If Iran continues to refuse to verifiably disarm, we want to make sure that other leaders of mid-sized powers still feel that a price is being paid that’s high enough to induce them to make other choices. ~Matt Yglesias

Greg Scoblete thinks this is a worthwhile accomplishment in its own right. There are so few states with nuclear programs that need such dissuading that I doubt this matters very much. Even if we all agreed on this point, all of this hinges on Iran actually paying a high price. Aside from Obama loyalists and administration members, no one thinks that this round of sanctions does anything of the kind. Engagement advocates find the pursuit of a new round of sanctions misguided, but recognize weak sanctions when they see them. As the Leveretts correctly observe, this round of sanctions is very weak and had to be very weak to gain Russian and Chinese support. On the other side of the debate, Jackson Diehl points out all the reasons why these sanctions are not very significant. Many governments will not adopt the stricter financial sanctions and ship inspections that the resolution allows but does not require. The Leveretts explain what that means:

The Obama Administration has indicated that it anticipates these provisions will provide a legal basis for other states—like members of the European Union and Japan—to enact tougher national sanctions of their own. But the United States is not going to get anything approaching universal compliance with these “optional” sanctions. The net effect will be to accelerate the reallocation of business opportunities in the Islamic Republic from Western states to China and other non-Western powers.

What the new resolution has managed to do is force Turkey and Brazil to show sympathy with Iran at the Security Council. Critics complained that the Tehran nuclear deal would not prevent Iranian enrichment, but the new sanctions will not prevent Iranian enrichment, either. Turkey and Brazil offered the U.S. the beginning of an alternative to going down the sanctions dead end, and the administration rejected it out of hand. Far from showing Iran’s isolation, the resolution shows how unimportant Iran’s nuclear program is to most major powers. Russia and China were willing to go along with some superficial penalties, but did not want to do anything really disruptive. Now that the resolution has passed, there will be even less patience for continued U.S. fixation on this issue.

P.S. I neglected to comment on the more ridiculous part of Yglesias’ statement. Obviously, Iran cannot “verifiably disarm” when it doesn’t possess and is nowhere close to possessing nuclear weapons.

My InoSMI column this week discussed the implications of the Georgian municipal elections and the blatant double standards that are applied to Western coverage of Georgian politics and policy. As if on cue to prove my point, Matt Continetti has a lengthy write-up praising Georgian democracy that completely ignores the significant flaws in the elections. AFP reported on the flaws of the elections last week:

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s party headed for a landslide win in municipal elections Monday but victory was marred after Western observers said the vote suffered “significant shortcomings.”

This is not surprising. When a ruling party completely dominates the political scene and has all of the advantages of power in such a country, we shouldn’t be surprised if there is some significant measure of fraud. What is worth noting is the reaction to these “significant shortcomings” in the Western press. If this had been United Russia or Ahmadinejad instead of Saakashvili’s party, we would be hearing outraged cries about fraud and election-rigging, and pundits and bloggers would be expressing their support for the opposition. Instead, we have heard little, and most of what we do hear comes from Saakashvili enthusiasts.

What is most telling in Continetti’s report is the selective use of election monitor evidence. The OSCE monitors did report “evident progress,” but they also cited “significant shortcomings,” which in this case meant “systemic irregularities” involving episodes of ballot stuffing and a contest clearly biased in favor of the ruling party. Given a weak, disorganized opposition and all of the advantages of incumbency and government, it is not shocking that Saakashvili’s party won two-thirds of the vote last week, but there is none of the skepticism about the legitimacy of the result that followed Iran’s presidential election last year. Saakashvili initiated a major war and presided over a military disaster, and his party still wins an overwhelming majority in the first election following the war. As I look at it, that is not a sign of a healthy, “resilient” democracy, but the beginning of a one-party state in which any amount of incompetence and failure will be tolerated by the electorate.

Personally, I am not terribly concerned with the integrity of the Georgian electoral process, but what does concern me is the steady flow of propaganda on behalf of Saakashvili that still treats his government as if it were a model of democratic reform rather than a deeply flawed, authoritarian-leaning failure when it comes to political reform. This is the sort of enthusiastic support Americans were giving Saakashvili right up until he escalated the conflict in South Ossetia, and it is this enthusiasm that blinded policymakers and journalists to Saakashvili’s flaws.

