Prof. Soli Özel has an interesting essay in World Affairs on the Turkish-Brazilian nuclear deal (via Scoblete). I was struck in particular by this observation:

Looking at the way the press in the US covered this story, I was deeply surprised to see pundits and other members of the American news media once again commenting on world events as if the Iraq War had never happened. Without recognizing how damaged American credibility has become as a result of the war — no less because it so egregiously abused the UN process through misinformation, bullying, and manipulation — it will be difficult for the American public to appreciate what other countries are doing.

This is right. What is more striking is how oblivious American pundits and journalists are to how diminished U.S. credibility, especially when it concerns disarmament and nonproliferation issues in the Near East, constantly undermines U.S. efforts to compel Iran to limit or eliminate its nuclear program. This is especially true for those who are supposed to understand such things, or who at least build their reputations around the illusion that they understand them. Leave it to Friedman, the globalization guru himself, to misunderstand completely the changing dynamics of international relations in a multipolar world order. Just as Prof. Özel says, Friedman continues to view the world before the Iraq war as if it were still the early 2000s, and so he seems to understand the cooperation of emerging-market democracies with an authoritarian Islamic government within the shoddy framework of “democracy vs. stability” and concludes that anything that contributes to international stability must necessarily come at the expense of democratic reform and human rights. If Turkey and Brazil have made a deal with Iran, they must be on Iran’s “side” and therefore against Iran’s democrats. Obviously, this is a simplistic, absurd way of seeing the world, but this is the way that so many punidts and journalists saw it before the war started.

Noah Millman has very carefully dissected the flaws in Friedman’s argument that I criticized last night, and we agree that Friedman’s wish to aid Iran’s opposition is directly at odds with the confrontational policy course he supports. Millman writes:

Meanwhile, there’s precious little evidence that a confrontational policy – granting for the sake of argument that such a policy could be successful in delaying or even ending the Iranian nuclear program – does anything to bolster the opposition or to improve the prospects for liberalization. The leadership of the opposition opposes harsh sanctions and emphatically opposes any military action by the West against Iran.

One of the more cynical political maneuvers of the last year has been the adoption of the cause of the Green movement by Iran hawks in the West. It has been quite effective for the purposes of lending the political cover of opposition to authoritarian rule to a confrontational course of sanctions and perhaps eventually military action. This has allowed Iran hawks to win over other Westerners who genuinely sympathize with the opposition and have come to loathe the Iranian government to such an extent that they cannot tolerate the thought of fully engaging with it. Even though a confrontational course will do nothing for the opposition, and it will almost certainly destroy its political hopes, many of the opposition’s would-be friends in the West have sided with the Iran hawks because they find the hawks’ hostility to the Iranian government emotionally and morally satisfying. Millman wonders how Friedman could fail to see the importance of several of his favorite themes when it comes to Iran, but I think Millman underestimates how important this emotionally satisfying anti-regime posturing is to people like Friedman.

This underscores that actual Iranian democratization and liberalization matter far less even to many of the Green movement’s sympathizers than we might think. What seems to matter more is staking out a sufficiently anti-regime position that allows these people to hold themselves out as friends of Iranian reform, which then allows them to denounce the governments that are actually doing the constructive work of engaging with and investing in Iran. As for the hawks, Iranian democratization and liberalization are secondary or tertiary concerns to the extent that they matter at all, and hawks express support for these things mainly because they believe that a more democratic, liberal Iran would be a more compliant, pro-American one. Of course, as we have seen with Turkey and Brazil’s diplomatic free-lancing and greater assertiveness in international affairs, democratization does not necessarily produce the obedient regional powers that many in the U.S. would like to have.

Where Millman may be slightly mistaken is in his proposed offer of a “carrot” to Iran. Overall, I think he is right that the U.S. has a lot to offer Iran in terms of economic exchange and investment, and it would benefit both countries to integrate Iran more fully into the global economy, but Millman may overstate the extent to which Iran’s ability to make this transition depends on the goodwill and cooperation of the U.S. Increasing trade with Turkey and Brazil is one hint that Iran’s integration into the global economy is happening with or without U.S. help or approval. Emerging-market nations may account for as much as 51% of global GDP in 2014, and already made up 45% of it two years ago, and their share will only grow larger over time. The largest emerging-market economies are in countries whose governments are friendly or willing to do business with Iran. Apparently the administration and much of the chattering class are unwilling to see it, but Turkey and Brazil have done the U.S. a favor by demonstrating rather dramatically that we cannot continue to count on our political and economic power, great as it still is, to be able to pull the rest of the world in directions it does not want to go.

