Do you still think the possibility of regional transformation remote? I’d say by definition the fall of Mubarak means massive regional transformation, and at this point it seems to me–and most observers, I think–more likely than not. ~Claire Berlinski

I appreciate the lengthy response to my earlier post. The disagreement centers on the expectation of Mubarak’s fall. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is likely at all, which makes this one of the few times that I agree with the Netanyahu government about something. It also centers on what seemed to me to be an unrealistic hope that the U.S. could lend support to Egyptian liberal democrats without also lending support to the Muslim Brotherhood. I would agree that there is another alternative besides Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood, namely a new form of military “emergency” rule that would be no less repressive and perhaps even more hardened against political reform in the future. From what I have been seeing and reading, many observers are overstating the significance of the protests and the protesters’ ability to overthrow the government. We saw much the same thing in the summer of 2009 in Iran, and we heard the same demands that the administration take the side of the Green movement. Granted, Iran is not Egypt, and the U.S. has much more leverage in Egypt, but the call to “do something” is the same and it seems just as misguided now as it did then.

As for a U.S. response involving withdrawal of aid, it may be that we don’t disagree as much as I thought. Here we probably differ only about what would trigger the loss of aid. From the last post, Claire, it seemed as if you were willing to pull all aid or even impose sanctions if Mubarak’s security forces so much as roughed up another protester. Perhaps I misunderstood. What I was trying to say is that there is a line of unacceptable use of force that the U.S. shouldn’t tolerate. If Mubarak’s forces committed atrocities on the scale of something like Andijan in Uzbekistan, Washington would have to suspend aid.

Up to that point, it makes no sense to drop all support for an allied government. It’s not as if we can pretend that our government hasn’t been implicated in its activities for all these years. If an alliance with Egypt has genuine strategic importance for the U.S. it doesn’t make sense why our government would try to help undermine it in a crisis. One reason that it makes no sense is that Mubarak, his party, and his military backers most likely aren’t going anywhere. Even if Mubarak were to step aside personally, which I doubt, the regime apparatus behind him isn’t going to give up its power.

Maybe the U.S. could do without the Egyptian alliance. No matter how it turns out, openly siding with the protesters against the government will mean that the Egyptian alliance as we have known it will be dead or severely damaged. That has to be considered in connection with its effects on other U.S. allies and interests in the region. I am not as concerned with containing and checking Iranian influence as many Americans are, but overthrowing the current regime in Egypt will make it more difficult for Egypt to contribute to the goal of containing Iranian influence. Trying and failing to overthrow the regime will make Egypt look for other, more reliable patrons (it has done so before), and there are other major powers that wouldn’t mind making Egypt into a client state. They aren’t going to have any concerns about how Mubarak and his successors govern the place, and they probably aren’t going to be concerned about growing Iranian influence.

If the government is overthrown, it will probably have a good effect on reducing the suffering of the people in Gaza by ending the Egyptian part of the blockade, but it would make it easier for Hamas to operate. If the U.S. helps bring the regime down, the message will be that the U.S. pulled the plug on one of the only two Arab states to make peace with Israel. What are the odds that any other Arab state is going to see the benefits of formally recognizing Israel after that? As for Egypt itself, the fall of the regime could unleash terrible religious violence. The Christians of Iraq have already paid a terrible price as a result of the “liberation” of their country. The Copts and other Christians are at risk of facing similar treatment.

Critics of the Obama administration have routinely accused him of undermining or “selling out” allies and encouraging U.S. rivals. These charges have been baseless, but now it seems that unless Obama actively undermines Mubarak his critics are arguing that he will have erred horribly. If I understand your position, you are calling for the administration to abandon an allied government on the chance that a popular movement is going to overthrow it anyway. My view is that this greatly exaggerates the power of the protests, it underestimates the staying power of the current regime and its ruler, and it doesn’t take into account any of the consequences of success (overthrowing the regime) or failure (trying and failing to overthrow the regime).

P.S. The comparison with Poland is not as useful as it might seem. Washington has never had difficulty denouncing the actions of governments allied with major rivals. When the U.S. is the patron, as the USSR was for the Polish government at the time, Washington has understandably been less insistent on public denunciation and sanctions. It is also true that the U.S. helped the political transitions in South Korea, Chile and the Philippines in the 1980s, but the Reagan administration did so only when there was no perceived danger of creating an opening for communists and Soviet influence. If we’re looking to Reagan for an idea of how to proceed, it seems to me that his administration would have continued to support Mubarak. One of Reagan’s chief criticisms of Carter’s administration was that his human rights activism had undermined the Shah. Stating the truth would be excellent, and part of the truth is that the U.S. has supported the miserable dictator Mubarak because our government concluded that his rule was preferable to the probable alternatives. That still appears to be true, and for the most part the argument to the contrary seems to be based on little more than the hope that it does not have to be true.

