Continuing the “epistemic closure” debate, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Lord knows the Democrats did not ride back to power on the backs of nimble and novel public policy prescriptions.

This is quite right. There is no necessary connection between election results and the quality or vibrancy of the intellectual life of the activists, wonks and experts aligned with one coalition or another. Between early 2002 and early 2005, Republicans and conservatives were politically in fairly good shape, but that same period was characterized by some of the sloppiest thinking and the most inflexible, ideological responses to events in at least thirty years. This is why references to the relative political strength or weakness of a party that Goldberg and Continetti have made are entirely irrelevant to the question. The conservative movement could be operating in a self-reinforcing cocoon and suffering from intellectual bankruptcy, and the electorate might nonetheless support their Republican political leaders in spite or even because of these things.

It is not difficult to demonstrate the reality of the “hermetically-sealed mental world in which only information provided by organs of the conservative movement is trusted.” In the last four years, Republicans and mainstream conservatives have largely learned nothing or learned the wrong things about why they lost power. It was not intellectual bankruptcy that directly caused Republican defeats, but we can see intellectual bankruptcy on display in the way movement conservatives have responded to political defeats.

The first, most predictable move was to declare the losses to be setbacks for Republicans, but not for conservatives. As a dissident conservative, I agree that there was nothing genuinely conservative in Republican policies between 2001 and 2009, but movement conservatives’ maneuvering to distance themselves from the failures of policies they either tolerated or embraced has just been an effort to flee from the scene of the crime. Since then, movement conservatives have invented comforting stories that reinforce their ideological commitments and avoid all responsibility for anything that happened while self-described conservatives were governing.

In movement-world, Iraq had little or nothing to do with what happened in the 2006 midterms–it was spending and earmarks! In movement-world, the financial crisis was caused pretty much entirely by the Community Reinvestment Act and the GSEs. You might have never known that the Federal Reserve, FASB 157, and Bush’s “ownership society” housing policy even existed if you relied on mainstream conservative media, because these things might implicate the “wrong side” in contributing to the disaster. Critical thinking, self-criticism and a willingness to revisit and abandon assumptions were all notably absent. As movement conservatives see things today, Obama either rejects American exceptionalism or simply loathes America (and in some circles the debate is simply over where he learned this loathing), and he is doing all he can to weaken America and hasten American decline. Their new political stars and leading pundits spout nonsense on foreign policy, and they make blusteryproclamations of the uniqueness and superiority of American social mobility and economic dynamism that are flatly untrue. There is an impulse to self-congratulation and hubris in all of this that tends to hamper clear and critical thinking.

As Austin Bramwell wrote four years ago for TAC, this is simply the way the movement works:

Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks, that everyone in the abortion debate—even the most ardent pro-lifers—inevitably engages in arbitrary line-drawing. Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.

Third, and closely related to doublethinking, the conservative movement engages in selective editing of history. When events have a tendency to disconfirm ideology, down the memory hole they go. Thus, conservatives do not recall their dire warnings about the Soviet Union during the Cold War or about the economy after the Bush I or Clinton tax increases. On the Iraq invasion, they will not remind you of their claims that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators, that the world would soon be applauding the Iraq invasion, or that events in Lebanon and the Ukraine heralded global democratic revolution. Nor will conservatives remind you of their predictions that the insurgency’s demise was imminent, that Saddam Hussein and then Zarqawi were the Big Men of the insurgency, or that the insurgency consisted largely of foreign jihadis. As in 1984, the ability to forget that any of these events ever occurred signals one’s loyalty to the movement.

