True loyalty is always to put party before country, such seems to be the RedState idea. The Huntsman candidacy is a good place to test whether that view is as widely shared as Erickson believes – and as America’s ill-wishers have always hoped. ~David Frum

Frum has entirely misunderstood Erickson’s attack. Erickson held that Huntsman was disloyal to Obama and also to the country on account of his presumed planning for a presidential run. The first part of the claim is plausible enough, and there is evidence that the administration reacted badly to the Huntsman political speculation in ways that affected how Huntsman was allowed to work in Beijing. A report in The Daily Beast relates how the administration imposed greater controls on Huntsman after media speculation on his possible 2012 run started up again in January:

After a January Newsweek article set off a flurry of speculation that Huntsman would make a bid for the presidency, the Obama administration began taking aggressive measures to ensure that Huntsman wouldn’t be able to use his appointment for 2012 posturing, said the official, requesting anonymity to discuss internal matters.

“Once the resignation was submitted, politics probably became much more of a question mark, and it was tense,” the official said. “On the embassy side, there was suspicion that [Huntsman] was being subjected to greater scrutiny than he would have otherwise been.”

According to the official, who was not a political appointee, the administration began micromanaging Huntsman’s schedule, canceling media appearances and carefully vetting his public remarks. The source specifically noted a major education speech in Shanghai that was heavily scrutinized by administration officials “to make sure it was kosher.”

The second part of the claim that Huntsman was disloyal to the U.S. is quite a reach, and there isn’t much to support it. According to the same McKay Coppins’ report, there is no evidence that Huntsman ever did anything that would compromise his work as ambassador. Regardless, Frum’s description is exactly the opposite of what Erickson said. However implausibly or unfairly, Erickson was judging Huntsman by an extremely high standard of “country first” and found him wanting. Erickson’s attack on Huntsman was probably the least partisan argument he has made in quite a while. Frum is so busy rehearsing his tedious moderate Republican line that he doesn’t even notice.

Something that is embarrassing to Huntsman is that the presidential rumors definitely affected his ability to do his job in China. This was not because he was abusing his position, but because the Chinese government and public began viewing his work as part of his positioning for a presidential run rather than as a representative of the United States government:

But even if Huntsman kept his political aspirations separate from his diplomatic work, as most people familiar with the situation have indicated, observers say the presidential buzz unquestionably affected his relationship with the Chinese government.

“There may have been some in Chinese policymaking circles who thought they could split Washington and take advantage of what they thought was a disconnect in American policy toward China,” said Russell Moses, a Beijing-based political analyst.

Experts in China also said the 2012 speculation colored the perception of Huntsman’s actions by the country’s government and citizens.

When Huntsman delivered a pointed speech at the end of his term condemning China’s human-rights record, many took it not as a genuine indictment but an effort to impress “the electing populace,” said Guo Xiangang, vice president of the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing.

Another international relations expert in China, who requested anonymity to address the sensitive issues, confirmed the sentiment.

This confirms that the Huntsman speculation led to the problem that James Fallowsworried about when the first Huntsman 2012 rumors started swirling, and it seems that his concerns were justified.

Via Scoblete, I came across two interesting working papers on the relationship between Pakistani support for “liberal democratic values” and militancy (.PDF) and the relationship between poverty and militancy (.PDF). Here I’ll be looking at the first paper. The authors of the papers found that support for “liberal democratic values” and militancy were related:

Using this approach, we find that support for a set of liberal democratic values–property rights, free speech, independent courts, the ability of citizens to elect representatives, a separation of civilian and military power, and freedom of assembly–increases support for militancy….Consistent with the principle of azadi (freedom or self-determination in Urdu), this result is driven by those who believe Muslim rights and sovereignty are being violated in Kashmir and Afghanistan. In other words, supporters of democratic rights are more likely to favor militant groups if they believe those militants are fighting against forces that are denying Muslims their rights.

