HUCKABEE: [O]ne thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits —

MALZBERG: Of Winston Churchill.

HUCKABEE: The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

Occam’s razor: Huckabee is just ill-informed. ~Dave Weigel

I agree with Weigel that Huckabee put “a few different ideas in the blender,” but the ideas he put in “the blender” are mostly garbage. It’s not saying much for Huckabee that he just happens to be ill-informed about Obama’s youth and upbringing, which are probably the most exhaustively discussed, over-analyzed subjects of any modern presidential biography. What I find most irritating about his remarks was that he is perpetuating the painfully stupid idea that returning a bust of Winston Churchill was one of the great diplomatic slights of our time that can only be explained by referring back to Obama’s Kenyan ancestors. Returning the bust of Churchill doesn’t imply that Obama has a bad opinion of Churchill, but one wouldn’t need Obama’s family background to have a bad opinion of Churchill. If it weren’t for the obsession to distort or simply make thinks up about Obama’s foreign policy, Republicans would not have complained about the returned bust (because it doesn’t matter, the bust was scheduled to return anyway, and the British didn’t care), and there would have been no attempt to speculate about the reasons for its return.

When I first saw the story about Huckabee’s remarks, I thought that it seemed similar to his off-hand remark about Mormon beliefs during the 2007-08 primary season (“don’t they believe Jesus and the devil are brothers?”). As I think about it, there is a difference between these episodes. The first is that Huckabee said something during the primary season that was technically true, but which he presented in a somewhat misleading way because he assumed it would be extremely damaging to Romney among Christian voters. Almost everything Huckabee said in this part of the recent interview was false, but he said it because it fits into the tiresome narrative that Obama disrespects and “snubs” allies. It appears that Huckabee was also directly channeling Glenn Beck’s view on the subject. It’s hard to imagine Huckabee saying this without the two-year drumbeat of nonsensical foreign policy criticism coming from both mainstream conservative pundits and talk radio.

Update: Alex Massie has more:

The “Obama Disses Churchill” nonsense was a scoop brought in by my old chum Tim Shipman and it was, yes, a grand wee story. But even as a fun thing for a Sunday newspaper it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Yet it has lived and thrived well beyond its shelf-life, spawning and nurturing a ridiculous, cockamamie view of the 44th President and his worldview.

The notion that Obama holds some kind of unusual animus towards Britain is entirely deranged and if he doesn’t subscribe to the Cult of Churchill that’s a small point in his favour too. Obama may lack obvious Atlanticist influences or instincts but this is scarcely unusual. The British press – especially, I am afraid, on the right – loves wetting its knickers any time a new President is elected, fretting that they won’t make the “Special Relationship” the centrepiece of their foreign policy and all the rest of it.

Jason Rezaian makes a strong case against lending any support to Mujahideen-e Khalq:

While many argue that the Iranian regime is too repressive to allow opposition, I would venture to say that there are still thousands, perhaps millions, of Iranians completely willing to speak openly about their attitudes on the 2009 election — but good luck finding a single person who is pro-MEK.

————-

In fact, working with the MEK would mean to cease speaking to the Iranian people. Furthermore, it would provide validation for those voices in the Iranian regime that have long accused the U.S. of meddling in their affairs, unnecessarily strengthening the domestic position of hardliners within the system. In a country with varied opinions on all subjects, the contempt reserved for the MEK is nearly universal [bold mine-DL].

Sitting here in Tehran, the mere thought of the MEK becoming a legitimate contributor to the policy dialogue on Iran is laughable, except to those of us who would actually like to see an end to the more than three decades of animosity between the U.S. and Iran, and hope for a productive future relationship through real diplomacy. To us — and we are much stronger in number than the MEK could ever hope to be — the idea is insane, heartbreaking and reprehensible.

