One of the big problems with the march toward Palestinian democracy, Wilkinson told me, was that the visuals were lousy [bold mine-DL]. “Secretary Rice would show up at the Muqata, and you had broken glass, bars on the windows, people with AK-47s running everywhere.” ~David Samuels

Quite.  Two other big problems were called Hamas and Fatah.

“He[Bush]’s had as much effect upon my foreign-policy views as I’ve had on his,” Rice told me. “It is in part, in large part, his unshakable belief in freedom. And his unshakable belief that human beings have not just a right to it, but they’re at their best when they have it.” Like the president, Rice is a regular churchgoer who embraced religious practice later in life—in Rice’s case, after returning from Washington, D.C., to her teaching job at Stanford University, where she served as provost from 1993 to ’99.

Rice’s detractors, and even some of her close friends, see her worldview, which is both intellectually coherent and heartfelt, as deterministic and lacking any real appreciation for the influence of local factors on big historical events. A common term for the core of her thought among her colleagues, past and present, is “the theology,” a reference to her bedrock faith in the likelihood, or inevitability, of progressive historical change [bold mine-DL]. Her views have evolved since she witnessed firsthand the end of the Cold War. ~David Samuels

If that doesn’t worry you, there’s this item a little later:

Where Rice sharply differs from Fukuyama is in her vision of a strong tension between a beneficent order of liberal states and the “transnational forces” that seek to tear down the global system. Her worldview is therefore trickier and more idiosyncratic than it first appears. “Democracy, for Secretary Rice, I think, and for them,” Zelikow says, speaking more generally of the administration, “is a universal safety valve for social conflict. And as they confront parts of the world in profound social and political crisis, they prescribe democracy.”

She thinks that democracy is the remedy for social conflict?  She hasn’t figured out yet that democracy simply becomes another vehicle for social conflict that the rival groups in any conflict use to continue their fight?  That politicising the different groups in a conflict-ridden society through a democratic process simply legitimises the ongoing conflict?  If she still doesn’t understand that this is a real possibility, I think she isn’t fit to be the Secretary of State.  (Of course, she isn’t fit to be Secretary of State, but we’ll leave that for later.)

Toward the end of our first interview, I asked Rice whether the hopeful narrative of Arab countries holding free elections and moving forward toward democracy risks ignoring 500 years of tragic history in the Middle East.

“It’s not hopefulness,” she said crisply, interrupting me. “It’s a sense of what is possible, and optimism about the strength of democratic institutions.

“Let me ask you this,” she continued, wagging her head back and forth, taking pleasure in the clash of ideas. “Not that long ago—you said 500 years, but not that long ago, say, 1944, or maybe even 1946—would anybody have said that France and Germany would never go to war again? Anyone?” ~David Samuels

The more of this article I read, the more troubled I am.  I have assumed for a while that Secretary Rice just went along with whatever the boss told her to do, since there has not appeared to be any overarching or coherent theme to her foreign policy views between 1999 and today, but it becomes clear that she does have some sort of ideas about history and foreign policy and they are all terrible.  She used to be a great one for talking about balance of power and Great Power interests, and now she talks incessantly of democracy and forces of history.  Maybe the confusion was there all along and I didn’t see it. 

Just consider her response to Samuels’ question and reflect on how utterly ridiculous it is.  As a Cold War-era official, she must know that the reason France and Germany didn’t go to war again after WWII was that France and most of Germany were our allies against the far larger threat from the east, a little place Secretary Rice supposedly knew something about, the USSR, and that there was no desire and no reason for renewed conflict between Germans and French while the Soviets loomed large on the horizon.  This might have been reasonably guessed at once NATO was founded and West Germany joined the alliance.  In 2007, we are theoretically where the post-WWII leaders of Europe were c. 1949-50, and the main worry in 1949-50 was no longer a revival of Franco-German enmity but the power of the Soviet Union.  She would also presumably know that the EU has centered around a strong Franco-German partnership.  As Secretary of State, she would also have to know that France and Germany remain U.S. allies and are therefore not likely to start wars with each other.  Would anyone have predicted such a happy outcome in 1946?  Maybe not.  But the non-occurrence of major war between French and Germans was not some mythical hope that had never existed for long stretches of time in the past.  Between 1815 and 1870, there was never a shot fired in anger across the eastern frontiers of France by French and German armies, which was a situation created by the Congress of Vienna and maintained by the Concert of Europe.  What European warfare there was after 1815, with the notable exceptions of the wars of Italian and German unification, tended to center on the Eastern Question, whence came so many terrible things.  This is not an answer to the question that was asked, which is, to paraphrase, “How oblivious do you have to be to think that democratisation will succeed in the Arab world?”  The Secretary responded to a very serious question about the applicability of democracy to the Arab world (which actually understates the burden of history) with a total non-sequitur about peace in Europe that she and everyone else knows is guaranteed by U.S. supremacy and our nuclear arsenal.  In fact, the guarantee of peace through such deterrence is relatively easy and straightforward compared to the difficult task of introducing a rare and fragile orchid into the desert.  Secretary Rice is even more clueless than I had feared that she was.

