Jonathan Bernstein discusses the strength of the prospective 2012 Republican presidential field:

It seems to me that the first thing to distinguish is between strengths as a candidate for nomination and as a candidate in a general election. It’s pretty clear that these are not always the same thing at all; to begin with, moderation would usually be a minus in primaries, a plus in November. Some candidates have no chance for the nomination because they fail a key litmus test on an issue vital to an important party group, but would be excellent general election candidates if they could somehow navigate that problem.

So: what makes a “strong” or “weak” candidate? For the nomination, I’d start, before anything else, with those veto issues. Indeed, the 2008 GOP field was (in my opinion correctly) thought of as weak in that sense because each candidate seemed to have a serious issue clash with a veto-wielding portion of the party. Thus the demand for a new, broadly acceptable candidate (alas for Republicans, that only managed to produce the ill-fated Fred Thompson semi-campaign).

One thing that makes it harder to estimate the strength of a candidate for the nomination is the ease with which a relative handful of activists can effectively tar a candidate as compromised or tainted very early on. As we are seeing with the treatment of Mitch Daniels, activists from one faction or another will savage a broadly acceptable candidate with no obvious, serious liabilities simply because he does not give their issues the priority that they think he should. This isn’t a matter of single-issue activists objecting to a candidate because of real disagreements on policy. No one can actually point to anything Daniels has said on foreign policy or social issues that would put him substantively at odds with the broad majority of Republicans, but social conservatives and foreign policy hawks interpret a lack of statements on their issues as something close to betrayal. Arguably, Daniels’ main weakness, if we want to call it that, is his consistent refusal to pander to these activists by talking up their issues.

Daniels is convinced that our attention must be focused on the government’s enormous fiscal predicament, and he sees everything else as subordinate or secondary to that. As far as domestic policy is concerned, that’s a very sound position to be taking. It isn’t going too far to say that Daniels is just about the only prospective 2012 candidate making an argument for a governing agenda. He seems to be paying all of his attention to the area of policy he knows best at a time when many conservatives are at least claiming that they take the problem of mounting debt seriously. Since he has not spent a lot of time governing as a social conservative firebrand, it doesn’t make sense for him to campaign as one, and as a governor he isn’t plunging into a foreign policy realm that is less familiar to him. That’s not a bad idea. Unlike certain former governors, he isn’t making the mistake of recycling bad think tank talking points as if they were insights into international affairs.

Despite making a very good impression with his CPAC speech, and despite having a reasonably good record as governor, the received wisdom (as offered by social conservative activists and foreign policy hawks) is that he is blundering terribly. Perhaps that’s right, and perhaps it matters more to pander and offer irrelevant lip service on lower priorities, but I would think that someone conveying expertise, competence, and leadership on the most pressing policy questions of the day ought to be considered a very strong candidate. That Daniels seems to be regarded as weak or perhaps even fatally flawed at this point tells us more about some of the inherent flaws in the Republican nominating process than it does about the 2012 field.

P.S. In light of Obama’s determined effort to avoid fiscal responsibility, a Daniels candidacy offers an even better contrast with the current administration.

There has been some discussion of this working paper on coups and democracy. The authors have done some valuable work in this paper, and their findings provide some reason to hope that Egyptian military rule might lead to a more representative government. The authors couldn’t have know this when they wrote the paper, but the practical problem for the U.S. is summed in one line in the paper:

In fact, since 1997, the US President has been bound under an act of US Congress to suspend foreign aid to another country in the case of a coup d’etat.

We can all agree that Egypt has just experienced a coup, albeit a “soft” coup that the U.S. welcomed. Does that require the administration to suspend aid to Egypt? It would seem so. Even if it is a “coup for democracy,” which is debatable, isn’t the U.S. still obliged to halt aid to a government when the military seizes political power from a technically elected leader? Can the administration just pretend that it isn’t a coup and avoid the problem? If not, it seems that one of the mechanisms created to discourage military coups may end up undermining the one tool that the U.S. might have to encourage the military to give up power. The relevant section, Section 508 of the Foreign Operations Appropriation Act, states the following:

None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available pursuant to this Act shall be obligated or expended to finance directly any assistance to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree: Provided, That assistance may be resumed to such government if the President determines and certifies to the Committees on Appropriations that subsequent to the termination of assistance a democratically elected government has taken office: Provided further, That the provisions of this section shall not apply to assistance to promote democratic elections or public participation in democratic processes: Provided further, That funds made available pursuant to the previous provisos shall be subject to the regular notification procedures of the Committees on Appropriations.