However, there has been an intensification in cocooning and forgetting as conservatives are now able to receive and exchange information in an almost parallel universe. In this universe, as Henninger’s column in The Wall Street Journal reminded me yet again this morning, Obama originally never intended to increase the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, when in the real world he had pledged to do this many times. When viewed from the parallel universe, Obama’s decision on Afghanistan is a surprise and a change, because it does not agree with the cartoon fantasy of Obama’s foreign policy that movement conservatives and their allies have constructed for themselves. This happens all the time, and not only are these mistakes never corrected, but the people who make them on a regular basis enjoy great success within the confines of the movement. This is not a “closing” of something that was once open, but the normal operation of an ideological movement.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans want to repeal the health care bill. ~David Brooks

Brooks refers here to the overall pro-repeal number in the latest Rasmussen poll. Like their last poll on health care repeal, this one contains several bizarre results when we look at the crosstabs. When we look at the numbers for 18-29 year old likely voters, who have regularly been the age group most supportive of the health care bill from the beginning, we see numbers that make no sense. Three weeks ago, 58% of 18-29 year olds said that they favored repeal, which was already hard to believe, and now that number has leaped to 76%. Looking at the other age groups, we find that pro-repeal sentiment has dropped among 30-39 olds from 52% in March to 48%, and it has risen from 55% to 64% among 40-49 year olds, but remain relatively unchanged among 50-64 year olds (54%) and 65+ likely voters (60%).

According to Rasmussen, by far the most ardent pro-repeal constituency other than self-identified conservatives and Republicans is supposed to be 18-29 year olds. This seems unlikely. 18-29 year olds, the so-called Millennials, were and have continued to be more supportive of Obama than any other age group, and they tend to be more socially and fiscally liberal than any other age group. The Pew survey on Millennials made this very clear. Obviously, something is wrong with this poll. The support/oppose repeal framing of the question ends up lumping in progressive hostility to the health care bill because they think it is too “centrist” and inadequate with the actual desire to repeal the new legislation and start over.

It would be much more useful if we could have a poll result of likely voters that distinguished between opposition to the bill and the willingness to support Republican candidates campaigning for repeal, or even a poll question like the one in the YouGov survey I have mentioned before. According to that YouGov survey of adults, 39.6% agreed that the “current health care reform bill has so much wrong with it that it should not become law.” That is what repeal advocates believe. Another 43% like some elements of the bill, but believe the bill could have been better. 17% are satisfied with the bill as it is. Even when we take into account that this was a survey of adults and not likely voters, that would not translate into 58% support for repeal.

Other weird numbers that leap out from the Rasmussen crosstabs is the even higher percentage of black likely voters who say they favor repeal: up from the implausible 32% of last month to 49% now. Does anyone believe that Republicans are going to win anything close to half of the black vote in the fall? 61% of women favor repeal, while only 55% of men favor the same? We’re supposed to believe that pro-repeal sentiment has jumped 10 points among women and dropped three points among men in the last three weeks? Are Republicans going to win the women’s vote by campaigning on health care repeal? This seems highly unlikely.

Most conservatives and voters 65+ really do oppose the health care bill, and they are more likely to turn out in the fall. If the Democrats are going to suffer major losses, it will be because of the relatively higher turnout of these and other voters for Republican candidates against relatively weaker turnout by the Democratic base and new Obama voters. It will not be because there is a pro-repeal majority swollen by the disaffected ranks of Obama’s core constituencies. In practice, very few of the young, black, women and Democratic voters who say that they favor repeal will actually vote in such a way as to make repeal more likely.

The argument for Middle East democracy that Hamid sketches above sees political participation as a release-valve for Arab grievances. But what are those grievances? As they relate to the United States they are: the basing of U.S. combat forces in the region and support for Israel.

So the idea that democratic participation would actually give aggrieved citizens some relief seems to imply that a democratic government would actually have to address and ameliorate those grievances.

In such a context, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that the advance of democracy in the Middle East could mean empowering governments that take a decidedly colder attitude toward America (and Israel). They might not go so far as to sever ties, but if you consider that a long-standing and democratic ally like Japan wants to reconfigure America’s basing agreements, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see newly empowered democratic states in the Middle East start pushing back against American military power in the region. ~Greg Scoblete

Greg refers to this column by Shadi Hamid, who mentions the phenomenon of “Bush nostalgia” among Arab reformers. This is sad for a couple reasons. No one in the region (or anywhere else) should ever feel nostalgia for the Bush years. However underwhelmed or disappointed one is with Obama for any number of reasons, Bush nostalgia is a horrible refuge. U.S. and allied policies during the Bush administration caused more harm and upheaval in the region than anything at least since the invasion of Kuwait. To the extent that the “freedom agenda” was welcomed by Arab reformers, the promises made in its name were never going to be applied consistently and regularly to Arab states.

