While Santorum says he “disagree[s] with Palin’s judgment” on some issues — like her endorsement of Rand Paul in Kentucky — he says he “by and large love[s] what she has to say. She’s a great rallying point for the party.” But he cautions that she still needs to be focused on “prudential judgment.” ~Robert Costa

It’s a bit rich for Rick “Gathering Storm” Santorum to advise anyone else on prudential judgment, but let’s leave that alone for now. Palin’s endorsements can be helpful, but they aren’t always critical to a candidate’s success. Often enough, she jumps behind candidates that are already poised to win. Martinez would have won the gubernatorial primary here in New Mexico regardless of any outside endorsements. It wouldn’t have mattered if Palin had endorsed one of her opponents. The candidates Palin endorses don’t always win, as Vaughn Ward conspicuously failed to do in Idaho, but for the moment she has aligned herself with enough high-profile successes across the country that the losing candidates she has backed don’t get much attention. What she has demonstrated is that she understands what a substantial part of the Republican primary electorate wants, and she has positioned herself accordingly. When it comes to making endorsements in intra-Republican contests, her political judgment is reasonably good, but that basically makes her nothing more than a celebrity endorser who generates enthusiasm for a particular product/candidate among a fairly small, targeted audience.

Santorum’s observation that she is a rallying point is correct, but that doesn’t mean that she is a viable presidential candidate. Andrew thinks that people in Washington are “in denial” when they conclude that she has no chance as a 2012 candidate. This doesn’t strike me as a form of denial, but a pretty fair assessment of the GOP’s habit of suppressing every other enthusiasm or grievance in the hopes of winning the Presidency. Ten or eleven years ago, we heard about the “broken glass” Republicans who would have supposedly crawled across broken glass to see Gore defeated, and there will be even more anti-Obama Republicans like this in 2012. It doesn’t seem possible right now, but when it comes time to select a nominee there will be boundless tolerance for an “impure” candidate who can give the party a chance at unseating Obama. Perhaps the only thing greater than the GOP’s enthusiasm for executive power is its desire to control the executive, which has usually been its only reliable access to power at the federal level for most of the last sixty years.

According to the pattern of the last thirty years, we all know that the Republican runner-up in one cycle is treated as the heir in the next open cycle. It doesn’t seem to matter how flawed or deeply disliked the runner-up is among conservative activists and journalists, and it doesn’t seem to matter how poor of a candidate he is. McCain became the nominee in spite of all the conservatives who loathed him, and Dole won the nomination in ’96 largely on the grounds that it was his turn. Democratic runners-up may try to come back, but they usually don’t succeed and just as often they don’t make the attempt. This is just one more reason why the conservative cult dedicated to Hillary Clinton is utterly misguided. If the pattern holds, and there is no reason to think that it won’t, the nomination will probably end up going to Romney or Huckabee, unless both of them appear so unelectable that a safe, viable third alternative becomes necessary. Then Mitch Daniels or someone else deemed suitable will emerge as the new frontrunner. Assuming that there will be a large, weak, divided field again, it is likely that the next Republican nominee will also win with barely a third of the early primary vote, so the bar is low enough for Romney or Huckabee to get over. It is probably still too high for Palin to cross.

On top of all this, losing VP candidates rarely come back to win their party’s nomination, and they simply never come back in the Republican Party. Most Republicans like Sarah Palin, but there are not nearly enough Republicans who like her so much that they will be willing to concede the 2012 election by nominating her. There is undoubtedly a dedicated core of supporters that doesn’t think she would lose the election, but even most sympathetic Republicans don’t believe that. Palin is unlikely to be an electoral threat to other potential Republican 2012 candidates, and she would be no threat at all to Obama if she were somehow to win the nomination. Anyone who wants Obama to skate to re-election with minimal resistance would welcome a Palin nomination, and anyone who wants a reasonably competitive contest in two years should hope that the GOP puts forward a far less ridiculous candidate.

My column for The Week on the flotilla raid, Israel, Turkey and U.S.-Turkish relations is now online.

