“I think all the arguments about where he [Gogol] belongs are pointless and even humiliating to some extent,” Mr. Yushchenko said, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news service. “He no doubt belongs in Ukraine. Gogol wrote in Russian, but he thought and felt in Ukrainian.” ~The New York Times

Yushchenko might even genuinely believe this–he is a hard-core Ukrainian nationalist, and this is the silly sort of thing that nationalists say. As a matter of literature, which is the relevant subject, does it matter that he “thought and felt” in Ukrainian if he didn’t write in it? Yushchenko’s appeal to Gogol’s inner life is a classic bit of nationalist evasion: literature written in the national language is often used as proof of the “emergence” or “rebirth” of national consciousness, but when a nationality does not or did not cultivate its high literary language (or had not yet defined a certain dialect as its high literary language) until very modern times it is necessary to adopt famous and important figures who, by the normal literary and linguistic standards used by nationalists, might be identified very differently. If necessary, the nationalist will even disavow outward proof of an historical figure’s belonging to a different group and appeal to mystical or emotional inner states, but at the same time cling all the more tightly to any external evidence that backs up the nationalist interpretation of the figure.

The eclectic and selective approach to evidence is typical of nationalists, as it is of ideologues in general, which helps to remind us not only of the futility of such arguments but also their fundamentally distorting and misleading character. Asking whether Gogol would have identified himself with Russia or Ukraine is to ask a question that would not really have meant very much to Gogol himself, because it is a question that would not have had political or, for that matter, cultural relevance in the mid-19th century. It is therefore not a very good question for understanding Gogol, which is what the study of Gogol ought to be focused on, rather than focusing on ways to use Gogol as a symbol. Gogol is an example of how metropolitan Russian intellectual and literary life was enriched by someone from the provinces, and recognizing him as the forerunner of so much in modern Russian literature also acknowledges the debt that all subsequent great Russian novelists owed to the idiosyncratic man who told stories about Rudy Panko the beekeeper, wrote withering social criticism of rural society and serfdom and embarked on extreme, even excessive Orthodox religious devotions that he made while essentially on a pilgrimage to what was still a very Catholic Italy. It is amusing that so many people are invested in trying to pin and lock down a person who was in many respects never fully at home anywhere.

There is something to his observation that arguments about whether Gogol is Russian or Ukrainian are pointless, because neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians are ever going to “cede” him. The malleability and fragility of what it means to be Ukrainian, and the flexibility with which Russians have routinely appropriated the history of Kievan Rus’ and the history of the territory of modern Ukraine down to 1991 ensure that the claim will continue to be contested as long as there are nationalists on either side willing to keep such a senseless dispute going.

Having a birthplace and residence in the territory of a region that later became a Ukrainian nation-state, Gogol is both easier for Ukrainians to claim but harder to monopolize. For the nationalist in newly-independent states, it is supposed to be consciousness, expression and self-identification that matter rather than geographical location, but when there is no evidence for the former apparently location will do, even though this is in turn completely at odds with the national consciousness of diasporan emigrants.

P.S. One point of clarification on this post: when I said that the question of whether Gogol was Russian or Ukrainian would not have had political or cultural relevance in the mid-19th century, what I meant and what I ought to have said was that in the mid-19th century the idea of identifying with Ukrainian ‘nationality’ or ethnicity would have been as meaningless to Gogol just as it would be meaningless to retroject modern national identities onto figures in the post-Byzantine Balkans. I should not have said cultural when I really meant ethnic or national, because there is such a thing as cultural distinctiveness between regions of the same country that does not imply ethnic or national difference between the peoples who belong to distinctive cultures or sub-cultures.

It shouldn’t surprise me, but Jonah Goldberg is mixing up conceptual categories and mashing together foreign policy positions that don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other in this column. In other words, it’s another typical Goldberg production. Consider this jumble:

Or take a look at Cuba. There’s a fresh effort under way, particularly from the left wing of the Democratic party, to lift the U.S. embargo against Cuba. Just this week, members of the Congressional Black Caucus junketed to Cuba to celebrate the heroism of Fidel Castro.

The arguments in favor of lifting the embargo are routinely swaddled in talk of realism. The Cold War is over; it’s time to throw away anti-Communist anachronisms. The only way to change Cuba for the better is to “engage it” with trade and tourism and exchange programs. The funny thing is, if you made the exact same arguments about South Africa in the 1980s, many of the same people would call you not merely an ideologue but a racist for not supporting sanctions. Indeed, today the anti-Israeli sanctions movement is infested with people who claim we must lift the embargo on Cuba.

