Thomas Ricks has taken up the thankless task of arguing with contributors at First Things about the immorality of the war in Iraq, and here I should note with appreciation that he has linked to one of my old disputes with another war supporter writing at First Things. Ricks has taken the (unremarkable) position that the continuing presence of American forces in Iraq is immoral. I call this an unremarkable position because the injustice of aggressive war seems obvious to me, and inasmuch as the continuing military presence in Iraq is the result and continuation of that aggression then it, too, is immoral.

Ricks has been slightly diverted by the question of the war’s false premises. While I would say that there is ample reason to doubt that the war met tests of just cause and right intention, it is important to distinguish between administration claims that turned out to be false and claims that they made with certainty when they possessed no sure knowledge at all. In the case of the latter, such as when the Vice President asserted that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, or when Mr. Bush stated that intelligence “leaves no doubt” Iraq possessed WMDs, these were dishonest claims. There was no evidence of the former, and a great deal of doubt about the latter. To say that they exaggerated but did not “lie” is to engage in spin: an exaggeration is a kind of falsehood, and not a trivial matter when it serves as part of a rationale for war. Manipulation of facts and the telling of half-truths are hardly laudable things, but somehow we are supposed to believe that if a charge was not created out of whole cloth that it was therefore made honestly and in good faith. It is not nearly that simple.

More important than the dishonesty of officials in government, however, was the cause in whose service these claims were made. Because the administration described the war as “pre-emptive,” when it was at best a preventive war against a future, allegedly “growing” threat, there has long been a diversionary pro-war argument about the possible merits of pre-emptive war against imminent threats. Engaging that argument is to end up going round in circles and has led some antiwar arguments into blind alleys, because what the Bush Doctrine set forth in 2002 proposed and what the administration did was not actually pre-emption against an existing, immediate threat, but was aimed at probable or possible threats. When administration defenders said that the administration had never spoken of imminent threats, this was narrowly true in that the administration had actually argued for going to war on a much flimsier, much less defensible basis than this.

Of course, if it is true that the concept of preventive war is not to be found in the Catechism, as then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, said at the time, preventive war of the kind proposed and executed by the last administration is simply unthinkable if we take the standards of just war theory seriously. No wrong was being remedied, because none had yet been committed or even immediately threatened against us. If the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated, as it says in the Catechism, preventive war must necessarily fail the test of proportionality because the “evil to be eliminated” was merely potential and not yet real, while the evils produced by the war have been all too real. If “the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain,” preventive war fails yet another test because the damage has not yet been inflicted and is not about to be, but theoretically might be at some point in the future. The damage is neither lasting nor grave, because it has not yet occurred, and it is anything but certain. Most obvious of all, all other means could not have been exhausted, because preventive war necessarily involves making war something other than a last resort.

As I have noted before, though, there are two camps that invoke just war theory: those who seek to find loopholes in it that permit wars as often as possible, and those who seek to use it as a barrier for the prevention of unnecessary wars and the preservation of greater tranquility and peace. As the restoration of peace is the proper end of any war, it seems to me impossible to make a credible argument that starting a preventive war is anything other than unjust and immoral. It is difficult to say that the evils arising from that war and the continuation of the military presence remaining in the country following the invasion are not also unjust and immoral.

Ricks has made the additional claim that leaving Iraq now would be immoral, and this is not a view that can be dismissed easily. Our government invaded without just cause, which I hasten to add we would not have had even if Iraq had possessed the weapons it was accused of having (see the above points on preventive war), and this does impose an obligation to repair the damage unleashed by our invasion. Indeed, it seems to me that the second part of Ricks’ view derives from the first part. It is an acceptance of moral responsibility for the wrong done to the Iraqis that Pavlischek seems incapable of acknowledging was done to them. I agree with Ricks that we do owe the Iraqis a debt for the destruction caused and unleashed by the invasion, and where we would probably differ is in gauging how effectively we can repay that debt by remaining in the country even for the next few years.

As the NY-20 special election remains undecided and will be determined by absentee ballots, the GOP has fallen short yet again in another special election in a district that should be favorable to it. Even if Tedisco squeaks out a win, the NRCC has to spin the result to make this look like anything other than a very weak showing, and so far the initial Republican claims reek of desperation. From Politico:

NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) was reduced to noting that the tight race itself was an accomplishment.

