I haven’t taken the time to comment on the reports that Thatcher was firmly opposed to German reunification and made rather accommodating statements to Gorbachev about the status of communism in eastern Europe, but I should say a few things. First, it is true that Bush was right and Thatcher wrong on German unification, but Thatcher was coming out of a British foreign policy tradition that prized division in Europe in order to prevent the rise of any single continental power. This had more or less been British strategy for nearly three centuries by the 1980s. Thatcher was also the product of a Britain that had been coping with the political consequences of German unification for seventy years before 1945. The combination of united German preeminence in Europe and British hostility to a single power dominating Europe made two states that otherwise had no reason to fight each other into enemies. The first Bush administration was not loaded down with this baggage and had different priorities. The interests of Britain and America in 1989-90 were not necessarily identical, and it would have been appropriate for Thatcher to distinguish the interests of her country from those of the United States.

If the Cold War froze many conflicts, there was good reason to fear that a thaw of these conflicts would lead Europe back to renewed warfare, and Britain would feel obliged (yet again) to enter into these continental wars to prevent the continental hegemony that it has usually feared. As Matt Steinglass notes, it was reasonable to fear revanchism and nationalist revivals in places other than the Balkans. If you see the world wars as the disastrous results of attempting (and failing) to integrate united Germany into the European state system in the first half of the twentieth century, German unification in 1990 would have seemed very risky and probably not worth it. As it has worked out, German unification has advanced peaceful European political and economic integration and the elimination of at least one major WWII-era division appears in retrospect to have been appropriate and wise, but this was not necessarily an obvious or easy conclusion to draw at the time.

Conor is wrong to conclude that this episode teaches us not to trust our politicians. Perhaps we ought not to trust them, but this is not a reason for distrust. If Thatcher was not the starry-eyed anticommunist idealist that later hagiographers would like to make her out to be, so much the better for Thatcher. This is a reminder of how broad of an umbrella anticommunism had in the political coalitions that formed because of it. There were zealous anticommunists who wanted to see the communist system in eastern Europe and the USSR dismantled because it was an abhorrent tyranny, and then there were far, far more anticommunists who were anticommunists principally in their desire to prevent the expansion of Soviet power and to secure their own countries against Soviet military threats. When that power seemed to be faltering, the instinct of the latter was not to press our advantage as hawks and neoconservatives would have done. Instead the response of these anticommunists was to try to manage Soviet decline in order to prevent violent and destructive implosion into which they would have been inevitably drawn. On balance, their instinct was the more prudent and wise one. If Thatcher was overly cautious, she had good reason to be.

One reason that I am not disappointed with Thatcher at all as a result of these reports is that I am leery of criticism made twenty years after the fact, especially when the criticism is being made with the certain knowledge that the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and eventual dissolution of the USSR occurred largely peacefully. People who want to find fault with Thatcher over this are generally the sort of people who think that Bush’s speech in Kiev in the summer of 1991 was some unpardonable betrayal of freedom and goodness. These people are foolish. The speech was, on the contrary, a sober and serious one that deserves to remembered for what Bush actually said and not the caricature that his hawkish critics have made of it ever since. Thatcher’s statements and actions in 1989-90 ought to be viewed with a similar respect for context and with an awareness of the uncertainty that Western governments experienced in coping with the collapse of a huge imperial system.

Andrew has responded to Bret Stephens’ latest, and he makes a number of good points, but I am left wondering something: why does every debate concerning aggressive war center on pragmatic considerations of whether it will “work”? Why give any deference to proponents of so-called “pre-emptive” war that isn’t pre-empting anything? Why should we permit them to set the terms and define the limits of the debate? Obama isn’t “making” Israel go to war against Iran, not least because the “threat” from Iran is vastly exaggerated and Israel’s security would not be significantly undermined if Iran did acquire a nuclear weapons capacity. When Iran is far away from acquiring such weapons, how much smaller is the Iranian “threat”?

