J.L. Wall, John’s colleague at Upturned Earth, has written a sober response to one of David Goldman’s recent odd posts. I confess I stopped paying attention to “Spengler” around the time he wrote this (to which I responded here), and I don’t think I’ve been missing anything since then. From a quick browse of his recent posts, I find that Goldman’s abandonment of anonymity has somehow led him to become even more unreasonable. It seems that Goldman has no use for M.K. Bhadrakumar, except when the latter happens to write something that reinforces Goldman’s own views, but he has no trouble using Bhadrakumar’s latest report as the basis for this claim:

Never in history has a great power [i.e., the U.S.] cast away so much influence in so short a period of time.

Of course, anyone who bothers to read Bhadrakumar’s report would come to a rather different and much more balanced conclusion. Bhadrakumar described Biden’s visit to Ukraine and Georgia and the statements he made there much as I have:

Plainly put, Biden’s stark message was that the Obama administration intends to robustly challenge Russia’s claim as the predominant power in the post-Soviet space.

Far from casting away influence, Washington seems intent on retaining and expanding that influence, and engagement and “reset” be damned. I may regard this as folly, but there is no question that it is happening. Indeed, it is plausible that Erdogan’s supposed troublemaking in Central Asia and Xinjiang, which could work to the detriment of both Russia and China, is either something that Washington has been encouraging or it is something that Washington does not find particularly upsetting.

It might also be relevant to this discussion to note that the Uighurs did not see Abdullah Gul’s visit to Urumqibefore the riots as a gesture of pan-Turkic solidarity, but instead as a signal to Beijing that improved Sino-Turkish relations need not be held hostage by any feelings of ethnic kinship with marginalized Uighurs. According to Gul, the Uighurs were to be a “bridge of friendship” between Turkey and China, which sounds pleasant enough until one remembers that being a bridge can mean getting trampled on.

It is true that Erdogan has sharply criticized China in even stronger terms than he criticized Israel over Gaza, which suggests a pattern of catering to a domestic audience at the expense of influence and good relations abroad. As it happens, Turkish public opinion is even more hostile to China in the wake of the riots, and the government is navigating very choppy waters as it tries to express some outrage over the treatment of Uighurs without destroying its relationship with China entirely. Everything AK has been doing for the last decade has pointed to internal consolidation, not Enver-esque adventures to unite all Turks. AK’s Islamism is as moderate or immoderate as ever, but it is not the issue here.

If one of our allies is stirring up trouble in the backyard of two rival powers, how could this possibly bother Goldman? Apparently he is deeply concerned that China has gained a foothold in the oh-so-vital market of Moldova. What he seems to have missed entirely is that Russian and Chinese moves in Moldova are pre-emptive moves designed to prevent Moldova from falling into NATO’s orbit, which means that this new projection of Chinese economic power is partly a response to the continued aggressive policy of NATO expansion that Biden’s trip just re-confirmed. Bhadrakumar comments:

Moldova is a country where China has historically been an observer rather than a player. This is Beijing’s first leap across Central Asia to the frayed western edges of Eurasia. Why is Moldova becoming so terribly important? Beijing will have calculated the immense geopolitical significance of Moldova’s integration by the West. It would then be a matter of time before Moldova was inducted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), before the Black Sea became a “NATO lake” and the alliance positioned itself in a virtually unassailable position to march into the Caucasus and right into Central Asia on China’s borders.

What we may never quite know is the extent of coordination between Moscow and Beijing. Both capitals have stressed lately of increased Sino-Russian coordination in foreign policy. The joint statement issued after the visit by the Chinese President Hu Jintao to Russia in June specifically expressed Beijing’s support for Moscow over the situation in the Caucasus. Clearly, a high degree of coordination is becoming visible across the entire post-Soviet space.

