Evidently, Michael Barone wanted to write a column about his admiration for Joe Lieberman, but he needed to come up with some way to make a politically unimportant retirement seem important, and he needed to manufacture a connection to the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s inaugural address. So Barone ties together Sargent Shriver’s passing with the retirement, which manages to insult the memory of Shriver at the same time that it concocts a far-fetched “link” between Lieberman and JFK.

Shriver was an admirable, principled, and conscientious man who respected the dignity and sanctity of human life, and he also happened to be a contemporary and in-law of Kennedy. Not only did Shriver represent a “link” with JFK, but he represented a particular culture of white ethnic Catholic Democratic politics that has been gradually disappearing for the last fifty years. A pro-life Catholic, Shriver had been a founding member of the America First Committee, and more famously he was also on the 1972 antiwar ticket with George McGovern. In short, he represented much of what was good in the Democratic Party of his time.

None of these things describes Lieberman. He represented the revival of militarism and hawkish foreign policy among Democratic Party leaders during the 1990s and early 2000s, and he was also resolutely opposed to protections for the unborn. He also had no personal connection to Kennedy at all, which makes Barone’s pairing of him with Shriver that much more forced and obnoxious. In fact, virtually the only things that he and Kennedy shared were membership in the Democratic Party and an impulse to support unwise military interventions all around the world, and after 2006 Lieberman couldn’t even claim to belong to the same party anymore. Except for his fondness for militarism, it is hard to see what real “link” with Kennedy Lieberman could have. The one area of policy where Kennedy was most often and most clearly wrong is the one that conservatives insist on emphasizing as his true legacy.

Notably, Barone has nothing to say about any of Shriver’s pro-life and antiwar convictions, because he is writing mainly to offer a tribute to Lieberman as the keeper of Kennedy’s legacy. In short, he uses the death of a good man as nothing more than a springboard to launch into a paean to an increasingly irrelevant warmonger.

There is only one thing the United States needs to do for Colombia right now: Pass the free-trade agreement negotiated and signed five years ago. The agreement has economic benefits for both nations. Failure to ratify it this year would be a slap in the face to Colombia’s new president and the Colombian people. Rewarding Colombians for their democratic progress would seem to be a no-brainer. But the administration shows no inclination to push the agreement forward, even with the new free-trade-oriented Republican House sure to pass it. Labor leaders, of course, oppose all free-trade agreements. And some human rights groups still want to punish Colombia for abuses committed years ago, and some in the administration agree.

In Egypt, the human rights abuses are not a decade old. ~Robert Kagan

Kagan makes it sound as if these abuses occurred in the late 1990s or earlier. In fact, dozens of Colombian union members were murdered in 2007 and 2008, and just in 2009 forty-eight Colombian union members were murdered. 2010 was reportedly no better, as murders of trade unionists were up in 2010 compared to the previous year as of September. Colombia reportedly leads the world in violent deaths of union members. One of the standing objections to the agreement from American unions and Colombian workers is that it would create trade preferences for Colombia without securing the rights of Colombian labor, which are under constant threat from violence and intimidation. Maybe supporters of the Colombian FTA can argue that the benefits of the agreement outweigh the ongoing abuses of labor that will continue, but it is telling that advocates have to minimize and obscure the objections to the FTA to make their case.

Lauren Damme at the New American Foundation wrote a paper outlining the problems with the Colombian FTA. Damme wrote:

The deal would reward egregious labor and human rights violations, bring minimal benefits to the U.S. economy, and have destabilizing impacts on Colombia — which will be paid for by American taxpayers in the form of U.S. aid.

Perhaps advocates of the deal could say that the murders are horrible, but the Colombian government shouldn’t be penalized for them. Damme explains why this is mistaken:

First, Colombia is infamously known as the most dangerous country in the world for unionists, but less well-known are the series of scandals that plagued Uribe’s tenure, including widespread party connections between Uribe’s close advisers and relatives to “demilitarized” paramilitaries, illegal wire-tapping of human and labor rights activists by DAS, the Colombian equivalent of the CIA, and the “falsos positivos” scandals in which the military murdered over 2,000 civilians and then dressed them as guerrillas to claim progress in Colombia’s internal war.

