As I asked about Tunisia before Ben Ali fled:

Is publicly taking sides intended to help the protesters, or mainly to take a self-satisfying, ineffective stand?

Obviously, as it turned out the Tunisian protesters were able to drive out Ben Ali on their own. We know that “taking sides” or “taking a stand” on their behalf publicly would not have achieved anything that the Tunisians couldn’t achieve on their own. When it comes to Egypt, my earlier objections to publicly taking the side of Tunisia’s protesters are even more relevant:

Declaring U.S. government support for protesting opponents of Ben Ali isn’t likely to lead to a peaceful resolution, but probably would lead to escalating tensions and more riots. Making Ben Ali’s removal from power the goal of U.S. policy (!) wouldn’t hasten internal reform, but would put the regime into an even greater panic and inspire an even harsher crackdown. It would also wreck a reasonably solid relationship with Tunisia for no discernible reason except that “we are in favor of democracy.”

Replace Ben Ali and Tunisia with Mubarak and Egypt, and the argument remains the same, except that in Egypt the U.S. has more reason to fear political upheaval because it has more at stake, and there is more reason to expect a brutal crackdown by Mubarak because of the presumed loyalty of the military. “Taking a stand” in support of Egyptian protesters might not be ineffective so much as it could be positively dangerous for them. After hearing declarations of support, protesters might expect the administration to intervene with or against Mubarak, and this could prompt the sort of uprising that Mubarak would feel compelled to put down with excessive force. Calls for Obama to “take a stand” are little more than demands that Obama set the Egyptian protesters up for a fall.

The administration should urge the Egyptian government to avoid violence, and it should be willing to withdraw aid if Mubarak uses excessive force against protesters, but publicly backing the protesters simply contributes to an escalating confrontation that cannot end well for the protesters or the U.S.-Egyptian relationship.

Even though the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is an ally of the United States, it would be jarring if Obama makes no mention of this unrest in his speech tonight, or in some other public statement. ~Michael Scherer

I would be surprised if the word Egypt appears anywhere in the State of the Union tonight. For one thing, if he mentions Egypt he will almost certainly feel compelled to mention his Cairo speech, and a lot of administration policy matches up pretty badly with many of the statements in the Cairo speech (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing!). Probably everyone in attendance knows that Obama has not made a priority of human rights or political reform in his dealings with Mubarak, so what does Obama say about the protests? When it has had to choose between not inserting itself into a foreign political crisis and “speaking out,” the administration has more or less consistently chosen the former. That was the right decision regarding Iran in 2009, and it was the right decision on Tunisia this winter.

People can call it neglect if they want (I happen to think saying as little as possible is wise), but the other plausible alternative is declaring some sort of support for protesters as they are chanting for the downfall of an allied government. If he chooses not to undermine Mubarak in public, Wilsonians here will berate him for it, but he will have made the wiser decision. If he throws his weight behind the protests, anything that happens in Egypt will be linked (fairly or unfairly) to his statement, and most of the possible outcomes are not good for the protesters or for Obama. It makes sense that Obama would say as little as he can about Egypt, and he may not have much to say about Tunisia, either, and there is nothing right now that requires him to address it in this speech.

Looking back at the 2010 SOTU, we should remember that foreign policy and foreign affairs did not make up a large part of the speech (these subjects accounted for just nine paragraphs). That was appropriate, since the speech is intended to be a statement about the state of the United States, and that is what we should expect to hear again tonight. Those looking for a State of the Empire speech will be disappointed. Last year, Obama touched on terrorism, Afghanistan, the military, arms control with the Russians, Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, the G20, and Haitian reconstruction.

