Thanks to one of the guest bloggers over at the League, I came across this 1989 article on the Reagan administration’s handling of Ferdinand Marcos’ exit. As Reagan’s 100th birthday has prompted all sorts of reflections on his career, so it might be worth reviewing how it was that the U.S. came to accept the removal of Ferdinand Marcos from power in 1986. What we find is that Reagan was very slow to react to Marcos’ election fraud and intimidation, and this came three years after Marcos’ forces had assassinated the leader of the opposition, and even then he very grudgingly accepted that Marcos could no longer remain in power. The push to get Marcos to leave filtered up through the administration from lower-level officials, the principals were among the last to accept that Marcos was finished, and Reagan was the very last to accept it.

The article includes many useful reminders that Reagan absolutely did not do the things administration critics have been calling on Obama to do in Egypt and elsewhere. Here is one example:

In January 1984, the State Department recommended that economic leverage be exerted on Marcos to reform his regime. Reagan conceded to modest pressure, but asserted that to throw Marcos ”to the wolves” would confront America with ”a Communist power in the Pacific.”

This one is even more relevant:

In Washington, a State Department task force fed Reagan massive evidence of Marcos’s electoral abuses. But the President preferred his own sources. Nancy gave him information she was receiving by telephone from Imelda. Donald T. Regan, his chief of staff, and William Casey pressed him to stick with Marcos.

Nor was Reagan keen on hearing Lugar, who returned to Washington on Feb. 11. Lugar candidly told Reagan that Marcos was ”cooking the results.” Reagan referred to a television segment he had seen of Aquino’s campaigners destroying ballots (it later turned out they were Marcos workers). Lugar persisted, relating his own accounts of Marcos’s misconduct. Reagan disregarded him, observing at a news conference that evening that fraud was ”occurring on both sides.”

In the end, Reagan very reluctantly agreed to push Marcos out:

Finally, Reagan seemed to be resigned to dropping Marcos, though he insisted the Philippine leader must be ”approached carefully” and ”asked rather than told” to depart. He declined to telephone him personally or send him a private message. But as the session closed, Reagan had acquiesced to deposing his ”old friend.”

Still, he and his staff were haunted by the prospect that Marcos might attack the rebels and slaughter civilians – on world television. Reagan approved an Administration statement warning Marcos that he ”would cause untold damage to the relationship between our two governments” if he used force. But he kept secret his decision to tell Marcos to leave in the hope that he might go voluntarily and so be spared the embarrassment of being removed under American pressure.

In other words, Reagan’s approach to removing Marcos was extremely cautious and slow, and this was in a country with a credible, relatively united opposition backed by the Catholic Church and familiar with a specifically American model of government. Even here, Reagan’s anticommunism led him to resist change in the Philippines until the Marcos regime had reached the breaking point. After Marcos was gone, Reagan wasn’t in any hurry to embrace Aquino:

Not until April, two months after her victory, did he personally congratulate her by telephone. He refused to grant Aquino the full honor of a state visit on her trip to Washington late in 1986. Had not Shultz dissuaded him, he might have called on Marcos during a stop in Honolulu.

I don’t point all of this out to criticize Reagan. His caution and concerns were appropriate, even if the fear of a Communist Philippines was wildly overblown, and he was right not to be publicly pushing for Marcos’ departure ahead of time. Put another way, even though he had less reason to worry, the U.S. had less at stake, and there was a straightforward political transition available in the election of Aquino, Reagan was more cautious about change in the Philippines than even Obama has been regarding change in Egypt. If Obama has largely been a realist in his response to Egypt, Reagan was even more so in a similar situation.

Last month, I mentioned that I was now reading The Caucasus by Thomas de Waal, and I promised addtional posts in the future. I probably won’t be blogging on every part of the book, but I wanted to make some general comments about it before I write posts on more specific topics. Given the complex and contentious nature of the subject matter de Waal is discussing, I have the found the book to be exemplary in its honesty and balance. He addresses the misconceptions and mistakes of the Russian government as straightforwardly as he does the errors of the local actors. The Caucasus also pays attention to national myths without simply endorsing them. The things that have stood out for me so far (I have not had a chance to read all of the chapters yet) are de Waal’s interest in thinking of the South Caucasus as a distinct region, his fair-minded handling of the question of the Armenian genocide, and his attention to the area’s demographic changes over the centuries that turned Tiflis from a predominantly Armenian commercial center in the early modern period into Tbilisi and the center of modern Georgia. This is something that has interested me since I first became acquainted with Sayat Nova, the great Armenian poet who served at the court of a Georgian ruler in Tiflis.