Perhaps the Egyptian military gets off on the technicality that Mubarak stepped down, or perhaps we aren’t taking seriously the idea that he is a “duly elected head of government,” but if the law applies it would prohibit assistance to any part of the Egyptian government.

One of the paper’s findings is that post-1990 states that receive Western foreign aid are more likely to move from military rule to democratic government. The authors write:

Our empirical section uses data on foreign aid as a proxy for Western pressure to hold elections post-1990. We find results consistent with our argument. We show that dependence on Western aid tends to make countries more likely to hold competitive elections after coups – but this result only holds for the post-Cold War set of cases. We get no relationship between aid and the speed with which elections are adopted for the period between 1960 and 1990.

Democracy and governance funding would not be prohibited, but as Anne Mariel Peters explains in this article this funding isn’t as valuable as its advocates make it out to be:

Most of the debate around these programs has focused on the dollar amounts and the terms of delivery. But a more useful debate might focus on the fundamental question of whether they work. And here, the evidence is thin. Between 2005 and 2009, when democracy and governance funding was at its peak, in the widely used Freedom House ratings Egypt retained a steady “6” in political rights and a “5” on civil liberties, placing it squarely in the “not free” category. On media freedom, between 2005 and 2008 Egypt vacillated between “partially free” and “not free.” If anything, the 2005-2009 period saw greater crackdowns — with the detention of journalists, revelations of police brutality, the imprisonment of Ayman Nour, and amendments to the Constitution that expanded the use of military courts, restricted political party activity, and prohibited independent candidates for president.

Before we start throwing money we don’t have to bolster Egyptian political factions that may have no significant constituencies in Egypt, we might consider that the people who have been railing against funding cuts have a vested interest in increasing the amount spent on these programs regardless of their merit or efficacy. Likewise, it is appropriate that the U.S. review all of its aid to Egypt and determine what can be eliminated. If continuing aid to Egypt is, in fact, illegal because of the military takeover, that isn’t something that should simply be passed over with the polite fiction that the military is overseing a “transition.”

At this point, we simply don’t know what will happen. We do know what has happened. Mubarak is out of office, the military regime remains intact and it is stronger than ever. This is not surprising, given what STRATFOR has said about recent events in Egypt, but the reality of what has happened in the last 72 hours and the interpretation that much of the world has placed on it are startlingly different [bold mine-DL]. Power rests with the regime, not with the crowds. In our view, the crowds never had nearly as much power as many have claimed.

Certainly, there was a large crowd concentrated in a square in Cairo, and there were demonstrations in other cities. But the crowd was limited. It never got to be more than 300,000 people or so in Tahrir Square, and while that’s a lot of people, it is nothing like the crowds that turned out during the 1989 risings in Eastern Europe or the 1979 revolution in Iran. Those were massive social convulsions in which millions came out onto the streets. The crowd in Cairo never swelled to the point that it involved a substantial portion of the city. ~George Friedman

Friedman’s assessment makes sense, and it is in line with part of what I have been trying to say for at least two weeks. It is not immediately obvious that “the people of Egypt” approve of what has happened, and it certainly isn’t true that “the people” caused Mubarak’s fall. A large, dedicated group of protesters centered mainly in Cairo contributed to this. As Friedman bluntly puts it:

But then, it is not clear that the demonstrators in the square represent the wishes of 80 million Egyptians. For all the chatter about the Egyptian people demanding democracy, the fact is that hardly anyone participated in the demonstrations, relative to the number of Egyptians there are…

That suggests that the support for “the revolution” to which protest leaders refer may be fairly narrow so far.

