There’s little else I agree with in this Matt Curry piece*, but Curry does make one important point:

Given this location, Ukraine will fall into a sphere of influence [bold mine-DL] and will lean toward either the West or Russia.

Obviously, Curry wants Ukraine to be in “our” sphere of influence, which is probably the most honest, straightforward statement I have seen made in defense of the insane proposition of bringing Ukraine into NATO. Nowhere does Curry pretend that bringing Ukraine into a Western orbit has to do with its sovereignty and independence or a repudiation of “19th century ideas of a sphere of influence,” which are the usual excuses for unnecessarily provoking the Russians. Spheres of influence are going to exist, so the real question is why the West generally or America specifically should continue to ruin the relationship with Russia to deny it a sphere of influence over territories that it has ruled for a large part of its modern, non-Soviet history. Why engage in what must be and will be seen to be openly anti-Russian moves? How is any real Ukrainian interest served by making Ukraine a front-line state in a renewed rivalry with Moscow? Who possibly benefits from this madness?

Curry says Ukraine’s role is to be “a successful check against Russian expansionist tendencies,” which would require Russia to have expansionist tendencies to check. Once again, we see an argument for the pursuit of NATO expansion in terms of defending against Russian expansion that has not been taking place and could not realistically take place on a large scale even if Moscow so desired it. At least when the British were afraid of Russian advances towards India, there had been some actual expansion of Russian territory to give them cause for worry. Today hawks are frightened of Russian expansion despite having seen the retreat of Russian power for the last twenty years. Isn’t it odd how remarkably skittish and easily spooked many hawks are? The only thing that has continually expanded regardless of circumstances or consequences has been NATO and the American sphere of influence in eastern Europe. Despite all of this expansion, NATO has shown that it has outlived its usefulness and has become more of a menace to the peace of Europe than it is a pillar of security, and real American interests that could have been served by improved relations with Russia have been tossed aside to keep an archaic, unnecessary alliance going.

* Can anyone spell Caucasus correctly? Anyone?

P.S. Curry’s article runs through all the reasons why Ukraine is vital to Russia, and how complicated by ethnic (and religious) differences Ukrainian politics is, and concludes that these are reasons why it is a good idea to make Ukraine a military ally! It’s quite obvious that Moscow’s interest in retaining Russian access to the Black Sea and Mediterranean, a strategic goal of Russian policy for centuries, is obviously a good reason why Western powers shouldn’t be allying themselves with the country that stands in between Russia and this goal. Clealrly, an ethnically divided state in which a large part of the population is Russian makes a very poor candidate for an ally in an openly anti-Russian strategy. Instead of providing a bulwark against Russia, which is unnecessary and dangerous in itself, this arrangement would fragment Ukraine. Ukraine’s long term survival and success depend on the strength of ethnic Russian nationalism being kept to a minimum inside Ukraine. Curry’s proposals would have the opposite effect. Finally, it goes without saying that fiddling with U.S. immigration policy to try to manipulate the demographics of Ukraine’s ethnic make-up would have approximately zero support on either the right or left.

When many conservatives were jumping on the bandwagon declaring Sotomayor to be a racist/racialist, I marveled at the short-sighted, self-defeating nature of the attacks. Of course, the bigger problem was that these charges against Sotomayor were baseless and ridiculous, and conservatives who kept propagating them were discrediting themselves and were distracting from the legitimate objections to the nominee’s judicial philosophy. What was more striking about the campaign to derail Sotomayor, which failed yesterday as everyone knew it would, was how it opened conservatives up to the most absurd, baseless charges of racism and lowered the standard by which an idea, statement or action should be considered racist. Now Paul Krugman has managed to discern racial antagonism in the vocal, sometimes obnoxious opposition to Democratic health care legislation at town hall meetings. Krugman writes:

But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.

You might call this Krugman’s Hatchet: no matter how many other reasonable explanations may account for conservative behavior, the real cause is always racial panic.

