Voters are more bearish on trade deals than the business class that want them. Even some Republican voters aren’t sure if they want new trade deals. But no Republican voter wants a “radical” who believes in “world government” to get a promotion. You’ve got an elite argument and a populist argument, pushed from different sides, working in tandem. ~Dave Weigel

What’s odd about this is that the Republican voters worried about “world government” are the same voters who loathe free trade agreements above all because they infringe on national sovereignty. If Senate Republicans are trying to placate populist constituents, holding up the nominee for Commerce as a tactic to expedite approval of free trade agreements is something that ought to backfire badly. Why not just announce that they are engaged in meaningless political theater to distract the public from the bad trade policies they want to support? There wouldn’t be much difference.

Another reason this should backfire is that the Korean free trade agreement is still a lousy economic deal for the U.S., and the Colombian and Panamanian FTAs will bring negligible benefits to the U.S. Support for these three agreements has become a standard Republican slogan over the last two years, but the two most important agreements with South Korea and Colombia are very badly flawed. KORUS will greatly increase the trade deficit at the expense of American workers, and the Colombian FTA mainly benefits U.S. agribusiness and large landed interests in Colombia at the expense of small Colombian cultivators. The Korean agreement is awful for the U.S., and the Colombian agreement is ethically indefensible. Both should be defeated.

Clyde Prestowitz described the problems with KORUS earlier this year:

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.

Perhaps I have missed something, but when unemployment remains above 9% what could possibly be the thinking behind approving trade deals that are going to increase unemployment?

The consequences of KORUS passage for for the U.S. are not only economic in nature. Here’s Prestowitz again:

And tariffs are not the real barriers to foreign penetration of the Korean market, especially since the Korean government can and does manipulate its currency to offset the effect of any tariff reductions. As for facilitating foreign investment in Korea, why do we especially want to do that when we need investment in the United States? Moreover, the proposed deal on investment as presently constituted actually allows the U.S. branches of Korean companies to take disputes over U.S. regulatory rulings and impacts out of the American legal system by appealing to the World Bank and the International Court [bold mine-DL].

Isn’t that something? The United States has consistently refused to join the International Criminal Court on grounds of protecting national sovereignty, but was just on the verge of signing a trade deal that would enable foreign companies to evade the sovereignty of the U.S. legal system in certain disputes. I wonder if the Republicans who have been promoting the deal understand that.

The Republicans promoting the deal may understand that, but it is likely that many of their voters don’t. They should understand that their political leaders are not defending their interests or their values when it comes to trade policy, and they haven’t been for a long time. Perhaps it was time that they began demanding better leaders and representatives.

P.S. I should note that Dan Phillips at Conservative Heritage Times, who is also a regular commenter here, has been making the conservative case against KORUS for quite a while.

Whether Gov. Pawlenty’s prescriptions—dramatically lower individual and corporate taxes, zero taxes on capital gains and dividends, sunset provisions for federal regulations and a growth-rate target of 5%—are provable as solutions is politically beside the point at this moment. As substantive brand differentiation, the Pawlenty speech was a success. ~Daniel Henninger

Henninger forgot the part where all of this supposedly slashes the deficit at the same time through the massive infusion of extra revenues. Yes, that’s “substantive brand differentiation,” all right. Pawlenty has branded himself as the candidate of wishful thinking and fantasy. Pawlenty’s “plan” is based on the idea that there are no trade-offs in making policy, and therefore there are no difficult choices to be made.

If Henninger means that Pawlenty stands to benefit politically from making unrealistic, fanciful promises that will never be realized, he may be right. Political candidates rarely hurt themselves during the campaign by making wild, impossible promises. As Weigel said recently, “base voters are suckers for promises.” The voters Pawlenty is trying to win over aren’t going to concern themselves with whether his proposals would achieve any of the things he claims. It doesn’t even matter whether his proposals would benefit them all that much, so long as he gives the impression that he is sufficiently fierce in his hostility to taxation. Meanwhile, the analysts who realize that the bold truth-teller is actually a snake-oil salesman weren’t likely to support him anyway.

