As arguments for ratifying START go, Robert Kagan’s column this morning was a fairly strange one. It is an argument focused entirely on political positioning and blame-shifting. It doesn’t matter to Kagan that there is currently no mechanism for inspecting the Russian arsenal, which has an adverse effect on U.S. security, and it doesn’t bother him that there won’t be one until the treaty is ratified by both sides. The pledge to reduce both arsenals is valuable, but verification is the more important element. Kagan’s main concerns about the failure to ratify the treaty don’t actually have anything to do with the relevant security issues involved:

But blocking the treaty will produce three unfortunate results: It will strengthen Vladimir Putin, let the Obama administration off the hook when Russia misbehaves and set up Republicans as the fall guy if and when U.S.-Russian relations go south.

The failure to ratify may or may not empower Putin, but even if it were true it would hardly be a reason to ratify a treaty. Imagine a Senate Republican explaining his yes vote in these terms. “The treaty was flawed, but I didn’t want Putin to get the upper hand against Medvedev.” This takes reflexive anti-Putin posturing to a new paranoid low. If Russia “misbehaves” (whatever that means to Kagan), it is hard to see how the Obama administration is “on the hook” for that. Obama doesn’t become responsible for Kremlin decisions simply because he opted for a less confrontational, more accommodating relationship with Moscow. Ratifying the treaty won’t put Obama “on the hook.” That won’t stop demagogues for blaming him for anything bad that happens inside Russia, but it won’t actually make him responsible.

The real issue for Kagan is the last point: avoiding blame for the GOP. Kagan takes it for granted that U.S.-Russian relations are going to deteriorate, and certainly if we followed his policy advice in most cases they would, so he wants to make sure that Obama takes the heat and GOP responsibility is minimized. Kagan has managed to take the idea of Republican support for START, which would be desirable, and made it seem like an even more opportunistic, shallow, mindless exercise in political maneuvering than Republican opposition has been.

If U.S.-Russian relations sour, it will be important to understand why it happened. If there is no treaty ratification, Medvedev will have exactly nothing to show for his engagement with Obama. No matter what happens in internal Russian politics, the idea of rapprochement with the U.S. will be discredited. Indeed, Russians can reasonably wonder what they have received as part of the “reset.” Missile defense has been relocated but remains an irritant, Patriot batteries are stationed opposite Kaliningrad, Russia has yielded on Iran sanctions and S-300 missiles and aided supplies for the war in Afghanistan in return for nothing, the Secretary of State routinely complains about the “occupation” of South Ossetia, and Washington has shown no interest in using its influence with Georgia to facilitate Russian entry into the WTO.

But the current fierce jockeying within the Kremlin suggests otherwise. If so, then the 2012 election is shaping up as another instalment of the age-old struggle for Russia between Westernisers and Slavophiles. ~Rupert Cornwell

Much of the rest of Cornwell’s article makes sense, and I agree that there will be political consequences inside Russia if the treaty is shelved or defeated here, but I do have to object to the Westernizer/Slavophile opposition he uses. This lends cultural or ideological significance to a rivalry, such as it is, between two camps within the ruling establishment. If it has been silly to claim that Medvedev is nothing more than Putin’s place-holder until after 2012, it is also an exaggeration to say that any rivalry between the two represents a clash between two divergent visions for Russia’s future. It reminds me of the limited vocabulary people seem to have for discussing Turkish politics. If the AKP is Islamist, it must therefore be oriented towards the East and away from the West, because someone has decided that Kemalism must be “pro-Western” because it is Westernizing. Because Kemalism was initially hostile to many aspects of the Ottoman legacy, the AKP must actually be “neo-Ottoman” in fact and not just as a matter of posturing and rhetoric. It’s almost as if we can’t grasp that nationalists in these other countries can be Westernizers without being slavishly “pro-Western” in their policy orientation, and that there can be more than one faction of Westernizers competing against others.

As for Slavophiles, the actual Slavophile intellectuals of the 19th century were conservative romantics who looked to pre-Petrine Russia and Orthodoxy as their ideals. Needless to say, they had relatively little impact on actual Russian policy, which combined conservative Russian nationalism with emergent Pan-Slavism. This had nothing to do with what Khomyakov hoped for. Indeed, Khomyakov and his circle were regarded poorly by the authorities because they were critical of the post-Petrine absolute monarchy and preferred an order dominated by the aristocracy as represented in the zemskii sobor. Several waves of Westernization and modernization separate anyone in the Kremlin from the Slavophiles.