Something in the introduction that de Waal wrote about the relations between the South Caucasus and the rest of the world struck me as particularly worth noting:

In this conjunction of the deeply local and the global, the small players can overestimate their importance, and the big players can promise too much.

This has obvious applications for the recent past, and de Waal uses the 2008 war explicitly as an example of how this dangerous dynamic can work. Sympathizers with the Saakashvili government are partly to blame for causing the small player in this case, the Georgian government, to overestimate its importance. When major figures in the American political class are routinely praising and endorsing a client state as the hope of the entire region and the leading edge of progress, it is understandable that leaders of any small state might start imagining that they are more important than they are. Related to this are the unreasonably high expectations of help that the client state inevitably has as a result.

The situation in Georgia before the 2008 war was far from optimal, but after following the situation for the past several years and especially after reading de Waal’s treatment of the conflicts involved I am more sure than ever that U.S. support for the Georgian government enabled dangerous and self-destructive behavior. I have often criticized Saakashvili and his actions as reckless in the last six years of writing, but I should have been more clear that it was the U.S. that was truly reckless in its mindless encouragement of a Georgian government in a region that it didn’t understand. Yes, Saakashvili was foolish to expect American backing, but Washington was perhaps even more to blame for offering false hope and conjuring up the illusion of support. If Saakashvili overestimated how much he and his government mattered to the U.S., it was because Bush and his allies gave him reason to believe it.

While March 8 parties are openly supportive of ongoing Egyptian protests seeking the ouster of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, many rival March 14 factions said they believe it’s best to stay out of an internal Egyptian issue. ~The Daily Star

As I have just said below, I don’t think it is all that wise to be declaring support for political movements in other countries when we don’t know what they will lead to, so I don’t fault the March 14 parties for showing some common sense here. (They also have no reason to cheer the downfall of a reigme that has been supportive of their cause.) What is worth noting here is that the coalition that Westerners openly, egregiously support as the only acceptable governing coalition of Lebanon doesn’t want to appear to be taking sides. The coalition that enjoys most of its foreign backing from Syria and Iran is very excited to see Mubarak fall. The parties in Lebanon that American democratists desperately want us to support are staying out of it, and the parties that they despise are actively cheering Egyptian political change. The March 8 parties seem to understand what many American democracy promoters do not: revolutionary change tends to help those forces in the region that the democracy promoters claim to hate.

The March 8 parties calculate that an Egypt without Mubarak is a good outcome for them, and everything the Iranian government has been saying publicly tells us that Tehran takes the same view. Part of this is simply propaganda, and their calculation may turn out to be wrong, but it should be noted that this upheaval in Egypt could be another episode of would-be democratization effectively empowering Iran and its allies. That is not because a democratic Egypt would align itself with them, but because “liberation” will have undermined yet another bulwark against Iranian influence and power, just as the invasion of Iraq destroyed a government dedicated to resisting Iran’s influence*. What is strange is that many of the people who were most eager to invade Iraq discounted this possibility before the invasion, and they have been desperately trying to pretend that this has not been the result of their war at the same time that they urge confrontational policies against Iran. The people who are supposedly the most opposed to Iran’s government have been endorsing every political change in the region that makes the Iranian government more influential throughout the region.

* Containing Iran was not one of the main reasons why Americans should have opposed the war, but greater Iranian influence in the region was a very likely outcome that war supporters blithely dismissed as improbable. Likewise, containing Iran and its allies is a generally misguided policy, and the U.S. should instead pursue rapprochement with Iran, but what democratists are offering us is the worst of both worlds: endorsing political change that makes Tehran more influential (or reduces opposition to its influence) while insisting that the U.S. and Iran must be adversaries no matter what. The point is that their political and strategic judgments are regularly wrong.

Update: Dr. Hadar makes some of the same observations in this very good post:

Indeed, when the leaders of Shiism International will be celebrating their great success in remaking the Middle East twenty years from now, my guess is that W’s picture will be hanging next to that of Khomeini: The secular Arab-Sunni minority that had ruled Iraq was replaced with a government elected in open election by the Arab-Shiite majority that is Islamist and has close ties to Iran – and includes the anti-American followers of Muqtada al-Sadr.

