Andrew Nathan discussed Henry Kissinger’s On China and Aaron Friedberg’s A Contest for Supremacy in a review article for Foreign Affairs. Nathan argues that Kissinger and Friedberg both exaggerate Chinese power to make the case for their respective calls for accommodation and confrontation, and says that Chinese power is not as great as many suppose:

By focusing on intentions, Friedberg, like Kissinger, leaves out any serious accounting of China’s capability to achieve the goals that various writers propose. Such an audit would show that China is bogged down both internally and in Asia generally. At home, it devotes enormous resources, including military ones, to maintaining control over the two-fifths of its territory that comprise Xinjiang and greater Tibet, to keeping civil order throughout the densely populated and socially unstable Han heartland, and to deterring Taiwan’s independence. Around its borders, it is surrounded chiefly by two kinds of countries: unstable ones where almost any conceivable change will make life more difficult for Chinese strategists (such as Myanmar, North Korea, and the weak states of Central Asia) and strong ones that are likely to get stronger in the future and compete with China (such as India, Japan, Russia, and Vietnam). And everywhere on its periphery, on land and at sea, China faces the powerful presence of the United States. The U.S. Pacific Command remains the most muscular of the U.S. military’s six regional combatant commands, after the Central Command (which is managing two ongoing wars), and it continues to adjust its strategies as China’s military modernizes.

All of this seems right, which is one more blow to the Friedberg-citing Paul Ryan‘s warnings about the possibility of Chinese hegemony.

Nathan points to some of the flaws in Friedberg’s argument:

Friedberg is also imprecise. His title, A Contest for Supremacy, means one thing; part of his subtitle, the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, means another — and neither idea is vindicated by the body of the book. He is on firmer ground when he writes that “if China’s power continues to grow, and if it continues to be ruled by a one-party authoritarian regime, its relations with the United States are going to become increasingly tense and competitive.” But friction is not conflict.

And all this assumes that China’s rise will continue unabated. Friedberg reasonably enough makes this assumption for the purposes of argument. But it is unlikely to prove correct in the long run because China’s economic and political model faces so many vulnerabilities. To add to the worries of Chinese leaders, as Friedberg points out, there are U.S. intentions: “stripped of diplomatic niceties, the ultimate aim of the American strategy is to hasten a revolution, albeit a peaceful one, that will sweep away China’s one-party authoritarian state.” This helps explain why Chinese leaders act more like people under siege than like people on an expansionist warpath.

Nathan claims that there is no struggle for mastery or contest for supremacy in the offing:

Even if China does stay on course, it cannot hope for anything that can reasonably be called supremacy, or even regional mastery, unless U.S. power radically declines. Absent that development, it is implausible that, as Friedberg predicts, “the nations of Asia will choose eventually to follow the lead of a rising China, ‘bandwagoning’ with it . . . rather than trying to balance against it.” Instead, the more China rises, the more most of China’s neighbors will want to balance with the United States, not against it.

Friedberg and Nathan largely agree on policy recommendations and on pressing China regarding human rights. It is the latter that is the real point of contention between Friedberg and those inclined to Kissinger’s view. Nathan critiques Kissinger on human rights advocacy:

Speaking of the immediate post-Tiananmen period, Kissinger says that “the American advocates of human rights insisted on values they considered universal” and that such universalism “challenges the element of nuance by which foreign policy is generally obliged to operate.” He continues: “If adoption of American principles of governance is made the central condition for progress in all other areas of the relationship, deadlock is inevitable.” These statements combine three fallacies: that the universality of international human rights is a matter of opinion rather than international law, that human rights equals American principles of governance, and that promoting human rights means holding hostage progress in all other areas.

The universality of human rights may be enshrined in international law, but that doesn’t contradict the argument that insisting on such universality is going to be blunt rather than nuanced. It is still likely to provoke resistance. Human rights may not equal American principles of governance, but the judgment that deadlock will result still seems reasonable. That is entirely consistent with Kissinger’s understanding of Chinese diplomacy as Nathan has just described it earlier in the review:

Whereas Americans believe that agreements can be reached in one sector while disagreements are expressed in another, Chinese prefer to characterize the whole atmosphere as warm or cold, friendly or tense, creating an incentive for the other side to put disagreements on the back burner. Whereas Americans are troubled by deadlocks, Chinese know how to leverage them to keep pressure on the other side. American diplomacy is transactional; Chinese diplomacy, psychological.