So the more important point is that Arab reformers have little or nothing about which they can feel nostalgic. The “freedom agenda” was applied half-heartedly when it was applied at all in Arab countries, and the administration quickly abandoned its efforts in Egypt at the first sign of resistance from Mubarak. I don’t fault the administration for backing away from some of its more fantastical ideas, but I would stress that Arab reformers cannot point to much of anything substantive that they received as a result of the “freedom agenda.” Hamid mentions that Obama’s Cairo speech raised expectations that have since been dashed, which is true enough, but the “freedom agenda” was just the same: long on idealistic rhetoric and hints of changes in policy that never really materialized.

Were allied Arab states to become much more democratic, their governments would be obliged to pay more attention to the grievances Greg mentions, and that would make the divergence of perceived interests between our governments difficult to paper over. An important factor in determining how “cool” relations with the U.S. became would be the American response to the more forceful and frequent expression of long-held objections to U.S. policy and military presence in the region. So far, our official and popular reactions to Japanese objections to the Futenma basing deal does not give much reason to think that the response would be particularly constructive. Washington is not very used to having many allies that pursue independent foreign policies, and it does not respond well to allies that resist or criticize U.S. policies. Americans tend to expect deference and gratitude from our allies, and much of our political class tends to categorize anything other than this as evidence of growing “anti-Americanism.”

At some point, allied states might begin to question whether it is their security interests, rather than Washington’s geopolitical ambitions, that are being served by the alliance. Like Hatoyama’s rhetoric of solidarity and fraternity (yuai) and his tentative proposal for an East Asian union, these allied states might begin discussing the possibility of regional economic and political cooperation with the neighboring states against which the U.S. is supposed to defend them. It might be possible for Washington to adjust to a world with many democratized Arab states that distance themselves from the United States in some ways, but more likely we would have to endure years of acrimonious domestic debate and recriminations over “who lost Oman.” Our politicians would try to outdo one another with promises to restore American “credibility” in the region, and the government would probably back the occasional coup against Islamist or populist Arab leaders. If American reactions to political change in Latin America are any indication, we would start hearing grave warnings about this or that anti-American Arab demagogue representing the next great threat to global peace.

Returning to the questions of the “cynical cudgel” of democracy promotion and causes of anti-American terrorism, Greg Scoblete writes:

If you’d like to see fewer American troops and less American meddling in the Middle East, in other words, than you should indeed be pushing for greater democratic participation in the region. And yet that sits at cross-purposes with much of what I understand the contemporary Republican and conservative position to be – which is to entrench American military power and influence over the region.

I suspect this is why, for all the talk, President Bush never really leveraged American aid and influence in the Middle East in such a way as to truly endanger any incumbent autocrats. If Bush grasped at the kernel of a sound idea, he and his advisers were likely scared off by its implications, especially after the elections in the Palestinian territories.

If they ever intended more than lip service to democracy promotion in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for example, the previous administration probably was very quickly scared off by the prospect of empowering democratic majorities in those countries. Even though it was U.S. support for Egyptian and Saudi governments and the policies related to that support (e.g., American forces stationed in Saudi Arabia) that contributed to the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers, there was no serious proposal to “drain the swamp” (to use the hawkish phrase from that time) by somehow compelling democratic changes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Such changes would have been destabilizing for two important allies, and it would have probably resulted in the empowerment of groups that are critical or hostile to the alliance with the U.S. There would have been absolutely no promise that liberalization would follow democratization, and probably the reverse would have occurred, at least in Egypt. Democratic “values” would have been served after a fashion, but most likely at the expense of U.S. hegemony.

