Via John Tabin, I noticed this back and forth between James Poulos and Nick Gillespie on Glenn Beck, public religiosity and libertarianism. James focuses on part of the two sentences that follow:

But they [Beck rally organizers and attendees] also want the government to be super-effective in securing the borders, they worry about an undocumented fall in morals, and they are emphatic that genuine religiosity should be a feature of the public square. Which is to say, like most American voters, they may well want from government precisely the things that it really can’t deliver.

James goes on to contest the idea that wanting religious expression in the public square has something to do with wanting something from government. Overall, James is right that these are two fairly different things. When James quotes Gillespie, he elides the first part of the sentence that refers to securing the borders, and this means that James spends most of his time addressing the rally’s religiosity without getting at the things that really unsettle libertarians about a lot of the attendees. While libertarians such as Gillespie may not like religiosity as a feature of the public square, it seems to me that religiosity is not the main thing that bothers them about the crowd at last weekend’s rally. One of the main things that bothers these libertarians is that the crowd was apparently interested in securing the borders, and more than this most were probably interested in enforcing immigration laws in the interior of the country. Indeed, my guess is that many of the people in the crowd would be content with the government being merely mediocre in policing the borders if the government were enforcing those laws with some reasonable regularity. I have to wonder if most of the attendees at that rally believe the government is capable of being “super-effective” at doing anything. Regardless, the crowd’s presumed support for border security is the main thing that prevents Gillespie from taking the “proto-libertarians” at the rally seriously. It is the one thing he mentions that actually has policy implications.

This reminded me of Brink Lindsey’s cover piece for Reason’s symposium on libertarians’ political alliances and Will Wilkinson’s recent post at Democracy in America on the Beck rally. One was written before the pair’s (presumably forced) departure from the Cato Institute last month, and the other was written just a few days ago. Both pieces identify conservative opposition to mass immigration and support for enforcing immigration laws as some of the reasons they regard contemporary conservatism as rotten and unacceptable. Support for border security and enforcing immigration laws is simply proof of conservatives’ “brutish nationalism” and “anti-immigrant xenophobia” for Lindsey, and Wilkinson refers to Arizona’s attempt to enforce immigration laws as a “nativist crackdown.” (Perhaps Wilkinson doesn’t know what nativist means, or that he simply wants to use the word incorrectly for polemical purposes.)

One reason why this stands out when I read these articles is that most of their other complaints against conservatives have something to back them up, but their complaints on immigration policy are mostly hot air. Having defined the enforcement of immigration laws as illiberal, authoritarian and xenophobic, they conclude that this is what most conservatives are on this issue, and that’s all they need to know. It doesn’t enter into their thinking that a significant part of the support for an “enforcement-first” position on immigration in general and the Arizona law in particular comes primarily from a law-and-order attitude. Neither are they interested that the Arizona legislature was acting out of frustration that the public’s strong support for enforcing these laws seems to have minimal effect on the federal government’s attention to the matter. It is difficult to trust Lindsey’s assessment that this is a product of “brutish nationalism” when he pairs the enforcement of existing, constitutional immigration law with foreign wars, and it is even harder to trust Wilkinson’s claims about the “Christian nationalism” at the Beck rally when he believes that patriotism is essentially the expression of deference to the coercive apparatus of the state and that love of country should bemerely incidental.

Certainly, Lindsey and Wilkinson have many other problems with contemporary conservatism. Lindsey’s Reason article seemed designed to define support for liberty in such a way that no social conservative, immigration restrictionist or traditionalist Christian could be anything other than anti-liberty. Wilkinson has spent years writing similar things. In the process of denouncing a third of their countrymen as hopelessly anti-liberty, they even get a few things right about jingoism and militarism, but they actually define support for liberty so narrowly and restrictively that many of the people here at TAC who are very critical of many of the same flaws in conservatism or conservatives strongly sympathetic to the work of the Cato Institute are automatically excluded. In the same way, these libertarians will never really consider attendees at Beck’s rally to be truly supportive of liberty so long as they retain any of their law-and-order attitudes and patriotic attachments.