“For the first time in a long time, a Republican candidate went toe to toe with a Democrat in a hard-fought battle over independent voters,” said Sessions. “This was hardly a common phenomenon in 2008, particularly in the Northeast.”

This is like a general who has abandoned entire provinces taking satisfaction that one stronghold has not been captured–yet. “Yes, gentlemen, we have been completely routed throughout the region, but we put up a lot of resistance at this single outpost, which is more than you could say for our other numerous defeats.” As it was a special election, the “hard-fought battle over independent voters” was actually much more like an effort to mobilize core supporters and partisans. Given the low turnout (approximately half of what it was in November), the GOP’s advantage in registration and their almost 2-to-1 spending edge ought to have put Tedisco over the top. Perhaps they will narrowly win, but not with anything like the kind of definitive protest vote against the administration that the NRCC needed to produce. The Republicans managed to take someone who was well-regarded locally and tarnish him with close association with national Republican leaders, which in turn succeeds in tarnishing the national party image even more as incompetent and out-of-touch.

Honestly, I don’t understand the electoral strategy over the last couple of cycles. Instead of localizing all of the House races and focusing on the virtues of their own candidates, national Republicans have repeatedly, unsuccessfully tried to link everyone from Jim Webb to Heath Shuler to Travis Childers with liberal wine-and-cheesers from San Francisco and, of course, with Nancy Pelosi. This was never a credible line of attack, and in pretty much every case it backfired. I sometimes wonder whether these folks ever leave Washington and its vicinity, outside of which most people don’t know much about Pelosi if they know anything at all. Nonetheless, time and again they try to paint Blue Dog recruits as Pelosi’s lapdogs, as if this has any significance for people in the rest of the country.

What is absolutely amazing about the outcome last night is that Murphy declared his opposition to the death penalty, even in cases of terrorist attacks, and he may have won anyway. It is possible that his victory, like Cazayoux’s in Louisiana, will be short-lived and will be reversed in 2010 because of this and similar issues. Murphy’s stance on this is fairly left-leaning for someone who wants to join the Blue Dog caucus, but instead of becoming a huge liability it barely registered. It barely registered despite an NRCC ad highlighting this position. Four years ago, to say nothing of seven years ago, he could not have survived politically had he taken the same position. One of the interesting things about this race, then, is the degree to which economic issues have completely overwhelmed the old politics of national security and terrorism on which the GOP relied since ’02, and they have done so even in one of the more culturally conservative districts in that part of the country.

Indeed, as was apparent today, the latest “conspiracy” is rather mainstream stuff, like supporting Obama’s Af-Pak policy, and it enjoys healthy bipartisan support — just as Clinton’s Balkans wars did, and yes, just as Iraq did initially. Criticizing these policies is fair. But those criticisms should be aimed at a broad swath of the foreign policy establishment, on both sides of the aisle, not just at the neo-cons. ~Christian Brose

It’s a deal. No doubt when critics focus on the failures of the majority of the foreign policy establishment, they will be treated as worthy adversaries in policy debate and not dismissed as unpatriotic and anti-American goons. Isn’t that right? Somehow, I doubt it.

Criticizing Iraq policy became broadly acceptable among the foreign policy establishment once the neocons could be made into the sole villains of the piece, which was useful for deflecting the responsibility of various other hawks and internationalists. In some ways, the latter were more responsible for plunging us into the disaster by creating a respectable and broad consensus in favor of an unjustified, unnecessary war of aggression. That doesn’t mean that neoconservatives weren’t actually responsible for a great deal of harm, for which they still refuse to take responsibility, but it does mean that they became convenient scapegoats for less fanatical, more “pragmatic” types who changed their views on the war in the last four or five years. Neocons take the brunt of criticism because they were the first to call for the war and are among the last to continue to defend the indefensible, but I am more than happy to hold accountable all of the people who have blundered so horribly. There’s no need to wait–I have started doing this already. These people are blundering again in endorsing Obama’s misdirected nation-building scheme in Afghanistan, just as many of them blundered in supporting or later embracing the “surge”* as something other than a delaying tactic that addressed none of the fundamental political problems in Iraq. I fully expect them to be just as wrong this time as they have been wrong in the past. I also fully expect them to hide behind their near-unanimity as a shield against this criticism, because this is what they always do.

* The “surge” failed, and its failurewasforeseenfromthe beginning.

