Janet Daley makes many good points here, but I find it curious that she thinks there is some meaningful difference between the stimulus bill’s “Buy American” provision and Mr. Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” notion that striking laborers there are now insisting be taken seriously. Our friends to the north are a bit put out by the “Buy American” provision, as the U.S. normally imports large amounts of construction materials from Canada, and you can see that Daley is also annoyed at the provision when it seems to adversely affect Britain, but without blinking she wants to insist that free trade does not entail the free movement of labor. This is a pleasant fiction that some generally pro-corporate conservatives like to tell people: I’m not a protectionist (I hate protectionists!), and I believe in market forces, except when they apply to the cost of labor. For years whenever “creative destruction” shuttered some small-town factory and led to greater efficiencies and cheaper goods for the consumer, the Janet Daleys here and elsewhere shrugged and declared that this was just the way things have to be. Now even some globalists are beginning to get agitated by the idea of undermining domestic labor. It might have social and political effects! Really, who would have guessed?

Daley thinks government should defend the interests of the people who voted it into power, except when those interests involve the import and export of goods and the competitiveness of domestic businesses. The interests of those citizens can be ignored, perhaps because they do not have the dramatic and headline-worthy option of launching wildcat strikes. According to Daley, the Americans should adhere to free trade ideology, regardless of the effects it has on American workers, but there ought to be some controls to protect the British worker. In other words, common sense tells her that the British government ought to be serving the interests of British citizens and ought to be able to limit or control the influx of foreign labor, but free trade ideology–something that is at the heart of the European project–keeps forcing her to pull back from her claim that the government has obligations to protect its citizens against cheaper competition more generally. That is horrid protectionism, economic “isolationism,” you see, and she will have nothing to do with that.

At the same time, she is outraged, simply outraged, that all those E.U. treaties compel her government to follow rules permitting the free movement of labor. She really cannot have it both ways. Globalists like Daley have spent the last two decades opposing and berating critics of free trade and mass immigration, only to find out now in a moment of global economic contraction (probably the worst time to make this discovery) that the critics may have been onto something. Even then she is not really willing to follow her position through to its logical conclusions, because one thing remains crucial: to keep the line dividing people like her from the “real” protectionists and nationalists as bright and clear as possible.

Daley is quite correct when she says:

It is not purblind nationalism, let alone racism, to resent the importation of cheap labour en masse when its conditions of employment (transport and accommodation provided, as seems to be the case at Lindsey) allow it to compete unfairly with indigenous workers. The drafting in of low-wage work gangs has always been seen as unjust: exploitative of the foreign workers, and destructive of the social cohesion of existing communities which, incidentally, is something about which the Tories say they are much exercised.

But then Daley wants to make another distinction between the sort of importation of cheap labor taking place with this oil rig operation and the general importation of cheap labor that is mass immigration. When it is prearranged by an employer, that is a dirty, rotten trick that harms all of the workers, but when it is not prearranged it is just a case, I suppose, of people doing the jobs Britons won’t do. Daley believes free trade in goods is essential to economic recovery and the relief of poverty elsewhere in the world, so how exactly does she square that with opposing the free movement of labor? Once you get past all of the caveats, that is what she is saying: the government should be able to restrict the importation of labor to protect native laborers. In the end, national sovereignty and citizenship should still count for something in the economic sphere. She has picked an awfully awkward moment to realize the obvious.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with this position, and there are good reasons to take this position, but just watch how desperate she is to avoid granting any legitimacy to other anti-globalist arguments. On top of all that, recent events have her so agitated that she even manages to confuse FDR for some kind of tariff-hiking maniac, when he continued to represent the traditional Democratic position of opposition to protective tariffs that were strongly supported by the other party. Whatever else I might say about FDR, it is simply not correct to describe him as a pro-tariff man.

