I am finally reading Thomas de Waal’s excellent The Caucasus. The entire book is a valuable overview and introduction in the recent history of the region. In connection with that, I should also recommend his article for The National Interest from last year in which he reviews–and demolishes–Ron Asmus’ Little War That Shook The World. Here is an excerpt from the article, which contains many of the same sharp insights as the book:

Back in Tbilisi, as the Georgian analyst Ivlian Khaindrava memorably puts it, Saakashvili had a “government by day” and a “government by night.” Washington and CNN studios saw the young, articulate, English-speaking reformers, but they did not see men like Vano Merabishvili, Saakashvili’s interior minister and chief enforcer, or Niko Rurua, an ex-paramilitary fighter who is now the minister of culture. It is men like these who sit with the president late at night in his office, making the big decisions. And it was they who supervised the crackdown against antigovernment demonstrators in November 2007, when riot police cleared the streets of Tbilisi and smashed up the studios of Imedi, then an opposition channel-an episode that barely figures in Asmus’s book. For men like Merabishvili and Rurua, it is more about control than about democracy. In November 2009, Transparency International reported that “Georgia’s media is less free and pluralistic than it was before the Rose Revolution in 2003 and the ousting of President Eduard Shevardnadze.”

These shadowy figures were also behind the massive buildup of the Georgian armed forces that preceded the 2008 war. Asmus honestly concedes that there were plans to launch a military operation in South Ossetia in 2004-a plan scotched in Washington-and for a “preemptive Georgian military move” on Abkhazia in the spring of 2008, as the Russians were increasing their military presence there. Presidents Bush and Saakashvili had a misunderstood conversation in which the latter apparently believed he had been given the go-ahead for military action. It took high-level diplomatic intervention to dispel the impression. U.S. officials delivered repeated messages in private that they would not support a military campaign, but they never said so strongly in public. Here, it seems, was the flashing amber light that made Saakashvili think that if he did launch a quick military strike, he would be allowed to get away with it.

As I am going through the book, I will probably be posting on some of the more interesting parts I come across.

Democratic nations in the region, worried that the United States may be losing influence, turn to Washington for reassurance that the U.S. security guarantee remains firm. If the United States cannot provide that assurance because it is cutting back its military capabilities, they will have to choose between accepting Chinese dominance and striking out on their own, possibly by building nuclear weapons. ~Robert Kagan

Hegemonists often say things like this, as if this is supposed to discourage Americans from reducing our military presence overseas. Since we can assume that China’s neighbors are not going to accept Chinese “dominance,” that means that they will have to start providing for more of their own security. It is possible that this will mean that some democratic states will acquire nuclear weapons. That is not ideal, but as long as China is a nuclear-armed state its neighbors are presumably going to want to have the protection of a nuclear deterrent. If it will not be ours, it will have to be theirs, and it makes more sense to start making the change to greater allied self-defense and less dependency on the United States when regional threats are reasonably well-contained. There’s really no reason why the U.S. should still be providing security guarantees to wealthy, self-sufficent democracies twenty years after the end of the Cold War. The underlying assumptions in Kagan’s argument here are that our allies cannot be trusted to make sound independent foreign policy decisions, and they cannot be trusted to have nuclear weapons. This is never quite stated openly, but this is what hegemonists mean when they say this.

The same applies to Kagan’s warnings about growing Iranian power in the Near East. It is supposed to be considered a disaster that allied states might start assuming more of the burden for their own security. Kagan’s argument is circular reasoning: the U.S. must provide security for the region, or else regional states will have to provide their own security, so the U.S. must provide security for the region. This is supposed to be a compelling case for endless U.S. military involvement around the world?

Kagan continues:

In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had collapsed and the biggest problem in the world seemed to be ethnic conflict in the Balkans, it was at least plausible to talk about cutting back on American military capabilities. In the present, increasingly dangerous international environment, in which terrorism and great power rivalry vie as the greatest threat to American security and interests, cutting military capacities is simply reckless.

Of course, hegemonists did not consider military reductions plausible in the 1990s. According to them, the international environment is always “increasingly dangerous,” and they describe it this way no matter what is actually happening. The reality is that terrorism is not that great of a security threat. It is a real threat, and it is one that should be taken very seriously, but if it represents one of the two greatest threats to U.S. security and interests it becomes clear that reducing the American military presence overseas and reducing military spending overall are very reasonable and appropriate responses to the reduced threats of our time. If we are honest, we will have to acknowledge that while there are other major powers, it is an exaggeration to speak of “great power rivalry.” Granted, China is interested in regional hegemony, and so is Iran, but in what respect does either of them figure as a rival, except that the U.S. insists on denying them the status they seek in their own regions?

