The atrocity in Tucson on Saturday was a horrifying act of political nihilism. As everyone knows, six innocent people were murdered, and fourteen more very seriously injured, including Rep. Giffords, who was the main target of the assassin. Obviously, the killer was deranged, but the same could probably be said about Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist assassin of William McKinley. That doesn’t make their destructive goals any less political. Nihilism is a charge that a lot of people have thrown around in the last few years, and it has usually been wrong. There are so few actual nihilists that it is usually a mistake to label someone this way, but it seems appropriate in this case. Nihilism is usually the wrong word to use because nihilism is “far removed from politics as we normally understand it,” to use Brooks’ phrase describing Loughner’s thinking, but if anything describes Loughner’s ideas that would seem to be it.

Aside from repugnant opportunism, the main reason why some liberals have tried connecting this atrocity with conventional Republicans and Palin’s demagoguery is that the assassin’s actual politics are so strange and unfamiliar. As horrible and genuinely senseless as it was, the massacre might make some sense if it could be linked to familiar political disputes and woven into ready-made narratives. It might lend the suffering and deaths of all these people some special meaning if they could be seen as political martyrs who were attacked by identifiable extremists from the other “side” because of their convictions, but that wasn’t the case. What is disturbing about Loughner’s attack is that it most likely could have been directed against any public official who happened to draw his ire. No one really knows what to do with someone who takes the view of Bazarov when he says, “Aristocratism, liberalism, progress, principles….Just think, how many foreign…and useless words!” For that reason, many people tend to turn to convenient scapegoats and default villains.

The material-support statute doesn’t need revision to accommodate non-existent defects. What it does need — and does not often enough get for fear of offending some Muslim organizations — is rigorous enforcement against accurately designated organizations, of which MEK is not one. ~Mukasey, Ridge, Giuliani, and Townsend

According to the CFR’s profile of Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the group has been engaged in terrorist activities for the better part of forty years dating back to before the Islamic revolution:

The group has targeted Iranian government officials and government facilities in Iran and abroad, and during the 1970s, it attacked Americans in Iran. While the group says it does not intentionally target civilians, it has often risked civilian casualties. It routinely aims its attacks at government buildings in crowded cities. MEK terrorism has declined since late 2001. Incidents linked to the group include:

the series of mortar attacks and hit-and-run raids during 2000 and 2001 against Iranian government buildings; one of these killed Iran’s chief of staff;

the 2000 mortar attack on President Mohammed Khatami’s palace in Tehran;

the February 2000 “Operation Great Bahman,” during which MEK launched twelve attacks against Iran;

the 1999 assassination of the deputy chief of Iran’s armed forces general staff, Ali Sayyad Shirazi;

the 1998 assassination of the director of Iran’s prison system, Asadollah Lajevardi;

the 1992 near-simultaneous attacks on Iranian embassies and institutions in thirteen countries;

Saddam Hussein’s suppression of the 1991 Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish uprisings;

the 1981 bombing of the offices of the Islamic Republic Party and of Premier Mohammad-Javad Bahonar, which killed some seventy high-ranking Iranian officials, including President Mohammad-Ali Rajaei and Bahonar;

the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries;

the killings of U.S.military personnel and civilians working on defense projects in Tehran in the 1970s.

This is hardly secret information. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, MEK was a group that operated against Iran from inside Iraq. MEK was practically the only terrorist group that Saddam Hussein’s regime did support, but one reason it had never been added to the list of terrorist organizations is that MEK’s ongoing terrorism did not trouble Washington as long as it was primarily directed at the Iranian government. During the early phase of the “war on terror” under the previous administration, it would have been a bit hard to rationalize if the zealous anti-terrorist Bush administration had taken MEK off the list when it had been attacking Iranian targets as recently as 2001.