None of this may change with incoming president Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s handpicked successor who assumes power on Aug. 7, 2010. As former minister of defense and a closely held member of Uribe’s party, Santos’s proximity to these scandals means he will not take office with a clean slate, but must earn support by respecting human and labor rights as well as the independence of Colombia’s courts.

All of a sudden, the “enlightened democratic leadership” of Uribe and the “no-brainer” of a free trade agreement aren’t quite what Kagan made them out to be.

So why should Americans care? After all, it might not be in the interest of Colombian workers, but it will help our economic recovery, right? Well, any boost from this deal would be small indeed:

In reality, that “entire” market will represent (about two decades down the line after full implementation of the FTA) less than a 0.05 percent increase in U.S. gross domestic product, and the International Trade Commission predicts that the FTA will have “minimal or no effect on output or employment for most sectors in the U.S. economy.”

So this is a free trade agreement that does essentially nothing for the American economy. Inevitably, reduced barriers between the U.S. and Colombia will cause some Americans to lose their jobs as businesses relocate and cause dislocation in local communities here. The deal is pretty obviously a political reward being handed out to a government that the previous administration wanted to bolster. In exchange for negligible benefits to the U.S., Colombian agricultural labor would be impoverished:

While the Colombia FTA would likely confer few benefits on U.S. workers, its effect on Colombian workers would be severely negative. In particular, the FTA would be devastating to rural agricultural laborers, who constitute 20 percent of the country’s employment, provide 40 percent of its domestic food consumptionand generate 8 percent of Colombia’s GDP. By tearing down barriers to U.S. agricultural products, the FTA would put Colombia’s farmers in competition with giant U.S. agri-business firms subsidized by tax dollars. It is widely expected that thousands of rural workers would be displaced as cheap U.S. farm products — particularly rice, corn and beans — flood Colombia. Oxfam Colombia estimates that at least 15,000 rural jobs will be lost and small farmers’ incomes, which average less than $3.90 per day, will be reduced by almost half.

All of this will contribute to deepening inequality and stratification in Colombia. As Damme says, it will add to the numbers of farmers who will be forced to turn to growing illegal cash crops or violence. None of this is healthy for Colombian political development or stability. As long as the U.S. is waging its pointless drug war in Colombia, it makes even less sense to pursue policies that are liable to fuel the culivation of coca, narco-trafficking, and paramilitary violence, since the U.S. will directly or indirectly have to bear the costs. The Colombian FTA doesn’t make sense for either party, and it is just the sort of neoliberal policy that has helped turn most of Latin America towards left-populism. Congress should reject the agreement until the Colombian government can improve labor protections and make this minimally-beneficial trade deal politically and ethically defensible.

Noah Millman has written a very good post on Tunisia and the possibility of a “wave” of democratization in other Arab countries. He concludes:

In other words: the international political context matters. The United States’ willingness to see Ferdinand Marcos go was crucial to his departure, and that willingness was an expression of confidence – confidence that the end to the Marcos regime would not mean a pro-Communist Philippines. That confidence, in turn, was in part the result of changes in the larger dynamic of the Cold War. So if you want to see greater democratization in the Arab world, the crucial change in political context has to be less concern in the West about the rise of political Islam.

That’s right, but I would add to this that there would also have to be much less concern for the foreign policy orientation of new democratic governments as well, and that seems even less likely than decreased concern about Islamism. Islamist or not, if a new Egyptian or Jordanian or Saudi government were likely to be ill-disposed towards serving as a support for U.S. influence in the region, the U.S. and other allies would try to prevent its formation or would try to organize a coalition of countries to isolate and punish that country. An Islamist government in any of these places would probably also align itself differently, but the more important factor is the alignment of the government in its international relations rather than its ideology.

To be specific, as long as a new Egyptian government continued to be at peace with Israel and remained opposed to growing Iranian influence, the domestic political program of that government would not become a major impediment to continued good relations with Washington. If, on the other hand, a new Egyptian government tried to reclaim its role as a regional mediator and started competing with Turkey as a regional power, the U.S. might be faced with increasingly independent Egyptian and Turkish foreign policies. Considering how short-sighted and foolish Washington’s response to recent Turkish actions has been, we shouldn’t expect a better response if a democratic Egypt started acting the same way. The U.S. might anticipate these problems when there is a serious domestic challenge to the current Egyptian government and decide that it’s not worth taking the chance that Egypt might act too independently. Of course, in the end Mubarak’s regime will depend most on the loyalty of the military, and by all accounts the military remains a pillar of the regime. Until that changes, the U.S. response is neither here nor there.

