Ross:

The last few weeks should bury, once and for all, the foolish idea that neoconservatism’s rhetorical commitment to democracy promotion is just a smokescreen for Likudnik dual loyalties or U.S. imperialism.

As an opponent of U.S. democracy promotion and its advocates, I would point out that I have generally taken democratists quite seriously that they usually mean what they say when they endorse global democratic revolution and democratization. It has never been “just a smokescreen” for anything, which is why it is so dangerous. If it were just a cynical ploy for nothing other than justifying the expansion of U.S. influence and toppling regimes hostile to Israel, that would be mildly reassuring, as it would mean that there was some identifiable, limited purpose behind it. I have tended to assume that avowedly “pro-Israel” people with hawkish, quasi-imperialist ambitions supported the policies that they did because they believed that these would advance their other goals, but perhaps I have been giving them too much credit. What we can say is that neoconservatives conflate values and interests together in the same way that they blur together the interests of the U.S. and allied states. This applies to Israel, but not only to Israel. As Ross mentions, neoconservatives indulge in the same sloppy, immediate identification with the cause of Georgia.

Certainly, one can point to examples of how the “freedom agenda” was aimed mainly at subverting unfriendly governments in order to replace them with more reliable clients, but that didn’t mean that many of the people endorsing the “freedom agenda” didn’t want a more radical policy than the one that Bush promoted. When the Bush administration backed away from democracy promotion in the second term, it was neoconservatives who complained loudest about the return of “realism.” Unfortunately, their support for democracy promotion really does seem to be an unreasonable ideological commitment that experience will not cure. Theircritics on the right haven’t called them “neo-Jacobins” for nothing.

What I don’t quite understand is why sincere attachment to ideological democratism is supposed to be counted as a mark in the neoconservatives’ favor. If anything, genuine democratizing zeal is confirmation that neoconservatives are unwilling to make any important distinctions between values and interests, it means that they don’t really believe that democratic states will have fundamentally divergent interests over time, and it suggests that they do not believe that there are ever genuine trade-offs in policymaking, at least when it comes to their preferred policies. What Ross describes as the “shallow side” of neoconservative idealism isn’t just one side of it, but represents the whole of it. Values must conflict with interests, especially when American interests are defined as broadly and loosely as neoconservatives do, but they take it as a given that American ideals and power advance together. That’s not just an arrogant prescription for endless warfare and instability. It also happens to be painfully wrong, and it makes a mockery of both our values and our interests. The spread of democracy typically makes other nations more resistant to U.S. policies and gradually makes their governments more independent in their foreign policy decisions, and the stronger their democratic political cultures become the less likely they are to serve as reliable yes-men for U.S. policies.

Neoconservatives are typically very hawkish in their views on U.S. policy and favor U.S. hegemony, they are strongly “pro-Israel,” and for much of the last 20-25 years increasingly they have been enamored of democracy promotion as an important feature of U.S. policy. The first two may be compatible up to a point, but neither of them can be paired with the third for very long. At least during the Cold War there could be some justification that democracy promotion was occasionally useful as a complement to anti-Soviet containment, but as the Cold War recedes the strategic value of democracy promotion has declined dramatically. Instead of acknowledging that one of these three should be given priority and that the three goals seriously conflict with one another, neoconservatives have endorsed three sets of mutually contradictory policies with equal enthusiasm: maintain U.S. hegemony through activist and interventionist policies abroad, provide unstinting support to Israel regardless of what it does and pledge protection of Israeli security, and promote democracy abroad as much as possible.

The war in Iraq showed that these three are basically incompatible and undermine one another. The war was supposed to advance U.S. hegemony in the region and remove a threat to Israel, but effectively empowered Iran to Israel’s detriment, and this was compounded by the insistence on democratizing Iraq, which redounded to the benefit of those factions aligned with and supported by Tehran. More recently, it has become increasingly obvious that the close relationship with Israel and the prolonged U.S. presence in the Near East work at cross-purposes, and both of them contribute to anti-American attitudes and violent opposition in the form of terrorism.

