Such “prudence,” “restraint,” and “patience”—the administration is fond of these words—can be commendable when a situation is messy or murky. But neither applies in Syria. This is an easy call: We have a chance to eliminate one of America’s worst enemies in the region—the linchpin of Iran’s alliances and terrorist apparatus. We have a chance to traumatize Tehran: The world will look a lot more precarious to supreme leader Ali Khamenei and a lot more hopeful to the millions behind Iran’s pro-democracy Green Movement if Bashar al-Assad goes down. The importance of Syria to Iranian foreign policy and internal politics cannot be overstated. ~Reuel Marc Gerecht

Gerecht certainly tries his best to overstate it. One thing that seems clear is that Assad’s fall is not going to have much effect on the hopes of the Green movement. How would that work exactly? Are we supposed to believe that the opposition will gain in popularity and strength because Iran suffers a strategic setback? That seems implausible. It also doesn’t follow that Assad’s fall will mean that Syria ceases to be in Iran’s orbit. An unstable, chaotic Syria would be vulnerable to continued Iranian influence in any case. The Syrian military obviously has a vested interest in preserving the regime if it can, and it also has built up significant ties with its counterpart in Iran. That isn’t going to go away anytime soon. That’s the heart of the problem: no one has any idea what might follow if the current leadership is removed. There could be nothing murkier than the Syrian situation.

Gerecht proposes Turkish intervention to create a “buffer zone” in northern Syria. Turkey could do this, but Gerecht doesn’t explain why its government would. There is no explanation of how Washington could entice an Erdogan government that it has repeatedly dismissed and ignored for years on every significant regional issue to take military action against its neighbor. Turkey opposed intervening in Libya, and wanted no part of it, but its view and its interests were ignored once again. Gerecht does cite growing popular outrage and feelings of sectarian solidarity in Turkey as motivations for Turkish action, but these are hardly good reasons. The argument is notable for one other thing. This must be the first time that someone writing for The Weekly Standard has insisted that Erdogan make policy decisions for the sake of assuaging Turkish public opinion. For all the warnings of neo-Ottomanism in Erdogan’s Turkey coming from the right these days, it is quite strange to hear calls for armed Turkish intervention in a former Ottoman territory.

If Turkey were to intervene, it would damage a relationship with Iran that has been a major part of the “zero problems” foreign policy it has pursued over the last several years. Meir Javedanfar believes that Turkey can afford to ignore Iranian complaints and pressure Assad even more, but this assumes that Erdogan is willing to jeopardize another relationship along with the one with Assad that he has already abandoned. In fact, Turkey has nothing to gain from any of this, and the U.S. has done everything it could in the last year and a half to give Erdogan no reason to take such a risk on our behalf.

All over America, newspapers and magazines are reporting on Tim Pawlenty’s criticism of his rival for the GOP nomination, Michele Bachmann. “Her record of accomplishment in Congress is non-existent,” he said Sunday on Meet the Press. I suppose a campaign barb is newsworthy. But the bigger story here is the fact that Bachmann, who is rising in the Iowa polls, does in fact have a resume that’s absurdly thin for someone seeking the White House. Ponder its shortcomings: she has no foreign policy experience, no executive experience, has never sponsored or co-sponsored a bill that became law, has never chaired a committee or subcommittee, and cannot even claim notable success outside the public sector like Mitt Romney.

Why this doesn’t bother her supporters? ~Conor Friedersdorf

The answer is a mixture of identity politics and the validation of one’s worldview that comes from the success of an ostensibly like-minded politician. The question of “Can she competently serve as President of the United States?” is a secondary consideration for many of her supporters, and it is not that important for some supporters of the other candidates as well. Bachmann the candidate is perceived by her supporters and by many Republicans more broadly as “one of us” in two ways: she is “one of us” in terms of her religious affiliation and political assumptions, and she thinks like “one of us” in the public positions she takes. Comparing her with then-Sen. Obama is probably more accurate than the comparisons with Palin and Bush, and even Obama did not compile a reliably ideological voting record once he reached the national level. Palin and Bush were/are not ideologically aligned with the conservatives who supported them, but they overcame this through identity politics and their indulgence of pseudo-populism. Bachmann can appeal to conservatives on the basis of biography and religious belief, and she can also credibly say that she has been a conservative activist and legislator. For many conservative voters, it is so rare to have a presidential candidate who fits that description and appears to be somewhat competitive. Rejecting someone like Bachmann because she isn’t qualified for the position is much harder to do than it might seem at first.