The most glaring omission in Continetti’s article is any discussion of the actual causes of the August 2008 war that so badly damaged Georgia’s economy and hurt its chances of attracting foreign investment. It is indeed difficult to attract investment when the country is governed by a reckless demagogue who escalated a war against a nuclear-armed major power. His only indirect acknowledgment that Georgia was mostly to blame for the war is that “some in the West said Georgia was at fault.” For his enthusiasts, Saakashvili’s responsibility for the August 2008 disaster simply has to be whitewashed, because it cannot be justified. All that Continetti can bring himself to say against Saakashvili is that he “mishandled” 2007 protests, which left dozens of protestors hospitalized, “made mistakes before and during the war” (such as escalating a skirmish into a war?) and that he is now “too friendly with Iran.”

Of couse, Georgia has every right to increase its economic ties with Iran, and it is doing the same thing as Turkey in improving its relations with its regional neighbors. This is the last thing for which Saakashvili should be criticized. Turkey has been successfully reforming its economy and its political institutions for just as long under the AKP government, but the latter now receives none of the glowing treatment offered to Saakashvili, because the Turkish government thinks that being an ally does not involve acting as an obedient lackey. The Georgians should take care that they don’t become too friendly with any of their neighbors, or else they may find that their democratization will someday come to be viewed as a threat to the West when their government chooses to pursue its legitimate national interests.

Walter Russell Mead must think that pacifists were in charge of major European governments in the interwar period. He must think that, because otherwise his endless droning about the evils of interwar pacifists would make no sense. These would be the same pacifist governments that gave war guarantees to Poland and ensured that Germany’s war with Poland became a general European conflict. I’ve usually thought that a large part of the responsibility for wartime deaths rests primarily with the people who declared war in support of a security guarantee they could not fulfill, but I don’t have Mead’s insight.

Mead talks about the U.S., Britain and France “enforcing the peace” to “prevent World War Two,” but any such enforcement would have involved starting a new general war, and there is no way of knowing how that conflict might have spiraled out of control. Interventionists and hawks look back on the 1930s and expect that the people who had lived through the greatest slaughter in human history up until that point should have been as willing to start wars as they are. This is simply ideological fantasizing.

However, before we can speak sensibly about WWII, we have to go back to WWI. It is impossible to understand American views on neutrality or western European views on disarmament and war in the 1920s and 1930s if we do not appreciate how completely useless, wasteful and destructive most people in the official victor nations of WWI believed the war had been. Having facilitated the punitive treaties imposed on the defeated Central Powers, Americans saw that their sacrifices had been in a bad cause and their ideals were being openly mocked by terms imposed by their allies. American intervention in Europe had been a disaster once, and there was no reason to expect anything different the second time.

Besides, American entry into WWI made no sense as far as American national interests were concerned. 115,000 Americans died in WWI for no good reason. In light of that experience, anything other than a neutralist position seemed insane to most people (and it was!), and once again most Americans concluded that entry into a second European war did not serve the national interest. Once again, their government did everything it could to bring them into it. As Niall Ferguson has argued, British entry into WWI made no sense as far as British interests were concerned, and it was a dreadful mistake that served to widen and prolong the war. Millions of British subjects died for no good reason, and perhaps millions more on both sides died than would have been the case had Britain remained neutral. Given that background, it is not only understandable why many people in Britain did not want to go to war again, but it was actually quite rational and correct as it concerned British interests.

When I was in a modern European history class in college, we debated which states were most to blame for starting WWI. As I recall, we concluded that the largest contributors to the crisis were Austria, Russia and Britain, and that still seems right. Serbia and Germany certainly had some responsibility, but it was not nearly as great as people normally assume. Obviously, Austria started the war and refused to accept Serbian concessions, so they bore the bulk of the responsibility, but it was also Russian mobilization in support of Serbia and the British refusal to declare their position early enough combined with eventually aligning themselves with France and Russia that allowed a regional conflict to explode into a continental war. It is usually the decisions of major powers to involve themselves in conflicts that have nothing to do with them that create the largest and most destructive conflicts. Russia went to war to defend Serbia, but it didn’t help Serbia in the least, and it ended up ruining Russia. Much the same happened with Britain and Poland in 1939.

Mead has revisited the interwar period, WWII and the Cold War because he wants to tar advocates of engagement with Iran as “appeasers” on par with interwar pacifists and communist sympathizers. For good measure, he smears supporters of American neutrality in the process. I wanted to address some of that first before getting to the question of engaging Iran, because it is important to remember that interventionists and hawks were the ones making policy decisions in 1914 and 1917 and the world has been paying a steep price in blood and wealth for much of the last century because of it. Now that we have emerged out of the short 20th century and mostly enjoy a stable and peaceful world, interventionists and hawks would like to resume destabilizing the world all over again. Their main obsession at the moment is Iran.