The administration has been operating on the assumption that Iran is increasingly isolated in the world, but Turkey and Brazil have shown clearly that this was never true. Iran’s economic integration with the rest of the world will continue despite Washington’s best efforts to isolate it. Instead of Iran missing its chance to “board,” Washington may find that it has missed its best opportunity to make a sustained, constructive opening to Iran, and various emerging-market nations will take advantage of our continued self-imposed isolation from Iran and its market.

No one will claim that Thomas Friedman knows what he’s talking about, but even for one of his columns this was remarkably bad:

I confess that when I first saw the May 17 picture of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joining his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with raised arms — after their signing of a putative deal to defuse the crisis over Iran’s nuclear weapons program — all I could think of was: Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table?

No, that’s about as ugly as it gets.

Apparently Friedman has lived a rather sheltered life. Was it as “ugly as it gets” when FDR and Churchill sat with Stalin at Yalta and carved up Europe, condemning half of it to oppression and domination? It wasn’t pleasant, but it was most likely necessary to avoid another general war. What about when Nixon met with Mao, one of the most destructive rulers in modern history, for the sake of American strategic advantage? Was that an example of prudent statecraft, or was it “as ugly as it gets”? I ask because the crimes of the Iranian regime, while very real and awful, are as nothing compared to the crimes of totalitarian governments that the U.S. has on occasion treated as allies or diplomatic partners. Despite that, we’re going to condemn two democratic governments for attempting a constructive solution to a diplomatic impasse that our government seems incapable of resolving?

Turkey and Brazil did not do this “just to tweak the U.S.” I can’t rule out that some in their governments might have found upstaging America attractive, and rising powers inevitably clash with established ones when they begin to act more assertively, but how hopelessly self-absorbed can Americans be that we think this is purely a gesture directed against us? Turkey and Brazil have economic and diplomatic relations with Iran that they want to cultivate, they simply don’t believe in the Iranian threat as Washington does, and they are taking their moment as non-permanent members of the Security Council to use their growing economic and political clout. This is not insidious or outrageous. It is part of the reality of international relations today, and it has far more to do with relations among Turkey, Brazil and Iran than it has to with with “tweaking” America. That most American observers seem incapable of seeing that is dispiriting.

Where exactly did Turkey and Brazil “sell out other democrats”? In fact, they did nothing of the sort. It’s true, they didn’t engage in the useless posturing that Iran hawks have insisted the President engage in over the last year, but frankly that is to their credit rather than their shame. They offered the beginning of a way to settle the Iranian nuclear issue, which would, if successful, reduce the international pressure on Iran that provides Iran’s authoritarian government with unearned political capital that it can use to strengthen its position at home. That can only help the opposition. The deal would have permitted Iran to develop a nuclear program that most of its people support, and it could have avoided the continued pursuit of additional sanctions that the Iranian opposition clearly opposes. If Iran hawks got the sanctions they wanted imposed, Iran’s opposition would probably wither and disappear. Nothing could be more useful to Iran’s authoriarians than the constant outside vilification directed at Iran on account of its nuclear program. It is laughable that Friedman thinks he is “on the side of the angels” by endorsing Washington’s current confrontational course, which will do no more to delay Iran’s possible acquisition of a bomb than the deal Turkey and Brazil proposed. Instead, it will almost certainly hasten the day when Iran’s government believes it has no choice but to build nuclear weapons.

In the meantime, this confrontational course will create the crisis atmosphere in which a repressive government thrives and a peaceful democratic opposition suffocates. It is not Lula and Erdogan that have sold out Iran’s democrats. On the contrary, it has been their short-sighted enthusiasts in the West who offer them nothing but lip service and then turn around and pursue the policies that will badly weaken or even destroy their chances at realizing peaceful political change.

Ross has replied to my my earlier post. There are several things I would like to say in response, but I want to start with his concluding point:

If the “old right” is ever going to be anything more than a sideshow in conservative politics, it needs to take its own beliefs about the limits of ideological thinking more seriously, and apply its criticisms of neoconservatives and liberals to its own leaders, writers, and institutions. Physician, heal thyself.