This strikes me as eerily similar to neoconservative promises of “regional transformation” following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Just as those proved to be bunk, I think it’s safe to assume that any “echo effect” caused by resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute will be similarly insignificant. We should have learned by now that individual societies have their own grievances and their own dynamics and that basing U.S. policy on sweeping predictions about how they’ll react to changes in other countries is a recipe for trouble. ~Greg Scoblete on Clemons

For the most part, I agree with Greg that we should put no more confidence in an “echo effect” resulting from any deal made by Israeli and Palestinian leaders than war opponents put in the “demonstration effect” that was supposed to follow regime change in Iraq. If the interminable peace process finally did come to some reasonably satisfactory conclusion complete with a genuinely sovereign Palestine and the resolution of major outstanding questions on land, water rights, the status of Jerusalem, and all the rest, we need to understand that showing a willingness to address one set of grievances isn’t going to make other grievances elsewhere disappear. Muslims who are resentful of U.S. backing for authoritarian regimes and monarchies in the region are unlikely to become less resentful, because their main grievances will still be unaddressed. Indeed, there might be greater discontent in another country where the population feels that its grievances are just as important and significant as those of the Palestinians.

That said, there is a difference between what Clemons describes and the promise of “regional transformation” that war supporters made before the invasion of Iraq. At both the official and popular level, Muslim countries throughout the region and around the world make a point of saying that they want a resolution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. That doesn’t mean that such a resolution is necessarily realistic or that it will fix any other issues in the region, but we can pretty reliably assume that this is a major priority of most of the governments and publics in Muslim-majority countries. There were no calls for the U.S. to solve the region’s problems by launching an unnecessary war and throwing one of the larger countries in the region into complete chaos. On the contrary, there was vehement, constant opposition to such a course of action among the countries of the region that was going to be “transformed” as a result. The “echo effect” may not happen, either, but there is a much better chance that a resolution to this conflict will produce goodwill and positive political consequences for the U.S. among many of the Muslim publics Washington has futilely tried to win over in the past. The effect would probably be minimal, and it would be very brief, but it might give the U.S. some of its lost credibility back and repair America’s reputation to some extent.

In any case, the “echo effect” wasn’t the main point of Clemons’ argument. The core of Clemons’ argument was that the White House should “hard wire” linkage of the conflict to the Iranian nuclear issue, as the title of his post makes clear. The idea of linking this intractable conflict to Iran policy seems crazy to me. It isn’t just that the idea of linkage doesn’t have much going for it based on past precedents, but that there is absolutely no reason to link these two very distinct issues together. For linkage to make sense, one has to accept that there is an impending threat to vital U.S. and allied interests from Iran, and one also has to believe that Israel and the Gulf states are unwilling to collaborate effectively against this Iranian threat until the status of Palestine is settled and they can all normalize relations with Israel. If the Iranian threat doesn’t exist or if it is grossly exaggerated, resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine therefore becomes much less urgent. If the Gulf states are truly terrified of Iran, they will presumably offer at least tacit support for any Israeli anti-Iranian action anyway. If they are trying to extract Israeli concessions on Palestine, the Saudis and other Gulf state governments have been doing a really poor job of hiding their anxieties about Iran.

Clemons makes the argument for linkage this way:

The interesting thing is that progress on a Palestinian state is what Arab governments may most need in order to be more robustly supportive of American, European, and Israeli designs with Iran. Delivering on Palestine may actually create conditions in which these states accept an “all options on the table” approach to Iran.

This is the sort of behind-the-back, triple-bank-shot approach to foreign policy that simply makes no sense. It’s a bit like arguing that the U.S. should try to force India to budge on the status of Kashmir to get the Pakistani army to take fighting the Taliban more seriously. As it turned out, this was completely unnecessary, it would have been nothing more than a free gift to hard-liners in Pakistan’s military, and talking about it just made the Indians upset and nervous. All of this is premised on the idea that the U.S. should want to get a lot of Arab states on board for an “all options on the table” approach to Iran, when this is the last thing the U.S. should be doing. What is most bizarre is that Clemons seems to be saying that an Israeli-Palestinian peace is essential so that the U.S. and our allies can escalate conflict with Iran. This is a weird, inverted version of the foolish, old hawkish claim that the “road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad” in that Clemons seems to be saying that the “road to Tehran runs through Jerusalem.”