European nations have already shown little stomach for a tough line on Russian bullying of Ukraine and Georgia. ~Ida Garibaldi

Whenever I read lines like this, I wonder what the author could possibly mean. European nations have little stomach for backing irrational policies for which they alone will have to pay the price? Yes, this is true. They have little stomach for backing unnecessary expansions of a defunct Alliance into countries that for most of the modern period were part of Russian territory? They are guilty as charged. Europeans are not interested in jeopardizing their own access to energy for the sake of unrealistic fantasies of a North Atlantic alliance that borders on the eastern shores of the Black Sea? No doubt. They are unwilling to put their necks on the line for the nationalist aspirations of a hot-headed demagogue who likes provoking one of the major nuclear powers on the planet? That is surprising.

Taking a “tough line” could have real consequences for Europeans in ways that simply don’t apply to America. It is always a good idea to remember this, and it would quite useful to understand that continued pressure for NATO expansion into these countries could provoke the Russian use of energy as leverage. For the most part, Russian “bullying” of Ukraine with respect to energy has been a matter of cutting subsidies for Ukraine, which means that Ukrainians are finally starting to pay something closer to the market price for a commodity they are used to getting for very low prices. Naturally, having become accustomed to cheaper prices, Ukraine has fought such moves, which has led to occasional interruptions in supply. How this is solely or primarily Russia’s fault must continue to elude us.

There is somecommentary today telling everyone to invest the outcome of the NY-20 special election with very little significance. That’s reasonable up to a point, as all special elections are quirky, not necessarily representative of broader trends and often turn on the qualities of the candidates, but then the same can be said for a lot of House races. Depending on the cycle, House elections can be won on national themes, or elections turn on local issues in ways that defy patterns. It is natural for both sides to lower expectations in a close race, and the GOP candidate is so intent on lowering expectations that he has apparently already filed a motion to challenge the outcome after internal polling confirmed earlier Siena polling that the Democrat, Scott Murphy, was pulling ahead.

Taken in isolation, this outcome wouldn’t matter much. But if Murphy does win it will mean that an out-of-state transplant made up a 20-point deficit against a fixture of regional politics in less than six weeks, and he will have done it in a district where Republicans enjoy a registration advantage of many tens of thousands (71,000 to be exact, which is approximately 25% of the size of the 2008 turnout). When Ogonowski lost a special election for MA-05 in a landslide, there were more than a few Republicans who went wild at how well he had done in a House special election in deep-blue Massachusetts. In that case, Ogonowski’s smaller-than-expected margin of defeat was supposed to signal a Republican resurgence in 2008 (which did not happen), which was never very credible, but are we really supposed to believe that a Democratic win in a traditionally Republican district in a special election doesn’t say something significant about the political fortunes of the GOP? When Gillibrand won in 2006, it could be written off as part of a wave and a reaction against Sweeney’s scandals, and when Gillibrand was re-elected and Obama carried the district it could be written off to some extent as part of another wave and a reaction against the financial crisis and recession, but if the Democrats hold the seat for the third time that begins to suggest a pattern. It may mean that the GOP’s strongholds in the hinterlands of the Northeast, already disappearing in New Hampshire, are also eroding in upstate New York.

What one doesn’t normally see is nonpartisan observers going to great lengths to deny the race’s significance, but this is what Charlie Cook does. However, he does this in a very odd way. This is how he starts his summary:

This is a historically Republican area that has become problematic for the GOP in recent years. President Obama’s popularity — he carried the district by 3 points — is helping to offset some of the longstanding GOP leanings. There is an experienced and established Republican against a Democratic newcomer to the area. Both sides have spent generously, though not at the break-the-bank levels of last year’s special elections.

Mind you, the NRCC has spent more, and independent Republican PACs have spent more than their counterparts, and the DCCC has not made that big of a push because of its existing debt problems in ’08. The Republicans have had the advantage of the well-known, experienced candidate, and the district is so traditionally Republican, as Cook himself points out, that it never voted for Roosevelt for statewide or national office and went for Bush both times. There are other districts like that somewhere in the country, in rural Idaho and parts of Utah maybe. If you wanted to make the argument that the outcome of this election isn’t very important, highlighting its strong Republican history and leanings isn’t the best way to go about it. In essence, what Cook is saying is that NY-20 used to be reliably Republican, and between the backlash against the GOP and Obama’s election this has been changing. How can we not see another Republican defeat in NY-20 as evidence of something more than a quirky special election outcome?