Kagan is correct that the only way to make substantial reductions in military spending is to reduce the size of the military, which means eliminating some of its missions:

To cut the size of the force, however, requires reducing or eliminating the missions those forces have been performing.

He states later on:

The only way to find substantial savings in the defense budget, therefore, is to change American strategy fundamentally.

That’s also right. If our existing security commitments make us “the only regional balancer against China in Asia, Russia in eastern Europe, and Iran in the Middle East,” it is well past time to scrap those commitments or at least begin the process of shifting the burden for these commitments to regional allies that have more than enough resources to meet them. The U.S. has no business being a regional balancer against any of these states, and the U.S. should not be expected to bear the burden for defending all of the nations of these regions.

Doug Mataconis speaks for many when he writes:

Considering that it’s hard to believe that Duvalier is in Haiti for anything other than personal, possibly, nefarious, motives, I can’t say I understand why Barr would represent this guy.

The news that Barr is serving as a spokesman or representative for Duvalier has be the weirdest story of this kind I’ve seen in a while. Evidently, Duvalier returned to Haiti as a way of evading Swiss law so that he might be able to gain access to assets that the Swiss had frozen. That would seem to account for the timing of his return, and his financial woes would help explain why he would take the chance of being arrested upon returning to Haiti. Duvalier’s regime was corrupt and repressive. One can make arguments that the U.S. government sometimes has to make deals or even alliances with such regimes, and it certainly isn’t America’s responsibility to fix other nations’ political systems, but there’s no reason and really no excuse for private citizens to be shilling on behalf of deposed dictators.

Update: Barr is an associate of the law firm of Duvalier’s lawyers.

Sadly, Mr. Cain will take up valuable time in GOP debates spouting this childish nonsense, further draining the water out of the candidate pool as he dives toward arguments with John Bolton and Rick Santorum over who is more hawkish. But to say Tea Party aligned candidates (and in the 2012 field everyone is going to be Tea Party “aligned,” with praise coming as standard as hosannas to Ronald Reagan) will bring nothing new to the foreign policy debate within the 2012 campaign is not accurate. We don’t know the make-up of the entire field and if it’s true that politicians like Cain are taking their cues from the Tea Parties and will say anything outlandish in order to impress them, they may well be sending different signals in 2011-12 than they did in 2007-08. ~Sean Scallon

It’s true that everyone in the 2012 field is going to make praise of the Tea Party into part of their boilerplate rhetoric. In fact, I wasn’t making quite the sweeping claim about all Tea Party-aligned candidates that Sean seems to think I did. I was referring only to Cain, who is a favorite of Tea Party activists notwithstanding his completely conventional views on these matters. If we must challenge Tea Partiers on these issues, as Sean has argued before, that has to include identifying the popular spokesmen among them who are ignoring the fiscal and political costs of the national security state. Cain is one of these. If he simply speaks for himself, his audience does not seem unduly bothered by his embrace of Bush’s foreign policy. Perhaps there are good reasons for that. It may be that he doesn’t dwell on those issues, or it may be that his audience is willing to overlook disagreements because they find the rest of his arguments appealing. It is also quite possible that most Tea Partiers are not bothered by Cain’s views on these issues because they share them.

As far as probable 2012 contenders associated with the Tea Party are concerned, he is fairly representative in the foreign policy positions he takes. That doesn’t rule out valuable contributions to the debate from Gary Johnson or Ron Paul, who can also claim connections with some Tea Party activists. The lack of alternatives may help give the foreign policy and national security arguments put forward by Johnson and/or Paul that much more attention. Nonetheless, virtually every other likely 2012 candidate largely shares Cain’s views on foreign policy, military spending, and the national security state. If several of them are closely associated with Tea Party activists, surely one of the best favors we can do for those activists is to emphasize that many of the politicians and spokesmen they have been cheering hold views on the role of government overseas that is incompatible with the desire to reduce the size, scope, and power of the government. Part of challenging Tea Party activists to think about the fiscal and political costs of perpetual war and empire has to involve pointing out that their would-be leaders lack credibility as fiscal conservatives and defenders of constitutional liberty.