Mead begins with the assumption that Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons. This is debatable. The Department of Defense earlier this year claimed that they believed Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons capability, as many states with peaceful nuclear energy programs already have, but it was not yet certain that Iran wanted to build their own arsenal. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that all of the Iranian leaders who specifically reject the possession and use of nuclear weapons as wrong and forbidden are lying. Let’s also assume that Iran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. Those are huge and largely unfounded assumptions, but even if they are right this doesn’t tell us much. If they want these weapons mainly as a deterrent against governments that have made a habit of attacking other countries in the last ten years, they might be intended primarily to prevent attack rather than provide a shield allowing greater freedom of action abroad.

Mead asks:

If the mullocracy is arming terrorists, interfering with neighbors, inflaming the Middle East and making intercontinental nuclear deals with the bad guys when Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, what makes us think that becoming less vulnerable to American countermeasures would make the Iranians settle down into responsible world citizens?

Iran is going to act as a patron of Hizbullah and Hamas in its capacity as a regional power. Its “interference” with neighbors is the normal exercise of influence by a major regional power in the surrounding area. By “intercontinental nuclear deals,” I assume Mead means the minimal technology exchange relationship Iran has established with Venezuela. None of these things is optimal in Washington’s view, but none of them is exactly a dire threat, either. Could Iran start becoming more assertive abroad once it has nuclear weapons? Perhaps, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is going to assert itself militarily. At most, it will probably continue to support its proxies abroad. It is possible that a “grand bargain” could include a provision that requires Iran to reduce or end its support for these groups. A sustained engagement policy might lead Iran to act less provocatively once its government has been assured that the U.S. will not act to destroy it. Of course, we won’t even begin to find out what Iran might be willing to offer if no sustained attempt is made to find out.

Does Iran actually have great ambitions that need to be “substantially” scaled back? What are they? Can Mead describe them? How passive and subservient would Iran have to become before it ceased to appear threatening to him? What would keep us from coexisting peacefully with it? This is really the heart of the issue: Americans have an absurdly exaggerated estimation of Iranian goals, and believe that Iran has to be cajoled into giving up ambitions for domination that it doesn’t actually seem to have. For some reason, Iran appears as an intolerable threat that Mead cannot abide for much longer, but this seems to have no relationship to reality. Mead has to lean so heavily on the history of far more significant conflicts against far greater enemies because the argument for confrontation with Iran is so poor that it does not stand up well on its own.

The burden of proof is not on the people urging restraint and engagement. The burden of proof is on the people who want to plunge an entire region into hell on the basis of unfounded suspicions and irrational fear of a mid-level power that may not even be seeking the weapons they claim it is.

Via Scoblete

Hamas’s security forces remain strong and in full control, while more extreme Islamist challengers are gaining influence because of an Israeli embargo that has done more to frustrate the population than to weaken Hamas’s grip, analysts say. ~The Washington Post

The article goes on to say that Israel wanted to “wait and see whether Gaza’s residents would rise up and force Hamas out.” One might conclude from this that Israel would end the blockade once it realizes that this is never going to happen, but that would be wrong. The trouble with this wait-and-see approach to regime change is that there is no obvious end to it. If Gazans haven’t overthrown Hamas yet, just wait a few more years and see what happens. A few more years becomes a decade, and then two decades, and in the end the blockade becomes essentially a permanent feature. Even if Hamas is eventually overthrown by people in Gaza, it will likely be by a more radical faction that comes to see Hamas as corrupt and ineffective, much as Hamas saw Fatah, and the rise of that faction will provide new justification for continuing the blockade.

There is a certain perverse logic to all of this. The misery, poverty and hopelessness created by a virtually stagnant private economy in a densely-populated, isolated enclave radicalizes the population even more, but more than that it deprives them of the incentive to turn against their own leadership and it makes them incapable of organizing effective resistance against the local regime. Everything about the blockade ensures that the political conditions in Gaza can only get worse, but lifting the blockade depends on the improvement of those conditions. Sometimes critics will refer to Gaza as an “open-air prison,” but the remarkable thing about the situation is that Israel and Hamas effectively collaborate as the jailors of the civilian population: Israel hems them in and controls their access to the outside world, and Hamas runs internal security to keep the population under their control. Officially, Israel claims that it wants a prison riot to break out, but by their actions the Israeli government seems satisfied to bring about a very different outcome.