Yet despite the administration’s penchant for bungling its messaging, most officials in these countries have become significantly less worried about the reset with Russia in the last six months. They are adapting to the reality that the administration’s top priorities require a working relationship with Moscow and that Washington no longer showers them with highly public displays of devotion. They have also grasped something that the reset-bashers haven’t: There have been no grand bargains or quid pro quos with Moscow that affect their relations with the United States. In fact, the administration is delivering for them on the ground, including in ways their supposed champions in the Bush administration never did. Put a different way, there is no bus. ~Samuel Charap

I appreciate Mr. Charap’s analysis very much. It largely supports what I have been arguing for the last year and a half in a couple of ways. Charap shows very clearly that no U.S. allies have been betrayed or abandoned in any meaningful way, and he correctly notes that the extent of U.S. concessions in pursuit of the “reset” has been exaggerated. Indeed, if anyone should be disappointed with the extent of the “reset,” it should be Moscow. One of the prime examples of Obama’s imaginary habit of abandoning allies and coddling rivals has been the “reset,” and Charap demonstrates convincingly that the hawkish critics of the “reset” are simply wrong in what they say about it. The administration has opened itself up to criticism by making more of Russian support for Iran sanctions than is warranted, but on the whole U.S.-Russian relations are significantly improved from this time two years ago and that is due in large part to the concerted effort of this administration to rebuild the relations that at times the previous administration seemed intent on destroying. There has never been much substance to the claims that Obama has been betraying allies in order to “appease” Russia, but then the people making this charge have never really understood what Obama has been trying to do in working with Russia, and many of them have been comically wrong in their assessment of Russian goals. Now that Kyrgyzstan is melting down, it is a good thing that Moscow and Washington have built up enough trust that both our governments can cooperate to limit the damage from the violence that erupted across the south of the country this week.

There are two cases of allied governments being hung out to dry, so to speak, and these are Japan and Turkey. The way that the new Japanese government was treated when it insisted on trying to re-negotiate basing on Okinawa was genuinely harmful to U.S.-Japanese relations, and it led more or less directly to the resignation of PM Hatoyama. Washington’s reaction to the new DPJ government has seemed flawed from the beginning, but it was a perfectly conventional reaction that treated the concerns of a major ally as irritating and irrelevant. Despite rhetoric about a “model partnership,” Washington has been handling Turkey even more clumsily in its dismissive treatment of the Tehran nuclear deal and its sorry response to the flotilla raid. Here are two cases of democratic allies that are attempting to pursue foreign policies slightly more independent of the U.S. and more in line with their own national interests and the wishes of their electorates, and in both cases Washington has slapped them down and made clear that it expects obedience. Instead of seeing an opportunity for burden-sharing and disentangling the U.S. from some of its responsibilities around the world, the administration has chosen to see signs of independence from major allies as problems to be eliminated.

Of course, the hawks who have been weeping over the supposed mistreatment of Poland and Georgia have no problem when the administration mishandles and harms relations with economically powerful, strategically valuable, democratic allies, because this is what they would have done at a minimum had they been in power. As far as many hawks are concerned, abusing allies and ignoring their legitimate concerns in pursuit of often questionable U.S. goals are a large part of what they think U.S. foreign policy is supposed to be. They responded so badly to the “reset” with Russia not because they believed that these allies were being exposed to some new danger, but rather because they saw the “reset” as a repudiation of their more combative, confrontational and disastrous approach to U.S. policy in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. If the “reset” succeeded and did not come at the expense of the security of any allies, their bankrupt anti-Russian agenda would be pretty thoroughly discredited.

The rivalry between democratic capitalism and state capitalism is not like the rivalry between capitalism and communism. It is an interdependent rivalry. State capitalist enterprises invest heavily in democratic capitalist enterprises (but they tend not to invest in each other). Both sides rely on each other in interlocking trade networks.