Now that New START has been ratified, we should expect to hear much more about that this year, as well as other areas of cooperation with Russia (e.g., the 123 agreement). Obama will probably also mention the Korean free trade agreement, and coming on the heels of the state dinner with Hu Jintao he may make some general comments about the U.S.-China relationship. We can expect some boasting about U.N. sanctions on Iran. If Obama refers to any current events, my guess is that he is more likely to mention the airport bombing in Moscow in order to stress the importance for international security cooperation (and, however implausibly, try to justify airport security procedures here in the U.S.). As policy on Israel-Palestine has more or less completely flopped, Obama may mention it, but it won’t receive much attention in the speech. Since this is the year that U.S. forces are supposed to leave Iraq at the end of 2011, and the mid-2011 deadline for Afghanistan has been pushed back, Obama will probably emphasize the former and skirt around the delay in withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Our analysis reached three conclusions:

There is no “isolationist” wing of the GOP. Of the Republicans’ 47 senators and 242 representatives, only 5 percent (15 members) expressed support for cutting defense spending. Adding those in the “ambiguously for” category makes it 13 percent. Forty-one percent are against cutting defense spending; with those ambiguously against, it’s 60 percent.

Only 10 Republicans, or 4 percent, are against the war in Afghanistan, and none are senators. Including the skeptical members, 10 percent are somewhat antiwar. Eighty percent support the war.

The tea party is not mellowing Republican militarism. If it were, freshman Republicans, who mostly proclaim allegiance to the movement, should be more dovish than the rest. That’s not the case. Five of the 101 Republican freshmen and 10 of the 184 who aren’t newcomers support cutting defense spending. That’s about 5 percent of each group.

No new Republican opposes the war in Afghanistan outright. Including skeptics, 9 percent of freshmen and 11 percent of the rest are against the war.

Fewer new Republicans have defined positions on these issues. Veteran Republicans are more likely to be in the clearly “against cuts” and “for the war” categories; freshmen are more likely to be ambiguous or have no position. This ambiguity is a silver lining for advocates of military restraint: Many tea-party Republicans were elected without saying much about foreign policy and may yet emerge as non-interventionists. ~Benjamin Friedman

Via Conor

Instead of repeating earlier arguments that support Friedman’s findings, I will try to find something more encouraging in all of this than Friedman’s rather thin silver living*. First of all, it could be that Friedman is looking at the wrong things. I agree that positions on military spending and Afghanistan are usually “a good proxy for general foreign-policy views,” but this is potentially misleading.

Measuring someone’s non-interventionist leanings based on support for or opposition to the war in Afghanistan is potentially quite confusing. Even among some of the reliable non-interventionists in the House, opposing the war in Afghanistan was not always an obvious or necessary position to take. During the Bush years, there was essentially no reliable Republican opposition to the war in Afghanistan, as opposed to a small core of Iraq war opponents in the House. Rep. Walter Jones is a good example of a House Republican moving from a hawkish supporter of both Afghanistan and Iraq to an opponent of both. Indeed, making opposition to the war in Afghanistan into a meaningful indicator of a conservative’s overall foreign policy views is a fairly recent and somewhat arbitrary move. Assuming that support for the war in Afghanistan is inconsistent with generally non-interventionist views, it is still possible that statements of support for the war in Afghanistan do not tell us nearly as much about someone’s foreign policy inclinations as one might initially think.

It is possible that some “skeptics” and opponents of the war in Afghanistan are not actually in favor of reduced military spending or a smaller warfare state, but have come to object to the war because it is useful to position themselves against a signature part of administration foreign policy, because they dislike “nation-building” but have no problem with starting wars, and because they believe that the rules of engagement are too restricting and “politically correct.” It may be that generally more hawkish members have been quicker to join the small number of consistent non-interventionists in questioning the war in Afghanistan for entirely different reasons, and it is possible that potentially more dovish members nonetheless support the war in Afghanistan. It is also possible that members, especially new members who did not discuss these issues much during the campaign, have staked out positions in favor of high military spending to guard against the inevitable charge that they are “weak” on defense in the event that they are critical of U.S. policies and wars overseas.

According to Friedman, “[f]orty-one percent are against cutting defense spending; with those ambiguously against, it’s 60 percent.” Those numbers are lower than I would have expected. That still leaves a significant bloc of Republicans in Congress that might be willing to consider cutting military spending. If anything, these findings show that definite support for high levels of military spending is not overwhelming, which creates the possibility that a substantial number of Republicans will be willing to question the need for current spending levels and to oppose spending increases in the future. It may be that there is a significant room for improvement as fiscal hawks and non-interventionists combine at least to hold the line on military spending and possibly start questioning an expansive U.S. role in the world.