Unfortunately for Pawlenty, his candidacy continues to languish in relative obscurity as far as the voters are concerned, and he needs to generate as much coverage as he can. Had Pawlenty delivered a remotely plausible economic policy speech, very few people would have paid attention to it, and it would have reinforced the view that Pawlenty is so very boring. No one’s saying that now. Some people are saying that Pawlenty is the new incarnation of George W. Bush, and some are saying that he is a con-man, but at least they aren’t still talking about how “nice” and boring he is. The most significant thing that Pawlenty may have done by giving this speech was to differentiate himself as a presidential candidate from the rather dull Minnesota governor that he has been until now.

A candidate who can bridge the gap between social conservatives, anti-tax conservatives and foreign policy conservatives is one who is aiming for more than just the 30 percent of the vote in Iowa that might get him to the next level in the primary gauntlet. Pawlenty, who has also made strong and informed statements on foreign policy [bold mine-DL], seems to be trying to reunite the disparate wings of his party. ~Jonathan Tobin

Pawlenty does like strong statements on foreign policy, but I’m not sure that many would call them informed. Leaving aside some of his goofiermistakes in recent weeks, Pawlenty’s “informed” comments have usually amounted to recycling boilerplate or thoughtlessly repeating hawkish complaints about Obama. Here is one example of Pawlenty’s “informed” commentary:

My basic perspective on foreign policy – this is oversimplifying it – but in the interest of time this is it: You may have learned it on the playground, you may have learned in it business, sports. You may have learned it in some other walk of life, but it’s always true. If you’re dealing with thugs and bullies, they understand strength. They don’t respect weakness.

At least he realized that this oversimplifies things! Previously, Pawlenty has relied on one of the oldest, most overused hawkish accusations available when he made the charge of appeasement against Obama. He also managed to get some basic facts wrong in the process:

Not only did the president abandon missile defense, but he is opening negotiations with Iran and North Korea. The lessons of history are clear: Appeasement and weakness did not stop the Nazis, appeasement did not stop the Soviets, and appeasement did not stop the terrorists.

Of course, Obama didn’t abandon missile defense. This is why the Russians are still complaining about the “Phased Adaptive” system that the administration has been supporting with the help of some eastern European governments. The claim that the administration gave up on missile defense in Europe is one of the earliest, most egregious lies Republicans have been circulating about the “reset” policy since it began in 2009, and it is one they kept relying on in their attempt to derail the arms reduction treaty. As I observed at the time when he first used this line, there was never any actual attempt to appease the Soviets or jihadists. That didn’t prevent people from recklessly flinging the charge of appeasement at their opponents, but the appeasement never took place. This just underscores how uninformed Pawlenty’s views really are.

Logevall and Osgood cited this quote from Pawlenty’s speech in their World Affairs Journal article as an example of the mindless use of the example of Munich to justify opposing all diplomatic engagement. They wrote this later in their article:

As the current debate over U.S. foreign policy again turns on the lessons of the past, Americans would do well to take a closer look at the country’s long wrestling match with Munich’s ghost. Such an examination would show, first, that “Munich” has retained its power in American political discourse for more than seventy years largely because of electoral calculations. Second, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the success or failure of American foreign policy since the 1930s has to a great extent hinged on the willingness of presidents to withstand the inevitable charges of appeasement that accompany any decision to negotiate with hostile powers, and to pursue the nation’s interests through diplomacy. Sometimes these negotiating efforts failed; sometimes the successes proved marginal. But those presidents who challenged the tyranny of “Munich” produced some of the most important breakthroughs in American diplomacy; those who didn’t begat some of the nation’s most enduring tragedies.

Pawlenty is someone who seems to be reflexively opposed to diplomacy and engagement. He generically extols the virtues of national strength and decries appeasement, and he doesn’t possess much understanding of the rest of the world. He is a living embodiment of hawkish ignorance, but he is a “serious” contender for the nomination and so we are told that he holds informed views on the subject.