Bachmann emphasizes her voting record because this is pretty much all that she has as far as political experience is concerned, but it is also proof that she votes the way that many conservative voters would want their representative to vote. According to a certain way of thinking, especially when one’s party is in the minority, “taking a stand” on legislation matters as much as, or perhaps more than, successfully shepherding legislation through Congress. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bachmann turns Pawlenty’s accomplishment attack around on him as Obama turned the experience criticism around on Clinton and McCain. Obama insisted that experience wasn’t what mattered; it was judgment that mattered, and both Clinton and McCain had judged poorly on Iraq. Bachmann might start saying, “It isn’t enough to get things done if they’re the wrong things or if they’re not done well,” and then she can rehash Pawlenty’s record of quick-fix budgets and talk up Minnesota’s current budget problems. Bachmann’s list of things that she has “fought” also draws attention to all of the things that Pawlenty has tried to disavow since he started organizing his campaign: she voted against the TARP and cap-and-trade, and Pawlenty conspicuously favored both at one time.

There’s no question that Bachmann is not remotely qualified to be President, but despite this her candidacy has been flourishing and Pawlenty’s has so far been a flop. Pawlenty’s problem is that he is attempting to make the case for “competence, not ideology,” but the role of the competent managerial candidate has already been filled. Indeed, it was filled long before Pawlenty started preparing to run. Republicans already have their Dukakis (and he’s even from Massachusetts), and many Republican voters would rather have a choice besides Romney in the nomination fight rather than a dull imitation. Bachmann isn’t qualified for the position she’s seeking, but she’s eminently qualified to serve as the conservative foil to Romney, which is the role that she now has.

Update: Weigel expands on the Obama/Bachmann comparison.

A world without America in this sense—the beacon, the inspiration, the speaker of truth—would be a world deprived of hopefulness. And so we must be our best selves again not only for us but for the world. ~Peggy Noonan

Really? The world would be deprived of hopefulness without this? One wonders how the world ever got along without us. By all means, let’s “be our best selves again,” but couldn’t we be our best selves for the sake of being true to who we are as a people? If they wish, other nations can look to us and find inspiration, or perhaps they could look to themselves and find inspiration from their own successes. Americans should speak the truth because that is the moral and honorable thing to do. If others are encouraged by that, that’s good, but we really have to give up this pretense to universal importance.

C.J. Chivers has a balanced, detailed report on Libyan rebel activities in the western mountains. He recounts the looting and arson in the recently-seized village of Qawalish:

By Sunday evening, the rebel license to loot had run almost its full course, and any such distinctions were fast slipping away. All of the shops in the town had been ransacked, several more homes were burned, and the town’s gas station, in fine condition when Qawalish fell, had been vandalized to the point of being dismantled. In building after building, furniture was flipped over, dishes and mirrors shattered, and everything torn apart. Except for a few rebels roaming the streets in cars and trucks, the town was deserted — a shattered, emptied ghost town decorated with broken glass.

Chivers goes on to explain why he believes the looting and arson are significant:

What was obvious and beyond dispute by Sunday was only this: Whatever their motivation, the behavior of rebels in Qawalish, who have been supported by the NATO military campaign against Colonel Qaddafi, was at odds with the NATO mandate to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure, and at odds with rebel pledges to free and protect the Libyan population.