It is a bit frustrating that the moment at which creating protections for domestic industry and labor is most likely to be popular is also the moment when imposing those protections makes the least economic sense. Having pursued utterly imbalanced trade and immigration policies that harmed domestic industry and lowered wages during the expansion (ultimately worsening many Americans’ ability to cope with the eventual contraction), Western industrial states are faced by increasingly angry electorates that are facing prolonged recession after having been urged on to spend themselves into oblivion. The prosperity of globalization was financed by the total irresponsibility and lack of discipline that was positively encouraged and cultivated by policies of globalists: keep goods and labor cheap, flood the system with money, keep inflating various bubbles and tell people that they can have it all without any consequences. The real perversity of globalist policies is that they have so sapped national economies of their ability to be anything remotely like self-sufficient that any attempt to break out of patterns of dependence would be extremely painful. Instead of suffering the short-term discomfort of some higher prices that would have resulted from correcting flawed trade and immigration policies when times were better, our governments avoided making the necessary corrections and deferred responsibility. Today we are seeing something similar in other areas: instead of enduring the consequences of the bubble’s collapse, our governments are desperately putting off the day of reckoning and delaying eventual recovery by burying us and our descendants under even more debt. We missed the chance during the last three decades to bring sanity to our trade and immigration policies, and we are now going to see what the full cost of those policies really is. Let’s hope that we are now able to stop from being quite so foolish and short-sighted in fiscal and financial matters.

I expect I will have more to say about this in another venue, but I will just note that Soner Cagaptay is once again on his mission to stir up distrust of Turkey with another op-ed. No doubt one can find illiberal AKP measures, and I am far from being a defender of the AKP, but under the old, supposedly more “liberal” regimes in Turkey’s past free speech was as curtailed as it is now, Islamist governments were banned, the Kurds were kept down and at the margins and the current Prime Minister was imprisoned while mayor of Istanbul for reciting a poem. It was a militant poem full of Islamist rhetoric and authored by the chief ideologue of of the Young Turks, but it was nonetheless just a poem. To the best of my knowledge, no politician of similar stature has been imprisoned for such an “offense” under Erdogan’s tenure. Turkey and the AKP have their flaws, which I will be happy to spell out, but this mythology that the AKP is turning away from some prior liberal order is utter nonsense, and it is very much like the people who lament Russia’s “turn” from the West and democracy after the ’90s. What these critics seem not to grasp is that these states are going to act in their own interests, which may sometimes be at odds with ours, and the products of their elections are not necessarily going to be in alignment with Western designs when policies undertaken by Western governments prove to be deeply unpopular with the population in these countries. Indeed, the “problem” with Turkey, as with Russia, is that its government does rather too good of a job of representing its people’s sentiments and fails to ignore public discontent as effectively as Washington does.

It is simply daft to facilitate the continuation of Hamas rule. ~Efraim Inbar

It certainly is if your stated objective is to bring about the end of Hamas rule, and it is even more so when you believe that you will bring about the end of Hamas rule by doing exactly those things that are guaranteed to keep it in power, such as laying waste to the enclave’s agricultural infrastructure and creating conditions that will either create a humanitarian disaster or lead to even deeper dependence on foreign aid. If the infrastructure is not repaired and Gazans do not receive food to make up for the shortfalls caused by the damage to their agricultural infrastructure, do you suppose that they will become embittered against Hamas for bringing this upon them (which, as we know, is itself a somewhat oversimplified explanation of how things have reached this point)? Or will they instead reasonably hold responsible those who refuse to send aid after their existing means of providing for themselves were badly damaged or destroyed by the governments of the very people who now concoct reasons to deny them aid? Haven’t Gazans already learned that Hamas rule carries dire consequences? Has it brought Hamas crashing down, or had the opposite effect? Besides the siege and the damage from the recent strikes, Hamas’ political killings have also made clear what Hamas rule offers. Who believes that making life in Gaza more miserable and making its people even less self-sufficient will make Gazans less inclined to support Hamas?

Of course, the former policies of siege and attack distract anger against Hamas, while Hamas’ willingness to eliminate vocal opponents ensures that mounting resistance against Hamas is very difficult and dangerous, and at the same time the siege makes opposition to Hamas seem like the act of a collaborator and makes material conditions more difficult in such a way that perversely makes the population more dependent on whatever social services Hamas can provide. Obviously, if you want to encourage people to rise up against thuggish rulers, the key is to eliminate their ability to raise an independent food supply, and you absolutely want them suffering from malnutrition and disease. This is clearly how you create the most effective insurgent political force. Professional strategists have told us so.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Inbar’s assessment of the blame is entirely correct–what then? In the end, more people will come away remembering that Hamas was attempting to provide them help–for self-serving reasons, of course–than will think through an elaborate chain of causality to determine that Hamas is actually to blame. At the same time, the pressure not to break ranks when under siege and attack is very strong, and it is even stronger in societies steeped in nationalist ideology, so even if Hamas did not kill its enemies there would be strong self-censoring and conformism in Gaza to avoid being seen as unduly sympathetic to the Israeli side. Even if Inbar is right about who deserves the blame, it does not follow that this group will receive the blame, nor does it follow that it is the proponents of aid who are most engaged in serious strategic folly.