In other parts of the Middle East, the Freedom Agenda forced the Syrians, led by the secular Ba’ath to withdraw its troops from Lebanon – and through open election created the conditions for the electoral wins of the Hizbollah movement whose leaders have just gotten rid of a pro-American PM and replaced him with their own candidate. And then there was another case of open election in Palestine which brought to power Hamas — strategic partner of Iran and the ideological ally of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Can someone explain to me how a policy that helped shift the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and the Levant helped advance U.S. interests? Or how the strengthening of the power of political movements who discriminate against women, Christians, Jews, and gays helped promote democracy and liberalism in the Middle East?

Reading Nick Kristof’s claim that “Today, we are all Egyptians,” I thought back to an old column I had written in 2006 that addressed this sort of misguided expression of solidarity with another nation in crisis:

It is ludicrous because, no matter the feelings of goodwill and solidarity, we cannot seriously identify ourselves with another nation, nor can they identify themselves with us, because in so many respects every nation, every people is significantly different in meaningful ways that precludes an identification of any two. The fundamental differences between nations also prevent a ready and reflexive identification of the interests of any two nations on the basis of decent moral outrage at evils perpetrated on another people’s civilians.

When the conflict is an internal political struggle between two groups of people of the same nation, as it is in Egypt, it is even harder to argue that “we are all Egyptians.” The thugs attacking the protesters earlier this week are Egyptians, as are the people who gave them the orders to attack. Those obviously aren’t the Egyptians with whom Kristof wants us to identify. Kristof doesn’t want to be that sort of Egyptian, as they are the ones trying to help Mubarak hang on a little longer, and the purpose of these expressions of solidarity is to declare a side in an ongoing conflict. Certainly, Kristof must assume that the protesters represent the broad majority, and that the supporters of the regime are unrepresentative, but he can’t possibly know that. When both sides in the struggle are Egyptian and they are divided by political goals and interests, it doesn’t tell us very much to declare solidarity with Egyptians. In the end, these expressions of solidarity are sentimental or ideological, and they tend not to mean very much in terms of lending other people anything more than a little moral support, and they are driven by some incessant need to take sides in other nations’ affairs.

More important, these expressions are simply not true. Kristof wants to support the protesters, and he thinks everyone should do likewise, and that’s his prerogative, but what makes his sympathy and solidarity notable is that he is not an Egyptian and never will be. He is identifying with the protesters because he sympathizes with their struggle, and he hopes that they succeed, but like McCain’s meaningless declaration that “we are all Georgians” it implies a degree of identification on our part with another people that simply doesn’t exist. Making these statements gives the misleading impression that “we” are going to do a great deal to help, when most of “us” are not going to do anything. It’s almost presumptuous to claim to belong to another people’s political struggle when “we” don’t have to bear any of the risks or face any of the consequences.

It may also be a mistake to declare support for the protesters before we have any idea what comes of their protests. Burke wrote in his Reflections something that seems most relevant:

I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have actually received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulation on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and it not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risque congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people before they declare themselves will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience, and in situations when those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.

To his critics, especially on the right, Bush’s cardinal sin was timidity. He was the quintessential anti-Reagan. Where Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall and boldly chastised the Soviet Union, Bush stood before Ukrainians eager for independence and told them to calm down .(That speech earned the nick-name “Chicken Kiev” by New York Times columnist William Safire.) When protestors were butchered in Tiananmen Square, Bush’s criticism was muted. Though he celebrated the “new breeze” of freedom blowing across Europe, Bush and his foreign policy team always appeared more worried that the breeze would blow over the old order too quickly. ~Greg Scoblete

I came across Greg’s 2008 column on the virtues of the elder Bush’s “prudential realism” today, and it is striking to me how similar Obama’s overall approach to foreign policy has been. When Bush was in office, major changes were taking place throughout Europe and the USSR, and on the whole Bush’s response to those events was cautious, limited, and prudent. In retrospect, many Americans look back on the elder Bush’s administration’s tenure as the last time that the U.S. practiced a mostly sane and responsible foreign policy, and Bush is now widely credited for handling the swift, sudden changes in the world fairly well to the extent that the U.S. had any role in them. It is a measure of how warped foreign policy discourse has become that Obama can be faulted by self-styled conservatives for being too conservative and cautious, as if caution and prudence were things to be avoided rather than guiding principles.