This silly material-support argument is a distraction from the real issue. The people arguing for changing MEK’s designation are not providing material support for a terrorist group. As of right now, they are merely expressing a repugnant political opinion informed by their hostility to Iran’s government, and they are free to do so. They are engaged in a political campaign to make it possible to provide support to that group after it is no longer designated a terrorist group.

It seems to be the case for now that MEK has been disarmed, and it seems unlikely that the new government in Iraq is going to get back into the business of providing shelter for anti-Iranian militants. That doesn’t mean that MEK isn’t a terrorist organization. It just means that it has become inactive. Of course, the reason for demanding the removal of MEK from the official list of terrorist organizations is so that the MEK can receive support from anti-Iranian hawks here in the U.S. The purpose of all of this is presumably to get MEK to resume its war against the Iranian government, which would be consistent with the previous administration’s policy of supporting violent separatist movements in an effort to destabilize the regime in Tehran. For the moment, their chances of success aren’t very good. The current administration is unlikely to change the MEK’s designation after it has just added Jundullah to the list.

Treaties seem to me to suppose the need for consensus and bilateral (or multilateral) approval and hence contrary to our ability to act unilaterally in our own interests. Again, I admit this is largely visceral, and I admit that it is not inconceivable that a treaty could be in our best interest. ~Red Phillips

I understand this reaction. I agree that treaties shouldn’t be entered into lightly, and they should only be entered into when they clearly serve the American interest. On the whole, I share this skepticism of most treaties, especially when they make policy decisions less accountable to the American public and when they invest international institutions with authority over matters that should be reserved to U.S. institutions. New START does neither of these things.

In this case, a bilateral agreement is necessary. The administration could try to reduce the nuclear arsenal unilaterally, but we all understand that this will never happen. As it was, there was strong resistance to the treaty when both sides were under the same restrictions, and any attempt to reduce the arsenal unilaterally would meet even stronger opposition on the grounds that it could put the U.S. at a strategic disadvantage. If reducing the number of deployed warheads is desirable, and I would hope that non-interventionists and conservative realists can largely agree that it is, there are good reasons why it needs to be done on a bilateral basis and confirmed through a negotiated agreement. There needs to be some reasonable confidence that the Russians are also staying within the same limits, and there has to be some mechanism for verifying compliance. The merits of the treaty are fairly straightforward, and I don’t think one has to be an “internationalist” to see them, which is why I continue to find opposition to it a bit mystifying.

Why did I spend so much time discussing the treaty? For one thing, opposition to the treaty was coming largely from all of the people complicit in the disasters of Bush-era foreign policy, including the poor handling of relations with Russia. When the alleged “expert” witnesses for the anti-treaty side were John Bolton and Richard Perle, it seemed to me that we were once again seeing the Republican position on a significant foreign policy issue defined by dangerous ideologues just as we had seen in the debate leading up to the war in Iraq, and as we have seen again and again in foreign policy debates over the last decade. On one side of the debate, there were most of the usual suspects that routinely try to stoke conflict, exaggerate threats, and demagogue national security issues, so why wouldn’t I oppose that side as intensely as I have been opposing them in the past?

We have seen the results of what the hawkish interventionists’ national security views are, and we know that they have damaged U.S. interests, and I was convinced that opposition to the treaty was in some respects a continuation of the reckless, hubristic approach to foreign policy that caused that damage. It was the fanatical opposition to it from most of the GOP and conservative movement leaders and the fundamentally dishonest arguments advanced in support of that opposition that made the treaty’s ratification seem to be particularly important. The treaty merited ratification, and its opponents deserved to be defeated, because they were recycling the very same ill-informed, reckless foreign policy views that have been prevailing on the right for over a decade. These are the same views that materially harmed American interests during the Bush years, and they are the views that non-interventionists on the right have generally been trying to combat at every turn for decades. If Robert Kagan wants to try to spin an outcome that most of his allies vigorously opposed, that has nothing to do with the importance of the treaty.