“I think we are just at the beginning of great historical flux, and I think it’s even much more dramatic and much more profound than I thought in 2000,” Rice says, when I mention an article she published that year in Foreign Affairs, laying out her vision of a global democratic future guaranteed by the United States. Most articles about foreign policy are op-ed pieces masquerading as political philosophy, and Rice’s is no exception. But it does describe a coherent view of the world that places a great deal of emphasis on the determined exercise of military and diplomatic power and has little in common with the humble, neo-isolationist platform on which George W. Bush ran for president. The world as Rice understands it is both a welcoming and a dangerous place, in which America plays a special role. The sunny and scary parts of her worldview are woven tightly together.

“There has been a triumph of the broad institutional consensus about what it takes to be effective and prosperous or successful,” Rice says, pointing to the interest that all states share in obtaining access to markets and ensuring domestic stability. Unlike Donald Rumsfeld’s finger- wagging, Rat Pack–era version of realpolitik, or Dick Cheney’s paranoia about mushroom clouds and sleeper cells, Rice’s views are the kind of optimistic stuff that mothers might wish their children were being taught in school. Threats to the emerging global order of liberal states come from what Rice calls “transnational forces,” “violent extremists,” or sometimes “terrorists,” locutions that share in common a studied avoidance of the word “Islam.”

“When we liberated Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan, we found Nigerians and Chinese and Malay and American people who essentially deny nationality in favor of a philosophy—a violent extremist philosophy to which they are committed,” she says. “It reminds me in some ways of the way that ‘Workers of the world, unite!’—Karl Marx,” she adds helpfully “—was a slogan that meant that an American worker had more in common with a German worker than an American worker would have with the American leadership.” When she is thinking hard about something, she furrows her wide brow and scrunches up her mouth in an unselfconscious way that suggests a schoolgirl determined to ace a test. ~David Samuels, The Atlantic

Is it supposed to reassure us that the transnational nature of Islam and the power of religion to unite various peoples were new ideas to the then-National Security Advisor in 2001 that she could only understand in terms of international communism? 

By the way, I think everyone reading The Atlantic knows what “workers of the world, unite!” meant, but it’s interesting to watch her tell us what it means.  The difference between that slogan and the transnationalism of Islam is that Marx’s theorising about the loyalties of workers around the world consistently failed to be demonstrated in the real world, because time and again nationalism proved to be more powerful than the draw of international socialism and even the “successful” communist revolutions were fueled by nationalist drives for anti-imperialist independence.  When push came to shove in WWI, French, British and German labourers dutifully lined up and slaughtered each other.  Communists were rarely, if ever, able to exploit class conflict in Western industrialised societies, where the communist message was supposedly going to take off like wildfire, and generally succeeded only in late-modernising societies or alongside national independence movements.   This is one reason why Prof. Lukacs regards nationalism as a far more potent and potentially destructive force.