In other words, the continuation of misguided hegemonic policies in eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia has worked to solidify and strengthen Sino-Russian ties and elicited a series of responses designed to thwat further advances of U.S. influence. From all of this, Goldman has managed to find evidence not only of diminishing American influence, but of the fastest decline in the influence of a great power in All Of History. This is plainly ludicrous, and it has nothing to do with what Bhadrakumar has written, nor has it very much to do with the real world.

Watching a certain segment of the right descend ever deeper into obsession with Obama’s place of birth*, I remembered that I predicted that a fixation on Obama’s identity would become one of the consuming passions for many conservatives during his time in office:

As the election campaign has already shown, the most powerful, widespread opposition to Obama from the right centers around his identity, his associations and what these are supposed to tell us about him. We can expect constant obsession with Obama’s biography and associations to preoccupy most mainstream conservatives for the next four years, so that the names Raila Odinga and Tony Rezko will become for another rising generation of conservatives what Paula Jones and Mochtar Riady were to mine, which is to say they will become the distractions that will consume most of Obama’s critics and keep them from focusing on more serious problems with his administration (whatever those might turn out to be).

I made my predictions last October by taking for granted that conservatives would go into opposition against Obama in the same way that they did against Clinton, and they would do this because many unaccountably believe that their opposition tactics were successful in the ’90s. One of the similarities between conservative responses to Clinton and Obama is how deeply and viscerally most conservatives seem to loathe the man, regardless of his policies, and how a presumption of some unusual degree of malevolence and dishonesty informs their reactions to everything he does. This not only puts them deeply at odds with an overwhelming majority of the country, who may have deep reservations about his policies but find it difficult to work up the concentrated disgust that many conservatives feel, but it also makes them less interested in persuasion, policy alternatives and effective argument. Focus on scandal and controversy is a sure sign of an opposition that cannot or will not do much else. It is also a sign of an opposition that has little hope of winning back the public’s trust.

* It is probably just a matter of time before they begin questioning whether he was, in fact, born as a human or instead grown as a Cylon copy. After all, this “raises serious questions” that Obama needs to put to rest!

In the new issue of TAC, Eve Tushnet sings the praises of Dupont Circle, and along the way expresses her annoyance with the “paeans to rural community” with which she is supposedly inundated by other Americans on the right. If the American right were suffering from an undue attachment to rural life and small towns, I might be able to understand better the source of Tushnet’s irritation, but what the right suffers from is a collection of deeply misguided policies combined with an excess of praise for the very communities their preferred policies decimate and change beyond recognition. I won’t begrudge the Dupont Circle resident her local patriotism, and I can appreciate her expression of what Kennan called a “loyalty despite” rather than a “loyalty because of,” but if the city is the “human condition with the volume on high” it nonetheless remains a kind of place relatively more hostile to moderation and virtue, and it will always be the kind of place prone to an exaggeration of all those desires that man needs to keep in check if he is to remain civilized rather than merely urbanized. In the meantime, the economic and political consolidation and concentration of power that our major cities embody are real dangers that threaten the urban professional and the farmer alike.

Jonah Goldberg is probably not working from deep familiarity with Cyril of Alexandria, so he probably doesn’t realize how this sounds:

Oprah promised Obama would help us “evolve to a higher plane.” Deepak Chopra said Obama’s presidency represented “a quantum leap in American consciousness.” Last month, Newsweek editor Evan Thomas proclaimed that Obama stood “above the country, above — above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Well, now he’s the god who bleeds, and once you’re the god who bleeds, it’s hard to get the divinity back in the tube, as it were.

Of course, Obama isn’t remotely divine, but if I were trying to make the point that Obama’s absurdly high elevation by his supporters has failed and he has come crashing back to earth I don’t think I would describe him in decidedly Christ-like terms. Yes, I get that Goldberg is making a Star Trek reference, but I am guessing that for most of his audience Kirok is not the first thing that comes to mind when describing a suffering divinity. More to the point, if you want to mock Obama supporters’ messianism, it might help to avoid describing their hero in such obviously messianic terms.