These findings are interesting, but they aren’t as remarkable as some of the responses to the papers would indicate. There is no reason why attachment to liberal democratic values should weaken support for militancy when that militancy is perceived as a liberation struggle for one’s co-religionists or people from the same ethnic group. These findings might be strange to some Westerners, but that is mainly because these Westerners have convinced themselves that occupation and political grievances have little to do with causing jihadist militancy and terrorism. As the researchers mention in the paper, some Westerners may also assume that liberal democratic politics is an antidote to support for any and all forms of militancy, but that just reminds us that they have seriously mistaken assumptions about liberal democracy, including the major assumption that liberal democratic values and support for political violence are incompatible. Supporting liberal democratic values certainly does not guarantee support for perceived “freedom fighters” elsewhere, but it is hardly shocking that people with those values are more likely to support such militants.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that support for liberal democratic politics at home translates into sympathy with those groups that are perceived as advancing the cause of self-determination in other lands, especially if they are neighboring lands where people of the same religion or ethnicity are fighting against a government that they perceive as illegitimate, foreign, or imposed from the outside. Had researchers been investigating the extent of support for anti-Ottoman Greek insurgents in Crete among Greek Liberals in the late nineteenth century, they probably would have found a similar relationship between political liberalism and support for Greek nationalist militancy. For much of the last century, one presumably could have found a similar relationship between Irish supporters of liberal democratic values and those who sympathized with the IRA. Obviously, there have been many Americans, and not only Irish-Americans, who supported liberal democratic values and have sympathized with IRB and IRA goals since nineteenth century. That sympathy more recently translated into American political pressure on Britain that led to the settlement of the Good Friday Agreement.

Illiberal militant groups will also readily adopt liberal democratic rhetoric or frame their conflict in terms of self-determination and rights in the hopes that it will win greater sympathy. There will probably be a legitimate political grievance that they are exploiting, which makes it easier for their claims to be taken more seriously, especially if no one looks very closely at the nature of the group itself. In any case, such groups take it for granted that people in the West who support liberal democratic values are suckers for this sort of talk. The KLA pulled this off very successfully twelve years ago.

The findings in the working paper on liberal democratic values and militancy shouldn’t simply be an occasion to say, “Oh, look, Pakistani democrats are more likely to support certain groups of militants,” but to revisit assumptions about liberal democratic values, their relationship to sympathy with certain kinds of political violence, and the role of occupation in causing armed resistance and terrorism.

There’s nothing Michael Gerson enjoys more than berating heartless right-wingers, and his latest column is a classic of his brand of smug paternalistic authoritarianism. His target this time is Ron Paul and drug policy. At last week’s debate, one of the Fox panelists posed a question to Ron Paul about heroin and prostitution as “exercises of liberty.” Paul demurred a little, objecting that the panelist was putting words in his mouth, but then went on to object to the insulting paternalism that holds that drug prohibition is necessary to protect people from themselves. Paul was assuming that most people would be personally responsible and wouldn’t rely on government prohibition to steer them on the right path in these areas. Gerson could accuse him of having too much confidence in people, but that wouldn’t go over nearly as well as attacking him for having contempt for the poor and destitute. Most irritating of all, Gerson presents himself as a defender of the weak and downtrodden, when these are the Americans disproportionately harmed by the drug war that Gerson is quite happily defending.

Though Paul did not frame his response in quite the same way that Gary Johnson did, their answers from the last debate were complementary. Paul addressed the question as a matter of whether or not it was appropriate to criminalize individual drug use, and Johnson advocated approaching problems with drugs other than marijuana as a public health issue rather than as a problem for law enforcement and the justice system. Gerson seems to view drug prohibition as a matter of expressing disapproval of drug use. Whether drug prohibition works as a matter of public policy does not interest him, and whether it is worth the significant costs and compromises of constitutional protections never comes up in his column.

Gerson gets some of his facts wrong in his column, but perhaps the greatest failing is the spectacle of this saccharine moralist, this so-called “compassionate” conservative defending an oppressive, and unconstitutional anti-drug regime that spawns criminality, violence, family disruption, mass imprisonment, and social dysfunction on a massive scale. As Erik Kain put it well:

This is the endlessly perpetuated myth about the drug war: that somehow imprisoning hundreds of thousands of poor people and minorities, many of whom are guilty only of putting substances in their bodies, and by waging violent war against black markets here and abroad, we are somehow helping children and the poor. What a fabulous lie. We spend billions upon billions every year in enforcement and prison cells, and still drug use continues.

