My new column for The Week on Biden’s calculated “blunders” is now up.

It shouldn’t be happening this way, but at the moment it seems as if 2010 will be a rather lousy midterm election for the GOP. All the usual caveats apply, and the passage of an unpopular health care plan or the failure to pass it could have significant effects on Democratic chances next year, but CQ’s ratings for House and Senate suggest that Republicans are still suffering aftershocks all over the country. Even assuming that the GOP can hold NY-23, vacated by Army Secretary nominee McHugh, and pick up ID-01 and MD-01, which are traditionally Republican-leaning districts, they seem likely to lose three open seats in Louisiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania. The latter two are open because the incumbents are running for Senate and governor respectively, but the Senate does not look much more promising.

This is the first time these Senate seats have been up for election since the GOP’s implosion, and many of the same factors that cost Republicans Senate seats in Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina and New Hampshire in previous cycles are still at work today. If anything, voters in Missouri and Ohio have become more inclined to support Democrats than they were in 2006, the voters have not changed their minds that much in North Carolina and New Hampshire since last year, and Obama carried all four of these states. Most of the Senate toss-ups are Republican-held, and the Democratic-held toss-ups in Illinois and Connecticut are less vulnerable than they seem. Giannoulias is a known quantity in Illinois state politics, and Mark Kirk, whatever his good qualities may be, is considerably less well-known. That can be fixed with advertising and good campaigning, but there are also things that voters will not like when they find out more about Kirk. You can be sure that Kirk’s China blunder will haunt him for the entire campaign. Beyond being simply foolish, the China blunder can be used to portray Kirk as unprepared for higher office: “How can we trust him to represent all of Illinois responsibly?” and so on. Giannoulias will also be able to draw on significant funding here in the city, and simply because of Illinois’ recent electoral history he has to be considered the favorite. Dodd is more vulnerable because he is personally tainted by ethical problems, but it would be a bit surprising if Connecticut is the place where the GOP wins back support in New England while losing it everywhere else. Possibly the GOP’s best chance of a pick-up is actually in Nevada, where the electorate has been more evenly divided in the past and where Reid is not all that popular personally, but Republicans would need to field a candidate capable of taking advantage of these things.

So it is possible that Democrats could be looking at a net gain of at least one or two seats in the House and possibly a net gain of as many as five seats in the Senate. Many of the Republican-leaning districts that should remain in GOP hands are more vulnerable than they appear at first and certainly more so than they should be at this point. Rothenburg identified their problems earlier this year:

They [the DCCC] are also hoping that Rep. Bill Young (R-Fla.) will finally call it quits and retire, and that Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) will either retire or run for the Senate. Open seats in any of those districts would create real Democratic opportunities.

California Republican Rep. Ken Calvert’s surprisingly narrow win in 2008 obviously makes him a target, though his district certainly continues to lean Republican.

And Republicans such as Reps. Don Young (Alaska), Erik Paulsen (Minn.), Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Leonard Lance (N.J.) Henry Brown (S.C.) and Dave Reichert (Wash.), all of whom had close contests last year, have to prepare for another possible Democratic assault.

Finally, DCCC automated telephone calls into districts currently held by GOP Reps. Charlie Dent (Pa.), Judy Biggert (Ill.) and Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) reflect Democratic strategists’ views that those districts are either already Democratic enough or are becoming Democratic enough to present the party with new opportunities.

The last one, McCotter’s district, would be a very visible loss given his position in the House minority leadership, and losing there and in the Illinois seats would be in keeping with the general rout of the party from the Midwest. It should not be the case, but it seems that the public may not be finished punishing the GOP.