Let’s look at the probable contenders who actually merit some identification with Tea Partiers based on their appearance at Tea Party events, their self-definition as members of the Tea Party Caucus (if they are House members), and the enthusiastic reception from Tea Party activists that they get. Two House members who have improbably been receiving a lot of attention in recent days as possible 2012 contenders are Mike Pence and Michele Bachmann, both of whom belong to the House Tea Party Caucus and both of whom have been regular speakers at Tea Party events. For their part, Pence and Bachmann have been better on some of the major votes on spending and bailouts than many of their colleagues (both voted against TARP, and Pence also voted against Medicare Part D), but they are both reliably on board with the hawks of their party. Bachmann and Pence were among the co-sponsors of H.R. 1553, which expressed support for an Israeli attack on Iran. The resolution is not binding and has simply been referred to committee, where it may languish, but their support for it reflects the warped understanding of national security issues that the two of them have.

Things go downhill from there. Rick Santorum is presenting himself as a Tea Party-style candidate, and he is definitely preparing to run, and his super-hawkishness on foreign policy is so well known that I don’t think it needs much more comment. I have already remarked at some length on Marco Rubio’s foreign policy views here, and more recently Rubio has shown himself to be true to his word that he will be a dead-ender for outdated, misguided Cuba policy. The less said about Palin, the better for everyone. Larry Sabato counted and rated 19 possible Republican candidates, and of those perhaps three offer something other than the conventional line. What may be most telling in all of this is that the one relatively mainstream Republican candidate willing to talk about reducing military spending is Mitch Daniels, who has no particular association with Tea Party activists.

Everybody in Lebanon needs to understand something: Israel is more likely than ever to target the entire country during the next round of conflict. ~Michael Totten

That would make it no different from 2006, when Israel targeted the entire country, including detachments of the Lebanese army. The 2006 war was a war against all of Lebanon even when the country was still formally governed by the March 14 coalition and the war was supposed to focus only on Hizbullah. So, yes, Israel will target all of Lebanon during the next round of conflict, but that would be the case if Hariri held on as prime minister and the Lebanese government had not collapsed. Apparently, what Totten means when he says this is that Israel will be more justified in wrecking Lebanon in the future.

Totten continues:

Regime-change in Lebanon would have been an insane policy with Hariri’s March 14 coalition in charge, but it won’t be if Hezbollah is calling the shots.

Right, because another Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon for the explicit purpose of overthrowing its government and installing a friendly puppet regime can’t possibly turn into a disaster for both Israel and Lebanon.

Nina Hachigian makes the claim that the Chinese have learned their enthusiasm for the protections of state sovereignty from American neoconservatives. This gets several things wrong, and manages to give neoconservatives credit for beliefs they don’t have. Hachigian writes:

Yet some American neoconservatives find themselves on the side of China’s Communist leaders in this debate. Though they have tended to criticize the Obama administration for not being adequately tough on Beijing, their own ideal of national sovereignty supports China’s.

As her chief witness for this, she cites John Bolton’s sovereignty arguments against international agreements and institutions. Despite being perpetually wrong and obnoxious about major national security issues, and despite being a former high-ranking Bush administration official, John Bolton is not really a neoconservative if we want to use the word properly. He is a hawkish unilateralist nationalist, and he and many neoconservatives would typically agree on most foreign policy issues, but it is still a mistake to call him a neoconservative or assume that neoconservatives are as attached to a particular understanding of national sovereignty as he is. To the extent that deploying pro-sovereignty arguments enhances American power, neoconservatives would have no problem using them, but they more than happy to exploit international institutions and their regulations as pretexts for infringing on other states’ sovereignty. Mistakenly identifying Bolton as a neoconservative creates no end of confusion about what neoconservatives’ views on national sovereignty are.

Indeed, there are few people in the U.S. more hostile to the idea of state sovereignty as a serious principle of international law than neoconservatives, because they correctly understand that respecting other states’ sovereignty dramatically reduces the occasions for American intervention overseas. Their view is really quite straightforward: the U.S. and its allies should enjoy all the benefits of sovereignty, and states that they regard as undesirable or dangerous should have none of its protections unless their governments fall in line. Hachigian may have been misled by the massive hypocrisy that this position requires.

