Fiscal conservatives are deficit hawks. They don’t want the federal budget to run a deficit. That’s what fiscal conservative has pretty much always meant.

Fiscal conservatives do not dominate the House Republican caucus. Fiscal conservatives appear to have virtually no influence with House Republicans. ~Jonathan Bernstein

This is true, but then that is what one would expect from the House GOP leadership that we have. The current House GOP leadership is filled entirely with people who endorsed the largest expansion of unfunded liabilities in over a generation The tax deal in December last year wasn’tthat long ago. It was obvious that no one in any position of authority was terribly interested in fiscal conservatism and fiscal responsibility then, and that remains true now.

But by far the greatest threat to Nato’s hopes of achieving a decisive breakthrough in the Libyan campaign is the onset of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins in three weeks’ time. During Ramadan, Muslims are obliged to observe a rigorous fast during the hours of daylight and to spend much of their spare time in prayer. When the feast falls at the height of an Arabian summer, it not uncommon for most countries to come to a complete standstill.

Political concerns over repeating the mistakes of the Iraq war have meant that none of the politicians leading the Libyan campaign is prepared to commit ground troops. As a result, this has meant Nato relying increasingly on Libya’s anti-Gaddafi rebels to complete the task of removing the dictator from power. But Nato officials are now concerned that the rebel offensive will effectively grind to a halt at the end of the month as fasting rebel fighters will be in no position to launch a major offensive. ~Con Coughlin

I had seen earlier reports that some NATO officials were concerned about this, but I am skeptical that this will matter as much as Coughlin claims here. Ramadan may bring the rebel advance grinding to a halt, but it isn’t as if it was going to be very swift otherwise. The Libyan war seems likely to drag on one way or another, but a halt in fighting during Ramadan may prolong it even more. The war on the ground might conceivably pause during August, which does not leave much time for NATO before it reaches its next deadline.

What complicates the situation is the position of the Italian government. Coughlin explains:

Mr Berlusconi’s comments are highly significant, as Nato is relying heavily on Italy’s cooperation to maintain its air operations against Libya. Nato’s operational headquarters is in Naples, while most of the combat missions are flown from air bases in southern Italy. Italian officials have already indicated that they do not want a further 90-day extension of Nato’s deadline for military operations, which is due to expire in late September.

Italy has always been the weakest link right from the beginning. Italy didn’t want to intervene, as Berlusconi has since publicly confirmed, its coalition government has been fragmenting because of the war, and it was very slow in bringing its air force into action once it grudgingly agreed to participate. The war was “handed off” to NATO partly to provide the Italian government cover to allow the use of Italian bases, and that lasts only as long as the war remains under NATO auspices.

Coughlin’s prediction of partition is probably wrong. It seems clear that the main intervening governments aren’t going to accept a settlement short of their regime change goals, and Britain and France in particular have committed too much to the intervention to stop short now. If the war continues after September 27, we can assume that Britain, France, and the U.S. will then press on without the fiction that the war had something to do with the alliance.

Update: The French government isn’t as stubborn as I thought. The Daily Mailreports that France wants to stop the war and negotiate with Gaddafi:

Military action in Libya must end and Colonel Gaddafi be welcomed around the negotiating table, the French sensationally claimed today.

Continual bombing of the country is not working, and diplomacy is the only solution – even if Gaddafi retains limited power – according to French defence minister Gerard Longuet.

In an apparent U-turn in policy, Mr Longuet said Gaddafi could remain in Libya ‘in another room of the palace, with another title.’

Second Update: The French Foreign Ministry has since contradicted Longuet’s statement:

However Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Monday that the NATO-led alliance still needed to keep up its military pressure on Gaddafi’s army and reiterated that Gaddafi’s standing down is a necessary condition for an end to the conflict.

There are persistent and worrisome reports that they might. The Hill newspaper, for instance, claims that Republican budget negotiators have been discussing cutting defense by $600 billion to $700 billion—considerably more than the already indefensible $400 billion in cuts that Obama has said he would like to see over the next decade.