Update: Michael has been making many of the same points on the main blog:

Four years ago, during some of the headiest days of Bush’s “democracy agenda”, our own State Department officials in Cairo told me that truly liberal parties in Egypt were “interesting to talk to but totally insignificant.” The idea that there is some huge reserve of middle class support for liberal democracy is an untested fantasy.

If there were still any doubt that Mikheil Saakashvili is a dangerous buffoon, this (via Antiwar News) ought to dispel it:

Mikheil Saakashvili, the President of Georgia, told The Independent yesterday that attacks like Monday’s suicide bombing at a Moscow airport were “payback” for Russia’s policies in the North Caucasus, as he compared the country to a “crocodile ready to swallow you up”.

There’s no question that Russian policy in the North Caucasus is a contributing factor to the ongoing problem of terrorism in Russia. It is also interesting that Western observers are happy to provide this sort of analysis when it comes to terrorism directed against other nations, but most can’t quite seem to grasp that their own governments’ policies might have a similar relationship to terrorism. What is really remarkable here is that Saakashvili is making this point publicly just a few months after Georgia eliminated visa restrictions from the North Caucasus in what everyone could see was a calculated provocation on account of Russian security problems in the region. As Thomas de Waal wrote last fall:

Georgia, which also needs stability on its northern border, is also playing the irrational card. The Georgian government has embarked on a new policy of embracing the North Caucasus, which to Russian eyes looks like a strategy to divide it from the rest of Russia. President Saakashvili unilaterally announced a visa-free regime for the North Caucasian republics and made a speech at the United Nations about his vision of a “united Caucasus,” north and south. The sentiments would have been laudable from the mouth of a poet or even a businessman. Coming from the president of Georgia, they only stoked Russian paranoia and Russian-Georgian tensions.

Coming not long after the provocative decision on visas and just days after the horrible attack in Moscow, Saakashvili’s blunt words about “payback” seem designed to provide Moscow with an excuse to worsen relations and become even more inflexible in dealings with Tbilisi. In an even worse scenario, Saakashvili’s recklessness could provide the Russian government with a pretext for blaming Georgia for having some role in the Domodedovo bombing. I don’t expect a Georgian nationalist to have much sympathy for Russian victims of terrorism at this point, but I would expect a sensible head of state to have enough sense not to goad Moscow when it is responding to a terrorist atrocity. This is just one more reminder that Saakashvili is an irresponsible and reckless leader, and the U.S. indulges him and supports him at our and Georgia’s peril.

U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman (R) appears to be leaning toward a run for president in 2012 and a team of political operatives and fundraisers have begun informal talks and outreach to ensure he could rapidly ramp up if he decides to run. ~Chris Cillizza

This makes no more sense than it did three and a half weeks ago, but it seems that the Newsweek profile may not have been as silly and speculative as we all thought. As Cillizza’s post explains, “the breadth of the team that has formed to prepare for just such an eventuality suggests he is quite serious.” Looking at the list, we see that Huntsman’s inner circle is largely made up of old McCain, George W. Bush, and Jeb Bush advisors. If he were to run, Huntsman’s campaign is would be dominated by people with connections to the party establishment (such as it is), the Bush dynasty, and the part of the failed 2008 ticket that most conservatives loathe.

I suppose he can serve as the “competent, wealthy Mormon executive who is not Mitt Romney” candidate, but is there really high demand for such a candidate? If Romney is the candidate with a liability on health care, Huntsman has publicly supported cap-and-trade. This is a position that is generally far more unpopular with the general public, to say nothing of Republican primary voters.

What is Huntsman’s argument for a presidential bid? Presumably, Huntsman wouldn’t be foolish enough to run as the anti-Obama foreign policy candidate, since he can’t have that many serious disagreements with the administration as it regards policies in China and the surrounding region. Then again, Huntsman’s foreign policy experience is the one thing that clearly distinguishes him from the rest of the likely 2012 field. Of course, it is also the one thing that he won’t be able to use to any great advantage in the primaries. If he tries to run against Obama’s overall foreign policy, he won’t really have any credibility to do that, and if he attempts to distinguish himself from the leading candidates by staking out somewhat rational or sane foreign policy positions the other candidates will spend every debate tearing him apart as Obama’s man in Beijing. They will use every hawkish, democratist, and anti-Chinese platitude available to tar him as an appeaser, and it won’t matter what he has actually done during his time as ambassador.