Moreover, the leadership of the Free Libyan Forces, for all the statements otherwise, appeared to lack the ability or inclination to prevent these crimes.

The depressing thing about Chivers’ report is that this sort of behavior from an ill-disciplined insurgent force advancing into likely hostile territory is completely unsurprising and entirely to be expected.

Gregory Feifer has an extensive feature article on German-Russian relations and the Nord Stream project at Radio Free Europe. It goes into great detail about the strong ties that Germany and Russia have built up over the last decade, but gives a very fair account of German dissenting views against the “too-special relationship” between the countries and controversy over the Nord Stream pipeline. One thing I found most interesting is the changing relationship between Germany, Russia, and the central and eastern European countries between them:

Link praised Germany’s domestically embattled foreign minister — FDP leader Guido Westerwelle, who lost the party leadership since we spoke — for seeking consensus among smaller EU members Schroeder’s government all but ignored.

That development reflects dramatic improvement in ties with the Czech Republic, Poland, and other former Soviet Bloc countries that have traditionally been among Russia’s most vocal critics, partly because trade between Germany and those countries is booming, dwarfing business with Russia.

Germany sells more to the Czech Republic alone than to Russia, while imports from the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary amount to 40 billion euros a year, compared to only 15 billion euros from Russia, including its energy.

Ties between Germany’s Central European neighbors and Russia are also slowly improving, helping shift the postcommunist dynamic of relations in Central Europe. Even attitudes toward the Nord Stream pipeline, once a lightning rod in the split between “Old” and “New” Europe, have changed.

Another curious detail is that criticism of the the German-Russian relationship in the article comes almost entirely from the Green left. I find this curious partly because it was their former party leader Joschka Fischer who served as foreign minister during Schroeder’s Ostpolitik phase, so it isn’t as if the Greens weren’t very recently implicated in building the close relationship. It is also rather striking that it is German Greens who seem most offended by the relationship that their successful anti-nuclear activism has made that much more indispensable to Germany.

David Bosco doesn’t like Walt’s “war of whim” definition:

The deeper problem with Walt’s standard for intervention is that it all but prohibits any rapid military response to an evolving crisis–strategic or humanitarian. Of course everyone would like as much time as possible to consider the pros and cons of an intervention. But policymakers watching events unfold in Libya faced a brutal choice: intervene quickly or acquiesce to the defeat of Libya’s rebels. Walt is skeptical that a massacre was imminent. He clearly doubts that intervention had an effect on the course of the Arab spring. Fair enough. But policymakers faced a difficult choice under the intense pressure of events. Characterizing their decision as whimsical is beyond glib.

Walt’s definition might be better-served if he emphasized the capriciousness, which is to say the arbitrariness, of certain interventions. As I argued several times in the spring, the Libyan war was by pretty much every standard an arbitrary intervention. I suppose that doesn’t distinguish it very much from a war of choice, but it does guard against Bosco’s complaint a little better. The Libyan intervention was undoubtedly rushed and ill-considered because the final decision didn’t come until virtually the last possible moment. The Libyan civil war didn’t really qualify as an exceptional emergency situation, but it was treated as if it were one. This was done impulsively.

Having spent weeks laying out the arguments why the U.S. didn’t really have any business in Libya, the administration turned around “on a dime” (Josh Rogin’s words) after having (correctly!) resisted appeals to intervene. The administration spent three and a half weeks acting as if it didn’t need to make any choice at all in the hopes that the rebels would manage on their own, and in the space of three days capitulated to the interventionist argument. There was actually ample time for weighing pros and cons, presenting the interventionist case to the public and Congress, and organizing an international coalition to support the action at the U.N. The first two never really happened, but that didn’t stop the administration from committing the U.S. to war anyway. That the administration did so in an illegal fashion as far as U.S. law is concerned supports the charge that it is a war of caprice.