The Russians, and particularly Putin, took away a different lesson than the West did. The West assumed that economic dysfunction caused the Soviet Union to fail. Putin and his colleagues took away the idea that it was the attempt to repair economic dysfunction through wholesale reforms that caused Russia to fail. From Putin’s point of view, economic well-being and national power do not necessarily work in tandem where Russia is concerned. ~George Friedman

Friedman’s article reinforces my view that Biden’s recent statements in last week’s WSJ interview were not only foolish things to say publicly, but were basically flawed in their analysis of Russia’s response to its economic and other problems. Biden’s mistake in underestimating Russian strength because of their economic woes is the same one he was making when he told the Georgian parliament that Georgia could win back its separatist enclaves by building a prosperous model state: he evidently believes that political strength flows from economic strength and from no other source. As Friedman argues, this is not necessarily true of Russia. In any case, it fails to account for relative disparities of power between Russia and most of its neighbors, including most of Europe.

Friedman makes another important point, which is that Russian demographic decline will take a generation to lead to the kind of political weakness Biden is counting on. Biden and Obama are setting policy in 2009 that only makes sense in 2029 or later, assuming that the decline trend continues, or it is almost as if they still think it is 1999 and the U.S. may do whatever it likes in Russia’s vicinity. In the meantime, they are ensuring deepening distrust and antagonism from the one major power the U.S. needs as a regular ally. The administration has tended to approach foreign policy issues with very short-term thinking. I think we will find that their handling of Russia, while consistent with the last twenty years of U.S. policy and couched in all of this rhetoric about Russia’s long-term decline, is founded on an immediate perception of Russian weakness in the wake of the financial crisis and collapse of oil prices, which is not likely to be true of Russia in the next three or seven years. Russia may be declining over the long term, but in the present its exceptional weakness is a passing phase. We will probably never again see the $20 or $10/barrel oil prices of the ’90s that made Russia incapable of doing anything on the international stage.

As the global economy recovers, demand for oil will rise, and so will Russian oil revenues, which means that the unusually poor state of the Russian economy will not last for most of the rest of Obama’s time in office. While it is true that resource-rich state economies are fundamentally weak and too dependent on the export of a few commodities, they thrive in times of economic expansion, and the administration certainly has to be hoping for its own sake that global recession comes to an end. If Washington sets out to antagonize and provoke Russia during one of these periods of greater weakness, it will have no markers to call in when the economy recovers and when Russia is in a secure enough position to be willing to make certain concessions on negotiable issues.

What the administration does not grasp at all, as its predecessors have never understood, is that Moscow regards its influence over its near-abroad to be as non-negotiable as our government regards its influence in the Western Hemisphere. Short of total regime collapse, there are probably no conditions under which Moscow will tolerate further NATO expansion.

Yglesias’ response to Ross’ latest column gets it just about right:

And while the situations don’t bear any resemblance in detail, there is a certain vague similarity in that while I would say counterinsurgency in the Philippines “worked” it’s hard for me to see that it actually achieved anything. I mean, suppose the Philippines had obtained independence from the United States in the 1890s rather than the 1940s. How would my life be worse? How would any American’s life be worse? What “long-term benefits” actually accrued to us as a result of the counterinsurgency effort?

It seems to me that unless you look at victory and conquest as being their own reward, it’s hard to see any. Anti-American rebels lost, but we didn’t really win anything of note. We spent a lot of money, suffered some casualties, killed a lot of people and in exchange got some military bases that were overrun by the Japanese as soon as it looked like they might be strategically useful.

We should be so lucky if the Iraq war ever yields anything nearly as beneficial as the Filipino war did. Perhaps a future Iraqi dictator will be generous enough to lend us military aid as we fight in another unnecessary war in the region! Iraq certainly resembles the Filipino war much more than it does the Korean, if only because the Filipino war was just as utterly unnecessary and wrong as the invasion of Iraq was. Whatever else one can say about the war in Korea, it was a war defending South Korea against an unprovoked attack; it had some semblance of legality and international legitimacy, and pretty clearly secured millions of people from coming under the rule of an appalling government. The Iraq war is quite unlike this is pretty much every way. If the Filipino war yielded no real long-term benefits, and if it was a factor in pulling us into a war with Japan, this comparison actually makes the war in Iraq look much worse as a matter of long-term strategic interests than Vietnam ever could have been. So the “amalgamation of the Korean War and America’s McKinley-era counterinsurgency in the Philippines” is extremely heavy on the latter and has virtually none of the former, but I wouldn’t rule out that the war in Iraq will have a Korea-like open-ended, perpetual quality that the Filipino war lacked.