One important factor in the apparent success (so far) of the Tunisian uprising is that the U.S. was not heavily invested enough in Ben Ali’s survival, and despite French complicity in Ben Ali’s regime the French government was in no position politically to launch an intervention to keep Ben Ali in power. The external support for many other authoritarian governments and monarchies in the region would be much greater, because the fear of how a new, more popular government might change its relations with the U.S. would dictate a policy of trying to shore up the old order or to restore a deposed ruler or a member of his family.

I am finally reading Thomas de Waal’s excellent The Caucasus. The entire book is a valuable overview and introduction in the recent history of the region. In connection with that, I should also recommend his article for The National Interest from last year in which he reviews–and demolishes–Ron Asmus’ Little War That Shook The World. Here is an excerpt from the article, which contains many of the same sharp insights as the book:

Back in Tbilisi, as the Georgian analyst Ivlian Khaindrava memorably puts it, Saakashvili had a “government by day” and a “government by night.” Washington and CNN studios saw the young, articulate, English-speaking reformers, but they did not see men like Vano Merabishvili, Saakashvili’s interior minister and chief enforcer, or Niko Rurua, an ex-paramilitary fighter who is now the minister of culture. It is men like these who sit with the president late at night in his office, making the big decisions. And it was they who supervised the crackdown against antigovernment demonstrators in November 2007, when riot police cleared the streets of Tbilisi and smashed up the studios of Imedi, then an opposition channel-an episode that barely figures in Asmus’s book. For men like Merabishvili and Rurua, it is more about control than about democracy. In November 2009, Transparency International reported that “Georgia’s media is less free and pluralistic than it was before the Rose Revolution in 2003 and the ousting of President Eduard Shevardnadze.”

These shadowy figures were also behind the massive buildup of the Georgian armed forces that preceded the 2008 war. Asmus honestly concedes that there were plans to launch a military operation in South Ossetia in 2004-a plan scotched in Washington-and for a “preemptive Georgian military move” on Abkhazia in the spring of 2008, as the Russians were increasing their military presence there. Presidents Bush and Saakashvili had a misunderstood conversation in which the latter apparently believed he had been given the go-ahead for military action. It took high-level diplomatic intervention to dispel the impression. U.S. officials delivered repeated messages in private that they would not support a military campaign, but they never said so strongly in public. Here, it seems, was the flashing amber light that made Saakashvili think that if he did launch a quick military strike, he would be allowed to get away with it.

As I am going through the book, I will probably be posting on some of the more interesting parts I come across.

Democratic nations in the region, worried that the United States may be losing influence, turn to Washington for reassurance that the U.S. security guarantee remains firm. If the United States cannot provide that assurance because it is cutting back its military capabilities, they will have to choose between accepting Chinese dominance and striking out on their own, possibly by building nuclear weapons. ~Robert Kagan

Hegemonists often say things like this, as if this is supposed to discourage Americans from reducing our military presence overseas. Since we can assume that China’s neighbors are not going to accept Chinese “dominance,” that means that they will have to start providing for more of their own security. It is possible that this will mean that some democratic states will acquire nuclear weapons. That is not ideal, but as long as China is a nuclear-armed state its neighbors are presumably going to want to have the protection of a nuclear deterrent. If it will not be ours, it will have to be theirs, and it makes more sense to start making the change to greater allied self-defense and less dependency on the United States when regional threats are reasonably well-contained. There’s really no reason why the U.S. should still be providing security guarantees to wealthy, self-sufficent democracies twenty years after the end of the Cold War. The underlying assumptions in Kagan’s argument here are that our allies cannot be trusted to make sound independent foreign policy decisions, and they cannot be trusted to have nuclear weapons. This is never quite stated openly, but this is what hegemonists mean when they say this.

The same applies to Kagan’s warnings about growing Iranian power in the Near East. It is supposed to be considered a disaster that allied states might start assuming more of the burden for their own security. Kagan’s argument is circular reasoning: the U.S. must provide security for the region, or else regional states will have to provide their own security, so the U.S. must provide security for the region. This is supposed to be a compelling case for endless U.S. military involvement around the world?