The recent fighting in Gaza has provided the opportunity for critics of developmentalism and foreign aid to note that Palestinians in Gaza are heavily dependent on foreign aid and that this is ultimately not good for Palestinians in Gaza. As a critic of the ideology of development and a skeptic of the effectiveness of foreign aid, I think these critics are right on one part of the question and they are horribly wrong on another part when they make arguments like those Inbar puts forward. Inbar’s basic mistake is to assume that inflicting collective punishment on Gazans will make them more likely to turn against Hamas, when we have seen time and time again that this is not how populations under siege and attack behave. Inbar’s argument is not merely one that says that cultivating economic dependence on international donors is self-defeating for helping the Palestinians’ well-being, but that their well-being should be deliberately kept poor to continue the failed political experiment of the siege of the last two years. It seems to me that this particularly grim experiment has been run and the results are conclusive: starving and battering people does not elicit their cooperation, but causes them to grow in resentment and anger. It is simply daft to facilitate the continuation of Hamas rule. So why do most of the supposedly hard-headed hawks and self-styled friends of Israel insist on doing it?

Inbar warns that sending reconstruction aid to Gaza will send the wrong signal, as if withholding it and being seen as the ones withholding much-needed humanitarian aid will encouage the kind of political behavior outsiders demand. Leave aside for now the assumptions that go into the idea that another people’s political behavior should be for someone else to manage or dictate, and consider simply whether these hard-line policies ever achieve what their proponents say that they will achieve.

An education ministry circular particularly annoyed Israel by telling Turkish schoolchildren to observe a minute’s silence in solidarity with Palestinian children. In the event, the Israelis persuaded the Turks to cancel a proposed essay and drawing contest for schoolchildren to air their feelings of hatred towards Israel. Israeli officials were apparently poised to respond by proposing a programme in Israeli schools for discussing the genocide of Armenians by Turks in the first world war. ~The Economist

This last item jumped out at me as I read this article. Israeli policy has dictated a certain avoidance of the question of the Armenian genocide and Ankara’s continued denial of it, and generally “pro-Israel” forces have rallied against any efforts to have the genocide recognized by Congress for this and other reasons. Last year, the ADL was caught up in a fairly serious controversy when it tried to discipline one of its chapters for daring to acknowledge that the Armenian genocide was something other than an unfortunate wartime incident, and grudgingly the ADL leadership was compelled to make vague statements that paid some attention to the reality of the genocide. As Turkish-Israeli relations sour over other matters, it might just work out that the genocide resolution in Congress will meet with less resistance this time around and could pass in the House if it continued to have President Obama’s support.

As tedious as it seems, I have to say a few words on the exchange between John Schwenkler and R.S. McCain. McCain seems to be laboring under the false impression that C11 was a) building a political movement and b) uniformly hostile to Sarah Palin. Neither is correct. The name of the site might have clued him on the first point, and paying more than passing attention to what its contributors had to say would have helped him with the second. Nor is McCain’s implicit claim that “the public” embraced Palin correct. If “the public” is never wrong (a strange claim for a conservative), Palin must be as bad as her critics claim, since most of the public does not care for her or at the very least does not embrace her. Is Palin “arguably the best hope for preventing the four years of Obama from becoming eight years of Obama”? Obviously not. It’s not even close, and the left would like nothing moe than for the GOP to believe this. Those who think she is the answer need to pause and reconsider before lecturing anyone about their lack of political insight. If anyone has had a “fanatical obsession” in connection with Gov. Palin, it has been McCain and his endless mooning over how wonderful she is.

McCain isn’t done yet:

Schwenkler seems to argue, as do so many of Palin’s critics, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Republican Party seeking the support of voters who don’t have college diplomas.

