As Greg Scoblete notes, the chances of India actually gaining a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council are not very good, but I found Obama’s statement of support for this Indian goal interesting for another reason. One of the common claims against Obama’s foreign policy is that he has given short shrift to U.S. allies, and critics have often cited the cool reaction of the Indian government to the Obama administration as proof that not all governments were happy to see Bush leave office. Handling U.S.-Indian relations was one of the very few things that Bush managed to get right, so there was naturally a period of adjustment as the Singh government tried to gauge if Obama would continue on the path Bush had laid out. Obama’s handling of India in the last year has shown that the first critique is simply wrong in this case as in so many others, and the second is not really relevant.

Initially, there was an awkward phase early in Obama’s term when New Delhi was terrified and outraged that he meant what he said about mediating in Kashmir. This was a blunder, and Obama and his advisors corrected this fairly quickly. As soon as that was sorted out, thanks to a quick retreat by Obama, relations have slowly, but steadily improved. PM Singh was the first to be hosted at a formal state dinner, and Obama has become the first American President to endorse India’s aspiration to join the ranks of the major powers holding permanent seats on the Council. To some extent, gaining a permanent seat would be a belated acknowledgment of India as a major power, which most other states accept as a matter of fact in many other venues, and in that respect it is an anachronism and not as important in itself. Nonetheless, it is a significant signal to India that the U.S. takes its ambitions seriously. It is the sort of signal and show of respect that the administration could have made to Turkey, Japan, and Brazil over the last year, but did not. Still, if those count as significant missed opportunities, Obama deserves credit for his successful cultivation of India.

The more interesting question is whether the U.S. is able to acknowledge that major and rising powers do not share its preoccupations and to adjust expectations of their cooperation with U.S. policy accordingly. Washington isn’t likely to abandon its fixation on Iran’s nuclear program, but it should give the administration some pause that it has just publicly endorsed permanent Security Council status for what is, in fact, one of the chief “rogue” nuclear states in the world. This is not a criticism of the administration’s engagement of India. On the contrary, the administration’s correct dealing with India stands as a rebuke to the administration’s Iran policy. Further, the favorable treatment shown to nuclear-armed India confirms that states that never join and flatly ignore the requirements of the NPT and go on to build and test nuclear weapons are not censured or isolated in the least. Instead, they are rewarded with good relations and high status. More to the point, if the administration had what it wanted and India were on the Security Council as a permanent member with veto powers, how much weaker would U.N. sanctions against Iran have had to be to satisfy India? Put another way, if India is ready to be considered such an acceptable and responsible power, what does Indian indifference to Iran’s nuclear program tell us about the rationality of our government’s obsessive hostility towards the same?

Republicans must take care that “exceptionalism” doesn’t collapse through thoughtless repetition into a mere slogan, another bit of political cant like “Take Our Country Back” or “Move America Forward,” losing all meaning even as it wows the focus groups. ~Andrew Ferguson

It’s too late for that. Clearly, it has become the slogan of choice over the last year, and it is questionable whether many of the people using it have any idea what it is supposed to mean. If many critics of American exceptionalism “pummel it into a caricature,” many of its enthusiasts seem to revel in the same caricature. Indeed, they accept that the caricature is true. Ferguson is no different. It is significant that he never once defines the phrase that he believes the critics have wrong. He makes vague references to America’s uniqueness. That isn’t very meaningful. Each country is necessarily unique and not like any other. Ferguson then insists that the task ahead is to “conserve the arrangements that make us exceptional, reaffirm them, and prepare to pass them on, with an abiding faith in personal liberty.” Of course, this is the heart of the debate: are there “arrangements” that actually make us exceptional?

Ferguson also relies on the same old Obama quote everyone insists on citing out of context to claim that Obama believes that “[s]ince every people believes it’s exceptional, none is.” Not only is this not what Obama believes, but it takes an exceptionally lazy critic to argue that it is. It is not hard to find Obama’s full statement, which at least offers some working definition of American exceptionalism. It’s fair to assume that Ferguson never bothered to check the source of the quote he and every other conservative pundit has relied on as a crutch for the last year.

Obama said:

And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

Obama also connected American exceptionalism to the U.S. role in the world when he said, “America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity….”