Instead of backing away from any of the goals listed above, neoconservatives have become even more adamant in their support for all three, and their critiques of Obama’s foreign policy have largely been based on their perceptions that he is overseeing American decline abroad, that he is antagonistic to Israeli interests, and that he is insufficiently committed to promoting democracy. These critiques are usually tendentious and often inaccurate on many points, but these critiques show that the same goals remain. There has been absolutely no learning going on, and there is no awareness on their part that neoconservatives are still pursuing mutually contradictory policy goals.

The main answer that some of them have come up with is to revive the discredited “freedom agenda” (now to be called the Freedom Doctrine) as a sure-fire way to combat Iranian influence, and most of them are all in favor democratization in the Arab world so long as no Islamist parties can participate in elections. In other words, they still want to have it all, pretend that trade-offs don’t exist, and send U.S. foreign policy careening from one disaster to the next.

While Americans may have some quibbles with the speed and extent of Obama’s response to the Libyan conflict, I think we can all agree that David Cameron has not acquitted himself all that well in making his first significant foray into making foreign policy decisions since becoming Prime Minister. Alex Massie sums up the problem:

Is David Cameron a hawk or a dove? And how useful is that question anyway? I suspect the answers are “more of a hawk than not” and “not much”. The Prime Minister has not, shall we say, been at his best vis a vis Libya. Then again, foreign policy is not his longest-suit as anyone who recalls his reckless – and pointless – response to the mini-crisis in South Ossetia. His Dash to Tbilisi was straight from the pages of the John McCain Foreign Policy Manual, substituting feel-good sloganising and photo ops for measured calculations of both the national interest and anything Britain could practically or usefully do.

It isn’t all that surprising that Cameron’s instincts would lead him astray. Despite occasionally saying reasonable-sounding things in the last few years, Cameron was a member of the Tory front bench that supported the invasion of Iraq, and as Massie reminds us he made a fool of himself over Georgia. Hague remains Foreign Secretary, and he belongs to that batch of Tories that fell under the sway of hawkish interventionism and Hannan-esque preaching about democracy during the first decade of the century*. Cameron and McCain both wanted to show solidarity with Georgia in 2008, which caused them to stake out misguided and somewhat irrational positions on a conflict that they didn’t really understand, and both of them have been at it again in Libya.

In this case, the desire to show support for the rebels in words has overwhelmed the reasonable judgment that there is not very much that the U.S., Britain and allies are able to do to lend support to them that would not plunge our governments into yet another foreign war. McCain is an opposition Senator with no real responsibility for making policy, so he has the luxury of indulging his militaristic instincts and can be more easily ignored, but Cameron is a head of government and shouldn’t be so eager to propose military action (which is what supporting a no-fly zone is).

* In fairness to Hague, this report relates that Hague is among the more cautious members of the Cabinet when it comes to Libya.

Another oddity, particularly given Obama’s high regard for the power of his own rhetoric, is that you’d think he’d be looking for ways to take credit for, and guide, the forces of reform in the region. ~Jonah Goldberg

It seems to me that this gets to the heart of what bothers so many people, especially conservatives, about Obama’s response to events in Libya. For them, American Presidents are supposed to want to exploit, appropriate, and control foreign political crises. Not doing this amounts to “dithering” or “failing to lead.” It may be that it really doesn’t occur to these critics that it is not the responsibility of the President of the United States to take credit for political forces that have nothing to do with him, much less to guide the political development of other countries.

One of the common refrains we keep hearing is that Obama has not been consistent in his responses. Consistency can be overrated, but it’s hard to miss that there has been a fairly consistent message. The administration has repeatedly said that these crises are internal to their respective countries, the U.S. is not favoring or dictating particular outcomes, and the political fortunes of each country will be determined by the nations involved. Egypt was a more complicated case, because the extent of our support for the Egyptian regime was such that professions of “not taking sides” meant less there than they did in Tunisia.