I haven’t said anything about the so-called “Birther” lunacy, because, well, it’s lunacy that really doesn’t deserve a moment’s consideration, but Steve Benen made a remark about it that I want to discuss briefly. Benen wrote:

Outside the South, this madness is gaining very little traction, and remains a fringe conspiracy theory. Within the South, it’s practically mainstream.

Now Benen already noticed that there is a significant partisan gap in the responses. The South has become the Republicans’ main region, and it has a disproportionate share of partisan Republicans living in it. My guess is that the reason why the South as a region has so many more people in agreement with Birther nonsense or those who are “unsure” about Obama’s citizenship is that it still has a much larger population of Republicans, and partisan hatred of the President is much greater there. This makes it more fertile ground for believing nonsensical claims about the President, because it is a region with a higher concentration of people willing to believe almost anything negative about a leading member of the other party. Hard-core partisans are quite often willing to believe the worst about their political opponents, no matter how baseless, and will happily ignore identical or worse claims about their own leaders no matter how well-supported.

If the President were McCain, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone and whose status is therefore very slightly more ambiguous than Obama’s, this movement would not exist. The same people leading the charge today would probably be shouting down anyone who had the temerity to “raise questions” about McCain’s citizenship. I won’t rule out that race may have some role, but nationality and nationalism are far more important. Never underestimate how closely some of these partisans identify their own particular ideology and party with being truly American. The only way to make sense of the explosion of this lunacy is to see it as a continuation of the belief that Obama, by virtue of what he believes, cannot be a “real” American, so the obsession with his place of birth is really an extension of the presidential campaign in which he and his supporters were considered not to be from “real” America. We are endlessly treated to more respectable versions of this argument in articles that claim that Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, that he embraces national decline, etc., which pretend to be policy arguments, but which are ultimatey arguments against Obama’s American identity. The argument normally portrays Obama as being somehow anti-American, and therefore self-loathing. The Birthers have modified this argument and chosen instead to claim that Obama is simply non-American. Neither is true, but the former somehow hangs on as a credible, serious argument when it is just as baseless and wrong as the latter.

None of this excuses the gross, willful ignorance that is required to persist in the belief that Obama is not a natural-born citizen, but it may help explain why otherwise presumably rational people fall for such nonsense.

Update: Dan McCarthy has a longer post in much the same vein at Tory Anarchist.

With respect to Alexander Cockburn, he is being far too generous to Obama when he tries to explain Clinton and Biden’s recent statements this way:

At best Obama is presiding over an undisciplined cabinet; at worst, he is facing mutiny, publicly conducted by two people who only a year ago were claiming that their qualifications to be in the Oval Office were far superior to those of the junior senator from Illinois.

It would be gratifying for those of us who have given Obama the slightest benefit of the doubt on foreign policy to believe that his subordinates are sabotaging him, or to put all of this down to poor discipline and headstrong rivals. However, as a recent Michael Crowley article makes clear, this administration is one of the most tightly-run ships in decades, and this is true nowhere more than in foreign policy. The “team of rivals” is notable for the absence of rivals. If the result is “seamless continuity with folly,” which I won’t deny, that is the intended result. The fault is Obama’s, as Cockburn argues later, but his failing is not that he has not controlled his administration well enough, but that he controls it quite well in the service of bad policies. Gone are the turf wars of the Bush administration that occasionally gave realists and war opponents some reason to hope for sanity. “No Drama” Obama has a unified administration that is heading down the wrong, hawkish path. Obama is responsible for these things–we cannot blame subordinates for the President’s mistakes.

Whether Biden’s remarks in Ukraine and Georgia were precisely scripted for him or not, he was saying what Obama wanted said. If Clinton has put forward the nuclear “umbrella” proposal that she previously floated during the campaign, she did so with Obama’s approval. (It may be worth noting here that such an “umbrella,” while far from optimal, is much better than the alternative of launching military strikes against Iran, and it represents a modest turn back towards deterrence and containment and away from “pre-emption.”) As Cockburn acknowledges, Obama does have and always has had “an impeccably conventional view of how the world works,” so we should never have been surprised when he stocked his administration with people who have the same view and endorse policies consistent with that view.