Obama’s proposed cuts are bad enough; as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates implicitly warned before leaving office, such deep reductions would seriously impair the military’s ability to meet its global commitments. Going beyond what Obama has proposed is simply suicidal—on both substantive and political grounds. ~Max Boot

The $400 billion figure is spread out over twelve years. That comes to an average of a little over $33 billion per year. Christopher Preble responded to the same report that has Boot hyperventilating, and he observed that the $700 billion figure “would amount to a bit more than 10 percent less than current projections over the next ten years.”

Preble also noted that the reductions may not be all that they seem:

As always, the devil is in the details. From what baseline? Over what time period? Would the cuts apply only to the base DoD budget, or all national security spending, including the costs of the wars, as well as the budgets for the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs? Most important is timing. If the savings are all backloaded in the out years, they may never materialize. Today’s budgets project spending out five or ten years, and the “savings” really just amount to a new set of projections against that baseline. Plus, these agreements are rarely binding on future congresses; a different cast of characters will be responsible for passing DoD appropriations bills in 2018 or 2020.

The Bowles-Simpson plan came up with $100 billion in spending cuts by 2015 and barely scratched the surface. Domenici and Rivlin’s proposal envisioned a spending freeze:

For the Pentagon, the panel wants to freeze spending at fiscal 2011 levels, which it says would save $1.1 trillion through 2020.

While their proposal was more ambitious in reducing military spending than Bowles-Simpson, Domenici and Rivlin claimed that this would not impair any of the missions that Boot rattled off:

The United States still would be the only nation able to patrol the world’s oceans, deploy hundreds of thousands of ground forces to any point on the globe, and dominate the global airspace with superior combat fighters, long-range bombers, and unmanned aircraft.

We should debate the extent of the U.S. role in the world, and many redundant and unnecessary missions and deployments should be brought to an end, but it is not the case that the level of spending cuts under consideration demands the kind of drastic changes that Boot claims. That doesn’t mean that these changes would be the disaster he predicts, and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider them. What Boot’s list of missions makes clear is how few of them have anything to do with the actual defense of the United States. These missions may or may not be wise or desirable in some other way, but they aren’t meaningfully contributing to national defense.

The United States gains a great ally with the birth of the Republic of Southern Sudan. ~John Avlon

This is obviously not true. South Sudan is many things, but it is not an ally of the United States. This is a word that gets thrown around all too easily, and sometimes it seems as if Americans bestow the title of ally on countries that the person using the word happens to like. To call South Sudan an ally suggests that we have a special obligation to provide for its security, and we do not. If it were an ally, that would hardly be something to celebrate. That would make it one more liability that the U.S. doesn’t need and cannot afford. As Avlon’s account of some of the country’s problems tells us, South Sudan begins its existence as an independent state with numerous major security problems related to conflicts along its border, and he is not telling the whole story.

Eric Reeves reviews the conflict brewing over Abyei and Khartoum’s campaign against the Nuba in South Kordofan, and then explains the third security threat to the new country:

In addition to direct military threats from Khartoum, South Sudan faces armed opposition from within. There are some six or seven significant renegade militia groups, the most dangerous of them headed by George Athor (a former SPLA general) and Peter Gadet (who changed sides constantly during and after Sudan’s long civil war). These two men and their ruthless forces pose perhaps the greatest security threat to the South, and they are backed by Khartoum. (The regime also supported these sorts of militias in Darfur.) These forces have one purpose: to destabilize and demoralize the civilian population in South Sudan.

This L.A. Times report lists some of the many difficulties South Sudan faces:

The country, roughly the size of France, has the highest incidence of maternal death in the world, one of the lowest rates of elementary school enrollment, and profound poverty, with more than 90% of the population surviving on less than a dollar a day and nearly 1 in 5 people chronically hungry, according to the United Nations; only about a third of the population has access to safe drinking water, and only a fourth are literate.

South Sudan also suffers from significant corruption, and its political leadership has a reputation for repressive tactics. According to Maggie Fick, a journalist based in the new state’s capital of Juba, the army is a significant drain on the country’s resources:

There are currently some 140,000 troops in the army, all of whom are drawing a salary from the impoverished state, but few of whom are fit to fight.