Of course, that is what some of us have been working on for many years now. This has been happening not only at this magazine since its inception, but has been a mark of “paleoconservatism at its best” for some time. We have not only provided outlets for dissident conservatives and libertarians of various stripes, but here at TAC in particular we have tried to bring in writers from across the spectrum to rethink conventional ideological categories, challengeourown prevailing views, and publish criticism of our own leaders. Comically, the intellectual curiosity and honesty that lead us to do these things are frequently used against us as proof of our “phony” conservatism and our supposed crypto-leftism. Considering how many more pressing issues there are to discuss, and considering how many more dangerous, powerful ideologies exist, it is remarkable that we spend as much time on this as we do.

It is disappointing but hardly surprising that Ross mostly glosses over all of this and has lumped all of us together with paleoconservatism “at its worst” as interpreted in the most polemical and hostile way. The “no-enemies-to-the-right” instinct that Ross denounces is actually proof of how sick most of us are of ideological purity tests. If we spent more time expelling undesirables, we would be having even more of the purity tests and outbreaks of factionalism that Ross claims are also proof of our ideological habits. In other words, there is no way for paleoconservatives to win this game: either we refuse to engage in purges, because we find ideological purity tests to be mind-numbing and petty exercises, or we engage in many more and impose all sorts of arbitrary standards of what people can and cannot say. One way or another, we will indict ourselves as ideologues according to Ross’ standards. Essentially, unless we wish to remain a “sideshow” we must become increasingly indistinguishable from the largely unimaginative, ideologically-stifled conservative movement that we have been criticizing for years for its lack of imagination and ideological mentality.

Ross wrote earlier in this post:

And finally, there’s the impulse to take an admirable principle — whether it’s Rand Paul’s staunch federalism or Pat Buchanan’s non-interventionism — and push it so far that people begin to doubt your intellectual judgment and your moral soundness alike.

Put another way, there is an impulse (by no means universally or equally shared) to question received wisdom from official American historiography that puts major events in U.S. history beyond any serious criticism. No doubt it would be more politically expedient and useful to offer no opinions on any major or controversial past event. What is worth noting here is that this stubborn insistence on revisiting old, settled debates is evidence that ideological thinking is not really one of our problems. Something that needs to be said here in this discussion is that principle is not ideology. Ideology exists first and foremost to acquire and justify the exercise of power, and this requires frequent, convenient forgetting and the superficial synthesizing of incompatible arguments. Nationalists are quite good at this: they can idolize political figures and causes centuries apart that are diametrically opposed to one another provided that they contributed in some way to an increase in the power of the nation, and they will likewise demonize very similar political figures and causes if they happen to be on the “wrong” side of the nationalist narrative at a particular time.

Ideologues try to craft “usable pasts” that facilitate the success of their present-day agenda. Probably nothing could be less “usable” or helpful to the cause of non-interventionism today than to argue that America should never have entered WWI and WWII because these wars did not serve American national security interests. If we non-interventionists were more ideologically-minded and therefore more flexible in our principles, we should have no difficulty pretending that entering these wars served the American interest and leave it at that, but there is the problem that many of us don’t think it is true. If we don’t think something is true, we have this incorrigible habit of saying so.

It might be worth having Ross provide some concrete examples of how paleoconservatives have been taking principles so far in relevant, current policy debates that he has begun to doubt our intellectual judgment and moral soundness.

Robert Kagan must think that no one will check the Bush administration’s record on Russia policy, or else he would not have written this column. Kagan focuses entirely on Russian support for watered-down Iran sanctions to make his argument that the “reset” has achieved absolutely nothing, which is what you would have to focus on to make this argument. As I have said many times, the administration was foolish to link Russian help on pressuring Iran to the other “reset” efforts, because that help would either not be forthcoming or would be so minimal as to be irrelevant. Having made Russian support for Iran sanctions into the measure of success for Obama’s Russia policy, the administration needlessly set themselves up for criticism just like Kagan’s.

Last year I had impatiently declared the “reset” to be empty and meaningless because it seemed that the administration was going to change nothing, but that was a bit of an overreaction. The administration later addressed Russian complaints about the proposed missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic and changed the missile defense plan to one that was somewhat less irritating to Moscow. Kagan noticeably fails to mention that the administration has been pursuing an alternative missile defense program elsewhere in Europe. The Prague treaty on arms reduction was another tangible result of a less openly confrontational policy against Russia. Russian support for supply lines for Afghanistan has been another. Naturally, both of these are nowhere to be found in Kagan’s column.

