Richard Spencer makes a fair point that the 19th century saw an impressive degree of global economic integration at the same time that modern nation-states were gaining strength. By the end of the “long 19th century” in 1914, the world was as interconnected economically as it would be until the post-Cold War drive for integration that we have experienced for the past twenty years. The “long 19th century” was indeed the age of nationalism, and so it was also the dawn of the age of mass politics and mass mobilization for warfare, and the results of this age discredited fanciful notions that economic interdependence promotes everlasting peace and brotherhood. Specifically in its nationalist character, that age was the forerunner and preparation of many of the nightmares of the last century, and it was the cauldron out of which the original ideas behind most of the other nightmares emerged.

To the extent that the ruin of remaining traditional European civilization in WWI can be laid at the door of mass politics, nationalism and mass mobilization for warfare, these elements of 19th century history offer warnings of the damage that can be done to social and political order as a result of breaking down barriers and loyalties as part of a political and economic project to consolidate power and organize resources inside larger nation-states at the expense of their various regions. Once nationalism was triumphant and nearly universal in Europe, it encountered some limited resistance from holdouts of traditional societies, which it mostly co-opted or marginalized, but then mostly faced the strongest competition from different varieties of international socialism. Nationalism eventually ate away at the latter from within because of its greater mobilizing power. After the second war, modified forms of liberal economic regimes had grown up in the midst of the social democratic West with an increasing emphasis on neoliberal trade abroad and a continuation of state capitalism at home. Finally, the social democratic West outlasted its communist rivals.

Inside the social democratic West, with some exception here in the U.S., nationalism was giving way to larger projects of political consolidation and economic “openness.” Within the U.S., nationalism was harnessed to what Bacevich has called “the strategy of openness” to make an American-led globalism palatable to people in the one Western country where there was still widespread resistance to transnational organizations and rules. For most Western nationalists, globalization is of questionable benefit both culturally and economically, but in the American context most globalists embrace American exceptionalism/Americanism to provide the popular rhetoric for their agenda and most American nationalists end up either supporting or acquiescing in globalist policies because they believe them to be necessary to preserve U.S. hegemony, which they, as nationalists, are unwilling to abandon, just as they are largely unwilling to reject the foreign wars fought theoretically to shore up or expand that hegemony. It should be the case that nationalism in the U.S. produces steady resistance to globalism, but in a way similar to the British experience in the late 19th and early 20th centuries our nationalists’ energy has largely been channeled into support for aggressive or ‘forward’ foreign policy, and so it is not really an accident that the most nationalist party in the U.S. also happens to be most in favor of globalist trade policies.

Actual Bastiat-style economic liberalism perished in the West as a matter of government policy in the latter half of the 19th century and never really returned, which has not stopped globalists from dredging up classical liberal texts, including those of Bastiat, to browbeat people on the political right into accepting their policies. More than a few libertarians and “economic conservatives” today recite the lessons from these texts whenever someone challenges some aspect of the state capitalist system, usually pertaining to trade or immigration, and they vehemently insist that in doing this they are protecting economic liberty against encroaching statism or something of the sort.

Speaking of state capitalism and related matters, I have a new article in this month’s Chronicles discussing Lincoln and modern Lincolnism. Be sure to check out the entire issue in print, and look in at Chronicles‘ website for online versions of some of the articles.

As I was saying earlier, refusal to provide humanitarian aid to Gazans will not only embitter the population against those withholding aid they could send but will present Hamas with the opportunity to maintain and improve on its position as the provider of services and supplies. Haaretz reports that Hamas is doing just that very aggressively. In fact, Hamas has been so aggressive that it is attacking U.N. warehouses to seize the goods inside so that they can be seen as the ones distributing them, which is very much like biting the hand that feeds them, but Hamas has every incentive to take advantage of the siege conditions in this way.

Meanwhile, the debate outside Gaza seems to be mostly about the different methods to be used in punishing the Gazan population to “educate” them, as Friedman might say, in the folly of supporting Hamas. It is not just that the Gazans are going to learn a very different lesson from their misery than the one Friedman, Inbar, et al. expect them to learn, but that when it comes to competing for the loyalties of the population Hamas is currently the only serious competitor in a position to act. Isolation, sieges and coercion do not undermine Hamas, as should be obvious by now. Naturally, then, Israelis are poised to vote into power a coalition made up of parties that do not understand this at all and either believe that current policy is succeeding or that it has failed because it has not been “tough” enough.

