So, at first glance, the fact that Obama won’t be meeting with the Dalai Lama when the latter is in Washington this month seems like a betrayal. The question, as it often is with Obama, is whether the president is playing a very subtle, long game to achieve his ideals, or abandoning those ideals altogether out of weak-kneed realism. ~Michelle Goldberg

Those can’t be the only options, and that can’t be the real question here. If every Obama decision has to be classified as either idealism by other means or “weak-kneed realism,” there will be a great deal of confusion, because there is good reason to think that neither description applies in most of these cases. When Obama refrained from speaking out on behalf of Iranian protesters this summer, I don’t think it was a long-term cunning plan to help the Iranian opposition by not overtly helping them. It was nonetheless the right decision for the U.S. and the one that better serves the interests of the Iranian opposition. Had Obama met with the Dalai Lama, what aspect of Chinese policy in Tibet would have changed? Nothing would have changed, because repeated meetings between our Presidents and the Dalai Lama have made no significant difference in how Beijing treats Tibet. Domination and control of Tibet are part and parcel of the new Chinese nationalist narrative, and it is hard to imagine what our government would really be able to do to change that. These meetings and the postponement of this meeting are occasions for moral posturing that accomplishes little or nothing.

Many people object that Obama does not meet with enough dissidents and exiles and he does not say enough on their behalf, but other than making himself feel and look better what do such meetings and speeches achieve? Goldberg floats the idea that Obama may be able to do more for Tibet by not antagonizing Beijing by meeting with the Dalai Lama first, but this holds out the hope that another state is going to be willing to budge on something that it regards as non-negotiable. As a matter of diplomatic protocol, it seems appropriate to meet with Chinese government leaders before meeting with the de facto leader of Tibetan resistance, but when Obama finally does meet him what will he have proved by doing so?

I don’t entirely agree with David Lindsay at PostRight when he says that Obama was “right to snub” the Dalai Lama, because it doesn’t matter to me whether Tibet was a feudal theocracy or a democratic paradise in 1959. No one needs to endorse the Han supremacism embodied in Chinese policy towards Tibet (and Xinjiang) to recognize that these are China’s internal affairs and nothing is going to be gained for Tibetans and Uighurs by publicly meddling or complaining about things that Beijing believes are none of our concern. Tibetan autonomy or independence would most likely be better for ethnic Tibetans, but we cannot successfully conduct relations with other major powers by continually encouraging the fragmentation and dissolution of their nation-states.

Just when I think the WSJ op-ed page couldn’t get any crazier, Bret Stephens writes another column. A few days after Eli Lake reported that Obama and Netanyahu had confirmed tacit U.S. support for Israel’s nuclear arsenal, reinforcing a policy that has been in place for forty years, Stephens conjures up a vision of the future a few months from now in which the Security Council demands Israeli nuclear disarmament and, even more incredibly, the United States acquiesces in this demand. At some point in the future, the other members of the Security Council might support such a resolution, but Washington would never abstain. There is not the slightest chance of this happening. Obviously Stephens’ vision of the future is silly, but that doesn’t automatically make it trivial. It matters because there is a sizeable part of the public willing to believe such claims, and it is part of the ongoing campaign to make Obama appear as someone who sells out U.S. allies.

The administration has made itself more vulnerable to this sort of attack by repeatedly emphasizing an interest in global nuclear disarmament, when the reality is that demands for nonproliferation and disarmament will never apply to U.S. allies in any meaningful way. On the proliferation front, India has already received the exemptions it desired on processing and enrichment in connection with the U.S.-India nuclear deal. Israel has evidently received assurances that all of this talk of a world without nuclear weapons is no cause for them to worry about the status of their arsenal. This is primarily a political problem, because the administration has given the impression that nonproliferation and disarmament are top priorities and Obama has expressed this in universal terms, which his otherwise hapless critics can use to distort how he wants to handle allied nuclear arsenals.