This is a mess, which isn’t helped by the vague generalizations. It is strange that Goldberg chooses to cites a policy that is roundly condemned as a failure in his indictment of realism. The embargo of Cuba is obviously an anachronism and a complete failure on its own terms, and ending it and restoring normal relations with Cuba are long overdue. Normalization of relations with communist Vietnam occurred fourteen years ago, and obviously normalization with China took place thirty-seven years ago, and it is pretty much indisputable that this engagement and the subsequent commercial relationship established with both countries have been beneficial to those countries (or at least to portions of the population of those countries who would otherwise not have benefited). While critics of large trade deficits might be skeptical about how much all of this has benefited the United States, as far as I know there are virtually no proponents of a status quo Cuba policy who worry about such things.

Some liberals would be more inclined to push for international sanctions on Israel in imitation of the sanctions imposed on South Africa, but realists have little interest in imposing sanctions on allied states at any time, and you would be hard-pressed to find evidence that there were any realists who argued for this course of action against the Nationalist government in the ’80s. It was one of the more controversial and ultimately correct decisions of Thatcher’s government to continue to engage Pretoria while many other states were joining in the sanctions regime, and if ending apartheid rather than engaging in moral self-congratulation was the goal Thatcher’s method was more effective in changing policy.

One thing that at least some realists on the right have argued for a while is that sanctions are ineffective and counterproductive, especially if the goal is to undermine another government, and tend to punish those, namely the civilian population, whom we presumably least warn to harm. The unsentimental, “amoral” realist has a better chance of implementing a more just policy than the so-called idealists, because he is interested in both the right means and ends, and he is not satisfied with moral cant and making oneself feel better by engaging in a lot of bluster and misguided actions that backfire. Indeed, even though many realists are critical of current Israeli policy and U.S. enabling thereof, you would need to search quite extensively to find a realist who supports sanctioning Israel or organizing boycotts against it or doing anything of the kind. Such boycotts and sanctions would be exactly the sort of petty moralizing and sentimental do-goodery that blinds people to real solutions and ensures that the target of the sanctions becomes even more steadfast in its resolve to resist.

The way to tell an ideologue from a realist, and the reason realists are not simply ideologues posing as something else, is that the ideologue will persist in a course of action long after it has failed and long after everyone knows it has failed because he thinks that his “values” demand it. Instead of “let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” the ideologue says, “I am right, and the world can go to hell if it doesn’t agree.” The ideologue is terrified of having to make adjustments and adapt to the world as it really is, because these adjustments reveal to the ideologue just how far removed from that reality he has become. The ideologue keeps redefining the justification for the policy, he keeps rewriting history to suit his own purposes, and he never accepts responsibility for the failure of his ideas, because he believes they have never been faithfully followed. For the realist, cutting one’s losses and reassessing the merits of a policy are always supposed to be possibilities, but for the ideologue the former is equivalent to surrender and the latter is inconceivable. In his greatest confusion of all, Goldberg manages to mix up realists with their opposites.

R.S. McCain takes a swipe at Erik Kain for this post, which reminds me why I usually avoid reading McCain these days. Not that it will matter to McCain, but Kain doesn’t assume that “all reasonable men of good will are liberal” and as I understand it Kain isn’t a liberal. Aside from misreading Kain and making false assumptions about his motives, McCain’s really on target, but what can you expect from someone who thinks E.F. Schumacher was a Buddhist? Oh, sorry, that’s “Buddhist-influenced”!*

Kain isn’t interested in a conservatism that “does not fundamentally contradict the liberal agenda,” which the slightest acquaintance with his arguments would make clear, but it is typical that McCain assumes that anyone on the right who sees the contemporary conservative movement as bereft of ideas and rudderless is simply craving approval and applause from the left. That in a nutshell is why the contemporary movement is bereft of ideas and rudderless–not because it doesn’t heed Kain’s recommendations or anyone else’s, but because it denies that anything needs to be fixed, it refuses to entertain the possibility that the movement itself (and not just the GOP or perfidious individual politicians) has gone awry, and it insists that anyone who argues otherwise is a left-winger. Of course, the left is happy to have opponents who are clueless, incapable of reform and certain that repeating old mantras is all that is needed. I wouldn’t necessarily agree with most, much less all, of these proposals, and Erik might not, either, but it’s a fair sight better than chanting “Wolverines!” and expecting anyone to take you seriously.