John does not “seem” to argue this, and there is nothing in his remarks that suggest this. Goodness knows we could stand to have the GOP do more to seek the support of voters who don’t have college diplomas–and they could do more to seek the support of voters who do have them. They might start by crafting policies that actually serve the interests of both groups and take it from there. Instead they throw up symbolic champions who are supposed to embody a certain way of life, give all the right signals and ham it up as jes’ folks while supporting the most conventional establishment policies that work to the detriment of precisely “voters who don’t have college diplomas.” At the same time, the GOP strikes the pose of the willfully, proudly ignorant, delighting in its members’ lack of expertise, that alienates those who have graduated from college. It’s the worst of all worlds: ignoring the interests of its natural constituents while deliberately mocking the education of the middle and upper-middle class. If the GOP keeps “building” its political coalition like this, it will soon be gone from the scene. Palinites don’t accept either populism in any meaningful form, at least not if Palin’s positions during the campaign count for anything, and they are satisfied to pay lip service to “the people” to co-opt them in the perpetuation of establishment policies that do them no good. Unlike most of Palin’s conventional boosters, McCain does not go along with all of those policies, but he is more than happy to be a cheerleader for a politician who does. Behind all of his endless blather about being duty-bound to defend the common people, McCain is helping to enable every habit in the modern GOP that works to harm them and their communities. Perhaps that is why he so desperately clings to the fiction that Palin’s critics hate Middle Americans. Perhaps at some level he is aware that he is doing more to undermine Middle American interests with his shameless Palin-worship than any of them ever will.

Mark Thompson responds with an interesting post, arguing that overturning Roe would deprive absolutists on both sides of the debate of the power that they currently possess:

In most places, the pro-choice and pro-life absolutists will no longer find themselves with quite as much power, as the majority in the mushy middle will wind up crafting most state regulations. Simply put, sending abortion back to the states would have the effect of drastically reducing the unity that exists within the two identity groups.

There will be changes in the composition of the two sides. No doubt there will be many formally pro-life secular conservatives interested in a federalist compromise who will be less inclined to ally themselves with religious pro-life absolutists, and there will be moderate suburbanites who don’t like the idea of “taking away” a woman’s right entirely but who are supportive of some limited restrictions who will drift into a more vaguely-defined pro-life camp. The groups will reorganize along somewhat different lines. As with most issues, however, it is the activists who define the debate and they are going to continue to do so at the state level, and they tend to be more absolutist in their views. One of the basic characteristics of the “mushy middle” is not just that they do not hold absolutist views on this or most subjects, but that they are not motivated to organize and mobilize other moderates to counterbalance the absolutists. Over time, the moderates will be drawn back to one camp or another as state ballot initiatives and elections present them with choices that will still be fairly stark.

There are going to be many organizations and lobbying groups whose existence depends to a large extent on continuing to pressure politicians and shape public opinion to justify their fundraising, and they’re not going to vanish overnight and are going to try to remain relevant in the new landscape. While it is possible that some of these groups would be diverted into the losing cause of trying to re-nationalize the issue one way or the other, and I can imagine pro-life splinter groups forming to keep pushing for the HLA, my guess is that they would reorganize and redirect their efforts toward state governments in states where the “mushy middle” was most malleable. As we saw with outside LDS funding for Prop. 8, culture war initiatives and legislation will attract the attention of donors and activist groups from across the country, and while each state electorate will have their say the two sides are going to be inundated by outside funding, advertising and attempts to mobilize voters one way or the other.

There might be some irritation about out-of-state interference, but I am guessing that this would not be important to that many people. At most, it would be a complaint registered after the fact by the losing side, which would only encourage them to cultivate fundraising networks of their own for the future. States where absolutist views on either side do not hold sway will become the battlegrounds for activists in both camps, and I think you will have the most contentious fights in the most evenly-divided states where the incentive to polarize the population will be greatest. As the Prop. 8 debate and its aftermath have shown, putting contentious questions to a vote does not quell passions and does not deprive absolutists of power, but on the contrary seems to allow them to define the tone and public image of their respective sides. The push to constitutionalize one view or another in state constitutions would begin in earnest, which would recreate the same problem of seeming to close off debate at a more local level. Whichever side enjoyed majority support at a particular time would try to lock that into their state constitutions, which would give the losing side something to keep fighting to repeal in every election that follows.