On the whole, Obama’s hawkish enemies ought to be satisfied with the President on matters of policy. Their party political need seems to keep outweighing this consideration, so they are forced to invent policies Obama does not support and will not pursue. Hence the plainly ludicrous claim that Obama will one day make Israel give up its nukes. It’s similar to how GOP unsuccessfully tried to campaign against Obama last year: he was portrayed as the foreign policy naif, the new McGovern, the Pentagon budget-slasher, etc. , but he was none of these things (or no more so than his opponent). It’s as if these hawks remain trapped in the late 1970s, and what is more they remain convinced that the public has not changed in any meaningful way since then. Right on cue, you have Elliott Abrams invoking “Scoop” Jackson and his staffers as the model for the anti-Obama resistance. Republican hawks write and act as if the New Democrats had never existed, and they seem to think that no one will notice that conventional Democratic foreign policy thinking is far closer to “Scoop” Jackson than it is to McGovern.

I suppose there is some method to all of this. Just as every “emergency” security measure eventually becomes a permanent, non-negotiable minimum of government power, and just as every new program becomes “vital” and its repeal quickly becomes unthinkable and politically toxic, the logic of aggressive foreign policy means that there must be ever-increasing projections of power. Merely maintaining the status quo and perpetuating virtually every policy overseas are no longer considered enough, and will be portrayed as “retreat” and “surrender.”

If U.S. hegemony is not advancing, hawks seem worried that the unnecessary and dangerous nature of all this power projection will become clear. This is why there has to be a constant buzz of alarm and fearmongering about “emerging” threats that are not really serious threats. The public has to be kept in a state of some anxiety and agitation about the rest of the world, which they would otherwise not think about very much, or else they might begin to resent the waste of resources and needless trouble that hegemony entails.

I appreciated Kevin Sullivan’s lengthy response to my earlier post on Iran sanctions. Sullivan and I are at odds on several points, but where we may disagree most of all is here:

The notion that the United States and the greater international community have somehow failed to reach out to the Islamic Republic in an effort to normalize relations and ease economic sanctions is totally false and unfounded.

It depends very much on what we mean by “reach out.” No one will deny that there has been a history of engaging in talks with and making gestures of goodwill to Tehran as another means of pursuing unobtainable objectives. Indeed, I never claimed otherwise in my first post. Obama is alternately praised or cursed for his “engagement” of Iran, but the administration crafted its policy of engagement with the hope that it will yield Iranian disarmament. This is something that will not happen, which is not an argument against pursuing full normalization of relations. On the contrary, recognizing the futility of trying to disarm Iran is the beginning of working to integrate Iran as a pillar of regional security. For most participants in the debate, the thought of rapprochement is unthinkable until Iran abandons nuclear weapons ambitions. As I see it, rapprochement is the only way to adapt to Iran’s eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons without setting off the regional arms race many fear and without resorting to the use of force that will trigger broader conflict and which will fail to achieve its objectives in any case.

Most of the “reaching out” in the past has been carried out through symbolic gestures and rhetorical nods. Apologizing for the U.S. role in the 1953 coup did not end or modify the policy of dual containment that the Clinton administration pursued. Sending mid-level officials to Geneva, as the Bush administration did in its second term, did not remove the threat of “pre-emptive” use of force against Iranian nuclear facilities, and it did not halt covert support for Jundullah in eastern Iran. Were an historically hostile regime to make such half-hearted, minimal gestures to Washington, very few Americans in or out of government would find them credible.

There is a similar assumption afflicting Russia policy debate, as if there has been a time in the last eighteen years when U.S. policy towards Russia was not in some important respect confrontational and provocative. The argument is much the same: we have repeatedly sought good relations with Russia to no avail. As with Iran, the examples of our goodwill towards Russia are few and not very meaningful. If we recognize this, Russian skepticism and distrust are much easier to understand. Western hawks on Russia love to cite Bush’s silly remark that he had looked into Putin’s soul, as if this kind of empty public banter meant anything to Moscow at the same moment when Bush was pushing to scrap the ABM Treaty and expand NATO to their borders over their strenuous objections. Our government makes some minimal move, and this is supposed to override all the other substantive complaints the other government has.

