Ross’ first New York Times column has appeared, and there are several interesting observations in it that I want to discuss over the course of the next day or two, but I thought I would start with this statement:

In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

As a description of the post-election rationalizations of “much of the American right,” I think this is exactly right, and this succinctly explains why “much of the American right” is utterly, hopelessly confused about how they came to be in their current political predicament. Think about this for a moment. It is undeniably true that most conservatives have blamed the political defeats of Republican candidates in ’06 and ’08 on excessive and “wasteful” spending, and they have obsessed over earmarks, and yet McCain, arch-enemy of earmarks and a Republican Senator who voted against the Medicare prescription drug program, was made part of the official pantheon of moderate squishes and someone whose nomination was regarded as a disaster and his defeat was taken as proof that fiscal austerity is a winning message. Clearly, this is incoherent on its own terms, to say nothing of the unfounded assumption that the elections in ’06 and ’08 turned on questions of spending.

There were issues on which McCain genuinely was a squish, so to speak, and chief among these were immigration and, to the extent that it alienated him from the bulk of rank-and-file Republicans, the torture regime. There is something quite bizarre about a party and movement that have crafted a self-serving narrative about their downfall because of spending that nonetheless try to use McCain’s alleged moderation as a scapegoat, when it was McCain, more than most of his major rivals, who was the most vehement, if not necessarily intelligent, critic and opponent of spending increases. Comparing McCain and Cheney and noting the very different responses to them from movement activists and rank-and-file partisans are useful for understanding the state of the mainstream right today, and this is one of the valuable things about Ross’ column.

In what way would Cheney, who necessarily backed (or at least did not publicly oppose) Medicare Part D, have been seen as substantively more “really conservative”? Indeed, according to the post-election rationalizations, Cheney would have to be regarded by default, because of his identification with the administration, as being to the “left” of McCain on spending and identical to McCain on immigration.

In other words, on the issue that most conservatives now use as their explanation for both election defeats, Cheney was worse on account of his identification with Bush, but it also seems hard to contest that most conservatives would have been happier with Cheney as the nominee than they were with McCain. Part of this would have been because they could concoct stories about what Cheney “really” believed but had not been allowed to say publicly (we saw this time and again with all those Palin defenders who hated McCain), which is the sort of storytelling that people often engage in about the would-be political heir apparent, who naturally agrees with them but must keep the “real” views under wraps. Had Cheney been the nominee and then lost by an even larger margin, we can also reasonably assume that the official explanation on the right would have remained the same as it had been in ’06 (too much spending!), and torture and war would not be blamed for the GOP’s political woes, even though the contrast on both issues would have been even more stark in a Cheney vs. Obama race.

On immigration, Cheney would have been identified with Bush’s “comprehensive” reform, and he obviously made no public statements that would have created a different impression about his views on this subject. Somehow I feel confident in saying that had Cheney run his connections to Bush’s immigration policy would not have been made into much of an issue. Unlike McCain, who was the media darling, Cheney was almost universally despised by the media, which would have instantly made Cheney the much-preferred candidate according to the tribal rules that govern who counts as a “real conservative” in practice. Cheney also quite actively backed the bailouts and berated the House Republicans who resisted the creation of the TARP, which the tea party activists have denounced so vociferously. We can also be fairly sure that many of the same people who rallied around Palin’s pseudo-populist rhetoric while backing a candidate who embraced establishment policies, including all the bailouts, would have rallied to Cheney’s large doses of red-meat rhetoric and ignored the substance of the policies that he had endorsed. A Cheney nomination would have driven home how much of the “real conservatism” to which Ross refers is not anything substantive, but is instead a series of poses and gestures that validate the audience’s preferences and way of life.

The only issue on which Cheney was conceivably to McCain’s “right” was torture*. This is an important part of Ross’ argument, which I think Ross was not able to flesh out as much as he could have done if he had more space:

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation.

As I was suggesting yesterday, torture and war seem to be the non-negotiable policies for the mainstream right, and Cheney serves as the symbol and champion of this position.

* Of course, I don’t think one becomes more pro-torture the more one goes to “the right,” but as a shorthand this will have to do for now.