Having said all that, Cornwell is correct that the failure of START ratification here will have adverse effects on Medvedev’s standing in Russia. To the extent that he represents integration with Europe, modernization and political reform, all those things will suffer setbacks if one of his main diplomatic intiatives stalls.

As you all know, my midterm predictions were truly, incomparably abysmal, but it seems that I was on the right track when I wrote this about the 2012 Republican race:

A substantial percentage of Republican primary voters in 2008 overlooked his complete lack of credibility on a range of issues on which he pretended to be the true conservative candidate, and without McCain in the race sucking up the support of all the moderate primary voters Romney will probably gain their support as well [bold mine-DL]. The voters who regard Romney as too fake and too unprincipled will probably be split several ways by a large field of candidates, and the new Republican rules for awarding delegates will benefit the candidate who is best able to compete in many different kinds of states and who has the resources and organization to have a campaign presence across the country. All of that leaves Romney with a decent chance at the nomination.

It isn’t to the credit of moderate Republicans that they favor Romney so heavily, but Romney has always been the obvious candidate for them for a lack of viable alternatives. What I find intriguing about the extent of moderate Republican support for Romney is that it exists despite Romney’s desperate effort to reject everything he ever did that once made him appealing to moderate Republicans. Perhaps moderate Republicans put their hope in Romney’s later reversion back to what he was in the early 2000s, or perhaps they assume that Romney doesn’t really believe the hard-line rhetoric he’s spouting these days. This puts Romney back in his old position of actively courting the conservative voters who won’t trust him while eagerly repudiating the actual record that moderates admire. The pandering to conservatives hasn’t significantly improved his standing with them after all these years, but strangely it hasn’t caused moderates to abandon him.

There is a long way to go until Iowa, but the nomination is Romney’s to lose. I find that somewhat amusing, since Romney and the GOP clearly deserve one another, and Romney is unlikeable enough that Obama’s chances of re-election get much better with him as the opponent.

The Senate should heed the will of the voters and either reject the treaty or amend it so that it doesn’t weaken our national defense. ~John Bolton

I know, Bolton will be Bolton, but this has to be the sorriest bit of self-serving election analysis ever written. The Senate should heed the “will of the voters” by making New START more acceptable to John Bolton? Every activist and advocate is going to try to claim popular support for his position, but few of them have as little evidence that “the will of the voters” supports his position as Bolton does.

After the negotiation of the Moscow Treaty in 2002, the public was overwhelmingly in favor of the agreement:

An overwhelming majority supports the 2002 US-Russian nuclear weapons reduction agreement. A May 2002 Gallup poll found 82% approval for the “agreement between the United States and Russia to substantially reduce the number of nuclear weapons in each of these countries.” Only 11% disapproved. At the same time, Time/CNN found 85% in favor of “a treaty between Russia and the US to reduce the number of nuclear weapons of each country.” Again, a mere 11% opposed the deal. In the same poll, a near-unanimous 90% said that it was at least somewhat important (62% very important) to them that the two sides reached this agreement.

On New Start, an April 2010 Quinnipiac poll found public support for ratification at 60-33%. As we might expect, a plurality of Republicans (48%) opposed ratification at that time, but independents overwhelmingly back the treaty 63-32% and Democrats support it at an even higher rate. A CNN poll taken around the same time shows even greater support at 70-28%. Bolton is pushing for a position on New START that possibly doesn’t even command majority support among Republican voters. Obviously, voters on November 2 weren’t voting the way they did because of an arms reduction treaty, and there is no remotely credible way to claim that the election outcome was a rejection of Obama’s foreign policy. Evidently, a large majority of voters supports the treaty Bolton is disingenuously claiming they reject.

New START doesn’t need to be overwhelmingly popular, because it is worth ratifying on the merits. As it happens, it is also overwhelmingly popular according to the relevant polling. However, as we all understand, strong popular support doesn’t necessarily mean anything when it comes to foreign policy and national security matters, because such decisions are not outpourings of the will of the people. Senate Republicans will either embrace specious complaints about limits on missile defense and other distractions, or they won’t, but it will have nothing to do with the election. What the midterms have done is to increase the number of Senate Republicans in the new Congress, which makes ratification that much more difficult.

Alex Massie starts off with a faulty assumption in this post on Mitch Daniels and Jim DeMint:

When Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, proposed a GOP “truce” on social issues it was clear that a) he was interested in running for the party’s presidential nomination and b) that his moderate views on said social issues would most probably be a significant handicap.

