In addition to what I linked to yesterday, Romney’s argument against the new START has been thoroughly destroyed here, here and here, so we don’t need to dwell on Romney’s failure much more. What is a little bit more remarkable is that there has been hardly one right-of-center politician, analyst or pundit who has objected to Romney’s embarrassing op-ed. It is instructive to compare the very negative reactions to Michael Steele’s anti-Obama remarks on Afghanistan with the indifference or approving comments for Romney’s effort.

Whether one agrees with them or not, Steele’s remarks were not nearly as absurd as what Romney wrote. Even if you believe that they were utterly cynical and mistaken, as I do, some part of what Steele said is at least debatable. Nonetheless, the response on the right was instant and almost universal condemnation. Romney’s op-ed was pure nonsense from almost start to finish. Put it another way: Romney’s op-ed made Michael Steele seem like a reasonably well-informed, serious public figure by comparison. If any conservatives could be bothered to take notice of Romney’s op-ed, they have usually quoted from itwithout comment or simplyapproved of it. The only criticism from the right other than mine that I have been able to find is this bit of Palinite propaganda.

These reactions are quite consistent in that most conservative critics of Steele were offended by his remarks because they are reflexively hostile to any dissent from a hawkish position regardless of the merits of it, and most conservatives are pleased with Romney’s argument because it supports a foolish, super-hawkish position and because they are reflexively hostile to the idea of arms control and arms reduction regardless of the merits. Automatic hawkishness and anti-Obama sentiment did not align at all in Steele’s case, but they align quite nicely for Romney. Unfortunately, far from being discredited by his sheer ignorance of the relevant issues concerning the treaty he is attacking, Romney is going to prosper within the GOP because his ignorant arguments reaffirm what many in the movement and the party already believe. In this case, what they believe is that diplomacy is usually ineffective, authoritarian governments should never be diplomatically engaged, much less trusted, and that Obama is selling out the country to rivals and enemies. The new START is probably the worst example to use to argue for this already ridiculous view, but that doesn’t seem to bother them.

Ambinder tries to understand the politics of Romney’s horribleop-ed on the Prague treaty:

Does he believe opposition to Senate ratification is a political winner? As the privately acknowledged “invisible primary” frontrunner, is he attempting to use what leverage he has to make sure that his party does not capitulate on this issue, depriving him of the chance to draw a clear contrast with Obama? Or does he see this as an opportunity to burnish his foreign policy chops ahead of 2012?

It is hard to say what exactly Romney hopes to accomplish by trying to put a wonkish face on an absurd anti-ratification, “nuclear anarchy” position in an op-ed in The Washington Post, but it is very likely that this is intended almost purely for consumption by movement and party activists. No one else could possibly take it seriously. As Paul Podvig explains here, Romney’s op-ed is even worse than I originally argued, and Romney’s arguments are meeting with outright mockery from those who understand these issues well. Concerning tactical nuclear weapons, Podvig makes an important point:

Interestingly enough, when talking about tactical warheads, Romney makes a point that underscores importance of the treaty – he asks, “[W]ho can know how those tactical nuclear warheads might be reconfigured?” This is a legitimate question. This is why the treaty, in fact, addresses it – its explicit limit on the the number of strategic launchers, which serves to ensure that “those tactical nuclear warheads” cannot be reconfigured into anything that they are not.

So Romney grossly exaggerates the Russian advantage in deployed tactical nuclear weapons, misrepresents the treaty’s implications for tactical nuclear weapons, and generally shows that he has no idea what he’s talking about.

In the last presidential cycle, Romney decided that he had to stake out a zealous social conservative position to neutralize criticism of his earlier social liberalism and to give him some credibility with the activists and voters whose support he needed to win the nomination. For the next cycle, Romney apparently decided some time ago that attempting to out-hawk the administration and any potential Republican rivals and pretending that he knew something about foreign policy were the keys to winning in 2012. At some point during the last year and a half, Romney decided that his next presidential bid required him to jump into the deep end of American nationalism and become a champion of American exceptionalism against the ostensibly post-American worldview of Obama. This has involved embarrassing himself by showing how poorly he understands the subject he has chosen to make one of the main themes of his future campaign, and he has just done it again. This is the sort of thing that activists will cheer, which is unfortunate, because it is also the sort of thing that tells us why Romney should never be President.