The Post article continues:

Bruce Riedel, a former Middle East analyst for the CIA who is now with the Brookings Institution in Washington, said he has no doubt that “Hamas now faces a much bigger threat from the extreme jihadists sympathetic to al-Qaeda” than from Fatah, which controls the West Bank. Al-Qaeda sympathizers appeal to Hamas’s core constituency “of militants who want to fight Israel, not live in a cease-fire and under blockade. They are frustrated that Hamas won’t allow [rocket] attacks or attempts to kidnap more Israelis [bold mine-DL]. Hamas has the upper hand for now because it has more force and is ruthless in using it, but the long trend is worrisome.”

The standard line we hear in defense of the blockade is that it is necessary to prevent Hamas from attacking Israel. The analysis in the article suggests that the blockade is actually making future attacks more likely by encouraging more radical groups to challenge Hamas on account of its apparent lack of militancy. The cease-fire is holding, but the blockade is still being enforced rigorously. The tightness of the blockade seems to have no relationship to security conditions. Under these conditions, Hamas appears unduly weak and conciliatory. To the extent that there are any political forces opposed to Hamas in Gaza, they are even more implacable and uncompromising, and the blockade is slowly making them stronger.

Israel is losing a former ally, as Turkey continues its Islamist slide. But the most important factor behind Israel’s diplomatic isolation, it seems to me, is the current American administration. Imagine that Dubya or John McCain were president. Would the flotilla incident have occurred? I doubt it. When Bush was president, Israel’s enemies knew with certainty that the White House would support Israel’s right to defend herself against provocation. American strength not only guaranteed Israeli freedom of action, it deterred a lot of devious behavior. ~Matt Continetti

Greg Scoblete says this claim is proof of Continetti’s “historical amnesia,” and that’s partly right, but it’s also proof that there isn’t much to support the argument that Israeli security is enhanced by unwavering, uncritical American support. What we saw between 2001 and 2009 was arguably the most reflexively supportive U.S. administration since the founding of Israel and at the same time a steady, fairly rapid deterioration of Israel’s international standing and extensive damage to Israel’s strategic interests. Just because one happened after the other doesn’t necessarily mean that reflexive, uncritical U.S. support had to lead to Israel’s international isolation, but there are quite a few reasons to believe that it did. We can observe something similar in U.S.-Georgian relations. Strong expressions of support and backing for an ally, including the promise of future NATO membership, did not result in greater security for Georgia, but instead encouraged the Georgian government to embark on a disastrous war that severely damaged its economy and ensured the permanent loss of the territories it was trying to take over. What Continetti and the like think is a deterrent against attack is usually a provocation inviting international condemnation and an invitation to allied recklessness.

Concerning Lebanon and Gaza, Bush’s stalwart support and encouragement allowed Olmert a free hand to pursue his policy of overkill and disproportionate response. This is an approximation, but my guess is that these two operations by themselves did roughly 60% of the damage to Israel’s international standing. The blockade and the flotilla raid account for another 30%. These two operations were responsible for more of the bad blood between Turkey and Israel than anything before the flotilla raid itself. The Bush administration enabled or allowed those operations, and publicly defended them against all critics (remember Condi Rice’s “birth pangs of a new Middle East” remark?), but the main contribution to Israel’s isolation has come from Israel’s own excessive military actions. Had Obama been even more unswervingly in lockstep with Israel on every issue, that wouldn’t have eliminated the causes of Turkey’s alienation from Israel, and it wouldn’t have deterred anything. It simply would have identified the U.S. more closely with whatever action Israel took.

As for the flotilla raid, if Bush or McCain had been in office, U.S. support for the Gaza blockade would have been unyielding and U.S. indifference to Turkish interests and concerns and to Palestinian grievances would have been even greater. Something similar would have occurred, and it is possible that it would have been far worse. It is likely that the Turkish government would have been more resistant to requests from Bush and McCain to prevent the flotilla from departing for Gaza than they were to Obama’s requests. At least Obama had made some minimal attempt to repair U.S.-Turkish relations that Bush had done so much to wreck, so there was a small chance that Erdogan would pay more attention to Obama, but Obama had just gone out of his way to humiliate and slap down the Turkish government on account of the nuclear deal with Iran.

