In the face of this lack of will on the part of the Europeans, the United States’ readiness to rapidly and constantly support the pursuit of European interests out of solidarity to the alliance will also diminish, as is currently illustrated in the case of Libya. The consequence of this is that NATO may transform into a forum for nonbinding trans-Atlantic political discourse. With solidarity fading away within the military alliance, the Europeans would be relegated to ensuring their security on their own in the future.

That is a scenario that surely cannot be in Germany’s interests if it wants to pursue a serious, credible and responsible security policy. However, Germany’s present self-isolation leaves the international community with the fatal impression that Germany, the former main beneficiary of NATO, is no longer available to shape a NATO strategy for the future. And why isn’t it? Because of ignorant, nationalist-pacifist provincialism. ~Jorg Himmelreich

When Americans wring their hands about German pacifism, it is fairly strange, but when Germans do it there is something really bizarre going on. It is amusing that Himmelreich feels the need to throw in the label nationalist as part of his indictment, as if the greatest danger from nationalism is its capacity to undermine multilateral wars of choice. If this were what we could reliably expect from nationalists, we might want to encourage them.

On the whole, Himmelreich’s complaints about Germany’s “self-isolation” ring just as false as standard American warnings about the bogey of “isolationism.” In both cases, the supposed isolation under discussion is not anything like diplomatic, economic, or cultural isolation. Merkel isn’t suggesting that Germany put itself under an embargo, nor is she saying that Germany should break off relations with all other nations. There is no question of Germany’s pursuing autarky, or hunkering down behind fortifications, or cutting itself off from the rest of the world. What we’re talking about is an unwillingness to support the killing of foreigners.

One can debate the merits of that decision, but instead of doing that the Germany-bashers have usually resorted to deriding Germany for its lack of cosmopolitan belligerence. That’s why we keep hearing how the European project is being jeopardized by a “nationalist” Germany, as if Merkel were Marine Le Pen, and the government that has so far kept the EU and euro from imploding is being accused of provincialism! Of course, if one is provincial, ignorance has to come with the territory, because it’s obvious that only an ignorant person who knew nothing about Libya would not want to attack it. The attackers are clearly so very well-informed.

I keep seeing claims that Libya has marked the death of a common European defense policy, but this is the same abuse of language that militarists engage in here in the U.S. when they refer to spending for power projection to prosecute wars of choice as “defense.” Libya is showing the limits of how far European governments can project power outside Europe, but in the case of Libya this has nothing to do with a common European defense. Europeans will have to spend more on their militaries to provide for such a defense. If Libya reveals the obsolescence of NATO and speeds that up it may have at least one small redeeming element. What Libya does not show is an unwillingness on the part of Germany to support a common European defense policy. It shows that Germany is not interesting in using European resources to settle a North African civil war.

Describing neutrality or inaction or opposition to war as “isolation” is an impressive abuse of language. One of the first things that happens when a war starts is that the relations that previously existed between two or more nations are severed. Economic and diplomatic ties are broken. Governments that do not participate in ongoing wars are among the least isolated in that they can conduct commerce and diplomacy much more freely, and their relations with other governments are not distorted by war aims.

It would be one thing if Germany were one of a few states objecting to the Libyan war. Then it might be the case that Germany was isolating itself diplomatically by staking out an extremely unpopular position. That isn’t what’s happening. Germany happens to be on the same side regarding Libya as the vast majority of governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and in Europe it is on the same side as the second-largest non-U.S. member of NATO and one of the six largest members of the EU. Most of NATO is uninvolved in Libya, and even some of the governments formally supporting the mission are not fully committed. It is not Germany that is isolating itself, but rather those few European states that are carrying out the attacks on Libya.

John McCain has a long history of engaging in grandstanding-as-policymaking. He does this in both domestic policy and foreign policy debates. On most issues, he does not so much have informed opinions as moralistic and ideological reactions that are shaped and channeled according to what will gain him the greatest attention. Like most other “centrists” praised for their independence and bold truth-telling, he has a knack for aligning himself with whatever happens to be the fashionable cause of the moment so long as it does not conflict with two basic imperatives: 1) question the national security state as rarely as possible; 2) criticize an administration’s foreign policy if it is insufficiently militaristic, but otherwise act as a reliable supporter of the executive. On Libya, McCain has been able to combine his eagerness to grandstand and moralize with his habit of backing military solutions to political crises. Thus he celebrated the Libyan rebels as his “heroes” and as Libyan patriots.

Jack Hunter points out that McCain’s flat denial of any connection between the rebels and Al Qaeda or jihadist militancy is simply not true, which makes him either ignorant (always possible) or shows that he is openly cheering on a force that includes people who were until very recently attempting to kill Americans. Arguably, many Arab and Afghan patriots become jihadists because of their patriotism, just as happened with some Chechens, but acknowledging this would require that McCain accept that jihadists are frequently driven by political grievances, that terrorism is provoked by occupation and invasion, and that the sort of activist, militaristic policies that McCain favors is a boon to filling the ranks of jihadists.