What I find remarkable is just how certain so many critics of the elder Bush that he was not sufficiently bold, activist, or visionary, and how wrong they were. It is hard for me to take seriously those who insist Obama has responded poorly to the Egyptian uprising when many of them were likewiseinsisting that Obama “do something” for the Green movement. It is even harder when some of themcontinue to misrepresentBush’s Kiev speech. The speech was filled with responsible advice on the potential dangers of political change and a statement of support for genuine democrats as opposed to opportunists and demagogues who would exploit the rhetoric of self-determination and self-government in abusive ways. “Chicken Kiev” is the interventionist’s catchphrase for denouncing a cautious approach to foreign political crises the same way that “Munich” is the tired slogan used to browbeat opponents of unnecessary wars and aggressive foreign policy. The difference is that the Kiev speech isn’t even what its detractors have made it out to be.

Anne Applebaum’s recent distortion of what the elder Bush said in 1991 may be the most glaring in its dishonesty:

In 1991, when Ukraine was about to declare its independence from the Soviet Union, President George H.W. Bush made a declaration (this was the infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech) in praise of the Soviet Union.

The speech became infamous because people in the U.S. lied about what Bush said, and they continue to lie about it even now. This is some of what President Bush actually said:

So, let me build upon my comments in Moscow by describing in more detail what Americans mean when we talk about freedom, democracy, and economic liberty.

No terms have been abused more regularly, nor more cynically than these. Throughout this century despots have masqueraded as democrats, jailers have posed as liberators. We can restore faith to government only by restoring meaning to these concepts [bold mine-DL].

I don’t want to sound like I’m lecturing, but let’s begin with the broad term “freedom.” When Americans talk of freedom, we refer to people’s abilities to live without fear of government intrusion, without fear of harassment by their fellow citizens, without restricting other’s freedoms. We do not consider freedom a privilege, to be doled out only to those who hold proper political views or belong to certain groups. We consider it an inalienable individual right, bestowed upon all men and women. Lord Acton once observed: The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Freedom requires tolerance, a concept embedded in openness, in glasnost, and in our first amendment protections for the freedoms of speech, association, and religion — all religions.

Tolerance nourishes hope. A priest wrote of glasnost: Today, more than ever the words of Paul the Apostle, spoken, 2,000 years ago, ring out: They counted as among the dead, but look, we are alive. In Ukraine, in Russia, in Armenia, and the Baltics, the spirit of liberty thrives.

But freedom cannot survive if we let despots flourish or permit seemingly minor restrictions to multiply until they form chains, until they form shackles. Later today, I’ll visit the monument at Babi Yar — a somber reminder, a solemn reminder, of what happens when people fail to hold back the horrible tide of intolerance and tyranny.

Yet freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local depotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.

We will support those who want to build democracy. By democracy, we mean a system of government in which people may vie openly for the hearts — and yes, the votes — of the public. We mean a system of government that derives its just power from the consent of the governed, that retains its legitimacy by controlling its appetite for power. For years, you had elections with ballots, but you did not enjoy democracy. And now, democracy has begun to set firm roots in Soviet soil.

How dare he praise the Soviet system so egregiously! Of course, there is hardly anything in this speech with which most Americans could seriously disagree, and those things that do come across as nods to the status quo can be explained when we understand the diplomatic context in which Bush was operating. He gave the speech on August 1, 1991, which was just a few weeks before the coup attempt against Gorbachev. Gorbachev was promoting an idea of reorganizing the USSR along more decentralized lines, and this is why Bush was citing lessons from the experience of the early American republic. As it turned out, some of the speech became redundant when the USSR fell apart, but most of it is so unobjectionable that it is startling to see how people shamelessly use the speech as a means to shame people into supporting “bold” action.

Elsewhere in the speech, Bush made a statement that we can only wish would have been the guiding principle of U.S. relations with the former Soviet republics:

We will determine our support not on the basis of personalities but on the basis of principles. We cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America.

All of that sounds very sensible. It’s a pity that one of the better speeches by an American President on the question of building and sustaining a liberal and democratic political order continues to be tarred by people who have probably never read it, or who choose to misrepresent it to score some cheap points in the name of reckless idealism. It’s also a reminder that the contemporary reactions by over-eager, idealistic observers initially sound more appealing than the cautious, restrained response from an administration, but it is usually caution and restraint that prove to be the wiser course. Those who demand quick action, “bold” leadership, and immediate changes in policy have usually not given much thought to the consequences, especially the unintended ones, and they are usually in the grip of an enthusiasm that distorts their perceptions and judgments.