There is a tendency to focus on personalities and individuals in foreign policy debates. Critics of the Iranian government are always eager to identify the regime with Ahmadinejad, but this often obscures more than it reveals. Likewise, a lot of people treated Mubarak’s fate and the regime’s fate as the same thing. It could turn out to be the same thing, but that is not at all certain right now. Friedman writes:

There is a critical distinction between the regime and Hosni Mubarak. The regime consisted — and consists — of complex institutions centered on the military but also including the civilian bureaucracy controlled by the military.

One of the reasons that a lot of Westerners have consistently overestimated the strength and significance of “people power” movements is that they have paid too much attention to changes in personnel and not nearly enough attention to the regime’s structures and institutions and the lack of established democratic institutions.

That was the question that occurred to me while reading Daniel Oliver’s article on Mitch Daniels’ CPAC speech. Oliver noted the absence of foreign policy remarks in Daniels’ speech, mentioned the upheaval in Egypt, and then made this remarkable non sequitur:

A reasonable position for Gov. Daniels would have been to cut through that fog of argument and call for increasing the defense budget. Another position would have been to call for not cutting it, and notwithstanding that the Pentagon’s balance sheet is as unyielding of useful data as a black hole.

These would be two positions Daniels could have taken, but why would he take them? Daniels’ argument is that our fiscal predicament is so dire that addressing it should take precedence over everything else, and more than that he argues that it will require us to scrutinize and reduce all parts of the federal budget. Calling for increased or unchanged military spending in response to a political change in an allied country would not only be irrational and completely at odds with Daniels’ ideas, but it would be a sign of desperate pandering from someone who has so far admirably refused to do so. It would concede ground to the phony argument that a person’s commitment to national security is only as great as the amount of spending he wants to lavish on defense contractors.

The only connection between what has been happening in Egypt and domestic debates over budget cuts is the question of whether it is wise to eliminate aid to Egypt at the present time. Daniels might credibly argue that increasing aid payments to Egypt for the purpose of bolstering certain political parties is almost certainly a counterproductive waste of resources. I imagine he would also observe that the amount of money at stake in the Egyptian aid package is even more of a trifle than earmarks. The possible cuts to be found in the Pentagon budget are ten times as great as the entire foreign aid budget. No matter what one believes the U.S. should do in Egypt, that really has nothing meaningful to do with the size of the U.S. military budget.

Andrew on CPAC:

The reason you haven’t heard much about Iraq or Egypt or Afghanistan is because a reprise of Bush-Cheney would go down like a Ricky Gervais joke at the Golden Globes.

For a lot of the crowd that was at CPAC, this is true, but for the right as a whole it isn’t quite so straightforward.

The pity is that a lot of the conservative movement remains wedded to the conviction that the Iraq war was ultimately good for Iraq. This is a genuinely bizarre view to hold, since Iraq has been reduced to the status of a failed state with a broken economy and a hybrid regime that has many of the worst aspects of mass democracy (majoritarianism, abuse of minorities) with many of the worst aspects of an authoritarian system (enormous state intervention in the economy, negligible private sector, arbitrary detention, torture). Millions may have been forced into exile, over a million more may be internally displaced refugees, the middle class may be decimated, and the Christians have been all but wiped or driven out, but they have elections!

For reasons of party loyalty and ideological identification, many conservatives not only believe, as David Brooks put it, “Iraq is in a much better place right now than Egypt,” but a nontrivial number of them believe that the Egyptian uprising happened because of Iraq. No one can compare Iraq and Egypt and seriously claim that the latter is worse off right now. By every measure of security, standard of living, employment, and legal protections, on average it is better to be Egyptian than Iraqi today. If there is one thing that unites most conservative hawks beyond their certainty that Obama mishandled Egypt one way or another, it is that any remotely positive political change in the Near East over the last eight years can be traced back to Iraq. There is also broad agreement that anything that has gone wrong is the fault of the Bush administration’s backsliding or whatever it is that Obama has done. It doesn’t matter if that happens to be nothing more than the continuation of what Bush was doing. That doesn’t translate into a very clear foreign policy argument.