One part of this is descriptive, and another part is prescriptive: America has an exceptional set of values that no other country has (probable), and America should continue to have an “extraordinary role in leading the world” (questionable). If all that Americanists meant by American exceptionalism was that our political values and constitution are distinctively ours, I wouldn’t object. The trouble is that this is not all that they mean by it. They clearly mean to say that America is not simply unique and has distinctive political values, but that America is markedly superior to and significantly different from all other nations in terms of economic dynamism and political freedom. That is partly what Marco Rubio means by it, and from the praise he heaps on Rubio I assume this is what Ferguson thinks American exceptionalism means.

There was a time when this was true, or at least partly true, but over the last half century America and “the rest of the world” have changed enough that we cannot claim to be the most free or most economically dynamic country in the world. If all that Rubio wanted to say was that the U.S. ought to be the most free and most economically dynamic country, and that he believes that current policies are preventing that from happening, he could say that. Instead, he subscribes to the claim that America is the “greatest nation in all of human history.” Unless this is being measured in the crudest terms of global power, I’m not sure how one would substantiate such a claim, and even then I’m not sure that the claim would hold up.

More to the point, if it is true, why is there this constant need to repeat it and announce it to the world? Even if America were objectively the greatest nation in history, why would we need to talk about it on a regular basis? If a patriot should never boast of the largeness of his country, why do so many people believe they are being truly patriotic by boasting that their country is the greatest that has ever existed?

The first problem with this portrayal is that Bachmann has been in Congress since 2007, only four fewer years than Hensarling. The second problem is that the Tea Party is supposed to be motivated, first and foremost, by concerns about runaway government spending and the escalating federal debt, and Hensarling has a stronger record as a fiscal conservative than Bachmann does [bold mine-DL]. Both voted against Obama’s stimulus package, the legislation that created the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and the auto industry bailout backed by the Bush administration. Hensarling did vote for Bush’s reckless expansion of Medicare in 2003 [bold mine-DL], but Bachmann was not a member of Congress then, so we don’t know which way she would have voted. In Hensarling’s favor, he opposes earmarks in both theory and practice, while Bachmann has managed only the former. Her stand against wasteful, unjustified spending is also belied by the agricultural subsidies her family farm has received. ~Jacob Sullum

Let me state up front that I don’t want Michelle Bachmann to have any leadership responsibilities in the 112th Congress. That said, if this is the best argument for Hensarling, he might have a harder time winning this race than I thought. It’s not really true to say that Hensarling has a “stronger record as a fiscal conservative” when he was complicit in the largest expansion of government of the last 45 years. Yes, his leadership colleagues also supported the prescription drug benefit, which is a mark against the entire leadership. It is not a justification for Hensarling, especially when he has been echoing Republican leaders’ talking points on the health care bill by attacking it for cutting Medicare.

For those not familiar with the story, Hensarling and Bachmann are contending for the position of Republican conference chair that is being vacated by Mike Pence, who may have ambitions of running for governor of Indiana in the future. Hensarling probably has the race wrapped up and has the endorsements of Pence and virtually every other leading House Republican, but Bachmann is challenging him anyway. Whether or not one likes Bachmann, and I can’t say that I do, she is one of the main organizers of the Tea Party Caucus. As far as I know, Hensarling is not a member of the caucus, and outgoing conference chair Pence was a member. Frankly, I don’t care and I doubt that it really matters, but it is hardly unreasonable for Bachmann to be considered the “Tea Party heroine” when she publicly identified herself with Tea Partiers many months before the election.

When Hensarling has to answer for supporting Medicare Part D, it is hardly worse that Bachmann has taken farm subsidies and has pursued earmarks for her district. On one side, you have someone who definitely did vote for the largest increase in unfunded entitlement liabilities in a generation, and on the other you have an eccentric, rather annoying person who has voted the right way on the bailouts, which have been the main test for Republican members in the last three years. One might point out that the leadership’s backing for Hensarling shows that none of the House leaders has much credibility to rail against both bailouts and entitlement spending, since some of them voted the wrong way on both and all of them voted the wrong way on at least one. The news that the House Republican leadership will remain basically unchanged confirms my skepticism that the House leadership will live up to the fiscally conservative rhetoric it has been selectively employing during the campaign. The Republican leadership will be essentially identical in the new Congress, except for Pence’s departure. That actually removes one of the few anti-TARP Republicans from the leadership, which makes the overall composition of the leadership worse than it was before.