It did matter to me that anti-treaty figures in the GOP have generally been advocates of provocative, aggressive and confrontational policies towards Russia and towards many other states. Whatever their other political considerations were, there was certainly a desire on the part of some treaty opponents to sabotage improved U.S.-Russian relations. The U.S. should not seek improved relations with Russia for their own sake, but to advance concrete U.S. interests. This involves securing nuclear materials, promoting security cooperation against jihadism, countering nuclear proliferation through civilian nuclear cooperation (such as the recently-enacted 123 agreement), and further reducing our costly, unnecessary nuclear arsenal. Beyond this, cultivating good relations with other major powers should make it less likely that the U.S. will attempt to back proxies along their borders or pursue provocative policies that the other state will perceive as an attempt at hostile containment. Anyone who wants to scale back the warfare state and restore some sanity to U.S. foreign policy should be able to see the value of reducing tensions with other major powers.

Recognizing the limits of U.S. power also means that the U.S. will need to cooperate with other powers in some cases to secure American interests. Politically, the treaty’s failure would have undermined the thaw between Washington and Moscow, and it would have given great encouragement to those in the U.S. and Russia that desire and would benefit from renewed antagonism between our governments. Renewed antagonism would not serve American interests, it would become a new pretext for increased U.S. involvement in other nations’ affairs, and it would also destabilize eastern Europe and the Caucasus as hawkish interventionists pushed for escalating pressure against Russian “expansionism.” The treaty’s ratification doesn’t eliminate the danger of renewed antagonism in the future, but it does make it less likely, and that seems obviously desirable.

Christ is born, glorify him! Christ is from heaven, go to meet Him! Christ is on earth, be ye lifted up! Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing out with gladness, all ye people. For He is glorified. ~First Ode of the Christmas Canon

Thy Nativity, O Christ our God, hath shined upon the world the light of knowledge; for thereby, they that worshipped the stars were taught by a star to worship Thee, the Sun of Righteousness, and to know Thee, the Dayspring from on high. O Lord, glory be to Thee. ~Festal Troparion

The Virgin today gives birth to the Transcendent One, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable One. Angels and shepherds glorify Him, and wise men journey with a star. For a young Child is born for us, Who is the eternal God. ~Nativity Kontakion

Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
Christos razhdaetsya! Slavite!
Christos gennatai! Doxasate!

Just before Christmas, Robert Kagan applauded the ratification of New START, and he claimed that it heralded the emergence of a working “internationalist” majority in the Senate:

The internationalist coalition that passed this treaty will be critical in advancing U.S. interests over the coming years: in dealing with Iran; China; the continuing war in Afghanistan; the stabilization of Iraq; the ratification of free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama; and the maintenance of adequate defense and foreign affairs budgets. With the right presidential leadership, this muscular internationalism ought to, as it has in the past, provide the center of gravity for American foreign policy.

According to the Status of Forces Agreement, the direct U.S. role in the “stabilization of Iraq” ends at the end of this year. There is scarcely any time and no inclination on the part of Iraq’s new government to re-negotiate the agreement, and it is likely that trying to re-open the issue of an American military presence beyond the deadline would bring down the government that was put together so slowly and with so much difficulty last year. There will be no need for a working coalition in the Senate on this issue beyond December. Every other issue Kagan lists is far more contentious, and some are quite unpopular.

The passage of New START was misleading in that it created the impression that there was consensus on the direction of U.S. foreign policy among a super-majority of Senators. What we actually saw was a cobbled-together group of thirteen Republicans supporting a specific arms reduction treaty over the strenuous and often ludicrous resistance of most of their leadership. Three of them retired and were replaced by more hawkish Republicans, and five of the Democrats voting for the treaty retired or lost their bids for re-election, which means that Kagan’s “internationalist coalition” from the treaty vote has already been decimated.