But democracy promotion has also been unfairly discredited by the invasion of Iraq, a decision too often remembered as nothing more than a foolish “war for democracy” that went predictably wrong. The subsequent failure of Iraq to metamorphose overnight into the Switzerland of the Middle East is cited as an example of why democracy should never be pushed or promoted. This silly argument has had a strong echo: Since becoming president, Barack Obama has shied away from the word democracy in foreign contexts — he prefers “our common security and prosperity” — as if it might be some dangerous Bushism. ~Anne Applebaum

Applebaum is attacking the wrong “silly argument.” The silliest argument was the one made by war advocates who insisted that democratization would contribute to regional stability on the bizarre assumption that democracies are inherently more peaceful. That certainly hasn’t happened, and I’m not referring just to the countries that went through “color” revolutions and U.S. wars of “liberation.” Thailand, Kenya and Ivory Coast are among the countries in the last decade that have suffered tremendous upheaval as a result of tensions heightened and exaggerated by democratic politics. Another silly argument that war supporters made on a fairly regular basis was that a democratic Iraq would necessarily be relatively pro-Western. As it has turned out, Iraq has quite naturally come under increasing Iranian influence and has become more sympathetic to Iran than it ever was in the past. All things considered, that may not be such a bad outcome, but it flatly contradicts what most of the war supporters and democracy promoters said would happen. Fans of democracy promotion seem to have an unusually bad understanding of what democratization would actually mean in most other parts of the world, and so it is fortunate that we seem to have an administration that is suitably more wary of the idea.

It’s true that the Bush administration’s rhetoric of liberation and democracy promotion was mainly an afterthought when it came to Iraq. It was something the administration threw in to win over skeptics that doubted the wisdom of preventive war and questioned the claims about WMDs, and it only became a centerpiece of Iraq policy when the claims that led us into the war were shown to be false. It’s also true that it is fairly ridiculous to treat the liberty-subverting, Constitution-trampling, executive power-worshipping Bush administration as if it were some band of true believing zealots for freedom and popular participatory politics. There is some mania among Wilsonian idealists that requires attacking the things at home that we are supposed to be exporting elsewhere. Nonetheless, it’s equally true that many advocates of democracy promotion jumped on the Iraq war bandwagon as a result. The Iraq war doesn’t necessarily discredit any and all democracy promotion, but it is a cautionary tale of how the government can invoke freedom and democracy to advance and sell completely appalling policies. (Mind you, it isn’t just that Iraq hasn’t become Switzerland, which was never going to happen, but that its political institutions haven’t even risen to the level of Lebanon’s.)

One danger of making democracy promotion an important priority of U.S. policy or even of official rhetoric is that it becomes an ideological slogan entirely detached from the substance of fostering a more liberal and participatory political order. In that way, Bakiyev’s coup against Akayev could be dressed up in the West as an example of “people power” triumphing over authoritarianism. A run-of-the-mill power struggle in Kyrgyzstan was treated as part of the global democratic revolution Bush had insanely lauded in his Second Inaugural, and Kyrgyzstan is still bleeding and suffering today partly as a result of the genuinely stupid, unfocused enthusiasm for spreading democracy that the government could use to cloak its agenda of reducing Russian influence in the former Soviet Union. Enthusiasm for democracy blinded Westerners to the errors and flaws of Saakashvili, and even when he was wrecking his country by escalating an unwinnable war quite a few democratists were still defending him and the “democratically elected government of Georgia” no matter what.

Another danger is that this emphasis on democracy promotion conflates U.S. interests in a region with the aspirations of other peoples to govern themselves democratically when these two may not be complementary. Most enthusiasts for democracy promotion seem rarely to contemplate the possibility of such a conflict between the political goals of democrats in other countries and U.S. policies, and there usually seems to be a casual assumption that American interests and “values” advance in tandem. Much of the sympathy for the Green movement in the U.S. is predicated on two basically false beliefs that most Green movement members want to topple their government and want to adopt policies more amenable to the U.S. Many Western sympathizers with the Green movement would suddenly start singing a very different tune if they understood that neither of these things is true.