Nathan also sees the advantage for the U.S. in keeping human rights front and center:

Friedberg’s counterargument is persuasive. Showing softness on core values will reinforce the view of many Chinese that the United States is in decline, thus encouraging China to miscalculate U.S. resolve [bold mine-DL]. As Friedberg writes, “Soft-pedaling talk of freedom will not reassure China’s leaders as much as it will embolden them.”

Embolden them to do what? If U.S. power in the region is as structurally sound as Nathan insists elsewhere in the review, how would China get the impression that the U.S. is “in decline”? What is it that the U.S. has resolved to do that would be put in doubt by “showing softness”? Let’s remember that “showing softness” would mean not deliberately provoking the other side by hectoring them over their domestic affairs.

Nathan concludes:

It is no wonder that Chinese statecraft aims to establish the cultural relativity of human rights and to pose talk of human rights as the enemy of friendship. After all, the failure to respect human rights is a glaring weakness of Chinese power both at home and abroad, whereas promoting human rights has been among the United States’ most successful maneuvers on the wei qi board of world politics [bold mine-DL]. What is surprising is that the United States’ master strategist wants to play this part of the game by Beijing’s rules. Would it not make more sense to emulate Chinese strategy than to yield to it? Emphasizing the principled centrality of the human rights idea to American ideology and keeping the issue active in bilateral relations even though it cannot be solved would seem to be — along with exercising the United States’ strengths in other fields — a good way to set the boundaries within which a rising Chinese power can operate without threatening U.S. interests.

It is debatable just how successful the maneuver have been for the U.S., and it is even less clear how China’s horrible human rights record is actually a weakness for it abroad. If “keeping the issue active in bilateral relations” has no prospect of solving the issue, it promises instead to make it that much more of a permanent irritant. This may set boundaries of a sort for China, but it will also severely limit what the U.S. can expect to achieve in other areas of bilateral cooperation.

When pressed to give examples of “decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal” to which the administration and its party are supposedly devoted, here were the examples that Pawlenty could give during his Q&A session yesterday (questions begin at around minute 27): 1) Obama’s lack of rhetorical support for the Green movement*; 2) Obama’s decision to withdraw some of the soldiers he sent to Afghanistan earlier than Petraeus recommended; 3) Obama’s decision to send an ambassador to Damascus, and his reluctance to criticize Assad’s crackdown. That’s the best he could do. On the first and third charges regarding criticism of other regimes, Pawlenty is faulting Obama for being insufficiently rhetorically confrontational, whereas he would have shown “moral clarity” by being tougher rhetorically. In other words, these are largely complaints about sending or failing to send messages publicly.

It makes no sense to say that sending an ambassador and resuming relations with another state is an example of “decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal.” As far as American “leadership” is concerned, re-establishing full diplomatic relations with a state is either a neutral move or an example of wielding U.S. influence. It may or may not be a good decision to resume relations with a given state at a particular time, but it has absolutely nothing to do with these three things. One of the oddest rhetorical tricks that hawks use is their claim that advocacy for greater diplomatic engagement with former pariah states is proof of a desire to manage declining power and withdrawal from the world. They seem unable to grasp that engaging in diplomacy is an exercise of power, or that diplomacy is one instrument among many for projecting power. It is a kind of action. It isn’t a refusal to act. In the same breath that they damn skeptics for “isolationism,” they mock them for their international engagement. Clearly, they are confused people.

On the question of Obama’s decision on troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, Pawlenty might seem to be on firmer ground, since he is at least referring to a withdrawal of some soldiers from overseas. In fact, what he is complaining about here is not an embrace of “decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal” as such, but Obama’s decision to overrule the judgment of a particular general and his insistence on setting an earlier deadline for that withdrawal that Pawlenty and others consider to be too early and motivated by domestic politics**. The issue here isn’t whether the decision that Obama made on troop levels and timetables was right or not, but that Pawlenty is trying to use it support a much broader critique of Obama’s foreign policy that simply doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Pawlenty has identified things he considers to be mistakes, and then cobbles them together to claim that they represent something that they don’t. Most of these things aren’t obviously mistakes, nor is it clear that Pawlenty’s “moral clarity” and deference to Petraeus would produce more desirable outcomes.