Would returning the issue to the states allow for the possibility of democratic consensus? Yes, and the very fact of allowing the issue to be regulated by the voters and the representatives of the people would be a significant improvement in itself. But it would also mean that whatever consensus each state reached would be viewed as temporary, and there would be a constant effort to try to push and pull state electorates in opposite directions. Even if state constitutions were amended as a result, this would not necessarily settle the issue and would certainly not make the issue less contentious.

Of course, all of this assumes that one can get enough independents and liberals to support the overturning of Roe after having drilled into their heads that the ruling provides fundamental protections for women. Since most people do not understand, or do not understand very well, the constitutional questions involved, this would be a very hard sale, and there are so many groups on the left with a vested interest in the status quo that it would be politically very dangerous for national Democrats to propose a federalist solution.

As long as you’re not too picky about some details (it was South Dakota, not North Dakota, where the abortion restriction initiative failed), Damon Linker is making a certain amount of sense here (via Chris Dierkes):

How could Obama — how could liberals, how could supporters of abortion rights — both win and end the culture war, once and for all? By supporting the reversal or significant narrowing of Roe, allowing abortion policy to once again be set primarily by the states — a development that would decisively divide and demoralize the conservative side of the culture war by robbing it of the identity politics that holds it together as a national movement.

If liberals were persuaded by this proposal, I would be very surprised, because it is an abandonment of the status quo where pro-choicers hold all the cards. Ending the culture war “once and for all” will not follow the reversal of Roe, and liberals would resist that reversal as strongly as they could. First of all, pro-choice interest groups have at least as much invested in keeping Roe/Casey as the law of the land, and there is a parallel identity politics that has emerged on the left that insists that it is a matter of a woman’s fundamental rights that must be upheld at the federal level and enforced nationwide. I assume most pro-choicers believe this, or at least none is willing to deny it openly, so it is difficult to see why they would accept an argument that returns the matter to the states. After all, I can imagine someone arguing that liberals would not submit other constitutional rights–which is what they believe Roe upholds–to state electorates to limit or eliminate as they saw fit.

Allowing the issue to be returned to the states would satisfy a large part of the electorate, including many conservatives interested in reviviving federalism, but it would not end the culture war over abortion. It would decentralize the culture war and make it part of democratic debate in each state, which means that the issue would retreat from debates in presidential elections and in Congress but become even more intense as an issue in state legislative and gubernatorial elections. It might be for the next few decades that most states would maintain legalized abortion with few restrictions, but the pressure to change that in many states would be constant and intense. The more politicized and involved in the democratic process a contentious issue becomes, the more it becomes the basis for identity politics and polarization. There is certain “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” quality to this: keeping the issue as a matter for the judiciary and keeping Roe in place generates tremendous opposition and perpetuates the culture war, but overturning Roe would probably intensify the culture war.

At present, pro-lifers might reasonably question what purpose is served by basing their voting on an issue that is not even directly under the control of elected officials, and over time pro-lifers’ support for the GOP is bound to wane as they see little action in exchange for their steadfast support. In a post-Roe future, the GOP might have to make itself much more accountable to pro-life voters by pushing for restrictions on abortion, and the alliance between pro-lifers and the GOP might be solidified. One exception to this might be extremely zealous pro-lifers, who would insist on re-nationalizing the issue on their terms, but their influence would likely fade over time. To the extent that many pro-life activists fall into this category, there would be some internal division on the right, but it would hardly have the crippling or demoralizing effect Linker wants to see.

Contrary to the cynical take that the national GOP needs to keep Roe intact to maintain its coalition, which was a view for which I had some sympathy in the past, I am beginning to think that the last thing the GOP wants is to have to answer to pro-lifers on a regular basis and be judged on the basis of meaningful legislative action. Keeping Roe in place allows the GOP to pay lip service to the issue and win a certain number of votes, but this also prevents pro-lifers from putting even more pressure on state Republican parties, which is what they would do if the ruling were overturned. The shape of post-Roe social and religious conservatism would change, and its pro-life activists would have to adapt to an entirely different landscape, but if Linker thinks that the reversal of Roe in the context of continued legalized abortion in most states would cause “the religious right” to diminish I think he has misjudged things. Certainly, I can see many advantages in the reversal of Roe, but I find it hard to believe that Linker would welcome it. If he does, this could be the basis for a limited compromise, in which the two sides agree to submit the debate to the electorates of the several states.