Kathryn-Jean Lopez interviewed Rick Santorum recently. Fortunately, most of the interview doesn’t touch on Santorum’s Venezuela obsession, but it is still there:

CNA: Are we completely unaware of what’s going on in our backyard in this regard?

Sen. Santorum: Almost completely. I was talking about Venezuela and Hugo Chavez long before most. In fact, I was criticized in my 2006 race for being alarmist by raising the possibility that Iran might be working with Venezuela to plant terrorist cells in our back yard [bold mine-DL]. You look at his alliances with Iran now, you look at Hezbollah in Latin America now, and then you look at the weakened state of our border, yes. If we don’t wake up ourselves we are going to be woken up by others. I have been saying this for years now, and working to wake Americans up. My weekly alert was called “The Gathering Storm” for a reason.

It’s true that Santorum was talking about Venezuela and Chavez long before most, because no one else feels compelled to exaggerate the threat from Chavez’s Venezuela. He used the phrase “The Gathering Storm” because he wanted to pretend that he was like Churchill warning against a new Nazi-like menace, and he was attacked as alarmist because he said crazy things about Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba forging a military empire that was going to dominate Latin America. Santorum is referring to one of the least alarmist things he said in 2006 as if that were one of the most controversial, when he routinely littered his speeches and op-eds with absurd and unhinged claims about the existential threats facing America and the world. Here is Santorum in 2006:

Did you know that Venezuela is the leading buyer of arms and military equipment in the world today? Did you know that Chavez is building an army of more than a million soldiers and the most potent air force in South America-the largest Spanish-speaking armed force in history?

Did you know that Venezuela will shortly spend thirty billion dollars to build twenty military bases in neighboring Bolivia, which will dominate the borders with Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil? The bases will be commanded by Venezuelan and Cuban officers. This is what the brilliant Carlos Alberto Montaner-a survivor of Castro’s bloody regime-calls “a delirious vision of history,” and it is driven by a new alliance of dictators from Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

It is part of the grand design so proudly announced by Ahmadinejad: the destruction of our civilization

The only one delirious in all of this was Santorum. Two years after Santorum made these dire warnings of Venezuelan military build-up, Chavez had to back down from his saber-rattling against Colombia in the recognition that Venezuela stood no chance in a military conflict with its neighbor. Back in 2006, Santorum also made overblown claims about the dangers coming from Venezuelan-Iranian cooperation, and made some flatly ludicrous claims about Iran’s government:

Ahmadinejad , like Hitler and Mussolini, intends to conquer the world. This is not a hidden agenda. His goal is to establish a Caliphate.

Not only is this is obviously not true, but why exactly would Venezuelan socialists and Cuban communists be interested in advancing this goal? During his re-election campaign, I criticized Santorum quite a bit for saying foolish things about Iran’s goals of world conquest and throwing around the nonsensical phrase “Islamic fascism” in the process. His alleged prescience about the activity of Hizbullah in Latin America is exaggerated, and it is more than outweighed by the sheer number of preposterous, alarmist claims that he made five years ago and in the years since then.

“We are the United States of America,” Pawlenty said today in Chicago. “We settled the west and went to the moon. We liberated billions of good people from communism, fascism, and jihadism [bold mine-DL]. We’ve lit the lamp of freedom – for the entire world to see. The strength of our country is our people – not our government. Americans believe our country is exceptional. And they deserve a president who does too.“ ~Stephen Hayes

Most of this is Pawlenty’s standard stump speech, but the line about liberating billions of people is a new one. It also happens to be a massive exaggeration, which seems to match up well with the details of his economic plan. If we take the most self-important interpretation of historical events since 1941, and the United States gets at least partial credit for all of the people liberated from “communism, fascism, and jihadism” in the last seventy years, that won’t get us remotely close to one billion people, much less the multiple billions Pawlenty seems to think were liberated. And those were just the good people. There’s no telling how many bad people Pawlenty may think were liberated.