It is always very frustrating whenever Ross writes about foreign policy. I wouldn’t mind the repetition of establishment bromides along the lines of “everyone knows the “surge” worked,” except that ratherwell-informed people in the establishment have made a point of emphasizing its fundamental failure. Even granting certain hawks credit for devising tactical changes that improved security conditions, the “much-hated neoconservatives” whom Ross credits with some sort of strategic vision here backed what was always going to be a temporary and superficial attempted fix of enduring structural problems in Iraq. Indeed, as ever, those who continually refuse to address Iraq policy at the strategic level and obsess about tactics are the hawks, who cannot provide a coherent, achievable set of objectives that would allow us to know when we have succeeded. Perhaps even more important, the hawks ignore the failure to reach stated strategic objectives (i.e., politicial reconciliation) to perpetuate the myth that their temporary fix was successful on its own terms. Naturally, then, it is proponents of withdrawal whom Ross criticizes for their alleged lack of strategic thinking about post-withdrawal Iraq, when it has largely been the opponents of the war who have been doing most of the strategic thinking since 2002.

Ricks wrote last month that “the surge succeeded tactically but failed strategically.” Regarding the “surge,” Walt put it this way earlier this month:

The second and equally important goal was to promote political reconciliation among the competing factions in Iraq. This goal was not achieved, and the consequences of that failure are increasingly apparent. What lies ahead is a long-delayed test of strength between the various contending groups, until a new formula for allocating political power emerges. That formula has been missing since before the United States invaded — that is, Washington never had a plausible plan for reconstructing a workable Iraqi state once it dismantled Saddam’s regime — and it will be up to the Iraqi people to work it out amongst themselves. It won’t be pretty.

With the passage of time, the “surge” should be seen as a well-intentioned attempt to staunch the violence temporarily and let President Bush hand the problem off to his successor. Hawks will undoubtedly try to pin the blame on Obama by claiming that we were (finally) winning by the time Bush left office, in the hope that Americans have forgotten the strategic objectives that the “surge” was supposed to achieve. It’s a bogus argument, but what would you expect from the folks who got us in there in the first place?

Advocates for withdrawal have never pretended that we hold the key to fixing those structural problems, because they are Iraq’s structural problems that must be fixed by Iraqis, which is why we have been calling for withdrawal for at least the last four years. However, opponents of the war supposedly got the “surge” wrong by opposing it, despite the long odds that it would succeed and despite its actual failure, which is somehow supposed to rehabilitate the reputations of the people who have been wrong at every turn. One of the recurring problems with the hawkish line on Iraq is that hawks vastly overexaggerate the importance of Iraq, and they have done this from the beginning. Whether it was because it was the “center” of the region, or because it was (once upon a time) the most educated and secular Arab nation, or because it was once (centuries ago) the seat of the caliphate, or because it has oil reserves, Iraq is always invested with such enormous significance. Ross does this again:

But America’s most important interest remains a stable, unified Republic of Iraq, even if takes longer than any domestic faction wants. Afghanistan may be “the good war” to most Americans, but Iraq’s size, location, history and resources mean that it’s still by far the more important one.

Let’s take these one by one. Iraq is smaller than Afghanistan in sheer square miles and population, unlike Afghanistan it is surrounded on almost every side by stable, U.S.-allied states, its pre-Hussein history did not distinguish it greatly from other Arab states, its current and future close ties with Iran are not going to be undone by any U.S. policy, and its resources do not make it fundamentally different from any other petro-state in the world. Incidentally, it is precisely those resources that make our efforts in Iraq far more redundant than they would ever be in the far more impoverished reaches of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Arguments could be made that current Af-Pak policy is misguided in significant, but different ways, but to the extent that everyone agrees that the real issue in Af-Pak policy is Pakistani and regional stability and, more remotely, the fate of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal it seems clear that Af-Pak is the more strategically significant conflict. That does not necessarily mean that the U.S. should engage in the sort of prolonged and extensive nation-building effort this administration has endorsed, nor does it mean that we should continue current tactics, which seem to be pushing the Taliban deeper into Pakistan and strengthening them. But it certainly doesn’t mean continuing to chase the will o’ the wisp that is Iraq’s vast strategic significance by perpetuating a war that should never been started.