Neoconservatives are not necessarily averse to multilateralism, so long as it is a multilateral arrangement in which the U.S. is the dominant party, and as much as they may complain about the U.N. on certain occasions they are overwhelmingly hostile to pro-sovereignty conservatives who want to scale back U.S. involvement in international institutions, including trade organizations. Hachigian refers to the NPT and free trade agreements as examples of what a “more modern view of sovereignty” permits, and neoconservatives generally support both. Mind you, they support the NPT very selectively, and they do so as a way to thwart the Iranian nuclear program while permitting U.S.-aligned, non-NPT nuclear powers to do as they please.

Among the cuts in the plan offered by the Republican Study Committee is one measure calling for the virtual de-funding of USAID. As Josh Rogin notes, this is consistent with the statements leading House Republicans have been making about foreign aid spending since shortly after the election:

If the RSC plan was ever implemented, which is doubtful, the State Department would be in the firing line for huge cuts. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) announced, on her first day as chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, that she wanted to take an axe to the State Department and foreign aid budgets. Her appropriations counterpart, House Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee chairwoman Kay Granger (R-TX) has made similar statements in the past.

This is not hard to understand. Most Republicans are viscerally opposed to most forms of foreign aid. It is one of the easier parts of the budget to target. Its recipients are not voters, it is actually a very small part of the budget, votersbelieve it is an enormous part of the budget, they overwhelmingly support cutting this funding because they imagine that getting rid of it would significantly reduce the deficit, and it usually funds projects that can be easily portrayed and dismissed as “nation-building” or worse. There are also good arguments that can be made that foreign aid is often useless, encourages corruption in the governments receiving the aid, and undermines local, private economic development. Then again, wiping out almost all funding for USAID is just the sort of indiscriminate budget-cutting that horrifies Republican hawks when funding the Pentagon’s budget request comes up for discussion.

Notably, the RSC plan designates all of its targeted cuts as “non-security discretionary spending.” If military spending cuts are on the table, no one told the members of the RSC. If Exum persuaded them that USAID funding is properly defined as being related to national security, that might make them more supportive of foreign aid spending, but it isn’t going to encourage them to put military spending under greater scrutiny. So, no, Republicans didn’t vote to cut defense. To claim that they support “defense” cuts because they want to de-fund USAID is to abuse the phrase “defense spending” even more than hawks already do. The RSC supported cutting foreign aid spending because they don’t think of most foreign aid as having any importance for national security policies, and to the extent that they acknowledge that foreign aid funding is directed to Afghanistan and Pakistan they would probably point to this as one of the problems with “Af-Pak” policy.

The overall RSC plan is not likely to go very far. As Rogin reports, “The RSC plan is so drastic and extends its projected cuts so far out into the future that its chances for implementation are slim to none, [Tom] Donnelly said.” AEI’s Tom Donnelly isn’t right about much, but this assessment seems correct. What’s discouraging about this is that the specific cuts the plan identifies actually come to approximately $140 billion, and the rest is supposed to be made up by keeping discretionary spending at ’06 levels. Even a plan that is actually fairly modest and relatively unserious when it comes to long-term deficit reduction isn’t likely to go anywhere.

And here’s a shocker for modern progressives and conservatives alike: The first pursuers of American communists were Democrats Woodrow Wilson and his attorney general, Alexander Mitchell Palmer. For all his faults, Wilson understood the dangers of Bolshevism. ~Paul Kengor

The Palmer Raids were among one of the more shameful episodes of hysterical, authoritarian overreach in modern American history. It is awful to see them implicitly praised as if they were admirable or desirable. Yes, they pursued American communists and anarchists, and they also baselessly harassed Russian immigrants who had done nothing criminal, just as the Wilson administration harassed and arrested critics of entry into WWI. The post-1917 Wilson administration is a disgraceful period, and the fact that Wilson happened to count communists among his domestic foes doesn’t make it any better. If popular anticommunism during the Cold War was overwrought and prone to excess, as Kennan believed and Lukacs has argued for decades, the Red Scare of the early ’20s and Wilson’s intervention in the Russian Civil War were simply lunatic. The dangers of Bolshevism in 1919-1920 were dangers to Russia and the peoples of the collapsing Russian Empire and its environs. In terms of international power, the early Bolsheviks were very weak and couldn’t have seriously threatened the interests of any of the major Western powers of that time, to say nothing of the United States. Never mind that Wilson’s commitment of the U.S. into WWI helped knock the Germans out of the war in the east and allowed the Bolsheviks to secure their position. For some reason, we’re supposed to give Wilson credit for deploying Americans to Vladivostok in a no-hope fight after the Bolsheviks had largely already won.