I intend, along with a couple of my colleagues this week, to introduce a resolution here in the Senate to act on this issue. And my hope is that this policy will move quickly on voicing support for those on the ground there in Syria who are trying, in a peaceful way, to bring about change to their country. And I think the world has to be so disappointed, I think, that this administration has not been more forceful in speaking out on behalf of freedom and democracy throughout the region, including places like Bahrain. ~Marco Rubio

No, the world is not disappointed. Maybe Bahraini and Syrian protesters are disappointed, and we know that knee-jerk democratists are disappointed, but much of the rest of the world isn’t terribly interested in whether or not Obama “speaks out” more forcefully. Maybe that shouldn’t matter, but invoking “the world” here is even more ridiculous than the routine reference to the American people. When Rubio refers to “the world,” he mostly means himself and his colleagues.

Speaking out isn’t substantive action. It is nothing more and nothing less than paying lip service. I suppose one can argue that American officials should pay more lip service to the cause of Syrian or Bahraini protesters, but it isn’t clear what it would actually accomplish. So, Marco Rubio wants Obama to pay lip service to “freedom and democracy throughout the region.” I don’t see how that counts as an example of “forceful, clear and unequivocal support for a robust American presence in the world,” as Jennifer Rubin describes it. It is an example of support for stronger American rhetoric in lieu of action. It is just the sort of cheap talk that Jackson Diehl was demanding from the administration in the same column in which he acknowledged that it wouldn’t do any good. This will change exactly nothing in Syria and Bahrain. That’s not surprising, since it isn’t intended to change anything in those countries. It is intended to distinguish Rubio and the others speaking out forcefully, and it costs Rubio nothing. Thanks to the low standards of Republican foreign policy discourse, it earns him points.

Here is an example of what Rubin calls Rubio’s “fluency” on foreign policy:

There is a nonsensical fear that what comes after [Assad] will be worse.

It’s actually a very well-grounded fear, and the governments closest to Syria are the ones that share it. Again, this is easy for Rubio to say. If Assad falls, and something worse follows, virtually no one will remember that Rubio shrugged at that possibility and dismissed it as nonsensical. All that most people will remember was that he was in favor of “speaking out” against Assad. It won’t matter that Rubio will have been shown to be blithely indifferent to unleashing regional instability and chaos. It isn’t going to bother his fans that he was oblivious to the possible fault-lines in a country whose political future he so confidently wants to influence. No, he somehow possesses “fluency” in foreign policy because he repeats the correct slogans.

Rubin relates another gem of Rubio insight:

The notion that we don’t have interests in the welfare of other peoples, he argues, “goes against everything we believe as a nation.”

It goes against everything we believe as a nation to hold this view? This sounds like bleeding-heart Republicanism at its worst. Apart from Bush’s Second Inaugural, this is possibly the most expansive and most reckless definition of U.S. interests I have ever seen.

In just over a week, 60 days will have passed since the war in Libya began. But Congress has no plans to exercise its rights under the War Powers Act to either approve or stop the administration’s use of U.S. military forces to fight the army of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 allows the president to commit U.S. forces for 60 days without the explicit authorization of Congress, with another 30 days allowed for the withdrawal of those forces.

“The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to a declaration of war, a specific statutory authorization, or a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces,” the law states.

But the administration won’t be immediately pressed to follow the law if nobody in Congress intends to enforce it. Both leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told The Cable on Tuesday that there are no plans for Senate action on the war in Libya — before or after the deadline.

“I’m not hearing from my colleagues that they feel the War Powers situation is currently in play because we’re deferring to NATO,” committee chairman Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) told The Cable. Kerry had been working on a resolution with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) but the text was never finalized. ~Josh Rogin

Whatever some members of the Senate may feel about it, supporting NATO attacks on Libya with Predator drones, refueling, and logistics means that the U.S. is very much involved in ongoing hostilities against the armed forces of another state. It’s not as if American involvement in the war ended at the start of April. For Kerry to claim otherwise is ridiculous. The Libyan war continues to be the largest U.S. military intervention since Panama that has not received at least a formal vote on a resolution while it is still going on.

Obama deserves the overwhelming share of the blame for involving the U.S. in Libya, but with a few honorable exceptions members of Congress have been making it extremely easy for an unchecked executive to take whatever military action it wants around the world without the slightest protest from Congress. There has been nothing resembling oversight or the exercise of Congress’ appropriate and vital role in determining when the United States wages war against another state. By the end of next week, it will be undeniable that the Libyan war is simply illegal under U.S. law. What will be equally obvious is how completely indifferent the Congress and much of the public is to this gross abuse of power.

Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman had passed through a few weeks earlier, to see King Abdullah II. Their visit, I quickly learned, was simultaneously a source of bemusement and irritation for the Jordanian government. The two senators, of course, advocate an assertive foreign policy, and both are associated with neoconservative striving for robust and quick democratization of the Middle East. “They came in and said that Jordan should open up its political space for more parties, and be more aggressive about democratization within the parameters of a constitutional monarchy,” a senior Jordanian official told me. “And then they said, ‘But whatever you do, don’t allow the Muslim Brotherhood to gain more power.’ So they want us to be open and closed at the same time.” ~Jeffrey Goldberg

This illustrates very nicely the basic incoherence of the “neoconservative striving for robust and quick democratization of the Middle East” in combination with their other foreign policy priorities in the region. That doesn’t stop neoconservatives from advocating for democratization, but they want to pretend that these countries can open their political systems without undesirable results. As I have said before, “In other words, they still want to have it all, pretend that trade-offs don’t exist, and send U.S. foreign policy careening from one disaster to the next.”

Matt Yglesias quotes an interesting passage from the new Jason Stearns book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. These last lines of the passage are the most important:

If we want to change the political dynamics in the country, we have above all to understand the conflict on its own terms. That starts with understanding how political power is managed.

Understanding conflicts on their own terms is something that outsiders tend to do badly. This is partly because of lack of knowledge, but it also partly because of an overemphasis on political categories that are most relevant to us that may not translate directly to political conflicts elsewhere. When outsiders decide that it matters to them which side prevails in the conflict, understanding becomes even more elusive. There are two responses that most interested outsiders, especially Westerners, gravitate toward when confronted with a foreign conflict. The first is the response Stearns criticizes here, which is to emphasize the sheer destructiveness, frequency of atrocities, and apparent futility of the conflict as a way of drawing attention to it as a humanitarian disaster. This approach doesn’t so much try to understand the conflict as to make people aware that it is happening and to express the view that it ought to be stopped somehow. Paradoxically, the greater the emphasis on the horrors and complexities of a conflict, the less likely outside governments are to want to become involved in any way.

The other response is one of arbitrary identification with one of the factions in the conflict. A conflict may be quite complicated, but to sell military intervention Western governments need to have a ready-made villain, and they must also (mis)represent whoever opposes the villain as people fighting for freedom rather than, say, power and territory. Many Westerners have a habit of adopting foreign political movements, and they define them in terms that make them seem familiar and sympathetic, and the members of those movements may want to encourage this perception to gain additional backing. This doubly obscures the nature of the movement, its goals, and the practical obstacles that stand between it and those goals. In the Libyan case, we have had a combination of the two responses.

This touches on something that Damir Marusic has been sayingfor a while now. Back at the start of April, Marusic wrote:

The state-centered approach is not blind to the new popular internet-fueled movements and political realities in the Middle East, but it does question the likelihood of their success….It posits that the deciding factor in the early days of these Middle Eastern revolutions is not primarily the values being fought for, but violence—whether, and how decisively, it is used. The Libyans, accustomed to 40-odd years of brutal rule by Qaddafi, understood this all too well and chose to respond in kind. What may have started as a protest for democratic change is now very much a war over the state itself. The discussion is no longer about values, but over power, territory, and sovereignty.

According to Marusic, liberal interventionists “tragically misunderstand the nature of politics and war.” If I have his argument right, they misunderstand it because they do not fully take account of these factors of power, territory, and sovereignty in the conflicts into which they insist that the U.S. and other governments insert themselves. To use Stearns’ phrase, they don’t take fully account of how political power is managed in the country in question. It is little wonder then that the interventionist plan is to squeeze the Libyan regime until it spontaneously collapses without any explanation for how or why that would happen.

Elliot Hentov’s analysis of Iran and the Syrian uprisings had an opening paragraph that was fine as far as it went, and then I realized that it could be reproduced almost exactly by substituting the U.S. and Egyptian protests for Iran and Syrian protests. It would read something like this:

America moved quickly to frame the uprisings aross the Arab world as a democratic awakening and as a reflection of its own revolutionary ideals. But Washington is visibly shaken by the possibility of regime overthrow in Egypt. Despite Iranian efforts to highlight American support for the Egyptian regime’s efforts to retain power, in fact Washington has little control over the future of political order in Egypt. The turbulence in Egypt and America’s limited influence had significance beyond the immediate question of the survival of Hosni Mubarak. It shows powerfully how much America’s influence is a function of external developments rather than internal strength–and how that influence might be severely affected by changes in the regional environment beyond its control.

