If the good patriots keeping the world safe for democracy feel they need to keep certain things secret, then they need to keep certain things secret. To splash those secrets all over the internet is simply to interfere with America’s attempt to carry its noble burden, to perform its urgent and necessary task, to make the world a little less safe for democracy. What kind of person would do that?

The more plausible that line of thought sounds to you, the more WikiLeaks will strike you as something akin to a terrorist enterprise. But the more you see a hegemonic America as a problem and not a solution, the more WikiLeaks will strike you as a welcome check on a dangerous, out-of-control hyperpower drunk on its own good intentions [bold mine-DL]. In that case, it may seem that the American political establishment and the collaborating media has grown blind to the hypocrisy so clearly apparent to others in its approach to WikiLeaks because it has forgotten that freedom and democracy have meaning apart from their role in justifying the operations of the far-flung secret-shrouded state. ~Will Wilkinson

I have seen different forms of this argument in the last few weeks. This is the second of them from Wilkinson. Each time I see it, I find it more annoying than the last. For one thing, it assumes that American critics of U.S. hegemony should welcome active subversion of their government’s legitimate functioning as a means of holding it accountable for its abuses and illegalities. This is as politically tone-deaf as can be, and it will almost certainly backfire to make the government less accountable and less transparent. I find the idea that all good anti-imperialists have to stand up for an organization that seems dedicated to harming American interests to be perverse, and it just the sort of argument that militarists here in the U.S. are only too happy to see libertarians, antiwar conservatives, and progressives take up. American opposition to U.S. hegemony as I understand it is rooted in the conviction that hegemony is unsustainable and damaging to real American interests in the meantime. It takes for granted that there are legitimate American interests that can and should be pursued, and that U.S. hegemony badly distorts our understanding of what our real interests are, conflates them with the interests of other nations, and wastes national resources on a project of global power projection that America can’t afford and doesn’t need. Enthusiasm for Assange distracts from all of this and substitutes the cheap thrill of airing some dirty laundry for the difficult task of changing the foreign policy consensus.

Wikileaks doesn’t interfere with “America’s attempt to carry its noble burden, to perform its urgent and necessary task, to make the world a little less safe for democracy.” All of that is risible nonsense. So is much of the anti-Wikileaks hysteria. If it is true that the information provided by Wikileaks hasn’t caused all that much damage, which its defenders argue by way of exonerating it from more serious charges, it is even more of an ineffectual bit of posturing than it seemed at first. It seems to me that would-be defenders of Wikileaks have made the easy mistake of imputing virtues to Wikileaks that it doesn’t have out of frustration with government abuses and disastrous policies. This comes from the tempting, mistaken belief that if these people oppose government abuses, it must make what they’re doing all right. All of this is an exercise in cheering on someone who has poked the hegemon in the eye without considering the counterproductive nature of such a protest.

I find myself agreeing with Michael Cohen in his exasperated reply to David Rieff:

The first an most obvious rejoinder to this is that even non-exceptional countries require diplomatic secrecy! So if you embrace the notion that confidentiality is a sine qua non for the ability to conduct effective diplomacy then you would certainly believe that Wikileaks’ modus operandi is dangerous and counter-productive.

Anyone who thinks we can disentangle the U.S. from our many commitments around the world without substantial international goodwill, cooperation, and trust is kidding himself. Undermining the confidence that other nations’ diplomats have in dealing with our diplomats reduces the options available to U.S. policymakers, and it makes it harder for Washington to employ tools other than the blunt instruments of force and coercion that Wikileaks admirers find so objectionable.

John McCormack follows up on the discussion about Gary Johnson and humanitarian intervention with another quote from his interview:

TWS: So, you think that the United States, even if it weren’t in its own narrow national interest, even if we weren’t threatened by the [other] country, but there was a genocide going on—a clear genocide—it would be the right thing to do to go in and stop that?

GARY JOHNSON: Yes. Yes, I do.

Other than Jack, I’m not sure that anyone doubted that this is exactly what he meant when he talked about intervening in the case of a “clear genocide.” As I said in the previous post, Johnson’s view is straightforward enough. What still doesn’t make much sense is how he reconciles his belief that the U.S. should wage war to prevent genocide with his opposition to nation-building, his obvious aversion to interfering in the affairs of other nations, and his apparent interest in dramatically cutting military spending. His support for intervention in the case of a “clear genocide” doesn’t match up very well with his other views. My puzzlement about Johnson’s answer remains unchanged, but I don’t doubt that he meant what he said.