This is not the picture of a “great ally” or “strong friend.” It is the description of a state that will be plagued by almost every sort of political and economic problem that overly-militarized, poor, conflict-ridden states have. If the U.S. is to lend support or aid to South Sudan, we must understand that we are doing so because South Sudan desperately needs help, and not because the U.S. will be getting anything out of the bargain.

Earlier this week, David Bosco interviewed Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia. Moyn presents a revisionist history of the modern human rights movement, and he argues that the movement had its real origins in the relatively recent past in the 1970s. Moyn writes in the first chapter:

The classic case begins with the Stoic thinkers of Greek and Roman philosophy and proceeds through medieval natural law and early modern natural rights, culminating in the Atlantic revolutions of America and France, with their Declaration of Independence in 1776 and Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. These are usable pasts: the construction of precursors after the fact. The worst consequence of the myth of deep roots they provide is that they distract from the real conditions for the historical developments they claim to explain. If human rights are treated as inborn, or long in preparation, people will not confront the true reasons they have become so powerful today and examine whether those reasons are still persuasive. (p. 12)

The error that R.W. Southern called precursorism is always a temptation for historians. This is partly because it offers a way to get around the messiness of contingency, and it creates the illusion that the most significant ideas and actions of a given period were those that seem to conform to our expectations of what matters in the present. It is a way of claiming and appropriating the past for ourselves, and it is also a way of projecting our preoccupations into the past. It is also a means of defending something quite new as if it were also grounded in ancient tradition. Precursorism keeps us from understanding what Moyn calls the “real conditions” because it does not investigate deeply enough into how these developments happened. It is intriguing that Moyn likens historians of the human rights movement to church historians, because what he seems to be doing in his book is very similar to the efforts of modern historians to reconstruct doctrinal development without taking the arguments of heresiologists as the final word.

Moyn describes the modern human rights movement as an alternative, minimalist utopianism that emerged in the 1970s to replace earlier utopian schemes that were regarded as failures. He stresses one important feature of this minimalism in the interview:

Human rights came to take over our idealism in part as common denominators, but also because they were less ambitious, as well as less risky — in particular, in not courting violence in the name of liberation.

He goes on to say that this minimalism has waned as time has passed, and now the human rights movement faces the problem of adopting some of the ambitions of its defeated competitors:

Now, however, people are willing to set aside some of the very minimalism that allowed human rights to survive as its rivals failed. For example, the new doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” that is a form of human rights idealism is willing to countenance violence, albeit as a last-ditch option, as in the Libyan campaign today.

It is useful to revisit David Rieff’s article on R2P to consider whether the use of force is, in fact, a last-ditch option in practice. According to Rieff, military action was supposed to be a last resort:

Where, at least as Evans sees it (Kouchner would almost certainly disagree), humanitarian intervention was exclusively coercive, and most often militarized, the R2P is different because its fundamental emphasis is on preventive action, preferably as early as possible, and on using every possible nonmilitary means. Resorting to force is a last recourse.

The dilemma that R2P faces is that it has not replaced the “exclusively coercive” humanitarian interventionism, but simply revived it under a different name. The resort to military action is the thing in the R2P doctrine that is most likely to be used:

What Evans has never been willing to entertain is that whatever outcome he and the other architects of R2P might have wished for, its military aspect remains the most usable element of the doctrine because it is the only one that is both coherent and practicable.

The experience of the modern era is that armed doctrines eventually discredit themselves. However, the use of force in humanitarian interventions by itself isn’t going to cause people to turn against the human rights movement as a whole, and Moyn is probably right that the claims of this utopianism are still minimalist enough that it won’t suffer the same catastrophic collapse as earlier ideologies. It does make me wonder how long it will be before the backlash from human rights activists starts as it becomes increasingly clear that governments are exploiting R2P’s rhetoric to justify military interventions without meeting its criteria or adhering to any of its other requirements.

“It is kind of funny when there is such a dramatic reaction in the market,” Betsey Stevenson, chief economist at the Department of Labor, said in an interview with On Wall Street.