Naturally, Jamie Kirchick offers us an example of just how to do this. The most important thing in writing horrible op-eds on Obama’s foreign policy is to misrepresent absolutely everything that he has said and done over the last three months, deliberately ignore any information that would allow a fair and intelligent assessment of his statements (e.g., when Obama referred to European anti-Americanism as “insidious”), and then to use a series of words–feckless, embolden, decline–in almost any way you like to show that you have no understanding of diplomacy or international affairs. If at all possible, in order to write one of the worst pieces one can, one should frequently complain about criticisms of the previous administration’s foreign policy that Obama has never made while in office. It is also useful to take every acknowledgment of the concerns and perceptions of Obama’s audience (e.g., the fear that America is at war with Islam) as character assassination directed against Bush, as if Bush’s own statements to this effect were some sort of coy attack on his predecessor. Above all, it helps to be extremely dense and ideologically-motivated.

Or more precisely, why is the belief that the torture of captured combatants is wrong compatible with anything other than some form of pacifism? I mean this an actual question, not as a passive-aggressive assertion. ~Jim Manzi

One of the things that has kept me from saying much over the last week or so is my sheer amazement that there are people who seriously pose such questions and expect to be answered with something other than expressions of bafflement and moral horror. Something else that has kept me from writing much on this recently is the profoundly dispiriting realization (really, it is just a reminder) that it is torture and aggressive war that today’s mainstream right will go to the wall to defend, while any and every other view can be negotiated, debated, compromised or abandoned. I have started doubting whether people who are openly pro-torture or engaged in the sophistry of Manzi’s post are part of the same moral universe as I am, and I have wondered whether there is even a point in contesting such torture apologia as if they were reasonable arguments deserving of real consideration. Such fundamental assumptions at the core of our civilization should not have to be re-stated or justified anew, and the fact that they have to be is evidence of how deeply corrupted our political life has become, but if such basic norms are not reinforced it seems clear that they will be leeched away over time.

Manzi’s mention of pacifism is instructive insofar as it suggests that he cannot imagine a rationale for limited, just or defensive wars compatible with protections for captured combatants. It’s all or nothing, total war or pacifism. Once captured, combatants at that point become non-combatants, and one has to assume that Manzi can see why non-combatants are to be treated differently and are to be protected against reprisals, beatings, torture and execution. One certainly hopes that he would defend such protections for American non-combatants, which, incidentally, every apologist for the torture regime is daily undermining with their consistent, public defense of illegal and immoral treatment of detainees.

Implicit in Manzi’s entire post is the rejection of any distinction between combatant and non-combatant, which tells me that he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept the concept of limited war. For him, unless one is a pacifist, one must endorse total war. In such a view, there would be nothing immoral about the summary execution or cruel and inhumane treatment of POWs, since the latter would have been targeted for death while they were still combatants. After all, if torturing such prisoners is not immoral, as Manzi seems to say it is not, what could possibly be wrong with killing them? That is where one must ultimately end up once the distinctions between combatant and non-combatant are erased or blurred, and it is the barbaric conclusion one will eventually reach if one does not start from the assumption that war itself is a sometimes-necessary evil and that it is morally justifiable only under specific circumstances and within certain limits. One of those limits is that captured combatants are to be treated humanely, and when we go down the road towards easing those restrictions we taint not only the institutions responsible for national security with crimes but we also abandon any real claim to moral integrity.

Alex Massie and Michael Crowley are less impressed with Obama’s statement on the Armenian genocide than I was. Ben Smith records the official lobby reactions, which I think are mistaken on both sides. Contrary to the Turkish Coalition’s awful statement, Obama did not “defer” to historians (by which they mean embrace whitewashing of the record), but he made quite clear that he regarded it as one of the great atrocities of the last century and used an Armenian phrase, Meds Yeghern, to describe it that conveys the message that these were criminal acts. Not unfortunate incidents or unavoidable wartime excesses, as the hacks and paid-off spokesmen would have it, but crimes and atrocities. That implies willful mass murder directed against an entire people, which in the end is quite close to what people understand when someone refers to genocide. In my modern Eastern Armenian dictionary, yeghern means “slaughter, carnage, genocide” or a “crime” or “evil deed,” and the word yeghern has been and can be used in the context of referring to the genocide.