Even when our government does something that does address the other government’s concerns, Washington always expects unreasonably great reciprocation from the other side. Having scrapped the missile defense system in central Europe, Washington expects Russian aid in pressuring Iran, which it was never likely to do under any circumstances. In short, even when we budge on points of contention, we give an inch and expect the other state to give up a mile, and then we recoil in frustration when the other state does not respond to our efforts to “reach out.” So, yes, we have “reached out” to Tehran many times over the years, but always haltingly, inconsistently and never with any intention of accepting Iran’s core security interests. It is no surprise that this sort of engagement has yielded nothing of consequence.

P.S. I would add that most of the “international community” has no interest in pressuring Iran on this or any other matter, much less compelling it to abandon its nuclear ambitions. This is a preoccupation limited almost entirely to the U.S. and our European allies. What makes effective sanctions regimes against Iran so politically difficult to create is the broad indifference of much to the world to the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons, because most nations in the world can see quite clearly that it is nothing to them whether or not Iran has a nuclear deterrent. Rising Asian powers and emerging-market countries simply do not see Iran as a threat, so when we are talking about engaging or “reaching out” to Iran we are speaking primarily of the U.S. and our major European allies. Even most of the latter engage in significant commerce with Iran.

It’s a matter of trust. And the Israelis don’t have it when it comes to President Obama. In the most recent Jerusalem Post poll, the number of Israelis who see Obama as pro-Israeli is just 4 percent. That’s not a typo; it was down two points since June. Fully 51 per cent say Obama is more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israeli. ~Richard Wolffe

I confess that I find these numbers mystifying. If Bush had an 88% “pro-Israeli” rating, and his administration was partly responsible for Hamas’ acquisition of elected power in Gaza, one could conclude that public perception of an American President’s “pro-Israel” leanings has absolutely nothing to do with the susbstance of the policies he pursues. How could it have been “pro-Israeli” to encourage Olmert to wage his failed, counterproductive war in Lebanon? Yet this is what Bush did. To be fair, Obama supported the same failed, counterproductive war, just as he supported the operation in Gaza, and despite some slightly tougher rhetoric his stance on settlements is not really any different. How can Israeli opinion change so dramatically when the two men are virtually indistinguishable in their predictable, guaranteed support for Israel and most of its current policies?

I would have thought that one would need to be under the influence of mind-altering drugs to see Obama as “pro-Palestinian.” The idea that he is “pro-Palestinian” is so painfully, absurdly wrong that I don’t know quite what to make of it. I suppose it is possible that systematic misinformation could lead to such results, but even this would require a gullibility and willful blindness on the part of the general population that it seems unlikely. Wolffe remarked at one point that “it’s hard to be a mediator when one side feels you are overwhelmingly one-sided,” which is quite amusing when you consider that Wolffe is referring to the Israeli side believing that the U.S. under Obama is “overwhelmingly one-sided” in favor of the Palestinians. This is as close to the opposite of current political reality as one can get. How can anyone contend with public opinion so completely unmoored from reality?

Like Jay Cost, I am fatigued by the permanent campaign, but he isn’t making any sense when he says this:

And so, in this case, what would otherwise have been a “mere” rejection of Chicago and Mayor Daley has now become a rejection of the entire country [bold mine-DL]. Why? Because of his decision to perpetuate the permanent campaign while holding the power of the executive.

This is wrong in several ways. If the President lends his support to an American city’s Olympic bid and that bid fails (as most informed observers outside the Chicago delegation guessed it would from the beginning), the “entire country” has not been rejected. This is ridiculous. While we invest it with some national symbolic importance, the Presidency does not embody “the entire country.” Though we may forget this at times, the Presidency does not even embody the entire federal government. There is something rather creepy in Cost’s assumption that a rejection of Obama, if that is what happened, is a rejection of America.