At times, as in Iraq, we seem to give no thought as to whether democratization will undermine U.S. interests, because promoting democracy was always a tertiary consideration when we launched our invasion, and at other times we seem to favor only those protest movements that we believe will become reliable supporters of U.S. influence in their region. In practice, democracy promotion gets a bad name because it is used in the most obviously cynical way to justify a policy decision after the fact, or it is used in a highly selective manner to favor only those regime opponents who are willing to become our yes-men. Its fair-weather supporters also contribute to the bad reputation democracy promotion has acquired. Many of the same people who clamed to be so thrilled by the so-called Arab Spring of 2005, the “color” revolutions in the former USSR and purple Iraqi thumbs were completely horrified when more fully mature democratic governments and allies of the United States, such as Japan and Turkey, began pursuing mildy independent courses of action that clashed slightly with current U.S. policies.

The reality is that hegemonists and interventionists don’t really want to promote democracy unless it undermines rival powers’ influence or installs a clique that wants to align its country with the U.S., and that leaves people interested in democracy promotion in its own right in a difficult bind. These people could accept this selective, occasional interest in democratization as better than nothing, or they could insist on opposing the cynics and partisan opportunists who try to co-opt the language of democracy promotion every time they want to use it as political cover for an entirely different agenda. Until they do a better job of distinguishing themselves from the hawks and interventionists who have dragged their cause through the mud, they aren’t going to get a lot of sympathy from the rest of us who have seen how their rhetoric has been used to start wars, stir up instability and foment riot and conflict.

How many dishonest and misleading things can Mitt Romney pack into one op-ed? There are a few. Romney’s first lie was remarkably brazen even for him:

He [Obama] castigated Israel at the United Nations but was silent about Hamas having launched 7,000 rockets from the Gaza Strip.

Neither of these things happened. One will look in vain for any speech Obama has ever given in which he actually castigated Israel, but it is even more certain that he never did this at the U.N. Castigate means censure, and if there is one thing Obama has never done it is censure Israel. The only thing Obama has been silent about with regard to Gaza was the excessive military operations Israel launched there immediately before he took office. A couple sentences later, Romney lies about missile defense in Europe:

He acceded to Russia’s No. 1 foreign policy objective, the abandonment of our Europe-based missile defense program, and obtained nothing whatsoever in return.

The missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic were scrapped, and they have since been replaced by proposed new installations in southeastern Europe. Unlike the previous plan, which guarded against non-existent Iranian ICBMs, this one could theoretically defend against medium-range missiles that Iran actually has. So missile defense in Europe has not been abandoned, and despite what Moscow may say the Prague treaty apparently does not rule out missile defense, either, so Romney is complaining about something that hasn’t happened.

Romney repeats a common misrepresentation of the Prague treaty, which is that it “impedes missile defense.” Dr. Jeffrey Lewis had a very useful review of the relevant parts of the new treaty that he wrote earlier this year, and his conclusion is worth citing here:

I think it is very hard to conclude that the treaty “limits” missile defenses. The treaty may have some implications for missile defense programs, but on the whole it is written in such a way as to create space for current and planned missile defense programs, including language that exempts interceptors from the definition of an ICBM [bold mine-DL] and the provision to “grandfather” the converted silos at Vandenberg.

Still, I suspect we will continue hear from some quarters that the treaty “limits” missile defense. This is a form of special pleading. The common-sense test is that no one would claim that the treaty “limits” conventional bombers, despite some provisions to separate conventional bombers from their nuclear-equipped brethren. By any consistent standard, the treaty limits neither.

As for Romney’s objection that the treaty “explicitly forbids the United States from converting intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos into missile defense sites,” Dr. Lewis makes what seems like a very sensible observation:

The advantages of this are obvious: otherwise, you would have Russian inspectors crawling all over US missile defense interceptors to ensure they weren’t stocked with contraband treaty-limited equipment.