With a few exceptions (Pawlenty, Bolton), most would-be presidential candidates at CPAC didn’t see an opening to speak about Egypt. Aside from faulting Obama for whatever he did or didn’t do, there aren’t many available arguments for Republican candidates to use. Most of the party’s foreign policy elites have either grudgingly endorsed the administration’s goals in Egypt, or they want an even more aggressive revival of the “freedom agenda.” Most remain convinced that Obama “failed” to support the Green movement in Iran, and that had he not been so averse to U.S. democracy promotion he could have done something for them.

The standard attack line against Obama used to be that he undermined allies, but most of the GOP’s foreign policy elites have been actively urging him to do just that in Egypt for weeks. Another standard attack was that he had largely given up on democracy promotion, but Obama has been moving in the direction of the democratists for the last month. The GOP’s positions on these questions have been lacking in substance or simply wrong, and now Obama has acted in such a way that they can’t credibly take advantage of it. On the one occasion when conservative hawks might credibly charge that Obama has undermined an ally they find that they cannot use that argument, because just last month many of them were complaining that Obama was too indifferent to the cause of the Egyptian opposition. The problem that the Republican candidates have is that they can only gain traction with grassroots activists if they tap into general anti-jihadism and vague hawkishness, so when they attack Obama they must do so for his “appeasement” of Islamists, but Republican foreign policy elites strongly favor democracy promotion. The candidates can only demagogue these issues so much, since their foreign policy elites are implicated in whatever happens in Egypt.

That brings us to the biggest losers in Egypt’s transformation – Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Tehran’s clients in Syria and Lebanon. ~Jackson Diehl

Diehl makes a lot of debatable claims in his op-ed, but this one stands out for being positively delusional. If political change in Egypt is harmful for Hizbullah, the group’s leaders have been doing a very convincing job of pretending otherwise. They have been some of the loudest cheerleaders for the Egyptian protesters. This is not because most of the protesters and Hizbullah share the same agenda, but because they are undermining one of Hizbullah’s regional enemies. They probably calculate that anything that destabilizes a government hostile to them works to their advantage, and they are probably guessing that a fairly reliable U.S. ally will become much less reliable in the future. Egyptian liberals and democrats might or might not identify with the March 14 coalition’s politics, but one effect of their opposition to the Egyptian regime is to weaken resistance to Iran and its allies in the region. The point here isn’t to approve or disapprove of this development, but to recognize it for what it is.

Since Hizbullah and its coalition allies represent the majority of Lebanese, they are quite content with the emergence of “people power” in authoritarian Arab states. When we look at the regional balance of power, one of the more significant adversaries of Iranian influence has been seriously weakened and it will be preoccupied with internal problems for some time. The Green movement may want to appropriate the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings as inspirational models for their own struggle, but that doesn’t mean that they can obtain the same result. For that matter, it has never been clear that all of the Green movement supported full regime change of the sort that Tunisians and Egyptians have been demanding. Some in the movement may want that, but if the Green movement is best understood as an Iranian civil rights movement rather than a revolutionary one it does not even have the same political goal that opponents of Ben Ali and Mubarak had. To the extent that their opposition has focused on Ahmadinejad rather than on the entire system, their political goals are much more limited. As long as the movement’s leaders remain committed to Iran’s form of government, the success of the Iranian opposition in securing some political reforms will not directly lead to the toppling of the Iranian regime and it may never result in this. If one wants to applaud political change in Egypt as ultimately good for the U.S., as Diehl does, it’s simply not credible to ignore its less desirable consequences and pretend that the opposite will occur.

Update: Another danger of renewed American interest in preaching democratic universalism is that it will encourage this sort of argument:

We all admire America’s current professions of support for human rights — and the apparent end to the reset/realist Obama policies of the last two years — but soon some will ask for consistency. Why do we welcome the demise of a Mubarak, but keep quiet about a Castro or Chávez? Are Cubans freer than Egyptians? Did a Mubarak have more blood on his hands than a Castro? Why celebrate the freedom in the Cairo streets, but help facilitate its growing suppression in Moscow? If we are, admirably, to privilege democracy in the case of Egypt, then surely such ideological tilting must apply to democratic Israel over its autocratic neighbors, or democratic India over autocratic Pakistan, or democratic Colombia over autocratic Venezuela, and so on.