What was striking about the difficulty of New START’s ratification is how even an overwhelmingly-supported treaty could meet with such intense opposition. There is nothing like that general consensus for any of the other policies one way or the other, and it would be strange if there were. The free trade agreements in particular are neither popular nor do they command the same kind of broad support that the treaty did. Even after the last round of negotiations produced a slightly improved agreement, the free trade deal with South Korea will meet with significant opposition on the Democratic side, and KORUS opponents have far more support from the public than anti-START Republicans ever had. Ratifying the treat should have been very easy, and instead it was an unnecessarily drawn-out and difficult process. Now that there will be a more evenly-divided Senate faced with a number of more contentious and controversial issues, we should not assume that there is meaningful consensus on any of them.

As David Lindsay has asked the question, “What is Liu Xiaobo for?”, perhaps I can provide part of an answer. On the one hand, he is one of the authors of Charter 08, which says all the right sorts of things that will appeal to most Western liberal democrats, and his statement read out at the Nobel Peace Price ceremony in his absence includes an appeal to freedom of expression with which most of us would probably agree. Then again, his old organization was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which is never a good sign, and Liu has made argumentsendorsing the Iraq war, among others, and democracy promotion through warfare.

Unfortunately, it seems that on most political questions Liu Xiaobo has fully adopted the conventional views that “pro-Western” dissidents are expected to take. Where Solzhenitsyn denounced the West for its decadence and materialism, and rooted his critique of the Soviet system in older Russian traditions, Liu Xiaobo would seem to be a Chinese version of those Russian liberals who disdain most of their countrymen and their national traditions in the name of a democratic universalism that aims to reduce all nations to what George Bush once called the “single model of human progress.” He has called for the thoroughgoing Westernization of China both culturally and politically.

Obviously, none of this remotely justifies his arbitrary detention, and I can even understand why a dissident against a truly oppressive authoritarian regime would make the mistake of identifying so strongly with America that he recklessly endorses every U.S. policy. We should also recognize that this sort of wholesale “pro-Western” attitude among Chinese dissidents cuts off would-be political reformers from most of their fellow countrymen and makes it that much easier for the Chinese government to portray these dissidents as hostile to China. The more that such dissidents say the things that most Westerners want to hear, the less relevant they are likely to be to reforming their country’s politics, and the more that they become cause celebres in the West with minimal influence where they might do the most good.

It’s worth emphasizing that Liu Xiaobo’s detention is obviously, purely political. There is no question that he is being held as a political prisoner for the “crime” of expressing views that the regime finds unacceptable, and for no other reason. For some reason, I haven’t seen anyone arguing that Liu’s detention, or the detention of so many others like him, should have any impact on U.S.-China relations. Presumably, most people understand that harming U.S. interests for the sake of “speaking out” to no purpose about the treatment of Liu and others like him will accomplish nothing, but this is just the sort of useless hectoring that some hawks have been urging in the wake of the Khodorkovsky trial.

Tea Partiers say their movement is a response to the way government power, and government debt, grew under both Bush and Obama. But if they looked seriously at the reasons for that growth under Bush, they would see that much of what they’re upset about is the military and homeland security spending justified by his expansive “war on terror.” Anyone genuinely worried about debt can’t ignore the fact that defense constitutes a majority of federal discretionary spending. And anyone devoted to a strict interpretation of the Constitution can’t ignore the fact that America is still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Pakistan, Yemen and lots of other places, without formal congressional declarations of war, although that is what the Constitution requires.

The Republican foreign policy apparatus in Washington, which is in large measure funded by defense contractors, has declared preemptive war on the idea that military spending should be part of deficit-reduction discussion. But before going along, the Tea Partiers should think about how they’d like to be remembered by history. If they don’t extend their constitutional vision to foreign policy, they’ll be abandoning any serious chance of cutting the deficit and reducing the size of government. They’ll become indistinguishable from other conservative Republicans, just the latest in a long line on the right to put a globalist foreign policy over a minimalist state. If, on the other hand, they genuinely chart a foreign-policy course based upon their understanding of the Constitution—if they subordinate the “war on terror” to the demands of fiscal solvency—they will be a new and subversive force in American politics, and the Republican Party will be headed for a fascinating ideological showdown. ~Peter Beinart

