There are several items that have already caught my attention today. The first is Peter Ferrara’s article for American Spectator on Obama and Iran. Ferrara writes:

A cherished maxim of self-congratulatory liberals is the notion that diplomacy and negotiation are always the best course of action because “as long as the two sides are talking, they are not shooting.” That was not true on the morning of December 7, 1941. On that very day, Japanese diplomats were in Washington to continue ongoing talks for peace between Japan and America, as Japanese planes were slaughtering some 2,400 American servicemen at Pearl Harbor.

President Obama now has America, and Israel, on that same course in regard to Iran.

I doubt very much that very many liberals would recognize this as one of their cherished maxims, but I’ll leave that to them. There is no guarantee that negotiations preclude fighting, and this is not just because of the possibility of sneak attacks or one party negotiating in bad faith. After all, negotiating peace treaties and armistices presupposes that there is an ongoing conflict. In general, however, avoiding war by pursuing a diplomatic track is preferable to war. If there is to be a war with Iran, it will be started by U.S. or Israeli forces launching, well, something very much like sneak attacks on Iranian facilities. The main difference is that most of the world will be expecting these attacks, and much of the Western world will have acquiesced in them. If anyone should be suspicious of Obama’s extended hand, it should be the Iranians, who could reasonably conclude that Obama is merely buying time or going through the motions of diplomatic overtures to make war “inevitable.” Most of the pre-invasion “diplomacy” the Bush administration engaged in from September 2002 until the start of the war was meaningless. It was done for the benefit of squeamish liberal hawks, multilateralists and pro-war Labour figures in Britain. As we know very well, the decision to go to war had been made months earlier. It is the Iranians who are in the position America was in during the closing months of 1941; we and one of our allies are the ones openly discussing the possibility of bombing their country without having suffered any injuries at their hands. Obviously, this is not the repeat of Pearl Harbor that Ferrara means to conjure up for us, but that is the only way to make sense of the comparison.

Ferrara’s article is representative of the distorted language and thinking that permits American hawks to cast the objectively aggressive, provocative moves of the U.S. and our allies as defensive and the defensive, minimal responses of other states as aggression, revanchism, revisionism, and imperialism. By this thinking, Georgia was not acting aggressively even though it started last year’s war with Russia; Russia is necessarily the aggressor because it is Russia and opposes our projection of power into their backyard. This is how American hawks can continue to portray the events of August 2008 as proof of Russian “expansionism” and aggression: they invert the meanings of all the relevant words and corrupt language to suit their purposes.

As Michael Lind recently observed in an essay Dan McCarthy has already mentioned:

First, defensive military measures that these nations undertake to deter U.S. attack — Russia’s attempt to intimidate Georgia, China’s development of “anti-access” capabilities to reduce the ability of the U.S. to defeat it in a war over Taiwan, and Iran’s not-so-disguised attempt to obtain nuclear weapons to deter conventional U.S. or Israeli attacks — are portrayed by American policymakers and pundits as aggressive. According to this Orwellian double standard, U.S./NATO encirclement of post-Soviet Russia on its borders is alleged to be “defensive,” while feeble protest gestures like Russian military flights to Cuba or the bullying of Ukraine are defined as “aggressive” actions that threaten a new Cold War. The knight with the best sword naturally wants to ban the use of shields and armor.

In addition to defining the defensive reactions of Russia, China and Iran to U.S. provocations in their own neighborhoods as diabolical schemes for regional or global conquest, some champions of the Pax Americana have pretended to identify a new global ideological struggle against an “axis of autocracy” or “authoritarian capitalism.” In reality, of course, three countries could hardly be less similar to one another than Russia, China and Iran, which seek to benefit from the existing world system on their own terms rather than overthrow it.