As we have seen, hegemonists find democratization desirable only when it destabilizes rival or hostile governments. After overthrowing a hostile Iraqi regime by force, hegemonists assumed not only that Iraqis would be grateful, but that they would show this gratitude by adopting a “pro-American” orientation. This did not happen. In many of the “color” revolutions, the supposed reformers were embraced because they supported a “pro-Western” orientation, but in most cases they were unrepresentative of their nation as a whole and their efforts to pull their countries in that direction met with varying degrees of resistance (Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan) or resulted in calamity (Georgia). What mattered to Washington in the Rose and Orange “revolutions” was not the leaders’ credentials as reformers or their credibility as democrats, but their willingness to move their countries toward Western economic and security structures that their people either did not want or the pursuit of which worked against the economic and political interests of their countries.

There are at least two key tenets that democratists have typically held: democratization will stabilize the region in which it occurs and nations that share “our values” will also tend to share our interests. These are both wrong. New democracies are often unstable and can often be the cause of international instability. Democratic practices, institutions and values provide the framework for the expression of a nation’s own interests (as defined and shaped by the nation’s political class), which normally diverge more sharply from the interests of other nations than their authoritarian or monarchical rulers admitted. Even with thoroughly Westernized and European allies, values and interests do not coincide nearly as often as democratists would have us believe. A foreign policy view that assumes that the U.S. interests are served whenever “our values” prevail somewhere is a policy doomed to result in repeated misunderstandings, disappointments and failures. And so it has.

There is a bizarre but noteworthy feud erupting between the absurd “Spengler,” now a resident blogger at First Things, and some of the more appallingneoconservatives. In some ways, it resembles the dispute between Andy McCarthy and Max Boot I mentioned last week. On the one side, you have completely irrational fanatics who also favor perpetual war and on the other side the hawkish interventionists that are embarrassed by them. In light this comparison, it is appropriate that Goldman recently wrote an entire essay claiming that the non-story about Petraeus was a deeply significant episode in American politics.

It is true that David Goldman, a.k.a. Spengler, has been making absurd claims about Obama for years. I first noticed this about him a little over two years ago. It has been obvious to me for a while that there was something awry with Goldman. In April 2008 I made what I think is the most important criticism against Goldman’s thinking:

There is something far, far more insidious and twisted than cultures of defeat, and these are cults of triumphalism, to which Spengler makes his contribution here. A cult of triumphalism is far more dangerous first of all because it sanctifies violence in a way that Lost Causes cannot do, and because it implies that there are wars that are not only just, but that the victor in war can literally do no wrong (and in any case the defeated deserved whatever they got, according to this circular reasoning, because they lost). A culture of defeat teaches humility and reminds that justice and military strength do not have any necessary direct relationship with one another. Triumphalism teaches the opposite: victory is the proof of righteousness, and not only did the enemy deserve to die, but we should have killed more of them to keep them down longer. Spengler approves here of the abandonment of restraint and total war and endorses the narrative of the victors. In fact, he endorses not just the cause of Unionists, as he specifically does in this case, but the narrative of every victor, whether it is the Mauryans and the Romans or the Mongols, the Ottomans, or the Aztecs. It is, of course, a filthy lie that “whole peoples can go bad.” This is the argument of the genocidaire and the totalitarian, and it gives a pass to anyone who would commit genocide against a weaker people. After all, we must allow the losers to lose! Except that when Spengler says “lose,” he means “die.”

It is telling that it was not the abhorrent ideas contained in this article that prompted attacks on Spengler. No doubt many hawks will cite this article in his defense. Spengler’s error was instead simply a slightly more aggressive form of the garbage that anti-Obama hawks routinely encourage in every argument they make. He seems to have made the mistake of actually believing the nonsense that other Obama critics utter for political advantage.

The first round of Hungary’s recent parliamentary elections have seen the clear victory of the center-right liberal Fidesz under Viktor Orban. They have also resulted in the 26-seat gain for a nationalist protest party, Jobbik (from the Hungarian jobb for right), which Frank Furedi describes here (via Will at the League). Jobbik is the more successful, slightly updated partner of Igazsag es Elet (Justice and Life), which was generating the same worries a decade ago that Jobbik is generating now. As it turns out, MIEP’s appeal was a flash in the pan. Jobbik may have more staying power, but I doubt it.