His speech had a hard kernel of advice, though: do not try to fight Russia. Georgia’s best hope of reclaiming the territories, he said, was building a country so appealing that the separatists would eventually return voluntarily [bold mine-DL]. Meeting with ethnic Georgian children displaced during the war, Mr. Biden couched that process in terms of years, or maybe decades.

“When all the people of Abkhazia and South Ossetia see prosperity and opportunity in the rest of Georgia, and when they look north into Russia — unless it radically changes — and don’t see the same opportunity, they’re going to say to one another, ‘Regardless of ethnic background, I want to be in Georgia,’ ” he said. “That’s ultimately why the Berlin Wall came down.” [bold mine-DL]~The New York Times

If I were a Georgian nationalist, I would find this patronizing and stupid. Georgian nationalists believe they have every right to these territories, and the more hard-line among them aren’t going to be interested in waiting years to win back by persuasion what they believe they already should have by right. If I were a South Ossetian or Abkhazian, I would find it laughable. These peoples are unlikely to be enthusiastic about going back under the control of a government that has committed atrocities against them; their pro-Moscow leaders have every incentive to discourage them from ever considering this. Biden might as well have said to the displaced Georgian children that they would someday return to a Russian-ruled South Ossetia so long as it was well-governed, market-oriented and prosperous, which completely fails to take account of the questions of ethnic identity and security that are at the heart of all of these conflicts. As an American, I find all of this deeply embarrassing.

For the last decade, Russia was booming economically thanks to high oil revenues, and Georgia lagged behind, but this did not inspire Georgians to want to become part of Russia politically. On the contary, increased Russian strength indirectly encouraged an upsurge in Georgian nationalism. Post-Soviet independence for many former Soviet republics meant far worse economic conditions for many years than they had experienced earlier, but their nationalism and particularly the anti-Russian element of their nationalism made independence more attractive to them than any benefits they might have had by remaining under Moscow’s control. For many newly independent and post-communist states, independence and freedom from Soviet domination have gone hand in hand with an explosion of corruption and rising inequality, but it is understandable that they would prefer their own ramshackle states to being part of someone else’s similarly troubled state. For all of my criticisms of nationalism, I understand that the identity nationalism provides people is not something to be taken lightly, nor is it something that can ever be fully erased once it has been built up.

If nationalist peoples decided their political fortunes based on what was most economically advantageous, many would not have pursued national independence in the first place. Few doubt that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are hotbeds of criminality and corruption, and they are hardly flourishing economically, but the antagonism with the Georgians, which was already bad enough in South Ossetia before last year and is now much greater, means that there is no going back. To the extent that South Ossetians emphasize their identity as Ossetians, they have far more reason to attach themselves politically to Russia, where other Ossetians live, than to join Georgia, even if it were not the economic mess that it now is.

As a practical matter, Georgia is heavily dependent economically on Russia for its trade and supplies. If there is to be deeper economic integration leading to political change, it will mean Georgia’s eventual absorption into Russia, not the splitting off of bits of Russia to join Georgia. Georgian nationalists will probably be the first to recognize this.

Via Isaac Chotiner, I see that Biden’s WSJ interview wasn’t the only place where he said inflammatory and stupid things about Russia. The NYTreports:

At the gathering with displaced Georgian children from South Ossetia, Mr. Biden saved his harshest words for Russia.