The one thing lacking from the statement, which we know is lacking not for any good historical reason but obviously because of sheer politicking and interest group lobbying, is the word itself and the attribution of responsibility to the elements of the Ottoman government that organized and carried out the genocide. The statement is therefore incomplete, and it does fall short of what Obama promised he would do, but there is little cause for the pro-Turkish side to be particularly pleased about the result. It is understandable that advocates of recognition are disappointed, but one need only compare statements of the last two Presidents to appreciate how much of an improvement this statement is over what we have been offered before. In his last statement in 2000, the same year he scuppered a House resolution acknowledging the genocide, Clinton referred to the genocide as a “great tragedy,” which is rather less strong than referring to it as a great atrocity. Bush’s 2001 statement was relatively stronger, inasmuch as he described it as “forced exile and annihilation,” but did not go so far as to call it an atrocity, and by 2008 the word annihilation had dropped out all together to be replaced by “mass killings.” By comparison, Obama’s statement is a significant improvement, especially when he says:

I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed. My interest remains the achievement of a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.

In every way short of using the word, he is saying that it was a genocide, and I think he reasonably refrains from using the word, which might badly damaged U.S.-Turkish and Turkish-Armenian relations*, while all but conveying the same meaning.

* It is worth noting that Reagan publicly referred to “the genocide of the Armenians” almost thirty years ago, and somehow our alliance with Turkey endured. I am still inclined to think that waiting until relations are somewhat better is the wiser thing to do, but a President has already acknowledged the truth and our relationship with Turkey survived intact because of shared interests. My guess is that the Turkish Coalition’s boast that “his administration will not sacrifice long-term strategic allies for short-term political gains” will be thrown back in their faces in the event it becomes clear that neither Washington nor Ankara is willing to end our long-term strategic alliance over this question. Indeed, my guess is that over the next few years we will find out that Ankara has been engaged in an extraordinary bluff that multiple administrations have never had the courage to call.

Andrew Bacevich reminds us that Obama has not made any moves to change or challenge the consensus on national security:

What the president is doing and saying matters less than what he has not done. The sins of omission are telling: There is no indication that Obama will pose basic questions about the purpose of the US military; on the contrary, he has implicitly endorsed the proposition that keeping America safe is best accomplished by maintaining in instant readiness forces geared up to punish distant adversaries or invade distant countries. Nor is there any indication that Obama intends to shrink the military’s global footprint or curb the appetite for intervention that has become a signature of US policy. Despite lip service to the wonders of soft power, Pentagon spending, which exploded during the Bush era, continues to increase.

The recent back-and-forth over Obama’s actions in Trinidad has caused many observers to mistake the shift in tone, important as that can be, for something more significant. Prof. Bacevich reminds us that on many of the most important questions Obama is largely indistinguishable from many of his current critics. I might go so far as to say that the summit in Trinidad, like many of the earlier summit meetings this year, was almost entirely unremarkable, except that Obama’s opponents on the mainstream right showed how ready they are to lash out at any gesture or move, however meaningless and harmless in itself, and declare it proof of Obama’s naivete, weakness, folly, etc.

Even though Obama does not question “global power projection, global military presence, and global activism,” and probably could never have won election had he done so, it is imperative for these critics to use any perceived blunder to claim that America is somehow “losing ground.” It doesn’t matter whether these criticisms make sense (for the most part, they don’t), and it doesn’t matter that no one can actually point to any “ground” being lost. What does matter is that Obama’s shift in tone be made far more important in the public’s mind than his support for continuity in overall U.S. foreign policy. This way, should anything go awry during Obama’s tenure, any failures will be pinned on the relatively trivial stylistic changes rather than on the misguided hegemonism that Obama’s critics champion even more than he does.

It is interesting that the mainstream right has “rediscovered” their opposition to excessive spending and exploding deficits, and quite a few have once again learned to fear and loathe expansive executive power, at least when it comes to economic policy, and suddenly talking about the inviolability of the Constitution is very much in vogue again, but on national security matters the script remains the same and there is no hint of any opportunistic “rediscoveries” of principle. One might have thought that the brief blip of realism and skepticism of U.S. hegemony that appeared on much of the right in the ’90s would reappear now, if only for partisan purposes, but what we have been seeing instead is something like the Republican shift in foreign policy from a mostly neutralist stance in the ’30s to the predominantly global anticommunist “rollback” position of the ’50s and ’60s.