Clemons’ reliance on the charge of anachronism makes his overall argument pretty weak. Consider this passage:

These naysayers surround themselves with and thrive in anachronistic assessments of these challenges in a way that have been appropriate and worked out over the last several decades — but which are simply out of place and passively reckless in the post-Cold War period.

It’s true that the world is different from the way it was during the Cold War, but the basic dynamics of inter-state relations haven’t changed all that much. If resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine wasn’t essential to other geopolitical issues in the past, it probably isn’t essential now, because the secret is that the conflict and the parties to the conflict are not nearly as important as we and they keep pretending. Seeing his disapproval of the “passively reckless” views of naysayers, I am struck by how depressingly similar Clemons’ rhetoric is to the fiercely urgent claims that “9/11 changed everything” and that those attacks had dramatically and totally changed how we should assess international threats from then on. This sort of hastiness has caused a lot of people to make some huge mistakes in the last decade, and we would be wise not to encourage more of it.

On one side of this question, there is ample evidence based on historical precedent and experience that says that tying these two issues together makes no sense, and on the other side Clemons is insistently telling us how everything is different now. That’s not a good sign for Clemons’ argument. Incrementalism might take the U.S. over a cliff, but there’s a much better chance of going over the cliff if you leap off of it, and that seems to be what Clemons is inviting the administration to do. Let’s hope they decline the offer.

At Democracy in America, E.G. asks this question in response to the New York Times article on declining support for Democrats among the young*:

Why don’t we see more candidates who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative? It’s a huge and largely untapped political market.

I’m not so sure that it is such a huge market. For one thing, social liberals have needed political organization and candidates representing their “issues” far less than social conservatives insofar as popular culture and social norms have gradually been liberalizing without that much encouragement from political leaders. On the whole, there aren’t very many fiscally conservative candidates because there is no significant political constituency interested in an electoral message that tells people that they have to pay for the government services they receive. If they can delay paying for the services, or avoid paying for them all together, the consumer culture people have grown accustomed to over the last thirty years leads them to think that this is what they should do. Despite what Tea Party activists and their sympathizers may tell you, fiscal conservatism is absolutely not a vote-winner, and in many parts of the country social liberalism isn’t going to make candidates very popular, either. There are relatively few places in the U.S. where the combining these two fairly unpopular stances is not politically folly. Even if there were a “huge and largely untapped market” of socially liberal/fiscally conservative voters, it is probably not concentrated enough in that many districts or states to create the demand for candidates tailored to these voters. This is a rough impression, but that’s my guess at why there aren’t very many of these candidates.

* The article is odd not only for its reliance on old polling data, as E.G. mentions, but also because it completely fails to mention that the Pew data was part of its report on Millennials. The report was arguing that Millennials were relatively more pro-Democratic and continued to be generally supportive of the administration’s agenda despite the more dramatic shift in public opinion among other cohorts against the Democrats. I did have to laugh at one student’s remark that he thought the Republicans “cared” more.

My new column on Iran for The Week is online.

Erik Kain declared recently that he isn’t a conservative. As he explains, this doesn’t mean that he’s changed that many of his views from when he called himself a conservative. Nor is it a more narrowly political issue of changing his voting preference. As Erik writes:

It’s not my politics so much that have undergone a change lately (though they have as well), but my thoughts on who I should and should not align myself with, and why this is important.

I understand what Erik wants to do here, but it seems to me that it has been quite clear where he has stood and what side he has picked in all the many debates over the years. It was no secret that he was basically sympathetic to the health care legislation, to which I was opposed, and he was furiously hostile to the Arizona immigration law, which I find basically unobjectionable. The label he chose for himself was essentially irrelevant in both of those debates, and there was no danger that he would be confused with the people aligned on the other side of the argument.

I’m sorry to say that I find Erik’s post to be very close to the flip side of the argument that mainstream conservatives have deployed against dissident conservatives for years, which is that we associate with the wrong kinds of people, tolerate “liberal” arguments, and generally fail to be good team players when it comes to organizing for electoral politics and reinforcing absurd ideological claims. In other words, we are too close or insufficiently hostile to the other “side.” From what I can gather, Erik is telling everyone that he isn’t a conservative so as not to be mistaken for “one of them,” which is almost as depressing to watch as it is when a thoughtful person feels compelled to jump through a series of ideological hoops to prove that he is “one of us.”