It is difficult to convey just how misguided the push to take the MEK off the government’s list of terrorist groups is, but Rezaian does it better than anyone else I’ve seen. I agree entirely with Rezaian’s assessment, and I would add that the idea of working with the MEK is part of an effort to prevent real diplomacy from ever taking place and to make sure that animosity between the U.S. and Iran remains and increases. The main problem isn’t that some of the people promoting this idea are misinformed about the degree of support the MEK has in Iran, but that the MEK’s support in Iran or lack of it doesn’t matter to them. What matters to these pro-MEK Americans is that the MEK is hostile to the government in Tehran, which matches up with their hostility to the Iranian government. Yes, they’re being short-sighted and oblivious to internal Iranian politics, but what else is new?

Autocratic and dictatorial Russia has become a veritable friend. America will say very little about the Russian government’s involvement in the chronic assassination of journalists and dissidents. We don’t mind passing along nuclear-weapon information about our British allies to Russia if it furthers better relations with Moscow and results in a treaty. We apparently are more worried about offending Vladimir Putin than about offending our Polish and Czech allies. We eagerly sign an arms treaty that most people believe favors Russia more than ourselves, and we shrug when Russia does not, as promised, help thwart Iranian nuclear proliferation. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Hanson has done some really impressive work here. I count three grossly false or misleading statements, and it’s just the second paragraph of the article. How did Hanson let this happen? There are two diagnoses, and neither of them is very reassuring. Hanson and his editors must not care that they are making false claims, or they may be so misinformed that they believe these claims are correct.

“Most people” don’t believe the arms reduction treaty favors Russia. This is a rather lazy debating trick, since what Hanson really means is that “most people” opposed to the treaty believe that it favors Russia. They represent a decidedly minority view, and they also happen to be wrong. Russia has provided minimal assistance in imposing sanctions on Iran at the U.N., which isn’t much, but it did happen. The claim about sharing British information is entirely misleading. This provision simply continues a provision from the earlier START. The cancellation of the missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic was handled poorly, but that is the only instance one could cite to support the remaining overblown claim.

What does it say for Hanson’s general critique of administration foreign policy that virtually every statement he made at the start of his argument isn’t credible? The only people who can read that passage and take it seriously are those safely inside a cocoon of conservative commentary and news where all of these half-truths and falsehoods circulate freely. The rest of the article isn’t any better. Let me just point out a couple more egregiously false claims that Hanson makes.

Hanson writes:

We cannot quite assure Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or the Philippines of past levels of support, since we are worried that our old high military profile would now only provoke Chinese sensibilities.

This is laughable. The U.S. has pledged support to Japan over something as questionable as its claim to the Senkaku Islands, it has continued arms sales to Taiwan regardless of what Beijing says, and just in the last few months administration officials have gone out of their way to make an issue out of Chinese claims in the South China Sea. China apparently responded to joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises in the East China Sea, but these exercises are exactly the sort of thing that Hanson claims Washington wants to avoid doing. If someone is worried about provoking Chinese sensibilities, it doesn’t seem to be this administration. One can argue that it was a mistake to let the relationship with Japan weaken on account of disagreements on Okinawa basing rights, and Secretary Gates admitted as much when he was in Japan in January, but Hanson has nothing to say about that.

No dishonest account of Obama’s foreign policy would be complete without a nod to the persistent lie that Obama rejects American exceptionalism, and Hanson makes sure to throw that in as well:

In the theoretical sphere, we are unsure that America is any more “exceptional” than, say, Greece, since such perceptions are always relative and merely rest in the eye of the beholder.

If Hanson can’t even describe what has been happening without resorting to fabrications and distortions, why should anyone trust his conclusions?

Yes, Hanson is just repeating standard talking points, and he doesn’t seem to be giving any thought to them, and he obviously hasn’t bothered checking many of his claims, but it is because they make up a large part of the standard Republican critique on foreign policy that they matter. This is what a lot of mainstream conservative foreign policy argument has devolved into, and that can’t be healthy for the conservative movement or for the quality of foreign policy debate. This is what a number of prospective 2012 Republican candidates will be saying for the better part of the next two years, and a huge part of it is just ideological make-believe.

My column on Libya for The Week is online.