The difference between the two parties is that Jobbik is tapping into far greater discontent brought on by the financial crisis and recession, and so for the moment it has enjoyed far greater success. Hungary was among the financially worst-hit European countries, and Hungarians have lost confidence in both capitalism and electoral democracy more than any other nation in Europe. Amid this gloom, a protest movement such as Jobbik was bound to make inroads when the incumbent Socialists were utterly discredited and a mainstream liberal party such as Fidesz is not going to appeal to the most disaffected and alienated segments of the population.

There will be a temptation for many Americans and western Europeans to wail and gnash their teeth about this result. No doubt Jackson Diehl will resume commenting ignorantly on Hungarian politics as he did eight years ago when he baselessly accused Orban of preaching a Nazi-esque policy of Lebensraum when Orban used a completely neutral Hungarian word, eletter, in the context of opening up Hungary to the labor of ethnic Hungarians from neighboring countries. As the late, great Balint Vazsonyi pointed out soon thereafter:

Apparently, during a morning radio program, Mr. Orban spoke of closer economic cooperation between Hungarians residing in the Hungarian living sphere and those 3 million Hungarians whose living sphere is within the borders of other countries. The discussion had to do with economic spheres, and nothing whatever with territorial revisions or demands.

I bring up this old disagreement to make an important point, which is that Orban and his politics have never been the danger that Diehl once claimed. Eight years ago, it was considered appropriate to try to demonize an utterly mainstream, center-right Hungarian political party in the most despicable way in a major American newspaper. We can now see how wrong Diehl was, and we can be grateful that Orban and Fidesz are nothing like what he tried to make them out to be. We can see that Orban represents the tradition of Hungarian right-liberalism, which is now arrayed against the forces that Jobbik represents.

P.S. Note to The New York Times–it is Fidesz, not Fidezs. The name is an abbreviation of the original Hungarian name for the Alliance of Young Democrats, and the name wouldn’t make sense if it were spelled the other way.

Jackson Diehl is bothered that Obama failed to meet with a demagogic nationalist warmonger, er, I mean the democratically-elected president of Georgia. Obama also met with Yanukovych (who committed to getting rid of Ukraine’s HEU stockpile) and leaders from Armenia and Turkey (whose bilateral relations the administration has been working to improve for the last year). Of course, these meetings are supposed to be unfortunate because these states are on good terms with Moscow, and Georgia most certainly is not. The most irritating thing about Diehl’s post is that he is fully aware of the significant nonproliferation gain that Ukraine’s commitment represents, he knows perfectly well that Turkish-Armenian rapprochement is an important priority, and he understands that Georgia has almost nothing to contribute to the securing of nuclear materials, but he still tries to find some insult towards Georgia in all of this.

Diehl continues:

Obama thanked Saakashvili for that help in their phone call last week. But according to a Georgian account of the call, Obama didn’t say anything about Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO, or about Georgia’s interest in buying defensive weapons from the United States, in order to deter a repeat of the 2008 Russian invasion.

In other words, the administration is pulling back from some of the more irrational, anti-Russian postures of the last few years. This is actually to Georgia’s benefit, as it will make Georgia realize that confrontational policies are a dead-end and Georgia will start to repair relations with Russia. It may mean that our government’s reckless backing for Georgian aspirations for territorial “reintegration” is being scaled back.

Following up on the last post, I would just add that hardly anyone in the West is celebrating Bakiyev’s overthrow (he has now offered to resign), singing the praises of Kyrgyz “people power” or writing lengthy, glowing profiles of acting PM Roza Otunbayeva. Having foolishly cheered the imposition of a far worse dictatorship on Kyrgyzstan than the authoritarian president the country had before, Western enthusiasts for popular revolution have become remarkably quiet as a real bloody tyrant has been deposed by a popular uprising.