*I call it a thin silver lining because it is highly unlikely that freshmen without well-defined views on these subjects are going to opt for the position shared by 5-10% of their colleagues rather than the one held by 80-90%. Unless they represent districts where military spending is unimportant and antiwar sentiment is strong, or unless they are already convinced by non-interventionist and realist arguments, their lack of well-defined views will make them easily influenced by members who hold the prevailing view. In any case, this argument from members’ silence is not much to go on.

Update: Friedman follows up on his op-ed at The National Interest’s blog.

Because it has banked on this approach, the administration has consistently played down U.S. support for the opposition Green movement, which has been dormant in recent months. Yet Mr. Jalili’s behavior in Istanbul suggests that the regime remains more concerned about appearing weak to its domestic opposition than about the consequences of defying the Security Council.

By doing more to support the Iranian opposition, the United States could press the regime where it actually feels threatened. It could also send an important message to Iranians: that the international coalition seeks not to punish them but to weaken the government they despise. ~The Washington Post

In the world of the Post’s editors and columnists (and foreign policy hawks generally), it is always necessary to support foreign governments’ opposition movements and it is always imperative to avoid negotiations with them. It doesn’t seem to matter whether supporting the opposition aids U.S. goals or not, and it doesn’t even matter if the opposition is capable of bringing significant pressure to bear on the government in a way that is useful to U.S. policy. “Support the opposition!” is the reliablecry. It is the same advice, and it makes no difference if it is an allied government, a rival, or another major power. This recommendation is a substitute for a policy recommendation rather than a serious alternative. It is the foreign policy equivalent of calling for re-training and education as the answer to any and all economic problems.

This proposal might make sense if anyone advocating it could explain how it aids U.S. policy goals or U.S. interests. It would be helpful if the Post’s editors could offer a plausible account of how lending direct support to the failed Green movement would translate into more concessions from Iran on its nuclear program. There is no plausible account available, because there seems to be no meaningful connection between the two, and there is little reason to believe that a stronger Green movement would make Iran more cooperative. It wouldn’t hurt if Diehl or Kagan could point to something that the Egyptian government can’t do for the U.S. now that a politically reformed Egyptian government would be able to do. Of course, neither one tries to do this. Diehl dubs the administration’s “silence” on reform “dangerous,” and Kagan complains that Obama has “said nothing about the dangers of a similar eruption in Egypt,” but Diehl always thinks silence on political reform is a bad idea, and Mubarak is probably more aware of the dangers of a popular uprising than anyone in the U.S. is. Harping on the administration’s lack of support for political reform in Egypt is simply what an administration critic has to do when the administration isn’t mishandling relations with Egypt.

For his part, Kagan asserts, “After the “Jasmine Revolution” in nearby Tunisia, the Egyptian pot is about to boil over.” Anything’s possible, but despite the impressiveprotests taking place in Cairo this week, Kagan is simply guessing. He insists that the administration needs “to press Mubarak and his government to open the political system and avert impending disaster,” which takes for granted that there is an impending disaster (i.e., an Egyptian revolution).

It is quite possible that trying to compel political reform in Egypt now will weaken Mubarak’s government just enough to de-stabilize it without making sufficient changes to satisfy opponents of the regime. Instead of averting a disaster, Kagan’s recommendations might hasten its arrival. Opening up an authoritarian political system in such a way that it does not completely collapse is extremely difficult, the U.S. has little experience in how to facilitate this (acquiescing in the transition of a handful of allied dictatorships in the 1980s in countries with quite different political cultures doesn’t offer much guidance), and usually the result is the complete collapse of the system. Why are Mubarak and his allies going to set in motion the dissolution of their regime? Unless an advocate of reform can answer that question, calls for pushing political reform in Egypt or elsewhere shouldn’t be taken seriously.

