Greg Scoblete shatters the main conceit in Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly today:

This is a noble sentiment, and at the level of abstraction, probablyly true. But when we descend from the realm of abstraction, it falls apart. China no doubt wants to keep the nuclear club elite, but won’t join in sanctioning Iran or pressuring North Korea. Pakistan doesn’t want to suffer from terrorist attacks, but won’t abandon the leverage provided by the Taliban. The world professes alarm at climate change, but can’t translate that alarm into concrete policy decisions commensurate with the task.

It’s all well and good to cooperate with other nations toward common goals. But such action has to be grounded in the reality that we’re still in a competitive, zero sum international system.

One of the constant themes in Obama’s foreign policy speeches is interdependence. According to this view, interdependence is something that is both unavoidable and also eminently desirable. Even though it makes every problem under the sun an American problem demanding American “leadership” and has potentially catastrophic consequences for all involved, interdependence has to be deepened and intensified as much as possible. It also follows from this conviction that major international actors ultimately have a set of shared interests that ought to compel them to cooperate. One would have to ignore, for example, that Russia and China (and, for that matter, India) have significant vested interests in doing business with Iran and will always try to prevent Western-led attempts to isolate and punish Iran.

Not only are these states uninterested in sacrificing their interests for the sake of an ideal of nonproliferation that they do not respect, but they do not even see the possibility of Iranian proliferation as a problem to be solved. Our officials assume that the Russians must want to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, because they have already concluded that this is what rational international actors must want. They begin from their assumptions and try to force other states to act according to their expectations. Unsurprisingly, they are routinely disappointed. One of the most significant problems with theories of international interdependence is that they blind their adherents to the reality of divergent national interests. This attachment to the idea of interdependence also leads its advocates, who are almost entirely to be found in Europe and America, to confuse what they want for what the world needs.

Sometimes the absurdity of this confusion becomes too overwhelming, as it did in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and even believers in interdependence had to step back and realize that Washington’s obsession with overthrowing the Iraqi government was not shared by most other major powers. For whatever reason, this experience does not cause them to reevaluate the merits of organizing foreign policy around such an idea, but forces them to hide behind “multilateralism,” as if blunders committed by many nations together (e.g., bombing Serbia or the recognition of Kosovo) are any less damaging to international stability and peace than those done by one or a few states.

The lesson of the recent post-election protests in Iran has little to do with the strength or weakness of Islamism; it is that people care about their democratic rights – about their right to have a say in how they are governed. This feeling is not something cooked up by neo-cons and democracy mongers in Washington think tanks; it is a universal right reaffirmed time and time again by people in all parts of the world who find the denial of such rights a cause of legitimate grievance.

The contention that democracy would be bad for U.S. interests is simply wrong: take, for example, the issue of Arab-Israeli peace. Authoritarian Arab governments exist very comfortably with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Constant tension that occasionally flares up into armed conflict provides the perfect background to the official narrative of permanent emergency, threats from hostile external forces – especially the “Zionist entity” and its evil foreign backers – and the need to prioritize the national /religious struggle over progress in the area of basic human development indicators. ~Neil Hicks

Hicks is right that authoritarian Arab states are basically satisfied with the status quo, as this allows them to divert dissatisfaction with their rule towards Israel, but it might be worth noting that the two states most prone to the rhetoric of permanent emergency that justifies extraordinary security measures are the Israeli and American democracies. Democratization does not prevent the empowerment of fundamentalism, nationalism or other ideological obsessions. Especially in its formative stages, ideological obsessions are very strong in democracies, and the continued promotion of democracy by new democratic states beyond their borders can become an obsession all its own. The early experience of democratization can often mean an outpouring of revolutionary fervor, and democracy provides the overarching justification that everything is being done in the name of freedom and the will of the people. Combine this with a sense of long-standing political or religious grievance, of which there is plenty in the countries in question, and you have a recipe for internal political violence and war.

This is exactly why everything else in Hicks’ argument makes no sense. At least two allied Arab governments have been content to make peace with Israel, pay lip service to the plight of Palestinians and do nothing more. Were the governments of Jordan and Egypt to become mass democracies tomorrow, it is likely that peace between those states and Israel would not last long. Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.