Then Kagan objects to things the administration has no power to stop or change:

Obama has officially declared that Russia’s continued illegal military occupation of Georgia is no “obstacle” to U.S.-Russian civilian nuclear cooperation. The recent deal between Russia and Ukraine granting Russia control of a Crimean naval base through 2042 was shrugged off by Obama officials, as have been Putin’s suggestions for merging Russian and Ukrainian industries in a blatant bid to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty.

By “continued illegal military occupation of Georgia,” Kagan means the Russian military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia that has been there in one form or another for almost twenty years. Of course, he skates by the reason why Russia’s military presence continues there and why it increased in the last two years, namely the Georgian-escalated war that targeted Tshkinvali and killed Russian soldiers stationed there. Kagan does not mention that both separatist republics want Russian protection and many of the inhabitants of the republics, especially South Ossetia, have taken Russian passports and may ultimately want to have their territories annexed to Russia. He ignores all of this because it would make the administration’s position seem reasonable and understandable.

How could the Russian presence in the separatist republics be an obstacle to civil nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and Russia? Is India’s control of Kashmir an obstacle to the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal? Is Turkey’s military presence in northern Cyprus an obstacle to U.S.-Turkish relations? Are we actually in the habit of linking such contentious political and territorial issues to other aspects of bilateral relations? What could the administration have realistically done in response to the Black Sea Fleet agreement or the natural gas deal between Ukraine and Russia? Is Washington going to start spouting the Ukrainian opposition line and try to be more concerned for Ukrainian sovereignty than Ukraine’s own government? That’s silly. When there is nothing that the U.S. can do, there is no purpose served in throwing a fit and denouncing agreements that both states have accepted and ratified. The natural gas deal might well be a horrible, corrupt rip-off of Ukrainian consumers, but what is Washington supposed to do about it?

So Kagan’s critique of the “reset” is hard to take seriously. His description of the current state of affairs is simply wrong. There is no “wave of insecurity” sweeping the region, and it is misleading to refer to “expansive Russia” as if it posed a threat to the territorial integrity of its neighbors. Instead of contentious relations between Russia and its neighbors that Washington was constantly stoking and trying to worsen with its encouragement of reckless, anti-Russian leaders, there is now relatively greater stability throughout the region and warmer Ukrainian-Russian relations, all of which serve the interests of all nations involved and the interests of Europe as a whole. At the same time, U.S.-Russian relations have slowly but genuinely improved, which was the main point of the “reset” all along.

Apparently Rand Paul doesn’t meet Justin Raimondo’s eccentric and ever-changing purity test. Six months ago, Raimondo was full of praise for two reliable hawks who supported the Iraq war because they happened to be making the right politically expedient noises on Afghanistan, and he was cheering on Rep. Jason Chaffetz in particular as an example that the antiwar right was on the rise. As I pointed outat the time, Chaffetz believes that the United States should “take out” Iran’s nuclear facilities, which means that he explicitly called for starting a war with Iran. That didn’t bother Raimondo. However, Raimondo does think that Rand Paul’s statements on Iran are intolerably bad. So once again a consistent, early opponent of the Iraq war gets no credit from Raimondo, and Paul is now being held to a higher standard on Iran policy than the pro-war, pro-gasoline sanctions Chaffetz Raimondo celebrates.

I don’t deny that Rand Paul’s position on Iran leaves a lot to be desired. In the interview Raimondo cites, Paul says that he opposes government subsidies to companies doing business in Iran. That doesn’t mean very much, since the U.S. government doesn’t subsidize companies that do business in Iran. It is a formally pro-sanctions position without any new sanctions attached. He also wants public pension plans to divest any Iranian holdings, which is hardly the stuff of “crippling” sanctions, and it is probably just as meaningless as the other one. Divestment is futile for rather obvious reasons, and Paul overestimates the threat to regional stability from an Iranian nuclear weapon, and it is mistaken to say that a military option is on the table if one has no intention of exercising it.