As I was saying earlier this week, the hysteria that hawks display at the smallest sign of another state acting in its own legitimate interests does not come from a real fear of growing foreign threats. It is a pose. It is an an act put on to keep the public from thinking or questioning the reason for so many deployments, wars and permanent installations around the globe. An important part of the play is to make the audience believe that our policies are not arbitrary, aggressive and unnecessary, but have been forced upon us by myriad foes that would annihilate us if we did not keep attacking other states without cause. Their opponents are so busy untangling the nonsensical language and misinformation they put out that there is scarcely any time to debate the real policy, which I suppose is one of the side benefits for the hawks.

Bret Stephens claims that they are, and as evidence for this claim he offers an anecdote about an anonymous French writer who has found Obama’s foreign policy underwhelming and has somehow concluded that neoconservatives have “returned.” It is worth noting that this anecdote is all that Stephens has to back up his argument that “the world” finds Obama’s approach wanting and is “casting around for an alternative.”

It is not at all clear that neoconservatives have “returned” in any way, and it seems highly unlikely that many people overseas are now craving the firm smack of incompetent warmongering that the neocons can offer. To a large extent, the neocons never went anywhere in domestic policy and political debates. This is because there has not been any accountability in either the foreign policy community or the conservative movement for their colossal failures and misjudgments. That said, they are not exactly riding high, either. Neocons continue to be taken far too seriously and they continue to have access to a great many media outlets, but for the most part they have been leading the Republican Party’s charge into spluttering irrelevance on foreign policy. Having destroyed the party’s political fortunes with the war in Iraq, they seem intent on sinking the party even deeper into the ditch into which it has crashed. If this is a “return,” I wonder what decline looks like.

One of the problems the GOP and the conservative movement has had over the last several years is the retreat inside their own echo chambers, in which they keep repeating the same nonsense to themselves and reinforcing all of their false assumptions. The foreign policy cocooning seems the worst to me, but the stagnation and persistence in error we see in most Republican foreign policy arguments are functions of the larger intellectual collapse on the right. Stephens’ op-ed is one example of this. The world is not looking for an alternative to Obama at the moment, but Stephens simply asserts that it is because a foreigner (a Frenchman, no less!) pitched a counterintuitive idea for a column to him. This assertion is similar to the repeated claims made by Iraq hawks throughout 2006 and after that the public had not turned against the war when it clearly had. It is understandable that ideologues feel compelled to ignore reality, because it almost never fits their predetermined schemes, but when they are reduced to making things up out of thin air they have reached a new depth of desperation.

So Stephens claims that the world is turning against Obama at a time when it is doing no such thing. Just days before this Republican hawks were outraged at what a warm reception Obama had the U.N. Aziz has noticed the incoherence:

One need only look at Republican bastion Redstate.com for evidence that the GOP is unserious on foreign policy, such as this typically incoherent argument that wanting America to be respected around the world is a “leftist delusion” while simultaneously blaming Obama for a loss of that respect… in Russia, where earlier they were hyperventilating about Obama’s “cave” on the missile defense issue, on the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland. The ideological whiplash about Russia is nicely instructive of the complete lack of any principle of actual national security, just recycled cold-war rhetoric. It’s embarassing.

What is remarkable is that Republican hawks are not embarrassed by it, and they are now so far out of it that they think they are winning the debate. They imagine that they have already become credible leaders on foreign policy, and they think that the rest of the world is now moving their way. That is what Stephens means when he says that neocons are “back,” and he could not be more wrong.

[Corrected] Kevin Sullivan does not find this argument against Iran sanctions persuasive. Scoblete Sullivan believes that absolute opposition to sanctions is helpful to anti-Iran hawks:

Rejecting sanctions doesn’t make Iran go away, it simply limits the viable options for dealing with the recalcitrant regime. Instead of a policy shaded in grays you get the more hawkish option of black and white—attack or do nothing. This dichotomy incidentally suits the hawkish community just fine.

Of course, refraining from imposing punitive measures on a state with which we have no necessary conflict of interest is not “doing nothing.” It could be the prelude to rapprochement and the normalization of relations, the opening of economic and diplomatic ties, and the de-escalation of tensions through the region. That is not really “doing nothing.” It only counts as inaction for those who have been conditioned by the nature of foreign policy debate in this country to equate coercion with “doing something.” One of the reasons why we routinely define “doing something” in terms of coercion is that our foreign policy is not tied to concrete interests of the American people, but has instead become a hegemonic project with a life and vested interests of its own.