I had to grimace a little when I read Erik talking about his cultural affinities. The point is not that I object to most of his cultural affinities. When I’m in my car on long road trips, I listen to NPR, too, and I have several friends to the left of Russ Feingold (as well as friends who are dyed-in-the-wool Republicans). I’m sure I could rattle off a list of other such “heterodox” behaviors, but I had thought that Erik agreed that these affinities have or ought to have no bearing on political coalitions. All of this reminds me of the ridiculous political categorizing that people wanted to impose on everyday habits during the debate over “crunchy” conservatism, as if eating organic vegetables or shopping at a co-op were proof of left-wing convictions. Erik continues:

I still believe in the importance of decentralized power structures, checks and balances, and in not placing too much faith in the state – but again, these are positions that are perfectly acceptable on the left in ways that my belief in gay marriage or higher taxes or non-interventionist foreign policy are simply not acceptable on the right.

Perhaps that’s true within the confines of conservative movement institutions and in many conservative media outlets and magazines, but it isn’t true of “the right” as a whole, and this exaggerates how acceptable decentralism really is on the left. There is sympathy for it in some circles, but is it “perfectly acceptable”? It probably depends on what’s being decentralized.

As far as the major parties are concerned, a “pox on both your houses” attitude is generally a very healthy one, and it is frankly one that we need more people to embrace. The last thing we need is more people accepting the two major parties as the inevitable political coalitions that must always exist. There are already too many people who give in to the idea that you have to become a reliable team player for one side or the other. That finally brings me to the first part of Erik’s post, in which he wrote:

When I think about the GOP retaking Congress I get cold sweats and flashbacks of 2000-2008. Ditto that for the prospect of say, Newt Gingrich sitting in The Oval Office. The only Republicans who are at all honest – like Gary Johnson who has really good civil liberties bona fides – would A) never win and B) are really way too economically conservative for me. So yeah, Republicans taking back Congress in a couple months is just bad news as far as I’m concerned.

There is no reason to worry that Gingrich might become President. He would probably not win the nomination, and he could never win a general election. There is such a thing as likeability, and Gingrich doesn’t have any outside the camp of true believers. As a rationale for giving up the label conservative, this paragraph isn’t a good short answer. Honestly, I don’t see what Republican chances in the midterms have to do with anything here. For one thing, I don’t respect the Republican Party enough to let it have any hold on how I define myself. In fact, the more their partisans keep profaning the name of a humane political persuasion, the less inclined I am to let them have it to themselves.

As I have said before, I don’t think the GOP will win the House, but if that did happen it would primarily be bad news for the Republican Party and the conservative movement. If that seems a little too counterintuitive for you, let me explain. Should the GOP somehow win the House, they will not have earned it and they will not deserve it, and they will proceed to destroy themselves in very short order. Arguably, there was nothing worse for the American right than to be given the free gift of winning the 2002 midterms, because this win encouraged them to pursue the policies that proved to be their undoing, and a similar win in 2010 would have the same effect of enabling Republicans’ most destructively self-indulgent impulses. As one horrified by the prospect of Republicans in power, Erik should look forward to this.

After all, even if the Republicans won the House there would not be much that they could do once in office, except waste their time as they did in the ’90s hauling executive branch officials before committees to testify on this or that outrage of the week. They would likely be stymied by the Democratic majority in the Senate on any major legislation, and Obama would veto just about anything they passed if it somehow got to his desk. At the same time, Obama would make them into a much more effective foil for his arguments once they had some hold on power, and out of frustration they would become increasingly obsessed with “getting” Obama and become even less interested in representing the interests of their constituents.

Update: Erik has a long response that is worth reading, and I do appreciate the kind remarks he has for the work here at Eunomia. He clarifies several points, and he has persuaded me that I didn’t really understand him the first time around. Here’s Erik:

Nor am I trying to say that we should not associate with conservatives or not tolerate them or any of that. Daniel writes, “From what I can gather, Erik is telling everyone that he isn’t a conservative so as not to be mistaken for “one of them,” which is almost as depressing to watch as it is when a thoughtful person feels compelled to jump through a series of ideological hoops to prove that he is “one of us.”” I can see how I might come across this way, but it was not my intent. My intent was simply to say, look – this isn’t me. It isn’t honest of me anymore to call myself this. It doesn’t sit right with me.