Why don’t we see the decision instead an affirmation of Lula, an embrace of Brazil, an endorsement of Rio de Janeiro? Because Obama’s critics and fans alike insist on making it about him and us, and they do this even when they are complaining that Obama inserts himself into everything. The problem here is as much our national self-absorption and continental provincialism as it is Obama’s politicking: most people criticizing Obama for this trip could not imagine losing out to the Brazilians, and it is even more unthinkable when the President involves himself. This is a product of an American feeling of entitlement, as if our city’s bid had to be the prohibitive favorite just because it was ours. After all, why would it be a “shock” that the IOC gave the next Games to a major city in an emerging-market country in South America instead of giving the U.S. yet another chance to host the Olympics? Everything pointed to Rio all along, but for many of Obama’s critics this seems incredible.

More to the point, while Obama went to Copenhagen when he didn’t have to go, it was the breathless obsession with this trip that both critics and admirers indulged in that has created the impression that the IOC’s decision represented, as Larry Kudlow absurdly said earlier today, “a crushing blow for the United States.” As far as I could tell, Rio had had the win locked up for some time, and today’s vote was mostly a formality. If Obama is “just the President,” as Cost says, we should be willing to ignore him whether or not he inserts himself into all sorts of things. Obama persists in campaign mode to the extent that he does because journalists, pundits and viewers respond to it and keep giving him reason to continue.

P.S. I should add that if Obama had ignored Chicago’s bid and it went down to defeat as it was always going to do, we would have heard endless groaning from the usual suspects about how Obama refused to “stand up” for America or some such nonsense.

David Brooks ruins a good argument with this:

Back in 2006, they [talk radio hosts] threatened to build a new majority on anti-immigration fervor. Republicans like J.D. Hayworth and Randy Graf, both of Arizona, built their House election campaigns under that banner. But these two didn’t march to glory. Both lost their campaigns.

This is at best misleading. It remains true that immigration restriction will never win elections on its own, and it is also true that candidates who present themselves as nothing other than restrictionists are not going to win in the absence of any other compelling message. Hayworth and Graf were primarily restrictionist candidates, and they lost during an incredibly bad year for their party. There were more than a few supporters of “comprehensive reform” that also lost that year, because voters repudiated the GOP mostly because of the war that almost all Republicans, including both restrictionists and pro-amnesty types, continued to support. This is the real weakness of the Republican Party that Brooks can never bring himself to acknowledge in his analysis. It does not help make his case against both popular and populist conservatism, because most mainstream conservatives of all stripes are implicated in this foreign policy failure, and few more so than Brooks himself.

What Brooks fails to mention is that McCain and Huckabee did as well as they did during the primaries partly by avoiding the issue of immigration or, in Huckabee’s case, by simply reversing his immigration stance. How many times did McCain claim that he had “learned his lesson” from backlash in 2007? Of course, he had learned only that he and his allies could not be as obvious in their contempt for rank-and-file conservatives. In any event, he ignored immigration throughout the primaries and the general election, because he knew that there were no votes to be won by talking about his record. One moment Huckabee was the media darling, a folksy “compassionate” conservative who spoke to the NEA and defended mass immigration, and the next he attempted to make himself a populist firebrand aligned with the Minutemen and Chuck Norris. Furthermore, the problems most mainstream conservatives claimed to have with Huckabee concerned his fiscal record and his flirtations with foreign policy realism. Penalizing that sort of “deviationism” would likely not trouble Brooks quite so much. Brooks also fails to mention that the candidate favored by many of Brooks’ reformist conservatives, Giuliani, flamed out even more spectacularly than Thompson. As out of touch and unrepresentative as Limbaugh et al. may be, the reformists are even more so.