Despite their age, Biden and Clinton may be positioning themselves for a future run at the White House, but their “disloyalty” would require them to be in disagreement with Obama on policy and offer them a way to separate themselves from his agenda. Far from being disloyal and distant from Obama’s goals, they are identifying themselves closely with the implementation of his foreign policy. Cockburn might as well say that Powell went before the U.N. to sell the world on invading Iraq because he was cunningly planning to run against Bush in 2004. As we know from Powell’s experience, the reputation of the leading Cabinet members in our presidential system rises and falls with that of the President, and this is true of the reputation of the Vice President as well. If Biden wanted to turn against Obama in 2011-12, he would make sure that everyone knew that he had been shut out of decisionmaking and he would claim that Obama had been unsuccessful in foreign policy because he had been ignoring his Vice President’s advice. As it happens, the opposite is the case.

There used to be a lot of Saakashvili apologists writing in Western papers and magazines, but it takes a special kind to outdo them all in sheer servility. I give you Andre Glucksmann:

If only such a vibrant opposition could exist under Putin’s regime—with newspapers, two television channels, and the privilege of blocking major arteries and access to official buildings by setting up political protests. In Georgia, I saw a protest take place for two months, while the police refrained from opening up traffic in order not to offend the demonstrators. How many minutes would it take to arrest someone so bold as to set up a protest in front of the Elysée Palace? And who would imagine for an instant that such a thing could be attempted in Red Square?

Of course, this only came after Saakashvili disgraced himself and embarrassed all of his willing defenders in the West by ordering a brutal crackdown on a similar protest in late 2007 that seriously injured 500 people, whom Saakashvili lamely claimed were working as part of a Russian-backed coup. Saakashvili tolerated the recent demonstrations because he realized that he could not simply bludgeon his critics and get away with it after having led his country into a disastrous war.

As for allowing a vibrant opposition, Glucksmann is greatly exaggerating. Imedi was shut down on Saakashvili’s orders, and he and his allies have been taking control of the rest of the media for the last several years. Regarding the “republic free of corruption” Glucksmann praises, this is also a vast overstatement. Corruption has been declining, but it has by no means been eliminated.

Earlier this year, The Christian Science Monitorreported:

The annual global survey by the New York-based Freedom House found that Georgia “slid backwards” in a few key democratic indices in 2008, such as independent media and electoral process, but still had a higher freedom rating than most other post-Soviet states.

But some Georgian experts take a dimmer view. “The human rights situation is worse today than it was under Shevardnadze,” says Nana Sumbadze, codirector of the independent Institute for Policy Studies in Tbilisi. “Last year’s presidential elections were faked. The [subsequent] parliamentary elections were manipulated; the media was controlled and opposition parties had no voice on TV. The public mood [about the elections] was dark,” she says.

It was under these circumstances that Saakashvili has held on to power. Meanwhile, Glucksmann is reduced to appealing to sheer majoritarianism to defend Saakashvili’s continued hold on power. From the same CSM article, this is how political opponents are treated:

Last month, Georgian authorities arrested seven members of Ms. Burjanadze’s party on charges of illegal weapons possession. Georgian intelligence chief Gela Bezhuashvili alleged they were part of a Moscow-backed conspiracy aiming to “remove Georgian authorities through internal disorder and destabilization.”

Looking for anything he can use, Glucksmann brings in the chimera of energy independence for Europe. What little gas and oil that can be moved through Georgian pipelines is not going to free Europe from its dependence on Russian energy. If it were the case that Russia did not have major agreements with the Central Asian republics concerning their energy supplies (Turkmenistan was just the latest), an alternate route might make sense, but it is not the case. For the foreseeable future, that dependence is not going away, and it is simply wrong to hold up potential pipelines through the Caucasus as a realistic chance to break Russia’s hold on the European energy market. To use this as a means to prop up a reckless authoritarian seems especially foolish.