One of the likely consequences of eagerly indulging in democratism now is that it will strengthen all of those advocates of democracy promotion in the U.S. and contribute to the ongoing ideological distortion of U.S. foreign policy. Applauding democratization and dismissing reasonable concerns about the consequences will simply encourage all of the most meddlesome interventionists to demand that American policy conform to their recommendations.

Since Raimondo wants to keep score, it’s worth noting that I also wrote this:

One reason that it makes no sense is that Mubarak, his party, and his military backers most likely aren’t going anywhere. Even if Mubarak were to step aside personally, which I doubt, the regime apparatus behind him isn’t going to give up its power.

It’s true that I doubted that Mubarak was going to leave. When I wrote that, three days after the protests had begun, that seemed reasonable. So, yes, I got that wrong along with maybe 90-95% of observers. The larger point that the regime behind Mubarak wasn’t going anywhere seems to have been basically correct.

When all of this started last month, Raimondo wrote:

Before we start cheering this world revolution as the salvation of us all, however, it ought to be remembered that revolutionary regimes often turn out to be worse than the tyrannies they’ve overthrown. There’s no telling what direction these political insurgencies will take, either in the Middle East or in America.

That is largely what I have been saying during what he calls my “weeks-long campaign against Egypt’s democracy movement.” It’s the sort of thing that genuine conservatives have been arguing for quite some time, and it’s a lot more sensible than celebrating political upheaval. It is also what Raimondo was constantly arguing in opposition to Western media-driven hysteria over every “color” revolution that broke out over the last decade. There was a time when Raimondo found it embarrassing that Americans would cheer for the cause of foreign political factions that they didn’t fully understand. Now that it is useful to cheer on a revolution because it happens to target the “right” kind of government (i.e., one allied with the U.S.), Raimondo is as enthusiastic as any “freedom agenda” booster.

Update: Srdja Trifkovic has twocolumns on Egypt at Chronicles‘ website. In another piece, he argues to beware “neocon advocacy of Egyptian democracy.”

Second Update: Raimondo has a typically petty response. Since I have admitted that I was wrong in saying on January 28 that Mubarak would stay in power, there isn’t much more to say about that. Cheering on revolution and democratization regardless of the circumstances or consequences is mindless, but that is what Raimondo has been doing. It has nothing more to do with serving the interests of the United States or the cause of peace than the “freedom agenda” did. It shouldn’t matter whether it is the U.S. government that is pushing for democratization or not. The dangers remain the same, and it is just as foolish to ignore those dangers when talking about Egypt as it was to ignore them in Iraq.

Following Mubarak’s resignation and delegation of powers to Suleiman, Egypt is now directly ruled by the Egyptian’s military’s Supreme Council. It is a measure of how strange the situation has become that many Westerners seem to be celebrating what everyone would otherwise be calling a military coup (which is effectively what it is) as a moment of liberation. Even more than in Tunisia, the apparatus of the old regime remains in place. Dislodging Mubarak from power was extraordinary, but Egypt is now more directly under the control of a purely military regime than it was when the protests began. Once Mubarak’s immediate departure became the central demand, this became the most likely outcome.

There are times when the military’s intervention in politics can defuse a political crisis and provide a transitional phase to some sort of representative government. No doubt this is what many hope and expect will happen in Egypt. It is also true that these interventions typically work to the detriment of popular movements, and as long as the military retains the right to intervene to resolve political crises no government will be very safe from a future coup. The “deep state” might be more or less heavy-handed in its involvement in politics, but it will remain as an ever-present reminder to any future government that it is not really in control of anything that matters. It might be worth considering that the overall effect of the protests so far has been the purge of the few civilians, technocrats and economic reformers that had been part of the political leadership. The current leadership is now drawn entirely from the military, which is the most powerful institution in the country and the one that has the most to lose from meaningful political change.