Larison has once again let his hyper-realism get the best of him, in arguing that the military has just been playing a clever game and will get behind the exceedingly craven to America and Israel Omar Suleiman as Mubarak’s successor. ~Jack Ross

I take the charge of “hyper-realism” as a compliment, since I take it to mean that I am more realistic than most. Better that than hypo-realism, I suppose. More seriously, I am not sure where I have gone wrong in saying that the interests of Suleiman and the military are aligned. Jack says that I am arguing that the military “will get behind” Suleiman, but from everything I have read about him the military is already fully behind him and was before the protests started. After all, he is the person who represents their interests at the top level in the government. There doesn’t seem to be any question of whether the military will “get behind” Suleiman. Since Mubarak’s announcement that he will not run again, the question has been whether Suleiman and the military will make Mubarak leave sooner or later. The answer seems to be later.

Furthermore, it seems correct that they (i.e., Suleiman and the senior military officers) see their interests being served by a transition in which Mubarak co-opts part of the opposition, hands off the baton to Suleiman, and secures the regime against the current challenge. Maybe this isn’t “clever” at all. It is possible that it could backfire, damage the respect Egyptians have for the military, and result in an even bigger mess in a few years’ time. Whether it is clever or not remains to be seen, but it does seem to be what is happening. I should add that Springborg regards all of this as a “bad gamble” by the administration. That’s possible, but even critics of the decisions that have led to this point should be able to acknowledge what is going on.

There is also the power of precedent. As Issandr El Amrani wrote in his profile of Suleiman two years ago:

Every president of Egypt since 1952 has been a senior military officer, and the military remains, by most measures, the most powerful institution in Egypt.

Meanwhile, Suleiman had already been gaining supporters as the next successor years ago, because he appeared to be a more acceptable alternative to Mubarak than his son:

Publicly, Suleiman has started to gain endorsements for the job from Egyptians across the political spectrum as the increasingly public discussion plays out of who will follow Mubarak. A leftist leader of the Kefaya movement, Abdel Halim Qandil, has urged the military to save the country from a Mubarak dynasty. The liberal intellectual Osama Ghazali Harb — a former Gamal acolyte who turned to the opposition and founded the National Democratic Front party — has openly advocated a military takeover followed by a period of “democratic transition.” Hisham Kassem, head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, also has stated that a Suleiman presidency would be vastly preferable to another Mubarak one. On Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, partisans of a Suleiman presidency make the same argument, often seemingly driven as much by animosity toward the Mubaraks as admiration for the military man.

Meanwhile, here is some reporting from CNN that is worth reading:

“The military’s refusal to act is a highly political act which shows that it is allowing the Egyptian regime to reconstitute itself at the top and is highly, utterly against the protesters,” said Joshua Stacher, assistant professor of political science at Kent State University and an expert on Egypt. He was among more than a dozen Middle East experts who met Monday with three White House National Security Council officials to talk about the Egyptian crisis.

The absence of military action serves two purposes, Stacher said.

“(One,) make the protesters go home, and two, scare the population that isn’t protesting,” Stacher said. “They want the Egyptian people to submit to the police state, and they want the people to pine for their police state so that they have stability back.”

“It’s getting really ruthless,” Stacher added.

In Egypt, Vice President Omar Suleiman issued a statement saying that dialogue with opposition forces, as ordered by Mubarak, won’t begin until the demonstrations stop.

Like the protesters who have flooded the streets of Egypt in the past week, the country’s large minority of Coptic Christians worry about joblessness and lack of freedoms. But most want President Hosni Mubarak to stay in power.

Fear of what may follow the removal of Mr. Mubarak, a secular strongman who has ruled the country for the past 30 years, is making reluctant supporters out of the country’s Christians, an estimated 10% of Egypt’s 80 million population. Mr. Mubarak has been aggressive in pursuing perceived Islamist extremist groups, a policy that has endeared him to Coptic Christians, not to mention the U.S.

Many Copts worry that Mr. Mubarak’s exit would leave them dangerously exposed—either by chaos, or to a government that may be more tolerant of Islamist extremists. ~The Wall Street Journal

These are very reasonable fears. Since the secular authoritarian government in Iraq fell after the invasion, the Christian minorities in Iraq have been exposed to frequent atrocities and intimidation. While there were some encouraging signs of Muslim solidarity with the Copts after the Alexandria church bombing, there is reason to worry that Copts and other Christians would face the same threats if the current regime fell. Even if a new government were not tolerant of attacks on minorities, it might be too weak to offer effective protection. Protections for ethnic and religious minorities are essential for preventing new democratic governments from devolving into majoritarian tyrannies, especially when those minorities may be identified (fairly or unfairly) with the old regime. Democratists have had a bad habit of ignoring the dangers to minorities that promoting democracy in the region has worsened, and Near Eastern Christians have been among those most harmed by this project. We may hope that the Coptic Church and the other Christians living and working in Egypt do not share that fate.