The differences between the situations in Libya and Egypt are obvious, so it’s puzzling to me why people keep demanding to know why Obama’s responses have been different. In Egypt Washington had leverage and had common interests with the Egyptian military in easing Mubarak out of power. It mattered to members of the Egyptian regime how the U.S. viewed their actions, so it made sense to exert more direct pressure on the figures in the regime on the assumption that they would be responsive to it. Angrily denouncing Gaddafi from the start wouldn’t have changed anything in Libya, but in addition to endangering U.S. embassy personnel it would have immediately inserted the U.S. into a conflict that has nothing to do with us.

As it did in Iran, the administration seems interested in making sure that an American response does not overshadow, step on, or get in the way of the opposition. Part of that involves not publicly identifying with the opposition. From what I can see, the administration doesn’t presume that it can or should directly facilitate the opposition’s success, but it isn’t going to complicate their task by burdening the opposition with U.S. backing that could undermine, splinter, or discredit the opposition. Egypt may be the exception to this pattern, because Washington found that Mubarak could be removed without dramatically changing the relationship with the Egyptian military.

Critics of this approach reject the idea that U.S. support can ever be a burden, but more than that they believe that the U.S. should be trying to promote puppet factions that will give Washington a degree of control over the shape of these future governments. In their view, the “color” revolutions weren’t horrible mistakes that backfired and harmed the countries affected by them. Instead, they see those largely failed revolutions as models for other countries. To the extent that there are connections between some of the Egyptian protest groups and instigators of earlier “color” revolutions (and their American funding), we should be cautious about endorsing the independence of these groups and skeptical about the degree to which the next Egyptian government will actually represent the Egyptian people.

Huckabee had another radio interview this week, and he expressed his outrage that his position had been so horribly misrepresented:

Fischer: Well Governor, what got lost in all the shuffle was the legitimate point that you were making which is that we may have a president who has some fundamentally anti-American ideas that may be rooted in a childhood where he had a father who was virulently anti-colonial, hated the British – might have something to do with the President returning the bust of Winston Churchill back to England. You know, I was struck by the fact that when he made his tour to Indonesia, he made a point of going to an Indonesian memorial that celebrated the victory of Indonesians over British troops – again, part of that anti-colonial thing. And so I’d like you to comment on that; you seem to think that there is some validity to the fact that there may be some fundamental anti-Americanism in this president.

Huckabee: Well, that’s exactly the point that I make in the book and I don’t know why these reporters – maybe they can’t read, I guess that’s part of it because it’s clearly spelled out and I’m quoting a British newspaper who really were expressing the outrage of the Brits over that bust being returned and the point was that they felt like that due to Obama’s father and grandfather it could be that his version and view of the Mau Mau Revolution was very different than most of the people who perhaps would grow up in the United States. And I have said many times, publicly, that I do think he has a different worldview and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.

Ah, yes, the heroic Indonesian fight against the British. Who can forget that one? There were just a couple small problems with this. As far as I can tell, Obama did not visit any memorial during his Indonesia trip, and Indonesia was formerly a Dutch colony. Not that it will matter to Huckabee, but Obama didn’t attend a madrassa when he was in Indonesia. Of course, there is that famous Punahou madrassa in Honolulu, but everyone knows about that one.

Update: Obama did visit the Indonesian national war cemetery, which is what one would expect during a state visit to another country.

HUCKABEE: [O]ne thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits —

MALZBERG: Of Winston Churchill.

HUCKABEE: The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

Occam’s razor: Huckabee is just ill-informed. ~Dave Weigel

I agree with Weigel that Huckabee put “a few different ideas in the blender,” but the ideas he put in “the blender” are mostly garbage. It’s not saying much for Huckabee that he just happens to be ill-informed about Obama’s youth and upbringing, which are probably the most exhaustively discussed, over-analyzed subjects of any modern presidential biography. What I find most irritating about his remarks was that he is perpetuating the painfully stupid idea that returning a bust of Winston Churchill was one of the great diplomatic slights of our time that can only be explained by referring back to Obama’s Kenyan ancestors. Returning the bust of Churchill doesn’t imply that Obama has a bad opinion of Churchill, but one wouldn’t need Obama’s family background to have a bad opinion of Churchill. If it weren’t for the obsession to distort or simply make thinks up about Obama’s foreign policy, Republicans would not have complained about the returned bust (because it doesn’t matter, the bust was scheduled to return anyway, and the British didn’t care), and there would have been no attempt to speculate about the reasons for its return.