Roger Cohen has written an odd op-ed on the missile defense matter. I call it odd because Cohen is unusual among New York Times columnists for not simply swallowing every conventional idea on foreign policy without protest. On occasion, he has even been known to question common assumptions, but not in this case. It is also strange that he gauges the Polish view of the Obama administration by the reaction of some Polish military and political figures rather than searching out what most Poles think. For example, Cohen states:

Poland is now one of the very few places in Europe that prefers former President Bush to Obama.

This is not true. It is not even remotely true. As that Economistarticle I mentioned the other day told us, Obama has a higher approval rating in Poland than Bush did last year. As I noted Saturday, almost half of Poland welcomed Obama’s decision to scrap the proposed missile defense program. Less than a third opposed the decision. No doubt the 31% that had a negative reaction looks back at the Bush years more fondly, but it is simply untrue that Poland as a whole prefers Bush to Obama. It’s as if a foreign columnist based his analysis of American public opinion regarding the Iraq war in 2006 on what top officials at the Pentagon were saying. When less than a third of the population opposed Obama’s decision and less than half of Poland viewed Bush favorably, it is ridiculous to speak as if most Poles loathe Obama or suddenly long for his predecessor. Cohen makes this mistake because he confuses a certain segment of Polish elite reaction for the views of all Poland. He accuses Obama of snubbing Poland, but most Poles do not feel slighted.

Via Andrew, Ben Smith brings a new Polish poll on the missile shield to our attention. By a 48-31% margin, Polish respondents say that Obama’s decision was good for Poland. This is in line with what I have been sayingabout Polish and Czech public opinion regarding the missile defense proposal for quite some time. The Wall Street Journal‘s latest news article this morning was blaring headlines from tabloids in Poland and the Czech Republic as if these responses were representative of the population as a whole. Evidently they are not at all representative. It’s as if foreign media picked up the latest stories from Newsmax and treated them as proof of what most Americans believed. One of the problems the American right seems to be having in understanding the Polish and Czech reactions is that they are taking their cues from the most nationalist segments of the population, and as a result they are given very misleading impressions of how most Poles and Czechs view things. If you believe that Vaclav Havel speaks for his people on this matter, his outrage over the cancellation would mean something, but he doesn’t speak for them, just as he did not speak for them when he backed the invasion of Iraq. The same is true of Kaczynski and the Poles.

How is it that most conservatives can bristle at American elites who ignore them and their interests and not see that most “pro-Western” or “pro-American” governments are staffed with people who are just as out of touch with their own nations on many issues? How do they not see that the sort of people from the coasts they find so unappealing and unlike them are very much like the Europeans who align themselves so slavishly with Washington? Why would anyone assume that such people represent the broad majority of their countrymen when it comes to foreign policy?

This statement from a number of major movement figures attacking the administration’s decision on missile defense is a useful reminder of how bankrupt movement conservative thought is when it comes to matters of national security and foreign policy. Had I set out to write a parody of hysterical conservative reaction to this decision, I would not have been able to come up with anything that compares to the genuine article. The first paragraph sums up their view:

The announcement that the Obama Administration will abandon Missile Defense in Poland and the Czech Republic represents a massive surrender of American Strategic Influence and a betrayal of two of our closest friends in the region. The move also indicates appeasement towards Russia, and a misunderstanding of the seriousness of the potential nuclear capability of Iran.

For starters, you have to enjoy all of the unnecessary capitalization. It isn’t merely missile defense, but Missile Defense that Obama has scrapped. All of the usual tropes are here: surrender, betrayal, appeasement. It doesn’t seem to bother these people that all of this is garbage. Former Polish President Kwasniewski specifically rejected describing this decision as a “betrayal,” and it is laughable that anyone would make such a charge. How can cancelling a system that hasn’t even been built and which at least half of Poland doesn’t want count as a betrayal of Poland? If this move were an attempt at “appeasing” Russia, it might start to rehabilitate the reputation of appeasement. It would mean that foregoing unnecessary provocations can repair frayed international relations, and it implies that critics of the decision would prefer a world in which relations with Russia continue to deteriorate and European security is steadily undermined. Iran’s nuclear capability is neither here nor there. Without a long-range missile program to deliver the nukes that Iran is nowhere near close to having, Iran’s nuclear capability might be real and still pose no threat to European security. The signatories of this statement haven’t a shred of credibility on these issues. Unfortunately, instead of being greeted with embarrassment and disdain by conservatives, this statement represents the common view of much of the American right.