The point is not that Krugman would not have made an argument like this had the opposition to Sotomayor not been centered around her non-existent racism, but that Krugman and the like always make these arguments and the attacks on Sotomayor have made it virtually impossible for the public to take conservatives seriously after they so cavalierly threw the same charges against Sotomayor. Conservatives will reject Krugman’s attack as the nonsense that it is, but every conservative who hallucinated Sotomayor’s racism/racialism doesn’t have much of a credible defense. Indeed, these conservatives will be reduced to saying that their outrage over Sotomayor’s non-existent racism was just as manufactured as Krugman’s claims are unfounded. If Sotomayor’s really unremarkable “wise Latina” statement is proof of abiding anti-white racism, as so many pundits on the right have claimed and as at least one of the Senators voting nay insisted during the floor debate, “code”-breaking liberals are going to have a field day with every anti-Obama statement any conservative makes. Having watered down what constitutes racism so much to try unsuccessfully to trip up Sotomayor, these conservative critics cannot credibly refute Krugman et al. when they impute motives to their opponents just as the critics foolishly imputed them to Sotomayor.

The clever thing in accusing someone of “racial anxiety,” as Krugman does to the protesters against health care legislation, is that it is as hard to disprove as a conspiracy theory. No matter what explanation one provides for the intensity of opposition to Democratic health care proposals, the “real” reason for such intense opposition must be found somewhere else. One simple explanation might be this: the protesters are die-hard partisans who want to thwart Democratic initiatives as much as they can. Another might be that they see the proposed legislation as another advance towards a socialistic system that they find unacceptable and un-American on an ideological level (which may also explain the cries of “This is America!”). (The importance of Americanism as the driving force of much of the right cannot be overestimated in all of this.) There may be a more mundane, practical reason for opposing the plan, such as having a strong desire not to pay for it. It is possible that Middle Americans who have seen wealthy and powerful interests saved in one bailout after another have reached their limit with the concentration of power in Washington and the collusion between government and corporate interests, and they are reacting reflexively against any new large government spending commitments. It could also be the case that protesters are acting on exaggerated or misleading information that was designed to inspire outrage, which could help account for the vehemence of some of the protests. Of course, none of this is sufficient for Krugman, who must always see everything on the right in terms of racial resentment. As usual when he writes about politics, he is making it all up and pretending to know something about what drives the other side of the debate, when it is merely what he prefers to believe are the motives of his opponents.

It’s been ages since I have had an occasion to mock Mitt Romney, so I was very grateful to one of my commenters for drawing attention to Romney’s silly book title, No Apology: The Case For American Greatness. Via Andrew, I see that Alex Massie has already said much of what needed saying:

That alienation responds to emotion, not policy. It’s nationalism – or, if you prefer, its definition of patriotism – is instinctive, suspicious and belligerent, keenly aware that there are sell-outs and traitors everywhere. This, then, is the crew Romney is pandering to. Maybe he is right to do so, perhaps he needs to do this. Either way, it’s a sad commentary on the state of the modern conservative movement.

Just to be clear: the notion that Obama has been scurrying around the globe grovelling and apologising on behalf of the United States is utterly absurd. As candidate Obama said over and over again, he owes everything he has to the United States. It was America, after all, who gave his father the chance to come and study in the US. Without that there is no Barack Hussein Obama, far less a President Obama.

Nor can it be said that Obama’s foreign policy views diverge much from the American mainstream. They are, for the most part and at bottom, pretty conventional. Certainly there are few areas in which Obama’s views would have been considered extreme in, say, the time of the George HW Bush administration. Nor, needless to say, has he staffed his administration with radicals.

Still, that’s by-the-by. Romney’s little book – and it is bound to be terribly small – wrestles with a straw man. Sadly that’s only to be expected these days. The GOP has, for the time being at least, decided to double down on nationalism amidst an atmosphere of festering resentment. Denouncing your opponents as un-American isn’t serious politics, nor does it seem likely to be sufficiently persuasive in serious times. But at the moment, that’s where the GOP is at.

What I find intriguing in Romney’s choice of topic for his book, which I imagine will be a more long-winded version of thisspeech, is that he has absolutely no background in foreign affairs, military policy or national security issues. Just as he did in the last cycle, he is intent on identifying himself with hard-line positions on issues where he has no credibility, and he is also studiously avoiding all those areas of policy where his business experience and his inner domestic policy wonk might help him. Of course, as a proponent of bailouts for Wall Street and Detroit and as the governor who signed off on MassCare, Romney has less credibility than most other Republican presidential aspirants in attacking Obama on either front. No doubt he will transform himself yet again into a hard-charging, government-slashing radical if he thinks that is what will win him support, but the man’s lack of any enduring convictions will reveal itself before long.