Of course, if we took this comparison too seriously, it would greatly exaggerate how non-interventionist the right was in the ’90s, but the movement is in the same direction towards support of “global power projection, global military presence, and global activism” since the end of the Cold War and obviously this accelerated in the last eight or ten years. For some reason, most of the mainstream right keeps falling into the habit of embracing “global power projection, global military presence, and global activism” and movement conservatives have been, for the most part, among the most zealous advocates of all three. This has been the pattern for so long that it is almost as if they no longer know how to respond to the heirs of the Old Right, much less would they know how to adopt their arguments to criticize an activist foreign policy directed by left-liberals. This helps to make clear that post-Cold War administrations may come and go, other economic and political principles may be compromised as needed, but misguided, excessive hawkishness and nationalistic bluster are constants on the mainstream right through the decades.

I failed to mention the commemoration of the Armenian genocide yesterday. After seeing Obama’s remarks, I thought I would make a couple of observations. Obviously, Obama refrained from referring to it directly as genocide in English, and the Armenian phrase he used to describe it, Mets Yeghern (or, in the Western dialect transliteration being used in the official remarks, Meds Yeghern), primarily means slaughter or crime, but it can be and has been used to refer to genocide. The official name for the genocide in Armenian is a calque, tseghaspanut’yun, which refers specifically to the killing of a race or people, so it is not quite full recognition, but it is also as close to full recognition as possible under present circumstances. This provides a face-saving way to acknowledge the reality of what happened without unduly irritating Turkey, and I think it shows enough respect to Armenian history without jeopardizing the improving relations between Turkey and Armenia.

On the main blog, some commenters have pointed out the disagreement between my column for The Week and Mr. Buchanan’s recent columns concerning Obama’s latest trip overseas. Because we are coming at this from more or less the same perspective as far as political and policy views are concerned, I think it is worthwhile to explain why I have responded to Obama’s appearance at the Summit of the Americas as I have. Long-time readers will know that it is not because of any particular fondness for Obama on my part. Neither is it because I have any great confidence that Obama is likely to change U.S. foreign policy in significant, fundamental ways that I think are needed. Indeed, I find that I am often compelled to defend Obama in spite of his own policy views because of the errors of his critics and the awful nature of the alternatives they propose.

One reason I take a different view is that I have found myself drawn to Kennan’s view of how foreign policy should be conducted, which included his wariness of the influence popular passions and domestic politics can have on foreign policy, and I am also increasingly sympathetic with the estrangement from his own contemporary America that he felt. After reviewing John Lukacs’ biography of Kennan, I obtained a clear picture of a man who was perhaps as viscerally patriotic as any and thoroughly Midwestern in his attachments, but who also felt estranged from his country and what it was becoming. As Lukacs put it:

He would, because he must, remain loyal to his country. “But it would be a loyalty despite, not a loyalty because, a loyalty of principle, not of identification.”

As a Foreign Service officer and diplomat who lived abroad or served in Washington for many years, Kennan might be superficially grouped with “rootless” people, but I rather tend to think of Kennan’s experience as one of an exile in his own country–an unchosen dislocation that resembles unchosen obligations in its effects. This was because the country was transformed around him, which did not lessen his attachment to it, but it also made him more aware of the dangers of American self-congratulation because he did not share in any of its triumphalist moods.

Lukacs writes elsewhere in the biography:

Early in his life he found that he agreed with the admonition of another former midwesterner, Reinhold Niebhur: “The Gospel cannot be preached with truth and power if it does not challenge the pretensions and pride, not only of intellectuals, but of nations, cultures, civilizations, economic and political systems. The good fortune of America and its power place it under the most grievous temptations to self-adulation.”

It may simply be coincidence that one of the wisest foreign policy thinkers of the last half century and one of the best today, Andrew Bacevich, are influenced by Niebuhr, particularly as his work relates to restraining power and pride. I would not try to make any far-reaching claims that Obama’s own reported interests in Niebhur necessarily have anything to do with how he has conducted himself in office, but to the extent that he has learned to be wary of too much American self-congratulation (in which he still indulges on occasion) it may be reasonable to assume that he picked up some of this caution from Niebuhr.