It is possible to see Libyan rebels, including the jihadists, as patriots, but this is an idea that runs contrary to so many of McCain’s other long-held ideological tenets that I doubt he could keep those ideas in his mind at the same time. In fact, McCain’s praise of the Libyan rebels as patriots is purely situational and dependent on the fact that they are currently the alternative to Gaddafi in a war that McCain has been pushing to have since February. Obviously, he would never dream of saying that same thing about, say, the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr or supporters of Hizbullah. Those people are fanatics and terrorists!

If Libyan rebels are patriots, what did that make the Iraqi insurgents? What does that make the Afghan Taliban? Of course, the latter are classified as the enemy, and the Libyan rebels have been endorsed by at least two Western governments as the legitimate Libyan government, and for all intents and purposes Washington has been treating them as Reagan treated the mujahideen. Thus people that McCain would otherwise be happy to see locked away indefinitely in Guantanamo or worse are now among his new congeries of heroes. McCain’s heroes are rather like his policy positions: he embraces those that are useful to his present need, and the substance of what they represent, like the substance of the policies he endorses, is quite beside the point.

Something else that McCain has a habit of doing is endorsing foreign national causes with enormous zeal. Back in the late 1990s, the best way to be an anti-Russian hawk was to embrace the Chechen cause, and so McCain became a vocal spokesmen on behalf of Chechen self-determination, despite the fact that the Chechen cause was becoming more and more closely aligned with jihadist fanatics and terrorist atrocities by the end of the decade. More recently, he has become a comically outspoken supporter of the cause of Georgia, and everyone who pays attention to such things remembers his crazed “we are all Georgians now” routine during the August 2008 war. The point of these exercises isn’t just to stake out dangerous and confrontational policy positions, though that is part of it, but also to grab media attention by jumping out in front and identifying with the popular cause of the moment.

The overthrow of Assad, the Assad government, the Assad Mafia, would be a very welcome thing in Syria. ~Brit Hume

It’s safe to say that Hume has no clue what the fall of Assad’s government would mean for Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, or Turkey. In fact, no one has any clear idea exactly what would happen, but most of the likely scenarios would be quite bad for all of the countries I just mentioned. Of course, we have seen what happens when a heterogeneous state ruled by a Baathist dictatorship experiences the collapse of its regime. Robert Kaplan sums up the possible consequences:

Were central authority in Syria to substantially weaken or even break down, the regional impact would be greater than in the case of Iraq. Iraq is bordered by the strong states of Turkey and Iran in the north and east, and is separated from Saudi Arabia in the south and Syria and Jordan to the west by immense tracts of desert. Yes, the Iraq war propelled millions of refugees to those two latter countries, but the impact of Syria becoming a Levantine Yugoslavia might be even greater [bold mine-DL]. That is because of the proximity of Syria’s major population zones to Lebanon and Jordan, both of which are unstable already.

The idea that any of this would be “very welcome” for the nations that would suffer the effects of this upheaval is madness, and it is ridiculous to think that it would be “very welcome” for the U.S. As we found in Iraq, the slogan that “we pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East — and we achieved neither” sounds insufferably glib in the wake of the humanitarian disasters that result from the breakdown in real political stability. In fact, the people who use this slogan tend to go out of their way to destroy or undermine whatever stability existed in the region. Some of them will keep trying to do the same thing in Syria, and if they succeed the greatest losers will be the people of Syria and the surrounding countries.

As Daniel Trombly explains very well, Max Boot’s post from last week on the Libyan rebels is wrong in a number of ways:

The point is that Libya is not America in 1775, and the Libyan Civil War is not the American War of Independence. The experience of the American rebels is a dangerous and misleading analogy that creates a falsely reassuring narrative of intervention in Libya, when the historical situations and interests at play are extremely different. We are not somehow betraying our predecessors by remaining skeptical of the Libyan rebels, nor does invoking them give us any insight into how to handle a largely humanitarian intervention in another country’s civil war.

When the Libyan civil war started, supporters of Western intervention frequently scoffed at the idea that it should be up to the Libyan rebels to prevail in their own fight. “What about French support for the American colonies?” they would ask. This was never a good objection, and it is actually a disastrous comparison for interventionists to make in support of their new war. If Americans want to make arguments for military intervention on behalf of a rebellion in another country, they should probably try to avoid one of the classic examples of how such interventions can ruin major powers. France intervened on our side, and in the process burdened itself with ruinous debt such that its entire political system later went through violent, destructive upheaval for a decade as a result. The U.S. isn’t going to go through such convulsions because of expenditures on the Libyan war, but it would be hard to come up with a more discouraging comparison as far as the intervening government is concerned than France’s intervention on our side.