Joshua Stacher just wrote about the role of the military for Foreign Affairs. He argued:

Although many of the protesters, foreign governments, and analysts have concentrated on the personality of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, those surrounding the embattled president, who make up the wider Egyptian regime, have made sure the state’s viability was never in question. This is because the country’s central institution, the military, which historically has influenced policy and commands near-monopolistic economic interests, has never balked.

Ellis Goldberg writes in a new article for FA today that Mubarak’s departure likely means ” the return of the somewhat austere military authoritarianism of decades past.”

I am as skeptical as anyone about what might come from rapid political change in Egypt, but this IBD editorial is a tendentious and embarrassing contribution. In addition to using the absurd, misleading word Islamofascism, the editors write this nonsense:

Even after getting beat up by anti-American mobs, CNN’s Anderson Cooper portrayed rioters as largely secular yuppies yearning for modernity and the triumph of human rights over martial law.

The IBD editors must believe their readers to be uninformed morons. Anyone paying the slightest attention to the events in Cairo know that foreign journalists, including Cooper, were targeted by pro-regime thugs sent into Tahrir Square to cause havoc, muzzle media coverage, and harass human rights workers. The “anti-American mobs” the editors are referring to were supporters of Mubarak and the status quo, and these thugs were not so much anti-American as they were hostile to anyone and anything that seemed to be lending support to the protesters. They go on to offer this gem of insight:

He and other media elite have it exactly backwards: Egyptians are revolting against Western-style democracy.

This is unspeakably stupid. Obviously, there is no “Western-style democracy” in Egypt for them to revolt against. This is about as dense as saying that the Green movement was a protest against British colonialism. It requires a rare degree of dishonesty and ignorance to make such claims. Like some of the other more hysterical reactions against the protests, the IBD editorial serves as a useful reminder that the judgment of a lot of anti-jihadists in the West is hopelessly impaired by their complete failure to make any distinctions among Muslims or between different groups of Islamists. The catch-all term “Islamofascism” is the perfect symbol of this tendency to conflate everything together. Even if they happen to make some valid observations along the way, their overall interpretation and understanding of politics and religion in the Near East and elsewhere are so flawed that their analysis can’t be taken very seriously. It is the anti-jihadist hysterics’ crying wolf at every opportunity that makes people completely indifferent and hostile to any warnings that come from them.

Greg Scoblete points out that Krauthammer is fixated on the wrong threat (again) when he describes the main threat in the Near East:

As in Soviet days, the threat is both internal and external. Iran a mini-version of the old Soviet Union, has its own allies and satellites – Syria, Lebanon and Gaza – and its own Comintern, with agents operating throughout the region to extend Islamist influence and undermine pro-Western secular states.

Krauthammer is very deliberately re-fighting the last (cold) war, which should make us realize that the Cold War analogy is probably not the best one, but what is interesting here is that Krauthammer doesn’t (can’t?) acknowledge the contradiction between his proposed Freedom Doctrine and his goal of containing Iranian influence. The first principle of the Freedom Doctrine is also the most reckless:

The United States supports democracy throughout the Middle East. It will use its influence to help democrats everywhere throw off dictatorial rule.

If the U.S. actually were in a “long, twilight struggle” with Iran and its allies, Krauthammer’s first principle would guarantee that the U.S. would end up with virtually no allies anywhere in the region in fairly short order. This is not because those governments would be taken over by forces sympathetic to Iran or by “totalitarian” forces following democratization, but because even properly functioning democracies in these countries would have no interest in serving as America’s front-line states in a regional contest with Iran. I can’t say that I blame them. Our Iran policy is irrational, and it is based in a wildly exaggerated fear of what Iran is capable of doing. Western Europe was at risk of being dominated or conquered by the Soviet Union, and other anti-Soviet allies were at risk of being overthrown or invaded by Soviet-backed forces, so their self-interest dictated allying themselves in defensive pacts with the U.S. Little of this applies to the countries Krauthammer is talking about here.