Nationalism has been the most powerful political force in modern political life, and since the end of the Cold War nationalist movements have been asserting themselves around the world, so one would think that Victor Davis Hanson would have no trouble proving this to be true. Strangely, he misreads much of the world’s political landscape and misinterprets most of what has been happening over the last two decades, and that leads him to make a number of far-fetched or simply false claims. For instance, he writes:

Cultural, linguistic, and economic divides between Germany and Greece, or Holland and Bulgaria, remain too wide to be bridged by fumbling bureaucrats in Brussels. NATO has devolved into a euphemism for American expeditionary forces.

Nationalism is returning, based on stronger common ties of language, history, religion, and culture. We are even seeing the return of a two-century-old European “problem”: a powerful Germany that logically seeks greater political influence commensurate with its undeniable economic superiority.

It’s not clear that the first sentence is correct. One might think that the cultural, linguistic and economic divides between EU member states are too great for the European political project to succeed, but it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. Despite some real difficulties over the last two years because of the woeful fiscal position of some of the Union’s peripheral members, the institutions of the EU seem to have remained intact.

As for NATO, there two major reasons why it is little more than a “euphemism for American expeditionary forces,” and both of them go against Hanson’s argument. First, Europeans are preoccupied with their project of political integration and cannot be bothered with increased military expenditures or larger deployments abroad (especially when they involve “out of area” missions that have nothing to do with NATO’s purpose). Second, economically their interests dictate that they should not antagonize Russia, which they have reasonably ceased to see as much of a real military threat to them. As a result, western Europeans in particular have no great desire to continue expanding NATO, nor do they want to provoke Russia with missile defense schemes and military installations in the new member countries, and they continue to dominate the EU’s course politically and economically. This is actually closely related to the “problem” of a powerful Germany, as Germany has been the European nation most interested in building an economic relationship with Russia. Nationalism is returning in some parts of the world, but for the most part it does not seem to be returning in Europe.

All right, so maybe Hanson got off to a bad start, but he must be able to do better, right? Not really. There is rising Turkish nationalism, which has been stoked in part by the invasion of Iraq Hanson supported and the flotilla raid Hanson’s colleagues defend, so Hanson ought to be able to use it as a perfect example of what he’s talking about. The trouble is that he’s so intent on insulting the Turks that he makes a number of easily avoidable errors:

Turkey is flipping back to its pre-20th-century past. Its departure from NATO is not a question of if, but when. The European Union used to not want Turkey; now Turkey does not want the shaky EU.

Turkish revisionism now glorifies the old Ottoman sultanate. Turkey wants to recharge that reactionary model as the unifier and protector of Islam — not the modern, vastly reduced secular state of Kemal Ataturk. Weak neighbors Armenia, Cyprus, Greece, and Kurdistan have historical reasons to tremble.

Going back to the “pre-20th-century past” sounds bad, or Hanson wants to make it seem so, but this isn’t what Turkey is doing. Neo-Ottoman kitsch aside, Turkey under the AKP is trying to do something quite different. Turkey has no interest in leaving NATO. Indeed, it is probably one of the few states in the Alliance with a significant military establishment that wants to contribute. For that matter, the actual position of the government in Ankara is that EU accession is still very much on their agenda. Foreign Minister Davutoglu was just discussing the matter earlier this week with the Belgian foreign minister. Hanson et al. may believe that Turkey has rejected the West, but they don’t see things this way.

Something that I find very annoying is the repeated claim in a lot of anti-Turkish commentary these past few months that the AKP has somehow betrayed the legacy of Ataturk by pursuing good relations with its eastern neighbors. The people writing this commentary evidently forget that Ataturk’s entire active military career involved fighting against European armies, and his tenure as president of the Turkish republic was marked by his friendly relations with the USSR and neutrality during WWII. [Correction: It was Inonu, Ataturk’s successor, who kept Turkey neutral in WWII.] From the Turkish perspective, these moves made perfect sense and served Turkish interests. Later, postwar Turkey joined NATO and faithfully served as a trusted ally for all this time even when its interests were sabotaged and harmed repeatedly and its protestations ignored over the last twenty years. Following this, the AKP has made a handful of small, mostly symbolic gestures of solidarity or goodwill with some of the officially vilified nations of the Near East, and for its trouble was denounced as treacherous and anti-Western when it is a far more Western-oriented government than Ataturk’s was or ever could have been. Incredibly, the Western response to this seems to be to pine for the good old days of true Kemalism.