It isn’t always reliable, but the rule I follow is that if an administration has done something to bother David Broder it has probably done something right or at least something smart. Regarding the Daschle mess, Broder writes:

Even when the White House belatedly learned of Daschle’s tax troubles, it misjudged the political fallout. Despite the glaring contradiction between Obama’s proclaimed ethical standards and Daschle’s lucrative expense-account life that led to his tax underpayment, Obama said he “absolutely” stood by his choice. One day later, he accepted Daschle’s withdrawal. This is a blow to Obama’s credibility that will not be easily forgotten.

Of all the things to criticize about Obama’s mistakes in the first few weeks, this seems the strangest one to hold up as damaging. Arguably, appointing Daschle or failing to investigate Daschle’s tax problems and insurance industry connections was the major blunder; quickly climbing down from support for the nominee was not. At what point did Obama’s habit of dropping inconvenient political allies and associates start to be seen as damaging to his credibility by establishment pundits. No matter how close to Obama they have been, friends and allies are thrown overboard with the greatest of ease after having issued ringing declarations of fidelity and everlasting bonds of trust. Remember “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community” or “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother”? The disowning followed a little later. Granted, it wasn’t the next day, but it is the same idea. After the Philadelphia speech where he made those remarks, in which he defended his membership at Trinity, it took all of a couple months for him to cut his ties with the church, too, after it had become just a little too embarrassing. Power says something offensive about his opponent? She is banished for the remainder of the campaign, and has returned to his camp only much later.

Now that Daschle, one of his patrons and long-time supporters, had become a millstone around his neck, he casts him away, and in this case the decision to drop him was obviously the right and smart move under the circumstances. This is how the man operates: when what is useful to his advancement at one point becomes a burden, he abandons it after a display of support to make it seem as if the abandonment is reluctant. It seems to be very politically effective, as Obama’s continued rise demonstrates. His fans will read this as a very hostile criticism, but it seems to me that it is just a description. After the last administration, when corrupt or incompetent officials had to be pried out of their positions with tremendous public pressure and criticism, and then only after some catastrophic failure on their watch, it is a welcome change to have a President who will throw his people to the wolves almost immediately.

The people who should be most upset by the Cabinet troubles are probably progressives, especially those interested in seeing some major health care legislation in the 111th Congress. Daschle was one of the few Cabinet selections whom progressives found unobjectionable, and some were even enthused by the choice, so it may be a sign of the administration’s priorities that he was made into the sacrificial offering while Geithner, whose competence and judgement in his last post are questionable at best, was kept on. Faced with comparable scandals, the relative centrist with Goldman Sachs ties stays on and the relative progressive health care advocate is dropped. Guardians of the status quo ought to be well pleased, which makes Broder’s complaints all the more strange.

Most would grant that Newsweek has been very favorable to Obama over the last year, so it is remarkable to find Michael Hirsh declaring that Obama has lost control and already has to mount a “comeback.” This is a measure of how badly things have gone for the administration in the last week. There is certainly something different about a President who can admit publicly and without much coaxing that he made mistakes, but it doesn’t inspire confidence that while just in its third week the administration has already managed to bungle the handling of multiple major Cabinet choices and finds itself criticized by friendly pundits for a lack of leadership. The comedy of the Commerce appointment continues after the embarrassment of Richardson’s withdrawal, which was only made necessary because of the need to placate interest groups who wanted to see Richardson in a significant Cabinet post and were disappointed that Clinton received the spot at State that they expected him to fill. The strange chain reaction can be traced back to the decision not to select Clinton as VP and the supposedly “clever” move to neutralize Clinton by bringing her into the Cabinet. That “clever” move, besides freezing out many Obama loyalists from top slots at the State Department and elevating to the top foreign policy post in the government a rival whose foreign policy judgement he regularly derided as poor, continues to have negative effects on the administration weeks later.