It is true that America has no interest in another war in the region, and an attack on Iran would expose our forces and allies to serious retaliatory strikes, and it is also true that Muslims worldwide would be incensed at the sight of yet another U.S.-led and/or backed war against their co-religionists. It is true that the economic consequences of such an attack, no matter which state carried it out, would be severe and politically ruinous for the incumbent in the White House. Andrew is also right that deterrence and containment will be enough for U.S. and allied security in the event of any Iranian acquisition of a nuclear bomb. That said, why do we object to aggressive war this way? Why don’t we simply insist that aggressive warfare is the crime that the Allies defined it as over sixty years ago?

The most significant assumption Stephens makes in his op-ed is that Israel has a perfect right to do whatever it thinks necessary to guard against any possible threat, no matter how chimerical or far-fetched, and that it is the task of the United States government to change Iranian behavior to prevent an unprovoked Israeli attack. No other state is granted this sort of exceptional treatment in its dealings with regional rivals as Israel is, and Washington exempts no other state so completely from the requirements of international law as it does for Israel. At no point does Andrew challenge Stephens’ baseless claim that Iran is just a year or two away from possessing a nuclear weapon. ElBaradei has made it clear that this is fiction. Why does Andrew take seriously that Stephens is interested in the “disarmament” of Iran when Iran has no nuclear weapons of which it can be disarmed?

A new poll (see chart) by the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank, shows that western Europe is now much more pro-American and pro-NATO than the ex-communist east. Until last year, the eastern countries swallowed their misgivings about George Bush, while the west of the continent writhed in distaste at what many saw as his administration’s incompetence and heavy-handedness. ~The Economist

This is quite misleading. The difference between eastern and western European reactions to the Bush administration and its foreign policy decisions could never be found among the actual voters in either part of the continent. What was different in France, Germany and (later on) Spain was that their governments sooner or later represented public discontent with U.S. policies, while the governments of so-called “New
Europe” sided with Mr. Bush against their own peoples.

In fact, what this article reminds us is that approval of both Bush and Obama is higher in countries such as Poland and Romania than it is in Germany and France, and Obama’s approval has increased in all four countries. The relationship with eastern European countries only appears “wobbly,” as the article puts it, because the relationship with western Europe is much better than it was and has improved more than in the east. There was some real, sizeable minority support for Bush in eastern Europe, but in western Europe he had very few sympathizers. Obama has greater support in both regions, which hardly amounts to a weakening between the U.S. and eastern Europe. To the extent that Obama has met with any significant criticism from eastern Europe, such as the “open letter” from earlier this summer, it has tended to come from many of the same political leaders who aligned their governments with Washington over the Iraq war, which means that they are once again taking a position that a vast majority of their fellow citizens does not hold.

If it is true that there are some questions in the Marshall Fund survey that yield better “pro-American and pro-NATO” results in western Europe than in the east, this may have something to do with the differences in the fortunes of the two regions. Having felt the full impact of the financial crisis and having fewer resources to draw to cope, eastern European publics are probably not going to respond well to the demands of Atlanticism, especially when Atlanticism these days seems to be defined by a willingness to send soldiers to places far removed from the Euro-Atlantic zone.

Eastern Europeans may have been under the silly impression that NATO was primarily a defensive alliance designed for collective security in Europe and that “out-of-area operations” were not going to become the main raison d’etre for the Alliance in the future. This more skeptical turn in the east may also be a product of the weariness many small ex-communist states may be feeling after having dutifully backed every U.S. initiative abroad without seeing any tangible gains for themselves. As militarily irrelevant and politically weak states, they were embraced for the token support they could and did provide, and they have been taken for granted ever since because their contributions were always nominal and mattered to Washington only inasmuch as these provided diplomatic and political cover for its invasion of Iraq.

The article mentions the “open letter” and discusses Obama’s rethinking of the missile defense installations, but as I said when the letter was first published these installations have been very controversial in the proposed host countries. Czech and Polish voters are evenly split over the question, and in the past clear majorities have been opposed to accepting the installations. Viewed in this light, it is clear that scrapping the proposal would not necessarily have to be a “a climb-down to suit Russian interests,” but could be an acknowledgment of the politically divisive and controversial nature of the plan within the host countries. Instead of pushing ahead with a security policy decision that ignores the opinions of at least half of Poland and the Czech Republic, Washington could instead show some respect for the diversity of opinion in these countries and recognize that building “defense” installations against chimerical Iranian missiles is not worth aggravating and worsening relations with two NATO allies over the long-term. That would work to strengthen a relationship founded on some kind of real respect for our allies, but that would require distinguishing between what eastern European nations want and what their leaders want to do in their name.