Daniels’ problem wasn’t that he had moderate views on social issues (his pro-life credentials, among other things, are impeccable), but that he gave social conservatives the impression that he wanted to downgrade and push aside their priorities. The “truce” proposal didn’t make much sense, but it didn’t really threaten social conservatives, either. Daniels made the mistake of thinking that having a very good record on social issues gave him the freedom to propose such a “truce.”* He has since learned otherwise.

One of the difficulties Daniels faces is that social conservatives already believe they have been given short shrift. They believe they are taken for granted, used to get Republicans elected, and then carefully ignored the rest of the time. In their view, a “truce” on social issues would simply confirm the low priority party leaders give to their main issues. Their complaints are largely valid, but they show why the “truce” proposal was irrelevant. It’s not as if the Republican leadership failed to notice that it was creating huge deficits because it was so preoccupied with trying to restrict abortion.

Social conservatives are the main neglected, under-served constituency in the Republican Party, but most of them seem willing to keep putting up with this treatment for some reason. A lot of people have noticed that Tea Partiers also tend to be very socially conservative, because most Tea Partiers are rank-and-file conservative Republicans, but what has been clear is that these socially conservative Tea Partiers have made fiscal and economic issues their top priority. In effect, they have endorsed the “truce” that some activist groups and politicians find so offensive. This is what makes all of the kvetching about Daniels’ proposal so redundant: a great many social conservatives agree that putting our fiscal house in order is the most pressing issue, which was Daniels’ point.

* Daniels keeps running into resistance whenever he attempts to think creatively about policy problems, or simply whenever he tries to think. Every constituency in the party demands that candidates jump through its hoops, and it doesn’t matter that this has the effect of stifling and stopping debate before it begins. Daniels has supposedly “offended” or “alienated” every major constituency in the party because he has tried to speak intelligently about contemporary problems rather than recite brain-numbing slogans that haven’t been relevant in 20 years. The reaction to Daniels over the last few months is proof that the shameless, ridiculous pandering Romney has engaged in for the last five years was absolutely necessary if he wanted to have a position of leadership in the GOP. Absurdly, the completely non-credible Romney really is the de facto front-runner for the nomination, and somehow Mitch Daniels is treated as a deviationist despite having more credibility on every issue conservatives care about than Romney ever will.

Max Bergmann has remarkable confidence in the power of Republican “wise men” to bring the GOP into line for START ratification:

Should the GOP oppose or obstruct START explicitly, almost every editorial board in the country will rip them and there will be countless stories about the far-right shift of the Republican party. Foreign policy heavies like James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, George Schultz, among others, will likely rebuke the leadership and perhaps even leave the party [bold mine-DL]. Therefore if McConnell is willing to oppose START it provides clear evidence that their partisan obstructionism and their significant lurch to the right over the last two years was not just some temporary tactical approach.

Bergmann seems to think that the Senate Republican leadership wouldn’t welcome most or all of these developments. It would be very useful to Senate Republicans to be denounced for their alleged “far right” turn, since it would allow them to oppose a treaty they already dislike for various reasons and portray the issue to their core constituencies as a matter of protecting national security against a feckless elite. The difference from previous rejectionist stands over the last two years is that Senate Republicans actually have it within their power to kill the treaty. That would make them responsible for its failure, but there is no reason to think they would have a problem accepting responsibility for that. According to Heritage’s deceptive talking points, START subverts national security, and all any Republican Senator has to do when challenged on his treaty vote is to recite the misinformation Heritage has given his staffers. Yes, they would be repeating falsehoods, but their core supporters would eat it up. Why would they not want to receive the praise National Review and other conservative outlets will heap on them for their “courage”?

Perversely, widespread criticism from the editorial pages would allow the ultimate establishmentarian McConnell to pose as some sort of independent-minded critic of the Washington consensus. The protestations of prominent realists would be music to their ears, since most national security conservatives hold Baker, Scowcroft et al. in low esteem for one reason or another. For many Republican hawks, defeating START and driving the remaining old guard of realists out of the GOP would be an ideal outcome. Unfortunately, most of the GOP’s political incentives are on the side of rejecting the treaty.