Alex Massie slaps Jonah Goldberg around for this item extolling the “Churchillian” courage of the House GOP. Massie refrains from mocking the “apparently compulsory Churchill reference,” but I cannot. There really ought to be a rule for Americans, especially when they’re writing from Britain, that they cannot compare their own politicians to Churchill under any circumstances unless that comparison touches on a politician’s wartime decision-making, drinking or party-switching. It would be a corollary to Godwin’s Law such that the first person to invoke Churchill for rhetorical purposes automatically loses the argument. Presumably, the House GOP’s vote against the stimulus is supposedly “Churchillian” because it demonstrates some steely-eyed refusal to surrender (unlike, one assumes, the Chamberlain-like capitulation of others). If the House GOP plays Churchill in this story, someone must be Chamberlain and therefore weak and spineless and so forth–that is inevitably how these comparisons work on the American right. David Cameron and the Tories are made to serve the latter role:

For instance, Tory party leader David Cameron has a circus-act flexibility when it comes to ideological principles. No adjective is too constraining for his brand of shmoo-like conservatism; “Green,” “compassionate,” “progressive,” “radical,” even “libertarian paternalism,” his conservatism can fit into them all, for his philosophical invertebracy is boundless. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, the mop-topped conservative mayor of London and former editor of the indispensable conservative journal The Spectator, seems to see conservatism as a mere facet to his own charming eccentricity. Both men have a politician’s love of popularity, rather than an ideologue’s love of principle, so both are scrambling like teenagers who’ve spotted Paris Hilton at the mall to ingratiate themselves with Barack Obama, the ex officio president of the United Kingdom.

I could go on for a while about Goldberg’s genuinely absurd contradictions-in-terms “ideological principles” and “an ideologue’s love of principle,” but there is only so much time in the day. Suffice it to say that principles and ideology are not the same, and conservatives should eschew the latter, so if the complaint is really that Cameron is not an ideologue then so much the better for his reputation as a conservative. Many times I have criticized the Cameroons for adopting what seems in many respects to be watered-down New Labour policies, but I think it gets things quite wrong to think of Cameron as simply a popularity-seeker. Massie covers some of the following points, but I want to elaborate on them a bit more.

Cameron and the Cameroons are adopting arguably more “moderate” policies because they come from the modernizing wing of the party where people adhere to such policies because they find them superior, and they have come to prevail in intra-party squabbles at a time when such policies seem to be attractive to a large part of the electorate. More crucially, as a matter of electoral politics, the Tories are no longer automatically loathed by quite so many people, and some part of this is the result of Cameron’s attempts to reorient the party. There is an important difference between being a shameless popularity-seeker and reveling in one’s marginal status, and for a time the Tories seemed to be heading in the second direction. Cameron has undoubtedly also benefited from Brown’s tremendous unpopularity and failure, both of which worsened significantly over the last year, just as Obama benefited from Bush’s, but the modernizing trajectory he is setting for the Tories is one that the left of the Conservative Party has been pushing for at least since 1997. The label modernizer can give a biased impression in favor of the Cameroons, but this is what their faction has been called on a regular basis for years.

Between New Labour’s implosion and Cameron’s make-over of the party, the Tories have been making huge gains in local elections and notably won the Crewe and Nantwich by-election by picking up support among working-class voters who had been lost to the Tories for decades. Granted, Cameron has not yet won a national election, but one reason for this is that Cameron has so successfully revived the Tories that Brown was frightened away from calling an election in ’07. As things stand now, Cameron may be on the verge of orchestrating the Tories’ comeback after 12 years in the wilderness–clearly, there is nothing that Republicans could learn from this example!

There are many reasons why the kind of changes Cameron has introduced on policy and image may not work as well in the U.S. for Republicans. There are reasonable arguments to be made that center-right parties ought not always copy one another’s positions. Indeed, if Goldberg’s complaint is with “compassionate conservatism” it might be worth noting that the Tories started adopting Bush-like rhetoric about “compassionate conservatism” many years ago under Hague’s leadership. They also adopted a hawkish foreign policy modeled on that of Mr. Bush, making them a completely ineffective opposition against Blair’s backing of the war in Iraq and his egregious violations of civil liberties, while persisting in a kind of monomania about Europe that never resonated with a broad section of the electorate. A combination of a lack of credibility, lack of an imaginative and relevant agenda, poor leadership, terrible public relations and backing an overwhelmingly unpopular war ensured that the Tories gained no traction despite increasing discontent with Blair’s government.