Quite a fewpeople are talking about Robert Kagan’s apparent inability to understand the difference between an actual cut in defense spending and the refusal to endorse the Pentagon’s entire budget request for the coming fiscal year. Some seem not to notice that Kagan is arguing against an administration position that does not exist. Defense spending, not including appropriations for the wars, is scheduled to go up 8% 2.7% (per CQ’s correction for last year’s budget) for the coming year. This is consistent with Obama’s campaign pledge to increase the Pentagon budget, which was frequently ignored or treated as an empty promise on the right during the campaign. Bizarrely, Kagan was one of the hawks who acknowledged Obama’s interventionist foreign policy views and support for increasing the size of the military, and he even attempts to portray Obama’s defense spending increase as being at odds with his earlier pledges. This last bit is the strangest things of all, because drawing attention to Obama’s campaign statements makes it all the more clear that Kagan is just making things up to repeat all of the standard “we must not lose our resolve” chatter that these types enjoy so much.

I don’t get it. Certainly it would not be difficult for someone who thinks we should be willing to mount an invasion of Pakistan to come up with a similar argument stressing the need for even more vast increases in military spending. That might require Kagan to start talking numbers, and he would be forced to say, “Only $527 billion? That’s chump change–we need at least $1 trillion!” As we all know by now, one trillion is now the bare minimum for any amount of government obligation to be counted as real money. For that matter, Kagan could play the “irresponsible pundit” role he assigns to nameless others and warn breathlessly that unless the U.S. vastly expanded its military and international role that our “decline” would be inevitable. Railing against non-existent budget cuts to mask advocacy for even larger increases is a desperate tactic, and it tells me that interventionists on the right are getting annoyed that they have been unable to paint Obama as “weak” on national security.

Daniel Kennelly makes some interesting observations about the Peters column I criticized below. I should say a few words on why the column irritated me so much. As Kennelly notes, it was hardly the sort of column that someone already inclined to cheer on foreign wars, wink at “enhanced interrogation techniques” and dismiss civilian losses should write, unless he wants to appear, as Jim Antle says, as a sort of parody of a neoconservative written by his opponents. But that is exactly the problem. Peters’ columns often seem as if they could only be parodies of interventionism, or interventionist exercises in self-parody, because the views expressed in them seem so unmoored from reality, but more often than not interventionists are deadly serious when they make these claims. By the end of Peters’ column, he has to resort to a fairly lame qualification to keep from saying what he has been saying the entire time, which comes across like this: “I’m not saying Pashtuns are non-human, I’m just saying it sure seems that they are….”

If liberal internationalist views can be reduced to a simplified “all people want the same things” that ulimately leads to a squishy One Worldism, neoconservatives will modify this universalist idea with Peters’ sci-fi-inspired take. Both liberal internationalists and neoconservatives are globalists, especially in that they believe there need to be mechanisms for global governance, but neoconservatives (and liberal hawks who tend to agree with them on policy) seem to thrive on retaining the idea of a frontier or a periphery that still needs to be actively guarded. (Insert obvious open borders joke here.) As universalists, however, neoconservative interventionists are usually inclined to say, against mountains of evidence to the contrary, “All people want to be free,” which makes the ensuing “liberations” seem more legitimate because they are merely giving the people what they want. Peters might be less inclined, especially after this latest column, to say that all people want to be free, but the only way he seems to be able to make this point rhetorically is to turn the people who don’t want this into aliens and the places they inhabit into other planets. One World globalism and the idea that all people want the same thing survive by denying anyone who wants something else the status of human. Yes, what Peters is doing is rhetorical and arguably Peters does not “mean” it when he says that our enemies are not human, just as his confreres never “mean” it when they imply that dissenters against certain foreign policy decisions are traitors to their country and Iraq war supporters never “meant” it when they claimed that opponents sympathized with the enemy and wanted American forces to lose. Perhaps these, too, were merely mental exercises designed to shake things up.

For that matter, Peters’ qualification is not really good enough. Peters says that this does not mean that Pashtuns in the Taliban are “inferior,” but he insists that it means that they are “irreconcilably different beings.” To say that another group of people, no matter how different they are in custom and religion, is irreconcilably different is to say that we must be at war with them forever, or at least until one group is wiped out, because there can be no reconciliation, no peace. It is a more polite way of saying, “It’s them or us.” Sane people, on the other hand, know that it is not a question of it being a matter of “them or us.”