It was hardly any consolation to the Bourbons later on that the United States had achieved its independence, and far from advancing French interests the alliance with the U.S. proved to be fleeting and of little strategic value to the French later on. As Americans, we can be grateful that the French government was filled with people more concerned with getting revenge on Britain than in tending to the dynastic interests of the Bourbons and the real national interests of France. As a matter of serving French interests, the Treaty of Alliance might well be one of the bigger mistakes the government of France has ever made. Fortunately for us, the Libyan war is not on the same scale. That’s about the only favorable thing I can think to say about it.

Gary Johnson announced the start of his presidential campaign last week. I’m quite late commenting on the story on account of Holy Week and other obligations, but I do have a few things to say. If Ron Paul weren’t intending to run, I could easily see myself supporting Johnson against the rest of the GOP field, but as it seems more likely than not that Paul will be running I don’t quite see the point of Johnson’s campaign.

As I’ve said before, it will help promote libertarian and antiwar right causes to have two candidates in the race instead of just one, but having two candidates running at the same time will just as often reduce the impact of a candidate espousing these views as it will bring greater attention to them. Neither one will win as many delegates with both of them in the race as one would win on his own, and contrary to emerging conventional wisdom Paul has the greater ability to win support among Republican primary voters. Because I don’t expect Johnson to have a serious chance at the nomination, I would be somewhat willing to overlook his socially liberal and pro-immigration views so long as he made criticizing authoritarian and interventionist policies the focus of his candidacy. I don’t think I am very representative of antiwar conservatives on that point. It goes without saying that those other views that Johnson holds makes him significantly less competitive in a Republican primary field than Paul. While I might be willing to give Johnson a pass, large numbers of conservative Ron Paul supporters would never have given Johnson’s candidacy a second thought if he were the only one running. If Paul is also in the race, it’s safe to say that none of us would consider supporting him.

There remains the danger that dueling Paul and Johnson campaigns will bring out the fratricidal element among their respective supporters. Given the genuinely shabby way that many currently pro-Johnson libertarians treated Paul in 2008, I’m not sure that this will be easily avoided. As it happens, I agree with Justin Raimondo’s criticisms of some of Johnson’s foreign policy positions, and he is probably right that Johnson is running to be the candidate for libertarians who don’t want to be identified with Ron Paul. These include people who went out of their way to undermine Paul during the ’08 campaign. One thing that may make such a feud less likely is Johnson’s relationship with Paul. To his credit, Johnson was Paul’s supporter throughout the campaign, and when talk of Johnson’s candidacy started Paul still seemed to be very well-disposed towards Johnson. If both feel compelled to run, I would rather that their supporters spend their time and energy helping both of them against the rest of the field.

One of the reasons that Johnson has given underwhelming or disconcerting answers on some subjects is that he doesn’t seem to have given them as much thought as I would like. When Johnson made his statement about supporting military intervention to prevent a “clear genocide,” it was clear that he hadn’t squared this with his call to slash military spending drastically, nor had he thought about the virtual inevitability of “nation-building” that would follow such an intervention. If he doesn’t will the means, and refuses to accept the responsibilities that go along with intervention, my hope is that he doesn’t really favor such interventions. That said, pleading ignorance is not a very good excuse for an incoherent policy view. In fact, such ignorance ought to be disqualifying.

On Libya, Johnson’s reaction was mostly encouraging, but it wasn’t as forceful or as principled as it should have been. Johnson ends up in the right place, which is something, but in light of Johnson’s own comments about humanitarian intervention it isn’t nearly enough. Johnson has previously opened the door to launching a war of choice in which no American interest is at stake, and he has done so by making a misguided and absurd claim that this is “what we have always been about,” which isn’t significantly different from the insipid notion that the U.S. has to meddle in other nations’ internal affairs because “America is different.”

My new column on the U.S. and Pakistan for The Week is now online.

When Thou didst descend to death 0 Life Immortal, Thou didst slay hell with the splendor of Thy Divinity! And when from the depths Thou didst raise the dead, all the hosts of the heavens cried out: O Giver of Life! Christ our God! Glory to Thee!

The angel standing by the grave cried out to the women: Myrrh is proper for the dead, but Christ has shown himself a stranger to corruption.

When the glorious disciples were enlightened at the washing of their feet before the supper, the impious Judas was darkened by the disease of avarice, and to the lawless judges he betrayed You, the Righteous Judge. Behold, this man because of avarice hanged himself. Flee from the insatiable desire which dared such things against the Master! O Lord Who deals righteously with all, glory to You!