This is true for both the U.S. and Iran up to a point, but it is also misleading for both. Iran has been trying to align itself rhetorically and publicly with popular uprisings, especially when those uprisings target regimes Tehran opposes, and the U.S. has been doing likewise when the administration has decided it can afford to do so. Iran would hardly be the first revolutionary regime to exploit political instability elsewhere and use the rhetoric of popular revolution to stir up trouble for adversaries while suppressing its own dissidents.

Obviously, Iran has limited influence over the internal politics of other states, and like any government interested in wielding regional influence it is going to be opposed to the changes that it fears might undermine that influence. It’s true that Iranian influence has been growing over the last decade as much because of the weakness of its regional opponents as it has because of any advantages it possesses. It also seems to be the case that continued regional instability will tend to work in its favor because that instability is largely affecting states that are hostile to it. Hen-Tov makes the important point that the Iranian regime leadership seems genuinely convinced that these events are vindication for their ideology and foreign policy. That may be delusional nonsense, but it is worth noting that they may believe their own propaganda.

Syria’s regime is the one Tehran-aligned government that is facing the most significant challenge from popular uprisings, which is one reason why it has become the new focus of Western attention. Everyone constantly emphasizes the importance of the Assad regime for the Syrian-Iranian alliance, but I have not yet seen much evidence that the Syrian opposition objects to the alliance or that a post-Assad Syria would abandon it. The connection is “unnatural” in some respects, but one might say the same of many strange alliances in history that have come into existence because of perceived or real strategic needs (e.g., tsarist Russia and republican France; Catholic France and the Ottoman Empire; France and Sweden in the Thirty Years’ War, etc.).

It is true that Iran has not been a driver of events, but a beneficiary of them, and it is also true that the connection between Syria and Iran is defined by their common adversaries more than anything else that the two states may have in common. To argue that a post-Assad Syria would be less closely aligned with Iran is to assume that a post-Assad government would want to have a more neutral or even pro-Western alignment instead. It isn’t entirely clear why any Syrian government would want to move away from Iran at a time when Turkey and Egypt are cultivating closer ties to varying degrees.

Of course, all of this is moot if the Assad regime remains in place. The regime may or may not survive, but I suspect that the Syrian-Iranian alliance will outlast the regime. Supporters of regime change in Syria are likely to be unpleasantly surprised by what follows the fall of Assad.

Erick Erickson objects strongly to Jon Huntsman’s preparations for his 2012 presidential campaign while he was still serving as ambassador in Beijing, saying that he will “never, ever support him” because of the disloyalty he has shown to the President and, as Erickson would have it, to the country as well. That puts things very bluntly, and I doubt that very many people objected to then-Ambassador Lodge’s 1964 presidential run in these terms, but Erickson has a fair point about Huntsman’s loyalty.

Administration officials have reportedly expressed feelings of betrayal, and Erickson insists that it is simply wrong for an ambassador appointed by a President to plan for a presidential run against him while serving abroad. It is, in his words, “unseemly and disgusting.” There is something to this, especially when Huntsman has been presenting himself as someone who puts service to the country ahead of political ambition. In fact, one could fairly say that he very consciously exploited the opportunity to serve in Beijing to advance his political ambition. By the standards of Washington politics, that might not be so remarkable, but for someone who claims to be representing something different from conventional politics and seems to be casting himself as a post-partisan public servant it is a very damaging charge.

Erickson raises some good questions that journalists should ask Huntsman during the nominating process. He asks, “[D]id you fully carry out your duties as Ambassador or let a few things slip along the way hoping to damage the President?” These questions can probably be answered pretty easily, as Huntsman has generally received rave reviews for his performance in Beijing from within and outside the State Department, but they are perfectly fair questions to ask.

Evidently, however, there are limits to Erickson’s patriotic outrage. By “never, ever,” Erickson means that he won’t support him unless he becomes the Republican nominee. “If he is the Republican nominee, I will vote for him,” Erickson writes. Since Huntsman is not at all likely to be the nominee, that is something that Erickson won’t have to worry about later on, but what sense does it make to damn Huntsman for his disloyalty during the nominating process and then say that he’ll support Huntsman in the general election against the President to whom he showed such disloyalty? Wouldn’t that be a case of directly rewarding Huntsman’s disloyalty to Obama by supporting his effort to unseat Obama?