There are a lot of ways to react to this story, but ridiculing Tea Partiers for preferring Bachmann to Hensarling on fiscal conservative grounds isn’t one that makes any sense.

You can think of patriotism as a kind of status socialism—a collectivization of the means of self-esteem production. You don’t have to graduate from an Ivy or make a lot of money to feel proud or special about being an American; you don’t have to do a damn thing but be born here. Cultural valorization of “American-ness” relative to other status markers, then, is a kind of redistribution of psychological capital to those who lack other sources of it. ~Julian Sanchez

Via Andrew

You could think of it that way, but that would confuse patriotism with a popular expression of national identity and commitment to a triumphalist Americanism. As I was trying to say the other day, the obtuse boastfulness of American exceptionalism is not patriotism. Indeed, if we follow Chesterton’s understanding of patriotism, it is something alien and hostile to patriotism. It is certainly hostile to the patriotism Prof. Lukacs described in his biography of Kennan, the love in spite of, which leads the patriot to love his country even if he finds much of it to be flawed. Put another way, enthusiasts for American exceptionalism seem to love America because they see it as great and supreme, and there is the possibility that they might cease loving it if it were no longer great and supreme. When Americans say that ours is the greatest country in the history of the world, it is obviously not just a description of how they think America compares, but a claim that they must be in some way the greatest people in the history of the world by virtue of being Americans. It is self-glorification masquerading as praise of something else.

To rephrase Sanchez’s observation in terms of power, celebrating Americanness and congratulating ourselves for “our” greatness are ways for those who feel relatively powerless to see themselves as participating in U.S. global hegemony and American “leadership” in the world. This may help explain why enthusiasts of American exceptionalism on the right have become even more attached to the empire at the moment when conditions at home have worsened and America can least afford so many unnecessary commitments around the globe. It is also why there is such intense resistance to the reality that America is experiencing relative decline in its political preeminence compared with other nations. If there is relative decline, conservative Americanists insist that it is only temporary and the result of a government that does not embrace American exceptionalism, which they then have to define narrowly so as to exclude many moderate and liberal Americanists who otherwise share their assumptions.

The argument for “linkage” between Iran and Israel-Palestine is not persuasive, as I have said before, and it seems to me that advocates of the “linkage” argument insist on connecting the two because they think that it gives the U.S. sufficient leverage over Israel to compel changes in Israeli policy that Israel would otherwise not make. The argument runs something like this: “If you want more help fending off the ‘existential threat’, you have to give ground on Palestine.” My earlier argument against “linkage” is still relevant:

For linkage to make sense, one has to accept that there is an impending threat to vital U.S. and allied interests from Iran, and one also has to believe that Israel and the Gulf states are unwilling to collaborate effectively against this Iranian threat until the status of Palestine is settled and they can all normalize relations with Israel. If the Iranian threat doesn’t exist or if it is grossly exaggerated, resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine therefore becomes much less urgent. If the Gulf states are truly terrified of Iran, they will presumably offer at least tacit support for any Israeli anti-Iranian action anyway. If they are trying to extract Israeli concessions on Palestine, the Saudis and other Gulf state governments have been doing a really poor job of hiding their anxieties about Iran.

It seems to me that Andrew’s recommendation in this post shows that the issues aren’t closely connected at all. Andrew writes:

My own view is that, under these circumstances, if Israel continues to refuse to budge on the West Bank, US interests are affected enough to lay out its own preferred final status boundaries and conditions for a Palestinian state, and press forward on those lines at the UN, regardless of the position of the Israeli government. At some point, the U.S. has to stand up for itself and its own interests if an ally refuses to be reasonable in lending a hand.

This position would prompt a huge fuss at home, but also dramatically alter moderate Muslim views of the US abroad, while also strengthening the credibility and underlining the necessity of tightening sanctions around Tehran.

American interests are threatened if Israel attacks Iran, because U.S. forces and Arab allies will bear the brunt of Iranian retaliation and the global economy will suffer from the shock of higher energy prices, but that doesn’t really have much to do with Israel’s occupation policy. It has everything to do with Israel’s unreasonable estimate of the Iranian threat, which Washington daily reinforces with its support for sanctions and which advocates of the “linkage” argument use to try to extract concessions on Palestine. Sanctions on Iran are either necessary or they’re not, and if Iran isn’t the threat it has been made out to be they are unnecessary no matter what happens in Palestine. If Iran were the threat that hawks claim it is, it would be necessary to confront it regardless of what happens in Palestine.