My new column for The Week on the Afghan elections and the folly of democracy promotion is now up.

As an advocate of scrapping the proposed missile defense system in central Europe since it was first announced, I was pleased to hear that the administration scrapped the system, which was supposedly designed to defend against a chimerical Iranian missile threat. By scrapping this system, the administration admitted that the long-range missile threat from Iran did not exist, which is what critics of the system had been saying for some time. They also implicitly acknowledged that the system was never really intended to defend against an Iranian threat. Instead, it was always another provocation aimed at Russia by providing a pretext for putting American soldiers in Poland and the Czech Republic on a permanent basis. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the Republicanfreakout over this decision if we do not take for granted that the missile shield was an anti-Russian move that was embraced by the governments in Warsaw and Prague in no small part because it was an anti-Russian move.

Lech Walesa’s response to the President’s decision was telling. Walesa was quoted by the WSJ in an article on the central European reaction. He said, “It’s not that we need the shield [bold mine-DL], but it’s about the way we’re treated here.” In the same way, Moscow might admit that the interceptors in themselves represented no significant military threat, but were a symbol of disrespect and hostility. In reality, the security of both allied nations remains as strong as it has been since they joined the Alliance. This makes the hysterics of Republican hawks simply comical, and it reminds us that they have virtually nothing worthwhile to contribute to foreign policy debate. Of course it is absurd for hawks to portray this as some kind of betratyal of Poland and the Czech Republic. There has been no betrayal. If Polish and Czech voters should be angry with anyone, it is their own governments that deserve their scorn for signing off on participating in an unnecessary system that did nothing to improve their security just because Washington wanted it so.

The one useful thing hawks have done in their silly responses to Obama’s decision is to abandon the weak security rationales they have used until now to justify support for this system and reveal that there is little more than anti-Russian paranoia behind their “support” for U.S. allies in eastern Europe. It goes without saying that we would defend our NATO allies in eastern Europe against attack. Indeed, what Obama has done by scrapping this system is to remove the bullseyes from the backs of Poland and the Czech Republic that the missile shield had placed on them. This reversal of foolish Bush-era policy has actually enhanced and improved security for Poland and the Czech Republic, because it does not expose them needlessly to new risks. The administration has also refused to pursue a policy that gained as much support as it did from the exploitation of anti-Russian nationalism in eastern Europe.

All that having been said, the administration is going to be disappointed. Having scrapped the shield, it has held out the false promise that this decision will make Moscow more cooperative in pressuring Iran. As I have said before, this is not going to happen. The decsion to abandon this shield was the right one as far as both allied security and Russian relations were concerned, and it should be defended on those grounds. Moscow is certainly pleased that the proposed shield will not be built, but it would be a serious mistake to expect Russian help in squeezing Iran on its nuclear program. Russia has no reason to do this. If the administration insists that Russian support for tightening sanctions or isolating Iran is the “payoff” for abandoning the shield, the decision will be judged to have been a quid pro quo that gained us nothing. If we see it instead not as a concession to Moscow, but rather as a concession to reality and common sense, it does not have to produce Russian cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program to be regarded as the correct and appropriate move.

P.S. Ackerman sums it up pretty well:

If Gates, the model of a pragmatic defense secretary who often discusses the need to reset defense policy around “real” and not “hypothetical” threats, doesn’t see an actual cost to U.S. or allied security, then none exists.