The effect of the Cairo speech was to undermine an ally, the president of Egypt, by going to his capital to speak over his head to Muslim people generally. This idea of an unmediated relationship between the president of the United States and the world’s Muslims was always in tension with traditional approaches to foreign policy. For the purposes of making policy, the many peoples of the world belong to states that are broken down into allies, rivals (friendly and less friendly), and enemies. But this is not how Obama sees the Middle East. Instead, he sees it in terms of an undifferentiated people who need to be convinced that the United States is unbigoted and indeed friendly toward their hopes and dreams.

The problem is that there is no such undifferentiated mass of people. Rather, there are a variety of Muslim sects (e.g., Sunni and Shia), countries (e.g., Iran and Saudi Arabia), and centers of power (e.g., regimes and opposition movements) with a wide array of interests that in many cases cannot be reconciled. Obama approached them all as if Pan-Islamism were alive and well, and not a discredited and failed ideology of half a century ago. ~Lee Smith

Thank goodness The Weekly Standard is on the case to tell us how diverse and complex the Islamic world is, because if there’s one thing that hawkish Republicans are known for it’s their keen grasp of subtle distinctions between different groups of Muslims.

This “pan-Islamist” claim is particularly galling when these are the sort of people who have encouraged the use of idiotic terms such as “Islamofascism” and continue to promote the falsehood that Iran and Al Qaeda are allies. Anti-jihadist hawks have long been the ones promoting the idea of Muslims-as-undifferentiated-mass, and they are the ones that have been conflating and collapsing different Muslim groups together for years. Now Smith is berating Obama for doing this. Smith must think that no one in his audience remembers anything that happened before last month.

What really bothers him about Obama’s responses is that they have not been identical in every situation, but have varied from case to case depending on the country involved. Obama seems to be making distinctions and paying attention to differences between countries, which is what drives Smith mad, but somehow Obama is also looking at the region through pan-Islamist glasses and doesn’t understand the region’s complexity. Even by the standards of knee-jerk hawkish criticism, this is a very poor argument.

As for the Cairo speech, critics at the time and afterwards argued that giving the speech in Cairo was an enormous gift of prestige to Mubarak and the Egyptian government. I don’t think there was very much to this, but until Smith wrote this column no one attempted to argue that the speech actually undermined Mubarak. For his part, Mubarak was reportedly very pleased with the speech, and publicly praised it. The administration may want to refer to the Cairo speech in a lame bid to take “credit” for what has happened in Egypt, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to go along with it.

So is radicalization a major issue that warrants the U.S. to think twice before pursuing a preferred policy, or is it a small threat that doesn’t warrant sweeping government changes? It seems to me you can’t argue that on the one hand, the threat from terrorism is rather small and manageable, and on the other that it is so grave that we need to make major changes to American foreign policy. ~Greg Scoblete

I’m not sure that the two arguments are quite as incompatible or contradictory as Greg suggests, but I welcome the call for thinking through these questions. I have made both arguments over the years, so let’s examine the assumptions behind them. Non-interventionists and realists argue that terrorism is a relatively small threat when compared to other, far more significant security threats that the U.S. has faced in the past. We also argue that terrorism is mainly a response to U.S. policies abroad with the aim of changing those policies. If the second argument is right, that implies that the incidence of terrorist attacks could be reduced or virtually eliminated if the U.S. did not pursue hegemonic and intrusive policies.

It isn’t that the threat is huge. The threat isn’t huge. What matters is that it is avoidable. When calculating the costs and benefits of U.S. policies, it becomes important then to consider whether these policies are doing enough to serve the national interest that they merit the risk of incurring regular attacks on Americans at home and around the world. Whether the threat is relatively large or small, there is no reason to expose the United States to needless dangers. The threat is nowhere near as dire as warmongers make it out to be, but it is much greater than it has to be, and the threat exists in no small part because the people demagoguing and exaggerating the threat frequently prevail in seting policy.