Had McCain been President when the nuclear deal was announced, we can’t rule out the possibility that he would have launched a diplomatic crisis with Ankara, and he might have floated the idea of expelling Turkey from NATO. We should understand that a McCain administration would be filled with people who think that Turkey is in the wrong in this episode. Thanks to its poor response to the raid, the Obama administration is making a mockery of the “model partnership” it wanted to cultivate with Turkey, but had McCain been in office there would have been no rapprochement to sabotage. It is foolish to think that Turkey would have been intimidated into stopping the flotilla by an administration filled with people who are intensely and fundamentally hostile to Turkey’s more independent foreign policy.

Ross:

But the fact that Israel’s policy choices are understandable doesn’t make them wise. Taken case by case, there are good arguments for the Lebanon war, the Gaza incursion, and now the blockade of the Hamas-ruled strip [bold mine-DL]. But when you add them up, you’re left with a strategic course that promises short-term victories (of a sort), without any hope of long-term stability.

There really aren’t good arguments for the actual Lebanon war, Gaza incursion and the blockade. One can imagine an Israeli military action against Hizbullah in 2006 that would not have generated the near-universal condemnation that the actual war did, but the Olmert government opted for overkill, unnecessary devastation of an entire country and the displacement of a million people. There isn’t a good argument for what Israel did four years ago. It is easy to forget now, but much of the world sympathized with Israel’s initial response to the Hizbullah attack that had resulted in the capture of three Israeli soldiers. For once, when “pro-Israel” hawks said that no other country would tolerate such an attack most of the rest of the world, at least at the official and state level, nodded in agreement and offered expressions of support. That lasted for a few days until Israel widened the war against all of Lebanon. Here in the U.S., we followed the rapid progression from defenses of Israel’s great restraint to celebrations of its disproportionate violence.

Likewise, one can imagine a more limited response in late 2008 and early 2009 in Gaza that would not have devastated the enclave as Operation Cast Lead actually did, and one can imagine how Israel could have kept its Turkish ally appraised of its intentions well in advance of the operation, but once again that was not what Olmert’s government did. It is possible to envision an embargo on weapons coming into Gaza that would not involve annihilating Gaza’s private sector and reducing the population to dependence on outside aid and Hamas-provided services, and so it is also possible to imagine an alternative scenario in which there is no international mobilization of activists intent on drawing attention to the terrible human costs imposed by the blockade, but that is not reality. What we have seen over the last four years is a consistent effort to take the one good argument Israel can use in these situations, the argument for self-defense, and stretch it and abuse it beyond all recognition.

Those of us who specialize in all those “phony” critiques were pointing out the strategic folly of what Israel was doing when it was doing it. Meanwhile, Israel’s “admirers” were automatically blessing every decision made by the Israeli government, as most of them continue to do to this day. Naturally, the people who have been making the argument that Israel has no strategy or at least has a self-destructive one must not be involved in “raising and re-raising the strategic issues that Israel’s government seems incapable of contending with at the moment.” It is much better to leave it with people who have spent the last four years looking the other way, making excuses and still claiming that there are good arguments for what Israel has done.

One might think that critical, but ultimately friendly and supportive people would be considered Israel’s “real friends.” Real friends certainly wouldn’t wait for years and even decades as a country with which they sympathize becomes increasingly reckless and indifferent to consequences before saying something. Many Western critics of particular Israeli policies aim to make their arguments more welcome by casting them in terms of what best serves Israel’s long-term interests, but there may come a time when there will no longer be any interest in trying to help an ally that has no interest in correcting its mistakes.

Perhaps it would be best to scrap all of this friendship language and try to use more critical thinking and less sentimentality when discussing these matters. Even if they are trying to be, it shouldn’t be important whether Israel’s Western critics are genuinely its “real friends” or not. What ought to matter is that Israel’s self-professed friends and defenders have enabled and encouraged Israel’s government to pursue reckless policies that are to the detriment of the well-being of Israelis and their country. What ought to matter most in this debate is correcting the substance of the policies of an American ally in a way that serves the long-term interests of both the United States and Israel. At the moment, practically the only people who seem seriously interested in making those corrections are the ones making those “phony” critiques.

Also, why isn’t the world outraged by the wholesale deprivation we’re inflicting on the North Koreans? Why do we even bother talking about sanctions against Iran, which will surely hurt the average Iranian more than the mullahs and the kleptocrats running the Revolutionary Guard. We’ve been maintaining an embargo against Cuba for half a century. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, the supposed voices of peace and sanity argued for “giving the sanctions time to work” and “keeping Iraq in the box” — the “box” being a stiff sanctions regime. What was so great about the sanctions against South Africa if they too were a form of collective punishment?