In fact, Iran is not the threat hawks claim it is, and the more serious danger to Israel’s political future is the perpetuation of the occupation on account of demography and the ultimate unsustainability of a democratic government ruling over a subject majority. In other words, Israel’s government has mistakenly identified the minimal, deterrable threat as the urgent, immediate one, and treats the much more significant threat to its long-term survival as an acceptable, manageable situation. The “linkage” argument essentially endorses this basic misunderstanding and tries to use it to dictate Israeli policy, when the right answer is to stop encouraging the Israeli government in the belief that Iran is an urgent, immediate threat that must be stopped and to discourage Israel very strongly from taking any arbitrary military action.

As Greg Scoblete points out, the reason why Israel’s occupation policy has any adverse effect on U.S. interests in the region is that the U.S. provides Israel significant aid and diplomatic support, which implicates the U.S. in what Israel does. Creating and imposing the borders of a new Palestine will not implicate the U.S. any less in what Israel does, and it won’t shield U.S. forces from Iranian retaliation in the event that Israel launches an attack on Iran. All this assumes that there would be an administration in this country willing to go through with Andrew’s proposal, and that there would be some way of effectively enforcing the “final status boundaries” Washington decides to impose. This not only sounds extraordinarily messy and difficult to implement, but it would be far easier, relatively speaking, to propose withholding all aid, and then withhold it and make the resumption of aid contingent on Israeli compliance with U.S. requirements.

Via Josh Rogin, this Heritage Action mailer represents the latest push to browbeat persuade the few pro-ratification Republicans and a couple conservative Democrats in the Senate to vote against START. As Rogin reports, the trouble with the mailer is that several of its claims are so transparently ridiculous to anyone who follows this issue that it has little chance of achieving its intended effect. It may stir up some discontent among voters in the targeted states, but it seems unlikely that any of the targeted Senators will vote against the treaty because of this. However, as a little piece of propaganda it is worth looking at a little closer.

For the purposes of fearmongering, the mailer is fairly well done. It shows Obama shaking hands with Putin instead of Medvedev to maximize the visceral reaction, since most of the mailer’s recipients probably wouldn’t recognize Medvedev and haven’t been conditioned to regard him as a villain. Next to the picture are the words “Urgent: Who will defend us?” The implication is that Obama obviously won’t, which leaves it up to Sen. Corker (or whichever Senator happens to be targeted in a given mailer). Just below that is a series of photos of Obama, Putin and Ahmadinejad next to one another, which manages to introduce Iran into the discussion when it has absolutely nothing to do with the treaty, and just under the image is the claim that “our national security is at stake.” Why is it at stake? Because Corker has voted for that no-good treaty, of course! As the mailer puts it, “Why did Senator Bob Corker vote in committee to put Russia’s military interests ahead of our own?” This isn’t what he did at all, but Heritage has been misleading people about START for the last year and isn’t about to stop now.

There then follows a list of things that START supposedly does that it doesn’t do, and caps it off with this remarkably bold-faced lie:

And though President Obama claims START will reduce nuclear weapons, in fact, it will only lead to more nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue countries like Iran and North Korea—countries who want to destroy us.

This makes no sense. Obviously Iran and North Korea have nothing to do with any of this. There is no way that ratification of this treaty would lead to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and North Korea. In fact, one way to facilitate nuclear arms proliferation is to prevent the establishment of verification mechanisms that allow the U.S. to keep tabs on the Russian arsenal.

It is telling that the most emotionally powerful claim the mailer makes is also the most dishonest. It is an admission that the only way to portray the treaty as a threat to national security is to make up wild, unfounded stories. I confess that I don’t fully understand why the Heritage Foundation is so intent on shredding its remaining credibility by putting out such junk arguments. The treaty will most likely not have enough votes for ratification anyway even if Corker, Baucus, Tester and the rest vote for it, and a vote in the lame-duck session may not even happen.

Update: Well, this didn’t take long. Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker doesn’t want there to be a vote on START during the lame-duck session, and he was one of the three Republicans likely to be a yes vote. Rogin reports:

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), one of three Republicans to vote for the treaty on Sept. 16 in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, hasn’t yet committed to voting for the treaty on the floor. He now says that he doesn’t think there’s enough time in the post-election congressional session to properly debate and vote on the pact.