The conservative movement isn’t dangerous or “revanchist;” it’s just boring. Right-wing intellectuals should eschew the movement and reintegrate into the mainstream, not because the movement threatens the Republic, but because freedom of thought can only be found outside of it. ~Austin Bramwell

Via Rod

Bramwell has done a good job of critiquing Tanenhaus’ The Death of Conservatism, which he does again on the main blog here. In his earlier article, he makes the essential point that ideology and unscrupulous political opportunism are not opposites, but actually complement one another:

Tanenhaus misses that movements can become both unprincipled and tediously ideological at the same time. Nobody would accuse late Soviet commissars, for example, of a faithful commitment to socialist dogma. At the same time, the more their practices strayed from their principles, the more they clung to their creeds outworn. Similarly, the very emptiness of movement slogans is a sign not of fervent belief but the lack of it. Perhaps all movements end in some combination of hypocrisy and intellectual torpor. As Tanenhaus observes, creative and original writers are abandoning the movement. Those left behind are just going through the motions.

What is important for understanding ideology is recognizing that it is perfectly malleable depending on the needs of the movement and/or party. This means that if the immediate political needs of movement or party require incredible intellectual contortionism or flat-out contradictions of stated beliefs, political needs will win out and the “substance” of the ideology, such as it is, will be made to fit. One of the depressing things about movement conservatism is simply that it is a movement, and like other programmatic movements the perpetuation of its own existence and its access to power becomes the only enduring part of the program. Dissenters are purged in different waves, and those doing the purging in one wave may end up as the victims of the next. Today it is imperative to back the NEP, and tomorrow it is a death sentence. This is why it is probably wise not to try to outdo rival factions in ideological zeal, especially because this zeal is not an expression of deep devotion to enduring truths but an attachment to power and its trappings.

This is related to the troubled relationship of conservative elites and the grassroots and to the broader problem of nationalism on the American right. To some significant degree, the grassroots believe what they are told conservatism is, and it seems to me that the elites reconcile the definition of conservatism they hand down with how political conservatives actually govern by wrapping everything in the banner of Americanism. Government can expand enormously, so long as it is doing so in the name of spreading and/or defending freedom. This is tied to the mythology of American exceptionalism and mission that many conservatives believe that they alone accept, and any trampling of actual constitutional liberties can be justified so long as it is being done to “protect” America. Insofar as their nationalism tells them that country, people and government are bound up together opposition to any policies related to this can and must be defined as “un-American,” “anti-American” and “unpatriotic.”

Jon Henke recently called for a boycott of WorldNetDaily on account of its encouragement of Birther nonsense. This has prompted a predictably furious reaction from the WND audience and some more interestingresponses concerning the relationship of conservative elites and their grassroots supporters. Here at TAC, Dan McCarthy has argued that it is the Republican welfarism of ‘moderates’ and ‘reformists’ that requires and inevitably leads to the stoking of extreme emotions and the fostering of wild ‘fringe’ movements to compensate for the bloodlessness and lack of appeal of their own agenda. Dan writes:

They would all complain that the grassroots aren’t on board with their “moderate” military welfarism — the grassroots are too brusque, too bumptious, too worked up about Obama’s birth certificate and illegal immigration. But the grassroots Right is in the state it’s in thanks in no small part to the likes of Ponnuru, Frum, Douthat, and Brooks. Since their program of welfare for families doesn’t inspire anyone, their political allies wind up having to whip up enthusiasm for the military side of the program, and have to throw in some red meat about gays, immigrants, and abortion. But the NY-DC axis have no cause to complain, since that’s the only way to sell the public on their insipid welfare-warfare program. He who wills the end must will the means. The only means toward getting the Right to embrace the welfare state is to get the Right hopped up about real wars or culture wars. But that’s precisely what has cost the Right political power over the last four years.