Update: John Cole and DougJ at Balloon Juice have more. I agree that the closing of the gap between Tedisco and Murphy was the result of increasing name recognition for Murphy, who was bound to start pretty far behind as a newcomer. It was ironically the national Republicans’ anti-Murphy ad campaign that helped improve Murphy’s name recognition so dramatically. One thing I neglected to mention in this post was that Michael Steele may not last very long as RNC Chairman if Tedisco loses. This will be somewhat unfair for Steele, as it is the NRCC that screwed up the campaign so badly. By all rights, Rep. Pete “Taliban as Model for Insurgency” Sessions, who runs the NRCC, is the one who should have to pay the price for a Tedisco loss. I would add as a final note that the NRCC managed to take a candidate who had all the local advantages that Travis Childers had as a Democrat in MS-01, and they managed to turn Tedisco into a generic Republican who will probably end up losing.

Second Update: With all precincts reporting, Murphy has an extremely slender lead of 65 votes that is almost sure to be eliminated by absentee ballots. The GOP may end up dodging a bullet on this one.

It [the Iran-Iraq war] didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness. It wasn’t Britain after World War I, lapsing into pacifism because of the great tragedy of a loss of a generation. You see nothing of the kind. ~Benjamin Netanyahu

Via Alex Massie

As Massie says, this makes no sense. First of all, British losses in WWI, like those of all belligerents in WWI, were much higher both proportionally and in absolute terms than Iran’s losses in the war with Iraq, and WWI was far more futile and was, for the British, almost entirely a war of choice. The Iranians were resisting aggression against their country. People will endure remarkable hardship, at least once, to expel an invader from their country. Like France after Verdun, the horrific experience might be great enough to force a nation into a purely defensive posture, but even post-WWI France, which is a better comparison with post-1988 Iran, did not sink into pacifism.

Indeed, the occupation of the Rhineland, security guarantees to central European states and the building of the Maginot Line all point not to pacifism, but to an assumption that another war might come and France should be prepared for it. The Maginot Line came out of the experience of Verdun, which was that the defensive position held the overwhelming advantage in modern warfare; the problem with the Maginot Line was not that it was defensive and therefore somehow “weak” or pacifistic, but plainly enough that it did not guard the entire border.* Another small problem with Netanyahu’s remark is that it seems to show no awareness that Britain did not lapse into pacifism after WWI; British forces kept fighting the Bolsheviks and were busy suppressing colonial uprisings well after Armistice Day. There were practical, fiscal and political limits to the size of the military after the vast expense of WWI, so demobilization halted or reduced a lot of these operations, but it wasn’t for lack of will that Britain pulled out of Anatolia or gave up on the White cause in Russia.

The real gem of Netanyahu’s interview was this:

He continued: “You see a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” I asked Netanyahu if he believed Iran would risk its own nuclear annihilation at the hands of Israel or America. “I’m not going to get into that,” he said.

Massie comments:

Secondly, why does Netanyahu decline to “get into” a discussion on whether Iran would “risk its own nuclear annihilation at the hands of Israel or America”? Might it be because the obvious answer is that they would not? Otherwise why not just say “yes they would be prepared to risk that”?

Netanyahu might have to acknowledge that all the supposed glorification of “self-immolation” is just bluster and empty rhetoric. Let’s be very clear on this point: the only argument in favor of a preventive war against Iran to destroy its nuclear facilities is that traditional deterrence will not work with the Iranian government, because the “mad mullahs” are supposedly willing to suffer annihilation in exchange for destroying Israel. Not to be too blunt about it, but has it ever occurred to the people who make this argument that they may be making Israel’s fate far more important to Tehran than it actually is? I’m not sure what would offend some people more: the idea that Iran wants to destroy Israel at all costs, or the idea that it doesn’t place enough importance on the fate of Israel to do very much about it. Is Tehran willing to back proxies on Israel’s flanks that can launch rockets on Israeli cities? Yes. Does it follow that this garden-variety proxy warfare and power projection means that the government in question is so dedicated to harming Israel that it would invite nuclear apocalypse? Obviously, it doesn’t, and if I were an advocate of a strategy that takes this ludicrous idea for granted I would try to avoid talking about it in public, too.