Kagan continues:

In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had collapsed and the biggest problem in the world seemed to be ethnic conflict in the Balkans, it was at least plausible to talk about cutting back on American military capabilities. In the present, increasingly dangerous international environment, in which terrorism and great power rivalry vie as the greatest threat to American security and interests, cutting military capacities is simply reckless.

Of course, hegemonists did not consider military reductions plausible in the 1990s. According to them, the international environment is always “increasingly dangerous,” and they describe it this way no matter what is actually happening. The reality is that terrorism is not that great of a security threat. It is a real threat, and it is one that should be taken very seriously, but if it represents one of the two greatest threats to U.S. security and interests it becomes clear that reducing the American military presence overseas and reducing military spending overall are very reasonable and appropriate responses to the reduced threats of our time. If we are honest, we will have to acknowledge that while there are other major powers, it is an exaggeration to speak of “great power rivalry.” Granted, China is interested in regional hegemony, and so is Iran, but in what respect does either of them figure as a rival, except that the U.S. insists on denying them the status they seek in their own regions?

Kagan is correct that the only way to make substantial reductions in military spending is to reduce the size of the military, which means eliminating some of its missions:

To cut the size of the force, however, requires reducing or eliminating the missions those forces have been performing.

He states later on:

The only way to find substantial savings in the defense budget, therefore, is to change American strategy fundamentally.

That’s also right. If our existing security commitments make us “the only regional balancer against China in Asia, Russia in eastern Europe, and Iran in the Middle East,” it is well past time to scrap those commitments or at least begin the process of shifting the burden for these commitments to regional allies that have more than enough resources to meet them. The U.S. has no business being a regional balancer against any of these states, and the U.S. should not be expected to bear the burden for defending all of the nations of these regions.

Doug Mataconis speaks for many when he writes:

Considering that it’s hard to believe that Duvalier is in Haiti for anything other than personal, possibly, nefarious, motives, I can’t say I understand why Barr would represent this guy.

The news that Barr is serving as a spokesman or representative for Duvalier has be the weirdest story of this kind I’ve seen in a while. Evidently, Duvalier returned to Haiti as a way of evading Swiss law so that he might be able to gain access to assets that the Swiss had frozen. That would seem to account for the timing of his return, and his financial woes would help explain why he would take the chance of being arrested upon returning to Haiti. Duvalier’s regime was corrupt and repressive. One can make arguments that the U.S. government sometimes has to make deals or even alliances with such regimes, and it certainly isn’t America’s responsibility to fix other nations’ political systems, but there’s no reason and really no excuse for private citizens to be shilling on behalf of deposed dictators.

Update: Barr is an associate of the law firm of Duvalier’s lawyers.

Sadly, Mr. Cain will take up valuable time in GOP debates spouting this childish nonsense, further draining the water out of the candidate pool as he dives toward arguments with John Bolton and Rick Santorum over who is more hawkish. But to say Tea Party aligned candidates (and in the 2012 field everyone is going to be Tea Party “aligned,” with praise coming as standard as hosannas to Ronald Reagan) will bring nothing new to the foreign policy debate within the 2012 campaign is not accurate. We don’t know the make-up of the entire field and if it’s true that politicians like Cain are taking their cues from the Tea Parties and will say anything outlandish in order to impress them, they may well be sending different signals in 2011-12 than they did in 2007-08. ~Sean Scallon

It’s true that everyone in the 2012 field is going to make praise of the Tea Party into part of their boilerplate rhetoric. In fact, I wasn’t making quite the sweeping claim about all Tea Party-aligned candidates that Sean seems to think I did. I was referring only to Cain, who is a favorite of Tea Party activists notwithstanding his completely conventional views on these matters. If we must challenge Tea Partiers on these issues, as Sean has argued before, that has to include identifying the popular spokesmen among them who are ignoring the fiscal and political costs of the national security state. Cain is one of these. If he simply speaks for himself, his audience does not seem unduly bothered by his embrace of Bush’s foreign policy. Perhaps there are good reasons for that. It may be that he doesn’t dwell on those issues, or it may be that his audience is willing to overlook disagreements because they find the rest of his arguments appealing. It is also quite possible that most Tea Partiers are not bothered by Cain’s views on these issues because they share them.