Then there is the small matter that the actual liberation of the hundreds of millions of people in the USSR and eastern Europe was overwhelmingly the work of the people in those countries. They freed themselves. It’s hard for some of our latter-day Bonapartes to understand, I know, but this is what happened. Yes, the U.S. lent some moral and practical support, but the trade-off of containment strategy was accepting the communist oppression of all those nations for as long as it continued. The weakness and failures of the communist system caused it to implode. The U.S. put some pressure on that system, and that had some effect in hastening the unraveling of the USSR, but it was the fundamental flaws of that system that led to its collapse.

All in all, this doesn’t matter very much, but it is typical of the tendency of defenders of a triumphalist version of American exceptionalism to exaggerate vastly the accomplishments and sacrifices of Americans throughout history and to overstate the uniqueness and superiority of America in the present. For Fred Thompson, it was the false claim that Americans had shed more blood for the freedom of other people than all other nations combined, and for Marco Rubio it is the false claim that the American economy is “the only economy in the world where poor people with a better idea and a strong work ethic can compete and succeed against rich people in the marketplace and competition.” Not content to acknowledge the actual accomplishments of American efforts overseas, Pawlenty has to inflate the numbers of liberated people, as if he can demonstrate his greater enthusiasm for America by telling flattering falsehoods about our history.

This seems to be, as far as I can tell, a complete misreading of the GOP field. Pawlenty is running as the all-of-the-above candidate; he stands to win if Republicans want a normally credentialed nominee who is solid on every issue without being crazy and if, for a variety of possible reasons, the party rejects Mitt Romney.

As such, he certainly needs to demonstrate at least some ability to draw votes in Iowa, but that’s about it; most of what matters to Pawlenty is whether any other candidate shows up who encroaches on his turf, and then what happens to Romney. Bachmann is mostly irrelevant to that. ~Jonathan Bernstein

Bearing in mind what Bernstein has said here on plausible nominees, Bachmann is more relevant than he thinks. She does hurt Pawlenty in a few ways. Among activists right now, she is both better-known and more well-liked, and she probably steals some of the support Pawlenty would receive in Iowa as the governor of a neighboring state. Bachmann encroaches on his “turf” in that she is arguably more “solid” on every issue than he is, and what others may regard as her craziness is the very thing that generates greater enthusiasm among her supporters. There was a spot in the crowded field that Pawlenty was going to have, and Bachmann now largely fills that spot or takes up enough of it to render Pawlenty as an also-ran rather a top-three finisher in Iowa. Buchanan didn’t become the nominee in ’96, but his success in Louisiana led to Gramm’s early defeat and withdrawal. The Politicoarticle on the two described them this way:

She’s a lightning rod for political controversy, a conservative provocateur with strong tea party credentials and a significant grassroots following. The former governor, who is more closely affiliated with the business-oriented conservative wing, is often criticized for being boring.

It’s easy to imagine how Pawlenty could share Gramm’s fate, and that would be to a large degree because of Bachmann.

As America’s just-returned ambassador to China, Huntsman also brings foreign policy credentials to a Republican field lacking in them. But here he has raised questions of consistency. On the stump, he speaks movingly of visiting Chinese “freedom fighters” who were beaten and imprisoned for defending their rights. At the same time, he opposes the American operation in Libya, on the grounds that it is not “core to our national security interests.” As president, would Huntsman have allowed the leveling of Benghazi and the victory of Moammar Gaddafi? ~Michael Gerson

According to what Huntsman has said about it, yes. He would have “allowed” Gaddafi to win (i.e., he would not have intervened in a conflict in which America had nothing at stake), whether or not that involved the “leveling of Benghazi.” The counterfactual fate of Benghazi always seems to get worse with each new bit of interventionist speculation. If that is disqualifying for a Republican candidate in Gerson’s mind, he has no intention of winning! It’s fun to pretend that our policy preferences have something to do with a candidate’s electability, isn’t it?