* Regarding the Maginot Line, this short description may help the woefully ignorant out there:

Like the Séré de Rivières forts constructed along the line of the rivers Meuse and Moselle after the 1870–71 war, the Maginot Line was designed to keep the Germans out. Constructed between 1930 and 1940, it was the brainchild of the French Minister of War (1929–31), André Maginot. Spanning the entire length of the French–German border – plus a section of the French-Belgian border – it comprised a complete system of defence in depth. There were advance posts equipped with anti-tank weapons and machine guns. There were fortified police stations close to the frontier. But the main line consisted of a continuous chain of underground strongpoints linked by anti-tank obstacles and equipped with state-of-the-art machinery. It was of course hugely expensive and, when put to the test in 1940, proved to be worse than useless: the Germans simply violated Belgian neutrality and drove round the other end of the Line.

Obviously, defensive fortifications that fail to guard the entire border can be outflanked, which is the flaw mentioned in the original post. The Germans’ launch of their offensive through the Ardennes was an acknowledgment that the Maginot Line would have been very difficult and costly to breach, if it would have been possible at all. The Maginot Line was a classic case of preparing to fight the last war, but it had nothing to do with pacifism.

We have covered this question before during the strikes on Gaza, the war in Lebanon, and the war against Yugoslavia, but somehow it never seems to sink in with some people. As Massie correctly argues, the failure to understand that other nations do not respond well to bombing and terror is a failure of imagination and empathy, but I think it is more and far worse than that. Certainly, it helps that supporters of air wars and collective punishment do not try to see things from the perspective of a foreign population. It helps a great deal that they seem to have not an ounce of respect for the sentiments and feelings of loyalty and pride those people have regarding their own countries.

However, after the second or third or tenth failed campaign to spark a political backlash against a given regime by means of aerial bombardment and collective punishment, some learning would have to take place, wouldn’t it? Perhaps I have too much confidence in the intelligence of the supporters of these methods, but I do find it hard to believe that someone can still honestly and seriously put forward an argument that these methods are likely to yield the intended political result. It is hard not to conclude after a while that interventionists of this kind do not have a misguided desire to help other nations living under authoritarian or sectarian rulers and just happen to advocate using counterproductive means, but are content simply to use this as an excuse and a cover for their genuine interest to inflict humiliation and destruction on these nations in pursuit of projecting power and crushing resistance to the governments that they favor.

When it came to Gaza, this was much more straightforward and clear, because there was not much incentive for supporters of the operation to pretend that Palestinian attitudes mattered to them. There were undoubtedly some supporters who were interested in the operation’s effect on Palestinian attitudes, but for the most part the analysis stopped at “this is what you get for supporting Hamas, so there!” Supporters of the operation could more or less shrug off civilian deaths in Gaza as both unavoidable and supposedly deserved (the “they brought it on themselves” excuse). If collective punishment did not have the effect of discrediting Hamas with the population, it was neither here nor there, because it was simply the inflicting of punishment and not any grand strategy of undermining Hamas that mattered. Again, there were supporters of the operation to whom this description did not apply, but I think it very fairly describes the most vocal and zealous supporters. No one could have observed the counterproductive effects of bombing Yugoslavia (causing Serbs to rally to a leader most of them had come to loathe) or starving and bombing Iraq (empowering Hussein and weakening all opposition) and concluded that these practices succeeded in bringing down the regimes in question. At some point, don’t we have to say that people who make such manifestly ridiculous arguments are using them as nothing more than window-dressing and do not really mean what they’re saying? Lack of imagination and lack of empathy are part of the problem, but can they really account for the blindness to reality on display?

As Massie says:

The problem with Abrams and co is not simply that they treat every problem as though it were the same, but that they seem to have no imagination. That is, Abrams clearly cannot imagine how an Iranian might be both opposed to the regime and proud that Iran had a nuclear capability. Yet it is not difficult to imagine how such feelings might exist. Equally, Abrams’ lack of empathy makes it impossible for him to imagine how an Iranian might hear the “good messaging” about “why we ae not against the people of Iran” and see these messengers dropping bombs on Iranian territory and conclude that perhaps the Americans do indeed have something against the Iranian people. This is elementary.

It is elementary, and even Abrams et al. cannot be so dense as to be unable to grasp the concept. Something more than being unimaginative and indifferent is at work.