One of the reasons why no one ever seems to be able to define a “Tea Party foreign policy” is that most Tea Partiers tend to avoid the subject. On many other issues, one could cite candidates’ statements, campaign pledges, and interview answers, or search for what Tea Party activists have had to say about it over the last two years, but on the whole there is simply not much evidence available. Depending on the writer and the point he wants to make, Tea Partiers might be portrayed as anything from zealous Jeffersonians to fierce Jacksonians to conventional Republican voters. If all else fails, pundits might fall back on Rand Paul’s example to give them some idea of what to say, except that Rand Paul has been studiously avoiding discussing foreign policy for most of the last year.

It would be interesting and encouraging if Tea Partiers saw the threats to liberty and the Constitution from an unchecked, expansive national security state and a political establishment dedicated to perpetual war, but when it comes to the politicians who have identified with Tea Partiers there is remarkably little evidence of this. Looking at the House members connected with the House Tea Party Caucus, we see a lot of very conventional hawks. That doesn’t prove that most Tea Partiers are strongly supportive of the national security state, but it also suggests that it is not a major concern for most of them. Presumably, most of them haven’t given it a lot of thought. I don’t intend that as an accusation. It would be surprising if a lot of voters were particularly riled up about U.S. foreign policy at a time when domestic and economic issues dominate the scene, and it would be even more surprising if a lot of Republican voters suddenly started agreeing with a radical Jeffersonian critique of Bush-era foreign policy excesses when most of them reliably voted for Republican candidates throughout the Bush years.

Looked at another way, the constant search for a “Tea Party foreign policy” seems to be a waste of time. If there is a movement of activists and voters focused almost exclusively on one set of domestic issues, most pundits wouldn’t ask what the foreign policy views of movement members are. The question would never come up, because the movement consciously defined its priorities as having nothing to do with foreign policy. For that matter, there isn’t much interest in the domestic political preferences of explicitly antiwar movements, except by way of trying to discredit or defame them as part of the “fringe.” Yes, if Tea Partiers wanted to be thoroughgoing Jeffersonians and strict constructionists, they would favor dramatic reductions in the warfare state as Beinart says, but what gives Beinart the impression that there are suddenly legions of Jeffersonians among the Republican rank-and-file?

Beinart is the one making the connections between Tea Partier complaints about spending and debt and strict constructionism because of largely boilerplate rhetoric about respecting the Constitution. He mentions “their understanding of the Constitution” when he almost certainly knows that most of them do not really subscribe to the understanding to which he is referring. In other contexts, Beinart would be happy to emphasize the contradiction between Tea Partier constitutionalist rhetoric and their general acquiescence in New Deal and Great Society programs, and he would be horrified if any of the would-be constitutionalists were the strict constructionists he currently claims would at least be “interesting.” For that matter, if Tea Partiers became Jeffersonians on foreign policy, Beinart would likely be one of the first to decry their “isolationism.” Despite his most recent incarnation as a critic of American overreach and hubris, Beinart isn’t going to congratulate Tea Partiers for their principled opposition to the national security state. He would be amused by the intra-Republican conflicts it created, he would denounce the new and dangerous “extremism” the Jeffersonians represented, and he would point to it as evidence that his party has more credibility on national security issues. If Tea Partiers took their rhetoric to its logical conclusion, he would attack them as fanatics, and if they remain fairly conventional he will declare them to be frauds.