He said he believed that Moscow “used a pretext to invade your country,” [bold mine-DL] weighing in confidently on the question of whether Mr. Saakashvili should be blamed for ordering the Aug. 7 shelling of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital. He said Russia had paid dearly for invading Georgia, arguing that “all the countries that surround them are now saying very harsh things to Russia.” [bold mine-DL] He promised the children that the United States would press Russia to comply with the French-brokered cease-fire agreement, and that if they continued to defy it, “it is a problem for them.”

He noted the largess of Americans — “they said, ‘It’s O.K., take my money, raise my taxes’ ”[bold mine-DL] — in pledging $1 billion in aid to Georgia after the war.

“You should understand, America cares about you, cares about you personally [bold mine-DL],” Mr. Biden said. “We care about all of you, and we’re not going to leave you. It’s a hard journey, but we’re not going away.”

Well, there’s no “preemptive declinism” to be found here, that’s for sure! We knew that Biden was a hawk and was embarrassingly pro-Georgian during the August war, going so far as to visit Saakashvili that same month, and it was already clear how meaningless all of this “reset” talk was. Even so, I don’t know of any American politician other than McCain who has been so reckless and ideological in his statements about last summer’s war in Georgia. This can’t be written off simply as Biden’s normal idiocy. He was representing the administration on a major trip overseas, and this trip seems to have been calculated to serve as an insult and warning to Moscow based on Biden’s itinerary and his public remarks.

To take Biden’s claims in order, his claim about the Russian invasion is true only if by “pretext” he meant the Georgian government’s decision to escalate some small border disputes into full-scale war. It is worth noting that the ethnic Georgians who were unfortunately expelled from South Ossetia have not lived under Tbilisi’s authority for almost twenty years. There were probably not any children in the audience old enough to remember a time when South Ossetia was meaningfully part of Georgia. That doesn’t mean that they and their parents don’t think of it as part of Georgia, but it does draw our attention to an important distinction between the claims of the Georgian governmen and the political realities of the region. It also serves as a useful reminder that South Ossetia’s inclusion as part of Georgia is something relatively very recent and artificial.It has less history as part of Georgia than South Tyrol does as part of Italy. Correction: These statements were inaccurate. What is now South Ossetia does have a pre-tsarist history of inclusion as part of the kingdom of Georgia. I apologize for the error.

Russia’s neighbors are all saying “very harsh” things, Biden told the audience, but it is Georgia whose economy lies in ruins and whose people have been displaced by the tens of thousands. I don’t know what the political leanings of the refugees are, but you would think the victims of a crisis created by Saakashvili would be very hostile to the government that plunged them into their present predicament. Americans probably think $1 billion dollars spent on Georgia is $1 billion we don’t have for our own needs and under present circumstances even $1 billion, which is nothing in the grand scheme of the federal budget, is more than we can afford to waste as a show of goodwill. I would be fascinated to see the poll that shows how Americans are excited to have their taxes raised to subsidize an economic basketcase country ruled by a bellicose, authoritarian demagogue. Luckily for the Georgians, most Americans have already forgotten that Georgia exists and so will not be concerned that any of their money is being wasted there, but that drives home the final point, which is that Americans don’t care about Georgia. If the “hard journey” ahead was explained to them, they would probably be even less interested in aiding Georgia.

As Chotiner mentions at the end of his post, this is the sort of reckless rhetoric of support that could encourage Georgians to expect U.S. backing in a future confrontation, which would set them up for another deeply disillusioning fall. It is the kind of rhetoric from which the administration correctly refrained in Iran. It is also exactly the kind of reckless rhetoric of support that encouraged Saakashvili to make his disastrous blunders last year. If our officials continue to use this rhetoric even after everything Saakashvili has done, what would it take for our government to learn that unflagging solidarity with a state of marginal importance on Russia’s doorstep is very dangerous and contributes to a heightening of tensions between Russia and Georgia?