* I have addressed why this is a ridiculous complaint here.

** The Iraq “surge” decision and the temporary nature of the “surge” were both partly motivated by domestic politics, and it is wrong to believe that domestic political factors don’t have some influence on all such decisions. Damning withdrawal announcements as politically expedient is a roundabout way of acknowledging that the war in question is very unpopular and there is no public consensus behind it any longer.

Update: Alex Massie has more on Pawlenty’s speech.

Greg Scoblete follows up on his previous postonideology and U.S.-China rivalry:

I agree, although according to the Friedberg article we both cited, the manner in which China has pursued (and to some extent defined) its interests in the South China Sea is an expression of its ideology. I’m not sure about this – partly because I’m not intimately familiar with pre-Communist Chinese history and strategic policy, and partly because this same argument was trotted out about the Soviet Union and Russia and hasn’t held up all that well. (Even a “democratic” Russia under Yeltsin complained vociferously about NATO expansion in the 1990s and attempted to exert influence over her neighbors – it was just too economically weak and internally disordered to be effective.)

Bottom line: I think that between China’s actions and Washington’s ideological commitments, there is ample cause to believe that a Cold War-style standoff is imminent, if not already underway.

If such a standoff is imminent or underway, it could be avoided or stopped. Beijing’s policy is an expression of the Chinese government’s understanding of China as the leading East Asian nation, but this is not connected to regime type. At one point, Friedberg seems to acknowledge as much:

It is a nation with a long and proud past as the leading center of East Asian civilization and a more recent and less glorious experience of domination and humiliation at the hands of foreign invaders. As a number of historians have recently pointed out, China is not so much “rising” as it is returning to the position of regional preeminence that it once held and which its leaders and many of its people still regard as natural and appropriate.

Greg’s comparison with the USSR is a good one. The importance of communist ideology as the principal driving force in Soviet foreign policy was always vastly overestimated, and consequently there was a mistaken expectation that a post-Soviet Russian foreign policy, especially under an ostensibly democratic government, would be dramatically different. When Russia became more assertive in the last ten years, many Westerners didn’t know how to understand it except to label it neo-Soviet or something else equally silly, when it was the same pursuit of traditional Russian foreign policy along its borders that Russia had pursued long before the Bolsheviks. A more pluralist and liberal democratic Russia would not be very different from today’s authoritarian Russia in how it relates to the “near abroad.”

However, Friedberg remains convinced that the different types of regime and ideology are important factors in creating greater tensions than would otherwise exist. On the American side, he notes:

In fact, because ideology inclines the United States to be more suspicious and hostile toward China than it would be for strategic reasons alone, it also tends to reinforce Washington’s willingness to help other democracies that feel threatened by Chinese power, even if this is not what a pure realpolitik calculation of its interests might seem to demand.

Friedberg then make much bolder claims later on:

It may well be that any rising power in Beijing’s geopolitical position would seek substantial influence in its own immediate neighborhood. It may also be true that, in light of its history, and regardless of how it is ruled, China will be especially concerned with asserting itself and being acknowledged by its neighbors as the first among equals. But it is the character of the nation’s domestic political system that will ultimately be decisive in determining precisely how it defines its external objectives and how it goes about pursuing them.

And again:

A strong liberal-democratic China would certainly seek a leading role in its region and perhaps an effective veto over developments that it saw as inimical to its interests. But it would also be less fearful of internal instability, less threatened by the presence of democratic neighbors, and less prone to seek validation at home through the domination and subordination of others.