Looked at one way, this muted reaction is a very good thing. It might suggest that Western observers are beginning to appreciate that violent political clashes on the other side of the planet are usually not what we believe them to be, and we might acknowledge that the reasons for the clashes have little or nothing to do with us in most cases. Our need to take sides or invest with one side with moral and political superiority almost always gets in the way of understanding what is happening, and it always gets in the way of correctly assessing what the American interest is. The fewer Western personality cults built around little-known foreign leaders, the better it will is abe for the quality of our foreign policy discussions and our political discourse generally. Of course, the muted reaction is also a reminder that democracy promoters and enthusiasts tend not to be interested in celebrating the downfall of despots aligned with Washington.

Nonetheless, it is striking how ready some are to complain that Russia contributed to the uprising. Bakiyev was a terrible ruler, the leadership of the new government appears at least marginally better, so far there is little reason to believe that the new Kyrgyz government will cut off U.S. access to Manas, and we now have the rather odd spectacle of Moscow aiding popular uprisings to remove governments that it believes are working against its interests. These all appear to be reasonably good developments by the very standards democracy enthusiasts usually apply.

Russian support for a popular uprising against an authoritarian regime reinforces my view that the Russian government is a pragmatic authoritarian populist government that will act to establish and maintain itself as a major world power, and it will not have ideological objections to aiding opposition movements against authoritarian rulers. Russia’s role in Bakiyev’s overthrow is one more reason to doubt Robert Kagan’s theory of a clear-cut ideological rivalry between democracy and authoritarianism (or what he insists on calling autocracy) defining great power politics in this century. It seems just as likely that continued democratization will lead to the alignment of new democracies and rising democratic powers with the authoritarian defenders of state sovereignty and the status quo. On many contentious international issues, we are already seeing cooperation among the BRIC states against the U.S. and Europe, and other large democracies are following suit. The major authoritarian powers are beginning to take advantage of the reality that democratization has tended to undermine rather than enhance U.S. hegemony, and they are exploiting the opportunities provided by the stronger expression of divergent interests resulting from democratization around the world.

The new situation in Kyrgyzstan leaves open the possibility that the U.S. and Russia might come to an understanding that Russia has far greater interests and influence in post-Soviet space, in part because this is apparently how many people in former Soviet republics want it, but that this does not have to preclude constructive relations between former Soviet republics and the United States. As the Gallup poll Greg cites also tells us, there are substantial constituencies in almost all former Soviet states that support maintaining good relations with America and Russia.

As long as our government does not insist that these states define their relationship with Washington with hostility to Russia and Russian influence, and as long as Washington understands the limited and temporary nature of security cooperation with many of these states, there does not need to be contest for influence that ultimately harms these states and poisons our bilateral relations. Before 2005, Akayev had maintained the balance between Washington and Moscow fairly well. The previous administration’s inexplicable anti-Russian obsession helped to wreck this. Perhaps now there is an opportunity to repair that damage.

Obviously, Kyrgyzstan is geographically very close to Russia, around one million Kyrgyz work in Russia, and as a result economic and political ties between the two are very strong. Russia will naturally exercise influence over a small, impoverished neighbor such as Kyrgyzstan, just as it exercises influence in all of the former Soviet republics. Was it a planned uprising? There is reason to think so, but it is improbable that the uprising would have succeeded as quickly as it did had there not been a significant groundswell of popular discontent with Bakiyev’s rule.

Following the war in Georgia in 2008, Yanukovych’s election in Ukraine earlier this year, and now Bakiyev’s overthrow, supporters of the “freedom agenda” as a vehicle for advancing U.S. hegemony in post-Soviet space have to acknowledge that their concerted anti-Russian campaign has failed completely. In the process, U.S.-Russian relations were badly damaged and are only now beginning to be repaired, and in the meantime the United States gained nothing we did not already have and contributed to the rise of three failed governments, at least two of which were more brutal and authoritarian than the ones that preceded them, and all of which have presided over terrible periods of misrule. It is now time to try to retrieve something from the wreckage, and that begins by establishing full relations with the new Kyrgyz government and making clear to Moscow that we are not going to try to prise former Soviet republics from its orbit.