She explained that over the past 35 years, the monthly jobs figures have been routinely revised and adjusted after the initial release and end up being, “on average,” around 115,000 jobs higher or lower than originally reported.

Ryan Sweet, a senior economist with Moody’s Analytics, conceded that being off in his forecast of the new-jobs estimate by 72,000 is “a humbling experience,” but he agreed that it is not actually a significant difference. “Basically the BLS has a confidence factor of 100,000 jobs,” he said, “so the actual number of jobs created could be 100,000 higher or lower than what they initially report [bold mine-DL].”

Why the dramatic investor reaction then?

“It’s often overlooked by investors and analysts that the number can be off by that much either way,” Sweet said.

But what about the ADP jobs report for June? It was released — as usual — a day ahead of the BLS number and it reported 157,000 new jobs for the month.

Joel Prakken, an economist with Macro Advisors, which runs the numbers for ADP, said that his survey doesn’t include public employment — which the BLS does — and that sector, according to the BLS, lost 39,000 jobs last month. Take the public jobs out of the BLS survey and you get 57,000 new private sector jobs, putting the ADP number also within the BLS (and the ADP) margin of error. ~On Wall Street

Yesterday’s jobs report has generated a great deal of hand-wringing, and it certainly was an unexpectedly low number of reported new jobs in June, but by itself it doesn’t tell us that much. Nate Silver has more on this.

There has been a great deal of moaning from hawks recently about the administration’s refusal of Taiwan’s request to sell their government F-16s. Robert Haddick explains why the fixation on the F-16s is misguided:

Both the Bush and Obama administrations have demurred on Taiwan’s F-16 request and for good reason. As the Pentagon’s annual report on Chinese military power explains, China’s ballistic and cruise missile force, which the report terms “most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile program in the world,” is more than capable of crushing Taiwan’s airfields, rendering Taiwan’s fixed-wing air power nearly useless. Anticipating this, Taiwan has plans to fly its fighters from highways. But this is no way to generate enough sorties to confront a high-intensity attack from China; fighter aircraft need maintenance, fuel, ordnance, and much other support, all of which are efficiently located at modern airbases, not by the side of a highway.

What Taiwan needs instead is to mimic mainland China’s missile program. Mobile launchers, which unlike airfields could evade detection and targeting, could support both battlefield and strategic missiles that could hold targets on the mainland at risk. Such a program could do a better job of restoring a military balance across the Taiwan Strait than would fixed-wing aircraft operating from vulnerable bases.

The Postreport to which Haddick links includes another argument against the sale:

Asia expert Robert Sutter notes that despite Taiwan’s clamoring for fighter jets, the island has not given top priority to shoring up its defense capabilities.

“Their main concern has been its dealings with China, particularly as it becomes more economically tied to China,” said Sutter, an international affairs professor at George Washington University. “At some point, if they’re not doing much in their own defense, you have to ask: Are they free-riding it or maybe cheap-riding it? They aren’t usually punished by China in the aftermath of these arms sales. It’s the U.S. that suffers diplomatically.”

As Taiwan and the mainland become more closely integrated economically, and as long as Taiwanese politics keeps a more accommodating KMT government in power, there is even less incentive for the U.S. to sell Taiwan jets that won’t do it much good at the risk of stoking tensions with Beijing.

NASA may need to be rebuilt from the ground up, but surrendering the dream of manned exploration of space is certain to bring only a further sense that under this president, America is eager only to embrace mediocrity and a poverty of human spirit. ~Michael Auslin

As it happens, I watched the final shuttle launch this morning. It was a curious experience, as it marked the end of a program that had existed for almost my entire lifetime, but this does not trouble me in the least. Manned space flight has a certain romantic appeal, but it is a massively expensive exercise that serves very little practical purpose. I don’t deny that the shuttle program had some successes, especially when it came to repairing the Hubble telescope, but they were remarkably few. Had it not been for Cold War rivalry with the USSR, it is doubtful that there would have been similar significant investment in the space program, and there is even less reason for such spending today. As Auslin’s post suggests, promotion of the space program remains bound up with nostalgia for an earlier era and the space program’s function as a symbol of national power. This treats the aberration of Cold War-level support as if it were normal and desirable. It isn’t, and it’s long past time we started to realize that.