In Istanbul last Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the nomination of Abdullah Gul as president of Turkey. In Paris next Sunday, Nicolas Sarkozy will very likely be elected president of France.  These two events are geographically distant but closely connected in political terms. Together they explain a bald fact of life: Turkey is not going to join the European Union. And they also illustrate one more contradiction—and failure—of the neoconservative project. ~Geoffrey Wheatcroft

There is a relationship between the events unfolding in Turkey and France, and happily both do signal setbacks for the politics and policies neocons in America would like to see in these countries.  But tying these events in with neoconservatism is a bit overdone.  Goodness knows I would love any opportunity to point out yet another example of neocon failure, but this time their failure, such as it is, is a pretty small part of the story.  The protests against Abdullah Gul represent the profound schism within Turkish politics between the predominantly secular elite and urban middle class and the rural masses and the working class.  The neocons might never have existed, and this would still have happened.  Sarkozy’s rise is the result of a backlash against the rather more multiculti, hands-off approach to questions of immigration and assimilation (and, related, law and order) that France had sought to pursue under both Socialist and Gaullist governments.  The 2005 riots discredited lax law enforcement and the lax approach to integration and made Sarko the man to watch, because he alone among top-level French politicians seemed to understand that this was a burning issue (no pun intended) that had to be addressed, both for his own political advantage (naturellement) and for what he considered the good of the country.  Likewise, these events internal to France would have occurred in one form or another had The Weekly Standard never wasted the life of a single tree by being printed. 

Both events do repudiate core ideas of latter-day neoconservatism: that nations are a function of shared ideals and “values” and nothing more; that Muslim populations can and should be smoothly and easily incorporated into the West and/or that Islam and democracy are readily compatible; that mass, non-Western immigration is a good in and of itself and must be maximised.  Either in Turkey or in France or sometimes in both countries, these ideas are not doing very well at the moment.  However, all of the actors in these events are not thinking about the neocons at all, except when they completely misunderstand what a neocon is and think that Nicolas Sarkozy, who is a kind of French Thatcher if not even a French Pat Buchanan in certain ways, fits the bill.  In fact, the failure of Turkish entry has as much to do lately with Turkish hyper-nationalism, the continued denial of the Armenian genocide, the prosecutions of dissidents who insist on talking about the genocide and the state-encouraged murder of Hrant Dink as it has to do with anything related to AKP per se.  Turkish poverty and booming demographics would make the EU wary of admitting the country regardless of anything that was happening in Turkish politics.  Except for the despicable coat-holding that the administration does for such genocide denialism, one cannot actually pin any of that on the neocons, either, though their general silence and implicit hypocrisy on this matter are amazing.  They ignore genocide denialism while they are only too happy to meddle in every foreign crisis by calling it a genocide and demanding that something be done about it. 

So it is true that neoconservatives tend to be unduly enthusiastic for Turkish entry into the EU.  They seem to like to encourage anything that would weaken and/or destroy Europe, especially when it comes to Christians in Europe, and they continue to operate under the strange assumption that advocating for Turkish entry into the EU will somehow win America a nice finish in the Global Muslim Opinion Derby.  This is like the sad spectacle of Republicans voting for Puerto Rican statehood in a lame attempt to win Hispanic votes in California and Texas, when these voters don’t care about Puerto Rico, or the sadder spectacle of selling out on immigration in a desperate bid to win over Hispanic voters who don’t like illegal immigration anyway.  How many times have we heard the neocon lament: “Why don’t these Saudi and Egyptian Muslims appreciate all that we’ve done for the Albanians?”  Um…maybe because they‘re not Albanians?     

In the end, Mr. Wheatcroft does not demonstrate any clear connection between neocons and the secularist resistance to Gul or the voters’ support for Sarkozy.  He only vaguely outlines the connection between Turkish membership in the EU and Sarko’s popularity.  The connection is obvious, if we understand that Sarko’s popularity is driven in no small part by French anxiety about Muslim and African immigration.  If French leftists think of Sarko as a “neocon with a French passport,” they obviously don’t understand neocon views on immigration.  Mr. Wheatcroft mentions that the war has inflamed Turkish anti-Americanism, which is true, and it has encouraged the worst tendencies of the Turkish hyper-nationalists in viewing the Kurdish population as a fifth column and traitors, but if anything opposition to American policy in Iraq and opposition to an independent Kurdistan have served as things holding together such disparate political forces as the hyper-nationalists, the CHP and AKP.  Turkey is badly politically divided, but with their war the neocons have given all Turks something they can all hate together.  In the end, neocons are not even on the stage in these dramas.  Indeed, they have become entirely irrelevant to large parts of the world they would try to rule, and that may be the most damning indictment of them one can make.

