Andrew Nagorski indulges one of the worst habits of Russia watchers in this new article in Newsweek, framing his entire analysis around the supposed crazy unpredictability of the Russians. I’m not sure what it says about all those “closest observers of Russian foreign policy” that they cannot make sense of fairly straightforward acts of bluster (threatening to put Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad) and accommodation (welcoming the “reset” in relations), but it is just about as reassuring as hearing Secretary Gates brag that he and former Secretary Rice were two Russia experts at the top levels of government who had no clue what was going on in Russia. I could have told them that many years ago. Russian actions are not hard to understand, and they are not unpredictable. In fact, one can predict what Moscow will do with surprising frequency by paying attention to what the Kremlin says it will do in response to provocations or conciliatory gestures. Much of the rest of Russian policy can be understood by recognizing the power structures in the Russian government, paying attention to Russian history and understanding that Moscow sees its relations with its former satellites much as Washington has traditionally regarded Latin America. That is, as an area in which we may meddle at will, but where foreign meddling, no matter how minimal, is viewed with deep suspicion as a threat to our influence.

All the hemming and hawing about Manas assumes that the Russians have some stranglehold over Bishkek and that our lease of the base would have been renewed without Russian involvement. If we can believe the former Kyrgyz ambassador who served under Bakiyev’s rival (hardly a cheerleader for the new regime), this is doubtful. More to the point, everyone who brings up Manas as a piece of evidence in indictments of Russia has failed to notice or mention the SCO Afghanistan conference going on right now at which the Russians, the central Asian states, SCO observer nations in the region, and observers from NATO and the United States, among others, are discussing possible resupply alternatives. Alexander Lukin explains:

The SCO includes Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan as full members, and India, Iran, Pakistan and Mongolia as observers. One of the key objectives of the Friday SCO conference is to team up with the West and international organizations to address the Afghanistan problem. Among the participants will be: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; Mark Perrin de Brichambaut, secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Patrick Moon; and NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. In addition, there will be representatives from the Group of Eight countries, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the European Union and the Organization of The Islamic Conference.

The participation of NATO and its allies at the SCO conference indicates a significant shift in their approach to the Afghanistan problem. There is a good reason for this. NATO understands that it has a better chance of getting what it wants from Russia and other SCO members by cooperating with them rather than by confronting them. The U.S. and NATO wish list includes finding an acceptable format to somehow bring Iran into the dialogue [bold mine-DL]. It also includes securing transit routes for nonmilitary — and ultimately military — supplies to coalition forces in Afghanistan through SCO countries and placing NATO troops on the territories of SCO member states.

It’s almost as if making some effort to accommodate and heed Russian concerns might have significant, concrete benefits for U.S. interests! It’s as if needlessly alienating Russia for all these years was actually harmful to our own war effort, but then that might mean that the confrontational, anti-Russian posture of the last decade was deeply misguided and informed by hubris and ideological hang-ups left over from the Cold War. That couldn’t be right, could it? Note that line about bringing Iran into the mix. As I suggest in my forthcoming column on Iran for The Week (now online), involving Iran in Afghanistan policy makes sense for the purposes of our war effort and serves as a good way to begin rebuilding relations with Iran. As Lukin notes, Moscow has already agreed to allow the transport of non-military freight, which is a beginning for cooperation in central Asia.

One of Andrew’s readers chided him for for describing Afghanistan as a place with an “an utterly alien culture, institutions, religion and polity,” and in this follow-up post Andrew qualified his claim. This reminded me of the Ralph Peters column that I mocked for its “thought experiment” that Pashtuns were for all intents and purposes from another planet. Without question, Peters’ “experiment” is far, far worse than Andrew’s overstatement and it is significantly different from it, because Peters’ column was not an attempt to acknowledge profound cultural and religious differences, but on the contrary was a very clear effort to essentialize those differences and claim that they were practically differences according to nature. The purpose of this was to vilify Pashtuns in the Taliban to such an extent that their humanity was in question, which is another way of claiming that anyone who does not happen to embrace our “values” or our power projection into their part of the world cannot really share our nature, because we “know” that our “values” are universal.

Recognizing vast, significant differences between cultures and religions is sane and necessary, and I can understand very well the impulse to push back against the fantasies of universalist theories that hold that these differences are superficial and unimportant, but it is vital that we understand the distinction between what Peters was arguing and what Andrew is arguing. Essentialist arguments betray their basic hostility to history and culture in that they are blind to the possibility of change over time within and across cultures, they cannot fully accept that culture is a human invention, and hold instead that cultural difference must be rooted in essence rather than in will, which in turn denies the importance of human agency in history and endorses one of a variety of determinisms. The equally fantastical universalist notion that traditional tribal societies from a very different religious tradition can and should be molded and remade into a post-modern managerial democracy, because such a regime represents the inevitable, single model of human progress, substitutes an ideologically-defined determinism for other kinds. These two fantasies, the essentialist and the universalist, seem to co-exist in complementary tension with one another in their shared antipathy to real respect for culture and historical contingency. Andrew was indulging neither fantasy, and Peters was to some extent indulging both.