In short, the moderates created the extremists.

There is something to Dan’s claim, inasmuch as the ‘moderates’ and ‘reformists’ desperately need their more ‘conservative’ counterparts to appear to be in league with maniacs and fanatics in order to play their role as the ‘reasonable’ members of the right with whom respectable liberals can do business. Even when this is not the case, they try to give people the impression that it is. They also need to find something with which they can motivate the grassroots, and so they turn to those issues where they can maximize grassroots anger at cultural change and the political status quo (both of which make the grassroots feel as if they are relatively powerless) without embracing any substantive agenda that would satisfy grassroots concerns. When some part of the grassroots becomes preoccupied with plainly ridiculous distractions, such as Birtherism, this makes things much easier for the ‘moderates’ and frees them to set themselves up as the only credible alternative on the right. To the extent that non-conspiratorial conservatives tolerate their wackier counterparts, these conservatives are playing into the hands of the people whose policy agenda they loathe.

In turn, the frequently substance-free, occasionally conspiratorial nature of some grassroots activism, which is epitomized by the Clinton obsessions of the ‘90s or Birtherism today, helps to reinforce the idea that the elites and ‘moderates’ are holding dangerous political forces within their own movement at bay. Having marginalized, stifled and ignored the grassroots for decades, conservative elites use the angry expressions of grassroots discontent, which is a function of grassroots impotence, to quarantine them even more and keep them away from real centers of influence. My guess is that conservative elites were extremely happy with the Tea Party and town hall protests, but not primarily because they represented conservative resistance to Obama’s agenda or because they helped to delay or even stall health care legislation. What would have satisfied them was the almost entirely negative quality of these protests, which leaves the door open to them to provide their policy solutions for lack of any proposals from the rest of the right.

Because the elites and especially the ‘moderates’ would be nowhere politically without being able to exploit culture war sentiments and nationalist enthusiasm for real warfare, the ‘moderates’ need to keep rank-and-file conservatives in a state of constant agitation. This directs grassroots fury away from the ‘moderates’ and towards the left, where it dissipates harmlessly because it is usually incoherent and presents no serious alternative policy proposals. This helps keep grassroots conservatives so preoccupied and so obsessed with feeling outrage rather than thinking or crafting policy that it leaves the field of a lot of actual policymaking open to the ‘moderates’.

Because it is the loudest and most widespread expression of popular conservatism, usually channeled through talk radio, the furious grassroots becomes the public face of conservatism even as the grassroots have next to no influence on policymaking regardless of which party is in power. Thus conservatives win a reputation for being unduly fixated on, say, immigration, while actual elected conservatives either take up much softer positions on the issue or actively work in support of continued mass immigration, or conservatives are portrayed as obsessed with social issues when social issues have next to nothing with the agenda of their elected representatives. As a result, the issues where the grassroots are ignored with the greatest regularity somehow come to be identified as the defining features of their party. ‘Reformists’ are more than happy to encourage this identification, because without a negative public image for conservatism there would scarcely be anything for them to change and improve. The more the public loathes the grassroots, the thinking seems to be, the more it will welcome the arrival of people who will reorient the party away from the things the grassroots care about.

The grassroots are permitted to feel as if they are the beating heart of the GOP during campaign season while they are carefully excluded from real power, which simply deepens their discontent and ironically makes them even more willing to leap at the chance to support any phony populist who comes along and says the right things to them. This process builds on itself as the grassroots conservatives mistake their feelings of agitation for populism, the elites encourage the idea that populism is nothing but aimless discontent and phony populist politicians prey on the emotions of the agitated crowd to propel themselves into office, where they quickly surround themselves with conservative elites who either loathe or merely laugh at the people who put their boss into office. The elites have increasing contempt for the grassroots as the latter demonstrate time and again that they can be easily duped into endorsing candidates who do not represent them or their interests, and the grassroots respond to elite contempt, which the elites no longer even attempt to hide, by denouncing anyone who does not pander to their feelings of agitation and stroke their collective ego as an ‘elitist’.