The latest round of interventionist foreign policy over the last ten to thirteen years has focused heavily, though not exclusively, on countering the threat from jihadist terrorism, and everyone would acknowledge that many of the major policy decisions of the last ten years were made politically viable by the 9/11 attacks. Arguments for all of the policies connected to the “war on terror” lean heavily on the idea that terrorism, and specifically jihadist terrorism, represents a major or even an “existential” threat. Any reasonable assessment of the threat shows this to be absurd, and along with those overblown claims goes a large part of the rationale for pretty much every “war on terror” policy.

It seems to me that non-interventionists and realists make blowback arguments to focus on the consequences of current policy, and to point out the flaw in a national security and warfare state that actively makes America less secure by creating enemies where none should exist and provoking attacks that need not happen. It is also a rhetorical move to appeal to public concerns about security without endorsing standard authoritarian and jingoist responses to threats. I can’t speak for anyone else, but what non-interventionists and realists should be trying to do is to channel the public’s appropriate moral outrage over terrorist atrocities towards reforming the policies that create these unintended, avoidable consequences. To that end, there doesn’t need to be any exaggeration of the nature of the threat or the power of jihadism, but there should be a steady stream of arguments that the threat can be significantly reduced or possibly eliminated by reforming U.S. policies so that they actually minimize the risks to the nation rather than generate new dangers. The threat from terrorism isn’t all that great, but it could be greatly reduced. All that it will cost us is our undesirable pursuit of hegemony.

Who gets upset by the imposition of arms embargoes on countries in the throes of civil war? As one might expect, it is the people who want us to take a side in the conflict. Paul Wolfowitz is bothered that the arms embargo the U.N. has just imposed on Libya applies to the entire country:

If that sounds absurd, it is exactly what the United States and the “international community” did at the outset of the war in Bosnia 19 years ago. The embargo on the Bosnians remained in effect for years, depriving them of the means to defend themselves, with the argument advanced that supplying arms to either side would simply prolong the war. In fact, what prolonged the war was the weakness of the Bosnians.

Er, no. What prolonged the war was the continued support for armed factions from outside Bosnia. The arms embargo was disadvantageous to the Bosnian Muslims in that the other factions in Bosnia had ready access to weapons from Serbia and Croatia, but the issue was never that the arms embargo as such prolonged the war. One thing that prolonged the war was that all of the parties to the conflict had goals that were far more ambitious than they had the strength to realize. Obviously, it was the lack of an effective arms embargo that helped the war to continue for years.

The Bosnian arms embargo formally penalized all sides, but the embargo didn’t prevent arms supplies from reaching some of the factions. In retrospect, imposing an arms embargo on Bosnia seemed like the obvious, appropriate thing for outsiders to do, but it tipped the balance of the conflict in ways that some outsiders didn’t like. It’s no coincidence that the Westerners most frustrated with the arms embargo on Bosnia were/are the people who believed that the U.S. and NATO should actively take sides with Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the war. What they were interested in was not hastening the end of the war, which would have worked to the benefit of the Serbs, but instead they were interested in turning the tide of the war against the Serbs. The arms embargo got in the way of doing that, which is why American interventionists wanted it lifted.

Wolfowitz’s real objection to the current arms embargo is that there is one side in Libya’s civil war he believes that outsiders should be actively helping, and the arms embargo technically prevents that. However, if the goal is to limit the extent and duration of conflict, rather than to achieve a particular political result, imposing an arms embargo is reasonable. At the rate that the rebels seem to be taking over most of Libya with the weapons that they already have available from military bases and defectors, the arms embargo may not matter very much to the final outcome of the conflict. Nonetheless, it’s important not to fall for these phony objections.

P.S. It’s also worth adding that the arms embargo authorized by UNSCR 1970 specifically prohibits states from allowing the transit of mercenaries to Libya. It is possible that this prohibition will simply be ignored by other states, but it is directly aimed at halting one of the few supports for Gaddafi’s hold on power. Needless to say, Wolfowitz pays no attention to the significance of this provision.

Niall Ferguson dreams of the McCain administration that might have been:

The correct strategy—which, incidentally, John McCain would have actively pursued had he been elected in 2008 [bold mine-DL]—was twofold. First, we should have tried to repeat the successes of the pre-1989 period, when we practiced what we preached in Central and Eastern Europe by actively supporting those individuals and movements who aspired to replace the communist puppet regimes with democracies.