Indeed, Gen. Petraeus, who presumably knows something about these matters, thinks it is possible to negotiate and reconcile with at least some of the supposedly irreconcilably different people, which suggests that Peters may have learned the wrong lessons from his experiences. Of course, it is possible that there are people who prove to be unwilling to reconcile with their enemy as a matter of their upbringing and conditioning. What Peters does not even attempt to do is to consider whether the upbringing and conditioning of members of the Taliban allow for the possibility that they are not simply “irreconcilably different.” To the extent that the Pashtuns involved follow Pushtunwali more than they follow strict Wahhabist or Deobandist codes, their code of conduct not only permits but facilitates reconciliation after conflict. Indeed, one of the reasons why Pushtunwali endures and is reproduced over the centuries is that it serves a vital function in regulating vendetta and war. Peters’ gravest error is to conflate for rhetorical purposes significant cultural difference with a difference in nature, which at once minimizes the cultural basis for our radical differences in “values” and also exaggerates the degree of separation between us and the Pashtuns. It is a complete failure to understand the enemy, because the attempt to understand them is not even being made, which would be prelude to the failure of policy if anyone in government were foolish enough to take heed of Peters’ argument.

P.S. It is also worth contrasting Charles Krauthammer’s ridiculous “tribe or religion or whatever” argument with Peters’ alien thesis. Neither is correct, but if they meant what they wrote Krauthammer and Peters would have to regard the other’s argument as nonsense.

The reported plan to appoint Christopher Hill as ambassador to Iraq seemed strange given his lack of background in the region, but now this story makes it seem even stranger. Apparently, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni (Ret.), former Centcom commander, war opponent and briefly one of Clinton’s regional envoys (and an Arab-American), believed that he had the job as recently as a week ago after being told as much by Secretary Clinton. Ackerman finds the story credible, which makes me wonder what they are thinking at the White House to make Zinni believe he had the job and then give the impression that it was going to someone else.

I have my doubts about the Holbrooke apppointment for Afghanistan/Pakistan, and these are not allayed by the fact that Holbrooke has no particular familiarity with his designated region. This is the same problem with Hill. Actually, like Holbrooke, Hill is most familiar with East Asia and the Balkans from his previous assignments, and like Holbrooke Hill is reportedly being assigned to one of our more critical diplomatic posts without extensive background in the place where he will be serving. Hill has a reputation as a successful diplomat, having handled North Korea negotiations for the last administration, but the choice seems odd if Zinni was the first choice.

One of the common and correct complaints about the last administration was its willful ignorance of local conditions and culture before plunging into Iraq*, and it became something of a journalistic pastime to show how little our political class in both parties knew about the details of Iraqi history and society with Mr. Bush serving as an outstanding example. We can hope that this administration is not going to fall into the same habits. The good news about Afghanistan/Pakistan is that Holbrooke has selected Vali Nasr as his chief advisor, so perhaps Hill will also choose appropriate assistants once he is confirmed who will help make up for his lack of experience in the region.

* This is not to say that a better-informed administration would have been right to launch an unnecessary, aggressive war.

Update: Laura Rozen has more on the bungled ambassador appointment.

Ralph Peters somehow always manages to outdo himself. Not satisfied with being staggeringly wrong throughout the presidential campaign on Obama’s foreign policy, among other things, Peters now aspires to fit every last stereotype of militaristic imperialists, according to whom our rebel subjects are not merely misguided, backward or even simply evil, but are actually not really human:

A fundamental reason why our intelligence agencies, military leaders and (above all) Washington pols can’t understand Afghanistan is that they don’t recognize that we’re dealing with alien life-forms.

Oh, the strange-minded aliens in question resemble us physically. We share a few common needs: We and the aliens are oxygen breathers who require food and water at frequent intervals. Our body casings feel heat or cold. We’re divided into two sexes (more or less). And we’re mortal.

But that’s about where the similarities end, analytically speaking.

Yes, if there’s one thing the last eight years have shown it is that Washington politicians are prone to too many fits of respecting our enemies’ humanity! So many times we have had to plead with them: please treat Arabs and Afghans like alien beings! But would they listen to us? No! Their dedication to human dignity knew no bounds. Their tender concern for the “body casings” of enemy combatants was so great that you could easily confuse the subjects for human beings if you weren’t careful. Fortunately Peters is here to remind us that we are not really dehumanizing our enemies with propaganda and unjust treatment, since they are not really human in the first place. Where would we be without Peters’ keen insights?