One of the reasons why I take such an absolutist position against sanctions is that I object to a policy debate in which the main points of contention concern the means to be used to pursue a fruitless and futile goal. We have seen all of this before with our policies towards Iraq since 1991. Sanctions did not “work” to topple Hussein’s government, and they imposed a terrible cost on Iraqis in the process. Perversely, it was pro-war figures who exploited the inhumane nature of the sanctions regime to justify invasion. After all, they said, you don’t want these terrible sanctions to continue indefinitely. This was one of the bogus “humanitarian” rationales for attacking Iraq. If we continue down the path towards more severe sanctions, thereby conceding that the Iranian government is doing something unacceptable for which they must be punished, we will be hearing the call for military intervention a few years later, and no doubt hawks will claim that they are supporting such action for the sake of the Iranian people whom they will have been happily impoverishing for years.

Sanctions will not “work” to compel Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, but the more important point that I was trying to make in the earlier post is that our Iran policy ought not be concerned with Iran’s nuclear ambitions at all. Cutting off gasoline imports won’t be “successful,” just as a number of other possible sanctions will never gain enough international support to be economically punishing on the regime, but we shouldn’t be trying to find mechanisms with which to coerce Iran into abandoning a nuclear program that two of its close neighbors and several other major powers already have. While it is important to stress that neither sanctions nor military action will change Tehran’s behavior, those are merely pragmatic arguments. They are valid and useful as far as they go, but they do not go far enough. The crucial point that cannot be emphasized too much is that we should not be trying to change Tehran’s behavior, or at least we should be thinking far more creatively about how to relate to Tehran without falling back on using different kinds of coercion.

Scoblete Sullivan mentions “shades of gray,” but that suggests a wide range of possibilities and a variety of ways to approach Iran. These do not exist at present. The debate over sanctions is mostly a debate over the degree of hostility Washington should direct at the Iranian government. My view is that absolute opposition to sanctions is the only credible way to reject an Iran policy defined by this hostility. Once you buy into the idea that Iran’s nuclear program is “unacceptable” and must be stopped for the good of all, you have already given the hawks everything they need to keep ratcheting up the pressure until the “inevitability” of war has become the consensus view. Why not start instead from the assumption that war with Iran is the unacceptable outcome and change our behavior towards Iran accordingly?

The essential flaw in our Iran policy is that it defines as “unacceptable” something that we cannot prevent by any means available to us. Having set an impossible goal (short of a major land war involving hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Americans), the debate over the efficacy of different forms of coercion is practically useless. It is true that I am not offering a “viable option” for coercing Iran into changing its behavior, but I don’t accept that our debate should be so constricted and narrow that our only “viable” policy options are the ones that hawks find acceptable.

Andrew and Fareed Zakaria have picked up on the same point I was making in my last column, which is that most conservative of Obama on foreign policy is hysterical and laughably weak. Andrew and Zakaria were focusing on reaction to Obama’s U.N. speech, which he had not yet given when I wrote the column, but their remarks apply just as well to the response to the missile defense decision or almost any other decision in the last eight months.

The only thing I can think of that conservative critics have had right is that the administration’s treatment of Honduras really has been deplorable. Mainstream conservatives are right that penalizing the transitional government and calling for Zelaya’s return to power have contributed to the current unrest there, but these objections gain no traction in part because they come from people who no longer have any credibility when it coms to foreign policy. They happen to have been right on one issue because they are reflexively opposing anything and everything Obama does, and it was inevitable that Obama was going to blunder at some point. There is also every reason to think that if Obama had taken a diametrically opposed position, embraced the Micheletti government and opposed Zelaya at every turn, we would have never heard the end of his “coddling” of coup leaders and his “betrayal” of democratic principles. The common theme in all of this criticism is that Obama must be weak and every decision he makes reflects that weakness, but these criticisms persuade no one because they are obviously, embarrassingly driven by partisan obsession and not substantive concerns about national security or America’s reputation abroad.