I have no idea why Friedberg believes the last sentence. A liberal democratic China, and especially a strong liberal democratic China, would perceive its neighbors as traditional enemies or clients. They would not be seen as sources of ideological contamination in terms of dissenting political ideas, but perhaps instead seen as targets or scapegoats. Chinese democratic nationalists would be no less interested in projecting power than their counterparts in other new democracies. A liberal democratic China might be free of certain kinds of internal instability, but especially in its early phase it would be no less prone to domestic unrest, violence, and protest. Its early political stability might be much worse. A democratic government can foment a crisis to distract attention from its domestic failings just as well as an authoritarian one. Democratic governments may resort to foreign adventurism not because they believe their system needs validation, but because they are inspired by their political principles to expand, to “liberate” others, and to intervene against China’s remaining authoritarian neighbors in support of opposition movements. Once it can no longer be portrayed as a repressive authoritarian menace, China may be less constrained in its dealings with neighbors. Friedberg grants as much later in his article:

Beijing has sought at times to stir up patriotic sentiment, but, fearful that anger at foreigners could all too easily be turned against the party, the regime has also gone to great lengths to keep popular passions in check. A democratically elected government might be far less inhibited.

Friedberg simply has far too much confidence in the pacifying effects of liberal democratic institutions, and he appears to have too little confidence that the U.S. could come to live with an authoritarian China as “the dominant power in East Asia.” One thing Friedberg does not address anywhere in his article is why the U.S. should be engaged in a struggle for mastery in Asia in the first place.

If Chinese pursuit of regional preeminence is not in itself an impediment to a stable, cooperative relationship with the U.S., the nature of the Chinese regime and the would-be ideological struggle ought to be irrelevant. A non-authoritarian Chinese government would define and pursue Chinese interests in essentially the same way. Ideology is creating problems for the U.S. that America doesn’t need to have, and it is generating tensions with China that are unnecessary. On the question of what Chinese ideology is and how it affects Chinese policy, Andrew Nathan’s response to Friedberg is worth citing again. Nathan writes:

Democratic rulers in Beijing would still want to preserve control over Tibet and Xinjiang and assert Chinese authority over Taiwan because these territories have fundamental strategic importance for the defense of China. A democratic leadership would also want to press its claims to valuable strategic and economic assets in the East China and South China Seas; build up its navy so that it can participate in the defense of the sea-lanes that are crucial to the country’s prosperity; project influence in crucial neighboring regions like Central Asia, Korea and Southeast Asia; maintain the military capability to deter attacks; exercise influence in the far-flung territories where it acquires resources and sells goods; and in general, pursue much the same national-security agenda as the authoritarian regime follows today. Indeed, as Friedberg points out, a democratic China may be in some respects even a little harder to deal with than the current regime because of its responsiveness to public opinion, which is likely to be nationalistic.

Democratization doesn’t eliminate conflicts of interest between nations, and it doesn’t redefine fundamental national interests. There is not much reason to expect easier or more stable relations with another state once it has become a democracy. We should also know from experience that the “open and politically meaningful debate and real competition over national goals and the allocation of national resources” that Friedberg mentions as one of the virtues of a democratic system is not as influential on the shaping of a democratic state’s foreign policy as he suggests.

Friedberg also wrote:

Aspiring leaders and opinion makers preoccupied with prestige, honor, power and score settling will have to compete with others who emphasize the virtues of international stability, cooperation, reconciliation and the promotion of social welfare.

We know who wins such contests in a strongly nationalist political climate, and it isn’t the latter.

While I’m still beating up on Pawlenty, let me point you to Daniel Trombly’s very thorough refutation of Pawlenty’s dumb answer to a question yesterday about what might follow the fall of Assad. As some of you may have already seen, Pawlenty answered briefly:

People didn’t ask, ‘What comes after Hitler?’ Hitler was awful and needed to go.

As Trombly dutifully explains, the Allies were asking this and were extensively planning for the postwar period. This is what is most disturbing about hawks who rely on WWII mythology and invoke the refrain that “we did it in Germany and Japan!” to justify their hare-brained schemes of militarized democratization and regime change. Not only do they not take account of the differences between those countries and the ones they propose to “liberate,” but they don’t seem to understand the extent of the planning and work that went into the postwar occupations after WWII. Even though they have no interest in planning for the aftermath of their proposed policies, they take the simple fact that “we did it” before as proof that everything will work out fine.