Past TAC contributor Trita Parsi has a new article in Foreign Policy making the argument for a “tactical pause” in engaging Iran. The core of Parsi’s argument is this:

Although diplomacy must remain the policy, the momentous upheaval in Iran has completely changed the political landscape. Opening talks with Iran’s current government at this decisive moment could backfire severely.

Having stated my support for engagement with Iran many times, and then having re-stated itafter the June protests, I don’t agree with this. However, Parsi is someone whose arguments should be taken very seriously, so it’s important to explain why a “tactical pause” doesn’t make sense.

First, it is important to distinguish between different political landscapes. Even if the Iranian landscape has been “completely” changed, it does not follow that this changes the political calculus in the U.S. More to the point, one of the problems the protesters are facing is that the upheaval in Iran has not completely changed the Iranian political landscape. Indeed, the upheaval has not yet changed much of anything. Neither has the upheaval fundamentally changed Iranian or American interests, nor was it ever likely to do so. If engagement served the mutual interests of both states six months ago when the administration started gesturing towards it, it seems more likely than not that it still does.

Parsi places the political dispute at the center of his analysis, and he warns of what will happen if the protesters are denied any real remedy:

The likely result will be a radicalized population whose opposition to the government will be met with increased repression at home and more adventurism abroad.

I don’t know how many times I have seen this repression/adventurism pairing, but each time I see it I find it less and less persuasive. For many years, Iran has backed Hizbullah and Hamas under reformers, principalists and populists, in good times and bad, but this has been the extent of its “adventurism.” What shape would this increased adventurism take? Why should we expect that a regime beset by a radicalized, disaffected population would have either the resources or the time to devote to foreign adventurism? Iran has not waged a conventional war in over twenty years, and has instead fought proxy wars in which the cost in Iranian lives is basically nil and which therefore have limited political impact back home one way or the other, so what sort of adventurism would the regime engage in to distract attention from its failings?

Parsi says that opening talks with Iran could backfire severely, which is possible, and this is the more significant objectiong that needs to be overcome. How could it backfire? Parsi writes:

Delaying nuclear talks a few months won’t make a dramatic difference to Iran’s nuclear program. It could, however, determine which Iran America and the region will be dealing with for the next few decades — one in which democratic elements strengthen over time, or one where the will of the people grows increasingly irrelevant to Iran’s decision-makers.

Moreover, even nuclear talks would have a negligible impact on the election dispute, Iran currently is not in a position to negotiate. Some in Washington believe that the paralysis in Tehran has weakened Iran and made it more prone to compromise. But rather than delivering more, Iran’s government currently couldn’t deliver anything at all. The infighting has simply incapacitated Iranian decision makers.

If the talks would have a negligible impact on the political dispute, delaying them will have even less of an impact. Delaying talks is not going to determine “which Iran America and the region will be dealing with for the next few decades.” It will ensure that the diplomatic track stalls, the idea of engagement becomes a joke in Washington, and it will strengthen the hand of hawks who favor harsh sanctions and eventually want to see military action against Iran. If the dispute has weakened Iran, it won’t be more prone to compromise, but it is questionable whether the relevant parts of the government are as incapacitated as Parsi claims. On a more basic level, unless there is concerted movement towards opening talks with Iran U.S. policy will drift inexorably towards confrontation. I have this on good authority:

Unless a significant shift is made toward robust diplomacy—in which the two states negotiate an agreement for co-existence and a new order for the region—the clash is likely to be violent. In short, as geopolitical forces push the two toward a climax, there will either be comprehensive talks or a confrontation. Washington would be mistaken to think that containment and economic pressure can serve as a middle ground, evading both a costly military showdown and a potentially painful compromise with the mullahs.