One other glaring problem for Huntsman, as for many of the would-be Republican candidates this time around, is his obscurity. Outside of Utah and apart from a rather narrow set of people who follow Republican politics and foreign policy, Huntsman’s name recognition is horrible. One reason for this is that he vanished from the national scene and went to Beijing almost as soon as national reporters had started talking about him. James Joyner said that he had never heard of Huntsman before earlier this month, and James is a pretty well-informed person. If Huntsman is that unknown nationally, I would be amazed if he can catch up and become competitive with the well-established names among primary voters.

Every bit of my heart, as an American and a human being and someone who deeply believes in democracy and human rights, is on the side of Egyptians who want exactly the rights and freedoms and opportunities all Americans take for granted. And we should say so to Mubarak: Do not touch another hair on the head of another protester, or you will face the wrath of the United States. ~Claire Berlinski

The administration could tell Mubarak that. Instead of the increased criticism it has already promised, the administration could threaten Mubarak with its “wrath.” Would this entail merely the suspension of aid, or would it involve more serious penalties? In other words, what exactly should the administration be threatening to do to Mubarak and his allies if they do not comply? It’s all very well to bluster and make threats, but Mubarak knows that our government is not going to risk seriously undermining the current government. He will assume that the administration is bluffing and playing to its domestic audience, and he will probably be right. If the administration is not bluffing, it genuinely risks making the same mistake that Carter made in his handling of the Shah and domestic opposition to his regime.

As for Berlinski’s position, she says that she wants Egyptian democrats to win. However, she qualifies this by saying that this is desirable only so long as the Muslim Brotherhood has no part in the political system that follows. This is consistent with her opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, but it seems entirely untenable as a practical matter. Officially, the Brotherhood has stayed out of the protests as an organization, but its members have been participants all along. By the end of the week, it looks as if the Brotherhood will have officially joined the protests as well. The protesters cannot be neatly separated into the “good” secular democrats here and the unacceptable Islamists over there. For that matter, there is as yet no evidence that any of the protesters object to the Brotherhood’s participation.

That significantly undermines the claim that Berlinski is fully in favor of Egyptian democracy, because she is clearly (and I think correctly) opposed to the consequences of empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, which will almost certainly be the result of the realization of a democratic Egyptian government. It certainly won’t be possible for a democratic government in Egypt to bar political participation for one of the few groups that Mubarak permitted to operate. Al-Nahda in Tunisia was banned under Ben Ali, and it was only a matter of days after his flight before it was legalized as a political organization. It is entirely implausible that the Muslim Brotherhood, which is much stronger politically than Al-Nahda, could suffer the opposite fate in a post-Mubarak government. If it is that important to keep this organization away from power (for the sake of Egypt as well as for the sake of other interests), the U.S. and the Egyptian people are both “stuck” with some form of the current Egyptian government, whether Mubarak is the ruler or not, and that is a government that does not permit meaningfully free political participation and competition.

If Berlinski is dead-set against Muslim Brotherhood participation in a future Egyptian government, she can’t actually want our government to inflict its “wrath” on Mubarak for suppressing these protests, or at least she can’t want the government’s “wrath” to amount to very much. It’s a bit like agitating against the Tsar and his Cossacks, but then qualifying it by saying, “Of course, we don’t want to have a revolutionary dictatorship.” It sounds good (“I’m for liberal democracy”), but it is completely unrealistic.

Update: Jonathan Wright (via Arabist.net) makes some helpful observations:

The Brotherhood knows that the world (especially the United States and Europe) are watching events in Egypt closely. If the protests appear to be Brotherhood-led, the government will feel free to use much more brutal methods to disperse protesters. For the moment it suits the Brotherhood’s interests to give the impression that there is a broad coalition united against Hosni Mubarak, including liberals and leftists. This explains why Brotherhood members who have taken part in the protests have refrained from chanting slogans with religious connotations. The impression of a broad coalition also helps domestically — if the Brotherhood take the lead, it would frighten off some of the other groups.