The news out of Lebanon is that the March 8 coalition-backed nominee for prime minister, Najib Miqati, will attempt to form a government after the collapse of Hariri’s government earlier this month. The last time Miqati was prime minister, he oversaw the transitional government that prepared the parliamentary elections in 2005. The “Hizbullah-backed” leader is a Sunni* telecom billionaire whose last brief stint in Lebanese government facilitated bringing the March 14 coalition to power. As the NYT article explained:

The government he forms may in the end look much like past cabinets in this small Mediterranean country and, indeed, Mr. Miqati struck a conciliatory tone, calling himself a consensus candidate.

His small party, Harakat Majd (Glory Movement), is a predominantly Sunni party and it was not a member of the March 8 coalition at the time of the last elections in 2009**. Miqati is a representative from Tripoli in the north, and he is a graduate from the American University in Beirut. There’s no question that Hizbullah is ascendant in Lebanon right now, but all of this is worth keeping in mind. It should help temper wild claims about Hizbullah’s dominance and an “Iranian government” in Beirut.

* In the Lebanese system, the office of prime minister has to be filled by a Sunni.

** The new PM actually ran on Hariri’s list in 2009.

Update: Bloomberg’s report has a little more on the new prime minister:

Mikati “is seen as a genuinely neutral figure,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a research adviser at the Doha Institute in Qatar. He “is balanced and enjoys good relations with Syria and Saudi Arabia,” the two main powerbrokers in Lebanon, she said.

Damning as these true statements are, it’s a bit weird to see them offered, apparently as criticism, by a guy who runs a magazine that often as not takes an expansive view of executive power and doesn’t care much about due process when accused terrorists are involved. ~Conor Friedersdorf

Yes, it is a bit weird, which is how you know that Lowry isn’t offering these observations as criticism. He is engaged in a fairly uninteresting re-statement of things that have been obvious to a lot of us for years. It is damning that the Obama administration endorses unreviewable, unchecked presidential power to authorize the assassination of U.S. citizens on the suspicion of terrorism, but that isn’t why Lowry mentions it. He isn’t even pretending to be concerned with the executive branch’s overreach, the destruction of the rule of law, or the encroachment of the government on constitutional liberties. This isn’t one of those cases of conservative rediscovery of civil liberties during Democratic administrations–it is a celebration that the Obama administration has become as destructive of civil liberties as the Republican administration that preceded it. The entire column is an exercise in Cheney-like “we were right” gloating. To understand just how pitiful this is, consider the reasoning behind it: if Obama has continued or added to authoritarian and illegal Bush administration policies, those policies must therefore be “necessary” and appropriate. It couldn’t possibly be that different administrations from different parties could endorse the same immoral and illegal policies and that both could be equally wrong.

Naturally, it doesn’t bother Lowry and his allies in the least that Obama is doing these things, because they take all of this as vindication. Their party trashed the Constitution when it was in control of the White House, and now the other party is doing the same. According to the warped view Lowry is endorsing here, that isn’t a disgrace or a disaster for the U.S., but a gratifying victory for people who supported all of the Bush administration’s worst abuses. It doesn’t even matter that Lowry undermines the popular false narrative that Obama rejects American exceptionalism (so much for the “assault on American identity”!), because in the end the effort to portray Obama as hostile to American exceptionalism was simply a way of policing political discourse and pushing the definition of American exceptionalism in a more obnoxious nationalist direction.

Evidently, Michael Barone wanted to write a column about his admiration for Joe Lieberman, but he needed to come up with some way to make a politically unimportant retirement seem important, and he needed to manufacture a connection to the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s inaugural address. So Barone ties together Sargent Shriver’s passing with the retirement, which manages to insult the memory of Shriver at the same time that it concocts a far-fetched “link” between Lieberman and JFK.

Shriver was an admirable, principled, and conscientious man who respected the dignity and sanctity of human life, and he also happened to be a contemporary and in-law of Kennedy. Not only did Shriver represent a “link” with JFK, but he represented a particular culture of white ethnic Catholic Democratic politics that has been gradually disappearing for the last fifty years. A pro-life Catholic, Shriver had been a founding member of the America First Committee, and more famously he was also on the 1972 antiwar ticket with George McGovern. In short, he represented much of what was good in the Democratic Party of his time.