When I first saw the story about Huckabee’s remarks, I thought that it seemed similar to his off-hand remark about Mormon beliefs during the 2007-08 primary season (“don’t they believe Jesus and the devil are brothers?”). As I think about it, there is a difference between these episodes. The first is that Huckabee said something during the primary season that was technically true, but which he presented in a somewhat misleading way because he assumed it would be extremely damaging to Romney among Christian voters. Almost everything Huckabee said in this part of the recent interview was false, but he said it because it fits into the tiresome narrative that Obama disrespects and “snubs” allies. It appears that Huckabee was also directly channeling Glenn Beck’s view on the subject. It’s hard to imagine Huckabee saying this without the two-year drumbeat of nonsensical foreign policy criticism coming from both mainstream conservative pundits and talk radio.

Update: Alex Massie has more:

The “Obama Disses Churchill” nonsense was a scoop brought in by my old chum Tim Shipman and it was, yes, a grand wee story. But even as a fun thing for a Sunday newspaper it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Yet it has lived and thrived well beyond its shelf-life, spawning and nurturing a ridiculous, cockamamie view of the 44th President and his worldview.

The notion that Obama holds some kind of unusual animus towards Britain is entirely deranged and if he doesn’t subscribe to the Cult of Churchill that’s a small point in his favour too. Obama may lack obvious Atlanticist influences or instincts but this is scarcely unusual. The British press – especially, I am afraid, on the right – loves wetting its knickers any time a new President is elected, fretting that they won’t make the “Special Relationship” the centrepiece of their foreign policy and all the rest of it.

Jason Rezaian makes a strong case against lending any support to Mujahideen-e Khalq:

While many argue that the Iranian regime is too repressive to allow opposition, I would venture to say that there are still thousands, perhaps millions, of Iranians completely willing to speak openly about their attitudes on the 2009 election — but good luck finding a single person who is pro-MEK.

————-

In fact, working with the MEK would mean to cease speaking to the Iranian people. Furthermore, it would provide validation for those voices in the Iranian regime that have long accused the U.S. of meddling in their affairs, unnecessarily strengthening the domestic position of hardliners within the system. In a country with varied opinions on all subjects, the contempt reserved for the MEK is nearly universal [bold mine-DL].

Sitting here in Tehran, the mere thought of the MEK becoming a legitimate contributor to the policy dialogue on Iran is laughable, except to those of us who would actually like to see an end to the more than three decades of animosity between the U.S. and Iran, and hope for a productive future relationship through real diplomacy. To us — and we are much stronger in number than the MEK could ever hope to be — the idea is insane, heartbreaking and reprehensible.

It is difficult to convey just how misguided the push to take the MEK off the government’s list of terrorist groups is, but Rezaian does it better than anyone else I’ve seen. I agree entirely with Rezaian’s assessment, and I would add that the idea of working with the MEK is part of an effort to prevent real diplomacy from ever taking place and to make sure that animosity between the U.S. and Iran remains and increases. The main problem isn’t that some of the people promoting this idea are misinformed about the degree of support the MEK has in Iran, but that the MEK’s support in Iran or lack of it doesn’t matter to them. What matters to these pro-MEK Americans is that the MEK is hostile to the government in Tehran, which matches up with their hostility to the Iranian government. Yes, they’re being short-sighted and oblivious to internal Iranian politics, but what else is new?

Autocratic and dictatorial Russia has become a veritable friend. America will say very little about the Russian government’s involvement in the chronic assassination of journalists and dissidents. We don’t mind passing along nuclear-weapon information about our British allies to Russia if it furthers better relations with Moscow and results in a treaty. We apparently are more worried about offending Vladimir Putin than about offending our Polish and Czech allies. We eagerly sign an arms treaty that most people believe favors Russia more than ourselves, and we shrug when Russia does not, as promised, help thwart Iranian nuclear proliferation. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Hanson has done some really impressive work here. I count three grossly false or misleading statements, and it’s just the second paragraph of the article. How did Hanson let this happen? There are two diagnoses, and neither of them is very reassuring. Hanson and his editors must not care that they are making false claims, or they may be so misinformed that they believe these claims are correct.