Trombly goes on to point out that there are obviously worse things than Assad that could conceivably flourish after Assad falls:

It should be, at this point, quite obvious that there are worse possibilities in Syrian political thought than Assad. Take, for instance, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the actual Nazi-inspired group. Or take the possibility of a Syrian political vacuum which entangles the security interests of Pawlenty’s favorite Middle Eastern state, Israel, along with Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and essentially Egypt as well.

No less important, Syria is nothing like WWII-era Germany:

Unlike Hitler, Syria’s armies are not threatening the existence, territory, or prosperity of America or its Allies. This means that American policymakers have even more luxury to do what the Allies did when they confronted the problem of a post-Nazi Germany: debate, plan, and prepare.

There is also the small matter that the United States currently has no goal of toppling the Syrian government, our government has normal diplomatic relations with Damascus (Pawlenty naturally objects to this), and our government will not be in any position to dictate or “steer” the political developments in a post-Assad Syria. At most, Pawlenty voiced support for diplomatic and economic pressure on Syria. Even he isn’t prepared to support imposing regime change on Syria through the use of force, so by his own standards the comparison is absurd.

The better comparison that Pawlenty might have made was with post-Hussein Iraq, but that wouldn’t help his case. There was some planning for what would follow Hussein’s fall, but it was mostly ignored or overruled once the occupation began. The invasion’s strongest supporters dismissed worries about post-Hussein chaos, sectarian violence, and religious persecution just as blithely and ignorantly as Pawlenty dismissed these concerns yesterday. As a result, they failed to anticipate, much less to plan for, these developments, and were caught completely off-guard by them when they happened. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died, and millions were displaced or sent into exile. Even now, approximately one million Iraqis still live in Syria as refugees because they lack confidence in security in their home country or have nowhere to which they can return. This is one more complicating humanitarian factor in what might follow Assad’s fall. Pawlenty has not even begun to grapple with the consequences of the last disastrous experiment in regime change in the region, and it is clear that he has given no thought to any of the unintended consequences of the policy of regime change he is advocating for Syria.

Rather than obsessing over every last detail of the horse race, one should pay more attention to the fundamentals: Do voters respond favorably or unfavorably to a particular candidate? Does the candidate have enough money to pay for television when the primaries go national? Does the candidate have an actual message—an answer to the question of why he (or she!) is running for the presidency, and a realistic agenda for what he wants to do if he wins? ~Matt Continetti

Generally speaking, skeptics are right to dismiss early polls as mostly meaningless. Regardless, it seems to me that there wouldn’t be as much discussion of this if the supposed first-tier candidate Pawlenty weren’t struggling so badly. Instead of focusing on how badly Pawlenty is doing in all of the polls (and he’s doing very badly in all of them), let’s look at the fundamentals that tell us how badly Pawlenty is really doing. According to Gallup, Pawlenty’s favorability isn’t bad (66/14%), but it is a little lower than Romney and Bachmann’s favorability. The real problem is that the intensity of his support is not very great, and it has gone down as he has become better-known. Jill Lawrence’s report sums up Pawlenty’s problem:

Steve Grubbs, a former Iowa GOP chairman who was with the Steve Forbes campaign in 2000, says Pawlenty has a better organization in the state than Bachmann or another candidate with buzz, former pizza mogul Herman Cain. “Pawlenty’s biggest challenge is, he’s not creating excitement among voters. He needs to figure that out,” Grubbs says.

On the questions of money, message, and agenda, Pawlenty has likewise struggled. His economic plan has been widely panned as wishful thinking and the opposite of a realistic agenda, he has been at pains to explain why he is running, and his campaign’s fundraising hasn’t been very good. Lawrence’s report states:

Pawlenty has budgeted $1.75 million for the straw poll, according to a Republican consultant familiar with the Pawlenty campaign. That’s a major commitment, comparable to what George W. Bush and Steve Forbes spent in 1999 to place first and second ($1.1 million and $1.9 million, respectively, in today’s dollars).

The money could help, if it was there to spend. “They clearly don’t have it. So in the end I’m not sure how they’re going to implement their straw-poll strategy,” the consultant said. “I know so many of the vendors who aren’t getting paid. They are holding back so many bills.”