Next comes Japan, which should be easy pickings for Hanson. After all, the U.S. and Japan just finished having a major fight over basing rights that brought down a Japanese prime minister and created chaos in the current ruling party. It wouldn’t be hard to fit Japanese opposition to a continued military presence on Okinawa into a column on returning nationalism, and Hanson could have added to that by mentioning the brief tenure of the nationalist, historical-revisionist PM Abe a few years back and the repeated controversies over officials visiting the Yasukuni shrine of Japanese war dead. None of that is mentioned. What does Hanson write instead? He writes:

Japan’s economy is still stalled. Its affluent population is shrinking and aging. Elsewhere in the region, the Japanese see an expanding China and a lunatic nuclear North Korea. Yet Japan is not sure whether the inward-looking United States is still credible in its old promise of protection against any and all enemies.

Most of this is true, but basically irrelevant to the argument that nationalism is on the rise. For that matter, when discussing an “expanding China” in the context of the return of nationalism, it might be useful to observe that Chinese nationalism has become the new prevailing ideology on the mainland, and that there have been occasional outbursts of anti-Japanese violence resulting from this intensifying nationalism. That is, it would be useful if the purpose of the exercise was to analyze and understand political changes occurring around the world, but by the end of the column we find that it is just a set-up for an appeal to vote for Republicans in the midterms:

But just as old problems return, so do equally old solutions. Once-stodgy ideas like a free-market economy, strong defense, secure borders, and national unity are suddenly appearing fresh and wise.

For the sake of those ideas, I hope that the arguments conservatives make to advance them are much better than Hanson’s reflection on nationalism.

Conor Friedersdorf alerted me to this remarkable post at the blog of the Heritage Foundation. Conn Carroll has posted the main arguments from a new paper from James Carafano and Kim Holmes on what they believe the Obama Doctrine is. The post provided me with some very satisfying laughs before I had to start lecturing this morning.

I understand that the people who work on the subject at the Heritage Foundation do not and never will share my critique of U.S. foreign policy, nor would they agree with me on most international issues. They have a profoundly mistaken understanding of what America’s role in the world should be, and I assume they would say the same about me. Even so, they can avoid making complete fools of themselves, can’t they? For example, Carafano and Holmes believe Obama’s foreign policy has a lot in common with that of Wilson, so it is significant that they have such a bizarre view of what was wrong with Wilson’s foreign policy. It partly helps to explain why they end up making no sense when they talk about current debates. They wrote:

After the war, Wilson sought to revive his “concert of nations” idea by establishing the League of Nations, the failed forerunner of the United Nations. He also chose to emphasize soft-power diplomatic tools; he wanted Congress, for example, to issue an official apology to Colombia for U.S. actions in Panama. Congress refused.

Wilson’s brand of foreign policy became synonymous with an American idealism which presumed that traditional exceptionalism was somehow parochial and not universal enough. Ironically, just as this posture failed to stem World War I, it also helped to foster the isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s that inadvertently eased the road into World War II.

Progressive policies like Wilson’s generally reject the grounding of foreign relations in the principles on which this nation was founded—the same principles that undergird American exceptionalism.

Woodrow Wilson was misguided because he didn’t resort to hard power often and soon enough? What a warped and mistaken way to attack a truly terrible President. Oh, and he couldn’t prevent WWI! I have contempt for the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson, but this critique of Wilson is nonsensical. We are supposed to blame Wilson for failing to prevent WWI, which no American President had any chance of preventing, and we are supposed to find fault with him because his intervention in Europe prompted a backlash against future intervention in foreign wars. According to the Heritage writers, the problem wasn’t that he plunged America into a European war in which Americans had no business fighting and no interests at stake, but that in the process he stirred up opposition to sending Americans into other unnecessary foreign wars later on.