* The trouble with McCain’s description of Schumacher is that it is misleading and intentionally so. If McCain called him “Catholic-influenced,” which is far more relevant to his thought, no one would blink or care, but somehow it is supposed to count against him that he had even a passing interest in Buddhist ideas.

Mr. Saakashvili took office in 2004 after spearheading the so-called Rose Revolution, which ousted a government with Soviet ties [bold mine-DL]. ~The New York Times

One could dismiss this as laziness or a case of clumsy phrasing, but considering how eager so many people in the West have been to portray contemporary Russia as a neo-Soviet empire it is worse than the average blunder. Shevardnadze had been foreign minister for the USSR among other things, so he had a history in Soviet government, but it was obviously impossible for the government of independent Georgia in 2003 or at any time since 1991 to have Soviet ties when there was no USSR to which it could have been tied. It’s not that important, I suppose, but when Georgian and Russian politics are as poorly understood in the West as they usually are every misrepresentation makes things a little worse.

My column on Pakistan for The Week is now up.

Alex Massie gets at the heart of what has been bothering me about so much of this Republican yapping about Obama’s so-called “apology tour” and the idea that Obama has been demeaning and denigrating the United States during his first trip abroad as President. It’s not just that these claims are false, which they clearly are, but that they have absolutely no connection to reality: there were no apologies, and there was no denigration. One might think that this would satisfy his Republican critics, but that is not the case.

Reading some of the complaints, such as Krauthammer‘s, one might think the critics were five years old. They seem to think that the hard work of rebuilding America’s reputation in the world, a reputation that the very same critics and their confreres spent years dousing in gasoline and setting on fire, yields instant gratification, as if repairing frayed relations and coordinating international policies could have overnight results. The same people who grew weepy at the thought of History vindicating Bush decades or centuries hence are prepared to declare his successor a failure after less than three months. The people who contributed directly to pushing the good name of our country into the muck are now crying that Obama has not yet, in his first set of meetings, successfully cleaned up their mess. They and their arguments deserve little more than scorn.

Specifically, the idea that Americans have been fighting wars over the last two decades for innocent Muslims* (!) would almost be precious–an example of the sort of naivete they accuse the President of displaying–if it were not part of an ostensibly serious critique. Massie sums up in response to Wehner’s claims on this point:

This is nonsense and anyone with any knowledge of these things must know that this is self-serving, delusional bullshit.

The mainstream right’s reaction to Obama’s European trip has reminded me of the claim some on the Anglophone right were making during the election that the election supposedly pitted an advocate of “global universalism” against a defender of American exceptionalism. As I saidthen, it was never clear which one was supposed to play which role, because both of the candidates were American exceptionalists and universalists in their respective ways, but this basic truth that Obama is an American exceptionalist and one steeped in Americanism is simply inadmissible for some of these people. I don’t know why I have to keep telling so many of you Republican globalists this, but on most of the major policy questions Obama is on your side.

Even though this is incontrovertible and well-established, it has to be denied vigorously in order for the critics to lay sole claim to Americanism and to define it in its most aggressive, nationalistic form. There is a partisan purpose in doing this, I suppose, but more important than mere political advantage is the need to claim some sort of monopoly on national pride. This is a bizarre mutant strain of nationalism on display. You would think American nationalists would tend to see the broad, bipartisan embrace of exceptionalism, hegemonism and national security ideology as vindication of their own views, but instead they look for reasons to complain that left-liberal adherents of these things are lacking in zeal and are somehow intent on insulting the U.S.

As ridiculous as it is, all of this seems misguided and counterproductive for the critics on their own terms. They have gone to the well of national security demagoguery too often in the last decade, and now it is virtually dry. Most people aren’t buying what these critics are selling, and the critics are destroying whatever credibility they might have still had. What is strangely amusing about all this is that some of these critics, such as Wehner, were once some of the most embarrassingly pro-Obama people on the right to be found back in 2007 and early 2008. Once it became clear that he would be the Democratic nominee, the old instincts re-emerged. As I concluded in a piece from March 2008:

Disenchantment with Obama started to set in when he, or at least those closely associated with him, seemed to fail some of the basic tests of American nationalism, which gave his opposition to the Iraq war a different, more ominous appearance. When he began to appear “ungrateful” in their eyes, or when his views struck them as unduly “pessimistic,” these mainstream Republicans began to find him and his associates distasteful. You used to hear the argument from these Republicans that Obama might represent doom for the right, but would be good from the country—you don’t hear that anymore. Instead, partly because of the more hostile treatment from the mainstream right, the dissident right has been giving him far more of a hearing on an essentially single-issue basis than it has ever done for any Republican on any one policy question. Having rejected the siren song of “the lesser of two evils” in successive elections, some now embrace the same logic that empowers the stifling two-party system and the establishment consensus that the system perpetuates. It is difficult not to sympathize a little with a candidate who is being excoriated mostly because of the few views that are relatively sane and closer to my own, but that simply reminds me that these views are by and large the exception for this particular candidate, who is in virtually every other respect as wedded to the establishment consensus as any of the Republicans who are now savaging him.

* Even though this claim about fighting on behalf of innocent Muslims is dubious (not least because several of our wars, especially the war in Iraq, have killed or led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of these people), it reflects something basic to Americanism. This is the idea that anytime the U.S. fights a war, no matter what the actual reasons for it are, whichever group or nation comes out ahead at the end of the fighting must show eternal gratitude to us. It is apparently an additional requirement that anytime the U.S. fights a war that may benefit some Muslims, all Muslims must similarly be grateful, even if the U.S. wages other wars and backs other policies and governments that harm and kill many other Muslims. In other words, Americanists want Muslims to think like Pan-Islamists when it serves Washington’s purposes (i.e., when it is supposed to make Muslims favorably disposed to us), but Muslims must never think like Pan-Islamists when it doesn’t.

Kimberley Strassel reports from an alternate universe in which the Tories opposed invading Iraq (and presumably where Peter Hitchens is Leader of the Opposition):

To the extent the party did engage in policy debates, it was in the context of factions warring with each other over issues such as support for the European Union. It failed to take a hard line on the corruption that hurt the party. As it floundered, it increasingly stoked populist passions, in particular anti-immigration fervor or opposition to the Iraq War [bold mine-DL].

Strassel is right that internecine battles over Europe consumed much of the party’s energy and made Tories seem removed from what concerned most British voters, but the idea that the Tory leadership stoked populist passions on anything over the last twelve years is amusing. The last twelve years have seen the steady growth of both the UKIP and BNP as alternatives on the right in part because the Tories played the role of “responsible” opposition. Hague and Duncan-Smith made noises about changing rules for admitting asylum-seekers, which stoked few passions. Theirs was the lot of the moderate restrictionist, the one who cannot generate enough interest on immigration policy because the changes he advocates are so minor and unremarkable and who nonetheless gets tarred as xenophobic by the press because he is dissatisfied with the flawed status quo. Howard was even less interested in this issue. For the most part, the only strong feeling Tory leaders were able to stoke was contempt for their ineffective leadership.

The claim about riling up opponents of the war is simply false. No Tory leader before Cameron opposed the war, and even today Cameron’s critique of interventionist foreign policy is a limited, targeted one. As far as I know, he has never repudiated his past support for the war and re-stated his support for the war when he became Opposition leader. It is conceivable that there have been backbenchers critical of the war from the beginning, but to use this as a description of the Tories as a whole would be like citing Ron Paul and Jimmy Duncan when describing the GOP. The amazing thing is that the Tories managed to stake out the wrong position on the war in a country where it was always extremely unpopular and nonetheless they have been profiting from the implosion of Labour, which was much more split over the invasion and the continuation of the war. It’s as if the Democrats had been poised to sweep back into the majority in 2006 after having been and having remained as hawkish as Bush.

Of course, even after we have corrected the record the lessons are not entirely clear. The Tories might have been able to ride antiwar sentiment to oust Labour in earlier general elections had they opposed the war from the beginning, but we will never know. As things stand now, warmongers should be pleased that a pro-war leadership has managed to engineer a political comeback in spite of being utterly wrong on the most important foreign policy question of the last generation. What makes no sense about this entire column is that Strassel’s WSJ Republican worldview is much more in line with that of the Cameroons than with that of many of his critics on the British (and American) right. She ought to understand that if Cameron loses or fails once in office the Tories will turn to leaders who are much less amenable to Republican globalists.