Last time, Romney determined that social issues were his weakness with core GOP constituencies, and so he worked overtime to cover that weakness by saying all the right things despite having zero credibility as a serious pro-lifer. While it is true that Romney comically tried to out-hawk everyone in the Republican field in 2007-08, memorably telling Cuban exiles that they should appropriate Castro’s slogan of “patria o muerte, venceremos” for their own cause and touting his lame grandstanding over Khatami’s visit to Harvard in 2005 as proof of his strong leadership, he had to be aware that national security was not his strong suit. The latest incarnation of Romney, in which he pretends to be the vigilant security hawk and super-nationalist, has no more substance behind it than Romney the social conservative, but as Massie correctly observes it is emotion and not substance that matters more to most nationalists.

Specifically, it is the emotional satisfaction that the U.S. government is ultimately always in the right, because America is always right. It is the pleasure derived from the idea that whatever the government does or has done abroad should be praised, or at the very least not criticized. Unless, of course, we are talking about an episode of withdrawal or negotiated settlement, as these represent a “betrayal” of American “leadership” and “mission.” As long as Romney sets the right mood, demonstrates the appropriate attitude of idolatrous reverence for the nation, and acts as the national cheerleader, his actual policy positions probably could be less hawkish and aggressive than Obama’s and he would be taken seriously. Even if acknowledging past U.S. mistakes aids our public diplomacy and enhances American influence in another country by repairing tattered relations with a foreign government, what matters to the kind of nationalists to which Romney evidently wants to appeal is that the U.S. government never admit serious error, because to do so would be to diminish “American greatness” and somehow invite foreign attacks.

The report that two Russian attack subs appeared off the eastern seaboard in international waters has been an occasion for all kinds of speculation. While the subs’ appearance is remarkable mostly for how rare and unusual it is for the Russian navy to send its best vessels so far out to sea, thus underscoring how relatively non-threatening Russian conventional forces are to U.S. security and how few Russian provocations of any kind there have been for decades, it has prompted some predictable yelping. David Satter writes:

They are in international waters and have not taken any provocative actions. Nonetheless, they convey a message. In the wake of President Obama’s visit to Moscow and Vice President Biden’s prediction that Russia’s weakness will produce conciliatory behavior, the submarines demonstrate that the Kremlin has no intention of changing its aggressive stance toward the U.S. [bold mine-DL]

Russia does not have an “aggressive stance toward the U.S.” I’m not sure what one can call this except delusional. Our government arms and trains the military of a neighboring state, which then uses its army to escalate a war with Russia and kill Russian soldiers, and it is Russia that has an “aggressive stance.” Our government bombards a nominal Russian ally for 78 days without just cause, but it is Russia that is the aggressive one. We try to bring every former satellite and province into our anti-Russian military alliance, and it is Russia that is the aggressor. When Russia has the gall to protest against these provocations and aggressive moves, or even dares to retaliate against attacks on its soldiers and the populations under their protection, it is Russia that must be acting aggressively. The most frustrating thing about these lies is that they are so transparent and incredible, but they are nonetheless widely accepted and believed.

It is true that Biden’s prediction was wrong, in no small part because Moscow was bound to become unyielding and uncooperative because of Biden’s calculated insults to Russia during and after his visit to Ukraine and Georgia. If the Russians are cooling noticeably towards the new administration, it is because that administration has been operating at both “the level of dissimulation and the level of reality.”

P.S. Scoblete offers one of the few sensible comments on this story:

Either way, this should serve as a good reminder that it is jarring when a not-quite-friendly nation brings military power right up to your borders. Food for thought.

Quite. Now imagine how our political class would react if Russia had made security guarantees to multiple neighboring states and set about arming and training their militaries to “defend” against U.S. “revisionism” and “aggression.”

So Obama’s generally unimpressive press secretary called Ahmadinejad the “elected leader” of Iran. John has tartly mocked Andrew for calling this “unforgivable,” and for the most part I agree with John. One stray comment from the press secretary can hardly be such an appalling offense. It is not at all clear that waxing indignant about Ahmadinejad on the day of his latest inauguration would be anything other than counterproductive for American interests. Suppose that the administration treats Ahmadinejad as the de facto head of government in Iran and continues to pursue a diplomatic track with Tehran–will that be some super-unforgivable error or will it be the unemotional pursuit of national interest that ought to characterize U.S. foreign policy?