On any given day, hawks will mock Obama supporters because of the strong and obvious continuities in national security policy under Obama, and some of them will then turn around the next day to treat the unrealistic expectations of Obama-led change in U.S. foreign policy as a reasonable standard by which to judge the “success” of the Obama administration. “He did not magically eliminate decades of mistrust and suspicion in nine months–what a loser!” Joseph Loconte offers us a sample of the second line of attack:

Throughout the Bush presidency, opinion polling from the Pew Research Center trumpeted America’s “abysmal” approval ratings across the globe. The problem, pollsters suggested with numbing regularity, was that a “cowboy president” had inflamed the Muslim world—and America’s European allies—with his “unilateral” war on terrorism. The remedy, of course, was a new administration with a fresh approach: a president committed to multilateralism, smart diplomacy, and American soft power. Right on cue, a Pew report hailed Barack Obama’s election for inspiring “global confidence” in U.S. leadership and rescuing America’s reputation from eternal perdition.

This hagiographic storyline, however, is evaporating like a morning mist. A newer Pew survey suggests that most Islamic countries distrust the United States under the leadership of President Obama about as much as they did under President George W. Bush. Yes, majorities of the Muslim populations interviewed still believe that America plays a mostly destructive role in the world. Most view the United States as “an enemy” and “a military threat” to their own country. Most disapprove of the American-led effort to combat terrorism. Large numbers, in fact, voice strong support for terrorism and Osama bin Laden. Western Europeans, though expressing positive personal views of Obama, show little enthusiasm for key U.S. foreign policy objectives. In other words, anti-Americanism is alive and well in the age of Obama.

This is sloppy, weak stuff even by the standards of Weekly Standard-issue hawks such as Loconte. There may have been Obama voters who thought that simply changing the tone and style of the President and replacing one man with another would eliminate global antipathy, or perhaps some imagined that stories of his Muslim grandfather and his middle name would make people forget that Obama backed the bombing of Lebanon and Gaza and has continued the extremely unpopular drone strikes in Pakistan. However, no one paying any attention to the substance of the policies Obama endorsed believed any of this. No one with a modicum of respect for the intelligence of other nations ever believed this. Those who bristle at aggressive policies and U.S. hegemony were never going to become more favorably disposed towards them just because of a change in management.

After all, if policy has by and large remained the same, why would antagonism created by policy lessen? “Unilateralism” is not the important part of U.S. foreign policy that bothers Muslims around the world–it is the invasion of Muslim countries, the occupation of their lands and the killing of their co-religionists that incenses many of them. If Obama engages in most of the same actions, but does so on a more “multilateral” and consultative basis, what has actually changed as far as these publics are concerned?

If Europeans have little interest in “key U.S. foreign policy objectives,” the problem may be with the objectives Washington has rather than with the Europeans or Obama. Not supporting the expansion of NATO, for example, is not evidence of “anti-Americanism.” In truth, Europeans who refuse to give security guarantees to more of Russia’s neighbors are doing America a favor–they are refusing to let us make dangerous guarantees that would ruin us if we honored them. For that matter, an unwillingness to commit troops to Afghanistan under the auspices of NATO is not proof of anti-Americanism, either. It is a grudging acknowledgment of the absurdity of a European defensive alliance waging a prolonged counterinsurgency in central Asia to “defend” the world’s remaining superpower against Pashtun tribesmen.

Loconte bemoans how little Pakistanis trust the U.S., but then why would they? For years we backed a deeply unpopular dictator and resisted his removal from power as long as we could. It is our military campaign and that of the Pakistani army urged on by our government that has been creating a massive refugee population in western Pakistan. Pakistanis might reasonably conclude that we are using their country as little more than a firing range, and their attitudes would worsen accordingly. Add to that a hefty dose of conspiratorial paranoia that the U.S. is working to sell out Pakistan to India, and you have a nation that is obviously not going to be placated by a few pleasant speeches. A foreign nation’s distrust of the U.S. may sometimes increase in direct proportion to the closeness of our government’s relationship with theirs, especially when that close relationship has the practical effect of subordinating their perceived national interests to our stated objectives in their country and region. Loconte digs no deeper into why a mere 13% of Pakistanis believe that Obama will “do the right thing” in world affairs. All that matters to him is scoring the lame partisan and ideological point that Pakistanis have not rushed to embrace policies that are doing serious damage to the political stability and physical security of their country just because Obama is President.