As unfortunate as some of this is, there are some encouraging signs here. What seems significant is that Paul does not claim to favor imposing gasoline sanctions on Iran, nor does he voice any support for “crippling” sanctions of any kind. He does not go so far as to say that Iran’s nuclear weapons pose a threat to the United States, but instead he takes the exaggerated but more defensible position that they would contribute to regional instability. Obviously, he doesn’t volunteer any view in support of preventive war. Compared to Jason “The Time To Take Out This Threat Is Now” Chaffetz, Paul is far better on Iran policy, and for that matter he is far better on Iran policy than just about any major party candidate for the Senate. If he does not yet meet an exacting non-interventionist standard on this, he is much closer than most electable politicians. If Raimondo were applying any sort of consistent standard, he would have been far more critical of Chaffetz last year and far more enthusiasic about Paul right now.

Despite all this, Raimondo has cut Paul no slack and he has misrepresented Paul on an important point. Pro-war Chuck Hagel just had to make a few speeches against the “surge,” and Raimondo became ecstatic at the revival of the Old Right he claimed to see before his eyes, but when it comes to Rand Paul, who can credibly lay some claim to carrying on at least part of the legacy of the Old Right, Raimondo is suddenly suspicious and looks for problems. Paul’s criticism of the Nuclear Posture Review is just as misguided as every other Republican criticism we have heard, but we should understand that Paul’s criticism is consistent with Peter Feaver’s argument that removing strategic ambiguity was a mistake. I don’t agree with this, but it is hardly the unspeakable evil Raimondo pretends that it is. It is a debatable point, and it does not mean what Raimondo says it does.

Let’s try to remember that the review was addressing the possibility of using nuclear weapons in retaliation against states that launched biological or chemical weapons (and cyber-war) attacks on the U.S. The review exempted non-nuclear states that were in compliance with the NPT. All that Paul was objecting to was the modest change that explicitly and publicly included this exemption. As Feaver said in his op-ed a month ago, “Reasonable people can disagree as to whether the bargain is worth it, but it is a bargain on the margins.” Contrary to what Raimondo claims, this doesn’t mean that Paul necessarily favors nuking Iran under any circumstances, but that he believes strategic ambiguity is important for increasing deterrence. I don’t expect many non-interventionists to agree with this view, and I don’t agree with it, but it is actually a fairly mild disagreement that doesn’t tell us anything about how Rand Paul would vote on the sanctions bills pending before Congress or on any Iran-related legislation.

It certainly isn’t true that “not even the wildest-eyed neocon” has seriously proposed using nuclear weapons in retaliation against Iran in the (highly unlikely) event of an Iranian biological or chemical weapons attack on the U.S. After all, this is current Obama administration policy as laid out in the review itself, and most neoconservatives have been complaining that the review’s explicit exemption for NPT-compliant non-nuclear states was a sign of weakness. Rand Paul’s overall position on Iran is not as good as it could or should be, but it actually appears to be less confrontational and aggressive than administration policy, and it is clearly superior to the position of such supposed “antiwar” Republicans as Chaffetz.

Update: Raimondo has responded, but typically has nothing interesting to say except to make a lame jab at my support for the war in Afghanistan, which most non-interventionists also used to support when it was the war Bush neglected. He dislikes people who support the one just war we are fighting, cheered on someone who wants to start a war with Iran, and distorts the Iran position of one of the few candidates sympathetic to our views.

Earlier, I said that Raimondo misrepresented Rand Paul’s position on the Nuclear Posture Review. In his response, he does so again:

Rand Paul is the one who brings up the question of our nuclear first strike policy in the context of the Iranian question, not O’Reilly, and while O’Reilly agrees with him that we should strike a pose of “ambiguity” in this instance, the Fox News neocon drives home the point that Jim Bunning, Rand’s Republican predecessor (and endorser) would opt for an attack if it came to that. Rand’s answer is that he would “not take it off the table.”

So he’s not opposed in principle to attacking Iran – with nuclear weapons, no less! – and it seems likely, from his manner and his now well-established record of caving in to pressure, that he would go along with the program when the bombs start falling on Tehran.