Nonetheless, there is rivalry. There is a rivalry over prestige. What system works better to produce security and growth? What system should emerging and struggling democratic nations aim for? ~David Brooks

Brooks is discussing Ian Bremmer’s The End of the Free Market, which Greg Scoblete also reviewed recently. (Greg has some more critical remarks on Brooks’ column here.) The rivalry Brooks describes is not really between state capitalism and something that isn’t state capitalism (“democratic capitalism”), but between a state capitalist arrangement that includes public ownership of certain major industries (mainly energy companies) and a state capitalist arrangement in which corporations influence the state’s regulatory and policy apparatus to create favorable conditions for themselves. Dr. Clyde Wilson has defined the latter sort of state capitalism as “a regime of highly concentrated private ownership, subsidized and protected by government.” In practice, that is what we have here and throughout the industrialized world. As Blond puts it, “We’ve created a condition in which large businesses dominate—via a rigged market of rent-seeking capital—in an economy that cuts off for the majority the path to mobility and prosperity.”

One can approve of this, as I am guessing Brooks ultimately would, or one can see it as a dangerous system that unduly concentrates economic and political power into relatively few hands and invites frequent abuses and misallocations of resources, but it is important that we understand what it is we’re contrasting with Putinism, Chavismo, and other systems in which there are some government-owned and run industries. Obviously, there is a meaningful and real difference between governments that own and operate major industries and governments that collude with corporate interests, but these are really two species of state capitalism that differ from one another in degree and not in kind.

When Bremmer refers to the rise of the more statist state capitalism, Phillip Blond would respond that the free market ended long ago and the concentrated wealth and power of government and corporations make sure that it doesn’t revive. Relative to our system, wealth is even more concentrated and power is even more centralized in what Brooks and Bremmer are calling state capitalism, but our system is already far removed from the free market of what Blond calls popular capitalism. In other words, Blond’s objection to “democratic capitalism” is that it is precisely not democratic or anything like it. Perhaps that is an obvious point, but so far it is one that I have not seen made.

Brooks has other questions that actually point to the increasing similarities between the two systems or are simply off topic all together:

There is also rivalry over what rules should govern the world order. Should countries like Russia be able to withhold gas from Western Europe to make a political point? Should governments be able to tilt the playing field to benefit well-connected national champions [bold mine-DL]? Should authoritarian governments like Iran be allowed to nuclearize?

To take the last question first, Iran’s authoritarianism has nothing to do with it, nor is its corrupt, cronyist economic model relevant here. If Brooks is asking whether Iran should be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, the “rules” that govern this are clear enough, but there is no practical means of preventing Iran from acquiring these weapons if it decides to do so. If Brooks is asking whether Iran should be allowed to develop its nuclear program for energy, the “rules” already permit this under the NPT. Were Iran not a signatory to the treaty, there would be no legal mechanism to prevent Iran from doing whatever it wanted in developing nuclear technology. Proliferation issues are even less relevant when we realize that a country’s economic model has nothing to do with whether a government is permitted to develop nuclear weapons or not.

As far as Russian gas cut-offs are concerned, the cut-offs have had a political dimension in the past when there were tensions between Ukraine and Russia, but on the whole the pricing and shipment disputes behind the cut-offs have centered around Russian attempts to reduce state subsidies, which naturally resulted in higher prices for the consumers. As Paul Robinson explained in The Spectator four years ago, Gazprom has been trying to bring its pricing into line with what the EU wants:

The reason the EU dislikes the low prices charged by Gazprom to CIS members is that these are considered an unfair subsidy to CIS industries, which gives them a competitive advantage over European companies.

And he added later:

In short, the increase in gas prices is fully in keeping with the West’s desire to complete the process of creating a genuine market economy in Russia, Ukraine and the other countries of the CIS, as well as progressing towards fulfilling the environmental demands of the Kyoto accord. It is an entirely welcome gesture from the perspective of any free-market economist, not to mention any environmentalist.

So two of Brooks’ examples of how state capitalism affects international order are either unrelated to the question of state capitalism or actually concern the greater “marketization” of the Russian energy sector and the reduced role of state subsidies in the functioning of Russian energy exporters. As for governments tilting the playing field to benefit the well-connected, we have been seeing this happen here in the U.S. for the last two years on a depressingly regular basis (and it didn’t start two years ago). It is not at all clear that tilting playing fields in the name of collusion and cronyism is a unique trait of state capitalist systems run by authoritarian governments.