It is no surprise that the majority Muslim nation with the most positive view of the United States’ role in the world out of the five polled is Indonesia, which is the one country that does not have a close political-military relationship with Washington as Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan do. Deep distrust in Turkey is pretty easily understood. Loconte willfully fails to understand it, absurdly citing Washington’s strong support for Turkish E.U. membership. Any close observer knows is no longer very important to most Turks and was in any case counterproductive and actually worked against Turkey’s prospects for admission. As if Turkish entry were not controversial enough, the last administration gave its opponents the added ammunition that it was something Washington was trying to force down Europe’s throat.

Turks overwhelmingly opposed the invasion of Iraq, they correctly see Iraqi Kurdistan as a haven for PKK terrorists, they fear the potential for Kurdish separatism encouraged by the example of Iraqi Kurds, and they generally see the alliance with Washington as an increasingly one-sided arrangement that has ceased to benefit them. Turkish “anti-Americanism” is also a function of the further democratization of Turkey: the broad mass of Turkish voters has finally been permitted to elect and retain a government that better reflects their views and interests, which means that the artificial and automatic deference that the old Kemalist elite gave to Washington’s regional policies is a thing of the past. Egyptians understandably take a poor view of the government that helps prop up their dictator. Iraqi negative attitudes are self-explanatory. When it has been our standard procedure to trample on, ignore or abuse these Muslim nations, most of which are technically our allies, what sense does it make to complain about the “anti-Americanism” of foreign nations?

We should also remember that nations have divergent interests. Even if Washington were not so oblivious to public opinion in allied countries, approval of U.S. policy would not automatically follow. No matter how attentive to their other concerns Washington might become, Turks are not going to endorse harsh anti-Iranian policies, nor will they cheer the next Israeli military campaign against one of its neighbors, because they take a significantly different view of the relevant issues. If we stopped subsidizing Mubarak’s government tomorrow, most Egyptians would not suddenly become more sympathetic to U.S. effective support for the status quo in Palestine or the continued military presence in Iraq. I could go on, but you get the idea.

In an otherwise unremarkable column about the instant morality of sports, Henninger made the following preposterous claim:

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to let a prosecutor investigate CIA interrogations that were ruled inbounds years ago is like a baseball commissioner reversing a hotly disputed World Series home run. Fans everywhere would burn down the stadium.

This is bizarre in a number of ways. Henninger isn’t even using the correct sports analogy. In this case, the analogy would have to be some kind of action that had once been illegal but was permitted under a looser interpretation of the rules. You would then have to have some regulating authority declare later on that the new interpretation of the rules was basically invalid and that the old rules had always applied, opening the door to some kind of retroactive penalties. The closest comparison I can think of is when the NCAA voids the wins of coaches involved in recruiting violations, which is an appropriate disciplinary action for cheating college programs and exactly the kind of strict enforcement of rules that Henninger is implicitly rejecting in his criticism of Holder.

In practice, there are rarely dangerous actions in any sport that were once banned but are now permitted. In American football, the trend has been towards tighter and tighter restrictions on what defensive players can do to receivers and quarterbacks. There really is nothing in the sports world that directly compares to investigating the torture regime, because there is no professional organization that started allowing routine violent abuses during games. You have never heard NFL officials claim that there need to be more crippling tackles on defenseless players to preserve the game of football. Of course, contests premised on fairness cannot reasonably be compared to practices that are by their nature gross injustices against human dignity, but that doesn’t bother Henninger. The very thing that Henninger finds attractive and worthwhile in the instant and mostly reliable morality of sports (which apparently does not apply to teams from Massachusetts) is what he plainly does not want to have applied when it comes to national security, and what is most striking is that he isn’t even aware of the contradiction.

For Henninger and those like him, the torture regime is the natural response to a world with blurred lines, gray areas and extraordinary measures that must be taken against unconventional enemies. If sports ruled the world, as Henninger’s title reads, people who openly defy and violate the Geneva Conventions would be hauled before international tribunals and sentenced to many years in prison, and their apologists in the press would be hounded from decent society as the enablers of criminality that they are. As we all know, this has not happened and will not be happening, in part because of people like Henninger, who pretend to decry chaos and rule-breaking while regularly endorsing it in practice when it is done in the name of anti-terrorism and security.