“Most people” don’t believe the arms reduction treaty favors Russia. This is a rather lazy debating trick, since what Hanson really means is that “most people” opposed to the treaty believe that it favors Russia. They represent a decidedly minority view, and they also happen to be wrong. Russia has provided minimal assistance in imposing sanctions on Iran at the U.N., which isn’t much, but it did happen. The claim about sharing British information is entirely misleading. This provision simply continues a provision from the earlier START. The cancellation of the missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic was handled poorly, but that is the only instance one could cite to support the remaining overblown claim.

What does it say for Hanson’s general critique of administration foreign policy that virtually every statement he made at the start of his argument isn’t credible? The only people who can read that passage and take it seriously are those safely inside a cocoon of conservative commentary and news where all of these half-truths and falsehoods circulate freely. The rest of the article isn’t any better. Let me just point out a couple more egregiously false claims that Hanson makes.

Hanson writes:

We cannot quite assure Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or the Philippines of past levels of support, since we are worried that our old high military profile would now only provoke Chinese sensibilities.

This is laughable. The U.S. has pledged support to Japan over something as questionable as its claim to the Senkaku Islands, it has continued arms sales to Taiwan regardless of what Beijing says, and just in the last few months administration officials have gone out of their way to make an issue out of Chinese claims in the South China Sea. China apparently responded to joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises in the East China Sea, but these exercises are exactly the sort of thing that Hanson claims Washington wants to avoid doing. If someone is worried about provoking Chinese sensibilities, it doesn’t seem to be this administration. One can argue that it was a mistake to let the relationship with Japan weaken on account of disagreements on Okinawa basing rights, and Secretary Gates admitted as much when he was in Japan in January, but Hanson has nothing to say about that.

No dishonest account of Obama’s foreign policy would be complete without a nod to the persistent lie that Obama rejects American exceptionalism, and Hanson makes sure to throw that in as well:

In the theoretical sphere, we are unsure that America is any more “exceptional” than, say, Greece, since such perceptions are always relative and merely rest in the eye of the beholder.

If Hanson can’t even describe what has been happening without resorting to fabrications and distortions, why should anyone trust his conclusions?

Yes, Hanson is just repeating standard talking points, and he doesn’t seem to be giving any thought to them, and he obviously hasn’t bothered checking many of his claims, but it is because they make up a large part of the standard Republican critique on foreign policy that they matter. This is what a lot of mainstream conservative foreign policy argument has devolved into, and that can’t be healthy for the conservative movement or for the quality of foreign policy debate. This is what a number of prospective 2012 Republican candidates will be saying for the better part of the next two years, and a huge part of it is just ideological make-believe.

My column on Libya for The Week is online.

The effect of the Cairo speech was to undermine an ally, the president of Egypt, by going to his capital to speak over his head to Muslim people generally. This idea of an unmediated relationship between the president of the United States and the world’s Muslims was always in tension with traditional approaches to foreign policy. For the purposes of making policy, the many peoples of the world belong to states that are broken down into allies, rivals (friendly and less friendly), and enemies. But this is not how Obama sees the Middle East. Instead, he sees it in terms of an undifferentiated people who need to be convinced that the United States is unbigoted and indeed friendly toward their hopes and dreams.

The problem is that there is no such undifferentiated mass of people. Rather, there are a variety of Muslim sects (e.g., Sunni and Shia), countries (e.g., Iran and Saudi Arabia), and centers of power (e.g., regimes and opposition movements) with a wide array of interests that in many cases cannot be reconciled. Obama approached them all as if Pan-Islamism were alive and well, and not a discredited and failed ideology of half a century ago. ~Lee Smith

Thank goodness The Weekly Standard is on the case to tell us how diverse and complex the Islamic world is, because if there’s one thing that hawkish Republicans are known for it’s their keen grasp of subtle distinctions between different groups of Muslims.