Where Andrew and Zakaria’s columns are likewise mostly unpersuasive is in their claim that Obama’s handling of foreign policy has already produced a number of successes. Andrew claims:

For the first time in two decades Israel does not have carte blanche from the White House to do whatever it wants in the West Bank.

We have seen the administration issue slightly sterner warnings to Israel on settlements and then proceed to do little or nothing when those warnings were blatantly ignored. As far as I can see, there have been no consequences for the continued building of settlements, and I don’t think there will be any. The stern talk on settlements was not much more than talk. If you are going to judge Obama’s handling of foreign policy by how effective he is in halting Israeli settlement-building, you will have to give him poor marks, but this is not a fair test. Officially, Washington has opposed settlement building in the West Bank all along, but this doesn’t mean anything because there is never a long-term price to be paid for ignoring Washington on this question. Obama is not going to extract that price. Were he to do so, he would provoke a hysteria that would make the last few months seem quiet and peaceful. He has more pressing concerns and won’t want to have his time and political capital consumed by a damaging fight on that issue.

Andrew and Zakaria are also attaching far too much importance to Russian statements on Iran. Zakaria called recent Kremlin statements a “striking shift,” but there has been no shift, and while Andrew is more skeptical he has cited Medvedev’s remark about inevitable sanctions as if it meant something. Like the administration they are praising, they are holding out unrealistic hopes of Russian cooperation on an issue where this cooperation is not going to be forthcoming. The administration and its supporters are setting themselves up for a fall, and they open themselves to the jeers of an otherwise hapless opposition that Moscow has played Obama for a fool. Russian cooperation may be forthcoming in other areas, and repairing relations with Moscow might yield some desirable results, but to measure the success of Obama’s Russia policy by Moscow’s willingness to do something it has no intention of doing is to rig the game in favor of the hawks who preach confrontation and aggression.

What conservative critics ignore and what Andrew only touches on towards the end is that the Bush administration oversaw setback after failure after defeat for American influence and power. Iran has become a far more influential regional power thanks to the folly of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, democracy fetishists helped to strengthen the hold of Hamas in Gaza to the detriment of Palestinians and Israelis, and Russophobes helped to encourage Saakashvili’s recklessness with talk of NATO membershop and provoked Russian ire with the recognition of Kosovo that led to the de facto permanent partition of an American ally. Hawks have routinely unleashed forces they do not understand, cannot control and are unwilling to contain, and they still have the gall to shout “Appeasement!” when someone else tries to repair some small measure of the damage they have done. Compared to this partial list of Bush’s major failures, Obama has done reasonably well simply by not persisting in some of his predecessor’s errors, but it is far too early to speak of success or payoff and it is a mistake to measure Obama’s success in the way that his supporters wish to do.

Chuck Todd and Andrew seem to think that the Russian response to news of Iran’s enrichment facility is a significant move. Todd says that the Russians seem to be “on board,” and one assumes that he means that Moscow is “on board” with a more punitive approach to Iran’s nuclear program, but this is not at all clear from the Kremlin’s statement. The Kremlin said that the Russian government wants the IAEA to investigate and that it will assist the investigation. This is not quite diplomatic boilerplate, but it is close. This is not, as Andrew says, a “breakthrough,” but a minimal statement expressing concern about reported violations of Security Council resolutions. At most the Russian government is saying that it has not officially decided how it will respond until the IAEA investigates. Russia has committed to nothing new, and it has not altered its stance on Iran sanctions, and there is little reason to think that this will change.