Coming back to speculation about his presidential bid, it’s worth adding that Johnson’s answer on this puts him on the same side as a broad majority of the public. According to the survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs earlier this year, Americans are generally turning against hegemonism, but significant majorities apparently support just the sort of military interventions Johnson is endorsing here. As the survey report states:

In terms of humanitarian crises, Americans support many measures, including using U.S. troops
in other parts of the world to stop a government from committing genocide and killing large numbers of its own people (72%), creating an international marshals service through the United Nations that could arrest leaders responsible for genocide (73%), and providing food and medical assistance to people in needy countries (74%).

This comes from the same survey in which a majority wants a hands-off approach to conflict in Korea and wouldn’t want to intervene in a war between Iran and Israel, so Johnson’s combination of positions might be very representative of most Americans. One of Johnson’s political problems is that the Americans who share his views tend not to be members of his party and they are least concentrated among Republican primary voters. One of the other problems is that the public may theoretically support humanitarian interventions, but they sour on them just as quickly if anything goes wrong and Americans begin getting killed. Of course, they should sour on them under those circumstances, but that suggests that their support for these interventions is superficial. This may represent a case where people give the answer they think they are expected to give rather than the one they really hold.

I’m not going to assume that Johnson was taking the easy way out and providing the less controversial answer. After all, if Johnson had tried to make an argument for non-intervention in this case, the headline would not have been about his relatively recent marijuana use, but probably would have focused instead on his “isolationist” indifference to the suffering of innocents, etc. Evidently, he believes that humanitarian interventions are not only justifiable, but also desirable, but I would want to press him on specific cases. Is he really articulating a blanket principle in favor of intervention, or would he support intervention on a case-by-case basis? Was intervening in Kosovo prudent? How does Johnson distinguish between a “clear genocide” and a civil war in which all parties are guilty of atrocities? Are allied governments fair game, or are these interventions going to be aimed at the clients of rival powers as they mostly have been in the past? What are the implications for international stability if separatist groups assume that they will receive foreign backing against their governments by provoking massacres of their civilian population? These are the questions I would be interested in hearing Johnson answer.

Leave aside whether this characterization is accurate and focus instead on why a realist – of all people – should care. The United States supports states with far more egregious human rights records than anything sketched above. A realist is supposed to give less weight to a state’s internal flaws and focus instead on its geopolitical orientation, right? ~Greg Scoblete

Prof. Walt can provide his own answer, but I would say that a realist wouldn’t worry as much about Israel’s “internal flaws” if they were simply internal. We have other allies that still occupy territory seized during wartime decades ago, but the rest of them are not client states to the same degree that Israel is and the rest of them do not receive such generous aid. It is because of the extent of the relationship and the complications it creates for the U.S. with most other countries in the region that the realist cares about the implications for U.S. interests if the two-state solution is indeed beyond saving.

It is also the realist’s concern that much of the rest of the world claims to see the resolution of this conflict as a high priority, and it is the realist’s concern that much of the rest of the world focuses, fairly or not, on Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories more than it does on the worse internal repressions of numerous dictatorships. My preference would be to acknowledge that both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the U.S.-Israel relationship are vastly less strategically important than most people claim that they are, but a realist has to work with the world as it is rather than how one would like it to be. In the world as it is, the conflict is seen as very significant for the entire region. In this world, an Israel that engages in mass expulsions or continues the domination of a subject people becomes an even greater political liability for the U.S. than it has been. The realist’s question would then become: is the relationship with Israel strategically important enough to balance the costs incurred from maintaining it? In at least two of the three scenarios Walt sketches out, it seems to me that the answer will be no.

Yesterday, I was criticizing the tax deal and some of its more imaginative defenders. Jonathan Bernstein picked up on the second part and responds:

The problem is that Obama either had to abandon the core commitment to end the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, or the core commitment to continue Bush-era tax rates for everyone else. He didn’t have the votes to keep both core commitments. End of story.

I mostly agree with that. Once Obama insisted on a certain agenda during this final session of the year and the Senate GOP remained united behind their no-action-before-tax-cuts line, he was stuck with accepting bad options. My main objection to the deal itself is that it is fiscally irresponsible, and my concern about it is that the deal shows that there is no significant interest in deficit reduction on either side. I suppose we have all known that there was no significant interest in this, but the deal confirmed it. Quite a few defenders of the deal have also been making implausible claims that striking a deal that everyone agrees was forced upon him by necessity means that Obama has somehow cleverly set the stage for eventual triumph down the road. What I was trying to say in the section Bernstein quoted was that these claims of eventual triumph make no sense. Krugman has a persuasive explanation of why they don’t:

Look at the Zandi estimates: they show a boost to the economy in 2011, which is then given back in 2012. So growth is actually slower in 2012 than it would be without the deal.

Now, what we know from lots of political economy research — Larry Bartels is my guru on this — is that presidential elections depend, not on the state of the economy, but on whether things are getting better or worse in the year or so before the election. The unemployment rate in October 1984 was almost the same as the rate in October 1980 — but Carter was thrown out by voters who saw things getting worse, while for Reagan it was morning in America.