I’m just skeptical that the aggregate tendency of young white Bobos, in America as in Europe, to have one or zero children doesn’t contain at least an element of solipsism. ~Ross Douthat 

Surely there are things, even inside this fantastic moral taxonomy, that men and women could do with their lives to compensate for their choice not to have children. Surely not all childless lives are deplorably solipsistic. ~Will Wilkinson

Indeed.  I wouldn’t say deplorably solipsistic–I wouldn’t use the word solipsistic, since this ascribes an epistemological error to what is really just an exercise in glorifying autonomy and practicing self-indulgence.  On the other hand, these childless folks could become monastics and then Ross would be in more of a pickle.

It suggests that there aren’t any interesting Republicans in our fiction not because Republicans aren’t interesting, but because our intelligentsia’s political prejudices blind them to the possibility that a Republican might be, well, a complicated human being rather than just the sum of every liberal’s fears. ~Ross Douthat

Ross is right about a certain lack of imagination among liberals when it comes to depicting Republicans.  If there is an audience for what has seemed like 462 books on the imminent onset of theocratic fascism or fascistic theocracy or whichever other contradiction in terms the cunning religious conspirators are developing, this audience is not going to be interested in stories that depict religious conservatives and Republicans as anything but absurd stick-figures.  On the other hand, if you tried to imagine an administration filled with fewer interesting, engaging personalities than the present administration, I don’t think you could do it.  It also doesn’t help encourage the depiction of complex human beings when this administration in particular has seemed to go out of its way to play to every caricature of Republicans that the left has conjured over the years. 

That isn’t to say that the last few years haven’t provided plenty of material for rich, florid, even baroque novels about corruption, fanaticism, pride and failure.  But how to tell the story?  Perhaps only the genre of magical realism could fully capture what seems to be an assembly of stunning mediocrities, the half-mad, the drearily self-important and the embarrassingly venal.  I think we lack the writers we need to tell this story.  They would need to be part Prokopios, part Ortega y Gasset, part Kafka and part Miguel Angel Asturias, but would have to be able to speak in a distinctly American idiom.

Rather, the primary issue is that netroots activists and TNR have major, persistent, principled disagreements about foreign policy. ~Matt Yglesias

That often seems true (certainly it is true when it comes to Iraq).  I certainly hope this is the case all of the time, though the unfortunate enthusiasm of some progressive bloggers (who are, I understand, not part of the “netroots” proper) for Obama’s recent foreign policy address makes me think that this may be exaggerating this disagreement.

Update: A Kossack expresses his displeasure with Obama on foreign policy, so maybe there is some hope for them.  Matt Stoller characterises it by saying it was “what I would expect from a brilliant neoliberal,” but nonetheless finds “a lot to like here, though it’s not so much a progressive vision.”

Already a monumental fraud, he can’t even keep straight which novel is his favourite. 

Now, I understand how you might confuse Huckleberry Finn with Battlefield Earth.  No, really.  Both were written by Americans, and both have the letter ‘i’ in their titles, so the similarities are so extensive that it was almost inevitable that Romney would switch them around in his mind.

Unfortunately for Romney, regular voters who don’t pay that much attention will get it into their heads that Romney, a Mormon, likes books written by the founder of the wacky cult Scientology, and that there is therefore some reasonable association to be made between them.  He has managed to take what is already guaranteed to be a difficult issue for him and made it that much worse.  On the other hand, perhaps he is looking to pick up big money on the Hollywood fundraising circuit.

Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts [bold mine-DL] must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. ~Edward Luttawak

Yet there are quite a few people who speak and act as if they were experts on the Near and Middle East who show little or no comprehension of this totalising quality of Islam.  This all-encompassing nature of Islam is not a jihadi trick or part of their propaganda–it is supposed to be one of the more appealing aspects of Islam, because it proposes to have the right answer for every sphere of life. 

Just consider how many people want to give Islamists the benefit of the doubt that Islamist rule is somehow compatible with constitutional rule.  These would be the people who think real constitutional or liberal government is possible in the Islamic societies of these regions.  It might be possible to have some sort of mass participatory Islamic republic (such as, say, Iran), replete with candidates and maybe even parties, provided that everyone involved understood the unassailable position and final authority of Islam.  A constitution in which Islam was not established and empowered as the religion of the state seems highly unlikely.