One of the things that worries me about trying to acquire Russian support for sanctions on Iran is that sanctioning Iran is already a counterproductive, foolish policy. It does not become a wiser policy when it has Russian backing. Significant Russian cooperation with a sanctions regime would make it more “successful” in that it would isolate Iran more fully, which would at least address part of the practical problem of imposing sanctions on Iran, but this would not lead to the result that sanctions advocates want. Most likely, China would pick up the slack and become even more heavily invested in trade with Iran than it has been. On the contrary, as opponents of sanctions keep saying, a tighter sanctions regime will harm internal political opposition to the regime, increase the political-military establishment’s hold on the economy and cause Iranians to rally behind their government in the face of outside hostility.

Another thing that worries me about pursuing Russian aid in pressuring Iran is that it leads Americans to judge the quality of our relationship with Russia and the merits of repairing relations with Moscow on the basis of Russian cooperation over an issue on which Moscow has no intention of cooperating. This makes sure that Americans conclude that there is no use in maintaining good relations with Russia because it does not get Washington what it wants. It won’t matter that Washington was never going to get what it wanted from Russia regarding Iran–the administration has held out the promise that this could happen, and the Russians will get the blame when it doesn’t happen. This is why I think it has been a mistake to frame the missile defense decision as a move designed to extract Russian help in pressuring Iran. This ensures that domestic critics can point to the “failure” to acquire this help as “proof” that the missile defense decision was misguided. The Russians have been quite blunt in saying that they see no link between the two issues, and they are right that there is no link. Instead of assessing policy options for European security on the one hand and Iran’s nuclear program on the other, and instead of judging these options on their merits, the administration has created a situation in which the quality of its decision on central European missile defense will be judged by a standard of whether it somehow advanced international pressure on Iran, which is a ridiculous standard to use.

My new column on the weakness of Republican foreign policy criticism is now up.

Jack Ross writes:

As I wrote after the Cairo speech, Obama may be the first president since Herbert Hoover to seriously believe in the cause of peace.

It is impossible to know for certain whether Obama “believes in the cause of peace,” but if we look at what the man has said and done over the years I think we can see that he does not work in the cause of peace. When we look back at his responses to wars in Lebanon, South Ossetia and Gaza waged by our allies, we see mostly uncritical and reflexive support for those responsible for escalating small-scale conflicts into larger, unnecessary wars. Obama was not on the national stage in 1999, so I do not know for sure what his view of the bombing of Serbia was, but I would be very surprised if he spoke out against a “humanitarian” intervention led by a Democratic President. At some sentimental level, it may be that many Republican and Democratic hawks “believe in the cause of peace” and are so confused as to imagine that they are contributing to the peace of the world with their constant advocacy of war. An entire generation of hawks grew up misunderstanding the meaning of “peace through strength.” They thought that it meant the constant demonstration of strength through uses of force to keep the general peace, and as a result we have seen many shows of strength (against vastly weaker opponents) and not much peace.

Hoover and Taft may have been more peacefully-inclined Wilsonians, though I am skeptical about applying this label to Taft, but we should also remember that Woodrow Wilson himself was very devoted to a belief in the “cause of peace,” which meant getting over a hundred thousand Americans killed, destabilizing Europe and the Near East for the next 90 years and indulging the destructive idea of self-determination that continues to extract a price in blood throughout the Old World. Peace is an ideal that can be exploited by hawks just as easily as freedom, democracy or human rights. By their works shall ye know them.

Even Woodrow Wilson might have blanched at the mushy-headed exhortations to world peace and collective action better suited to a college dorm-room bull session or a holiday-season Coca-Cola commercial.

“No nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” Obama intoned. “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.”

Has an American president ever expressed such implicit hostility toward his own nation’s pre-eminence in world affairs? Or so relished in recalling its failings, or so readily elevated himself and his own virtues over those of his country? ~Rich Lowry

The sentences Lowry chose as his examples of Obama’s supposed mushiness are lifted directly from Obama’s Cairo speech. I noticed those lines and said this at the time in my column for The Week:

Even if one is inclined to accept Obama’s analysis and his prescription for active American involvement around the globe, it should be easy to see why a skeptical audience would react poorly when the president said: “Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” For a president who claims to prize empathy, he certainly failed to put himself in the other’s shoes when he composed that line. It should be obvious that many in his target audience see the present world order as the elevation of America and its allies over them. Indeed, many of the more accommodating, diplomatic parts of the president’s speech can easily be read as attempts to reconcile his audience to this unwelcome arrangement.