Put these two observations together — and what you get is that the tax-cut deal makes Obama’s reelection less likely. Let me repeat: the tax cut deal makes Obama less likely to win in 2012.

If Obama’s supporters want to say that he harmed his political interests to strike the best deal he could manage under the circumstances, that’s one thing. It’s something else to say that the Republicans have just fallen into Obama’s roadrunner jujitsu trap, as Andrew seems to think. What has happened is that Obama has given us an advance preview of the nature of hostage budget negotiations for the next two years, and he did so before his party’s majorities ended. I stand by my assessment that this is not what a cunning plan looks like.

At his press conference, Obama justified the deal by saying that he didn’t have the votes in the Senate for his preferred option, but he and everyone else understand that he and his party will have many fewer votes for his preferred option in the next Congress. Indeed, in the House his preferred option won’t receive a hearing. So it isn’t as if Obama is temporarily retreating in order to re-take the ground later–he’s just retreating. The best that one can say about it is that at least it was a more or less orderly retreat. His bargaining position a year from now will not be as strong as it is today, and in terms of Democratic numbers in the Senate it could very well be weaker in two years’ time than it will be before the next election.

The modern conservative movement did not waste time pitching primary challenges against George W. Bush in 2004. It spent that time trying to take down liberal Republicans in local, winnable races. In doing so, groups like the Club for Growth made it harder and harder for Republicans to break from anti-tax, small government orthodoxy, even when George W. Bush did so.

“There’s no point in just spending money for the sake of feeling good about attacking someone if no chance of winning,” says Club for Growth executive director David Keating. “You pick races you can win.” ~Dave Weigel

Weigel was making a lot of sense in this post until this part. It’s true that the conservative movement didn’t expend any energy or resources challenging Bush in 2004. It occurred to me earlier this week that I couldn’t recall anything like the outrage over the tax deal after Bush and his allies forced the prescription drug benefit through Congress. In terms of the damage it did to the long-term fiscal health of the country, Medicare Part D was infinitely worse than anything that has happened in the last few years, and it still represents the largest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ. By and large, conservatives have swallowed this, they generally never talk about it now, and they certainly don’t talk about repealing it. I suppose the one thing that Bush could say for himself is that he never specifically pledged not to do it.

There were conservative activists and pundits who disliked Medicare Part D, and many of them publicly opposed it, but there was never much mainstream conservative desire to penalize party leaders who pushed it through. Indeed, many of the people who voted for it have been promoted into the leadership since then. Aside from the immigration debate in 2007 and the much less important fight over Harriet Miers, the Bush years were a time when the conservative movement rolled over and tolerated one rejection of their views after another. Conservatives under Bush are a case study of how ideological core supporters are taken for granted. They also provide a good example of how these supporters reconciled themselves to their own policy irrelevance by engaging in constant intellectual contortions to justify their continuing support for an administration that regularly ignored their priorities.

It’s also true that many of the high-profile primary challenges launched by the Club for Growth against moderate and liberal Republicans in the last six years failed or led to a Democratic win in the general election. I found the Club executive director’s remark fascinating. It’s as if he doesn’t know that the Club has acquired quite a reputation for picking races that it cannot win, and for winning races that helped the GOP to lose seats in Congress. I suppose these challenges made it a little harder to break from anti-tax orthodoxy, but the GOP leadership happily ignored any “small government” principles until it was tossed out of power. Progressives are undoubtedly on the wrong track with talk of primarying Obama, but I can’t think of many worse examples of how a political movement can get its way than the conservative movement under Bush and the electoral strategy of the Club for Growth.

With Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pressing for quick ratification of the New START treaty, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) reiterated again on Wednesday there wasn’t enough time left in this lame-duck session of Congress to consider it. ~The Politico

Last week, there seemed to be a slight chance that the continuing resolution and tax deal would set the stage for bringing the treaty up for debate and a vote. So much for that. At this point, I assume we can all agree that Kyl never had any intention of debating and voting on the treaty in the lame-duck session, and all of the frenetic lobbying of the last three weeks was not going to change that. Perhaps Kyl held out the prospect of bringing up the treaty this year to make sure that Lugar agreed to the Senate GOP’s filibuster threat ahead of the tax deal, and once the deal was made he could revert to his earlier stalling. Of course, when Kyl insists that the treaty needs as much as two weeks to debate an arms reduction treaty, it is easy for him to conclude that there is “not enough time,” as he has set the bar so high that there never could have been enough time.