In other words, this is something that seems like a concession but which could actually aid the development of missile defense.

Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb recently wrote an op-ed in support of the treaty that addressed the missile defense question:

While some have alleged that the New START treaty will inhibit missile defense, this claim has been strongly refuted by Republican elder statesmen in their Senate testimony on the treaty. Former Secretary of State James Baker stated plainly, “There is, in fact, no restriction on the United States of America’s ability to move forward on missile defense in whatever way it wants.” Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft was equally direct, testifying, “The treaty is amply clear, it does not restrict us … I don’t think there’s substance to this argument.”

In fact, Baker and Scowcroft are joined in supporting the treaty by almost every senior Republican national security leader from the past three decades, including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Schlesinger, George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and the Senate’s foremost current expert on nuclear policy, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana. They are joined by leading Democratic national security leaders, such as former Defense Secretary William Perry and former senator Nunn.

Romney’s other objections are more technical, but they don’t appear to be much better. One of the standard objections to the new treaty has been that warhead reduction could do Russia a favor, because Russia does not want the expense of maintaining such a large arsenal, but Romney claims instead that loopholes in the treaty will permit a Russian build-up of warheads. For Romney’s objections to mean very much, one would have to believe that Russia is intent on a massive arms build-up and is looking for some means to achieve this without formally violating arms control agreements. In fact, the more substantive criticism that advocates of disarmament could make against the treaty is that there are not going to be many reductions at all on either side, and the loopholes in the treaty will permit both governments to maintain their arsenals near their current levels:

Due to the loophole, the United States could avoid counting roughly 450 of its 2,100 presently deployed warheads, while around 860 weapons in Russia’s 2,600-warhead arsenal would not be counted, Kristensen said. As a result, the United States would only need to place 100 deployed warheads in storage and Russia would only need to remove 190 weapons.

It is therefore quite difficult to credit Romney’s claim that “New-START gives Russia a massive nuclear weapon advantage over the United States.” Were that to happen, the same withdrawal provision in Article XIV of the treaty that Russia could exercise could also be exercised by the United States. If we view the Prague treaty as a beginning rather than a dramatic accomplishment on its own, we could then build on it to negotiate reductions in tactical nuclear weapons. Rejecting the treaty because it has not solved every arms reduction problem in one move is just the sort of short-sighted opportunism we have come to expect from Romney and other leading Republicans when it comes to important matters of U.S. foreign policy.

Of course, it could be that Romney is just incredibly uninformed and knows none of these things, but this is supposedly someone who prides himself on his mastery of whatever subject he discusses. He is supposed to be consumed by policy details and fascinated by wonkery. Somehow when it comes to foreign policy, which he now pretends to understand and wants to use as a club with which to bludgeon Obama, he has a fairly poor grasp of the subject.

Update: Max Bergmann makes an important point that the alternative to ratification is to accept the collapse of the arms control framework that has existed for at least two decades.

There is something obviously wrong when Fred Hiatt, friend of warmongers and torture apologists, holds forth on the dangers to liberty around the world. Here was the line that was the most jarring to me:

Taking advantage of their control of television, they mobilized ideologies of nationalism and anti-terrorism to undermine the rhetoric of freedom.

Of course, Hiatt is referring here to various authoritarian states, but he seems to have no notion that apart from the reference to television that statement could just as easily be applied to his own op-ed pages and the politicians he has defended over the last decade. For that matter, the measures he and his allies have favored haven’t just undermined the rhetoric of freedom, but have seriously undermined the limits on government power and significantly damaged the substance of American liberty and the liberty of people in other nations as well. More perversely, they did all of this while pretending to celebrate American freedoms. One might ask why Hiatt expects freedom to be flourishing elsewhere in the world when our own authoritarians have worked so hard to harm it here at home with security measures, power grabs and grossly illegal activities.