The sentences Lowry quotes are indeed galling, but not because they express “implicit hostility toward his own nation’s pre-eminence in world affairs.” The audience of assembled delegates and dignitaries probably got a good laugh out of these lines, not because they proved Obama to be weak or naive or gullible, but because these lines are ridiculous when uttered by an American President at the present time. The galling thing about them is that they are loaded with all the arrogance other nations resent in American conduct overseas, and it is an arrogance concealed as empathy. Everyone knows that our government has sought to dominate (and has succeeded in dominating) several other nations in recent years, and many other nations take it for granted that the current world order is organized to elevate the United States and its allies above all others and to hold them to different standards of behavior than we hold the rest. If anything, the remarks that Lowry quotes are bad because no nation on the receiving end of our “leadership” can take them as anything other than window-dressing for the maintenance of U.S. hegemony. No rival major power will take calls for cooperation seriously when Washington seeks to aggrandize itself at their expense, but perhaps by sugar-coating the way things are Obama hopes to make it easier to accept the bitter reality. If I were a hegmonist, I would find it very useful that Obama puts a friendly, accommodating face on the status quo, as this will make it easier to perpetuate our unnecessary deployments and entanglements abroad. Naturally, Lowry is more interested in scoring the lame partisan point against Obama in the ongoing campaign to paint him as another Carter, so he misses how potentially helpful to Lowry’s preferred policies Obama’s disingenuous rhetoric can be.

Scoblete notices the glaring contradiction in Helprin’s alarmist op-ed from this morning’s WSJ:

Really, what is the point of being a super power if a swath of our elite exist in a state of near constant panic?

It could be that the same hegemonists who cannot stay quiet about how unparalleled and unprecedented American power is are so genuinely terrified of being dethroned that they see even the tiniest possible slippage in U.S. preeminence as the beginning of the end, but I don’t think this is the case. I am hopeful that most Americans would not be interested in perpetuating U.S. hegemony if it were not for the steady drumbeat of fearmongering, hysteria and alarmism that comes from American hawks. If the public can be misled into believing that Russia is actually “revanchist” and “expansionist,” that the peace of Europe is threatened by Obama’s “appeasement” as it was in the 1930s or that an Iranian-Venezuelan axis is, in fact, a dire and unspeakable threat to our very survival (or something along those lines), to name just a few of the nonsensical claims from this crowd, the public will be inclined to defer to hawkish policies and will want to “support the President” as he makes the decisions that they have been persuaded are necessary to prevent calamity and disaster from reaching our shores. By the same token, the public can be whipped into a frenzy against a President if he is not reflexively hawkish enough. Fortunately, it seems that disapproval of Obama’s handling of foreign policy has barely increased despite the numerous (false) charges of weakness, appeasement and surrender.

The state of “near-constant panic” Scoblete identifies is not an expression of real fear, because the threats are either manufactured or vastly exaggerated, but it is part of a concerted effort to manipulate the public into accepting policies that it neither needs nor can afford. Mark Helprin is not an idiot. Not even people at the Claremont Institute can actually believe that scrapping a small set of missile interceptors that was defending against a threat that didn’t exist makes any difference to European security, much less that it can be seriously compared to Munich or even to the controversy over deployment of nuclear missiles in western Europe. It is hype designed to frighten people, to get them to stop thinking and to begin reacting viscerally and emotionally. This is done by summoning up spectres of past totalitarian threats that are long gone and by tapping into irrational feelings of national righteousness and by encouraging a belief that our government is undermining our national greatness. It is as deliberate and crafted as it is abhorrent. It is not the product of panic, but instead derives from calm calculation about how to mislead the public and to keep them in a state of perpetual anxiety about foreign threats that the hawks are only too happy to have our soldiers combat.