Update: Naturally, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio thinks that manned space flight is a national mission:

But the truth is it has always been our destiny. In the 19th century, it became our manifest destiny to explore and push westward until the American land stretched from sea to shining sea. And once we reached as far west as we could, Americans had no choice but to gaze up to the sky and settle on the stars as our next frontier.

We had no choice! Rubio skips the part where the U.S. went across the sea and annexed new territories against the will of their inhabitants. Presumably, we cannot rest until we have expanded our reach to Alpha Centauri. Fortunately, Rubio’s concern for the space program has nothing to do with “spending money to pay back political supporters.”

The U.S. Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, reportedly traveled to Hama to investigate the conditions there and to make some show of U.S. support for anti-regime protesters. This would be the same ambassador that Republican interventionistsinsisted be recalled after the crackdown began, and it is the same ambassador whose confirmation was blocked last year by Republican opposition. As it was, like several other ambassadors blocked in the Senate, Ford went to Damascus thanks to a December recess appointment.

If critics of the administration’s decision to send an ambassador to Syria had had their way, Ford would not be there now. According to these critics, sending an ambassador to Syria “rewarded” Assad, and they tend to regard all attempts at engagement as endorsements of regime behavior, which is why recalling Ford was the first and sometimes only thing they could think to recommend this spring. I am unsure whether the ambassador’s visit was a good idea, but it’s worth remembering that the people who keep insisting that the U.S. demonstrate support for Syrian protesters have been at the forefront of trying to stop the U.S. from having an ambassador in the country.

Jonathan Tobin comments on Ford’s visit:

The Syrian government reacted angrily, accusing the envoys of meeting with “saboteurs” and inciting protests. This will cause some to worry their association with Americans will taint Syrian dissidents, and the protests will now be seen as inspired by the West. But such arguments are absurd and are merely excuses for doing nothing while people are being slaughtered by a tyrant.

There are those, including not a few members of the Obama administration, who tend to see America’s role in the world as essentially malevolent. They believe any self-respecting freedom movement must disassociate itself from the West and the United States in particular if it wishes to succeed.

It is possible that association with the U.S. will taint Syrian dissidents in the eyes of many other Syrians. This is not absurd, but an acknowledgment that anti-American sentiment is very significant in Syria. The desirability and utility of U.S. support depend heavily on public opinion in a given country. According to Gallup’s survey back in 2009, 64% of Syrians expressed an unfavorable view of the United States, and 71% disapproved of American leadership. The favorability and approval numbers from 2010 were roughly the same. To the extent that such shows of U.S. support can be used to make dissidents appear to be agents of outside forces, this is potentially quite damaging to the dissidents’ credibility. This has nothing to do with Americans’ attributing malevolence to the U.S. and everything to do with the perception of the U.S. in Syria. It may be that the small minority of Syrians that views the U.S. favorably and approves of U.S. leadership overlaps to a large degree with the Syrians protesting against the regime, so at least the protesters might welcome U.S. backing, but for the most part that is just a guess and isn’t based on anything.

There is no point in trying to lend help to a protest movement if that would be used effectively to discredit it in the eyes of its countrymen. It isn’t good enough to say that the regime will make up stories to discredit the opposition no matter what the U.S. does. If the U.S. is going to insert itself into a political crisis in another country, there has to be a reasonable expectation that it would do some good. It is appropriate to be skeptical of calls to show support for Syrian protesters when many of the same people made the same calls two years ago in response to Iranian protests. The best evidence is that Western expressions of sympathy were not helpful and were not welcomed by most of the protesters. Of course, we are mostly arguing over whether or not the U.S. should engage in mostly symbolic gestures on behalf of protesters. The terms of the debate here in the U.S. reveal just how little our government can do in response to these protests and the brutal crackdown against them.

Update: Not that it will matter to the people demanding that the administration “do something,” but Rasmussen found back in May that 65% of Americans say that the U.S. should leave the situation alone. There is virtually no public support for more direct U.S. involvement in Syria’s upheaval (9%), and this is true regardless of party, ideology, income, and education.