“Senator Corker believes it is far more appropriate to deal with major pieces of legislation like this in settings other than a lame duck session,” Todd Womack, his chief of staff, told The Cable.

Barring something extraordinary happening, the treaty is dead, and the “reset” with Russia is in much worse shape than it was last week.

The possibility of a Gary Johnsonpresidential bid is an exciting one, and I say that as a New Mexican who didn’t like some of the major projects he undertook as governor. I can say that I would happily support his candidacy were he to pursue the Republican nomination. That’s part of the problem Gary Johnson faces in a GOP nominating contest: he appeals to people like me and Matt Welch, who are not remotely representative of the Republican primary electorate. For one thing, I’m not a Republican. Not even Ron Paul’s 2008 bid could make me change my registration to vote in the state primary, and I doubt I would change it for the next election.

The more significant difficulty Johnson faces is that all of the reasons why I would want to support him (e.g., his views on civil liberties, foreign policy, the drug war, etc.) are the reasons why he would be persona non grata for much of the GOP. Like Ron Paul’s run in 2008, a Johnson campaign would be refreshingly oriented toward ideas and policy, and it would show many of the leading candidates to be hypocrites and frauds when it comes to protecting constitutional liberties, balancing budgets, and reducing spending. More than that, it would offer libertarians and traditional conservatives a decent alternative, and it might force some healthy and much-needed debates on the security/warfare state, foreign policy, and the drug war. All of these are interrelated with one another, and all of them are huge blind spots for most Republican politicians. Johnson has enormous credibility in challenging the party line on all of them. I have no illusions that Johnson would win the nomination, but he might cause some Republicans to re-think their positions and he might bring some people to take libertarian and small-government conservative arguments more seriously.

P.S. His take on speed limits is excellent.

One might have thought that the main foreign policy implications of Tuesday’s results were limited to treaties and ambassadors, but Jackson Diehl is here to tell us that irrelevant, fading Latin American left-populism has just suffered a major blow:

Rubio, the son of refugees from Cuba, promised in his moving victory speech never to forget the exile community he comes from. That probably means that any pro-Castro measure is going to need 60 votes to pass the U.S. Senate.

More importantly, the House Foreign Affairs Committee under Republican rule is likely to be chaired by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a champion of Cuban human rights who was born in Havana. The outgoing chairman, Democrat Howard Berman, decided in September to put off a vote on the bill lifting the travel ban. Under Ros-Lehtinen’s leadership, it will almost certainly be buried for good.

The bad news for the Latin left doesn’t end there. Ros-Lehtinen has been an outspoken critic of Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chavez and allies like Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.

So our ridiculous, outdated Cuba policy has just won a new lease on life, and we will have a House Foreign Affairs chair who is unduly attentive to some of the least important countries on the planet. Obviously, Diehl thinks is good news, but other than perpetuating a failed embargo out of fifty-year-old spite and complaining about the conduct of unimportant governments what will any of this accomplish? It would be one thing if Diehl were merely observing that there are now more vehement anti-Castro members of Congress than there used to be, but strangely he seems to think that it matters and that it is a good thing:

The much-celebrated surge of the Latin left has been dimming for some time. The new political balance in Washington will ensure that the United States does not recharge it.

Diehl focuses on Chavez and Castro in his post because they are a) dramatic failures and b) growing weaker daily, but that is why it makes no sense to think of an ease on the U.S. travel ban as a “recharge” for the Castro regime. American tourists in Cuba might bring a much-needed infusion of cash for the moment, but the more that America opens up Cuba to trade and travel the sooner that regime will vanish. Dictatorships can usually hang on to power in impoverished countries much more easily than they can in prospering ones. Castro’s most ferocious opponents here in the U.S. keep doing what they can to help keep Cuba poor and Castro in power. Castro’s government is not important, except to the Cuban people, and if it is wobbling this would be as good a time as any to undermine it with an infusion of tourists and investors.

What Diehl doesn’t seem to appreciate is that the “much-celebrated surge of the Latin left” (who has been celebrating it aside from a few actors?) has partly been a long backlash against U.S. influence and interference in the region. It has also resulted from the empowerment of the lower classes, which was going to happen regardless of what the U.S. did and isn’t going to disappear because Marco Rubio is in the Senate. It is no accident that U.S.-backed neoliberal reform governments have given way to left-populist or center-left replacements in almost every country in South America, since these new governments came to power as a repudiation of neoliberalism in whole or in part. If House Republicans want to try to push through the Colombian free trade agreement, they may unwittingly empower the political forces in Colombia that they think they are combating.