David Brooks seems to put aside all of the reasons for skepticism about grandiose plans for Afghanistan that he correctly describes at the start of this column, and apparently he allows himself to ignore his properly skeptical instincts because so many of the people he met in Afghanistan are so very optimistic. Brooks concludes:

I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:

After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.

Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response — amid economic crisis and war weariness — says something profound about America’s DNA.

Infected may be a far more appropriate word than Brooks imagined. As I have said before, optimism is very much like a disease of the mind, and it is contagious. It inhibits lucid thought, it shuts down core reasoning centers and seems to inflict terrible damage on memory. It is optimism that continually causes us to lose our respect for limits and to have unrealistic expectations of what we can achieve, which leads us to set ourselves up for failure and disaster by encouraging us to overreach and believe that we can find a solution to every problem. There are certain realities in Afghanistan to which there are no American or NATO solutions (the drug trade springs to mind, as does the weak central government in Kabul), because they are not really problems, or at the very least they are not our problems. Their “solution” is so far beyond what our limited national security goals are that we are not going to find the solution in any reasonable amount of time at anything like an acceptable or reasonable cost.

If it was a fantasy in Iraq “to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states,” it remains a fantasy today. It makes no difference what label one gives to it, and it is certainly not a fantasy that only neoconservatives embrace. If Americans have not learned by now that such efforts are folly, and more important that they would not be worth it even if they turned out to be successful, it may indeed say something about our national character. What I fear is that Obama, who has always been an interventionist with great confidence in this fantasy of what American power can achieve, believes that the “energetic and ambitious response” is what the American public desires and will support for years to come. I worry that he will discover midway through his term that the public that voted to bring the war in Iraq to an end really is sick of frittering away our resources to no apparent purpose and for no real national interest, and they will turn on the entire mission in Afghanistan because it has been defined at once too broadly as a grand nation-building exercise and too narrowly in its preoccupation with forces based in western Pakistan.

Because Obama is setting far too ambitious goals for Afghanistan with too few resources, while largely neglecting (or exacerbating) more significant problems inside Pakistan that are gradually making our position in Afghanistan untenable, he runs the risk of jeopardizing public support for the much more limited and achievable security goals that are in our interest and the interest of Afghanistan’s neighbors. In the end, he will have the support of the fantasists who led us into Iraq and liberal internationalists who are still invested in the idea of nation-building, and he will have to face the growing numbers of people who have grown weary of a Long War that has ceased to make any sense (if it ever made sense in the first place). These people are not “isolationist” (as they will inevitably be labeled by the fantasists), but will have no interest in subsidizing open-ended missions in service to a ‘forward’ policy that seems unsustainable and which also seems far inferior to a containment approach.

Consider this the first in a series of reflections on the now-concluded Battlestar Galactica. Obviously, numerous spoilers follow for those who have not yet caught up with the end (or even the beginning) of the series, so caveat lector.

Peter and Matt are not wrong to see in the final episode hints at a “crunchy” or agrarian critique of a hyper-technological civilization, but I tend to agree with Matt that the “transparent craving for the supposed authenticity of the land will seem so pat to future generations.” At its best, the “crunchy” or agrarian critique should not be based in such a craving, as if there is an authenticity of the land that liberates us from the artificiality of technology, but instead be based in the recognition that man should be using techne to shape a landscape rather than objectify an “environment” for exploitation or pure preservation without any use. After all, it is not techne, which is part of human culture and cultivation of the land, but the glorification of techne, that leads to the abuses that agrarians and neo-traditional conservatives find so troubling.

One of the most annoying things about Battlestar Galactica is its tendency to insist on choosing between a primitivist society or a technological civilization doomed to destroy itself. The mythology of the series takes for granted that the latter will always happen, sooner or later, and in the final scene of the last episode the writers engaged in an unusually blunt, embarrassingly heavy-handed effort to drive home that we are just a hop, skip and a jump removed from the Cylon rebellion ourselves. In the least credible plot device of the entire series, we are supposed to believe that the incredibly fractious, disunited Colonial population will submit meekly and unquestioningly to some flight of fancy by Lee Adama to return to the land, despite his heretofore insufferably pious attachment to high-minded democratic principles and procedure. If only to insist on the importance of self-government, I have to protest at the idea that the conclusion of BSG has anything to do with a genuinely agrarian, decentralist or neo-traditionalist view of things. It has more in common with revolutionary dictates forcing intellectuals to go out into the fields and villages than it does with a real respect for the way of life that the cultivators and villagers have. In the end, the return to the land is treated as a therapy for alienated space-exiles, who have no knowledge of cultivation of crops or the raising of livestock, except, of course, for Gaius Baltar.