Lawrence goes on to question Pawlenty’s attempt to spin his poor results:

But those analogies are flawed. Clinton’s opponent, Barack Obama, “was raising huge amounts of money. He was drawing crowds that were filling massive venues very early on,” Collins recalls. As for Huckabee, he was “the only alternative on Mitt Romney’s right” in Iowa in a year with huge evangelical turnout. “I certainly wouldn’t write Pawlenty off. He’s a strong candidate. But those aren’t good templates,” Collins says.

The comparison with Huckabee is flawed, and obviously it doesn’t make sense for the decidedly uncharismatic, badly-funded Pawlenty to compare himself to the Democratic candidate who overtook his establishment rival through his personal charisma and well-funded campaign organization. When we look at the fundamentals, Pawlenty is truly in bad shape.

Update: Sean Scallon has a good profile of Pawlenty in the new issue of TAC (currently available only to subscribers). Here is a sample:

Pawlenty, like the proverbial five-star recruit, has a great deal of potential as a national politician, but there’s a reason his polling numbers are dismal—an explanation beyond simple lack of name recognition. In a new era where the search for authenticity dominates our political discourse, Pawlenty’s lack of it makes him a has-been before he ever was.

The recession and prolonged joblessness have led to a rise in protectionist sentiment, and no politician has stood up forthrightly to advocate for open markets and unrestricted trade. Nor is there a special interest group — a Patriotic Americans for Free Trade, say — that could launch a major television campaign to shape public opinion. ~Matt Continetti

Yes, the poor supporters of free trade agreements are really struggling to get their message out there. If only their arguments could be heard, that would turn things around! More information about free trade agreements wouldn’t do much to reduce popular opposition to them. Indeed, the more one learns about the Korean free trade agreement, the clearer it is that it is a bad deal for the U.S. For one thing, people whose communities have been affected or devastated by off-shoring and de-industrialization aren’t likely to believe the argument that free trade is beneficial. Even if the disruptions and losses that they have experienced were “made up” somewhere else in the country, that’s happening somewhere else and it doesn’t do those communities any good.

As for opening up markets, passing the sort of bilateral free trade agreement proposed with South Korea probably isn’t going to achieve much of anything in terms of opening up the South Korean market:

Even in cases where topics are nominally covered by the FTAs, the truth is that the FTAs may be largely meaningless. This is especially true for intellectual property and market opening. The proposed FTA between South Korea and the United States is a good example of both issues. It contains very strong language with regard to increasing protection of intellectual property. But the Korean legal system has demonstrated that it may rule otherwise. Over the past 15 years, for example, patents granted by the Korean patent office to FormFactor, an American company, for its probe cards (a device for testing semiconductor wafer circuits), were nullified by the Korean courts. This was not particularly surprising; Korean courts rarely rule in favor of non-Korean companies. Obviously the language of an FTA is pretty meaningless if a nationalistic legal system refuses to uphold it. In these circumstances, it does not make any difference what kind of FTA a country concludes; it will not achieve anything close to free trade.

FTAs are also meant to open markets, meaning that in any particular market, domestic and foreign producers are able to operate under the same conditions. Indeed, these deals are supposed to grant a sort of local treatment to nonlocal entrants into the market. Clearly, to sell a product in a given country, a producer must be able to get its products in front of the customer. Yet these FTAs never guarantee that. Take autos, for example: To sell them, an automaker must find dealers who will put the cars in their showrooms, service them, and market them. But in most countries, auto dealers don’t sell multiple brands. So even if auto tariffs are slashed to zero, in many countries imports of foreign cars won’t rise much because there are no or few dealers who will actually put the cars on their lots.

Continetti’s claim that the delay of these free trade agreements is one of the things holding back the economy is to be expected, but it’s not true. Clyde Prestowitz explained the flaws of the Korean agreement back in April:

If the economic gains from the Latin deals are likely to be small, they at least can be said to be real for both sides. In contrast, it is not clear that the proposed FTA with South Korea will produce any net gains for the United States at all. The U.S. International Trade Commission has calculated that the result of the proposed U.S.-Korea FTA is likely to be an increase in the overall U.S. trade deficit. And this is without accounting for the fact that South Korea’s currency management policies can easily offset any tariff reduction that may be made. Of course, some U.S. companies might benefit from the arrangement, but for the United States as a whole, any increase in its trade deficit at this time of high unemployment will only contribute to a further increase in the unemployment.