Last month, I noticed an odd article by G. Pascal Zachary on Obama and Africa, and today its more misguided sequel has arrived. Zachary calls for more political fragmentation in Africa:

The birth of South Sudan is a momentous invitation not to despair over the travails that the people of this new landlocked and impoverished nation surely will experience, but to celebrate another step toward closing what Pierre Englebert, a professor of African politics at Claremont College, has called “Africa’s secessionist deficit.”

This is a truly terrible idea. The states that emerged from the colonial period are undoubtedly artificial in many respects, their borders arbitrary, and their national identities often have limited meaning for many of the inhabitants. It does not follow that splitting them up into newer, no less artificial states will alleviate any of the practical problems these populations face. It might be a different story if this process of fragmentation could be achieved through peaceful devolution and grants of autonomy, but in practice separatist movements either resort to violence or must retaliate against violence. The government in any state that has colonial-era or post-colonial independence borders is not going to accept the loss of territory, resources, and population that separatist movements represent, and there are enough governments around the world that face their own separatist problems that they have no interest in supporting them elsewhere. An added danger of such separatism is that it will likely be drawn along ethnic and/or religious lines, and those identities will then become sharply politicized. That in turn will produce the potential for large-scale crimes and atrocities against the civilian populations of the separatist regions.

It should be noted that Zachary is enthusing over South Sudanese independence because it is a “a new nation, without precedent, either in colonial times or traditional pre-colonial times.” Not being grounded in any earlier polity or tradition is hardly encouraging for the development of the country. Yes, some countries can develop and succeed without this (e.g., Singapore), but they are very few and the circumstances of their success are highly unusual. There are not many examples of successful separatist movements in post-independence African history, and one that did does not provide evidence for Zachary’s enthusiastic support for more separatism. Since Eritrean independence, Eritrea has sunk into authoritarianism and has waged major, fruitless wars with Ethiopia. South Sudan is very much at risk of suffering the same fate. Splitting up these larger states merely internationalizes what were previously internal conflicts, and that can potentially be more disruptive to regional stability than a civil war inside a single state.

Decentralization can be very beneficial if it involves establishing genuine local control by the population over its own resources and makes government more directly accountable to the population. It can also devolve into the creation of criminal statelets ruled by corruption and brute force. It can also lead to the emergence of an international dependency that stagnates because of its lack of resources. Finally, such states can be treated as either the battleground of more powerful neighbors, or they can be reduced to little more than satellites of a more powerful neighbor.

Zachary says later:

In the global conversation about Africa, there are few greater taboos than to cheer for political fragmentation and the rise of new nations.

I don’t know that it is exactly a taboo (witness all the Western gushing over South Sudanese independence), but if it is it would seem to be a pretty well-grounded one. There may be a particular case here or there where establishing a new, formally independent nation-state makes more sense than keeping a population in the limbo of being formally part of a state that has long since ceased to function. There might be a case to be made for the formal independence of Somaliland, which has been doing many of the right things to thrive and succeed. That shouldn’t be turned into a general invitation to separatism across the continent.

Zachary reminds us that the Kosovo precedent will keep coming back to haunt us for a long time:

Did not the independence of tiny Kosovo receive the full measure of support from the very Western nations who worry that Africa might someday fracture into a hundred nations or more?

Yes, and this was a horrible mistake on the part of the governments that recognized Kosovo’s independence. The deed has been done, but there’s no reason to replicate this error elsewhere, especially not when we’ve seen the sort of government that Kosovo has now.

What we should remember about the South Sudanese example is that South Sudanese independence was the result of a process that all parties agreed was the best way to resolve the pervasive conflict between Khartoum and the south. Just because it proved to be a useful means of (temporary?) conflict resolution in Sudan does not mean that it ought to become a model for political change throughout Africa. In other cases of protracted civil war, partition may end up being the least bad option, but it isn’t something to be encouraged or cheered as something obviously desirable in itself.