Hiatt is quite happy to complain that Obama does not embrace a “freedom agenda” like that of the previous administration, but he completely fails to acknowledge the results of this agenda have been extremely destructive and destabilizing in many cases and outright failures in others. Of all the supposed beneficiaries of the “freedom agenda,” just one country, Ukraine, is listed as free. To Freedom House’s credit, it doesn’t whitewash the flaws of countries that have been held up as examples of democratic reform and liberalization. According to Freedom House’s own report for the previous year, Georgia is only “partly free” and is not considered an electoral democracy, and the same is true for Lebanon. As Hiatt mentions, “[e]leven of the 12 non-Baltic former Soviet republics are worse off than a decade ago [bold mine-DL],” but he neglects to add that two of the eleven underwent “color” revolutions and were supposed to be becoming more free. If this description from Freedom House is correct, not only has Kyrgyzstan gone backwards since the days of Akayev, which anyone can see, but Georgia has actually lost ground compared to when Shevardnadze was in office. That seems hard to believe, but I don’t find it all that surprising.

Not only is Iraq ranked as not free, but it also has the dubious distinction of being seventh in Foreign Policy’s failed state rankings for yet another year. Georgia is 37th and Kyrgyzstan 45th in those rankings. Just three years ago, Georgia was 58th, and it’s unclear whether Kyrgyzstan’s modest improvement in the rankings takes into account Bakiyev’s overthrow and the recent ethnic violence and refugee crisis. Being anywhere in the “borderline,” “in danger” or “critical” tiers of those rankings significantly qualifies any gains in terms of political reform. Potential failed states are among the worst places to test out an agenda of liberalization and democratization.

It is appropriate to be “skittish” about a “freedom agenda” when past attempts have yielded mostly bitter fruit. We would have to question Obama’s judgment and sanity if he were as enthusiastic and zealous as his predecessor. When so much upheaval and instability have been caused in the name of promoting freedom and democracy, it is no wonder that rising democratic powers do not want to replicate this chaos in their own neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, Russia continues to be marked by domestic authoritarianism and aggression beyond its borders. The harassment and murder of journalists and human rights advocates continues unabated. Press freedom has declined precipitously since Prime Minister Vladimir Putin came to power 10 years ago. Baton-wielding riot police regularly break up peaceful demonstrations. A recently “leaked” Russian foreign policy document cites NATO enlargement – the consensual process by which sovereign states, once held captive behind the Iron Curtain, decide to join an alliance of free and democratic nations – as the greatest threat to Russian security, underscoring the paranoid mind-set that dominates Kremlin thinking. And nearly two years after its invasion of Georgia, Russia continues to occupy 20% of the country’s territory, has illegally recognized two separatist provinces as “independent” states and stands in violation of a European Union-brokered ceasefire. ~James Kirchick

No one denies the authoritarianism, but as Kirchick’s statements show the evidence for Russia’s “aggression beyond its borders” is very, very thin. When the one concrete example of “aggression” Kirchick can come up with is the Russian military presence in the separatist republics, we know we shouldn’t take the charge very seriously. Yes, officially these republics are still considered part of Georgia, and in a parallel universe where state sovereignty and territorial integrity are actually respected by major powers this would mean something. Which is more outrageous: a Russian military presence in territories whose inhabitants welcome them and do not want to be part of Georgia, or an American military presence in Iraq where a large percentage of the population does not want us to be there and never has? Hawks usually bristle at the word occupation when it is applied to Iraq or the Palestinian territories, but they throw it around quite freely when discussing a case that is much more ambiguous.

Was Russian recognition of the independence of the separatist republics illegal? Of course. So was the recognition of Kosovo independence by the U.S. and much of Europe. It is pretty widely accepted now that it was recognition of Kosovo independence that led to Russia’s recognition of the separatist republics. Western governments wanted to make Kosovo a “special” case, and Russia was going to make sure that it became a precedent that had unhappy consequences for a U.S. ally. Georgian escalation made it very easy for Moscow to do just that.