Only one blockade is deemed indefensibly beyond the pale: Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Why? Because it imposes “collective punishment.” ~Jonah Goldberg

When I first read this, I thought Goldberg couldn’t be serious. On the whole, the strongest Western critics of the blockade of Gaza don’t believe that sanctions regimes usually achieve their stated objectives, or at least they don’t do so without inflicting enormous unjustifiable suffering on the civilian population that directly undermines any “regime change” goals the sanctions-imposing governments have. Economic sanctions directed at “punishing” a regime for its behavior hurt the civilian population far more and tend to reinforce the regime’s hold on power. We have been arguing this for years in every relevant debate.

Opponents of the Gaza blockade typically object to all policies of collective punishment, whether they are military or economic. It is the hawks who want to keep immiserating Gaza who also want to inflict economic ruin on the Iranian population with “crippling” sanctions, and it is the hawks defending the indefensible in Gaza who never batted an eye at the suffering of Iraqi civilians between 1991 and 2003. For that matter, they never batted an eye at the suffering of Iraqi civilians between 2003 and now. They are among the first to call for imposing sanctions, and they are among the first to say that the sanctions are insufficient and military action is required.

If the Gaza blockade is supposed to drive a wedge between the Gazan population and Hamas, it has failed. If the blockade is supposed to force Hamas to become more accommodating, it has failed. If it is supposed to compel the release of Gilad Shalit, it has failed. Gaza is Exhibit A in the case against the political effectiveness of sanctions. Whenever hawks say that a policy “works,” it means that it has temporarily achieved tactical success in exchange for massive civilian suffering and strategic failure. So, yes, by that awful standard the blockade has “worked.” As The Wall Street Journal reports today, and as we already knew, the blockade has devastated the economy of Gaza and made it into an aid-dependent basketcase. An arms embargo could be enforced without inflicting deprivation and malnutrition on an overwhelmingly underaged population. The limited goal of preventing Hamas from acquiring weapons could be reached without the immiseration of over a million people.

At least eleven years ago, I remember that Pat Buchanan was arguing that Iraq sanctions should be ended because they served no purpose and were contributing to the deaths of tens and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. There were many other people in the U.S. and abroad long before that pointing to the horrible human costs of the sanctions on Iraq. Iraq hawks insisted that containing the Iraqi “threat” was “worth it.” Only when Iraq hawks wanted to escalate to a full-scale invasion did the horrible sanctions policy seem like a barely preferable option, but for the most part opponents of the war did not favor continuing sanctions on Iraq.

Sanctions on North Korea have had no effect on the regime’s behavior. These are not sanctions that most of the world wanted. These are sanctions that American hawks pushed to impose. The push for Iran sanctions is running into concerted opposition from most governments around the world, which is why the draft resolution on Iran sanctions the U.S. has proposed is so “watered-down” and therefore dissatisfying to American hawks. Once again, most other governments want to avoid sanctions. That was a large part of the reason for Turkish and Brazilian efforts to negotiate a fuel-swap deal that could avoid the need to impose sanctions. No doubt Goldberg thinks that this was also an “outrageous insult” by Turkey. It was the U.S. and a few allies that kept Iraq sanctions going long after most of the rest of the world wanted them lifted. Most of the world regards our Cuba policy as ridiculous, outdated and pointless.

Opponents of the Gaza blockade have understood the futility and counterproductivity of sanctions for years. We have also objected to the toll sanctions take on the civilian population in all of these cases. There has been no double standard applied here, and Goldberg’s attempt to claim that there is one is not even remotely persuasive. Until last week, it was the standard hawkish view that the mere phrase “collective punishment” was an outrageous distortion of the Gaza blockade policy. Now we’re supposed to listen to defenders of the blockade complain that the blockade’s opponents are supposedly sanctions enthusiasts who are perfectly fine with collective punishment in all other situations? I know Goldberg specializes in this “Hey! Look over there!” style of argument, but even by his standards this is pathetic.

Goldberg is so preoccupied with the U.S. and Israel not losing face that he wants to keep the inhumane blockade in place:

But this is a terrible moment to consider abandoning the blockade.