Well, no, not really, but Michael Lind (via Andrew) seems to think so:

If there was a moment when the culture of enlightened modernity in the United States gave way to the sickly culture of romantic primitivism, it was when the movie “Star Wars” premiered in 1977. A child of the 1960s, I had grown up with the optimistic vision symbolized by “Star Trek,” according to which planets, as they developed technologically and politically, graduated to membership in the United Federation of Planets, a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN. When I first watched “Star Wars,” I was deeply shocked. The representatives of the advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization were now the bad guys, and the heroes were positively medieval — hereditary princes and princesses, wizards and ape-men. Aristocracy and tribalism were superior to bureaucracy. Technology was bad. Magic was good.

One of the things that Lind’s preferred states all have in common is that they are expansive, bureaucratic, centralized states ruled by autocrats or unaccountable overseers, and they are capable of extracting far larger revenues out of their economies than their successors. Obviously, Lind finds most of these traits desirable, and he seems not terribly bothered by the autocracy. In the case of the UFP, one simply has a technocrat’s utopian post-political fantasy run riot. Indeed, the political organization of the Federation has always struck me as stunningly implausible and unrealistic even by the standards of science fiction. It was supposed to be a galactic alliance with a massive military whose primary purposes were exploration and peacekeeping, and which had overcome all social problems by dint of technological progress. If ever there were a vision to appeal to a certain type of romantic idealists with no grasp of the corrupting nature of power or the limits of human nature, this would have to be it.

Lind’s article is not very persuasive, not least since his treatment of the change from antiquity to the middle ages is seriously flawed. Lind writes:

But few would disagree that the Europe of Charlemagne was more backward in its mindset, at least at the elite level, than the Rome of Augustus or the Alexandria of the Ptolemies.

Nor are the great gains of decolonization and personal liberation in recent decades necessarily incompatible with an intellectual and cultural Dark Age. After all, the fall of the Roman empire led to the emergence of many new kingdoms, nations and city-states, and slavery withered away by the end of the Middle Ages in Europe.

Well, count me among the “few” that would disagree. For one thing, the “Europe of Charlemagne” was also the Europe of the Byzantines, and under both the Carolingians and the Macedonians later in the ninth century there was extensive cultivation of literary and artistic production that significantly undermines claims that this was an “intellectual and cultural Dark Age.” This was an era of substantial manuscript production, and one marked by the learning of Eriugena and Photios. The Carolingian period was actually one of the more significant moments of political reunification in Europe prior to the later middle ages, but it is true that Charlemagne and his successors did not have a large administrative state apparatus at their disposal. The Iconoclastic emperors in the east were hostile to religious images, but in many other respects they cultivated learning and drew on the mathematical and scientific thought that was flourishing at that time among the ‘Abbasids. Obviously, we are speaking of the elite, but it is the elites of different eras that Lind is comparing. The point is not to reverse the old prejudice against medieval Europe and direct it against classical antiquity, nor we do have to engage in Romantic idealization of medieval societies, but we should acknowledge that this approach to history that Lind offers here abuses those periods and cultures that do not flatter the assumptions or values of modern Westerners. For that matter, it distorts and misrepresents the periods and cultures moderns adopt as their precursors, because it causes them to value those periods and cultures because of how they seem to anticipate some aspect of modernity rather than on their own terms.

There are very real trade-offs in opting for political and economic decentralization, just as there are significant costs in opting for centralization. Under a decentralized arrangement, efficiency and utility are going to be sacrificed for the sake of other goods (e.g., preserving local traditions and communities, sustainability, social solidarity, cultural identity, greater political autonomy, etc.) that Lind either ignores or simply declares backwards. Lind prefers one tendency that leads towards empire, concentrations of power and wealth, and technocratic government, and he is dismayed that anyone would object to the costs that these things impose. He would prefer instead that we pretend that those costs don’t exist, and he wants us to accept that resistance to the advance of Progress is futile. It is telling that his concluding proposal sounds a great deal like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.