Thus do three paladins of the right, left and center combine to erode support for a war that, if lost, would be to the United States roughly what the battle of Adrianople in 378 A.D. —you can look it up—was to the Roman Empire. Things did not go well for Western civilization for 1,100 or so years thereafter.

Overstated? I don’t think so. ~Bret Stephens

Even by the Journal’s standards, this is ludicrous and hysterical. The historical comparison is exceedingly silly. Adrianople was not as important as Stephens claims, and the war in Afghanistan is far less important to the survival and flourishing of our country and the Western world as a whole than defeating the Goths at that moment would have been for the Roman Empire.

In retrospect, we know that the outcome at Adrianople was significant for the future of the western empire in that it ensured the continuation of a large Gothic population inside the boundaries of the empire, and this had real and serious consequences for Roman Italy, southern Gaul and Spain. The annihilation of a Roman army by the Goths along with the eastern emperor was a shocking and demoralizing defeat, but saying this can exaggerate the importance of a single battle. Significantly, the eastern empire in whose territory the battle took place and whose emperor was slain endured and thrived after a fashion. The elementary Western Civ narrative Stephens leans on so heavily for support is simplistic at best. Most of the period when things weren’t “going so well” for Western civilization was the period when medieval Europeans were creating most of what is culturally and religiously significant and distinctive about the history of our civilization–not that I would expect even minimal respect for any of this from someone at the WSJ. If we took the long view and see the battle in relation to the entire Roman Mediterranean world, we would see that Gothic military success was limited and not the killer blow to Roman civilization that Stephens claims it was. Obviously, the war in Afghanistan does not compare militarily or politically to that battle.

Adrianople was a battle fought between rebelling settlers and the imperial government on its own land. Subduing the Goths was seen an imperative for internal security in the empire. There was nowhere for the Romans to withdraw had they wished to do so, because it was their territory and people that were under attack. No matter what its merits may be, a military campaign on the other side of the planet is not being fought for the same stakes as a campaign in one’s own country.

While it may not be immediately clear, we are more in the position of the invading settler Goths in our involvement in Afghanistan than we resemble the Romans. Unlike the Goths, we have no intention of long-term relocation or settlement in Afghanistan. Like the Romans, the Afghans we fight are fighting on their own territory against what they must see as a temporary foreign threat. Had the Goths lost at Adrianople, things would have gone very badly for them as a people. Like their descendants in Italy almost two centuries later, they would probably have been forcibly dispersed and ceased to exist as an identifiable group of people. The Romans did lose, and yet their civilization not only endured but in some places even enjoyed some recovery in the fifth and sixth centuries. If we lose in Afghanistan, or simply leave at some point (as we eventually will and must do), the United States will not crumble or collapse, nor will whatever civilization we have suffer any noticeable or significant decline.

The war in Afghanistan, like the broader war against jihadism, is not an existential struggle or anything like it. That doesn’t make it unimportant, nor does it automatically mean that there is not good reason to continue the war for the time being, but it does mean that we have to keep its real significance in mind when discussing it. I can think of few things more demoralizing and damaging to public support for an already desultory military campaign than grandiose, unrealistic proclamations of the conflict’s profound world-historical significance. This works for a little while to blunt criticism and delay weighing the costs and benefits of the campaign, but it cannot continue indefinitely. At some point, the small stakes for America cannot match up with the overblown rhetoric about barbarian invasions and the fall of Rome. Such claims are obviously excessive and unconnected to the real world, which makes support for the campaign seem like the province of ideologues and the slightly unhinged.

If one genuinely believes that a successful campaign in Afghanistan is important for stability in South Asia, and if one believes that there is a limited but legitimate national interest in preventing the re-establishment of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, it is necessary to make very clear that Stephens’ argument is raving alarmism of the worst kind that works to discredit arguments in support of continuing the war effort in Afghanistan. Stephens is one of those people who routinely lectured us for years that Iraq was vastly more significant than Afghanistan, who said that Afghanistan was a geopolitical sideshow of no great strategic importance, and who consequently derided the idea that Afghanistan was the appropriate and necessary fight from which the invasion of Iraq disastrously distracted us. Now, suddenly, Afghanistan has become the most critical and vital military campaign they have ever seen. Stephens and his ilk have no credibility here, but this does not stop them from having influence, which is why it is worth going to the trouble of resisting this nonsense.