The clashes, which broke out barely an hour after the government allowed Internet connections to resume, have added a new twist to the drama that has gripped the Arab world’s largest country: Has the army been on the side of the government after all? ~Time

Yes, of course it has. It remained “neutral” because that helped Mubarak and his allies play for time, and it gave Mubarak the chance to try to hide behind the military’s popularity. Apparently there are quite a few people who bought into the idea that the army, which is the foundation of the regime, wasn’t actually part of the regime. Instead of focusing on the silliness of the question quoted above, I would point everyone to Roberty Springborg’s grim, but basically accurate assessment of where things stand now:

The threat to the military’s control of the Egyptian political system is passing. Millions of demonstrators in the street have not broken the chain of command over which President Mubarak presides. Paradoxically the popular uprising has even ensured that the presidential succession will not only be engineered by the military, but that an officer will succeed Mubarak. The only possible civilian candidate, Gamal Mubarak, has been chased into exile, thereby clearing the path for the new Vice President, General Omar Suleiman. The military high command, which under no circumstances would submit to rule by civilians rooted in a representative system, can now breathe much more easily than a few days ago. It can neutralize any further political pressure from below by organizing Husni Mubarak’s exile, but that may well be unnecessary.

The military has not directly participated in the crackdown, which preserves the appearance that the military was not involved in attacking the protesters and keeps the military from being split, but it has stood by while Mubarak’s goons target the protesters. As the new cabinet is filled with figures representing the interests of the military, this ought to have been clear to all a few days ago. If Mubarak is on the way out after the next election, Suleiman will be taking over for him. In Tunisia the uprising prompted a “soft” coup against Ben Ali, and Ben Ali could not stay so long as the military was unwilling to use force to defend his hold on power. As quite a few people expected earlier this month, the alignment of interests between the military and Mubarak mattered more than the outrage and persistence of the protesters. Instead of a “soft” coup approved by the military, there won’t be any sort of coup, but an organized (though perhaps not all that “orderly”) transition from one military-backed strongman to another.

I’m not sure that this means that the “historic opportunity to have a democratic Egypt led by those with whom the U.S., Europe and even Israel could do business, will have been lost, maybe forever.” That assumes a great many things about what would have followed. It could also be that Egypt has avoided even more destructive political upheaval and massive suffering.

If Huntsman won the GOP nomination, he would be challenging the reelection of his former boss. White House officials are furious at what they consider an audacious betrayal, but know that any public criticism would be likely to benefit Huntsman if he enters the primaries. ~Mike Allen

Why are they furious? The administration already knew Huntsman was going to leave after two years, so it’s not as if he misled them about how long he was willing to stay. A Huntsman candidacy shouldn’t worry them in the slightest. Consider these results from Utah, where Huntsman was governor and left office with an incredible 84% approval rating:

Utah Republicans overwhelmingly favor Mitt Romney over Jon Huntsman Jr. as a potential Republican presidential candidate, according to a January statewide survey.

In a poll conducted for the Exoro Group and the Center for Public Policy & Administration at the University of Utah, Republicans in the state said they would prefer the former Massachusetts governor over their own former governor by a staggering margin, 65 to 16 percent.

This wouldn’t be a big problem for Huntsman if it were a poll from Massachusetts or even New Hampshire, since everyone expects Romney to dominate in those places. It also wouldn’t be a problem if these results were from any other state except Utah, but Utah is where Huntsman is well-known and still quite popular. If Utah Republicans don’t want him as their presidential nominee, who would? Put another way, if he can’t win against Romney in Utah, where he has almost all the advantages and the fewest liabilities, where could he possibly win?

The good news for Huntsman is that he would be the Utah GOP’s choice for Senate when Hatch comes up for re-nomination, but it appears that this isn’t the campaign he wants to run. So Huntsman is preparing to jump into a contest he can’t win and passing on one that he could. He has just consigned himself to political irrelevance, at least until 2016, which is all that matters to members of the Obama administration, so they should be very pleased.