Update: In fairness to Bremmer, Greg noted this in his review:

Bremmer’s picture of global state capitalism is nuanced – he acknowledges that even free market democracies interfere in markets for political purposes, as is the case with Europe and America’s generous farm subsidies and tariffs. The signature difference is the degree and scope of state interference and the lack of democratic transparency in the countries that practice state capitalism.

So I stand partly corrected. Bremmer does acknowledge these points, and Greg made a point of mentioning this.

Thomas Friedman manages to write an entire column on the deterioration of U.S.-Turkish relations and never once mentions the Iraq war, the PKK (which has revived since the start of the Iraq war), the weak U.S. response to the flotilla raid, or the Tehran nuclear deal that he and the administration both dismissed with contempt. If we’re apportioning blame for what has encouraged Turkey on its more independent course, we can assign quite a bit to both the Bush and Obama administrations, but that is not the only thing that interests me here. Friedman passes over U.S. mistakes in silence, because this makes it easier to portray Erdogan as the sole culprit responsible for wrecking U.S.-Turkish relations and it helps the misleading “the Islamists are coming!” narrative take hold.

A useful counterpoint to Friedman is a recent column by Ömer Taspinar, who provides what seems to me to be one of the more persuasive explanations for why the Turkish government has been acting as it has over the last several years. Taspinar starts by questioning the handy, potentially misleading Islamic/secular distinction that practically every Western observer, including myself, has used at one time or another:

I believe one of the major mistakes in analyzing Turkish foreign policy is done when analysts speak of a “secular” versus “Islamic” divide in Ankara’s strategic choices. While the growing importance of religion in Turkey should not be dismissed, the real threat to Turkey’s Western orientation today is not so much Islamization but growing nationalism and frustration with the United States, Europe and Israel.

Of course, for many analysts referring to this divide is not so much intended to describe what is going on as it is aimed at demonizing the direction Turkish foreign policy has taken. The so-called “Islamic” turn is mostly cited by those who want to minimize or deny the role that Western governments have had in sabotaging the Western orientation of Turkey they claim to find so valuable. Most American observers are only too happy to blame the EU for alienating the Turks, as Secretary Gates did just this month, and Friedman is even willing to acknowledge some Israeli responsibility, but most Americans refuse to acknowledge that Washington had any role in weakening ties. Writing shortly after Erdogan’s Davos blow-up, I said:

The episode summed up the growing frustration in Turkey’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) government with Israeli policy and showed the strain that the conflict in Gaza had put on Israel’s only alliance with a Muslim country. More than that, though, it reflected growing Turkish disillusionment with all of its Western allies over the last decade. The greatest danger to Turkey and the West now comes from failing to recognize how Western policies have alienated the Turks and misinterpreting their disillusionment as simple rejection [bold mine-DL].

There is something else that Taspinar said that is very important for Westerners to understand:

Until a couple of years ago, I used to argue that Western-oriented Kemalist elites had traded places with the once eastward-leaning Islamists on the grounds that it was the AK Party that seemed more interested in maintaining close ties with Europe and the United States. The AK Party, in my eyes, needed the West more than Turkey’s Kemalist establishment for a simple reason: It needed to prove to the Turkish military, to secularist segment of society at home and to Western partners in the international community that it was not an Islamist party.

Now, however, I increasingly believe that the AK Party, too, has decided to jump on the bandwagon of nationalist frustration with the West. After all, this is the most powerful societal undercurrent in Turkey, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an needs to win elections. As the events of the last couple of weeks have shown, America and Europe should pay attention to Turkey’s Gaullist inclinations. In the past, Americans and Europeans would often ask whether Turkey had any realistic geopolitical alternatives and complacently reassure themselves that it did not. But today such alternatives are starting to look more realistic to many Turks. The rise of Turkish Gaullism need not come fully at the expense of America and Europe [bold mine-DL]. But Turks are already looking for economic and strategic opportunities in Russia, India, China and, of course, the Middle East and Africa. It is high time for American analysts to stop overplaying the Islamic-secular divide in Turkish foreign policy and pay more attention to what unites both camps: Turkish nationalism.