The main difference between the conflicts prior to recognition is that the U.S. and NATO launched the attack on Serbia that later led to this partition, while Russia was repelling an attack from Georgia against the statelets that had effectively broken away decades ago. It was the U.S. and NATO that launched an unprovoked war against a traditional Russian ally eleven years ago after assuring Russia that it had no reason to worry about eastward NATO expansion. It was also the U.S. and many of our NATO allies that arbitrarily partitioned that country’s territory two years ago with those recognitions of Kosovo independence. Perhaps it isn’t exactly paranoia to see an expanding NATO as some sort of threat to Russia and its allies.

Then again, maybe Moscow is mistaken to see NATO expansion as a major threat. As NATO has expanded, it has steadily gone from being what some of us used to call the greatest alliance in history to something more like a club for the politically correct. Belonging to it has had far less to do with collective defense against a foreign threat, which has steadily receded for the last twenty years, and more to do with burnishing the credentials of one’s country as a truly Western one. Certainly, many new and aspiring NATO members have contributed to the war in Afghanistan, and many have also inexplicably contributed to the war in Iraq, but for the most part these have been symbolic commitments that underscore just how militarily useless most of the new allies are. To the extent that NATO continues to have any real military function at all, it has been to serve as America’s posse in military campaigns that have nothing to do with the alliance’s reason for existing. What continues to amaze is not the limited support NATO allies are giving to the war in Afghanistan, but that they continue to provide any support when they no longer really have any obligation to do so. Meanwhile, it is exactly those countries where Western security guarantees are truly risky and dangerous that stood no chance of gaining entry, because Ukraine or Georgia in NATO might have eventually required NATO to fulfill its pledge to defend against an attack on any member, and no current member of NATO had any intention of doing that.

In the back-and-forth between Fareed Zakaria and Leon Wieseltier over John McCain and Iran last month, what slipped by unnoticed was the best example of how “fantasy substitutes for foreign policy” in McCain’s speech. McCain said:

For this reason, I believe that it will only be a change in the Iranian regime itself—a peaceful change, chosen by and led by the people of Iran—that can finally produce the changes we seek in Iran’s policies.

As Kevin Sullivan notes, McCain’s interest in both military action against Iran and regime change in Iran are well-established and go back many years. It is hardly a secret that Iran hawks became Green movement enthusiasts primarily because they exaggerated the power and significance of the movement and assumed that it could topple the Iranian government and replace it with a more compliant, obedient one. As a matter of analysis, this was wrong. It always invested the Green movement with too much importance, and it quite deliberately misrepresented what Americans and Westerners could expect in terms of policy changes from a Green government. This is what McCain did again in his speech, and McCain’s position is actually very close to the one taken by Richard Haass earlier this year. Like Haass, McCain has made clear that he wishes to change the Iranian regime by opposition proxy. What divides realists from fantasists and ideologues in this case has been the ability to assess more or less correctly the strength of the Iranian opposition and the weakness of the Iranian government. Haass joined with the fantasists at a moment when it was becoming increasingly clear that the opposition was making no headway and was gradually weakening.

Wieseltier completely missed Zakaria’s most important point while writing his ridiculous response, and this was that whether or not one would like to have regime change in Iran at the hands of the Iranian opposition it isn’t going to happen. Making something that is far-fetched and highly unlikely into the centerpiece of Iran policy is not credible, and it is certainly not realism of any kind, but that is what McCain, Wieseltier and Haass have done. In the end, Wieseltier’s response amounted to a lot of pouting that Zakaria did not confuse his sympathy for the Green movement with his estimates for their chance of success. It seems clear that the main problem Zakaria had with McCain’s speech and with his general worldview was that McCain was proposing a piece of wishful thinking as if it were a meaningful solution to disputes between the U.S. and Iran. It is just another case of fetishizing democracy and claiming that democratization has pro-Americanizing effects that there is no evidence that it has. No less worrisome, McCain compounded his first error by repeating the lunacy he uttered during the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia (“we are all Georgians now”) and applying it to the Iranian opposition:

We need to make their goals our goals, their interests our interests, their work our work.