For Stephens’ unfounded fears of encouraging jihadis to make any sense, we would have to suffer the same complete economic and political meltdown that the USSR experienced. Despite the best efforts of our government to bankrupt us, destroy our currency and entangle us in endless conflicts, this is not likely to be the fate that awaits America. Were we to leave Afghanistan tomorrow, jihadis might take some encouragement from this, but they would also be deprived of their far greater, far more powerful recruiting tool, which is the presence of a foreign, non-Muslim invading force in a Muslim country. Whatever the global delusions of leading jihadis, their success will have been limited to making us recognize that Afghanistan is not important enough to us to make us wage perpetual war. Stephens is worried that some jihadis would conclude that “if you hold out long enough, they leave and you win.” But eventually we are going to leave. Everyone knows this. Our current strategy, such as it is, takes for granted that we are building up the institutions of Afghanistan in order to leave. If our departure is the only thing that secures jihadi “victory,” such an empty victory is as inevitable as it is worthless. At most, they will have retained what they have right now, which is not much. They will have gained nothing that they didn’t have eight years ago, and they will still have to work for quite a while to regain what little they had in terms of real political power.

That doesn’t mean that the right alternative to Stephens’ absurd alarmism is the proposed “offshore balancing” answer championed by all those people who are always hawkish enough to get us into wars without thinking through what our goals are supposed to be. Dan McCarthy has already explained why a policy that relies even more heavily on air strikes and drone attacks will not improve matters. In light of the apparent blunder behind this latest strike in Kunduz that reportedly killed scores of civilians, it seems clear that retreating to the use of air power and missile strikes in lieu of a continued military presence in Afghanistan is the military expression of an establishmentarian urge to be seen “doing something” with no real concern for the consequences of the actions being proposed. Indeed, eschewing tactically useful but destabilizing and strategically counterproductive strikes and focusing on population security make more sense. Peeling away as many people from continued hostility to the Kabul government as possible by integrating them into the political process would be more likely to result in a more lasting political settlement to a conflict that will not end with anything like our customary expectation of total victory.

My contribution to the Doublethink symposium on Obama and foreign policy is now available.

Last week the DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama had written an essay, part of which was adapted into an op-ed published in the NYT, and this prompted some anxiety that a DPJ victory represented a dire anti-American turn. In recent days, Hatoyama has tried to clarify his views and to de-emphasize the degree to which his ideal of yuai implies turning away from or against America. Essentially, Hatoyama had written something designed mainly for domestic consumption concerning Japan’s domestic economic and political model and some Americans inevitably made the mistake of thinking that it primarily had something to do with us. Hatoyama was using the United States and our so-called “market fundamentalism” as foils for his argument in favor of the idea of yuai, which center-left and Christian Democratic politicians elsewhere would probably refer to by the word solidarity. Hatoyama prefers to identify it more literally with the idea of fraternity, but he is making the same point.

What Hatoyama was saying was no more remarkable than it would be if a Frenchman derided the “Anglo-Saxon model.” No doubt someone would treat this as an “anti-American” statement, but this misses that Hatoyama’s purpose in saying it is to oppose his own view to a caricature of an unbridled capitalist system that doesn’t even exist. Ironically, our system is coming more and more to represent Japan’s in all of its state-subsidized, zombified glory at the moment when Hatoyama has been campaigning for the most part on the promise of providing even more subsidies and government guarantees. As for the rest of the op-ed, Hatoyama’s statements that the financial crisis has jeopardized the dollar’s position and that a multipolar order has begun to take shape seem to be rather banal obervations. As Yglesias has mentioned already, Hatoyama’s proposals for regional currency integration and collective security cooperation are reasonable. They are also exactly the things most American policymakers have liked hearing from European politicians about the economic and political integration of Europe. One wonders why being, as our politicians might put it, “whole, free and at peace” is something we would not eventually prefer to see in the region that served as the other main battlefield of the last world war.