Taspinar’s concept of Turkish Gaullism is quite helpful in making sense of Turkish foreign policy and the unreasonable hostility it has generated here in the U.S. Turkey today is acting very much as France did in the early 2000s, and it is provoking the same irrational backlash that characterized the response to French opposition to invading Iraq. The U.S. is fortunate to have allies that are not satisfied to serve as nothing more than lackeys, and we are also fortunate to have allies that try to create obstacles when we are heading down a self-destructive or foolish path. In 2002-03, the French government was a better ally to the United States in resisting the Iraq war than the British government was in facilitating it. Today Turkey is a better and more useful ally when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program than any of the governments that voted with the U.S. for the new round of sanctions. In protecting their own national interests, the Turkish government is providing the U.S. with opportunities to avoid a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. So far the administration seems to have learned nothing from the previous experience with difficult, independent-minded allies.

It seems to be easy for a lot of people in the U.S. to forget, but the AKP came to power on an agenda of integration with Europe and economic reform. For its part as far as economic reforms are concerned, the AKP has mostly delivered, and during Erdogan’s tenure Turkish trade has boomed. If it happened in almost any other country the combination of neoliberal economic policies and a relatively conservative, religiously-oriented ruling party would be well-received in the U.S., and for a time the AKP was well-received until it showed that it was going to use its increased economic and political clout to pursue Turkish national interests and regional ambitions. Turkey liberalized and democratized just as Western globalists wanted, and now they are annoyed at the results because it did not weaken their national identity or their nationalism as many of them expected that it would.

As he did over the lasttwo weeks, Friedman has chosen to portray independent Turkish foreign policy decisions as anti-Western and/or anti-democratic moves. Even though he claims to want Turkey to function as a bridge to its eastern neighbors, Friedman was sickened by the Tehran nuclear deal mainly because it was a deal made with the authoritarian government of Turkey’s main eastern neighbor. Friedman very much wants Turkey to mediate between its western and eastern neighbors, but he does not want it to mediate on its own terms and he does not want it to do any of the things that give it the credibility to be seen by its neighboring governments and other nations as an acceptable mediator. This is significant because Friedman’s reactions to recent Turkish government moves are entirely typical of most mainstream pundits and politicians. In fact, they don’t want a “bridge” and they don’t want Turkey to provide a “balancing role.” Quite clearly, they want Turkey to line up, shut up and not cause any disturbances. In other words, they want things to go back to being the way they were fifteen or twenty years ago, but Turkey and the region surrounding it have changed too much for things to be like that ever again.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing in discussing Turkey and its relationships with Western governments is just how oblivious most Western critics of Turkey are to how one-sided and biased the U.S. and Israel are and are perceived as being when it comes to any of the concerns of other nations in the Near East. European governments do not contribute as much to this, but that is because they are less activist and interventionist in the region. If Turkey is supposed to provide a “balancing role,” that will sometimes mean putting its weight behind the concerns and complaints of other nations in the region that the U.S., EU and Israel ignore or reject out of hand. Viewed from anywhere other than the U.S. or Israel, Turkey’s condemnation of Cast Lead, its opposition to the blockade of Gaza, and its fuel-swap agreement with Iran are all fairly reasonable, normal, and even Western positions. If Washington insists on making those positions into reasons to weaken the relationship with Turkey, it will be the U.S. that is pushing the U.S.-Turkish alliance over the cliff. That doesn’t have to happen, but at some point it will if the administration does not start correcting its mishandling of Turkey very soon.