It would be very healthy if the GOP moved towards a more Jeffersonian foreign policy after the disaster of the Bush years, and it would mean that a large number of conservatives learned some of the right lessons from the past decade, but it is more likely that very little will change in Republican positions on foreign policy. For one thing, foreign policy is one of the areas least affected by popular movements. On the whole, elected Republicans have no interest in a reduced American role in the world, and instead believe that the administration has been far too “passive” in its conduct of foreign policy. Except for a few honorable exceptions, Jeffersonians among Republican Tea Partiers have no one to speak for them in Washington, and there do not seem to be enough of them to bring much pressure to bear on Republican politicians. More to he point, Republican leaders make a habit of actively ignoring the interests and concerns of their constituents. Even if it is true that self-identified Tea Partiers are generally more “protectionist” and less supportive of military interventions, their political leaders seem to be reliably supportive of free trade and hegemonism.

Update: Jim Antle has more.

During my 60-plus trips to Russia over the last 20 years, I’ve noticed how Russian attitudes toward the U.S. — once relatively friendly — have evolved. Today, dislike — even hatred — of America leads some Russian national security officials to believe that if you are an enemy of the U.S. (e.g., Venezuela, Iran), you must be a friend of Russia. Most are not so dogmatic, but they also are not America’s friends. Their [Russian national security officials’] philosophical embrace of something akin to Mussolini’s corporate state, plus their ambitions for increased influence in, or annexation of, former Soviet territory, practically ensures they will hold negative feelings about the American government. After all, we believe in an open society and the independence and sanctity of borders of the former Soviet states. ~Herman Pirchner

One of the problems with this is that an “open society” very often means something very different when “we” are promoting it in former Soviet republics. So long as the government is filled with anti-Russian nationalists, the openness of society is very much a secondary consideration. Our government has made a habit of encouraging political forces in ex-Soviet republics that are hostile to Russia and assuming that hostility to Russia is proof of “pro-Western” credentials. In the Russian experience, proponents of an “open society” have tended to be people who also want to promote U.S. goals at the expense of Russian influence. To the extent that the Russian government has made a point of strengthening ties with states Washington dislikes, it is partly engaging in a tit-for-tat retaliation for past provocations. It is partly pursuing its own interests without regard for our relationship with those governments. Properly speaking, the national security officials of other governments are never going to be America’s “friends.” If we are foolish enough to believe that such officials other governments, even in formally allied governments, are our “friends,” our excessive trust in them will be abused. If we have national security officials interested in improving relations with Russia, it is not because they are “friends of Russia,” but because they see an improved U.S.-Russian relationship as a way of advancing concrete American interests.

That brings us to Pirchner’s claim that “we” believe in “independence and sanctity of borders of the former Soviet states.” For a few of those states (the Baltics), the United States has formal treaty obligations to defend them against attack, but for most of the former Soviet states our belief in the “sanctity” of Soviet-era borders doesn’t mean very much. The United States would not go to war with Russia to defend the “independence and sanctity of borders” of most of these states, and to do so would be extremely irrational. The U.S. has no vital interest at stake in most of these states. If Russian influence in these states creates a conflict with the U.S., it is because we have insisted on making the affairs of these ex-Soviet states our business.

Viewed another way, these officials may have “negative feelings” about our government because our government has seemed intent on blocking and pushing back Russian influence in what they consider to be their normal sphere of influence. One need only imagine the aggravation Russia would cause among American officials if Russians presumed to lecture them about respecting the “independence and sanctity of borders” of Caribbean and Latin American nations. The comparison is not exact, since Russian nationalists still view some former Soviet states in the same way that American nationalists view the Southwest. Were our positions reversed, does anyone suppose that Washington would be indifferent to Russian support for independent states of Texas or California?

Pirchner continues:

Russia’s dominant geopolitical idea, then, is neither friends nor enemies — only interests.

In other words, the Russian government is behaving as states normally behave. Instead of complaining about this, we would be well-advised to pursue American interests with much less sentimental and ideological baggage than we do today.