As for the abortion issue, it’s true that Johnson is a pro-choice Republican who could run as operationally pro-life. But most of the conservatives who would be inclined to back him rejected this argument when it came from Rudy Giuliani in 2007-08. It will be hard to walk that back simply because Johnson’s foreign policy is more to our liking. Though Johnson does have the advantages of having an actual record of signing pro-life bills as governor and he has gone a step further than Giulaini by supporting the reversal of Roe v Wade [bold mine-DL]. ~Jim Antle

Those last two points make some difference, don’t they? As governor, Johnson signed parental consent and partial-birth abortion ban legislation. At least by the standards of most national Republicans, that makes him as “operationally pro-life” as anyone, and he managed to do those things without engaging in a lot of absurd pandering by telling phony conversion stories. It makes a difference that Johnson has signed pro-life legislation. That is as much as most of his likely competitors in 2012 have done on this issue, and in some cases it goes beyond what other probable candidates did while in office. Giuliani’s claims that he would satisfy pro-life voters once in office were based on nothing in his record, so there was no reason to accept what he was saying.

In any case, what made Giuliani such a ridiculous candidate was not his socially liberal views. That made it impossible for him to be nominated, but it seems to me that everyone sympathetic to Johnson already accepts that he isn’t going to get anywhere near the nomination. What made Giuliani’s candidacy so ridiculous was that he proposed to run as the national security candidate solely on the basis of having happened to be New York’s mayor during a major terrorist attack, and that he refused to bother campaigning actively anywhere except Florida. If Johnson campaigns in a similar way, he will deserve the same mockery.

Andrew:

The most powerul aspect of this entire deal is how it has delivered a body-blow to the FNC/Limbaugh/RNC notion that Obama is an enemy and an alien and a threat. Instead, he’s now the architect of a deal with that most rightwing of Republicans, Mitch McConnell [bold mine-DL], a deal that legitimizes Obama on the right with consequences McConnell probably hasn’t completely absorbed yet.

This description of McConnell doesn’t make sense. It was not very long ago that conservatives saw McConnell as the embodiment of establishment Republicanism, which is what he is. McConnell is a very dedicated partisan, and uses his parliamentary skills to serve partisan goals, but it is clear that he is “right-wing” only by comparison to the moderates in the Senate GOP. McConnell did his best to oppose Rand Paul’s nomination in Kentucky, which put him in direct opposition not just to Tea Partiers but also to the broader Republican right as well. McConnell has been a leading facilitator of virtually every Bush-era legislative disaster from the prescription drug benefit to TARP. If McConnell is “that most rightwing of Republicans,” the left-right political spectrum truly has no meaning. Indeed, the opposition to the deal from the Club for Growth and Jim DeMint underscores that McConnell does not represent the right wing of his party, and it suggests that McConnell may not be able to force the conservative members of his caucus to accept the deal he has hammered out.

While I can understand opposing the deal, DeMint and the Club are in error in their resistance to the deal when they insist that all of the tax cuts be made permanent. The absolutist rejection of the estate tax compromise is also foolish, since the 35%/$5 million exemption arrangement is probably the best that can be had. For the sake of adding hundreds of billions more in debt, DeMint appears to be prepared to try to kill the deal. It’s important to note here that if DeMint succeeds, it will be in the name of even greater fiscal irresponsibility.

It is therefore quite conceivable that Palin could win Iowa, Johnson New Hampshire, and the battle joined. ~Jack Ross

I appreciate Jack’s enthusiasm, but after the 2008 primary I stopped believing that New Hampshire is some sort of natural base of power for libertarian candidates on the Republican side. It’s not just that Ron Paul didn’t do very well there, but that John McCain won and Romney came second. What’s worse, McCain somehow managed to win the most antiwar votes of any Republican candidate, which confirmed that the war was not a priority for most primary voters on the Republican side in 2008. All of the reasons why New Hampshire should have been a place for Ron Paul to do very well proved to have little to do with the actual voting behavior of Republican primary voters. In the end, for all the talk of the more libertarian leanings of the state, libertarian candidates don’t fare that much better up there than they do elsewhere. Johnson might make a decent showing in New Hampshire, but it is hard to see how he wins there or anywhere else. Of course, winning primaries and delegates wouldn’t be the main purpose of a Johnson candidacy. The main purpose would have to be to present an alternative to the supporters of the warfare and national security state that dominate intra-party debates, and to challenge the other candidates to defend positions that they normally adopt without any resistance or criticism from within the party.

Given his connection to Massachusetts and the influence of the Boston media market on New Hampshire, Mitt Romney has to be considered the favorite in New Hampshire until someone takes it away from him. McCain performed as well as he did in 2008 largely based on the goodwill he had stored up with New Hampshire voters with his victory there in 2000. As the runner-up in 2008, Romney will be well-positioned to pick up McCain’s supporters and dominate the New Hampshire scene.