Why? Because it would rightly be seen as giving the organizers and supporters of this seaborne propaganda stunt a victory. It would signal that America can be conned. It would reward Turkey’s outrageous insult to us (a NATO ally) and to Israel, a longtime friend of Turkey. It would undermine Egypt and other Arab governments (including Fatah) that don’t want Iran’s clients in Hamas strengthened (their propaganda notwithstanding). And it would signal that Iran is the most important power in the Middle East.

In other words, making an appropriate substantive change in policy to eliminate indefensible practices is a bad idea because it might send the wrong “signal,” and this is coming from the person complaining that blockade critics are too concerned with symbolism! Of course, the flotilla activists have already won a political victory thanks to Israel’s response. The Gaza blockade went from being a back-burner issue to the one at the center of the world’s attention. Turkey has already received its reward by assuming a position of regional leadership over one of the region’s most contentious issues, and for the moment it has won the support and admiration of most people throughout the Near East. Perpetuating the blockade will simply give the flotilla activists and Erdogan new reasons to criticize and isolate Israel.

Until now, Goldberg hasn’t shown any concern that Israeli military excesses might undermine “moderate” Arab regimes or Fatah and empower radical forces in Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere. When it comes to keeping an inhumane blockade in place, he is suddenly very concerned to alleviate the political problems of Salam Fayyad and Hosni Mubarak. Somehow I don’t find any of this very convincing.

The reality is that Israeli actions have created opportunities for new regional leaders, such as Turkey and Qatar, to seize the role that was once held by Egypt, and to a large extent it has been Israeli recklessness and excesses that have already undermined the credibility of its “moderate” Arab partners. One of these excesses has been the Gaza blockade. Continuing the blockade would only accelerate the process I’ve just described and would isolate Israel even more.

Apparently, as long as Israel and the U.S. keep sending the right “signals” of strength, it doesn’t matter to the hawks that they are steadily, consistently weakening the position of both governments in the region.

More recently, the strong reaction in Turkey to the Israeli interception of a convoy organized by Turkish groups with aid for Gaza underlines the possibility that Turkey is moving decisively away from its longtime partnership with the United States. ~Walter Russell Mead

It seems fair to say that Mead has completely misread the situation. Why has there been a “strong reaction” to the raid on the aid flotilla? It isn’t because Turkey is “moving decisively away from its longtime partnership with the United States,” and it isn’t even because the AKP government is bent on undermining the relationship with Israel. There has been a strong reaction because eight Turkish citizens were killed on a Turkish-flagged civilian ship in international waters by the armed forces of its ostensible ally while on a basically peaceful aid mission. Name me a government that would not have a strong reaction to such an episode. For that matter, the aid mission was an effort to breach an inhumane blockade that probably cannot be legally justified. If partnering with the U.S. means ignoring gross, violent provocations against its citizens, no democratic government in the world would be able to maintain such a partnership for very long.

The Tehran nuclear deal only runs “counter to U.S. policies” because U.S. policy towards Iran is not aimed at a reasonable compromise on enrichment and nuclear fuel. There is nothing “terrible” about Turkish and Brazilian efforts in attempting to negotiate a compromise. For that matter, we have some reason to believe that Turkey and Brazil crafted the compromise specifically to meet the criteria spelled out by the Obama administration. If the administration later decided to dismiss Turkish and Brazilian efforts to realize a deal that they apparently believed would satisfy Washington, that is not the fault of Erdogan and Lula. If the “American establishment by and large was taken by surprise by the new and more difficult Brazilian and Turkish foreign policies,” that is simply more evidence that this establishment makes a habit of blinding itself to inconvenient truths and realities that it doesn’t like. It was hardly a secret that Turkey and Brazil disapproved of our bankrupt Iran policy and the inevitable march to sanctions and confrontation that it represented. Both governments made this perfectly clear in the months prior to the Tehran deal.

Mead makes more mistakes later in his post:

Both Turkey and Brazil are now more democratic, but that democracy does not translate into pro-American or pro-globalization.

Superficially, this observation is partly correct, but at best it is a half-truth. A more democratic Brazil and Turkey do not translate into “pro-American” governments if “pro-American” means endorsing futile, unwise and destructive policies. Turkey does not share our obsession with Iran’s nuclear program and does not perceive the same threat that Washington does. That ought to count for something and ought to be considered evidence that the Iranian “threat” does not seem so dire to many of Iran’s own neighbors, but instead it is taken as proof of Turkish treachery. Brazil has gained more attention for its involvement in Near Eastern issues lately, but the real problem Washington has with Lula and the new Brazilian assertiveness in international affairs comes from Brazil’s opposition to U.S. power projection in Latin America. Brazil doesn’t much care for a U.S. military presence in Colombia, and it shares with much of the rest of the continent an aversion to the prosecution of our failed, destructive drug war. A truly “pro-American” view is not all that different, but we already know that this doesn’t matter. What makes a government “pro-American” is not whether it supports policies that are actually good for the United States, but whether it falls in line with whatever misguided policy Washington happens to be endorsing at the moment.