It is the word elected that really bothers so many people, isn’t it? Andrew complains, “He was selected.” Oh, well, that’s different. As if the finalists for the first round of voting on June 12 were anything other than selected, screened and pre-approved by the real powers in Iran. It seems clear that the government never had any intention of counting the votes, but we will also probably never know whether Ahmadinejad would have lost had they bothered to count them. As a matter of U.S. policy towards Iran, what difference does it make whether the head of Iran’s government is selected twice without any concern for public opinion or whether he is selected once and then endorsed by a plebiscite? What American and Iranian interests have changed since June 12 because of these protests and the government response to them?

Andrew continues to maintain that “the revolution” is not over, but as Kevin Sullivan correctly observed about the Iranian protests: “there was little evidence of any such revolution.” Sullivan elaborated:

Unlike the Shah and his father before him, the current Iranian regime — bloated, corrupt and incompetent as it most assuredly is — still enjoys the capital of perhaps the 20th Century’s most popular revolution. At its height, the revolution of 1978 and 1979 accounted for nearly 10% of the Iranian population. Dozens of cities were consumed by riots, marches and demonstrations on an almost daily basis. The Shah could read the writing on the wall, and more importantly, knew how to count. The people no longer required his services.

The Mousavites simply don’t have those numbers — yet. This doesn’t make them wrong, it simply makes them the minority. Any genuine revolution, so as not to be confused as counter-revolutionary, will require the support of the country’s mostly silent majority. Ayatollah Khomeini didn’t emerge at random as the figurehead of national revolt in 1979. His name was not drawn from a hat, nor was he nominated for his intimidating scowl. Much like the demonstrators and dissidents of today, he and his fellow travelers cut their teeth over a decade prior resisting the Shah’s efforts to secularize the country. Today’s reformists are green in more than color alone, and a great deal of work remains to be done.

But that work will only be more arduous and daunting with the gushing and premature support of western media and elites. Like any revolutionary regime, Tehran has gladly embraced the words and rhetoric of external actors and used them as evidence of yet another plot by outsiders to interfere in Iranian affairs.

It is this last point that is especially relevant here. If the White House daily scolds Ahmadinejad as a usurper and a villain, which would warm the hearts of pro-Mousavi Westerners everywhere, who benefits from a steady stream of American vilification of the de facto president? It isn’t going to be Mousavi and his supporters, that’s for sure. What could be more damaging to Mousavi’s claims to represent the true vision of the revolution and Islamic republic than to have the U.S. government regularly echoing the protesters’ complaints against Ahmadinejad? It would be a simple matter for state propagandists to say that Mousavi is collaborating with foreign powers and coordinating his message with them when foreign governments are happily repeating Mousavi’s charges.

The reality is that there is little the U.S. can do to affect the outcome of internal Iranian disputes, and most of what our government might try to do is likely to end up harming the people many Americans want to help. The non-starter idea of a gasoline embargo, which Iran’s major trading partners will never accept, would be political gold for the de facto government if it could be implemented. The government could blame any worsening economic conditions, rationing and shortages on external enemies and have one more thing to use against internal dissidents to turn public opinion against them. Luckily for the protesters, this deeply misguided effort to “help” will never get off the ground.

Update: Don’t take my word for it–Hamid Dabashi makes much the same argument against sanctions. Dabashi writes:

As in the Iraqi case, imposition of economic sanctions on Iran will have catastrophic humanitarian consequences, while it will even more enrich and empower such critical components of the security and military apparatus as the Pasdaran and the Basij. The two organizations work like a massive corporate conglomerate and have major control over the export-import components of both the official and the unofficial economy.

It will also give them a welcome opportunity to accuse the opposition of cooperation with “the Enemy” and initiate even a harsher crackdown of the opposition, and perhaps even move toward a full-fledged military coup.

The fact of the matter is that the nascent civil rights movement in Iran, which can use the moral support of ordinary Americans, is an amorphous uprising still very much in its earliest, formative, stages.

No one, particularly a panel that has a very thin and dubious claim on scholarship on Iran, can speak for it in any certain terms, especially in its having asked the United States to lead the imposition of new economic sanctions on Iranians.

Prof. Dabashi’s article also includes a depressing run-down of the embarrassing interventionist biases of practically every establishment think tank in Washington.