I sometimes think that the so-called “pro-Georgian” politicians and pundits won’t be satisfied until Georgia has been occupied and annexed by Russia, because their sympathy for Georgia mostly has nothing to do with the well-being or independence of Georgia and has everything to do with providing an example of Russian “revisionism” that they can use to justify an anti-Russian stance. How else can we explain the continued support for the Georgian government’s most self-destructive behavior? How else can we explain the continued provocations that are making tensions in the region worse rather than defusing them? Real concern for Georgia and the welfare of its people would dictate that we stop using the country as bait to lure Russia into another international incident, but the “freedom agenda” and support for Saakashvili never had much to do with what was best for Georgia.

As usual, Greg Scoblete is making sense:

One of the problems with America’s promiscuous use of security guarantees and promises of support is that those on the receiving end of those promises are going to take you at your word. This was the unfortunate fate of Georgia in August 2008 when, after hearing the Bush administration loudly insist that they should be in NATO and are a vital interest of Washington, we did nothing when Russia invaded.

This is right, but I would add one other thing. In addition to encouraging allies to take risks on the (false) assumption that they have our absolute backing, these guarantees or promises of future guarantees reduce the meaning of “vital interest” to almost nothing. This not only leaves marginal, unimportant allies suffering the consequences of their ill-judged gambles, but it also ultimately causes all of our allies and their rivals to doubt the guarantees we have made to allied states. Once ridiculous, irrelevant commitments have been defined as “vital interests” that Washington is not really willing to defend, it won’t be very long before no one believes that Washington is willing to defend genuine “vital interests.”

Hawks are always whining about conciliatory moves and how these “embolden” rivals, but what they fail to see is that the endless promises of support and defense, which they make to other states and which can rarely be backed up, are what invite the sorts of humiliating challenges they pretend an aggressive, ‘forward’ posture prevents. Contra London, humiliating challenges are not the product of “declinist” thinking, but are direct consequences of the hyper-interventionism that London plainly endorses. As the war in Georgia showed, the promise to draw a red line on Russia’s frontier not only encouraged Saakashvili to be reckless with the lives and property of his countrymen and the territorial integrity of his country, but it also showed how unrealistic, indefensible and absurd Washington’s red lines can be. Despite all the talk of how U.S. interests and “values” were at stake in Georgia, very few Americans actually believed that there was anything there worth taking a risk to protect. This is not a callous, much less “isolationist,” reaction–it is a recognition of simple reality. For all of the talk of “bearing any burden” that Herbert London engages in, there are scarcely any Americans who would willingly bear even a light burden to protect Georgia from attack, because there is no reason why Americans should bear such a burden. However, if you actually say this out loud, you are labeled a “declinist.”

The more security guarantees Washington hands out or promises to hand out, the more unlikely it is that any of them will be backed up. Much as excessive regulation breeds contempt for law, excessive promises of defense to other nations destroy respect for security guarantees. London’s thesis that the administration is guided by “preemptive declinism” is so baseless that at first it seems pointless to refute it, but it will be very important in the coming years to understand that any blowback or negative outcomes that result from administration policy will not be coming from being too conciliatory, passive or accommodating with the rest of the world. London’s argument and those like it are being made to keep hegemonism and interventionism free from blame while they continue to harm American interests.

The claim of “preemptive declinism” has nothing to back it up. The administration does not accept that our current policies overseas are unsustainable, outmoded or misguided. It has either continued or intensified practically all of them, and that is the problem. This means that they take for granted that the U.S. is and ought to be predominant and has the right to interfere whenever and wherever it likes. The refusal to interfere in Iran was purely tactical, rather than being a truly principled acknowledgment of sovereignty, which the immediate willingness to interfere in Honduras made clear. Of course, Pakistani sovereignty has been ignored and violated from day one of this administration, just as it had been under Bush. Even those things that the administration theoretically finds misguided, such as our military presence in Iraq, it perpetuates for the time being for fear of what might happen if it ended them quickly.