I’m not sure the Obama administration understands what many in the blogosphere have already seen: that a geopolitical transformation is underway — one more fundamental than any we have seen since 1945. There was always a likelihood that modern Arab peoples would rise up against their despotic leaders. And we have known for years what Hezbollah was up to in Lebanon. But it was not and is not inevitable that their dramas would play out without intervention from or reference to the United States. ~J.E. Dyer

We’re seeing a geopolitical transformation “more fundamental” than the end of the Cold War, the fall of communism in Europe, and the dissolution of the USSR? For that matter, there is a transformation underway that is “more fundamental” than the start of the Cold War and the inauguration of American containment policy? That’s just silly. The events of the last few weeks have been remarkable and important for the respective countries involved and to some extent for the entire region, but they do not represent anything as significant as the division of Europe after WWII or the end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. For that matter, these events pale in significance when compared to the de-colonization of Africa and Asia, or the communist takeover of China. There is no sense of historical perspective or proportion in anything Dyer is saying.

It’s true that it was not inevitable that the U.S. would take a largely hands-off approach in public. Fortunately, McCain lost the last election. If we had the misfortune of a President McCain, his administration would probably have been meddling in all of these countries very openly and insisting on America having a very active role in all of these crises. If the crises had nothing to do with us, McCain would insist on inserting America into the middle of each one of them, just as he would have done in 2009 in Iran. Undeterred by having permanently discredited the Iranian opposition, he would have egged on protesters with empty words of solidarity that caused thousands of people to be killed. McCain would have been dictating terms to all of the people involved, and the U.S. would then be directly implicated in whatever the outcome might be. In Lebanon, he probably would have said, “We are all Sunnis now” to express his solidarity with Hariri and Hariri’s rioting supporters, and he might then offer to send in a military expedition to “preserve Lebanese sovereignty.”

As far as these political crises are concerned, there is no other place for the U.S. government to be except on the sidelines or at least very far in the background. It is only American self-importance that makes any of us believe that our government needs to be significantly, publicly involved in internal political crises on the other side of the planet.

The nomination of Najib Mikati as prime minister-designate signals that a Saudi-Syrian deal remains near to blunt the crisis over the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, a number of analysts said Wednesday.

A politician and businessman as shrewd as Mikati would not have allowed the March 8 political alliance to name him unless he had received assurances from high-ranking Saudis that the kingdom was still willing to reach an agreement on the tribunal, said Paul Salem, head of the Carnegie Middle East Center. ~The Daily Star

Meanwhile, here in the U.S. we have hysterics talking about the “conquest of Lebanon by Iran,” when what we are seeing is something more like a Saudi-Syrian settlement in which a candidate favorable to both governments becomes prime minister. For those who assume Miqati is nothing more than a yes-man for Hizbullah, the Star article goes on to say this:

Because of his Saudi and other external support, Mikati will have a significant say in selecting the ministers for his government, Hanna added. “He is in a stronger position vis-à-vis March 8,” Hanna said. “They need him.”

The point here is not to cheer for a March 8-led government. Properly speaking, none of this is America’s concern, and it has little to do with American security. However, we should observe that a lawful, basically peaceful change in government in Lebanon that benefits a political coalition Westerners dislike is not the end of the world, nor is it even necessarily that bad for Lebanon. No one has “lost” Lebanon, because Americans never possessed Lebanon. It is not ours to lose.

Hizbullah’s nefarious puppet speaks:

“I am not going to make any move against the tribunal without full Lebanese consensus,” said Mr. Miqati, well known here as a politician and philanthropist.

Asked if Hezbollah would accept such a stance, he replied indignantly: “I am the prime minister and I will decide. If they do not accept, let them not accept.”

All caveats apply. Yes, he could be telling Western journalists what Westerners want to hear, or he could simply be lying to create the appearance of independence, or he could be buying time to make it easier to form a functioning government. It could also be that Miqati is not automatically going to do Hizbullah’s bidding on an extremely controversial issue. The point is that we don’t really know as much as many of us are pretending we know.

What I find remarkable is that in the Western press pretty much everyone, and I mean everyone, who has written something about Lebanon in the last month has automatically assumed that Miqati as prime minister is unacceptable, Hariri and his allies must be supported by Western governments, and failure to de-stabilize the new government by supporting Hariri’s opposition is tantamount to a complete abandonment of Lebanon. This is why it is supposedly imperative that we side with the coalition that has not commanded popular majority support in ages, and it is why we apparently must rally against a unity government that has some chance of avoiding renewed civil strife. Count me as a skeptic.