Following up on the previous post, I wanted to say a few things about how the debate over drug policy offers a good example of how our political debates tend to function regardless of the policy in question. The lopsided nature of these debates is most pronounced when it comes to one of the various “wars” the government has declared against abstractions and nouns, but it is not limited to these. If the government declares a “war” on drugs, or poverty, or terrorism, skepticism about or outright opposition to the actual policies employed by the government in the “prosecution” of said “war” is treated as implicit support for the target of the “war.” This is the one part of all of these “wars” that can be deemed successful, namely its propaganda, which frames criticism of “war” policies, no matter how counterproductive, failed, illegal or even immoral, as something akin to collaboration with “the enemy” in the “war.” Likewise, to have doubts or raise red flags about invading Iraq was to be an apologist for despotism at best and pro-Saddam at worst. We see this pattern replicated again and again in debates over the war in Georgia last year or Gaza this year.

This framing works very well for defenders of the policy being criticized, as it forces the critics to operate at a double disadvantage. They are first of all reacting to bad policy, which makes their arguments necessarily negative and more easily dismissed for that reason as mere “naysaying,” and second the critics must qualify the beginning of all their arguments with some emphasis on how much they, too, loathe the official enemy in said “war.” This means the critics are reduced to pragmatic and frequently much more complicated critiques that lack the rhetorical and emotional power of the simplistic, ideological line that the government is pushing, and they are reduced to arguments from circumstance, which tend not to pack the same punch as arguments from definition even when the latter are founded on falsehoods or, more often, on far more destructive half-truths.

Freddie’s frustration with Obama’s dismissive response to the large number of online questions about marijuana legalization is understandable, but it seems to me that legalization arguments will never gain much traction if advocates for it are constantly having to mention how they are not like the drug’s stereotypical users or regard the drug’s use as some grievous personal failing. Instead of coming across as a stronger argument, the standard “I’m in favor of legalization, and I’m the farthest thing in the world from a pot smoker!” argument ends up making the argument for legalization less compelling. This is because this kind of argument unintentionally reproduces the stigma against the drug and effectively endorses one of the key claims that supporters of criminalization make. While it is true that there are a great many practical and principled reasons why Americans of all stripes should oppose continued criminalization, for legalization to take hold as something more than a marginal issue that has the sympathies of more than relatively marginal political forces there would need to be a much larger constituency that regards criminalization as an intolerable imposition on one of their preferences.

Opponents of Prohibition in the ’20s and early ’30s were not called “wets” simply to dismiss or mock them, but to describe accurately that they wanted to be able to drink alcohol legally. A significant cultural obstacle that marijuana legalization faces is that even many leading advocates of legalization will decry the drug as unusually unhealthy and there are relatively few people who would use the drug once legalized who do not already use it. The irony of legalization is that it would probably lead to such a small increase in use of the drug that there is no large, untapped base of support to make support for continued criminalization a political liability. Criminalization is unusually irrational in this case, but there are not enough people directly inconvenienced or hassled by the criminalization of the drug to make politicians pay any price for supporting the status quo. On the other side, there is a fairly large number of people who remain committed to defending that status quo and penalizing politicians who entertain supporting legalization.

This is the familiar arc of a poorly conceived war. At first, it looks like necessary defense. The public rallies around in the adrenaline rush of solving an intolerable problem by force. The critics are few, or foreign, and easily dismissed. As time passes, it becomes more difficult to name what has been gained amid the horror. The moral price reveals itself. Criticism becomes mainstream and respectable and is entirely too late. ~Gershom Gorenberg

Gorenberg is referring to the Gaza conflict, but he could just as easily have been writing about the 2006 war in Lebanon or the Iraq war or the Georgian escalation in South Ossetia. What is striking about all of these episodes is how the experience of any or all of them seems to have no effect whatever on how most political and foreign policy elites respond to the next crisis or judge the next conflict. When the next crisis occurs, we hear the same justifications and arguments for the use of force, the pious intonations about the right to self-defense and the importance of national sovereignty (mind you, it is always our sovereignty and rights and those of our allies that count, and not those of the states or populations under assault) and the inevitable blaming of the victims of the campaign and whitewashing the excesses of the aggressor.