The video is quite clear that Paul objects to the change in declaratory policy. That doesn’t mean that he favors using nuclear weapons in retaliation against non-nuclear unconventional attacks. He objects to making an explicit, public statement outlining when such weapons would not be used. The review is not concerned with using these weapons to launch a war against another state, but addresses their use in the event that the United States is attacked with unconventional weapons. What we can say with confidence is that Paul does not automatically rule out military action against Iran. He also said, “It is equally reckless to say, well, if they get a nuclear weapon, I’ll drop a nuclear weapon on Tehran.” In other words, Paul is specifically rejecting the view Raimondo attributes to him. Simply put, everything Raimondo said about Paul wanting to nuke Iran is baseless and unfounded. Raimondo is assuming the worst about Rand Paul on extremely weak evidence, and there seems to be no real purpose served by any of it. Could it get any drearier than that?

It’s true that the U.S. has justified some of its more ill-conceived actions as being consonant with its international commitments, but in many cases (especially our big ticket wars), it was the U.S. pushing these institutions in the direction of activism, not vice-versa. The U.S. “forum shopped” the war in Kosovo, settling on NATO only after it failed to win over the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. was not led off to battle under the authority (or persuasion) of an international body. Ditto the second Iraq war, where the U.S. sought legitimation for an action it had already decided upon. Indeed, the entire liberal internationalist argument in favor of global institutions is precisely their ability to lend international legitimacy to actions the U.S. seeks to take in its own interest [bold mine-DL]. ~Greg Scoblete

I appreciate Greg’s response, and he’s quite right that Washington has used NATO and the U.N. as covers for actions it wanted to take anyway. I’m not sure it follows that the wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq would have happened had there not been a major U.S. role in these institutions that provided the pretexts for military action. The practical and political objections to interventionism increase when the President cannot invoke American “leadership,” the “international community” or the “credibility” of this or that institution.

Obviously, the U.N. was not forcing George Bush into Iraq, but the heart of the legal argument for the invasion, such as it was, was that it was necessary for the enforcement of U.N. resolutions and the upholding of the authority of the U.N. Willful misreadings of UNSCR 1441 aside, the U.N. never authorized the use of force in 2003, but had the Bush administration not presented itself as the enforcer of international norms and used the U.N. as a source of legitimation for the invasion it is difficult to see how any first- or second-tier powers could have cooperated in the war.

For example, Britain could not have legally participated in the invasion or occupation, and the same would go for most of the others in the “coalition of the willing.” The invasion was already pretty blatantly illegal, but without the fig leaf of enforcing U.N. resolutions and the pretense that the security of the entire world was threatened the U.S. would have faced the prospect of being almost completely isolated and at odds with virtually every other major power in the world. Bush did not invade Iraq because of obligations to the U.N., but the administration’s spin on those obligations facilitated the invasion in a way that would not have been possible otherwise.

If the U.S. had not been a member of the organization and one of its five most politically important members, it is difficult to see how the U.S. would have ever been taking the lead in punishing and sanctioning Iraq, and it is difficult to see how any administration could claim that Iraqi weapons programs were a matter of national security. As it was, the idea of an Iraqi threat to American national security was hard to take seriously, but the skepticism and opposition at home would have been even stronger had the U.S. not spent more than a decade as an enforcer of a collective security that Iraq no longer seriously threatened.

Of course, there was no legal basis for the war against Yugoslavia, but had the U.S. no longer been in NATO in 1999 it is hard to see how a low-level internal conflict in the southern Balkans becomes an American concern. Had the U.S. not been intent on finding some new purpose for an outdated and irrelevant alliance, it is hard to imagine why so many American hawks would have supported the war. One of the original purposes of NATO was to “keep the Americans in,” and Washington has a made a point of keeping NATO going in order to provide an excuse for America to act as a European power. It was this involvement in a multilateral alliance that put the U.S. in a position of taking an interest in the stability and security of peripheral parts of Europe that had nothing to do with us, and it was this role as a European power left over from the Cold War that put the U.S. on a course to humiliate Russia by punishing its historic ally and client.

As for Bolton and other hawkish critics of the U.N., some of them might welcome the theoretical freedom of action that non-participation would seem to bring, but if what I have been arguing is right the U.S. is much more free to act (and sometimes act abusively) when it is integrated into these institutions and can claim to be acting in the interest of global security. Multilateral institutions do not provide checks on interventionist impulses, and in some cases they can enable interventions that might otherwise not happen. For all of their complaining about ineffectiveness and corruption, hawkish critics of the U.N. are generally quite happy to use the U.N. to legitimize aggressive policies abroad. They would be among the first to lament America’s non-entry into the League of Nations, and they would also be among the first to object to the “isolationist” sentiments of people who oppose their proposed aggressive policies. Despite their “unilateralist” inclinations, they have a considerable amount in common with liberal internationalists, and as we see all the time the difference between unilateralists and multilateralists is to be found in disagreements over the means and the not the end. They are no less interested in global governance than liberal internationalists, but would like to see global governance mostly concentrated in American hands.