What I have noticed about most of the statements Obama made that have come in for criticism is that they are acknowledgments of things that pretty much everyone accepts as fact. For example, whether or not one thinks that Obama’s call for nuclear disarmament is serious or feasible, his remark that the U.S. has been the only state to use nuclear weapons in war is obviously true. It does not necessarily follow from his statement that he thinks the nuclear strikes on Japan were unjustified, but that he apparently thinks America has an exceptional responsibility to lead in nonproliferation and disarmament because of this reality, which is actually an expression of a sort of American exceptionalism. However, it is an exceptionalism that seems to be tempered by some aversion to self-congratulation or self-adulation, which I have come to regard as something very different from, if not actually diametrically opposed to, patriotism.

As I have quoted or paraphrased so many times from Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill, “Above all, he knew the supreme psychological fact about patriotism, as certain in connection with it as that a fine shame comes to all lovers, the fact that the patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it.” If one’s patriotism is instinctive and visceral, I think this is the patriotism one feels and practices. As Chesterton went on to say, “All this he knew, not because he was a philosopher or a genius, but because he was a child.”

Returning to the specific point, to the extent that foreign leaders attack past or present U.S. policies, they are not necessarily directing their attacks against the country. They are attacking specific acts of the government, some of which may be deserving of criticism and some of which many Americans likely also opposed or oppose now. One of the crucial distinctions that patriots need to make is between country and government. Even if it were advisable as a matter of policy to push back against Ortega’s tirade, doing this would not be a testament to anyone’s patriotism but to his willingness to serve as a defender of any and all past government actions. I submit that not rebutting charges against past administrations is not necessarily a sign of detachment from Middle America, whether or not Obama is otherwise estranged from Middle Americans, but instead might be proof of an unusual unwillingness to show solidarity with Washington.

My new column for The Week on Obama’s appearance at the Summit of the Americas is now available online.

Catching up on news from the last few days, I came across this Gingrich gem as I was following the ongoing pseudo-controversy about Obama’s handshake with Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas. The interview was unremarkable FoxNews chatter, complete with calls for more domestic oil drilling, except for Gingrich’s hilariously ahistorical reference to the Carter administration as “pro-dictator.” In reality, it was the Reagan administration that was rather more obviously pro-dictator, if we must use such simplistic descriptions, and this was on balance a good thing for U.S. interests. Indeed, one of the main, largely correct criticisms of Carter from the right was that he was too willing to sell out anticommunist and other allied dictators for the sake of maintaining a foolish, self-defeating consistency on democracy promotion and human rights advocacy. In the event, those who suffered most were the Iranian and Nicaraguan peoples, and all the moralistic cant in the world didn’t make the revolutionary governments that replaced the dictatorships better at governing or at treating the population more justly. By just about every measure, the revolutions made these nations worse off.

It was no less than Jeane Kirkpatrick, who later became Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, who authored the famous and genuinely important article in Commentary, Dictatorships and Double Standards, in which she made this observation:

As if this were not bad enough, in the current year [1979] the United States has suffered two other major blows–in Iran and Nicaragua–of large and strategic significance. In each country, the Carter administration not only failed to prevent the undesired outcome, it actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion. It is too soon to be certain about what kind of regime will ultimately emerge in either Iran or Nicaragua, but accumulating evidence suggests that things are as likely to get worse as to get better in both countries. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua appear to be as skillful in consolidating power as the Ayatollah Khomeini is inept, and leaders of both revolutions display an intolerance and arrogance that do not bode well for the peaceful sharing of power or the establishment of constitutional governments, especially since those leaders have made clear that they have no intention of seeking either.

Kirkpatrick’s interpretation of the revolutionary governments that were being established thirty years ago in those countries was on the whole accurate. She explicitly pointed to the counterproductive and self-defeating nature of U.S.-backed democracy promotion in states that were challenged by domestic subversion:

In each of these countries, the American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy–regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.