Indeed, one can exaggerate the differences in substance between Cameron and his predecessors, and one can place too much emphasis on policy change as the chief means to electoral revival. The interests of the parties’ constituencies may not necessarily be aligned, so different center-right parties will have to fashion their policies accordingly and may end up heading in significantly different directions. Symbolism, image and presentation count for quite a lot, as does the ability to acknowledge past failures, and it is in all of these areas that the Cameroons probably have the most to teach the GOP. Above all, the willingness to adapt is something that the Cameroons have brought to the Tories and have made them seem as if they are a credible governing party again. Cameron has done this not so much because he talked about “hugging a hoodie” or because he enthused about his love of bicycling, but because he demonstrated that Tories were capable of speaking to the British public about things that mattered to many more of them than they had done in the recent past. In any case, to appropriate language and terminology normally associated with the other side in a political debate is not necessarily to sign off on the policy solutions one’s opponents propose. There is nothing contradictory or necessarily supportive of extensive state regulation in conservatives’ describing themselves as “green.” Decentralization has become one of Cameron’s better themes, which can be entirely consistent with “green” policies, and “green” ends can be pursued in very different ways. The delight that some significant part of the GOP and conservative movement takes in denying or belittling green issues is part of the reason why the rising generation finds them intolerable.

For the most part, Republicans continue to retreat ever deeper into fantasy, imagining that they lost power because of “spending like drunken sailors,” to use an old McCainism, identifying earmarks as one of the great causes of our time and answering every question with a tax cut proposal. That is why there is little reassuring or gratifying about their vote on the stimulus bill, because it is just the sort of thing you would expect them to do if they had learned nothing from the last two elections. Hague and Duncan-Smith were arguably right on Europe, asylum-seekers and crime as a matter of policy, but politically they were clueless and ensured not only their continued opposition status but also the eventual marginalization of the issues they did consider important. These other issues were eventually marginalized even within their own party because they could not talk credibly about anything else. Not only do Republicans evade all responsibility for their contributions to the current financial crisis, an evasion that the mainstream conservative movement is largely happy to enable (“Greenspan? Who’s Greenspan?”), but also seem to have lost all connection to the parts of the country outside their core states. They are reduced to the districts where someone like Sarah Palin is taken seriously as a future national leader, and instead of pondering why the rest of the country finds them ridiculous they simply redouble their commitment to all of the things that make them seem ridiculous. In other words, there is no interest in and possibly little understanding of how they appear to the rest of the country. The Tories were in pretty miserable shape after 1997, but I’m not sure that even they were as bereft of vision and ideas.

One last point about the stimulus. I think it is the case that the current stimulus bill passed by the House is not very good, and I can see the merit of additional tax cuts as a faster and more effective way of providing economic stimulus, but the political failure of the GOP more broadly is that this (and hostility to earmarks) was and is their answer to almost everything on domestic policy. The greatest problem with the GOP leadership is that I suspect they think they have corrected the one flaw that they assume was responsible for their past defeats, and now that they are opposing “wasteful spending and earmarks” they will make no effort to rethink anything else.

Michael Crowley correctly observes that India’s diplomatic victory in limiting Holbrooke’s official mission, about which India is “exulting” according to the Post, is an illusory one. Crowley thinks that Kashmir will be an inevitable part of Holbrooke’s work. I agree that it probably will be, but not because it has to be. It will be because this is apparently something the administration wants to include on its agenda, and evidently nothing seems to dissuade them. There are no Indian foreign policy analysts that I have seen who think that there is any necessary connection between Kashmir and issues related to the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Someone will say that this is a function of Indian nationalism and the taboo against bringing up Kashmir as an international issue, which is partly correct, but that just drives home how misguided it is to try to internationalize the issue, especially when doing so is to give in to a kind of extortion from the Pakistani side.