It is probably true that there is no ideal arrangement that will keep interventionism in check, and the U.S. was involved in foreign wars and overseas empire-building before the world wars, so there is no guarantee that interventionists would not continue to join and start wars if the U.S. left these institutions. Even so, a reduced U.S. presence in international institutions could make future military interventions more politically and practically difficult to launch, and it might allow our debates over war and peace to focus squarely and solely on American interests. Ultimately, interventionism will survive and thrive for as long as most Americans tolerate or celebrate it. Still, if future administrations cannot hide behind these institutions and the global “leadership” role that goes with them, it will probably be harder at the level of the political class and foreign policy elites to justify the same degree of global military presence and meddling in other nations’ affairs.

Ross:

And it shouldn’t come as a shock that [Ron Paul’s] son found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.

When I first read Ross’ column, it seemed to be a reasonably fair and effective critique of “paleo” flaws, but something about it kept bothering me. Some of this has to do with Ross’ references to ideology. Most conservatives sympathetic to Rand Paul abhor ideology as such and not only recognize its limits, but are acutely aware of its distorting powers and flaws. Indeed, it has been the “paleo” right that has been relentless in criticizing the ideological mentality that dominates so much of conservative thought today. It has been one of our main themes for the last decade. If anyone has been aware of the limits of ideology, it has been people like Rand Paul. If anyone has been oblivious to those limits, it has been the people on the right who acknowledge Paul and his supporters only by way of belittling and dismissing them.

Something else that has not been discussed very much in response to Rand Paul’s controversial remarks is that Paul’s main error derives mostly from an overconfidence in the rationality and morality of both markets and democracy. This is arguably the product of an unduly optimistic assessment of human behavior. No one would normally accuse paleoconservatives of any of these things, since we are normally considered excessively pessimistic and skeptical of both the market and mass democracy. Put another other way, Paul has been subjected to particularly intense scrutiny because he has expressed confidence in markets and democracy in a way similar to, but less naive than, the ideologues who championed the inevitable triumph of democratic capitalism and promoted the ideas of Near Eastern regional transformation by force and the failed “freedom agenda.” The rather obvious difference is that Paul’s remarks had and will have no effect on policy whatever, but he could very well be politically punished more than all the people who helped wreck entire countries and provided the justification for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

For the most part, when “paleos” err we err because we are very concerned to prevent abuses of government power and because we want to keep the government from using its coercive powers unnecessarily and arbitrarily. Given their deference to the national security and warfare state, our critics on the right cannot say the same. This may lead us to go to extremes or to take the wrong position in a particular debate on occasion. Nonetheless, the alternative to this is a conservative movement that has obviously “sold out to both big government and the military-industrial complex.” We are all well-acquainted with what this means for our country, and generally speaking it has been a disaster. Rand Paul’s success so far offers the possibility of something different and better. It is simply foolish to try to destroy that.

Update: I’m afraid that Max Fisher has misunderstood my second paragraph. The point I was trying to make, and which I apparently did not make very clearly, was that Paul is being raked over the coals for being overly confident in the rationality and morality of markets and democracy in a way that resembles democratist ideologues, but the latter are never held accountable for being even more hubristic and unreasonable in their ideological convictions that have had disastrous consequences in the real world. Paul made some controversial remarks on a cable news show that he has since clarified. Democratist ideologues helped destroy whole countries in the name of democratic capitalist triumph. If we believed Ross, they were well-intentioned do-gooders who just made a few mistakes, and Rand Paul is a proud ideologue blind to complexities of the real world. I was criticizing the dramatic difference in how Paul is being treated and the way that ideologues who are actually responsible for enabling mass destruction and death have been treated.