All that said, does the DPJ’s rise to power make any difference? When a country is governed by an entrenched bureaucracy and has been subject to one-party rule for decades, it is the safe bet that electoral upheaval will not have major consequences. Dov Zakheim made this bet concerning the future of Japanese policy under the incoming DPJ government, and he might very well be right to take this view. As I said last week, continuity has to be expected in the short term. One should also not exaggerate the degree of difference between the incoming government and its predecessor. Nonetheless, I don’t quite understand why we should think that an opposition party that has never held power before would act as if it has the luxury of playing it safe, ignoring its constituents and trashing most of its campaign promises. Foreign policy will not be Hatoyama’s top priority, and he will be hard-pressed to carry out most of the domestic changes he wants to make, but one way to help ensure that a DPJ government does cause a “sea change” in U.S.-Japan relations is to dismiss past DPJ statements as little more than electoral bluster and fail to prepare for changes that we have every reason to expect will occur.

David Adesnik and Jamie Kirchick have contributed to a Doublethink symposium in which I am also participating. My essay will be up fairly soon, and I’ll announce when it appears. Adesnik and Kirchick are both addressing the state of foreign policy realism. Adesnik has provided the broader overview, and Kirchick has applied his usual critique of realism to Obama’s policies. As I hope my essay will explain, the relationship between realism and Obama’s policies is far more tenuous than realists or interventionists would like. So many of the arguments over the place of realism in the Obama administration take for granted that it actually has a significant place in the administration’s conduct of foreign policy. I am finding that assumption less and less tenable as time goes by.

On a related topic, via Andrew I see that Foreign Policy asked Walt, Rothkopf, Drezner and Clemons to respond to Paul Wolfowitz’s tired attack on realism. Rothkopf first objects to the abusive deployment of vague and/or meaningless labels and then proceeds to endorse a strongly interventionist view. Drezner distinguishes a kind of pragmatic recognition of hard truths from a grander theory of “Realism.” Walt and Clemons naturally engage in more polemical refutations of Wolfowitz as the most prominent and identifiable realists among the four.

On the question of whether realists should be concerned with regime type and altering the nature of other states, Rothkopf writes:

If the objective is to advance the national interest and influence states and our ability to do so is limited and different from circumstance to circumstance, shouldn’t we use every tool at our disposal to do so (assuming the use of the tool provides a net gain toward achieving our goals)? If so, influencing the nature of states or the internal workings of states is not off bounds for realism — it is the beginning of realism — it is the place where the effort to influence states begins.

If realists were simply interested in the most cynical Machtpolitik imaginable, this would be true. What is strange about this passage is that Rothkopf insists that realists pretend that state sovereignty and international law are ultimately irrelevant in the calculation of the national interest. Even though we have repeatedly seen from the 17th to the 21st centuries that wars fought to change the internal constitutions of other states produce profoundly negative consequences for all parties, respect for state sovereignty and international law appear nowhere in this analysis. If a government respects the principle of state sovereignty, which ours is bound by treaty to respect, it ought to be concerned overwhelmingly with relations between itself and other governments rather than working constantly to subvert them from within. There is no guarantee that changing regime type will change a regime’s behavior in our favor, and if we believe that there are permanent state interests that persist despite major internal political change there is no use in changing regime type. As I have said before, a liberal, pluralistic, democratic Russian government that meets all of the expectations of Westerners concerning its internal behavior will nonetheless still be a Russian government interested in the same strategic goals and wary of the same potential threats. Indeed, a more liberalized Russia could easily justify its interventions in neighboring states, whether on behalf of ethnic Russians or not, with the language of “responsibility to protect,” “human rights” and, of course, “freedom.” Even now Moscow mimics our use of this propaganda to justify its presence in the separatist enclaves in Georgia–imagine what “liberations” it might carry out if it had credibility as a full-fledged liberal, constitutional regime. Obsessing over the ideological orientation and constitutional organization of other states has powerfully destabilizing effects when that obsession is made into the basis for policy and the justification for the use of force. That ought to be enough of a reason for realists and everyone else to reject it as folly.