The obvious, natural role for the Tories as the opposition was to organize antiwar forces in Britain, including those in the Labour Party, against Blair, and they failed spectaculary in this regard. The rallying cry for Euroskeptics was to tie themselves even more inextricably to America and strike a pose of being more Atlanticist than Thatcher, which in practical terms during the Bush years meant signing off on U.S. foreign policy no matter how bad those policies were for Britain (and America!). Aside from some de rigueur swipes at neoconservatism, Cameron has never shown any hint that he disagrees with the positions Conservatives took on foreign policy over the last decade, and no leading member of the party has made any effort to rile up or organize antiwar voters despite the obvious incentives the Tories have had to do so. There are many policies the Cameroons embrace that would not necessarily work in the American context, and there are some that might if adapted properly, but no one can accuse Cameron or the Tories of having exploited antiwar sentiment. They not only never did this, but they never even put themselves in a position where this was possible.

Via Andrew, here is a fearmongering Heritage Foundation ad pushing the tiresome advocacy of missile defense, which dovetails with much of the criticism of the new (expanded!) Pentagon budget. What the ad somehow manages not to mention between its homage to the 1964 campaign ad “Daisy” and an unfortunate Thatcher cameo is that neither North Korea nor Iran currently has the capability to build a missile that can reach the United States. It also seems to ignore that our government has a nuclear arsenal that would be used to retaliate against any such WMD missile attack with devastating effect on the state foolish or self-destructive enough to launch such an attack. Please, someone explain to me why any of these people should be taken seriously on matters of national security.

It is a shock, but Cathy Young is skeptical about the administration’s efforts to repair the relationship with Russia. This line jumped out at me:

The Kremlin treats pro-Western governments and politicians in former Soviet republics as presumptively anti-Russian and tends to view any increase in Western and especially American influence in the region as a weakening of Russian power.

The Kremlin does this in no small part because Western governments and media outlets treat anti-Russian, nationalist governments and politicians in former Soviet republics as presumptively pro-Western and the governments set policy accordingly. They all tend to see any increase in Russian influence in post-Soviet space as a challenge and a threat to Europe and the United States. Compare the routine Western hyperventilating about Russia wielding its “energy weapon” against Ukraine to any piece of Russian alarmism about the American military presence in central Asia, and I will show you two mirror images of irrational overreaction.

Naturally, when the Russians engage in these overreactions it is proof of their dangerous propaganda machine, while on our side it is all calm, sober analysis. If Moscow is erring here, it is by mirroring the reflexive distrust and hostility shown to Russia by Western governments and media and expressed in one policy decision after another. There are signs that this may be changing, which is good news, but it is at these moments when relations stand a chance of thawing that misrepresentations of the relationship can be particularly damaging.

Young cites the Kyrgyz decision to end the lease arrangement at Manas airbase as proof of Moscow’s “zero-sum mentality,” because, of course, Young applies an exceedingly narrow interpretation of this event in terms of jockeying between Moscow and Washington as if the Kyrgyz government and public had virtually nothing to do with any of it. It was Young, after all, who described the end of the Kyrgyz lease as a Russian “punch in the nose,” when it was primarily the result of popular backlash against the U.S. military presence. Where in the world would Moscow have ever picked up the idea that America’s loss is Russia’s gain? The funny thing is that this duplicates almost perfectly the official Russian reaction to all of the “color” revolutions, which portrayed those movements as purely foreign-backed conspiracies, and Young does this in the case of Kyrgyzstan with far less justification. That it was the authoritarian beneficiary of the supposedy democratic “Tulip” Revolution who decided to throw us out of Manas is oddly appropriate.

As it happens, this zero-sum equation is not true, but it is odd that one of the people most inclined to see the U.S.-Russian relationship in exactly these terms should find fault with it. Russian and American interests are much more complementary than Moscow’s Western critics and Russian hard-liners will ever allow. If we are ever going to reach a point where our governments can pursue common interests, we will need to begin by rejecting precisely the sort of zero-sum analysis that Western critics of Russia engage in on a regular basis.

Update: On a related note, Daria Vaisman’s article in Russia! (via Julia Ioffe) has a perfect summation of the main reason behind Russo-Georgian conflict in recent years:

And so it’s America that is being punished here – for turning Georgia into a symbol, but not the symbol that America thinks. Russia doesn’t hate Georgia because it’s an icon of democracy; it hates Georgia because it’s an icon of Russia-hating. Georgia was designed to function as synecdoche and premonition – into part of a whole and as more to come. Under these conditions, can you blame Russia? Imagine, as Medvedev recently did, if Russia had done the same.

I would also add that Georgia is paying the price for being made into a “front-line state” in what was ostensibly a contest between democracy and authoritarianism, East and West, etc. As we have noted before, whenever a state is turned into the symbol of a grandiose cause, it tends not to work out well for the people who live there.