Via Socblete, Stephen Walt proposes a name for a new category of wars, the wars of whim:

It’s not that the leaders who start these wars can’t come up with reasons for what they are doing. Human beings are boundlessly creative, and a powerful state can always devise a rationale for using force. And proponents may even believe it. But the dictionary defines whim as a “sudden or capricious idea, a fancy.” A “war of whim” is just that: a war that great powers enter without careful preparation or forethought, without a public debate on its merits or justification, and without thinking through the consequences if one’s initial assumptions and hopes are not borne out. Wars of whim aren’t likely to bankrupt a nation by themselves, or even lead to major strategic reversals. But they are yet another distraction, at a time when world leaders ought to focusing laser-like on a very small number of Very Big Issues (like the economy).

One of the things that makes wars of whim particularly easy to start is the limited immediate costs involved. As foolish and misguided as the Libyan war is, it has fortunately imposed very few direct costs on the intervening governments and their countries. The costs of prolonged conflict and suffering that the intervention has imposed on Libya are considerable, but these don’t directly affect the U.S. or its allies. Obviously, on the terms of its own ideological justification, this is what makes the war that much more disgraceful, but it helps explain why there are so few genuine political consequences for any of the leaders responsible for said disgrace. The same desire to stay out of Libya’s civil war guarantees that a war that inflicts harm only on Libyans will not bother the folks back home. Indeed, had it not been for the egregiously illegal manner in which Obama has committed the U.S. to this war, opposition in Congress on the substance of the policy would likely be much weaker. Public support for the Libyan war has always been exceptionally weak, but there is relatively little strong opposition to the war in the media or in public opinion. This may be because there are fewer glaring mistakes that would generate strong opposition.

The Libyan war is a reckless intervention, and it has been a classic example of how not to take military action, but incompetence in waging the Libyan war doesn’t seem to produce the same dissatisfaction that incompetent management in Iraq did, and this is because incompetence in Iraq led to American and allied casualties. As long as a war can remain “casualty-free” for the intervening governments, they are free to under-resource or mismanage it to their hearts’ content. That said, the Libyan war has gone better for the U.S. and NATO in certain respects than the war twelve years ago. Yes, the Libyan war is longer than Kosovo, it is worsening the humanitarian situation it was supposed to alleviate, and it seems to have almost been designed to drag on by committing insufficient resources to a vastly more ambitious mission. On the other hand, the U.S. and NATO have had no aircraft shot down, nor have there been quite as many egregious blunders as NATO made in 1999 when civilian trains and the Chinese embassy were bombed. Because NATO is not targeting civilian infrastructure, this war is in a few respects less outrageous than the one that involved bombed-out wreckage of bridges clogging up the Danube. Instead of the embarrassment of having a stealth fighter shot down, NATO has so far only lost an unmanned drone. Consequently, the Libyan war has faded into the background for the most part. Unfortunately, that means that the public’s understanding of what has been happening in Libya is minimal, and the supporters of the war will be able to spin the outcome in the most flattering way possible. That makes it more likely that there will be more such wars of whim in the future.

Lyle Goldstein doubts the wisdom of U.S. policy vis-a-vis China in the South China Sea:

Washington’s focus on “freedom of navigation,” which has inexplicably become the main pillar of current U.S. policy in the region, is actually rather absurd. China, the world’s largest maritime trading nation by almost any measure, is very unlikely to threaten navigational freedoms — its own economy is almost wholly reliant on those very freedoms. The claim that China’s opposition to regular U.S. military surveillance activities in the South China Sea threatens “freedom of navigation” is likewise disingenuous and represents an unfortunate tendency to reach for the clever sound bite. In fact, such U.S. surveillance activities all along China’s coasts are excessive to the point of seriously disrupting the bilateral relationship and should thus be decreased, especially if linked to concrete progress on Chinese military transparency.