I wonder if such a pose – democracy promotion when it aligns with our strategic interests – is really all that tenable. Isn’t this a rather bald-faced hypocrisy? Why would anyone take the idea of political liberalism seriously if the U.S. – the supposed standard-bearer of the concept – holds it as nothing so much as a cynical cudgel to wield against regimes it disapproves of? ~Greg Scoblete

It is tenable enough as far as our domestic debate is concerned. What Boot proposes is more or less what the U.S. has done for at least the last ten years: preach the “freedom agenda” for all but only lend support to dissidents and protesters in countries with regimes Washington wants replaced. Left-populist movements in Latin America that have won power in elections are regularly regarded with suspicion and hostility here in the U.S. because they are social democratic or even genuinely socialist movements, and they are movements that stand in direct opposition to U.S. influence in Latin America.

Very few Americans seriously propose a sustained effort at democracy promotion in any of the allied Arab states, but a great many Americans still seem to believe that the “color” revolutions were full-fledged democratic protest movements that were going to usher in new liberal democratic governments. Those “revolutions” just happened to serve a perceived U.S. interest in the region. Of course, all the “color” revolutions have either stalled or ended in disaster for their countries with Kyrgyzstan as the latest to suffer, but a surprisingly large number of people retain some confidence in their original purpose. The trouble is not so much that the “freedom agenda” is hypocritical or cynical, but that it tends to impose worse governments on the countries that it was supposedly helping to free and ultimately manages to weaken U.S. influence in those countries when the failed “revolutionary” governments discredit or destroy themselves. If one wanted to come up with a proposal that would contribute to the ruin of the countries in question and have stated U.S. goals in their regions mostly or completely undone, pursuing the “freedom agenda” would be the way to do it.

There are other times when democracy promoters have misjudged the relationship between promoting democracy and securing perceived U.S. interests. Before the invasion of Iraq, advocates of democracy promotion had convinced themselves that a democratic Iraq would not fall into Iran’s orbit. There was a lot of talk about the significance of Iraqi nationalism that would prevent this, and as I recall there were even one or two amateur attempts to discern nascent Jeffersonianism in the Shi’ites’ hostility to the caliphate after Ali. Not only was there a willingness to use democracy promotion as a “cynical cudgel” against unapproved regimes over the last ten years, but there was the strange, unwise notion that all newly-democratic regimes would almost of necessity be friendlier towards U.S. and Western interests than their authoritarian predecessors. We have heard this countless times in connection with the Iranian protests. Part of this was informed by ahistorical “democratic peace” theory, and part of it was an attempt to reconcile perceived U.S. strategic interests and the results of democratization. As should be readily apparent to us now, the results of democratization are often in tension or at odds with those interests as Washington defines them.

Indeed, so long as Washington defines U.S. interests in such a way that Iran must severely limit or abolish its nuclear program, a fully democratic Iran would be no less intransigent on this issue and possibly even more so. A democratic Iran would probably expect to be treated as the regional power that it is, and it would probably seek to wield influence and project power as any regional power would. Many Westerners seem to assume that a democratic Iran would “solve” the “problem” of an empowered Iran that is not effectively checked by any of its Arab neighbors. Having supported the destruction of the Iraqi government that would and could have balanced Iran, anti-Iranian hawks have been eager to find some way to change the regime in Iran that they helped empower. In the short and medium-term, this will not work. Iran’s government is not going to succumb to opposition forces in the foreseeable future, because it is a much stronger, deeper and more entrenched state apparatus than the ramshackle post-Soviet governments that fell and keep falling.

Boot states quite clearly what many Western Green movement sympathizers have believed all along: support for the Green movement is appropriate and necessary mainly because it provides the U.S. with a way to “solve” the problem with Iran’s regime, and it does so with minimal risk to us. This is why the Green protests received intense coverage for months, and why the protests that are destabilizing an Asian ally in Thailand barely register. Given the relative weakness of the opposition in Iran, it was always far-fetched that the protests would significantly change or topple the Iranian government. There are other problems with the administration’s Iran policy, but its unwillingness to spend much time or energy on the Green movement has not been one of them.