As far as probable 2012 contenders associated with the Tea Party are concerned, he is fairly representative in the foreign policy positions he takes. That doesn’t rule out valuable contributions to the debate from Gary Johnson or Ron Paul, who can also claim connections with some Tea Party activists. The lack of alternatives may help give the foreign policy and national security arguments put forward by Johnson and/or Paul that much more attention. Nonetheless, virtually every other likely 2012 candidate largely shares Cain’s views on foreign policy, military spending, and the national security state. If several of them are closely associated with Tea Party activists, surely one of the best favors we can do for those activists is to emphasize that many of the politicians and spokesmen they have been cheering hold views on the role of government overseas that is incompatible with the desire to reduce the size, scope, and power of the government. Part of challenging Tea Party activists to think about the fiscal and political costs of perpetual war and empire has to involve pointing out that their would-be leaders lack credibility as fiscal conservatives and defenders of constitutional liberty.

Let’s look at the probable contenders who actually merit some identification with Tea Partiers based on their appearance at Tea Party events, their self-definition as members of the Tea Party Caucus (if they are House members), and the enthusiastic reception from Tea Party activists that they get. Two House members who have improbably been receiving a lot of attention in recent days as possible 2012 contenders are Mike Pence and Michele Bachmann, both of whom belong to the House Tea Party Caucus and both of whom have been regular speakers at Tea Party events. For their part, Pence and Bachmann have been better on some of the major votes on spending and bailouts than many of their colleagues (both voted against TARP, and Pence also voted against Medicare Part D), but they are both reliably on board with the hawks of their party. Bachmann and Pence were among the co-sponsors of H.R. 1553, which expressed support for an Israeli attack on Iran. The resolution is not binding and has simply been referred to committee, where it may languish, but their support for it reflects the warped understanding of national security issues that the two of them have.

Things go downhill from there. Rick Santorum is presenting himself as a Tea Party-style candidate, and he is definitely preparing to run, and his super-hawkishness on foreign policy is so well known that I don’t think it needs much more comment. I have already remarked at some length on Marco Rubio’s foreign policy views here, and more recently Rubio has shown himself to be true to his word that he will be a dead-ender for outdated, misguided Cuba policy. The less said about Palin, the better for everyone. Larry Sabato counted and rated 19 possible Republican candidates, and of those perhaps three offer something other than the conventional line. What may be most telling in all of this is that the one relatively mainstream Republican candidate willing to talk about reducing military spending is Mitch Daniels, who has no particular association with Tea Party activists.

Everybody in Lebanon needs to understand something: Israel is more likely than ever to target the entire country during the next round of conflict. ~Michael Totten

That would make it no different from 2006, when Israel targeted the entire country, including detachments of the Lebanese army. The 2006 war was a war against all of Lebanon even when the country was still formally governed by the March 14 coalition and the war was supposed to focus only on Hizbullah. So, yes, Israel will target all of Lebanon during the next round of conflict, but that would be the case if Hariri held on as prime minister and the Lebanese government had not collapsed. Apparently, what Totten means when he says this is that Israel will be more justified in wrecking Lebanon in the future.

Totten continues:

Regime-change in Lebanon would have been an insane policy with Hariri’s March 14 coalition in charge, but it won’t be if Hezbollah is calling the shots.

Right, because another Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon for the explicit purpose of overthrowing its government and installing a friendly puppet regime can’t possibly turn into a disaster for both Israel and Lebanon.

Nina Hachigian makes the claim that the Chinese have learned their enthusiasm for the protections of state sovereignty from American neoconservatives. This gets several things wrong, and manages to give neoconservatives credit for beliefs they don’t have. Hachigian writes:

Yet some American neoconservatives find themselves on the side of China’s Communist leaders in this debate. Though they have tended to criticize the Obama administration for not being adequately tough on Beijing, their own ideal of national sovereignty supports China’s.