It would be easy to dismiss Peters as deranged or simply hateful, but that does not give him enough credit. Every ideologue is tempted to follow the route Peters is going, and every person is tempted at times by the appeal of one ideology or another, and invariably the result is the same. Ideology teaches that those who do not fit into a universal scheme, whatever it claims about human nature and society, cannot really be human or at least they are not deserving of the treatment accorded to fully rational human beings. If another people has radically different cultural values that order things in an entirely different way, it is ultimately not enough to acknowledge that the values of different cultures clash, sometimes violently, or even that one culture may be deeply wrong about many things. It is apparently necessary to insist that the people who practice that culture are not the same species and do not share our nature, which implies that we do not have to afford them the same protections and respect that we extend to our fellow man.

At the end, of course, Peters must retreat and claim that he just wants this to be an “exercise” that is “meant to break our mental gridlock, to challenge our crippling assumption that we’re all merry brothers and sisters who just have to work through a few small understandings.” Yes, we are so badly crippled–obviously we have been suffering from an excess of empathy and recognition of shared humanity. If the pious internationalist claim that “all people just want the same thing” is misleading, Peters’ position is far, far worse in that he seems unable to imagine that other people could hold views that are radically alien to his own without falling into the habit of describing them as members of another species.

There has been a good deal of discussion about Michael Steele’s election as RNC Chairman. Even though this is a job he actively sought, I have to say I feel sorry for the man. Supposing for a moment that he proved to be as effective in his role as Howard Dean has been at the DNC, Steele is faced with an electorate so much more hostile to his party that his task is the thankless one of a coach who labors in obscurity rebuilding an absolutely decimated and humiliated franchise. Jim Schwartz, the unfortunate new head coach of the Detroit Lions, comes to mind as an example of what I mean. It is not going to be Schwartz’s fault that the Lions will continue to be terrible for the next several years; the flaws of the organization and the legacy of years of poor management would drag down the most successful and talented of coaches. Schwartz is by all accounts an excellent defensive coordinator, and the Titans’ defense has been outstanding during his tenure, but he is not a magician. Steele reportedly has been successful as a political operator, albeit not as a candidate, which is how he has maneuvered himself into the current position, so one imagines that he has some instincts for political tactics that may prove valuable. Regardless, his talent is not going to be all that important. The flaws of the party and the legacy of the last eight years will drag Steele down despite his best efforts, at which time everyone will hold forth on what it means that Steele, who we will continually be reminded is the GOP’s first black chairman, “failed” to work miracles. Like Schwartz, he is inheriting a team that has little talent. Unlike Schwartz, he isn’t going to get the opportunity to recruit the best new talent, because these are the people (i.e., degree-holding and young voters) who are fleeing from the GOP the fastest. Among these groups of voters, it is more and more as if the GOP held a draft and no one bothered to enter.

Curious to see what Steele had to say, I watched the interview he gave on FoxNews, and I can’t say I was all that impressed. To what did he attribute the GOP’s political decline over the last two cycles? Naturally, it was spending. That was it. Spending. It’s not just that he didn’t address the GOP’s failures in foreign policy and its errors in anti-terrorism, which I would have been interested to hear, but that this was the only reason he gave, which suggests that he thinks the main solution to GOP woes is to come out against spending (unless, of course, it relates to “defense”).

Steele refers to Republicans’ “value for a sound economy,” and this did not seem to be a joke. He said quite seriously that the election results had nothing to do with “our value for a sound economy.” I don’t know quite how to take that claim. One wonders where this “value” was over the last few years–no doubt being inflated by loose monetary policy along with the housing market. Then, when asked for a new idea, Steele invoked school choice! I can’t really blame Steele. He has become the national chairman of a party whose Congressional leadership has believed for years that the only thing it ever did wrong was to vote for too much spending, and he has become the public face of the GOP at a time when it has zero fresh ideas, which is why he had to keep returning to lines referring back to debates from the ’90s that could have been delivered in the ’90s without changing a syllable. The problem is not so much that Steele’s answers lack imagination, but that if he had shown an inkling of imagination much of his party probably would turn on him.