This “pan-Islamist” claim is particularly galling when these are the sort of people who have encouraged the use of idiotic terms such as “Islamofascism” and continue to promote the falsehood that Iran and Al Qaeda are allies. Anti-jihadist hawks have long been the ones promoting the idea of Muslims-as-undifferentiated-mass, and they are the ones that have been conflating and collapsing different Muslim groups together for years. Now Smith is berating Obama for doing this. Smith must think that no one in his audience remembers anything that happened before last month.

What really bothers him about Obama’s responses is that they have not been identical in every situation, but have varied from case to case depending on the country involved. Obama seems to be making distinctions and paying attention to differences between countries, which is what drives Smith mad, but somehow Obama is also looking at the region through pan-Islamist glasses and doesn’t understand the region’s complexity. Even by the standards of knee-jerk hawkish criticism, this is a very poor argument.

As for the Cairo speech, critics at the time and afterwards argued that giving the speech in Cairo was an enormous gift of prestige to Mubarak and the Egyptian government. I don’t think there was very much to this, but until Smith wrote this column no one attempted to argue that the speech actually undermined Mubarak. For his part, Mubarak was reportedly very pleased with the speech, and publicly praised it. The administration may want to refer to the Cairo speech in a lame bid to take “credit” for what has happened in Egypt, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to go along with it.

So is radicalization a major issue that warrants the U.S. to think twice before pursuing a preferred policy, or is it a small threat that doesn’t warrant sweeping government changes? It seems to me you can’t argue that on the one hand, the threat from terrorism is rather small and manageable, and on the other that it is so grave that we need to make major changes to American foreign policy. ~Greg Scoblete

I’m not sure that the two arguments are quite as incompatible or contradictory as Greg suggests, but I welcome the call for thinking through these questions. I have made both arguments over the years, so let’s examine the assumptions behind them. Non-interventionists and realists argue that terrorism is a relatively small threat when compared to other, far more significant security threats that the U.S. has faced in the past. We also argue that terrorism is mainly a response to U.S. policies abroad with the aim of changing those policies. If the second argument is right, that implies that the incidence of terrorist attacks could be reduced or virtually eliminated if the U.S. did not pursue hegemonic and intrusive policies.

It isn’t that the threat is huge. The threat isn’t huge. What matters is that it is avoidable. When calculating the costs and benefits of U.S. policies, it becomes important then to consider whether these policies are doing enough to serve the national interest that they merit the risk of incurring regular attacks on Americans at home and around the world. Whether the threat is relatively large or small, there is no reason to expose the United States to needless dangers. The threat is nowhere near as dire as warmongers make it out to be, but it is much greater than it has to be, and the threat exists in no small part because the people demagoguing and exaggerating the threat frequently prevail in seting policy.

The latest round of interventionist foreign policy over the last ten to thirteen years has focused heavily, though not exclusively, on countering the threat from jihadist terrorism, and everyone would acknowledge that many of the major policy decisions of the last ten years were made politically viable by the 9/11 attacks. Arguments for all of the policies connected to the “war on terror” lean heavily on the idea that terrorism, and specifically jihadist terrorism, represents a major or even an “existential” threat. Any reasonable assessment of the threat shows this to be absurd, and along with those overblown claims goes a large part of the rationale for pretty much every “war on terror” policy.

It seems to me that non-interventionists and realists make blowback arguments to focus on the consequences of current policy, and to point out the flaw in a national security and warfare state that actively makes America less secure by creating enemies where none should exist and provoking attacks that need not happen. It is also a rhetorical move to appeal to public concerns about security without endorsing standard authoritarian and jingoist responses to threats. I can’t speak for anyone else, but what non-interventionists and realists should be trying to do is to channel the public’s appropriate moral outrage over terrorist atrocities towards reforming the policies that create these unintended, avoidable consequences. To that end, there doesn’t need to be any exaggeration of the nature of the threat or the power of jihadism, but there should be a steady stream of arguments that the threat can be significantly reduced or possibly eliminated by reforming U.S. policies so that they actually minimize the risks to the nation rather than generate new dangers. The threat from terrorism isn’t all that great, but it could be greatly reduced. All that it will cost us is our undesirable pursuit of hegemony.