Mead’s remark about Turkish and Brazilian democratic governments not being “pro-globalization” is perhaps even more insidious because it is completely false. Under Lula, Brazil has been increasing trade all over the world, and Erdogan’s Turkey has been opening its market for most of the last decade. One of the reasons Turkey and Brazil have become more “difficult” in their foreign policies is that they have been building commercial ties with governments Washington views with suspicion of hostility. In other words, Turkey and Brazil have been so open to globalization that their economic interests now lead them in directions that conflict with (irrational) U.S. policies.

The AKP came to power partly on the promise of pursuing reforms necessary to improve Turkey’s chances of entering the EU. As far as economic reforms are concerned, this is more or less what Erdogan’s government has done. Turkey’s hope of EU membership continues to be stalled for reasons we all understand, and most of them have nothing to do with the policies or attitudes of the government in Ankara. To the extent that Lula and his party represent part of the broader Latin American backlash againsit neoliberalism, it is partly true that there is skepticism of the benefits of globalization in Brazil, but on the whole developing nations are the ones that want to expand free trade even more than the leading industrialized nations do. Both countries have become important emerging markets during a time when Mead wants us to believe their governments are not “pro-globalization.” It takes a certain willful blindness to conclude that the current Turkish political elite sees “the West as a rival and even an oppressor” when it is the current elite that has done more to integrate Turkey into the global economy than the Kemalists who preceded them. So Mead is pretty clearly and thoroughly wrong in his description of these countries.

But when the Cheonan sank, Mr. Lee’s party turned it into a dominating campaign theme to tamp down the domestic disputes, such as the river dredging project. Its candidates lambasted opposition rivals who championed engagement with North Korea.

Opposition politicians contended that Mr. Lee’s hard-line approach to North Koreahad helped provoke the North to lash out.

“Yes, people agreed with the president that the North needed punishing,” said Jeong Chan-soo, a senior analyst at the political consultancy MIN Consulting. “But when the government announced its investigative results on the same day when the election campaign began, and when President Lee chose the Korean War Museum as the venue to deliver his speech to criticize North Korea, they thought he was overreacting.

“They felt a risk of war,” Mr. Jeong added. “They thought they needed to rein in their president.” ~The New York Times

This result confirms how limited the options are for South Korea and the U.S. in responding to the sinking of the Cheonan. Given the first chance to show support or opposition to Lee’s handling of the attack, most South Koreans who voted in reportedly high-turnout local elections opted for candidates from other parties. As these are local elections, there are undoubtedly many other factors specific to different parts of the country that contributed to the GNP’s defeat, but to the extent that Lee tried to capitalize on the Cheonan sinking and made that a central issue of the campaign he has been pretty clearly rebuked. Once again, we are faced with a South Korean electorate that does not want to take the risks that some American hawks and realists want it to take in the name of changing the North Korean regime. It’s not clear why the United States should try to be more ardent in defense of South Korea than the South Koreans themselves are willing to be.

As I said last week:

South Korean President Lee may have hinted at a desire for regime change in North Korea, but it is not at all clear that Lee would be willing to risk renewed warfare to make this happen. Any sustainable policy would have to enjoy the support of a broad consensus of South Koreans, but South Korean opinion over the last two decades has generally been trending against confrontational policies and the alliance with the U.S. The sinking of the Cheonan may have temporarily changed some minds, but on the whole Haass is arguing that the U.S. should press the South Korean government to pursue a course that is increasingly unwelcome in South Korea.

The latest election results suggest that this view of South Korean opinion is correct. Lee’s more confrontational approach wins him admirers in the U.S. because confronting North Korea and being seen as “pro-American” go hand in hand. We could stand to think more critically about whether a government’s “pro-American” alignment as defined by its support for confrontational policies vis-a-vis its neighbors is necessarily the wisest thing for many of our allies around the world. It is also long overdue to recognize that the people who have to live with the consequences of such policies are not therefore “anti-American” when they object to a course of action they believe might plunge their country into ruin.