Aziz Poonawalla thinks that my earlier post on Birthers was an attempt to “put as positive a spin on this as possible,” which seems a strange way of reading what I wrote. As Aziz and other long-time readers must know, I am not normally in the business of providing positive spin for Republicans. Given my criticisms of the dangers and problems of nationalism for conservatives and for America, and considering how unsympathetic I am to partisan tribalism, I would have thought it was clear that I was not saying anything very flattering about Birthers by saying that this obsession was a function of blind partisanship and nationalism. As I thought I made clear, this obsession is a more exaggerated, bizarre expression of equally baseless fears about Obama’s insufficient Americanness and his supposed lack of devotion to Americanism. These fears continue to prevail among most mainstream conservatives and Republicans, and they inform a large part of the conventional Republican criticism of Obama’s conduct of foreign policy. If this is my idea of positive spin, what would the negative spin look like?

Assuming that racism is the central or overriding element behind this obsession, as Aziz does, is the easiest move in the world, but it is not necessarily accurate. It is a ready-made answer that in this case relies on a number of prejudices about Southerners, conservatives and attitudes towards race that are largely outdated, and it is an answer that fails to take account of the potency of political ideology, partisan attachment, and a particularly assertive, aggressive post-9/11 nationalism that took over much of the right in the last eight years. The insistence that Obama was born outside America, or that he must be in some way foreign, may be the only way for extreme Americanists to account for how someone born here and raised for almost his entire life in the U.S. could come to have views that they regard as un-American and anti-American. Those who have elevated the nation into a sort of church or religion, and those who are most attached to this kind of national idolatry, cannot abide the idea that the President–the secular high priest of their religion–believes what Obama believes (or, just as important, what they imagine he believes). For the Americanist, this is something like the abomination of desolation.

Chris Orr is drawing on the expressions of current Republican anti-Obama sentiment to claim vindication for his prediction that Bobby Jindal would be rejected by Republican primary voters if he were to run for President. Orr is still wrong about Jindal for the same reasons Ross Douthat, Dave Weigel and I gave back then, which is why it is important to stress the importance of ideology, partisanship and nationalism in understanding Birther nonsense and overall hostility to Obama. Were Obama a pro-war Republican who belonged to a mostly or entirely conservative denomination, none of the fears and obsessions about his heritage or place of birth would have gained any purchase on the right.

Back in October, I tried to explain the reason for the deep distrust of Obama on the right:

As with so many of the controversies of this year, the increasingly negative Republican reaction to Obama from the start of the year until now has been tied directly to the growing perception that Obama was insufficiently Americanist such that he has been regularly described as someone who does not believe in American exceptionalism. The idea that he does not believe in American exceptionalism happens to be as false as it is widespread, as any brief survey of Obama’s public remarks would make clear. (What Americanists on the right forget is that American exceptionalism survives because it is a widely shared, albeit misguided, idea that has adherents across the political spectrum.) Even all of the rumors and chain e-mails that cast doubt on Obama’s background were aimed at denying or questioning his Americanness because there was a presumption that an antiwar left-liberal Democrat (a veritable neo-McGovernite in the fantasies of some Republicans) was not Americanist enough or at all and it is this supposed lack of Americanism that makes Republicans revile him as much as they do. As a source of anti-Obama sentiment, this has always been more important than his left-leaning politics or any specific part of his domestic agenda. To some extent, it is not possible to disentangle Obama’s heritage, his particular experience of liberal Protestantism and his politics, but for the most part what has troubled Republicans, or at least what Republicans have focused on, is mainly the anti-Americanism of his past associates. Even in the last sputtering gasps of the McCain campaign, the socialist charge is one last attempt to link Obama to an ideology that has often been defined as a foreign import.