Whereas the Reagan administration in the 1980s could do little to help Iranians (Ronald Reagan’s determined efforts to engage the clerical regime over the hostages in Lebanon certainly didn’t strengthen “moderates” in Tehran), Mr. Obama could do vastly more. By throwing in his lot with the freedom movement, he would surely increase the odds that we won’t have to live with a nuclear bomb controlled by virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic clerics. Democrats, once the champions of promoting pro-democracy movements, need to understand that the good that they can do for the people of Iran far exceeds the great harm that comes from doing nothing. ~Reuel Marc Gerecht

As Andrew says, this Gerecht op-ed is not at all persuasive. All of the usual baseless assertions are there: Obama can “throw his lot” in with the Green movement (how?), this will increase the odds that a non-existent Iranian bomb won’t be controlled by the current batch of clerics (why?), and Obama can do “vastly more” than Reagan did (what?). It is very much like Stephens’ column in simply presuming that Obama had the ability to help the Green movement constructively and chose not to use that ability.

When the Bush administration basically stood by and watched as the Burmese junta crushed the peaceful protests in Rangoon three years ago, few people were daft enough to claim that Bush had failed to act aggressively enough on behalf of the “Saffron” revolution. Sane people recognized that there was not much that Bush or anyone else in the U.S. could do. Something worth remembering here is that sanctions imposed on Burma to punish the regime have simply suffocated the opposition and destroyed the middle class. Anyone who did attack Bush for failing to “throw his lot” in with Burmese protesters while also urging ever-stricter sanctions on the regime would now look quite ridiculous. Of course, the same ridiculous combination of rhetorical support for Iran’s opposition combined with a vindictive desire for “crippling sanctions” can be found in the writings of practically every Iran hawk.

Another baseless assertion that Iran hawks like making is one that Gerecht makes a little later:

The movement is no longer just about liberalizing the state: it is now all about regime change.

If Hooman Majd and Mehdi Khalaji understand Iran, and I am persuaded that they understand far more about it than most people commenting on the subject in the Western media, this “regime change” interpretation of the Green movement is fundamentally, horribly wrong. If “Green activists insist that they seek reform and not revolution or regime change,” as Khalaji wrote, no one in the West is doing them any favors by ignoring what they claim to seek and substituting an entirely different agenda as if it were their own. Gerecht makes another mistake when he writes:

Ayatollah Khamenei is far more likely to compromise on nuclear weapons if he feels he’s about to be undone by the Green Movement.

This makes no sense. A government secure at home and certain that its opponents cannot threaten it has the confidence to take risks in negotiating and compromising with other states on important security issues. If the threat from the opposition ever became great enough that the survival of the current government was in doubt, regime leaders would become extremely inflexible in their positions on anything they perceive as relating to national security. Compromising on Iran’s nuclear program could make the current government appear weak and provide an opening for the opposition to channel nationalist discontent against the government.

Perhaps the most misleading part of Gerecht’s op-ed is the part that seemed at first to be almost a throwaway remark, but which he intended to be central to his argument. Gerecht wants us to side with the “friends of Karl Popper,” and he concludes that the Green movement is filled with “friends of Karl Popper” because some reform leaders and movement intellectuals are interested in Popper’s ideas. This is a quick sleight-of-hand on Gerecht’s part as he mentions how Khatami and Soroush have engaged with some of Popper’s ideas, and then transfers their interest in Popper to the entire movement, and this is supposed to lead us to believe that the entire movement is made up of “friends of Karl Popper.” Leaving aside howshaky a lot of Popper’s own analysis in The Open Society and Its Enemies was, I doubt that the simplistic opposition between the “open society” and totalitarianism that made sense to Popper in the mid-twentieth century will be all that useful and appropriate for Iran’s opposition, many of whose leaders still value the legacy of Khomeini.

For their part, the Iranian “friends of Karl Popper” should be very wary of the heirs of the people that Popper called the historicists, who confidently proclaim that their ideology is going to prevail and that history is on their side. The historicists that Popper was referring to believed that they had gleaned the fundamental principles of history and therefore understood how to implement these principles to create an imagined just society. Perversely, many of the latter-day Western enthusiasts of the “open society” and supposed admirers of Karl Popper regularly indulge in the historicist error that Popper deeply loathed.

