:

Libya: an intervention launched on an untenable premise, conducted lethargically, with little regard to interest and little idea of what the end game should look like in even the most favourable circumstances.

Responding to Lee Smith’s latest silly interpretation of Obama’s foreign policy (this time it’s anti-colonialism), Zack Beauchamp writes:

Anti-colonialism doesn’t just mean opposition to the status quo: it means opposition to colonialism.

There is an argument that Smith could have used to push his anti-colonialist reading of Obama’s decisions, but that would have involved treating the U.S. as a neo-colonial power, and that is something Smith would never do. It would also require him to demonstrate that Obama intends to reduce the U.S. role in the region, and there is scant evidence of this. Count Smith’s article as another piece of evidence that “anti-colonialism” has become the foreign policy equivalent of crying socialism in response to anything Obama does. As usual, the truth is much more mundane: Obama is a conventional liberal internationalist abroad, and a center-left corporatist at home.

Let’s remember that this is the same Lee Smith who thought that Obama’s inconsistent, case-by-case response to uprisings in the Near East and North Africa was informed by an appreciation of Pan-Islamism. Smith speculated back in March:

For the purposes of making policy, the many peoples of the world belong to states that are broken down into allies, rivals (friendly and less friendly), and enemies. But this is not how Obama sees the Middle East. Instead, he sees it in terms of an undifferentiated people who need to be convinced that the United States is unbigoted and indeed friendly toward their hopes and dreams.

The problem is that there is no such undifferentiated mass of people. Rather, there are a variety of Muslim sects (e.g., Sunni and Shia), countries (e.g., Iran and Saudi Arabia), and centers of power (e.g., regimes and opposition movements) with a wide array of interests that in many cases cannot be reconciled. Obama approached them all as if Pan-Islamism were alive and well, and not a discredited and failed ideology of half a century ago.

It’s understandable that Smith abandoned this absurd theory in favor of his new absurd theory. The heart of his argument four months ago was that Obama’s policy was incoherent because he pushed Mubarak to give up power, but left Gaddafi alone. Four months later, we can only wish that Obama had been so “incoherent.” The funny thing is that Smith’s new argument makes the error he attributes to Obama: he treats an ideology that flourished a half-century ago as if it were the key to explaining Obama’s policy decisions. This is all the more bizarre given that the continuities between Bush and Obama in foreign policy are many and obvious.

Jim Bovard has reviewed Prof. John Mearsheimer’s Why Leaders Lie for the new issue of TAC. At The National Interest‘s site, Ted Galen Carpenter also had some comments on the new book. As both of them explain, Prof. Mearsheimer argues that political leaders lie to their own people far more often than they lie to one another, and he also argues that strategic lies told in the national interest can sometimes be beneficial. Bovard can’t find many examples of the beneficial strategic lie, and he makes a good case that even when they appear beneficial in the short-term they can lead to significant errors later on.

Bovard helps to explain why many foreign policy deceits go unpunished. He writes:

While some people regard political lies as negligible offenses, official deceits often prove fatal to foreigners.

At the end of the review, he concludes:

There is no reason to expect government to be more honest in the future than it has been in the past. The Obama administration’s lies on Libya are eerily akin to the Bush team’s lies on Iraq and the Clinton administration’s lies on Kosovo. But deceiving the American people should no longer be treated as a victimless crime.

One difficulty in holding a deceitful government accountable for its foreign policy decisions is that the vast majority of the people who suffer because of them are not American citizens. There are cases, most notably in Vietnam, where misleading Congress and the public has led to escalation of foreign wars that have cost tens of thousands of American lives, but on the whole most of the costs are imposed on the people in other countries. The public isn’t entirely indifferent to this, but they usually aren’t going to penalize government officials for it. Of the three wars Bovard lists here, only one became the cause of major political outrage here at home. This was partly because it dragged on for many years when it was supposed to be a short war, but mostly because of the growing number of U.S. casualties. The Iraq war’s costs to the U.S. in terms of killed and wounded were quite high for a so-called “small” war, but the Iraqi civilian population suffered much higher losses and enormous dislocation of population that will have adverse effects on Iraq’s politics and economy for years and decades to come. When the government misleads the public, it has all of the harmful effects Bovard mentions, and it may even cost America dearly at times, but most of the costs are paid by others, and those costs are either invisible or quickly forgotten back home. There might be more public outrage over government deceit if there were a more complete accounting of the consequences of the policies that were enabled by this deceit.

Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate the highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the gallies, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. ~Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

The War of 1812, despite not even having a decent name, is, like, the best war ever. Not a ton of people died, an important principle (American sovereignty) was at stake, and the outcome was good for all concerned. ~Jonathan Rauch

This is a strange understanding of the War of 1812. American neutral shipping rights were theoretically at stake, but a major impetus for the war was the hope of territorial expansion into Canada. The original slogan of the war was “free trade and sailors’ rights,” but the war was actually a disaster for the mercantile and shipping centers of the Northeast, which is one of the reasons why there was such staunch opposition to the war in the north and even agitation for New England secession. The U.S. failed in acquiring any of its objectives, and the peace settlement restored things to the way they had been before the war. We had the good fortune that the British were otherwise occupied fighting France for most of the conflict, and we still suffered some of the worst humiliations in our history. Unlike the Russians, we didn’t even have the consolation that the invasion of our country and burning of our capital helped weaken and defeat the invader later on. While some hawks described it as the second war of independence, American independence was fortunately never in danger. It was a war that the U.S. sought and declared first, and it was one that we managed to survive thanks to the geographical advantages of being a large country that was across an ocean. The outcome was “good” for us only in the sense that the U.S. didn’t lose any of the territory we had before the war. It was the very definition of a pointless, unsuccessful war.

P.S. American casualties were approximately 15–20,000 dead. Most of those deaths were not in combat, but that shouldn’t make them count any less. It was the second-most costly American war against a European power between the War for Independence and WWI.

Update: Alex Massie sums things up pretty well:

The War of 1812, upon which many American myths now seem to depend, was a foolish and futile enterprise from the start, rested on a policy of ignorance and needless aggression, and was founded on the erroneous assumption that Napoleon Bonaparte would prevail in the epic, global struggle of which the War of 1812 was but a minor sideshow. By its end even President Madison had recognised its folly: dispatching a mission to europe in 1814 to sue for peace.

Massie’s assessment of the war is very good. However, I’m not sure that very many American myths depend on the history of this war, which many Americans probably don’t know very well. Even in my AP U.S. History class in high school, our teacher skipped past it on the assumption that it wasn’t terribly important. (It was lucky that I had read From Sea to Shining Sea before I took an AP exam that included a major essay question on the war.) There was a time when the war was important to myth-making and the formation of national identity, but the wars of 1861-65 and 1941-45 have long since surpassed it in terms of creating modern American myths.

Alex Massie yawns at reports that Bachmann’s Wisconsin Synod Lutheran church adheres to the teachings of Martin Luther:

So, in the end, Michele Bachmann used to be a pretty conservative Lutheran. Which means she’s not a Roman Catholic and her church is not likely to be impressed by the Bishop of Rome. Big deal! Next: Red Sox fans disagree with Yankee fans. Amazing!

Theological differences have much more weight than team loyalties in sports, or at least they are supposed to, but Massie is right that there is nothing particularly incredible or strange that a (theologically) conservative Lutheran church takes the same view of the papacy as Luther. What is supposed to surprise us is that there are contemporary Lutherans who believe this, but I’m not sure why. There are hundreds of millions of contemporary Orthodox who don’t acknowledge the authority of the Pope, and the vast majority of them would reject certain teachings of the Catholic Church as false. Obviously, Orthodox reasons for this are very different from Lutheran ones, and that is part of the reason why we are not in communion with one another, but these reasons are why Orthodox and Lutherans are not in communion with Rome.

As I see it, candidates’ beliefs are fair game. If a candidate speaks publicly about her faith and stresses its importance in shaping and defining who she is, as Bachmann does, it is certainly legitimate to inquire into the substance of what she believes. Then it becomes something whose relevance or significance the voters will have to judge. What is a bit curious is that there seems to be a general consensus among journalists that doctrinal teachings of candidates’ churches should be irrelevant and immaterial when it comes to talking about Romney’s religion, and a different standard is being applied to Bachmann. If Bachmann’s church can be described in some meaningful way as “anti-Catholic,” what would be the description applied to Romney’s church?