As a practical matter, it is not clear what good raising the issue would do besides encouraging Kashmiri separatists and providing an incentive to groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba to stir up trouble in the state and inside India to try to pressure India. What few in Washington seem to appreciate is that the status of Jammu & Kashmir is non-negotiable for India, which makes the inclusion of it in any “grand bargain” a prescription for the failure of the other parts of the bargain. Imagine if Calderon tried to enlist China or Russia to have Washington revisit the status of the Southwest, and consider what the American view of that would be, and then you have an idea of what a non-starter this idea is.

It is true that the ISI has promoted both Kashmiri militants and the Taliban as proxies, and just as there are elements withint the ISI that continue to support the Taliban there is an even stronger attachment in the military to the cause of Kashmir, but this does not explain why it should be U.S. policy to intervene in the Kashmir dispute, which is an old legacy of Partition, as part of efforts to address the much more recent and unrelated problem of the Taliban. It is as if you tried to resolve the division of Cyprus by revisiting the status of western Thrace that had been settled at Lausanne. There would certainly be some people in one of the countries involved who would insist that this is vital to resolving the more modern point of contention, but to grant this is to allow hard-liners in one country to make you accept that satisfying one of their long-standing goals or addressing one of their older grievances regarding an issue where they have little, if any, moral and legal standing will make them more interested in giving ground in an entirely different dispute. For the third party, whose connection to the current problem is incidental and indirect, the idea of reopening a territorial issue that they consider closed seems not only unacceaptable but positively dangerous for all parties.

Consider the basic assumption of the “grand bargain” theory: Pakistan has spent decades trying to destabilize Afghanistan and India through armed proxies, and presumably rogue elements of its military and security service continue to do this in Afghanistan partly to strike at India’s influence there just as other rogue elements were likely involved in the Mumbai attacks, so to get the official, non-rogue Pakistani military to do what is already in its interest and what it has already pledged to do (i.e., stabilize Pakistan in the west) the U.S. must get India to reward the rogue elements for their troublemaking by trying to get India to make concessions over something it considers non-negotiable. Because the rogue elements are far more extreme and unaccountable, they have no reason to accept any deal that India makes and have every incentive to pursue maximalist goals, so even if you somehow persuade India to do something it will never do it will have no positive effect on stability in Pakistan.

On the contrary, it will encourage precisely the elements within the Pakistani state that have been fomenting instability, and it will encourage the same sort in Kashmir itself. Meanwhile, having strengthened rogue elements inside the ISI and military, the official military leadership will be even less inclined to assist in combating the Taliban, which will have necessarily grown stronger as its rogue patrons have grown stronger, for fear that the rogue elements will become powerful enough to overthrow them. Including Kashmir as part of the “solution” will not consolidate the Pakistani military’s divided attention and resources, but will exacerbate the very problem it is aimed at solving. For their part, the official leadership would be happy to see outside pressure brought on India, as their attachment to Kashmir is also quite powerful, and the civilian government will faithfully toe that line and argue, as President Zardari did earlier this week, that Kashmir is comparable to Palestine. Zardari’s comparison is clever, as he is using another example where a local conflict has already needlessly been turned into a regional and international question to urge similar treatment of the dispute in Kashmir, which conveniently avoids acknowledging that linking Israel-Palestine to practically every other regional problem (which is done to emphasize the supposed strategic importance of the conflict) has made resolution of all these problems more, not less, difficult.

There is a great desire in U.S. foreign policy thinking, perhaps most pronounced among liberal internationalists who love to demonstrate their understanding of how interrelated everything is, to link issues that do not need to be linked to address any particular question. Attention to complexity is desirable, but the mania for “comprehensive” solutions helps to make all of the individual problems harder to solve because it lends so much more weight to each dispute. Indeed, in the case of Kashmir, it would be attempting to solve something that one of the parties involved–India–does not see as a problem in need of being solved. Simply by having a third party raise the issue in the context of a regional “solution,” Pakistan acquires vastly more leverage than it would or should otherwise have and perversely makes Pakistan less likely to cooperate on the other issues where the U.S. actually needs cooperation. Now that Obama has floated the possibility of mediating in Kashmir, and as it seems likely that Holbrooke will raise the issue, the Pakistani government can claim that its hands are tied on assisting against the Taliban until the Kashmir mediation makes progress, and Washington will be in a position where it has to agree because it has already insisted that the two issues are fundamentally linked.