When they are not baseless, many of Pirchner’s specific complaints about administration policy towards Russia are based on just this sort of baggage. Pirchner claims that the missile defense decision devalued “American promises worldwide,” which is debatable, but he then repeats discredited objections to New START when ratification of the treaty (along with its supposedly pro-Russian language) was strongly favored by NATO allied governments, including allies from eastern Europe. Had New START ratification failed, it would have done far more to devalue American promises and to ignore the concerns of American allies in Europe, and yet this is implicitly what Pirchner would have preferred. In general, the “reset” has enhanced eastern European security by reducing U.S.-Russian tensions, and it has created conditions that have not only seen a thaw in Russian-Ukrainian relations, but even a modest beginning of Polish-Russian rapprochement. It isn’t true that the administration’s behavior in Ukraine and Georgia has been “increasingly passive.” Anyone paying attention knows that this administration has made a point of condemning what it calls the Russian occupation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

What is surprising about Pirchner’s article is that the rest of it might as well have been written by someone else. Pirchner emphasizes shared U.S. and Russian interests in Central Asia and specifically in Kyrgyzstan, and he drives home the futility of trying to bring the separatist republics back under Georgian control. He claims that the expansion of Russian influence in Ukraine is contrary to U.S. interests, but this is simply asserted. In his concluding paragraph, he states:

Today, an increasingly closed Russia is driven by thoughts of greater influence in, or absorption of, the Christian parts of its former empire. This puts Moscow at odds with Washington in spite of common interests that include the fight against radical Islam, anti-proliferation initiatives, space cooperation, and nuclear cooperation.

What remains entirely unclear is why this puts Moscow at odds with Washington. The U.S. has no stake in blocking Russia’s “greater influence in, or absorption of, the Christian parts of its former empire.” Why should we be putting all those common interests at risk for the sake of unnecessary commitments where we have no interests?

Jackson Diehl believes the Obama administration should be more outspoken on behalf of foreign dissidents. At no point does Diehl bother to explain why he thinks condemning other governments’ crackdowns is useful or necessary. Perhaps he thinks the reasons are obvious, or perhaps there are no good reasons. Apparently, the administration should be doing this for no other reason than that Obama said so at his last General Assembly address. I suppose Diehl could fault Obama for not doing enough to follow through on a public pledge. After all, why did Obama say, “Don’t stand idly by, don’t be silent, when dissidents elsewhere are imprisoned and protestors are beaten”? He knows as well as anyone that our idleness and silence may be more useful than our activity and complaints. When he said this, Obama effectively conceded to the critics of his response to the Iranian crackdown in 2009 that they had been right and he had been wrong, when it is quite clear that something much closer to the opposite is true.

Diehl is particularly annoyed that the U.S. is not doing more to help persecuted members of the Bahraini opposition. I can’t imagine how it is our government’s responsibility to help political dissidents in Bahrain, but at least as an allied state with which we have generally good relations Bahrain’s government might be receptive to our complaints. Then again, it is possible that the administration could be interceding for some of the dissidents privately, and it is possible that public hectoring of the Bahraini government would undermine such efforts by embarrassing the Bahrainis and forcing them to issue defiant demands that the U.S. mind its own business. What seems clear is that publicly denouncing a government’s crackdown will not end the crackdown, could intensify it, and might adversely affect U.S. interests in the process. Unless fruitless moral posturing that harms concrete American interests is the goal, I don’t see the point.

This brings me to Khodorkovsky. I don’t doubt that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are being targeted for prosecution for political reasons, and I am under no illusions that the Kremlin would have ever cared about Khodorkovsky’s past corrupt dealings had he not tried to enter politics as an opponent of the Kremlin. So, yes, Khodorkovsky’s trial was politically-motivated, and I assume it was designed to send a message to any other ambitious tycoons that they should steer clear of political opposition. What I fail to see is how this has ever been a problem that the United States government could or should address.