When it comes to Iran, it is more difficult to portray the Iranian government as both deeply unpopular and entirely unrepresentative if state and people are conflated together too easily. Different parts of the rationale for toppling the regime come into conflict with each other. For that reason, there is more of a need to resort to the fiction that the Iranian people will turn on their government if foreign governments launch unprovoked strikes on their country. The disastrous assumption that all Iraqis would welcome their invaders or attackers would make most Americans wary of trying something similar again, so the fiction is useful in reassuring some Americans that it will be different next time.

The advocates for attacking Iran have a small problem: people generally do not turn on their government when foreigners attack, and those who actually welcome the invaders or try to overthrow their government in response tend to be regarded as collaborators with the enemy and traitors and treated accordingly. Not only has the mass rejection of a government attacked by another state scarcely ever happened in modern history, but it makes no sense psychologically or politically. It may be the case that governments that launch or enter into wars and fail are subsequently thrown out of power, but when a nation is on the receiving end of an attack the population typically stands by the government during the attack and at most scapegoats individual commanders, politicians or rulers for failure afterwards. I can think of one example when a nation has turned on the leadership of the regime in wartime, which was Russia in February 1917, and this was done in part, so the revolutionaries hoped, to be better able to fight the Germans. Even that happened only after two and a half years of one of the bloodiest wars of all time in which Russia suffered enormous, lopsided losses. No one of any importance, thank goodness, is proposing to launch a military campaign against Iran that is even remotely similar, and it is worth remembering that the Iraqis did inflict major losses on the Iranians during their war at a time when the regime was actually much weaker than it is today, and the regime did not fall then. The net effect of the experience of their war with Iraq was to solidify support for the new regime.

As I said earlier this year, one need only think for half a minute about what our response would be and what our responses have been to what we regarded as purely unprovoked attacks, and it is fairly easy to understand what the response of another nation would be under similar circumstances. Did 9/11 cause the vast majority of Americans to ask, “How did our government get us into this mess?” Obviously not. It did cause most people to ask, “Why do they hate us?” to which the official and popular answer has been, “Because they are irrational maniacs bent on destroying our way of life.” Even to the extent that it was permitted to discuss the possible role our policies had in generating hostility and resentment against us, the conclusion in mainstream circles has always been that those policies were basically sound and necessary. Of course, the public tends to accept official answers during an emergency and in the years following it, even when these answers come in the form of propaganda that insults their intelligence, and in an emergency solidarity with the government tends to push everything else to the side. So even in the unlikely event that a majority of Iranians saw the Iranian nuclear program as the intolerable danger to international peace that Washington says it is, rather than the legitimate national pursuit most Iranians actually see it as being, launching strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities would ensure that whatever dissenters there are would be radicalized and pushed into the arms of their leaders, whose oversimplified, perhaps largely false, description of the motives of the attackers would become the widely-accepted one.

It should go without saying that a more nationalistic public, especially one that has been raised with the knowledge of modern unprovoked invasions of their country (as Iranians have been), will be even more likely to rally to the government in a time of crisis, because they will not see an attack on their military and scientific installations as an attack focused solely on the government or a specific policy of that government. Instead, they will see it as an attempt to thwart their national ambition and to humiliate them in the eyes of the world, and nationalists tend not to react well to either one.

Ross mentions this profile of Russian President Medvedev as an interesting source of background, and I agree that it is a useful primer on Medvedev if you are not familiar with his career prior to his elevation by Putin and election, but I am instinctively wary of efforts to interpret the actions of foreign governments or to speculate about their future actions based on the biographies of their temporary heads of state. Even if the impulse to distinguish Medvedev from Putin helps to make reconciliation with Russia more palatable in the short term, it inevitably sets up American observers for disappointment if it makes them overly confident that Russian policy is somehow going to change significantly with respect to Russian resistance to NATO expansion, ballistic missile defense or the launching of “pre-emptive” and humanitarian wars against their satellites and clients. Just as there are limits and constraints imposed by our political class and foreign policy establishment on how far Obama can go in accommodating Russia, whoever happens to be the head of state in Moscow will face similar limitations on his side.

One of the reasons I continually, perhaps boringly, insist that the Kagan-esque description of Russia and China as “autocracies” is completely wrong is that it creates a false impression that any particular head of state wields the kind of arbitrary and absolute power that an autocrat would actually possess. According to much of our political class, Putin was perceived to be a Bad Tsar, but that leaves open the possibility of a Good Tsar, when there are actually no more tsars. Otherwise, this autocracy framing is premised on the even more ridiculous notion that if only Russia were more democratic (which would actually make it more nationalistic in its policies) Russian policy would be less “anti-Western” or whatever term our political class feels obliged to put on Moscow’s pursuit of limited national interests.