Of course, there isn’t any obvious inconsistency here on Huntsman’s part. It’s not as if Huntsman is proposing that the U.S. lend military support to Chinese “freedom fighters.” Perhaps he sympathizes with the Libyan rebels, but doesn’t believe it is the responsibility of the U.S. to win their fight for them. Actually, we don’t need to speculate on this. Huntsman has explained it pretty clearly:

He said that he did not believe the humanitarian threat was significant enough in Libya to warrant intervention by the United States.

“We could be responding to corners of the world constantly if that were the motivating criteria,” Mr. Huntsman said. “I think we have to be very careful about where we choose to spend our money and what we define as being important to our national security interest.”

Huntsman seems to think that the U.S. should exercise more caution and restraint in where it chooses to intervene militarily. One can still sympathize with and even speak out in support of dissidents while believing this. There’s no inconsistency here at all. As usual, Gerson doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Of course, it is this implied notion that sympathy for dissidents ought to translate into support for attacking other countries that can cause people to want to reject both at the same time.

Well…. I have read parts of The Weary Titan, and both Ryan and Larison make valid points here. Friedberg does advance the argument in his book that British foreign policy elites voluntaily ceded aspects of their hegemony to other actors during the 1895-1905 decade — and that’s the point Ryan stresses. That said, Larison is correct to say that Ryan exaggerates Friedberg’s thesis. If Ryan had said “Western hemisphere” instead of “Western world,” however, he’d be spot-on accurate. ~Dan Drezner

I appreciate Drezner’s comments, but I think this lets Ryan off the hook a little too easily. Ryan doesn’t stress that “British foreign policy elites voluntaily ceded aspects of their hegemony to other actors during the 1895-1905 decade.” He claims that Britain ceded “leadership of the Western world” to the U.S. One problem with this, as others have noted, is that there was no “leadership of the Western world” to cede to America or any other state. Trombly sums this up very well:

The Western world did not have a leader in the late 19th and early 20th century, it just had a foremost power, the British Empire. Britain’s main competitors over the 19th century – France, Russia, and Germany – were within the Western family of nations. In fact, Britain looked outside the center of Western civilization, Europe, to the United States and Japan not to turn over leadership of a Western community within which significant enmity existed, but to reduce the burdens of Britain’s commitments in the Western Hemisphere and Asia so Britain could focus more efforts not on leading but deterring its fellow members of Western civilization.

According to Ryan, because the U.S. was not ready to assume this non-existent leadership of the Western world, “[t]he result was 40 years of Great Power rivalry and two World Wars.” If Ryan had said Western Hemisphere instead of “Western world,” he would have been representing Friedberg’s argument more or less correctly, but it would have ruined his cautionary tale that the preeminent great power ushers in global chaos by “choosing” decline. Ceding dominance of the Western Hemisphere to the U.S. didn’t usher in an era of Great Power rivalry, and it had nothing to do with the causes of the world wars. In fact, after the brief flare-up of tensions over Venezuela, this period marked the beginning of improved relations between Britain and the U.S. U.S.-British reconciliation in this period was not what led to the nightmares of the 20th century.

Ryan has misrepresented an example of a great power engaged in a sort of burden-sharing as a disastrous miscalculation that led to the great catastrophes of the 20th century. He has done this even though the reduction in commitments had no major effect on the great power’s global status, and it did not result in the disasters he claims it did. The reason he has done this is to instill fear. He wants us to believe that massive global instability will result if the U.S. reduces some of its outdated and unnecessary commitments around the globe, and he bases this on his misrepresentation of what happened in the early 20th century to make this alarmism seem plausible. I’ll leave it to Drezner to decide whether that merits a Trumpie or some other award, but it certainly shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Last month, I finished reading Jason Stearns’ excellent Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, which I first mentioned in this post. Stearns has written very recently on the current situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and his regular blog can be found here. While Stearns applauds the U.S. conflict minerals bill signed into law last year at the end of chapter 19 in his book and still argues that it is important to continue working on the issue, he explains at greater length here why understanding the war in Congo mainly in terms of conflict minerals is badly misleading. I have to admit that my knowledge of the wars in Congo was quite limited before I started his book. I strongly recommend it for anyone who wants a well-informed, accessible introduction to the conflicts that have been raging in central Africa for the better part of the last twenty years.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, is a country that has suffered enormously since the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda and the Rwandan-led invasion that followed two years later. Many readers will be aware that the massive loss of life in the wars there is the largest in the world since WWII, but beyond that the wars in Congo are not very well understood. Congo’s experience since 1996 is a prime example of the misfortunes that befall a country when it is turned into a proxy battlefield for other nations’ ambitions, and appropriately the authors who have written the most on the wars between 1996 and today have compared it to Germany during the Thirty Years’ War. The significant role of mercenaries, the importance of pillaging as a major activity of armed forces, and the massive death tolls resulting from disease, food shortages, and displacement in addition to atrocities are common features of both. There was no direct U.S. role in all of this, but to the extent that the U.S. was involved in the region after 1994 it was often not very constructive in its engagement.