They seem not to understand that Wilsonian idealism was an aggressive, foolish application of the idea that American principles are universal, which means that Wilson made the mistake of treating them as guiding principles for the conduct of foreign policy. Wilson’s error was almost the opposite of what they claim, and they seem not to grasp that they are themselves heirs to his foreign policy tradition, and they prove it with most of their other complaints against Obama. Indeed, the authors lauds the Presidents they like in this way: “They combined the pressing demands of their times with the universal principles of America’s Founding [emphasis and bold mine-DL] to leave a legacy in American foreign policy.” The authors naturally cite Truman and Reagan as their two modern examples. Bear in mind that their foreign policies have almost nothing in common with those of Washington and Monroe, the two early republican examples they cite, and note that their enthusiasm for the “universal principles of America’s Founding” as grounding for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy is a largely progressive and Wilsonian idea.

We could go through the entire paper line by line to demonstrate how their specific complaints against Obama are mostly misrepresentations, falsehoods or exaggerations. For example, despite what the authors say, the new START represents no threat to American sovereignty, and the administration has specifically pledged to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and the nuclear labs are awash with new funding specifically for this purpose. Leaving that aside, their amazing misrepresentation and misunderstanding of Wilson and his legacy seem even more telling, because it suggests that the authors don’t really know that most of the things that offend them about Obama’s foreign policy have nothing to do with Wilson and that they have no idea what Wilson got wrong.

P.S. The authors’ hostility to the new START is all the more amusing when they make a point of emphasizing Washington’s willingness to sign treaties to prove that he was not an “isolationist”: “He did not fear making binding commitments to other nations.” True enough, which would put him on the other side from the silly opponents of the new START. Their approval of Washington’s willingness to negotiate and sign treaties is all the more strange when you consider that one of their main lines of attack against Obama is that “Obama has made it clear that he will rely more on the “international system” and treaties to address critical problems.” Furthermore, if multilateralism and reliance on treaties are proof of “ineffective” presidential foreign policy doctrines, how exactly do Truman and Reagan make the authors’ cut? The administrations that gave us NATO and START are very strange ones for the authors to idolize.

Update: For a serious look at Obama’s foreign policy on the main blog, Leon Hadar makes the far more plausible argument that it resembles the policies of the elder Bush and Clinton. This argument has the advantage of being based in reality.

Two Republican senators have lost because, in large part, of their votes for TARP. It’s time to be skeptical that Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) could ever mount a real presidential bid, because he voted for the measure, too, and activists are simply not forgiving of that. And if Palin runs in 2012, how will she get past her own support for TARP? ~Dave Weigel

Via Bodenner

It would be reassuring if activists were consistent in their hostility to pro-TARP Republicans. One of the things that baffled me more than a little about Bennett’s defeat was why he received the ire of activists more than any of the other incumbent Republicans who voted for the measure. Bennett’s problem may have been that he has not furiously backtracked and become an anti-bailout zealot as Thune and Romney have tried to do. Then again, Murkowski tried having it both ways and lost anyway.

The trouble that activists on the right are going to have is that very few Republican politicians came out against the TARP at the time. If most of them are tainted and unacceptable because of backing the TARP, activists are going to have very few candidates they can support, which means rallying behind one of the few early bailout opponents or settling for one of the many supporters. If I understand Republican primary voters at all, they will end up backing one of the latter. Except for Mike Huckabee, I can’t recall that any remotely plausible presidential contenders in the GOP openly opposing the legislation creating the program. As far as I know, Mitch Daniels never made his views known one way or the other. In Palin’s case, there is apparently no real obstacle for her to overcome, because her enthusiasts are not at all interested in the policy positions she staked out in the past.

Thune and Palin may not be going anywhere as presidential candidates, but I doubt it will be because they were insufficiently zealous in opposing bailouts. It would be an encouraging and healthy development if that was the reason, but I don’t think that’s how primary voters would respond to the two of them if they ran. The voters most firmly opposed to the financial sector bailout are the ones most sympathetic to Palin, and they would probably be sympathetic to Thune, too, because he seems to be “one of them” even when he doesn’t vote the way they would want. After all, this is the man who kicked Tom Daschle out of the Senate. That sort of tribal point-scoring will matter a lot more than Thune’s vote for an admittedly horrible bill. It is the less ideological and less partisan voters that will be participating in the primaries that dislike Palin, but they dislike her mainly because of her style and the public persona she has crafted.