The comparison hadn’t occurred to me until today, but what is striking about the endless whining serious criticism concerning Obama’s response to the Green movement is how much it resembles the criticism of his handling of the Gulf oil spill in unreasonableness, pathetic need for executive activism, and overconfidence in the power of the Presidency. There seems to be no understanding that Presidents cannot address, much less solve, every problem that makes headlines. The U.S. government is not omnipotent, and Presidents do not work magic, but for whatever reason some people think it is reasonable to expect these things. Bret Stephens’ column this morning is a good example of what I mean.

Stephens concluded that Obama had a “fighting chance to alter the dynamics of Iranian politics,” but “flubbed” his chance. This is no less absurd than claiming that Obama squandered an opportunity to plug the oil leak with his powers of telekinesis. Small wonder that Stephens never explains how Obama could have successfully “altered the dynamics of Iranian politics” in a way that would not have harmed the opposition more than it helped, except by invoking a lot of heavy-handed sanctions measures that would have harmed the opposition more than they helped. Most of the consequences Stephens dreams up for punishing the Iranian government were not in the administration’s power to impose, and those that it could have imposed, such as gasoline sanctions, would have been destructive of the very opposition forces they are supposedly meant to aid.

The critics who think that the administration was too passive in its response to the post-election protests last summer had and still have no plausible proposal for what Obama could have done differently, except that they wanted to hear more fiery deunciations and more forceful rhetoric. This would have changed nothing, but it would have exposed the gap between the administration’s lofty sentiments and its lack of action. There was nothing that the administration could have practically done to put pressure on the regime that would not have been a disaster for the Iranian people (e.g., gasoline sanctions), but despite this Obama is being faulted because he did not “do something” and show that he cared by taking decisive, counterproductive and stupid action.

For most of the last twenty years, NATO has functioned as the vehicle and the pretext for continued U.S. involvement in European affairs despite the obsolescence of the alliance after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hawks and interventionists have been enthusiastic supporters of the alliance, they defended NATO’s Balkan interventions that had nothing to do with mutual defense, and they were glad to support the use of NATO for “out-of-area” operations that had even less to do with the alliance’s original purpose. For nearly twenty years, U.S. hawks have championed each round of NATO expansion, they dismissed and mocked Russian complaints about expansion, they vehemently demanded the inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia, and they have damned Obama for effectively yielding to the reality that neither Ukraine nor Georgia will ever be part of the alliance. As recently as last month, American hawks were moaning about the supposed lack of Atlanticism of the leaders of the new British coalition government, but if Atlanticism means tolerating allies that do not function as nothing more than U.S. lackeys it seems that some hawks here want nothing to do with it.

All of a sudden, some hawks have determined that NATO is a dangerous relic, and the main split among hawks on the American right seems to be between those who want to throw Turkey out of NATO and those who want the U.S. to leave NATO first. Of course, dissolving or leaving NATO would be the right thing to do, but it is telling that this thought never occurred to these people when they were urging the U.S. to be willing to go to war with Russia for the sake of Georgian control of South Ossetia. Hawks find NATO dangerous and outdated only when NATO allies act with any measure of independence and according to their national interests.

Via Andrew I came across this Hanson interview with Michael Totten. A lot of it is ridiculous, and some of it is appalling, but it is an instructive glimpse inside the cocoon where Europeans are apparently all perfidious anti-Semites, Obama is even weaker against foreign threats than the weak Europeans, and Obama simply goes along with whatever the prevailing global mood happens to be.

What is remarkable about the interview is that Totten and Hanson simply feed off one another and reinforce each other’s nonsense. There is not one probing or challenging question for Hanson in the entire interview. Totten does not object when Hanson says, “We’re only 65 years from the Holocaust. Europe is still anti-Semitic, and Israel is on its own except for the United States.” This sort of blanket condemnation of an entire continent for rank prejudice is as sloppy and false as it gets, and it gets dropped into the conversation as if Hanson were discussing the weather.