That said, Brooks’ larger point concerning the last primary contest is valid. Conservative activists and talk radio hosts are not representative of Republican voters in many of their policy views and their candidate preferences. They tried to shove obviously flawed candidates down the throats of primary voters by applying inconsistent, changing standards of “purity” to different candidates. What made Huckabee’s fiscal record absolutely unacceptable was irrelevant when judging Romney, and McCain’s minimal compromises on life issues were far less important than Romney and Giuliani’s complete lack of credibility. Activists and radio hosts responded well to the candidates that paid homage to them and deferred to them, and they were deeply opposed to the candidates who usually paid them little attention and fed off of positive mainstream media coverage. What the primaries showed was not merely the illusory political power of the talk show hosts, but they also showed that movement leaders and institutions had remarkably limited influence over Republican primary voters.

Speaking of myths that are constantly re-woven, the myth that the GOP is dominated and directed by its most conventionally conservative members, which movement conservatives promote to exaggerate their own importance, is one that Brooks must find very useful. What the primaries showed was that those who are most self-consciously movement conservatives have limited power in a party they claim to define, and they are forced to settle for whatever opportunistic, accommodating moderate Republican politicians happen to come along. Once the latter start to use all the right buzzwords, movement conservatives will engage in any number of contortions to rationalize support for politicians who routinely play them for fools.

Reports of Tim Pawlenty’s early preparations for a 2012 presidential campaign have drawn a lot of attention today, so I thought I would look at Pawlenty’s statements on foreign policy to see what we could expect from him if he did run for higher office. Most recently, Pawlenty went on record declaring Obama’s decision on missile defense to be “appeasement.” This is standard Republican boilerplate at this point, so some conservatives might be inclined to forgive him for repeating such nonsense on the grounds that it doesn’t necessarily reflect how he thinks about foreign policy. It could be that he will mouth stupid phrases to satisfy certain activists, but will then demonstrate some understanding of policy at a later date. I’m not holding my breath.

However, Pawlenty did not simply call the decision appeasement, but went on to make this bizarre claim:

Appeasement and weakness did not stop the Nazis, appeasement did not stop the Soviets, and appeasement did not stop the terrorists before 9/11.

I call this bizarre because there were no meaningful attempts to appease the Soviets or jihadis. Even the harshest anti-Clinton hawks could and did acknowledge that he did not attempt to “appease” Al Qaeda. For the most part, they have attacked Clinton for not engaging in enough military action in response to terrorist strikes, but that was it. Unless you tendentiously define detente as appeasement, there is nothing in U.S.-Soviet relations that would be relevant. In other words, Pawlenty is spouting pure nonsense, but he thinks he is making a significant contribution to the debate, and his audience is eating it up. What worries me about this statement is that it isn’t even remotely close to a serious statement about European security and U.S. interests. What worries me about Republican cluelessness on foreign policy more generally is that this statement counts as intelligent, informed commentary in GOP circles.

Yes, Pawlenty was speaking to the Values Voters Summit, so he was to some extent playing to the crowd and throwing them the red meat they want, but that has to be balanced with some modicum of knowledge and understanding. Otherwise, he would just be a Minnesotan version of Palin. This is supposed to be the viable, credible alternative to Mitt “No Apology” Romney?

Is there evidence from other remarks that would suggest Pawlenty knows anything about foreign policy? The more I search, the more discouraging the results. There are not many results, and those that I do find confirm my impression that he doesn’t know anything and has compensated by echoing the most ridiculous criticisms of the current administration. Pawlenty just launched his Freedom First PAC, which is not primarily concerned with foreign policy, but in his first conference call for the PAC he kept harping on the missile defense decision. This tells me that the primary debates are probably going to be dominated by candidates trying to out-do one another in hawkish ignorance. Pawlenty’s off to a good start in that respect.

I don’t understand who the audience is supposed to be for Henninger’s latest column. Henninger repeats the now standard complaint that Obama is ignoring dissidents in authoritarian states while making (largely superficial) overtures to their governments, and goes on to say:

For the American left, now fused to financial support from domestic labor unions, the world’s dispossessed represent a threat—less costly labor selling goods into the high-cost world.

Active help for democratic oppositions in Venezuela, Syria, Egypt, Iran or even Guinea hardly serves this interest. Today, social justice stops at the water’s edge.