Bennett was seen as being too close to the Democrats on health care, and Murkowski had all the baggage of being installed in her position by her father, so there were aggravating factors that made them more vulnerable than other pro-TARP Republicans.

Since, unlike the present, tomorrow is always imaginary, such idolatry can be manipulated in many ways. On the one hand, of course, the Stalins of the world can demand the death of millions in the name of a future paradise. This is an especial concern of Camus, who complains of those who “glorify a future state of happiness, about which no one knows anything, so that the future authorizes every kind of humbug.”…

Given the ironic character of history, we should, at the very least, make sure that our actions have some value in the present. The future that we imagine is unlikely to come about, if it does come about it will not last, and when it does come about we will probably despise it. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

It seems perverse to speculate on how much worse things might have been in Iraq had the United States not launched an unnecessary and illegal invasion that toppled Hussein’s regime. Much like the demagoguing of Iraq’s potential threat to the U.S. before the war, supporters of the invasion make up for their complete lack of evidence by asking us to imagine the very worst things that might occur if we had done nothing.

One thing we can be fairly sure about is that thousands of Americans who are now dead would still be alive and tens of thousands of Americans who are now wounded, some of them catastrophically, would not have been. We also know that America would not be perceived throughout the region and the world as lawless aggressor, our relations with any number of important allies, including Turkey, would not have been badly damaged, and jihadists would not have been given an open killing field on which they were largely free to murder people by the thousands, nor would jihadists have been given such a powerful boost to their propaganda and recruiting. We know that American attention and resources would not have been distracted for years from the war in Afghanistan, which might have otherwise been brought to a close by now, and the American military would not be so badly strained and overstretched. If the U.S. had not invaded, Iranian influence in the region would not have grown as much as it has, a refugee crisis in which millions have been displaced and Iraq’s professional classes have been decimated would not have occurred, and the complete dismantling of the Iraqi state and military apparatus would not have happened.

It is actually very difficult to imagine the anarchy and mass violence that we did see if there had not been an international occupier disbanding the Iraqi army and an outside political force causing the collapse of state institutions. If the U.S. did not directly cause the sectarian violence that followed, we made it impossible to contain. Hussein’s regime would probably have been succeeded by another dictatorship, and possibly it would have been one that is no more prone to torture and disappear its enemies than the current Iraqi government.

Last night, Obama referred to the invasion as a “war to disarm a state,” which was the official justification given by his predecessor. If we grant that this was the purpose of the war and not the pretext for regime change, it really makes no difference whether a far-off post-Saddam Iraq would have been better or worse than the one that has emerged now, because it means that the U.S. had no business invading on the Bush administration’s own terms. As Ross wrote in early 2009:

Strip away Saddam’s (supposed) rearmament and the imminent threat it (supposedly) posed, and the fact that you had nine other “here’s why this might be a good idea” reasons for war did not a strong-enough justification for war make.

Similarly, one cannot summon the specter of possible worse disasters that might have unfolded in the absence of an invasion to get around the responsibility supporters of the invasion have for the consequences of the war. Then again, if the primary purpose of the war was always regime change regardless of whether or not Hussein was already disarmed, an antiwar argument focused on preserving Iraqi and regional stability becomes even stronger.

Yes, the oil boom of the 2000s would have made Hussein’s regime richer, but like all the other petro-states that flourished during the boom Iraq would still have been limited to projecting power in its immediate neighborhood. In other words, Iraq would have continued to be an annoyance in the way that Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is an annoyance. Meanwhile, if Hussein were still in power, there would still be a fiercely anti-Iranian Iraqi government in Baghdad rather than a fairly pro-Iranian one. I am less concerned about that than most, but it doesn’t make much sense why people who irrationally exaggerate the threat from Iran are so comfortable with this outcome. Once the financial crisis and recession happened, and the price of oil dropped from the stratospheric heights of mid-2008, Iraq would have gone from being an annoyance to being something even less menacing. So instead of having a minor annoyance that represented no meaningful threat to U.S. interests, the U.S. has a dysfunctional sectarian dependency, and the U.S. will continue to have 50,000 soldiers in the country to continue enabling its dysfunction, sectarianism, and abuses of power.