What McCain never considers is that the goals, interests and work of the Iranian opposition may not have anything to do with the goals, interests and work of the U.S., especially not when those are defined by such dangerous hawks as John McCain. After all, we have good reason to believe that the opposition’s goals are not as far-reaching and radical as some Westerners would like. If the Green movement is actually an Iranian civil rights movement, and we have every reason to believe that this is what it is, then its concern is to make changes to the existing system rather than toppling it outright. If it is the character of the regime that causes Iran hawks to fear and loathe it, the Green movement is not even a plausible means to change the fundamental character of the regime because this is not what interests the opposition. Even if we all agreed that ousting the current Iranian government was the only option left available to secure American interests, much of the Green movement would want no part of our effort, because they do not wish to be seen as the tools of foreigners, and they would probably resent and maybe even resist our efforts. More than anything, it is sheer ignorance of or indifference to the Green movement’s objectives and an equally great ignorance of Iranian society that inform these regime change fantasies. My guess is that it was mainly McCain’s “startling ignorance” that made Zakaria relieved that McCain was not elected President, and on that point I heartily agree.

There were a few things I read while I was on my trip last week that still are worth addressing now. First, Greg Scoblete referred to an earlier Stephen Kinzer article in The American Prospect in which Kinzer made an intriguing proposal:

Improbable as it may seem right now, given the current regime in Iran, a partnership that unites Turkey, Iran, and the United States is the future and makes sense for two reasons: The three countries share strategic interests, and their people share values. Our evolving relationship with a changing Turkey offers a model for the kind of relationship we might one day–not necessarily tomorrow–have with a changing Iran. This is the tantalizing possibility of a new way for the U.S. to engage with the Middle East in the 21st century.

I am quite skeptical whenever someone tries to justify a present or future alliance even in part by invoking shared “values.” This is usually added to the mix when supporters of the alliance cannot point to any tangible or significant benefit from the alliance for the U.S. For example, pro-Georgian enthusiasts here in the U.S. have to lean heavily on Georgian democracy and Georgia’s market-oriented economic reforms to make sense of U.S. support for Georgia, which is in almost every other respect a stategic liability. There may be no American interest served in sending aid or selling weapons to Georgia, and it does complicate and sometimes damage relations with Russia to do these things, but if Georgians share our “values” then that makes everything all right. This doesn’t apply in the cases of Turkey and Iran, whose strategic importance is obvious but whose respective “values” are not entirely ours.

That said, I find Kinzer’s proposal interesting. Over the last few years, I have made it pretty clear that I think rapprochement with Iran is the obvious and wise course to pursue, and in the last month I have been emphasizing the value of the Turkish alliance at a time when many Americans seem to have decided that Turkey is no longer an ally. The trouble for Kinzer’s proposal and for my arguments is that much of the political class has been turning against Turkey partly because Turkey has become too accommodating with Iran. As Kinzer will have noticed, “our evolving relationship with a changing Turkey” has meant a deteriorating relationship with an increasingly alienated Turkey, and the relationship has deteriorated in no small part because Turkey has already started improving ties with Iran right now. Ankara isn’t waiting for the far-off day when the Iranian opposition becomes organized and effective enough to force some internal political change in Iran, in part because its “zero problems” approach does not require that Turkey’s neighbors share “values” with the Turks.

Kinzer is not quite so bold as to argue that this triple alliance will exist anytime soon:

A new triangular relationship involving the United States, Turkey, and Iran cannot emerge overnight. In order to become a reliable American partner, Iran would have to change dramatically. Turkey would also have to change, although not nearly as much. So would the United States. Our world, how-ever, advances only as a result of strategic vision. First must come a grand concept, a destination; once the destination is clear, all parties can concentrate on finding the way to reach it.

Unfortunately, leaving it to Iran to “change dramatically” before this realignment or new “triangle” of relationships could be established guarantees that it will not happen for decades. If we are going to wait until Iran dramatically changes, it may never happen at all. While the U.S. waits for Iran to undergo this transformation, Turkey will continue its own regional ambitions and pursue its desire to foster good relations with all of its neighbors. If the last few months are any indication, Washington will respond to this dismissively, contemptuously and angrily. Davutoglu has spoken of a “multi-dimensional” element to Turkish foreign policy in which good Turkish relations with Russia, for example, do not jeopardize good relations with the U.S. Davutoglu has argued that Turkey’s relationships are complementary to one another, but no other state seems to see it this way.