Think about it. If the treaty is voted on in the lame-duck session, Republicans could offer near-unanimous opposition on the grounds that the treaty is “too important” to be “rammed through” in the lame-duck session. This is what some of them are saying now, and it is why it is not clear whether there will even be a vote. If the treaty doesn’t get voted on before next year, the entire process has to start over and a Foreign Relations Committee with a different composition will rehash the issue for weeks or months. The committee vote will be more evenly split than it was last time, and the hill will be that much steeper to climb when it comes to the floor vote. After the new Congress begins, ratification will require fourteen Republican votes. When you have Rand Paul indicating that he will probably vote no, there are not fourteen Republican yeas to be found.

Annoyingly, defeating or significantly delaying ratification works to the GOP’s advantage, since the failure to ratify the treaty ultimately reflects poorly on Obama, and the defeat of START will deprive Obama of one of the main genuine foreign policy achievements of his first two years in office. If McConnell’s top goal is to ensure that Obama is a one-term President, as he claims that it is, why would he and his colleagues support the treaty and give Obama a clear win? It’s not as if the future Republican nominee will mind, since virtually every major contender for the 2012 nomination has denounced Obama’s overall foreign policy and some, such as Romney, have spent a fair amount of time attacking START specifically.

It could be that opposition to the treaty will simply be an expression of a deeper distrust of Obama, which makes ratification that much less likely. As Ambassador Richard Burt said recently (via Democracy Arsenal):

But there is a deeper and more difficult problem here… As people describe it to me, Kyl is part of a number of Republican members of the Senate that are more worried about Obama. And this almost kind of reminds you of some of the rhetoric you’ve heard over the last two years. And the argument is this:

Yes the treaty has some problems, but they’re not big problems, and under normal circumstances we could support it. But you know this guy Obama has talked about eliminating all nuclear weapons. And I don’t know if we could support a treaty when Barack Obama is president. ‘Cuz we don’t know where he is going in the long term on nuclear arms control.

And that’s a tough one it seems to me. Because what you’re really saying there is you’re not so much interested in the details of the treaty— what it constrains, it doesn’t constrain. You don’t trust the commander in chief. And that is sort of the argument you’re beginning to hear. And what I’m worried about is if that argument gets traction, particularly if the treaty isn’t ratified in a lame duck session, I think some of the new Republicans who are coming into the Senate could buy into that argument—that it’s not the treaty. It’s the president.

Obviously, I assume that the treaty is already almost certainly dead. I would be very happy to be wrong about that, but it doesn’t look good.

Terrorist attacks on India: “Here in this Parliament, which was itself targeted because of the democracy it represents, we honor the memory of all those who have been taken from us.” Mr. Obama is referring to the December 2001 terrorist attack on India’s parliament, in which six policemen and one civilian were murdered. But he is also taking aim at the idea, common among his progressive friends, that terrorists object to what free societies do—whether in Gaza, Iraq or Kashmir—rather than to what they are. To take the opposite view, as Mr. Obama now seems to have done, is to recognize that terrorists can never be mollified by political concessions, and that democracies live under a common threat. If that’s true of the U.S. and India, why not of the U.S. and Israel as well? ~Bret Stephens

Stephens is at his tendentious best here. There is nothing in this remark that tells us whether Obama was or was not “taking aim” at the blindingly obvious truth that terrorists launch attacks to force changes in policy. Jihadis from Kashmir don’t care whether India is a democracy. They care very much that India refuses to give up control over Kashmir. They targeted the parliament because they wanted to strike at a symbol of the Indian government. The effect of the attack was to harden Indian opinion against them, so in that respect it was a total failure, but the goal was not to strike at a Symbol of Democracy.

Inasmuch as the Indian government considers the status of Kashmir to be settled and unqestionable, Indian policy will never change, but that doesn’t mean that Kashmiri militants hate India because of its freedom. Of course, terrorists can be mollified by political concessions. This is another annoying truth that hegemonists never like to admit (at least when it involves countries they like). If Chechnya were independent and recognized by Russia tomorrow, Chechen attacks on Russians and Russian interests would disappear. Russia is not willing to accept this, and so violent Chechen resistance continues. Sometimes the price for ending resistance is too high, so people tell themselves stories that making concessions never works anyway. Of course, concessions will seem pointless if you assume that they will fail before they are even offered, which is the reason why Stephens and those like him keep claiming that nothing can ever come from making concessions.