At the same time, there is always a great deal of commentary about how much has supposedly been learned from past mistakes without any acknowledgment that it was the decision to launch a major military campaign in the first place that was the key error. Because the elites have claimed that they learned their lesson, the different publics seem willing to put their trust in many of the same political and foreign policy elites who failed them in the past. However, time and again the elites do not address the fundamental flaws in their assumptions about policy or the decisions leading up to the crisis, and they are concerned mainly with managing the next crisis less clumsily and more “competently.” The mistaken consensus that preceded a disastrous or counterproductive campaign shields the elites and keeps them from being completely discredited, as they can always hide behind the vast majority of the government and population that wrongly sided with their poor decisions.

Those politicians who acknowledge their error and make some attempt to rectify it are mocked as opportunists or worse, while the ones that brazenly refuse to admit their failure somehow retain a reputation for conviction and steadfastness, as if great devotion to an utterly wrong-headed view of the world were exculpatory or admirable. This makes the political calculus the next time around very simple. Any national politician with ambitions of higher office will go along with the consensus and back whatever military campaign comes along, and even if he becomes a critic of how the campaign has been managed he will always frame his criticism as an expression of his desire to manage the campaign more effectively. For that matter, even in the rare event that an antiwar candidate rises to the highest level, he will have done so by making clear that his opposition to that particular war is the exception to his otherwise more or less reflexive support for the use of force in all other cases, and he will highlight his opposition to that particular war only when it has become overwhelmingly unpopular. In this way the political class keeps producing timid, consensus-following members who have no incentives to reject military campaigns outright from the beginning, which is why the leadership of all major parties is predictably and routinely in favor of almost all of these campaigns almost regardless of the circumstances.

Patrick Deneen on the dangers of monoculture.

Mark Mitchell on Joel Salatin.

Jason Peters on the Exxon Valdez.

Allan Carlson on Wilhelm Roepke.

Niall Ferguson makes an important observation that the Anglophone right, as he calls it, has been oblivious to the impossibility of pursuing three distinct goals. As Ferguson writes:

Suppose that a government can have any two of the following things, but not all three: globalisation, in the sense of openness to international flows of goods, services, capital and labour; social stability; and a small state. Or, to put it differently, conservatives can pick any two from an open economy, a stable society and political power – but not all three.

This seems true to me, which is why it puzzles me that pretty much everyone on the Anglophone right (with a few exceptions) has concluded that the things that need to be dropped are either “social stability” or “the small state” or both. If there is one fundamental area of agreement among almost all Republicans and Tories, it is that policies that support globalization must not be touched. There are quite a few people who agree that the right has to adapt to new circumstances, but very few of them are interested in altering support for policies that facilitate globalization. Bizarrely, just as the worsening of the Iraq war made the war the one unquestionable policy on the American right, the global recession has made globalization even more sacrosanct than it was. As with Iraq, the Anglophone and particularly the American right seems to enjoy embracing even more tightly something that the rest of the world and most Americans are souring on.

Dropping social stability together with a tweak of the “small state” model is what Ferguson recommends: embrace social change and support a “smart” state that will be interventionist in targeted ways. What hardly anyone on the right is interested in challenging or critiquing, much less rejecting, is globalization. As I have been sayingseveral times this week, the things that conservatives claim to want to preserve are incompatible with globalization, just as George Grant observed decades ago that they were incompatible with the right’s embrace of technological progress (and empire). It seems to me that this vindicates one of the central insights of the “crunchy” and neo-traditionalist critique of the mainstream right, which is that when push comes to shove mainstream conservatives prize the fruits of “creative destruction” over all else. This seemed true several years ago, and the last three years have tended to confirm the claim.

MEP Daniel Hannan’s tongue-lashing of Gordon Brown has received a fair amount of attention, and certainly few deserve ridicule and scorn more than Brown, but Hannan is representative of the sort of thing I’m talking about. What was the first thing Hannan criticized? He attacked Brown’s hypocrisy for praising free trade while also having used the phrase “British jobs for British workers,” which is fair enough in that the two are contradictory, but it is telling that Hannan’s problem wasn’t simply the contradiction but that the problem with Brown’s position was that it was insufficiently globalist. Unlike Janet Daley, who has since come around to seeing the virtue of the idea of “British jobs for British workers” but still tut-tuts at protectionist measures, Hannan is a thoroughgoing globalist (and, I might add, a bit of a loon who says things like, “Israel is more than a country; it is an archetype”) and a perfect example of the sort of Conservative who would sooner defend globalization and abandon everything else if it were necessary.