As her chief witness for this, she cites John Bolton’s sovereignty arguments against international agreements and institutions. Despite being perpetually wrong and obnoxious about major national security issues, and despite being a former high-ranking Bush administration official, John Bolton is not really a neoconservative if we want to use the word properly. He is a hawkish unilateralist nationalist, and he and many neoconservatives would typically agree on most foreign policy issues, but it is still a mistake to call him a neoconservative or assume that neoconservatives are as attached to a particular understanding of national sovereignty as he is. To the extent that deploying pro-sovereignty arguments enhances American power, neoconservatives would have no problem using them, but they more than happy to exploit international institutions and their regulations as pretexts for infringing on other states’ sovereignty. Mistakenly identifying Bolton as a neoconservative creates no end of confusion about what neoconservatives’ views on national sovereignty are.

Indeed, there are few people in the U.S. more hostile to the idea of state sovereignty as a serious principle of international law than neoconservatives, because they correctly understand that respecting other states’ sovereignty dramatically reduces the occasions for American intervention overseas. Their view is really quite straightforward: the U.S. and its allies should enjoy all the benefits of sovereignty, and states that they regard as undesirable or dangerous should have none of its protections unless their governments fall in line. Hachigian may have been misled by the massive hypocrisy that this position requires.

Neoconservatives are not necessarily averse to multilateralism, so long as it is a multilateral arrangement in which the U.S. is the dominant party, and as much as they may complain about the U.N. on certain occasions they are overwhelmingly hostile to pro-sovereignty conservatives who want to scale back U.S. involvement in international institutions, including trade organizations. Hachigian refers to the NPT and free trade agreements as examples of what a “more modern view of sovereignty” permits, and neoconservatives generally support both. Mind you, they support the NPT very selectively, and they do so as a way to thwart the Iranian nuclear program while permitting U.S.-aligned, non-NPT nuclear powers to do as they please.

Among the cuts in the plan offered by the Republican Study Committee is one measure calling for the virtual de-funding of USAID. As Josh Rogin notes, this is consistent with the statements leading House Republicans have been making about foreign aid spending since shortly after the election:

If the RSC plan was ever implemented, which is doubtful, the State Department would be in the firing line for huge cuts. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) announced, on her first day as chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, that she wanted to take an axe to the State Department and foreign aid budgets. Her appropriations counterpart, House Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee chairwoman Kay Granger (R-TX) has made similar statements in the past.

This is not hard to understand. Most Republicans are viscerally opposed to most forms of foreign aid. It is one of the easier parts of the budget to target. Its recipients are not voters, it is actually a very small part of the budget, votersbelieve it is an enormous part of the budget, they overwhelmingly support cutting this funding because they imagine that getting rid of it would significantly reduce the deficit, and it usually funds projects that can be easily portrayed and dismissed as “nation-building” or worse. There are also good arguments that can be made that foreign aid is often useless, encourages corruption in the governments receiving the aid, and undermines local, private economic development. Then again, wiping out almost all funding for USAID is just the sort of indiscriminate budget-cutting that horrifies Republican hawks when funding the Pentagon’s budget request comes up for discussion.

Notably, the RSC plan designates all of its targeted cuts as “non-security discretionary spending.” If military spending cuts are on the table, no one told the members of the RSC. If Exum persuaded them that USAID funding is properly defined as being related to national security, that might make them more supportive of foreign aid spending, but it isn’t going to encourage them to put military spending under greater scrutiny. So, no, Republicans didn’t vote to cut defense. To claim that they support “defense” cuts because they want to de-fund USAID is to abuse the phrase “defense spending” even more than hawks already do. The RSC supported cutting foreign aid spending because they don’t think of most foreign aid as having any importance for national security policies, and to the extent that they acknowledge that foreign aid funding is directed to Afghanistan and Pakistan they would probably point to this as one of the problems with “Af-Pak” policy.

The overall RSC plan is not likely to go very far. As Rogin reports, “The RSC plan is so drastic and extends its projected cuts so far out into the future that its chances for implementation are slim to none, [Tom] Donnelly said.” AEI’s Tom Donnelly isn’t right about much, but this assessment seems correct. What’s discouraging about this is that the specific cuts the plan identifies actually come to approximately $140 billion, and the rest is supposed to be made up by keeping discretionary spending at ’06 levels. Even a plan that is actually fairly modest and relatively unserious when it comes to long-term deficit reduction isn’t likely to go anywhere.