Green’s article becomes more interesting and relevant when he reports that Bachmann explicitly denied that her church taught anything of the kind. He quotes her answer from a 2006 debate appearance when she was first running for Congress:

Well that’s a false statement that was made, and I spoke with my pastor earlier today about that as well, and he was absolutely appalled that someone would put that out. It’s abhorrent, it’s religious bigotry. I love Catholics, I’m a Christian, and my church does not believe that the Pope is the Anti-Christ, that’s absolutely false.

What does one make of this? Bachmann made a conventional and not remotely conservative argument that this basic theological disagreement is something abhorrent. I wonder if she really believes that, or if this is the answer she felt compelled to give during an election contest. The assumption behind this reaction is that affirming a major theological difference with another confession must imply hatred or contempt for the people who hold different beliefs. There is always the potential for that, because there is always a temptation inherent in fallen human nature to distort the affirmation of truth into the denigration of other people, but that is the exact opposite of the purpose of such affirmations.

The Georgian government is lobbying many European and Asian governments that use the name Gruzia (inherited from the Russians) to refer to the country to change to using Georgia instead. Some Georgians see the exercise as pointless:

Davit Muskhelishvili, a well-known Georgian historian, is among those who argue that “Gruzia” is not a Slavic term. But even if it was, he said, the current flurry of debate was a waste of time and effort.

“I can’t say what kind of sense it might make in political terms, but it’s ridiculous,” he said. “What difference does it make whether Poles call us ‘Georgia’ or ‘Gruzia’?”

———————-

But Davit Zurabishvili, a member of Georgia’s opposition Republican Party, said Georgia’s “Gruzia” initiative was setting a bad example by putting a priority on words, rather than deeds, in shaping the country’s foreign policy.

“It’s the usual thing. Every country is called something different by different countries, according to tradition,” Zurabishvili said. “To place such importance on this and point to it as a regrettable relic of the Soviet past is ridiculous. I strongly suspect that this is a private fixation of [President] Mikheil Saakashvili.”

Personally, I like the classical name of Iberia. When it comes to such things, I don’t have any strong objection if a certain government wants its country called by another name. In this case, the change seems likely to create a lot of headaches and inconvenience for the other countries that have been asked to make this change, which is why several have refused to cooperate. While I can almost understand the reason for it, it is a pointless symbolic protest against Georgia’s own past.

Will Wilkinson says that Michele Bachmann’s inexperience will be her undoing:

I agree Ms Bachmann projects an air of conservative authenticity, but I don’t think she’s poised to build on Mr Huckabee’s rather limited achievements. She lacks Mr Huckabee’s decade-long record of executive experience. I may be forced to eat my sneaker, but I insist experience matters to conservative primary voters.

He is still underestimating how well Bachmann will do in early caucus and primary contests, and I will go so far as to say that she will win more contests than Huckabee did in 2008. The voters for whom experience is important are already voting for Romney or one of the other ex-governors. Bachmann’s task is to rally most of the rest of the party behind her. What Huckabee lacked was funding and support from activists of all stripes. Huckabee had his record of executive experience, and that record (somewhat unfairly) earned him the undying hatred of many economic conservatives and interest groups. Bachmann’s lack of achievements is in some ways a blessing for her, because it is proof that she has never compromised. In today’s GOP, that is very valuable, and she doesn’t have many competitors in the race who can say the same. She begins her candidacy as a much more widely-known politician than Huckabee, and she also has the ability to raise funds that Huckabee could only have imagined.

That said, Wilkinson and I don’t disagree as much on this as it seems. Experience matters to more Republican primary voters than authenticity, ideological purity, or identity politics. It still matters to enough of them to make sure that Romney will almost certainly be the nominee. Bachmann’s candidacy offers dissatisfied conservatives with the opportunity to drag out that process for much longer than would otherwise be the case. The dreadful inevitability of Romney’s nomination seems more certain than ever.