Doug Schoen believes that Democrats should imitate Joe Sestak and Bill Halter, who were both more progressive candidates running against compromised “centrists,” but they should also imitate Mark Critz and “move decisively to the right.” As you may have noticed, this doesn’t make much sense. All three do have some anti-Washington credibility, and they can all cast themselves as being independent of the administration and party leadership in different ways, but there is nothing ideologically consistent about them. The correct lesson is that Democratic candidates should tailor campaigns to suit specific electorates, whether that means running away from, towards or (if it is possible) alongside Obama and the Democratic leadership. Critz’s victory shows how Democrats can win in conservative Democratic, McCain-voting districts. It is not “the only way the Democrats can win.” If the Democrats try to pursue a single model one way or the other, it will backfire.

There are states and districts where a Critz-style campaign would depress Democratic turnout and would do nothing to win over independents. This is what Creigh Deeds’ awful campaign did in Virginia, and he was routed decisively. The story for the last year has been low Democratic enthusiasm, which has translated into genuinely weak turnout in most off-year and primary elections. This has not happened because Democratic voters were disillusioned by a supposedly left-wing agenda, but at least partly because Obama coalition voters found that the administration favored “centrist” compromises and solutions most of the time. On the other hand, there are states and districts where Critz’s approach would work quite well. A suburban, Obama-supporting district such as Pennsylvania’s 7th will require a different approach and a different message from the anti-outsourcing, socially conservative message that worked in Pennsylvania’s 12th.

The DCCC and DSCC have a record during the last two cycles of correctly recognizing the differences and adjusting accordingly. Their Republican counterparts seem obsessed with running the same kind of candidate with the same broken-record, unimaginative national message almost everywhere. Rand Paul in Kentucky is practically the only Republican candidate that doesn’t match the cookie-cutter model that the party keeps trotting out at every election, and it is probably partly because of this difference that Paul generated such a strongly favorable response from primary voters. That doesn’t mean that Republicans should follow Schoen’s advice and try to copy Rand Paul in every other race. All that this would do would be to replace one uniform, national strategy with another.

Forbes is on the warpath against the Turkish and Brazilian nuclear deal this week. Another contributor, Melik Kaylan, attacks the deal and Erdogan in particular for pursuing it. If Claudia Rosett showed that she doesn’t understand the meaning of the word quisling with her latest effort, Kaylan’s column proves that he doesn’t understand much about Turkish history or Turkey’s neighbors.

For example, Kaylan tells us that Iran is “an ancient rival with whom [Erdogan’s] people have fought incessant wars for a millenium.” It is true that there were several Ottoman-Safavid and Ottoman-Qajar wars, but I believe there were only eight wars total in three hundred years, all of which were between the early 1500s and 1823, and the last major war between Turks and Iranians was fought when James Monroe was President. So they haven’t fought each other for a millennium, and their fighting has been anything but incessant, and whatever rivalry once existed was a modern phenomenon and it no longer really exists. Other than that, Kaylan’s description is excellent.

Elsewhere, Kaylan informs us that Russia is “expansionist,” which is typical misinformation. Kaylan is hardly the first and won’t be the last to abuse this word to refer to Russian foreign policy, so while it is false it is less remarkable than his description of Iran. He doesn’t like that Erdogan has been improving relations with “an expansionist Iran with dreams of a transnational Shiite caliphate all around Turkey’s borders.” It would help his cause a bit if any of these things were true. Even if Iran were expansionist, which it isn’t by any reasonable definition of the word, it couldn’t have dreams of any kind of Shi’ite caliphate because Twelver Shi’ites don’t want a caliphate. Indeed, ever since the usurpation against Ali the institution of the caliphate has often been viewed as an instrument of oppression directed against Shi’ites, and this hostility was sealed with the murder of Husayn. Unlike Isma’ilis, Twelver Shi’ites have no history of establishing an alternative caliphate. For the duration of Ottoman-Iranian conflict in the modern period, the Ottoman Sultan held the title of caliph following the Ottoman occupation of Mecca and Medina. That means that ever since Iranian rulers have been identified with Shi’ism since the beginning of the Safavid dynasty they have been political rivals of the rulers who claimed to be caliphs. How the Iranians are going to surround Turkey with this imaginary caliphate that they don’t want is anyone’s guess. Perhaps there is an as-yet-undiscovered army of Greek Shi’ite caliphalists just waiting for the order to strike. Then again, perhaps not.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Kaylan has a very poor understanding of Iranian intentions, which hardly makes him the best guide in understanding the merits and flaws of the nuclear deal with Iran.