Unlike some advocates of engagement with Iran, the administration has always qualified its interest in engagement by stating that even if engagement failed to yield the desired results (i.e., Iranian submission) it would provide the U.S. with the credibility to rally international opinion against Iran. Even when the administration has appeared to pursue conciliatory moves, these have always been in service to the same bankrupt Iran and Russia policies that the former administration had pursued. Rather than recognizing that the objectives of those policies are unrealistic or foolish, they have argued that they can reach those objectives another way, and in the end what matters to the administration are those unrealistic and foolish objectives.

As I was saying in connection with the open letter of central and eastern European politicians, America’s allies need not worry about being abandoned by an administration looking to cut deals with rivals. In fact, what should worry them more is that they have the full-throated support of Washington, as this support could prove to be meaningless because of the very overstretch that made security guarantees to them possible in the first place. Arguably, it is the existence of outmoded security structures such as NATO that creates needless tensions and conflicts between Russia and its neighbors, which means that the vehicle designed to keep America as a “European power” may be creating flashpoints that endanger European security where none needs to exist. The EU accession of many of the same states in eastern Europe has taken place with few Russian complaints, but NATO expansion generates such anxiety because it means that NATO is not simply keeping America in western Europe, but it is also pulling American military commitments ever farther east.

Oddly enough, these central and eastern European states in NATO might be safer on their own than as front-line allies of an overstretched hegemon. In the meantime, the emptiness of the administration’s conciliatory gestures, which offer the other parties nothing and expect everything in return, will make it clear to rival states that Washington has no intention of entering into talks in good faith. Allies cannot fully trust our promises, and rivals have no reason to believe that our gestures of reconciliation are genuine. This is not a departure from past administrations, but a repetition of the mistakes of the last twenty years.

Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview that Russia’s economy is “withering,” and suggested the trend will force the country to make accommodations to the West on a wide range of national-security issues, including loosening its grip on former Soviet republics and shrinking its vast nuclear arsenal. ~The Wall Street Journal

What may be most remarkable about this is that this is not being treated as one of Biden’s legendary gaffes, but rather as an appropriate and acceptable comment. As I was saying earlier this week, the administration must think that Russia’s relatively greater weakness at present will make it more compliant, but I never expected any of its top members to come out and say exactly that. Bizarrely, Biden was offering all of this as evidence in favor of why the “reset” was going to work. In other words, for Biden the “reset” has always meant Russian concessions and submission, and it will “work” because Russia lacks the means to do anything else. This is staggeringly wrong.

It seems likely that the “reset” will now blow up in Obama’s face. This is not because it was wrong to repair relations with Russia, and it is not because of some supposed Russian intransigence that made the exercise futile from the beginning. It will backfire because it is fundamentally deceitful, which the Russians will realize quickly enough. The point is not that deceit is not part of international relations (it is always there to some degree), but that no bilateral relationship was ever repaired and improved by one party deliberately misleading and taking advantage of the other. Worse than that, Biden has just revealed to all the world what the con is, so Medvedev will know right away that he is being played. These comments are sure to deepen distrust between our governments. Even if Biden’s analysis had been right, it would have “worked” only if Moscow had been allowed to save face and conceal its concessions behind a mask of generosity, and Biden has just made sure that every concession Russia could have made would be perceived as humiliation forced upon it by its economic and other woes.

Biden says that the U.S. is underestimating the strength of its own hand, but what he underestimates is how deeply Moscow resents U.S. interference in its neighborhood. Biden misunderstands that past Russian economic strength did not create Russian attitudes about its near-abroad and U.S. policies, nor did it foster the rising nationalism in the country. These things were stoked during the ’90s, during Russia’s last period of serious weakness, and merely received greater expression over the last eight or nine years. Most Russians saw the ’90s as a period when the West took full advantage of Russian weakness to their detriment; the appeal of Putinism was that it would make sure that this did not happen again. Biden is pledging to do the same thing to Russia that Clinton did in the ’90s: combine phony expressions of goodwill with pursuit of a consistently anti-Russian agenda.