Jindal suffers from none of this baggage, despite the fact that neither of his parents was born in the United States, because he identifies strongly with both the conservative Catholic and American nationalist elements in the GOP. Even though Jindal came to Christianity as a convert just as Obama did, it is the kind of Christianity he embraced that makes a huge difference. His religion and nationalism together immunize him fairly well against any attacks or conspiracy theories of the kind that have been used against Obama. If he were just a traditional Catholic, but not a nationalist, that could create friction with many constituencies in the GOP, and if he were just a secular or non-Christian nationalist he would run into significant resistance from many Christian voters, but the combination makes him acceptable to a broad cross-section of the party. Religious identity politics shields him from being regarded as “Other,” and among a significant number of Republicans his story of first-generation American assimilation and success is one of the main reasons why Jindal is so well-liked. Perhaps just as important, Jindal provides Republican voters with the opportunity to demonstrate their color-blind, anti-racist credentials, and they will jump at the chance to support him, if only to spite people on the left who expect them to do otherwise. It may be difficult for Orr to believe or take seriously, but all of this has enormous appeal on the right. The ludicrous response to the nomination of Sotomayor cannot be understood apart from the burning desire to pin the racist label on the left and take up the banner of color-blind equal protection. At some point in the past, this may have been opportunistic, but it has become deeply ingrained and integral to how a large number of conservatives understand themselves. The movement and the party that went into a frenzy over Sotomayor’s non-existent racism are not going to oppose Jindal because he is Indian-American.

Especially during his second run for governor, many conservative Louisiana voters came to see Jindal as “one of them” because of shared religious and political commitments. In his 2007 win, he overcame much of the resistance from northern Louisiana parishes, whose support for Blanco was interpreted after the 2003 election as evidence of racial antagonism. Whatever the reason for Jindal’s failure in northern Louisiana in 2003, his improvement in many of the same parishes that had defeated him four years before demonstrated how weak the resistance to his candidacy was when he presented them with a second chance to vote for him. This is the well-known story of Jindal’s electoral success in Louisiana. There is good reason to think that Jindal could replicate that success elsewhere with conservative Republican voters in other states. This will not be tested in 2012, because Jindal is not very likely to run for President in the next cycle, but it is important to understand that his reasons for not running will not include the concern that many Republican voters will hold his ethnicity against him.

Jacob Weisberg is wrong in this recent article, but not for the reason Joseph Bottum claims. Weisberg wrote:

In so doing, Obama now faces an inverted set of hazards: getting overcommitted in Afghanistan, putting too much faith in the United Nations, accommodating dictators instead of standing up to them. Most alarmingly, given all that his predecessor did to discredit them, Obama has failed to stand up for the broader ideas of democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. Surely if not for Bush, Obama’s instinct after the Iranian election would have been to identify with those risking their lives to free their country, not to get back to his attempt at dialogue with Ahmadinejad.

This led Bottum to whine:

Bush, you see, was so bad that he’s still making Obama make mistakes. The evil of Bush was so evil that, in recoiling from it, the righteous understandably go too far in the opposite direction.

This isn’t Weisberg’s point at all. While he may believe it to be the case, Weisberg isn’t claiming in this article that Bush was unusually incompetent or prone to error. On the contrary, he is saying that Obama’s reaction against Bush’s errors fits a pattern of behavior that all Presidents in the last forty years have practiced. Weisberg is arguing that Obama is overreacting and making mistakes in trying to be the anti-Bush, just as Bush’s foreign policy blunders both before and after 9/11 derived from a burning need to be the anti-Clinton, and so on. The main problem with Weisberg’s interpretation is that it gets almost everything about Obama’s foreign policy badly wrong.

On the surface, it appeared that there were going to be numerous corrections from the mistakes of the previous administration, but more often than not continuity has been the theme. Even on India, where Obama seemed to be wrecking improved bilateral relations built up by Bush, Obama has swung back around to pursuing similar policies. The trouble is that this means that Obama is following Bush in one of the few international relationships he handled correctly and also continues to follow him in his otherwise dreadful handling of foreign policy. If Obama has not yet embarked on some new foolhardy “humanitarian” intervention, my advice is this: wait. The main thing preventing him from pursuing such a course is the simple lack of resources imposed on his administration by the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan. It certainly isn’t for lack of figures on the NSC who are well-known for their well-intentioned belligerence.

The only people caught in what Weisberg calls the “dialectical rut” are the pundits and other observers who remain invested in the idea that Obama represents something significantly different from Bush when it comes to the substance and goals of foreign policy. For them, Obama may be better, he may be worse, but he is definitely quite different. The problem with this analysis is that it just flat wrong when it comes to substance and goals. For the first six months of this year, I entertained some small hope, vain as it proved to be, that Russia policy would not be self-defeating, Iran policy would be less counterproductive, and the general conduct of foreign affairs would be more responsible. That hope was apparently badly misplaced. It is a measure of how badly Bush performed, how horribly McCain would have done, and how terrifyingly dangerous Biden is that Obama as President remains the least bad alternative available at the moment.