Western support for the likes of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Solidarity in Poland was real. And it was one of the reasons that, when the crisis of the Soviet empire came in 1989, there were genuine democrats ready and waiting to step into the vacuums created by Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Sinatra Doctrine” (whereby each Warsaw Pact country was allowed to do things “its way”).

No such effort has been made in the Arab world. On the contrary, efforts in that direction have been scaled down. The result is that we have absolutely no idea who is going to fill today’s vacuums of power. Only the hopelessly naive imagine that thirtysomething Google executives will emerge as the new leaders of the Arab world, aided by their social network of Facebook friends. The far more likely outcome—as in past revolutions—is that power will pass to the best organized, most radical, and most ruthless elements in the revolution, which in this case means Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood.

The worrying thing is that Ferguson might actually believe this. Had McCain been elected, and had he managed to get to this point without starting WWIII over South Ossetia, he would most likely be facing very similar scenes. Democratists populating the McCain administration would have been agitating for pushing more political reform in these countries, and Washington would have started selecting the favorites that it wanted to promote, and it still wouldn’t have changed the reality that we wouldn’t know who will fill the power vacuums that are opening up in one country after the next. Western support for Arab liberals wouldn’t make them more successful than they would otherwise be. If Western backing were an important reason for the political success of the factions most Westerners prefer, the governments of Lebanon, Iraq, and Gaza would have a very different composition than they do. How are the “genuine democrats” doing there? We do know that actively supporting Russian liberals in the fashion Ferguson recommends didn’t lead to the greater success of Russian liberalism, but instead resulted in seeing it discredited and defeated for a generation.

Only the hopelessly naive (or the desperately opportunistic partisan) would believe that a little more McCain-sponsored Western support for, say, Ayman Nour would have dramatically altered the political landscape in Egypt in just a few years’ time. If “the best organized, most radical, and most ruthless elements” will be able to exploit the situation in Egypt now, they would have been able to do so even if the U.S. had followed all of the democracy promotion advocates’ advice. Nostalgia for Cold War successes is badly misleading. Western support for eastern European dissidents was all very well, but it wasn’t what made the revolutions in 1989 a success, and it wasn’t what led to the mostly peaceful transitions to democratic government in the years that followed. Westerners very much want to take credit for 1989 and afterwards (we “won” the Cold War, after all), but the reality is that this was something that the peoples of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union accomplished almost entirely on their own. The Western contribution to that political transformation was minimal, and we can be certain that if it had not turned out well hardly anyone would want to bring it up now.

The sobering thing about rapid political change in these countries is that there really is very little that the U.S. could have done differently in just the last few years that would have produced a significantly different outcome. Democratists look at what happened in the 1980s, they reason foolishly that 1989 happened because of what the U.S. and Western allies did in supporting political dissidents, and they conclude that “we did it before, we can do it again!” Just as Iraq war supporters stupidly invoked Japan and Germany as meaningful precedents for the political transformation that could happen in Iraq, Ferguson is invoking the successes of eastern European dissidents as precedents for what could have happened in the Near East.

What makes Ferguson’s comparison even harder to take is the presumption that Western support for eastern European dissidents was important to their success, when the success of eastern European revolutions in 1989 rested almost entirely with the peoples of those countries. Ferguson’s analysis and recommendations seem to hinge on believing that Western support for dissidents in communist states was important to the successful political transition in those states, because Ferguson can’t seem to imagine foreign political movements that succeed or fail regardless of what Westerners do or don’t do. Ferguson assumes that the “genuine democrats” don’t have much of a chance in these countries, which is a defensible, skeptical position, but then he destroys any credibility he might still have by arguing that the “genuine democrats” would have a decent chance at prevailing if only the U.S. and the West had promoted democracy a bit more.

If there is anything more pathetic than the usual round of “who lost [fill in the blank]?”, it is the risible attempt to claim that all would be well if there had just been more American emphasis on democracy promotion earlier on. Ferguson practically admits that the rest of his argument is nonsense when he stresses the poverty and relative lack of education of the populations in most of these countries.