Why are we going to make our relationship with Russia contingent on their development of a competitive political system and the rule of law? If we did, would this actually aid Russian dissidents? It almost certainly wouldn’t. It would reinforce the impression created during the 1990s that Russian “liberals” are little better than Western stooges, and it would remind us that they have no political base in Russia because they have been openly antagonistic to Russian interests. As Anatol Lieven wrote in 2009 for The National Interest:

Tragically however, many Russian liberals in the 1990s-through the policies they supported and the arrogant contempt they showed towards the mass of their fellow Russians-made liberals unelectable for a generation or more across most of Russia; and to judge by these and other writings of liberals like the ones under discussion, they have learnt absolutely nothing from this experience. They think that they form some kind of opposition to the present Russian establishment. In fact, they are such an asset to Putin in terms of boosting public hostility to Russian liberalism that if they hadn’t already existed, Putin might have been tempted to invent them.

This is one reason why focusing on Khodorkovsky is particularly misguided. Khodorkovsky is a very unsympathetic figure and a corrupt tycoon, but Western critics of the Russian government seem intent on making him into the poster boy of Russian dissent. If one wanted to continue discrediting and marginalizing Russian liberalism, linking political reform in Russia to the fate of Khodorkovsky would not be a bad way to do it. Instead of separating the cause of political reform from the fortunes of an oligarch, everyone who claims to oppose Putinism wants to tie them together inextricably. They also want to go back to confronting and provoking Russia, which would make it even harder for political reformers to gain any traction. As Lieven argued in the same article:

This is not just because there is something bizarre and twisted about pro-Western Russian liberals attacking the recommendations of the Hart-Hagel Commission or statesmen such as Henry Kissinger and James Baker. It is also because their criticism serves as a mouthpiece for the agendas of the most bitterly anti-Russian and geopolitically aggressive liberal interventionists and neocons who help maintain tensions between Russia and the West-and actually between the United States and the rest of the world.

And these tensions are extremely damaging to any hopes of the long-term liberalization and Westernization of Russia which these liberals want to further. Do Piontkovsky, Shevtsova and the others seriously think that the U.S.-Russian rivalry in the Caucasus, and the war over South Ossetia which resulted, helped the cause of liberalism in Russia?

This is where criticism of the administration’s “notoriously weak defense of human rights around the world” seems especially foolish. The people complaining the most about the administration’s insufficient zeal on behalf of human rights and democracy are the very same people who want to resume confrontational, aggressive policies towards the governments they want Obama to criticize over internal affairs. In other words, they are among the most enthusiastic for policies that will help authoritarian governments smother their political opponents.

As I have said before, these people see U.S. relations with authoritarian governments in binary terms: appeasement or confrontation. Expressing support for foreign dissidents is simply another means of poking the other government in the eye, and it seems to be unimportant to the hawkish critics whether this works to the advantage or the ruin of the dissidents in question. If confrontational U.S. policies work to subvert the cause of internal political reform, so much the better for the hawks who want to perpetuate the dynamic of escalating confrontation.

Do we want our government to be in the business of stirring up political opposition to the governments of other major powers? To what end? Would we be doing this if the opposition were more nationalist, more antagonistic to Western influence, and more skeptical of “democratic capitalism”? We know the answer to the last question, and it is no. That tells me that the only dissidents most administration critics are interested in helping are those that they see as reliably “pro-Western” or “pro-American,” and that almost certainly means that they have staked out positions that are very unrepresentative, unpopular, and unwelcome in their own countries.

As Greg Scoblete said last week, it doesn’t make sense to judge the “reset” with Russia on the basis of how the Russian government operates inside Russia, and I agree with him entirely when he writes:

It’s also not quite clear to me how the United States can go about changing Russia’s political institutions (have public figures whine loudly about them?) or why such a complex and ill-defined effort should be the key priority going forward.

What is clear is that the people complaining most loudly about Russian domestic authoritarianism desperately want to sabotage improved relations with Russia, and so they are trying to re-define the goals of the “reset” to make it seem as if improving relations with Russia is a waste of time and effort. If they have their way, it won’t help Russian dissidents one bit, but it will harm U.S. interests in the meantime and cause U.S.-Russian relations to begin deteriorating again, which will make it that much easier to perpetuate the status quo in Russia.