Prestowitz has also argued that all of these bilateral trade deals on tariffs miss out on the most important barriers to exchange. To take just the most obvious example, free trade negotiations of all kinds ignore the role of currency manipulation:

But dueling FTAs is the least of the problems. Far more significant is the question of whether any of our free trade negotiations, be they in pursuit of FTAs or in pursuit of new global arrangements under the auspices of the WTO, have any relevance to the actual problems in the global economy.

Take the question of exchange rates. FTAs, as well as all the WTO negotiations, including the Doha round, focus on tariff reduction and protection of intellectual property. Yet manipulated exchange rates can have a far greater effect on imports and exports than the tariffs that are so laboriously negotiated. Brazil, China, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Switzerland all intervene in international currency markets to keep their currencies undervalued as a kind of indirect subsidy for their export-led economic growth strategies. Currencies can swing by 20 to 30 percent in the course of a few months, easily wiping out tariff reductions that might be equal to 2 to 5 percent of the cost of a product. Cordoned off as the domain of banks and finance ministries, one of the single most important determinants of trade is thus left out of discussions altogether.

Advocates for “open markets and unrestricted trade” might be able to persuade a few more people to see the merits of free trade if they didn’t endorse such flawed agreements that don’t do much to open markets or eliminate the most significant barriers to trade.

Despite their seeming shock, though, and despite the predictions of people like Robert Kagan that authoritarian and pseudo-authoritarian countries like Russia would follow a broadly “anti-democratic” foreign policy, it’s long been clear that the Russian government doesn’t particularly care whether a country is democratic but rather if that country is friendly towards Russia. ~Mark Adomanis

This is right. As Mark mentions later in the post, Russian opposition to Bakiyev and tacit support for the Kyrgyz opposition in 2010 was one example of how Moscow was willing to ignore the type of regime in a country and align itself with those forces that were more cooperative with Russia. It also marked the end of the so-called “freedom agenda” in post-Soviet space.

Kagan’s democracy vs. “autocracy” model of international relations is wrong in many ways, but it is particularly misguided in believing that Russia (or China) automatically prefers to support other authoritarian governments out of some feeling of solidarity with other authoritarians. Kagan looks back to an earlier world of Great Power rivalry and maps it onto the modern world, and he then assumes that the struggle between autocratic and absolute monarchies and liberal and constitutional movements in the 19th century has some relevance for what is happening now.

There hasn’t been much meaningful political solidarity among “autocrats” since 1853, and outside of the Gulf states we are unlikely to see coordinated international action by absolute or authoritarian rulers. How Russia relates to these states depends on what the authoritarian governments want to do, and whether that conflicts with their interests. What they prefer are governments that are not fiercely anti-Russian (or anti-Chinese).

Russia has viewed many of the so-called “color” revolutions with such suspicion because they were obviously anti-Russian nationalist movements aimed at aligning neighboring countries with the U.S. Their supposed or real democratic character was not all that relevant. The willingness of Moscow and Beijing to lend support to authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian regimes that are potentially in danger of being targeted for Western intervention is partly a negative response to U.S. democracy promotion, and it is also their way of defending the international status quo to limit the ability of Western governments to intervene in the internal affairs of other states. In that sense, their foreign policy will only appear “anti-democratic” in those regions where the “democrats” are Western clients or allies.

While protesters were killed and tortured, Secretary Clinton said the Administration was “waiting to see the outcome of the internal Iranian processes.” She and the president waited long enough to see the Green Movement crushed. ~Tim Pawlenty

We can all agree that the Green Movement was crushed, but what exactly could the administration have done that would have prevented or positively affected this outcome? Iran hawks view the Iranian regime in the worst possible light as ruthless, uncompromising tyrants, but they also seem to think that they would be responsive to a harsh scolding from foreign leaders. Oh, and sanctions. We shouldn’t forget sanctions. Pawlenty has a comical amount of confidence in sanctions as an effective instrument of foreign policy. If they have not been successful to date, he takes it for granted that all that will needed is even more sanctions.