Modern Russian Presidents may like to model themselves after Byzantine emperors, but that does not mean that they have the constitutional role of the autokrator. If we take this autocracy idea seriously, we are going to come to the wrong conclusions. As a general rule, we routinely misread and misunderstand what other governments are trying to do because we tend to personalize discussion of what these governments do. Even now that Putin is no longer actually President, there is some need in certain circles to insist that he is the one really in charge, because the personalized interpretation of a neo-Soviet regime or “unpredictable” so-called revisionist power does not work nearly as well when its head of state is a lawyer with some modest reform impulses. Medvedev can’t really be in charge, and can’t even be the major partner in a sort of dyarchical executive, because he cannot be made into a villain as easily as an ex-KGB officer.

Medvedev’s reform impulses shouldn’t be ignored, but they shouldn’t be exaggerated, either. Likewise, Medvedev is a Russian nationalist, and his view of Russian security interests and foreign policy is not significantly different from that of Putin. His career in Gazprom reinforces the certainty that his policies will be shaped to a significant degree by the needs of the Russian energy sector, as you would expect in a petro-state. As we saw in the war in Georgia, Medvedev is no less willing to defend Russia’s role in the separatist enclaves in Georgia, and he has shown no significantly greater tolerance for dissent. Indeed, in reaction to the worsening economic crisis, authoritarian measures have become stronger inside Russia in an attempt to quell or minimize dissent and upheaval. We would be less surprised, and less inclined to invent ridiculous narratives about Russian “backsliding” if none of us floated a theory every few years that some new leader is going to change Russian policy in major ways. One of the problems with such theories is that they seem to be driven to some degree by a desire to see foreign leaders who sign off on U.S. foreign policy moves that their predecessors found intolerable, as if opposition to these moves was the idiosyncratic or arbitrary reaction of a particular person rather than an expression of state interests as understood by a broad consensus inside the other government.

Of course, the siloviki, the military, Gazprom and the oligarchs are fundamentally no less important to the current system than they were when Putin was President (the oligarchs and Gazprom are poorer, but not necessarily less important in shaping policy for all that), and their interests continue to define the contours of Russian policy because they make up the overwhelming bulk of the power structure. Even modern regimes that might be more reasonably described as autocracies–the Saudi monarchy, for example–have interest groups at home they must satisfy, and in Russia and China there are institutions and political forces that the head of state has to accommodate, not vice versa. The more we acknowledge that Russian policy is dictated by Russian perception of their national interests, rather than by the preferences of a particular leader, the better chance we have of recognizing where our interests are shared and where we can accommodate their objections.

Update: Now posted at The New Atlanticist.

Not that I want to encourage a lot of television-watching (it is Lent, after all), but I have to say a few words about the new NBC series Kings. As a longtime Ian McShane fan from his days as the roguish antiques dealer Lovejoy, I was very pleased to see him in the lead of this new series, and he has not disappointed in his new role. When I discovered that the show was an attempt to make a modern adaptation of the story of Saul and David from the First Book of Samuel, I was even more intrigued and was determined to give it a chance. I did this even though I assumed that, being a network television series, it would downplay if not actually eliminate all references to God, prophecy and anointed kingship, and in this assumption I have been completely wrong from the first minutes of the pilot. The first three episodes have treated the original Biblical story respectfully, if not slavishly, and they have given the political theology of I Samuel and the role of “Rev. Samuels” as central a place in the story as one might expect to see. Obviously, the show is being marketed as a political drama/soap opera a la Rome with the religious component obscured almost entirely in the advertising (apparently because, as they say in the first scene, “it’s not popular to speak of God”), and additional plot twists added on occasion. Like Rome, it has impressive sets and casting, and a similarly large budget, and it has so far brought in high quality directorial talent. Naturally, pitted against The Simpsons and even more mindless reality TV fare, Kings has been doing very badly in the ratings. NBC is infamous for its mishandling of quality programming, so there is every reason to fear that the network will do its best to undermine the show until it is cancelled. However, this is a show that is intelligent, reasonably attentive to the Biblical narrative and serious when speaking of matters of faith and sacrifice, and if there is any show on network or cable that can claim anything similar I have yet to hear of it. It’s worth a look.