These illusionary alternatives could potentially be pursued if the U.S.-Iranian clash was solely centered around the nuclear issue or Iranian involvement in Iraq. But in this larger strategic battle over pre-eminence in the Middle East, these policies are untenable, largely because time isn’t on America’s side. Sanctions can’t cripple Iran’s economy faster than Tehran marches toward nuclear capability, and perhaps more importantly, Washington can’t weaken Iran faster than it is being weakened in Iraq. As time passes, Iran’s position relative to the United States will likely strengthen. Indeed, Iranian leaders already refer to the U.S. as a “sunset” state and describe themselves as a “sunrise power.” Sooner or later, the containment policy will deteriorate into either talks or military action. More likely than not, the sanctions approach will increase the risk for a confrontation precisely because it renders a diplomatic opening less probable.

That was Trita Parsi writing in TAC two years ago. Parsi went on to say:

But whereas the simplest mistake—or even inaction—can spark a conflict, diplomacy can only be achieved if deliberately and persistently pursued.

Someone might object at this point that Parsi has even more credibility to call for a “tactical pause” because he has been such an outspoken advocate of pursuing a diplomatic course, but I think Parsi was right in 2007 that deliberate and persistent pursuit of diplomacy is the only way to ensure its success. A “tactical pause” makes sure that this pursuit is not persistent and may never be resumed once it is halted. Parsi’s objective remains the same, which is laudable, but it seems to me that he has erred in forgetting his own advice on how diplomacy with Iran can succeed.

Following up on my column, I found the analysis from various Russia experts in this interesting Scoblete piece unconvincing. Scoblete writes:

Be that as it may, experts expect the Biden flap to blow over and not derail the Obama administration’s “reset” strategy. “In the long term this will pass,” Charap said. “I don’t think it reflected the administration’s thinking, it was just the words of a tired Vice President.” The U.S. and Russia “are moving to manage disagreements, agreeing to disagree, and not let things spiral out of control.”

It is understandable that Biden’s most provocative statements in the WSJ interview have captured most of the attention in the last week, but I think the experts Scoblete consulted are being all together too optimistic in their analysis. Were Biden’s interview an isolated incident, the Kremlin could laugh it off as an unfortunate mistake and leave it at that, but it came on the heels of a visit to two governments Moscow views as irritants at best and antagonists at worst and followed numerous public statements stressing American solidarity with Ukraine and Georgia. If rhetorically rubbing salt in the wound of diminished geopolitical status during an interview generated so much outrage in the Russian government, what do we think would be the Russian view of displays of support for Ukrainian and Georgian membership in NATO during formal state visits? Such membership is something that would be a very concrete expression of the diminution of Russian power if it ever happened, and it is something that we know Russia furiously opposes. If merely mentioning Russia’s diminished status angers them, how much worse is it to take high-profile policy positions that try to take advantage of that diminished status while visiting states that border on Russia?

Scoblete concludes:

Whatever the outcome, the Biden flap underscores the diplomatic minefield that the Obama administration is waltzing on: showing respect for Russia’s interests without appearing to concede a Russian “sphere of influence” over former Soviet territories.

This is right as far as it goes, but why does the minefield exist? It exists because we insist on defining their lack of a “sphere of influence” in terms of the expansion of our own to their borders. The issue is not just that the former Soviet republics are not aligning themselves with Russia, but that they are explicitly aligning themselves against it alongside the superpower. If the tables were turned, it would be as if the U.S. were forbidden from wielding influence over the Caribbean and Central America while the Russians insisted that Cuba and Mexico be permitted to join a military alliance organized to defend against American imperialism. Then imagine that Russia and its allies around the world portrayed the routine exercise of regional power that most Americans take for granted as insidious aggression and sought to penalize America for doing what Russia does as a matter of course in its neighborhood. There would be a much less hazardous diplomatic minefield if we did not insist on having our maximal demands for projecting our power and influence met as the sine qua non of any relationship and simultaneously portray another great power’s natural exercise of regional hegemony as something perfidious and evil. This is the fundamental problem in the U.S.-Russian relationship, which means that it was what Biden said during his visits to Ukraine and Georgia, and not what he said during his interview afterwards, that mattered and reflected administration policy.