The choice in the summer of 2009 in responding to the Iranian crackdown was between full-throated denunciation that would have changed nothing, and which could very well have made things worse for the opposition, and exercising restraint by saying very little in the knowledge that the U.S. could not lend any support that would have been constructive. On the whole, the Green movement didn’t want U.S. or foreign help. As Hooman Majd wrote in January 2010:

U.S. President Barack Obama has so far expressed only moral support for Iranians fighting for their civil rights and has rightly articulated the unrest in Iran as a purely Iranian affair. Lacking relations with Iran, Obama can do little to help the green movement, but plenty to hurt it. Coming out squarely on the side of the opposition in Iran is likely to undermine its credibility, and perhaps even lend credence to the government’s assertion that the movement is a foreign-inspired plot that will rob Iran of its independence.

As it was, Western expressions of support for the Green movement premised on the idea that the movement was intent on toppling the current regime were genuinely harmful to the movement’s chances.

The Green movement is not the only thing Pawlenty gets wrong in his remarks on Iran. He seems to believe that the administration had a serious engagement policy with Iran, but it was never a genuine attempt to engage with the Iranian government on the nuclear issue or on anything else. It was mostly done for the benefit of other states in order to organize a new round of sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, and to that very limited extent it achieved its misguided goal. When Brazil and Turkey attempted to mediate the dispute, the administration slapped them down. Further, he absurdly concludes that the reason that U.S.-Saudi relations have been in a nosedive this year is Saudi dissatisfaction with the Iran engagement policy, when it is fairly common knowledge that the Saudis and all of the Gulf states have been reacting to Obama’s treatment of Mubarak.

Pawlenty then veers into the realm of sheer fantasy:

When [Assad goes], the mullahs of Iran will find themselves isolated and vulnerable. Syria is Iran’s only Arab ally. If we peel that away, I believe it will hasten the fall of the mullahs.

There is no reason to suppose that Assad’s fall would hasten the collapse of the Iranian regime. It might present a serious blow to Iranian influence in the region, and it could curtail Iran’s ability to wield influence in Lebanon, but that wouldn’t make Iran much more isolated. There’s no way of knowing what would replace Assad in any case, and it is possible that a future Syrian government would find some advantage in continuing the economic and military ties between Syria and Iran that Assad has increased. Regardless, Iran would still have diplomatic and economic ties to many other significant powers, not least of which include Russia, China, and India. Such a setback in foreign affairs would not trigger regime collapse, and it is foolish to expect this.

After his awful speech today, Pawlenty is receiving praise for his “principled” stand from the usualsuspects. Now that Republicans are dividing more sharply over foreign wars, and a substantial part of the party base is growing weary of the policy of perpetual war, it is becoming a mark of “principle” for politicians who have spent the last two years pandering to national security hawks to keep pandering to them. Pawlenty is supposed to be the generic, broadly acceptable candidate, but practically the only people expressing any strong interest in his candidacy are neoconservatives. He has been dubbed “the most serious candidate on foreign policy” at Commentary, which should be sufficient warning to stay away from him. Pawlenty’s call for a return to the worst of first-term Bushism may be part of the reason why he is doing so poorly in every early primary and caucus state.

One of the stranger things about the GOP presidential contest is that Mitt “No Apology” Romney has managed to let Tim Pawlenty outdo him in ignorant hawkishness. After spending the better part of the last two years berating Obama on foreign policy, and despite going out of his way to embarrass himself by jumping on board with the anti-START crowd, Romney is now lumped in with the rest of the field because he expressed modest reservations about permanently occupying Afghanistan. Considering public discontent with both Libya and Afghanistan, this is probably the best thing that could happen to Romney. If Pawlenty becomes the most aggressive hawk in the field, Romney will able to appear almost reasonable by comparison. Pawlenty could do what McCain did for Bush on foreign policy in 2000 by providing a neoconservative foil for a slightly more realist-oriented campaign, but only if he lasts long enough to remain a major contender. Asthingsstandright now, Pawlenty won’t be Romney’s problem, and by fully embracing a Bush-like agenda of hegemonism and democratism he might be driving away voters that would otherwise support him.