Stalin had opted for a Russia that was isolationist, which meant, among other things, the isolation (even more than the segregation) of foreign diplomats from contacts with almost any Russian; this included, too, close and constant secret police accompaniment and supervision. Because of his great interest in Russia, because of his affection for its people, Kennan was even more pained by these conditions than were other diplomatists posted in Moscow….At the same time the violence and the rabid lies of their government directed against American and Americans were such that, at least on one occasion, he came close to suggesting that while an American diplomatic representation should remain, there might be no need for an American ambassador in Moscow. He was unhappy with some of the activities of his government, too. He tried–on occasion, more or less successfully–to curb such American military undertakings that, close to the Soviet Union’s frontiers, would unnecessarily arouse Russian suspicions and countermeasures. In early September he sat down at his desk and–again–wrote a long paper for Washington entitled “The Soviet Union and the Atlantic Pact.” In this he warned against excessive militarization on the part of the West, because of the condition that the Soviet Union did not want another war and did not plan to extend militarily. The dispatch was comparable to the Long Telegram of 1946, but only to some extent; it went largely unnoticed by Washington. But what vexed Kennan above all were his experiences of sequestered life in Moscow. The result was his–unexpected–explosion, and the subsequent end of his ambassadorial career. ~John Lukacs, George Kennan: A Study of Character (p. 117-118)

I wanted to find Lukacs’ account of the end of Kennan’s tenure as ambassador to the USSR after Ryan Lizza referred to it in this item on Jon Huntsman. Lizza’s description seemed incomplete, and it is. Lizza uses Kennan’s “explosion” as a precedent for an ambassador causing an uproar in the country where he is posted, but this misrepresents Kennan’s actions and almost gives Huntsman a pass for what Lizza speculates he might be doing. Lizza wrote:

But the fallout from Huntsman’s adventure in a Beijing market clotted with protesters raises an interesting question: What if, in his last two months before he leaves his Beijing post, Huntsman provoked some sort of diplomatic row that emphasized an ideological split with the President? What if he demanded that Obama give more aid and support to the pro-democracy movement? That could certainly make some waves in Iowa.

I can’t think of a recent Presidential candidate who used his or her diplomatic confrontations as a campaign platform, but my editor, Nick Thompson, the author of “The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War,” reminds me that Kennan’s very public spat with a Communist regime served him well politically later in life.

For Huntsman’s sake, and for the sake of the relationship with China, I would have to hope that his dedication to serving as ambassador in a professional way would prevent him from doing anything like this. This is the scenario that James Fallows worried about when rumors of a Huntsman run startled swirling. Were Huntsman foolish enough to make some melodramatic break with the administration, everyone would see it as a transparently political ploy. Far from helping him with anyone in the U.S., it would signal to anyone paying attention that Huntsman was unduly self-serving and was willing to put his own ambitions ahead of serving responsibly in his current position. I don’t know that Huntsman would even consider doing such a thing, but it isn’t a compliment to suggest that he might.

This is why it’s important to understand the difference between what Kennan did and why, and what Lizza suggests that Huntsman might do. Kennan’s outburst was the result of frustration with his experience in Moscow, and it obviously wasn’t a deliberate plan with the goal of setting himself up politically back home. Despite disagreements with Washington, his statement wasn’t primarily an expression of his dissatisfaction with policy. What Lizza proposes here is that Huntsman should pick up on (or maybe invent?) some China policy disagreement he may have with the administration and then exaggerate it for the sake of creating the appearance of distance between himself and Obama. Whether or not the disagreement would have merit is irrelevant. As Huntsman would be concocting this diplomatic incident after his resignation had already been accepted, it also wouldn’t do Huntsman any good politically. Lizza acknowledges as much at the end. He wouldn’t be seen as someone speaking out on a point of deep principle, which some people might at least respect even if they thought it unwise. He would be seen as obviously pandering to domestic constituencies that want to find fault with Obama’s foreign policy, and his credibility would be badly damaged.