What about the people of Lebanon? Or of Egypt? Don’t they deserve support too? ~Max Boot

These are maddeningly stupid questions.

For one thing, the outgoing Hariri government didn’t represent the majority of the “people of Lebanon.” Thanks to the rigged way that Lebanese elections work, the March 8 coalition received far fewer seats than the 2009 results would have merited in a more balanced system. In 2009, the March 8 coalition received 55% of the vote and 45% of the seats. I won’t pretend that a more representative and majoritarian Lebanese government will be a better one, but then I’m not the one throwing a fit over our government’s lack of overt support for the “people of Lebanon.” In the days before the fall of Hariri’s government, the administration stated its support for Hariri’s government, and we can see how unimportant that was.

Now that Hariri’s government has fallen thanks to the defection of Hizbullah and Jumblatt’s PSP, the administration is supposed to lend support to a political opposition that represents a minority of the population and has just been driven from power by legal parliamentary means? On what grounds? The administration is supposed to state publicly that the only acceptable government of Lebanon is one governed by the March 14 coalition? In other words, they want Obama to tell the Lebanese that elected governments are all very well, so long as the elected government has the right foreign patrons. On the other hand, the critics want the administration to embrace the Egyptian protesters because the Egyptian people “deserve support” regardless of the possible damage to U.S. interests that could come from undermining Mubarak. Neither criticism makes much sense on its own, but together they are incoherent nonsense.

Let’s also consider that the Egyptian “day of rage” was scheduled for yesterday, and the large scale of the protests was an unexpected development that happened on the same day that Obama was giving his address. Assuming that he and his advisors had nothing better to do yesterday than re-write the speech to tack on some reference to Egyptian protests, what should he have said that the government wasn’t already conveying through official channels? For that matter, the Obama administration officially supports the current Egyptian government, just as the five administrations before it did. Critics of Obama’s relative silence on Egypt either want him to undermine an allied government, or they want him to engage in meaningless happy-talk in which he professes support for protesters without any intention of providing them actual support.

Mind you, if Obama had said something about Lebanon and Egypt, the same crowd would be asking why he didn’t say something about Belarus, and if he had included Belarus they would have demanded that he throw in Bahrain, too.

The list of what he didn’t mention is much, much longer than what he did: Egypt, Lebanon, the United Nations, the stalled peace talks, Hugo Chavez, the Green Movement, Syria, China (except as an economic competitor), Cuba, human rights outside of Tunisia, Russian occupation of Georgia, the trial of Sept. 11 terrorists or passage of the Panama or Colombia free trade agreements. ~Jennifer Rubin

As I said yesterday, this wasn’t a State of the Empire speech, and it wouldn’t have made any sense for Obama to spend time on most of these topics. My guesses on what he would mention proved to be mostly right, because I assumed that the focus of the address would be elsewhere. As it happens, Obama did mention the Panamanian and Colombian FTAs, but we can be fairly sure that at least one of those isn’t going anywhere (and for good reason).

Obama and his advisors must have judged that the public isn’t interested in and doesn’t care about foreign affairs very much, and the public is interested in such things only insofar as these matters relate to American security as the public understands it, and they are right. Let me suggest that the Russian military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia isn’t one of the first one hundred things in the world that relate to American security. Actually, it doesn’t relate to American security at all, but accepting this is a bit of reach for people who think that everything in the world is properly the business of the United States government. The official administration line is that it opposes the Russian “occupation” of these territories, and that’s much more than I would like and it is as much as anyone can expect them to say about it.

On a few of these issues, the State of the Union address is hardly a good place for discussing them. In the past, addresses that focused heavily on foreign affairs have often included statements that helped pave the way for extraordinarily bad policies (e.g., the “axis of evil” section of the 2002 SOTU). One advantage of saying relatively little about foreign policy in the address is that the President doesn’t step all over ongoing diplomatic and political efforts by making cheap rhetorical flourishes. On most of the issues, Obama had no reason to mention them last night. Chavez? Syria? The Green Movement? Really? Why would he mention any of these? Josh Rogin has his own list of things Obama didn’t mention, and for the most part my response to that list is the same. Can you imagine anything less interesting to most Americans than talking about Belarus? While we’re at it, why didn’t he talk about Polish visa waivers? Oh, right, because this isn’t a State Department briefing.