Stearns reminds us that the coalition of governments that organized alongside Rwanda in 1996-97 to topple Mobutu was the expression of an ideological movement and a new generation of African leaders:

It is easy to forget, now that greed and plunder claim the headlines as the main motives for conflict in the region, that its beginnings were steeped in ideology. The Rwandan-backed invasion was perhaps the heyday of the African Renaissance, riding on the groundswell of the liberation of South Africa from apartheid, and of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Rwanda from dictatorships. It was an alliance motivated in part by the strategic interests of individual governments, but also by a larger spirit of pan-Africanism….President Museveni recalled: “Progressive African opinion was galvanised.” (p. 55)

This quote struck me as I read it because it sounds so very much like the “Arab Spring” enthusiasm that contributed to the push for war against Libya. Not that different from Gaddafi in some ways, Mobutu was badly isolated internationally and exposed to attack from his neighbors. Mobutu had alienated virtually all of his neighbors by playing host to insurgent groups opposed to the current governments, which set the stage for the alliance arrayed against him. Instead of being a recently “rehabilitated” dictator who had become an embarrassment for the West as Gaddafi was, Mobutu was an old Cold War ally who had ceased to be useful and had become an embarrassment for the West, so there was little interest among his traditional allies to keep backing him.

Unlike the anti-Mobutu coalition in 1996-97, however, the Libyan war has not seen Libya’s neighbors taking part in the conflict, nor have anti-Gaddafi Arab governments contributed much in the way of supporting the war effort with the partial exception of Qatar. Proponents of both campaigns share the same overconfident optimism that the war heralds something new and promising for the specific country and the region as a whole, when instead it simply unleashes destruction. The wars in the Congo are a reminder that it is interventionist policies themselves that ruin country being “liberated” and corrupt the governments that carry them out, and it is makes surprisingly little difference whether the initiative for the intervention comes from states in the region or from far away.

A little earlier in the same chapter, Stearns recounts how Western governments were enthusing over the new African leaders at the time:

Between 1986 and 1994, ideologically inspired rebels ousted repressive regimes in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, and Rwanda. Coded cables sent to European and American capitals from embassies spoke of a new breed of African leaders, apparently different from the corrupt and brutal dictators who had ruled much of Africa since independence. Although they had all begun their careers as socialists, after coming to power they initially endorsed the principles of free markets and liberal democracy and were enthusiastically greeted by western leaders. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright swooned: “Africa’s best new leaders have brought a new spirit of hope and accomplishment to your countries–and that spirit is sweeping across the continent….” (p. 52)

The wars in the Congo put an end to all of that. As Stearns concluded at the end of chapter 3:

Within several years, the Congo was to become the graveyard for this lofty rhetoric of new African leadership as preached by Mbeki, Albright, and many others. Freedom fighters were downgraded to mere marauding rebels; self-defense looked ever more like an excuse for self-enrichment. Leaders who had denounced the big men of Africa who stayed in power for decades began appearing more and more like the very creatures they had fought against for so many decades. (p. 56)

It is still too soon to know what will come of the war in Libya, but it is possible that the Libyan war marked the beginning of the end of whatever “Arab Spring” there may have been.