This doesn’t actually represent the current politics of organized labor in this country, nor does it correctly characterize progressive opposition to free trade. Most major labor unions want to bring immigrant laborers into their organizations to bolster their numbers, which is why they have supported various forms of amnesty for many years. To the extent that the unions oppose certain free trade agreements, they often do so because they regard these agreements as being raw deals for “the world’s dispossessed” and because these agreements do not contain sufficient protections for foreign laborers.

Some people in Latin America have done very well thanks to neoliberal policies, but the gains have been very unevenly distributed and concentrated among the wealthiest in these countries. Economic inequality and social stratification, which were already considerable before neoliberalism swept the region, have grown worse as neoliberalism has advanced. The left-populist backlash across Latin America did not come from nowhere, but instead originated out of dissatisfaction with the limited or non-existent benefits that the poor majority was receiving from neoliberal policies. Had “the world’s dispossessed” benefited so greatly from these policies, they would hardly be embracing political movements that denounce those policies and preach nationalization of resources and industries and redistribution of wealth instead.

Progressives and their labor allies know this, and will not be shamed by lectures on social justice from The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, why would business-oriented Republicans be interested in a critique of the administration for its lack of concern for international social justice? Do the business-oriented readers who make up a significant part of WSJ’s readership think it is a problem if social justice “stops at the water’s edge”? Would they not consider this a good thing?

Henninger writes as if there had been sustained, active help for democratic dissidents in these countries under the previous administration, when we know very well that whatever limited help the Bush administration had been willing to offer Egyptian dissidents was withdrawn soon thereafter. If “social justice stops at the water’s edge” today, it hardly went overseas in the past. Perhaps someone is outraged that Obama has not taken stronger steps against the junta in Guinea, but does anyone really think that the actions of the government of Guinea, however abhorrent and wrong they are, should occupy much of the attention of the United States government?

What we have with Henninger’s column is an attack on Obama ostensibly from the right because Obama is conducting a foreign policy that is effectively too conservative and insufficiently radical and revolutionary. There is no significant constituency whose opinion of Obama will change because of this kind of argument. It is a ridiculous kind of opposition, and it is one that will gain no purchase with the general public.

One of the strangest lines of attack against Obama that I have seen this year has to be the talk radio-inspired meme that Obama’s travel to the IOC meeting in Copenhagen is some kind of outrage or a case of dereliction of duty. Gingrich has joined in, complaining that Obama has more pressing matters to attend to, the talk radio legions are dutifully repeating how offended they are that Obama has gone to Denmark, and even Ruben Navarette felt compelled to add to the endless whining:

If you want to see Obama get passionate in pursuit of an international cause, you’ll have to go to Copenhagen, where the president and first lady this week will lobby the International Olympic Committee to pick their home city of Chicago to host the 2016 Olympics.

One might think that we could stand to have a President with fewer passionate international pursuits after the last one’s enthusiastic pursuit of dangerous and destructive causes, but can someone explain to me what exactly the substantive objection to Obama’s Copenhagen visit is? One could argue that that bringing the Olympics to Chicago will ultimately be bad for Chicago by requiring the city to take on unnecessary debt or by subjecting the city to years of construction and upheaval, but on the whole this has not been the complaint.

More important, why are his domestic critics upset that he is taking time away from his domestic agenda to push for Chicago’s bid? Shouldn’t his critics be pleased if he is wasting time and not pushing for health care legislation? If he had not gone, it would have taken about five minutes for the same critics to declare that Obama had “thrown Chicago under the bus,” or that the “citizen of the world” had no loyalty to his adopted hometown, or that Obama really wanted the non-American candidate cities to have a better chance, no doubt because he is, as Navarette absurdly claims, “ambivalent about America’s role as the world’s one great superpower.” Should Chicago not win the ’16 Games, and if the IOC chooses Rio instead, we will undoubtedly hear the same people complaining that Obama failed to get the Olympics in the United States because he is “ambivalent about America’s role as the world’s one great superpower.” It wouldn’t be true in either case, but that hasn’t seemed to stop any of these people so far.