Economically, Russia may be in very bad shape, but that is why there is much less chance that Medvedev will have the luxury of accommodation on security issues. Bush missed the opportunity to build a constructive relationship with Russia while times were good, and now there is much less room in which Medvedev can maneuver. Medvedev is not Yeltsin, and the Russians are not going to fall for the same ploy twice. Think about it: if you are governing a country with a weak economy, do you start abandoning what you regard as important national security interests or do you re-double your commitment to them to mask or compensate for that weakness? Biden should be able to realize that Moscow isn’t going to give up on its previous objections to U.S. policies on NATO and missile defense, because it sees these policies as provocative and unreasonable, and it isn’t going to agree to arms reductions while these other policies are being advanced. Moscow isn’t going to become any more alarmed by Iranian or North Korean nuclear programs than it is. In the event that Iran did acquire a bomb, it is not clear that Iran would ever use it in a first strike, and it is even less clear that Moscow would be one of its main targets. Thanks to its relations with both governments, Russia has less to fear from an Iranian or North Korean bomb than most states. Biden cites their “geographic proximity” as a reason why Russia should be more concerned, but Iran and North Korea haven’t moved in the last few years, so there’s no reason why Russia would be more worried about these programs now than they have been in the past.

More important, Russian state interests have not changed since last year, and there is nothing fundamentally new in the demographic and economic problems Biden cites. If these factors have not made Moscow yield on certain fronts before, they are not going to make Moscow more interested in yielding now. Indeed, inasmuch as the Russian government is an authoritarian populist one, relative Russian weakness is likely to make its government more unyielding, less tolerant of domestic dissent and more intent on pursuing its interests in its neighborhood than it has been in the past. There may still be opportunities for cooperation on a few things, such as supply routes for soldiers in Afghanistan, but so long as the U.S. extends its sphere of influence to Russia’s borders and insists that Russia must not wield any significant influence over its neighbors there is no way that Russia, weak or strong, will be interested in new proposals coming from Washington.

Biden actually says in the same interview, “It is never smart to embarrass an individual or a country when they’re dealing with significant loss of face.” So at least Biden acknowledges that he is behaving stupidly, since he has made clear that he and this administration have every intention of embarrassing Russia on a regular basis. Once we get to the substance of policy, we can see that the new administration remains closely tied to the bankrupt and failed Russia policy of the last twenty years, which is just what I assumed last year during the campaign. A genuine “reset” would have been very wise and desirable, but this was never the administration’s goal.

James says I have exaggerated Peter Lawler’s charge against “isolationists” when I wrote:

[t]he idea that the central complaint among non-interventionists on the right is that U.S. wars are driven by anything so rational as pursuit of new markets is just hilariously wrong…

Now Lawler said plainly that he thinks so-called Midwestern isolationists indulge in a postpolitical fantasy, according to which “greedy capitalists” cause wars and that wars can therefore be cured by somehow eliminating said capitalists. It may be true that my description disfigured Lawler’s original statement, but only in that it tried to make sense of a nonsensical, false statement. Allow me to rephrase: the idea that non-interventionists on the right believe that wars are caused by “greedy capitalists” is hilariously wrong. James says that I didn’t like Lawler’s linking of “anti-capitalism” to isolationism, but the issue isn’t whether I like it or not–it simply isn’t true that the people Lawler was criticizing believe what he claims they believe.

Even when certain “paleo” critics recognize a close relationship between economic globalization and U.S. hegemony, or criticize the “empire of consumption,” they do not hold the views about war Lawler attributes to them. Indeed, a recurring theme in our criticism of most military interventions over the last two decades has been how draining and wasteful of American resources these have been. Quite often, we have criticized interventions because they have gained America nothing but casualties, debt and global hostility. On the whole, we have emphasized the ideological forces propelling the U.S. into one deployment after another. More basically, non-interventionists don’t disagree that the United States should be prepared to fight wars, and many of us consider a high level of preparedness for defensive warfare necessary to avoid entering into larger, costlier wars. Lawler’s remarks on these points were wrong and misguided from start to finish.