None of these things describes Lieberman. He represented the revival of militarism and hawkish foreign policy among Democratic Party leaders during the 1990s and early 2000s, and he was also resolutely opposed to protections for the unborn. He also had no personal connection to Kennedy at all, which makes Barone’s pairing of him with Shriver that much more forced and obnoxious. In fact, virtually the only things that he and Kennedy shared were membership in the Democratic Party and an impulse to support unwise military interventions all around the world, and after 2006 Lieberman couldn’t even claim to belong to the same party anymore. Except for his fondness for militarism, it is hard to see what real “link” with Kennedy Lieberman could have. The one area of policy where Kennedy was most often and most clearly wrong is the one that conservatives insist on emphasizing as his true legacy.

Notably, Barone has nothing to say about any of Shriver’s pro-life and antiwar convictions, because he is writing mainly to offer a tribute to Lieberman as the keeper of Kennedy’s legacy. In short, he uses the death of a good man as nothing more than a springboard to launch into a paean to an increasingly irrelevant warmonger.

There is only one thing the United States needs to do for Colombia right now: Pass the free-trade agreement negotiated and signed five years ago. The agreement has economic benefits for both nations. Failure to ratify it this year would be a slap in the face to Colombia’s new president and the Colombian people. Rewarding Colombians for their democratic progress would seem to be a no-brainer. But the administration shows no inclination to push the agreement forward, even with the new free-trade-oriented Republican House sure to pass it. Labor leaders, of course, oppose all free-trade agreements. And some human rights groups still want to punish Colombia for abuses committed years ago, and some in the administration agree.

In Egypt, the human rights abuses are not a decade old. ~Robert Kagan

Kagan makes it sound as if these abuses occurred in the late 1990s or earlier. In fact, dozens of Colombian union members were murdered in 2007 and 2008, and just in 2009 forty-eight Colombian union members were murdered. 2010 was reportedly no better, as murders of trade unionists were up in 2010 compared to the previous year as of September. Colombia reportedly leads the world in violent deaths of union members. One of the standing objections to the agreement from American unions and Colombian workers is that it would create trade preferences for Colombia without securing the rights of Colombian labor, which are under constant threat from violence and intimidation. Maybe supporters of the Colombian FTA can argue that the benefits of the agreement outweigh the ongoing abuses of labor that will continue, but it is telling that advocates have to minimize and obscure the objections to the FTA to make their case.

Lauren Damme at the New American Foundation wrote a paper outlining the problems with the Colombian FTA. Damme wrote:

The deal would reward egregious labor and human rights violations, bring minimal benefits to the U.S. economy, and have destabilizing impacts on Colombia — which will be paid for by American taxpayers in the form of U.S. aid.

Perhaps advocates of the deal could say that the murders are horrible, but the Colombian government shouldn’t be penalized for them. Damme explains why this is mistaken:

First, Colombia is infamously known as the most dangerous country in the world for unionists, but less well-known are the series of scandals that plagued Uribe’s tenure, including widespread party connections between Uribe’s close advisers and relatives to “demilitarized” paramilitaries, illegal wire-tapping of human and labor rights activists by DAS, the Colombian equivalent of the CIA, and the “falsos positivos” scandals in which the military murdered over 2,000 civilians and then dressed them as guerrillas to claim progress in Colombia’s internal war.

None of this may change with incoming president Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s handpicked successor who assumes power on Aug. 7, 2010. As former minister of defense and a closely held member of Uribe’s party, Santos’s proximity to these scandals means he will not take office with a clean slate, but must earn support by respecting human and labor rights as well as the independence of Colombia’s courts.

All of a sudden, the “enlightened democratic leadership” of Uribe and the “no-brainer” of a free trade agreement aren’t quite what Kagan made them out to be.

So why should Americans care? After all, it might not be in the interest of Colombian workers, but it will help our economic recovery, right? Well, any boost from this deal would be small indeed:

In reality, that “entire” market will represent (about two decades down the line after full implementation of the FTA) less than a 0.05 percent increase in U.S. gross domestic product, and the International Trade Commission predicts that the FTA will have “minimal or no effect on output or employment for most sectors in the U.S. economy.”