The larger obstacle to Krauthammer’s Freedom Doctrine is that Arab publics apparently have little interest in serving as U.S. allies in a struggle with Iran. Egypt seems to be a good example of this. According to the WINEP poll that we have been discussing recently, 19% of the Cairo and Alexandria respondents favored aligning Egypt with the U.S. as part of the old system of “moderate” Arab states, and almost as many (18%) wanted Egypt to align itself with the “resistance front” against Israel. Another 16% favor more distance from the U.S. and an independent foreign policy similar to Turkey’s, and 15% want reconciliation and alignment with Syria and Iran. If that’s right, most of the respondents don’t want Egypt to take part in an anti-Iranian coalition, and a sizeable number would rather have Egypt on the other “side.” Given the reputation that the alliance with the U.S. has there, that is perfectly understandable, but it is also why it makes no sense for Krauthammer to argue simultaneously for democratization and an anti-Iranian containment policy.

If the U.S. ditched its anti-Iranian policy first, and abandoned hegemonist policies in the region, I could see the consistency and perhaps even the desirability of promoting democratization later on. Americans should want to stop hegemonist and confrontational policies, but pursuing democratization and hegemonism together is foolish. As long as opposing Iranian influence is the priority, Washington will keep finding itself paralyzed when confronted by popular uprisings, and each time that Washington “succeeded” in helping remove another autocrat Iranian influence would grow (or resistance to it would weaken). Krauthammer’s Freedom Doctrine would probably lead to the U.S. trying and failing on both counts.

The Cold War analogy falls apart on closer scrutiny. Consider the example of Turkey, which should be the equivalent of Britain or France in Krauthammer’s “long, twilight struggle.” Turkey has been naturally trying to increase its trade with Iran, improve relations, and deflect Western hostility away from Iran’s nuclear program. The bigger problem for the U.S. is that the Turkish approach makes sense for Turkish interests, and our Iran policy doesn’t for ours, but that’s an argument for another day. Krauthammer and his allies regard a more fully democratic Turkey as a problem, because Turkey has ceased to serve as a reliable supporter of U.S. policies. Many of our regional policies are directly harmful to Turkish interests, and the Turkish public now has more effective control over its government’s actions than it once did.

The AKP government has an interest in pursuing better relations with its neighbors, including Iran and its allies. That suggests that democratic states in the region are likely to take a less confrontational line with Iran than their authoritarian and monarchical predecessors. Provided that the U.S. started adapting its policies towards Iran and the entire region well in advance of all this, I don’t regard that as a problem. It could be a very healthy and desirable development. What would be a significant problem is if the U.S. continued to pursue an anti-Iranian policy at the same time that it cut off its regional allies at the knees by pushing democratization.

Dr. Hadar has written a good column that explains the difference between Obama’s handling of Egypt and Carter’s handling of Iran. He also makes a comparison between what happened in 1989 and what is happening now by comparing the responses of Gorbachev and Obama:

If anything, Obama is now trying to come up with the least costly strategy to help manage American decline in the Middle East, not unlike the man who presided over the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe in 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev had hoped that Moscow’s willingness to allow the downfall of its friendly dictators in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Berlin, would help preserve Soviet influence in the region.

And like Gorbachev, Obama and the rest of the political establishment in Washington believe that backing the protest movements in Egypt and elsewhere in the region, and partnering the United States with the dramatic change in the Middle East – that is, being on the right side of history – will make it possible for the Americans to drive that transformation to the benefit of long-term U.S. interests.

Needless to say, Gorbachev’s acquiescence in the end of communism in eastern Europe did not preserve Soviet influence in the region, but led to a decisive repudiation of that influence and the domination of its former satellites by U.S. and western European influence. Obviously, this is the exact opposite of what Krauthammer expects will happen if the U.S. actively supports democratization in allied countries. Even if backing the protests puts the U.S. government on the “right side of history,” so to speak, there will be no reward for that. If the U.S. pursued Krauthammer’s Freedom Doctrine, U.S. influence in the region would be sharply reduced and would remain so for decades. Unlike Krauthammer, I wouldn’t regard this as an unmitigated disaster, but I’m not the one spouting ideological nonsense about democracy promotion.