It’s also worth emphasizing that “democracies” don’t live under a common threat. Democracies that rule over or occupy disputed territories face the threat of terrorist attacks from the people whose land they occupy and their sympathizers. Brazil, Malaysia, Japan and Taiwan do not really live under a common threat, nor do Sweden, Greece and Lithuania have anything to fear. U.S.-Indian military cooperation is good for strengthening relations with India, and a good relationship with India is in the American interest, but it really has nothing to do with India’s form of government and has very little to do with the security threats it faces. Fortunately, the U.S.-Indian relationship is based on much more than a shared loathing for jihadism and the experience of terrorist attacks.

Jonah Goldberg has rushed to the defense of American exceptionalism. He points out that scholars have used the phrase to describe the distinctive origins of the United States, which is true and fairly irrelevant to the current debate.

It is irrelevant because the people advocating on behalf of American exceptionalism in contemporary debates don’t limit its meaning to the recognition of America’s distinctive origins, constitution, and values. They also routinely lie about Obama’s views about American exceptionalism, so it is a bit rich to say that Kinsley and Beinart are hurting Obama’s cause by attacking the purveyors of these lies. Quite clearly, the advocates’ understanding of American exceptionalism is that America is vastly superior to all other nations in terms of economic opportunity, dynamism, and freedom. If Goldberg wants to describe that conceit as “an artifact of right-wing jingoism, xenophobia or ignorance,” I will not disagree.

Goldberg manages to write an entire column on this without addressing or even acknowledging the Rubio claims that Beinart was attacking. If he did this, he might notice that Rubio’s claims are empirically false and not worth defending. This is typical of the point-scoring sort of argument that many conservatives make these days. If someone from the “other side” attacks “one of us” for making a genuinely stupid mistake, loyalty to “the team” dictates that we bring up a tangential or irrelevant issue to distract attention from the fact that “our” guy said something that was flat-out wrong. Thus, if Rubio engages in embarrassing nationalist hyperbole, Goldberg will rally to his side with a few scholarly references to show that his embarrassing hyperbole has the backing of learned men. The trouble is that the references do not support or validate Rubio’s claim, but merely underscore how detached Rubio’s rah-rah Americanism is from any serious study of American history. Indeed, Goldberg has effectively proved that American exceptionalism as historians mean it is not what we have been debating. What we are debating instead is the nationalist distortion of the concept into a cause for arrogant boasting, which is basically the point Kinsley and Beinart were making.

Instead of being embarrassed for Rubio, Goldberg is indignant that Beinart and Kinsley are pointing out the hyperbole Goldberg carefully ignores. As Goldberg says, he’s “with Rubio,” and that’s all there is to it.

My column for The Week on the likely death of New START is now online.

Neither Ros-Lehtinen nor Rubio speaks to the aspirations and outlook of this new majority — and indeed, if you look closely at the voting patterns in exile community, you can see cracks in the foundation of the bloc beginning to emerge. According to exit polling in the 2008 election by Bendixen & Associates, 84 percent of Cubans in the Miami area over the age of 55 voted for John McCain, a traditional Republican Cuba hawk — but Barack Obama, the first major presidential candidate with a record of opposition to the embargo, garnered 55 percent of the under-30 vote. This year’s election also saw the second serious challenge in as many elections from a Cuban-American politician running in a Florida House race on a platform of engaging with Cuba. Joe Garcia, a former leader of Mas Canosa’s Cuban American National Foundation who has reinvented himself as a Cuba policy reformer, got 42 percent of the vote against Cuba-hardliner David Rivera — a loss, but in an exile-heavy district and an election year that favored Republicans, a hopeful sign for the future. ~Arturo Lopez-Levy

Ros-Lehtinen and Rubio’s older exile mentality is representative of a broader problem Republicans have had in thinking about all kinds of policy, but especially foreign policy. It is almost as if these people are in a time warp and the last twenty years have not really happened. We see this in the support for an absurdly outdated Cuba embargo policy that Cuban-Americans themselves increasingly reject, fanciful confidence in democracy promotion in the Near East on the basis of what happened during the “third wave” of democratization at the end of the Cold War, and wistful nostalgia for the “good old days” of Kemalist military dominance in Turkey. As far as Russia is concerned, it is as though the Cold War never really ended and Republicans remain committed to containment of Russia when containment has long since ceased to serve any American interest. It is not just that Republican leaders are losing young voters, but also that they are losing young voters because they seem incapable of adapting to the world as it is today. Part of this is reliance on the votes of older voters who are wedded to worldviews that have decreasing relevance, but part of it is simply a lack of imagination and a failure to pay attention. This may be most obvious with regard to Cuba policy, but it is typical of Republican foreign policy views across the board.