So this is a free trade agreement that does essentially nothing for the American economy. Inevitably, reduced barriers between the U.S. and Colombia will cause some Americans to lose their jobs as businesses relocate and cause dislocation in local communities here. The deal is pretty obviously a political reward being handed out to a government that the previous administration wanted to bolster. In exchange for negligible benefits to the U.S., Colombian agricultural labor would be impoverished:

While the Colombia FTA would likely confer few benefits on U.S. workers, its effect on Colombian workers would be severely negative. In particular, the FTA would be devastating to rural agricultural laborers, who constitute 20 percent of the country’s employment, provide 40 percent of its domestic food consumptionand generate 8 percent of Colombia’s GDP. By tearing down barriers to U.S. agricultural products, the FTA would put Colombia’s farmers in competition with giant U.S. agri-business firms subsidized by tax dollars. It is widely expected that thousands of rural workers would be displaced as cheap U.S. farm products — particularly rice, corn and beans — flood Colombia. Oxfam Colombia estimates that at least 15,000 rural jobs will be lost and small farmers’ incomes, which average less than $3.90 per day, will be reduced by almost half.

All of this will contribute to deepening inequality and stratification in Colombia. As Damme says, it will add to the numbers of farmers who will be forced to turn to growing illegal cash crops or violence. None of this is healthy for Colombian political development or stability. As long as the U.S. is waging its pointless drug war in Colombia, it makes even less sense to pursue policies that are liable to fuel the culivation of coca, narco-trafficking, and paramilitary violence, since the U.S. will directly or indirectly have to bear the costs. The Colombian FTA doesn’t make sense for either party, and it is just the sort of neoliberal policy that has helped turn most of Latin America towards left-populism. Congress should reject the agreement until the Colombian government can improve labor protections and make this minimally-beneficial trade deal politically and ethically defensible.

Noah Millman has written a very good post on Tunisia and the possibility of a “wave” of democratization in other Arab countries. He concludes:

In other words: the international political context matters. The United States’ willingness to see Ferdinand Marcos go was crucial to his departure, and that willingness was an expression of confidence – confidence that the end to the Marcos regime would not mean a pro-Communist Philippines. That confidence, in turn, was in part the result of changes in the larger dynamic of the Cold War. So if you want to see greater democratization in the Arab world, the crucial change in political context has to be less concern in the West about the rise of political Islam.

That’s right, but I would add to this that there would also have to be much less concern for the foreign policy orientation of new democratic governments as well, and that seems even less likely than decreased concern about Islamism. Islamist or not, if a new Egyptian or Jordanian or Saudi government were likely to be ill-disposed towards serving as a support for U.S. influence in the region, the U.S. and other allies would try to prevent its formation or would try to organize a coalition of countries to isolate and punish that country. An Islamist government in any of these places would probably also align itself differently, but the more important factor is the alignment of the government in its international relations rather than its ideology.

To be specific, as long as a new Egyptian government continued to be at peace with Israel and remained opposed to growing Iranian influence, the domestic political program of that government would not become a major impediment to continued good relations with Washington. If, on the other hand, a new Egyptian government tried to reclaim its role as a regional mediator and started competing with Turkey as a regional power, the U.S. might be faced with increasingly independent Egyptian and Turkish foreign policies. Considering how short-sighted and foolish Washington’s response to recent Turkish actions has been, we shouldn’t expect a better response if a democratic Egypt started acting the same way. The U.S. might anticipate these problems when there is a serious domestic challenge to the current Egyptian government and decide that it’s not worth taking the chance that Egypt might act too independently. Of course, in the end Mubarak’s regime will depend most on the loyalty of the military, and by all accounts the military remains a pillar of the regime. Until that changes, the U.S. response is neither here nor there.

One important factor in the apparent success (so far) of the Tunisian uprising is that the U.S. was not heavily invested enough in Ben Ali’s survival, and despite French complicity in Ben Ali’s regime the French government was in no position politically to launch an intervention to keep Ben Ali in power. The external support for many other authoritarian governments and monarchies in the region would be much greater, because the fear of how a new, more popular government might change its relations with the U.S. would dictate a policy of trying to shore up the old order or to restore a deposed ruler or a member of his family.