In her essay, which holds up remarkably well thirty years later despite her preference for referring to modern authoritarian governments as “autocracies,” the “pro-dictator” administration was being castigated for being unwilling to back pro-U.S. dictators. Whatever else one wants to say about the Reagan years, no one can accuse President Reagan of a consistent or intense hostility to dictatorships as such. Neither was Reagan always insistent on attempting to prop up allied dictators if their peoples were trying to compel major political change. There are times when permanent national interests and relations with other states clearly trump past working relationships with a specific ruler or regime. The Reagan administration treated different states differently, providing aid to Hussein to contain Iran and consume Iran’s attention with his aggressive war against them, but also accepting the popular repudiation of the South Korean and Filipino dictatorships. Kirkpatrick was representative of thinking popular on the right at the time, which has now been all but banished to the margins as veritably anti-American, that was extremely skeptical of the possibility of rapid and successful democratization:

In the relatively few places where they exist, democratic governments have come into being slowly, after extended prior experience with more limited forms of participation during which leaders have reluctantly grown accustomed to tolerating dissent and opposition, opponents have accepted the notion that they may defeat but not destroy incumbents, and people have become aware of government’s effects on their lives and of their own possible effects on government. Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits.

This is essentially indistinguishable from arguments made by conservative critics of the so-called “freedom agenda” and the project to work political transformation of the Near East through regime change in Iraq. These were the same arguments that the Bush administration and its defenders dismissed as “racist” condescension when they were used to cast doubt on the prospects of the grand project in Iraq.

Gingrich was just coming into national politics in the Reagan years, and he could hardly have been unaware of Kirkpatrick’s essay or the views espoused in it, because these views were quite common on the right prior to the end of the Cold War. He could not have been under the impression that the failures of the Carter administration in foreign policy were the product of excessive chumminess with dictatorships, and so this recent babbling about the “pro-dictator” Carter is simply inventing a new history of that period and completely reversing the terms of the debate back in the late ’70s and early ’80s as modern partisan need demands. By freakish political accident and bizarre ideological fixation of its foreign policy elite, the GOP has become the party of democratization and international instability and more Democrats have settled into a slightly more realist-oriented bias against regime change, whether it is imposed from within or without. As I have noted before, when it comes to this dictatorship/democracy question today’s GOP interventionists are eerily, ironically akin to Carterites on foreign policy, which shows how far from Kirkpatrick neoconservative foreign policy arguments have traveled. Framing it simply as favoring dictatorship or democracy obscures the complexities of this question, but this is how democratists have always insisted on framing it.

What is so laughable about Gingrich’s interview is that Gingrich is held up as one of the main idea men in the GOP, and he actually has a doctorate in history, so one might think he would be somewhat embarrassed to be making such obviously stupid statements on national television, but clearly he isn’t. Viewing this clip, I am reminded that this is the person to whom Mark Sanford unfortunately claimed to defer in matters of foreign policy, and it occurred to me that the most damaging thing about Sanford’s statement is that it has lent credibility to someone whose foreign policy views as as ill-informed (or deliberately dishonest) as they are dangerous and aggressive.

Update: Regarding the ludicrous pseudo-controversy, Steve Benen asks:

Since when does the GOP find it useful to promote the idea of American weakness?

I believe the changeover occurred three months ago today. From that time on, it has become extremely useful to them. Of course, if anyone were to suggest that America is no longer as relatively predominant in global affairs as it was in 1945, he would be ridiculed by the same crowd as a “declinist” and a “post-American.” What is imperative and much more important than emphasizing U.S. weakness is manufacturing foreign threats, which Obama then supposedly “fails” to confront and overcome. Having cooked up the Venezuelan menace where no significant threat exists, Obama’s critics will then decry his “appeasement” of this menace, by which they will mean that for the most part Obama does not seem interested in hysterical alarmism in the conduct of foreign affairs.

The main problem I have with the handshake with Chavez, to the extent that I have any problem at all with it, is that it might be seen as raising the profile of a weak and strategically unimportant head of state. In reality, the handshake doesn’t matter because Venezuela doesn’t matter all that much one way or the other, and it needs us to buy its oil exports a lot more than we need them to supply it, but there is potentially a problem in engaging Chavez because it reinforces the impression that Chavez is important and needs to be engaged for the sake of broader U.S. goals in the region. The problem is not that Chavez is some regional menace who threatens real American interests, but that he is and ought to be almost entirely irrelevant to how we shape Latin America policy, but for some reason he has become a central figure in Washington’s approach to the entire continent. I am hopeful that this is why Obama laughs off the meeting with Chavez and ignores the hectoring of Daniel Ortega: because neither of these leaders matters very much at all. If in the process America’s reputation and our relations with the rest of Latin America are thereby improved, so much the better.