Weisberg’s claim that Obama would have publicly identified with the protesters in Iran but for the example of Bush is wrong. This claim is clearly driven by Weisberg’s belief that Obama ought to have identified with the protesters, and the only way to explain his failure to do so explicitly is to pin it on overreaction to Bush’s excessive support for “color” revolutions in several countries and his militant pursuit of democracy promotion. Refusing to identify with the protesters was not an over-correction to Bush’s democratist excess, but was instead the tactical, cautious move that the administration claimed that it was. In other words, it was not an error, but a decision made with the actual well-being of the protesters in mind. If Bush would have engaged in some obnoxious grandstanding that would have led to a harsher crackdown and additional civilian deaths, it is hardly Obama’s failure that he did something else.

Juan Cole has written a misguided article comparing the “right-wind populism” of Palin and Ahmadinejad. Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings, who should know better, buys into this and writes:

No doubt he’s playing up some parallels and downplaying some differences, but it’s nonetheless true that Red Province political factions around the world have a great deal in common.

This would be a lot more persuasive if Ahmadinejad were the leader of such a faction, unless we want to change what we now mean by “red,” which has absurdly come to be identified with the main faction of what passes for the center-right here. If you look past a few superficial and ultimately meaningless similarities, it becomes very difficult to see how Ahmadinejad is anything like Palin. Ahmadinejad is more like Huey Long with an engineering degree (not normally the profile of a right-wing populist), whose power base is the rural and urban poor, and who has pushed for redistribution of wealth in his campaign rhetoric and in his governing policies. In other words, when it comes to actual policy Ahmadinejad is an actual economic, and even left-leaning, populist. Because of the peculiarities of Alaskan sources of state revenue, Palin was able to play at this for a time with her tax hikes on oil companies, but in her incarnation as a national political figure she has become the antithesis of all of this.

The “right-wing populism” Cole disdains when critiquing Palin has no real populist policies behind it. Palin and Ahmadinejad have both railed against corruption in principle, but even here we see a crucial difference. Despite her reformer mantra, Palin has been the political ally of Ted Stevens, and Ahmadinejad has been a stern critic and opponent of Rafsanjani and the wealthy elite of the country. Superficial electoral stunts aside, on the national stage Palin was one of the candidates of a predominantly middle- and upper-class coalition, and Ahmadinejad has been the candidate of the lower-class majority arrayed against an alliance of predominantly middle-class reformers and wealthy establishment figures such as Rafsanjani. Would anyone seriously claim that Palin is a sort of American Hugo Chavez? No, not really. So we shouldn’t make a similarly silly mistake by comparing her to Ahmadinejad. Whatever they may purport to represent, their respective constituencies are as different as can be.

I suppose both do adopt a working-class Everyman/woman shtick, but once again when it comes to substance Palin endorses the usual pro-corporate economic policies of her party. Ahmadinejad’s tenure has been an economic disaster as he has tried to buy his way out of economic woes with easy credit and spending, but this is a function of his genuine, if poorly-conceived and even more poorly-executed, economic populism. Palin’s populism is purely rhetorical and symbolic: she is a journalism major who rails against journalists, and a politician who rails against the political class. Even if Ahmadinejad intends merely to replace one entrenched, corrupt establishment with his own cronies, and there is every reason to believe this is what he has been doing and will continue to try to do, this has much more in common with Chavismo than it does with Republican pseudo-populism.

Prof. Cole says at one point:

Both appeal to a sort of wounded nationalism, speaking of the sacrifice of dedicated troops for an often feckless public, and identifying themselves with the common soldier.

An important difference here would have to be that Ahmadinejad actually served in the Revolutionary Guards and trained members of the Basij militia during a very bloody war. As we saw in her resignation speech, Palin’s praise for the military is often enough self-serving: “soldiers risk their lives for your rights, so don’t say mean things about me in the press!” Whatever else one might say about it, Ahmadinejad’s “wounded nationalism” appeals to an entire generation that experienced a foreign invasion, while Palin’s conventional pro-military refrains are boilerplate for politicians of both parties as they back any and all uses of force around the world. In Palin’s defense, at least she does have one of her own children serving in wartime.

Cole’s comparison would work a lot better if Ahmadinejad were right-wing or if Palin were a populist.