The alleged Chinese threat to ASEAN states, moreover, turns out to be more hype than fact. Much has been said about China’s new nuclear submarine base on Hainan Island, but the surprise is that up to now Beijing has had only one nuclear submarine base (Qingdao) — quite paltry when compared with the four operated by the U.S. Navy in the Pacific area. Similarly, the basing of a ballistic missile submarine and even China’s first aircraft carrier at Hainan would more likely represent weakness than strength. After all, alternative basing in north China simply means these high-value assets would be closer and hence more vulnerable to the impressive striking power of both the Japanese and U.S. fleets that are based primarily in Northeast Asia.

It is not difficult to imagine how U.S. support for the rival claimants against China could encourage conflict. If China’s neighbors believe that the U.S. will come to their aid in the event of an incident, they are more likely to pursue a confrontational policy towards China. Goldstein later cites the example of the U.S. non-response to the Georgian-Russian war as evidence that the U.S. will not actually jeopardize its relationship with a major power for a country of marginal significance, but the more relevant lesson to take from U.S. policy towards Georgia is that it was U.S. support and the Georgian expectation of full backing that created the conditions for the Georgian escalation in the summer of 2008. Georgia paid the price for the confrontational policy previously endorsed by Washington. The same could happen to one of China’s Southeast Asian neighbors, albeit probably on a smaller scale. As in Georgia, U.S. security interests here are minimal. Goldstein states:

The brutal truth, however, is that Southeast Asia matters not a whit in the global balance of power.

For that reason, Goldstein makes a recommendation for U.S. policy:

The main principle guiding U.S. policy regarding the South China Sea has been and should remain nonintervention. Resource disputes are inherently messy and will not likely be decided by grand proclamations or multilateral summitry. Rather, progress will be a combination of backroom diplomacy backed by the occasional show of force by one or more of the claimants. In fact, Beijing’s record of conflict resolution over the last 30 years is rather encouraging: China has not resorted to a major use of force since 1979.

It is this last point that many people tend to overlook. When Aaron Friedberg was warning against the potential for Chinese aggressive action that was built into their political system, he cited two examples of Chinese surprise attack, both of which occurred under Mao’s rule. Friedberg referred to this as proof that the Chinese leadership had a “peculiar penchant for deception and surprise attacks.” It’s possible that the current Chinese leadership might regard these episodes as examples to follow, but this is still very strained. It’s as if one were to discuss how to relate to the Soviet Union in the 1980s as if Stalin were still in power.

What is the source of U.S.-Chinese tensions in this region? As Patrick Cronin has explained, U.S. surveillance activities in this area clash with China’s interpretation of its territorial rights under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea:

Similarly, China and the United States have fundamentally different interpretations of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). One major difference is over whether and which type of military activities are permitted within the 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of a nation. China’s national interests and growing confidence lead to an expansive view of its EEZ and a narrow view of which military activities are permissible for a foreign nation to undertake within an EEZ. Such activities must be peaceful, and Chinese nationalists don’t consider intelligence gathering even by non-warships to be peaceful. The United States, on the other hand, not only contends that such information gathering is entirely within international law, but also that the United States has an obligation to periodically test the premise in order to maintain what it considers the global public good of freedom of the seas.

It is hard to conclude that the “freedom of navigation” argument is much more than a political cover for continuing intelligence-gathering activities in waters that China considers as its own. That still strikes me as a recipe for an international incident, and one that doesn’t seem to serve any discernible American interest. This brings to mind something that Clyde Prestowitz wrote a little while ago:

I am suggesting that we resist the knee jerk temptation to maintain absolute hegemony in the Pacific and engage in an arms race with China.

To avoid this, Goldstein has a suggestion:

Active U.S. cooperation with China in Southeast Asia, for example in the fight against piracy and terrorism — which constitute genuine threats to the vital sea lanes — could serve to build up trust in the security relationship that is sorely lacking at present. Such cooperation would also serve to reassure regional states that do not wish to see their region become the new cockpit of great-power rivalry.

The example of the “reset” with Russia may be a model for this, as improved U.S.-Russian ties have reduced regional tensions and created the opportunity for eastern European states to thaw relations with Russia.