There is a casual, automatic anti-Europeanism in the U.S. that has mutated in the last decade into something truly rancid and destructive. It shouldn’t need to be said, but anti-Semitism in Europe has been removed to the margins of society and politics in pretty much every EU member state. There are some protest parties that traffic in this garbage, but they remain marginal because of it, and even some of the nationalist and anti-immigration parties in western Europe go out of their way to declare support for Israel because this aligns with their own opposition to Muslim immigration. Americans don’t have to like European views on Israel and Palestine, but we shouldn’t employ cheap, baseless smears of all Europeans as the “explanation” of why they take a different view.

No less nonsensical is the discussion Hanson and Totten have regarding Obama and foreign policy. This passage captures just how far removed from reality both of them seem to be:

VDH: This a confusing period. There’s a lot of irony. Look back at the period when Europe had it both ways, when we defended them while they mouthed off, when they undermined us and Bush pushed back.

Now compare that to what Obama is doing. He’s almost smiling while selling out Europe. He’s trying to become even more left than they are on foreign policy [bold mine-DL]. On one hand, the Europeans are getting what they deserve, but they are Westerners, they are a positive force in the world, and what we’re doing is dangerous.

MJT: It seems to unnerve the Europeans now that Obama is to their left.

VDH: It does.

MJT: They seem uncomfortable being to the right of the United States in some ways.

Of course, neither of them elaborates on any of this, because there is nothing they can cite as evidence for this silly idea. Even though there is no reason to believe any of this, they are content to agree that Obama is trying to be more left-wing on foreign policy than Europeans. They say this at the same time that Obama continues to push harder on Iran’s nuclear program and missile defense in Europe than most governments in Europe actually want, and they completely ignore that Obama has been dragging NATO allies to support the war in Afghanistan very much against the popular desires of most European nations. They talk about Obama “selling out Europe” as if this were an obvious reality, when it is an insane, ideological distortion of the last year and a half to say that the administration has been “selling out Europe.”

Selling out Europe to whom? To the Russians with whom Europeans have been steadily expanding their trade over the last decade? Most members of NATO never wanted the Czech/Polish missile defense installations, which is why they had to be negotiated through bilateral agreements. Most European governments did not want to try to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO (and Germany made sure that it didn’t happen two years ago). At most, Obama has moved the U.S. slightly in the direction of most of Europe with respect to continued NATO expansion, but officially Washington remains far more interested in expansion than the Europeans are. Very few European governments perceive Iran’s nuclear program to be the threat that Washington does. Obama is foolishly pushing for Iranian isolation at the same time that some European countries are increasing economic exchange with Iran, so how has he been trying to get to “the left” of Europe?

For his part, Totten doesn’t seem to know what’s going on:

If ganging up on Israel is the popular thing to do, he’ll do it. If the Organization of American States wants to isolate Honduras, Obama doesn’t want to be only the head of the state in the hemisphere doing the opposite. That might make the United States look it’s returning to Yankee imperialism again, even if it’s not true.

Each time there has been widespread international condemnation of Israel since Obama took office, and long before that, Obama has quite conventionally and predictably taken Israel’s side or at the very least said nothing. Totten will search in vain for administration condemnations of Operation Cast Lead, but he will find Obama specifically rejecting the Goldstone report. The administration had essentially nothing to say about the Dubai assassination, and obviously in the aftermath of the flotilla raid the U.S. has sided quite clearly with the Israeli government. Even in squabbles over settlement policy when Netanyahu deliberately and repeatedly ignored and publicly defied Washington, the administration relented quite quickly. Initially, the administration joined the OAS in condemning Zelaya’s deposition as a coup. I thought this was a serious mistake, but it ultimately didn’t amount to much. The provisional government stepped aside, elections were held, and Honduras now has a new, legitimate president. Ever since Lobo’s election, Washington has defended the results of the new Honduran election despite the vocal protests of Brazil and many other Latin American governments. Totten has taken two good examples of how Obama does not just “go along to get along” and used them to claim that he does exactly this.

The nonsense that Totten and Hanson casually spout in this interview is worth addressing because it is unfortunately quite typical and representative of the quality of foreign policy analysis and discussion on the right these days: heavy on ludicrous assertions and extremely light on any supporting evidence.