At one point, Kinzer writes:

No other nation is respected by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Taliban while also maintaining good ties with the Israeli, Lebanese, and Afghan governments.

What’s wrong with this sentence? I don’t dispute the last two, but surely Kinzer sees that in practice Hamas’ respect for Turkey and good ties with Israel are inversely related. As one has increased, the other has almost vanished. We can go through the arguments why Israel needs Turkey more and can’t afford to be as petulant and short-sighted as it has been, but the reality is that Turkey’s ability to serve as a mediator depends very much on the willingness of both sides in any given dispute to continue to trust and accept Turkish help. As of right now, Israel doesn’t trust Turkey, and as everyone knows their relations are a wreck.

The U.S. has publicly sided against Turkey twice in the last month precisely because it has been engaged in pursuing its regional ambitions and mediation efforts. Kinzer is rigt that Washington ought to pursue sustained engagement with Iran, but the administration made it clear long ago that their engagement policy was another means to the same dead end of limiting or ending Iran’s nuclear program. More than anything else, what has to change to make rapprochement with Iran and rebuilding the alliance with Turkey successful is the attitudes toward both countries’ goals of regional influence. Turkey is already in a position to help facilitate the early stages of reconciliation between the U.S. and Iran, but our political class continues to be held hostage by the idea that Turkish accommodation of Iran equals Turkish betrayal of the U.S. Until we get rid of that absurd idea, Kinzer’s arguments will unfortunately fall on deaf ears.

Outside of Republicans, she’s not popular at all. According to our NBC/WSJ poll, just 29% view her favorably, compared with 43% who view her unfavorably (not far from George W. Bush’s 29%-50% score). In addition, the poll shows that 52% have problems with a candidate who has been endorsed by Palin, versus only 25% who are comfortable with that attribute. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Palin is more of a political celebrity than a political figure. ~First Read

This is true, but there is nothing here about Palin that we know now that we didn’t already know a year or a year and a half ago. Her unfavorables among non-Republicans have gone up steadily since the Republican convention in 2008, and outside of a dedicated core of admirers and a few critics no one is taking her political chances seriously. This is the same as it has been for a very long time. As Josh Green notes, it would normally be absurd to think that someone with a 14-point favorability deficit was a serious presidential contender, and there aren’t that many non-partisans who think that she is anything of the kind. The reality is that the more independents and Democrats see of Palin, the less they like. In a country where these people make up at least 65% of the electorate, Palin is essentially unelectable in a general election. This isn’t a difficult call to make. The question to which we don’t know the answer yet is whether the GOP is so willfully blind to this reality and so bent on self-destruction in 2012 that the party nominates her anyway. For all of the reasons I have given before, I very much doubt that Republicans are this foolish. It is possible that the GOP will decide to immolate itself as part of an elaborate reality TV experiment, but they have every incentive not to want to do that.

We have good reason to expect that the 2012 Republican field will be large and support will once again be fairly evenly divided. This might give Palin a better chance than she would have otherwise, but many of her likely rivals are going to be going after the same voters who view Palin favorably. For that matter, she is not favorably viewed by all Republicans. That leaves a huge opening for a more credible, electable candidate to pull together some fraction of conservatives together with the primary anti-Palin vote. As it is, she has just 66% favorability with self-identified Tea Party supporters, and she is supposed to be one of their political heroes. If she can’t even consolidate all of the Tea Party’s approximately 18% of the vote, why does anyone think she can win at least a third of the vote in primaries that she will need to get the nomination?

If she did somehow pull it off, Democrats would spend most of the summer and fall of 2012 rubbing their eyes in disbelief at their good fortune. Even in a fairly polarized national electorate where McCain/Palin could manage to get 47% of the vote in the midst of a financial meltdown at the tail end of the second term of one of the three most unpopular postwar Presidents, a ticket headed by Palin would be hard-pressed to break 40%. Palin as the nominee would probably make 2012 the most lopsided election victory for the incumbent President since 1984.