Have I overstated Republican hostility to ratifying the new START? Max Bergmann would say yes:

With the support of the four fairly moderate Republican Senators from New England – Collins (R-ME), Snowe (R-ME), Gregg (R-NH), Brown (R-MA) – and the two retiring moderates – Voinovich (R-OH) and Bennett (R-UT) – the New START treaty would pass.

Yes, I suppose that’s true, but that would require all these “moderates” to be in support of ratification. Last I checked, Scott Brown has been following the lead of John McCain on national security matters, which makes it far from certain that he would vote to ratify. It is a significant mistake to assume that Republicans that happen to have a reputation for being “moderate” on domestic social or fiscal policy will be reliable yes votes. Bennett has expressed support for the treaty, and Gregg and Voinovich are possible, but Collins has already expressed reservations about the treaty, Brown has echoed Romney talking points on tactical nuclear weapons, and Snowe’s position remains uncertain. The one new Republican who will be serving during the lame-duck session, Mark Kirk, is so far uncommitted either way.

These calculations also take for granted that Democrats can still count on all of their 58 votes during the lame-duck session. The administration may need just six more Republican votes, but it is not at all obvious that the votes are going to be there. That assumes that there will be a vote. For one thing, a debate and vote would eat up a lot of time during the session. As Josh Rogin reported last month, there is some Republican opposition to holding any vote on the treaty during the lame-duck session:

Senior GOP senators, most of who have yet to signal their positions on the treaty, are also making it clear they don’t support voting on New START during the lame duck session. They don’t think there’s enough time, and they still have substantive concerns about it.

This could be a tactic to win more concessions from the administration on modernization funding or other issues, or it could simply be a way to drag out the process until ratification becomes impossible.

What was revealed was a world of thought in which authentic patriotism and, more specifically, authentic Zionism, were defined by one’s political beliefs. Incorrect political beliefs do not merely signal a lack of Zionism, but active anti-Zionism.* (When the right uses the label “post-Zionist” this is, for all effective purposes, what they mean.) ~J.L. Wall

This is perfectly recognizable as the same structure of belief that Americanists have. Authentic patriotism and authentic Americanness are defined by one’s political beliefs, and incorrect beliefs are taken as evidence of active anti-Americanism. This is construed very, very narrowly so that it excludes not only adherents of “un-American” ideologies, but also everyone outside of a limited range of political and policy views. Indeed, one reason so many Obama critics prefer to accuse him of being “post-American” is that it allows them to impute anti-American hostlity to Obama without being quite so blunt about it. The “post-American” charge is based on most of the same assumptions as the more outlandish “anti-colonial” sort of attacks, but it sounds less absurd. Despite being extremely polemical, it can come across as being merely descriptive.

We encounter this structure of belief most often during debates over foreign wars and national security. One of the interesting, pernicious effects of much of the right’s growing embrace of democratist rhetoric over the last twenty to thirty years is that it has become possible to accuse someone of insufficient attachment to American values for “failing” to support foreign dissidents. To take just one example, consider this passage from the newly-elected Sen. Mark Kirk’s essay on Iran:

As Americans, how can we justify this apparent retreat from human rights? Is the President afraid that public discussions of human rights abuses in Iran will offend the regime and undermine talks over the Iranian nuclear program? If that’s the case, this Administration has lost its way when it comes to our most basic American values.

Kirk is judging administration’s dedication to “basic American values” on the basis of whether or not it has disbursed funding to Iranian dissident groups. Kirk seems to have no notion that direct U.S. funding of Iranian dissidents might actually be harmful for those dissidents by making them appear to be American agents. Three years ago, the National Iranian-American Council was protesting Bush administration democracy funding:

A coalition spearheaded by an Iranian-American group Thursday urged Congress to cut 75 million dollars in funding for democracy promotion in Iran, saying it did more harm than good.

A total of 26 organizations, including the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and human rights groups, argued there was overwhelming opposition to the program among activists within Iran.

“The money has made all Iranian NGOs targets and put them at great risk,” said Trita Parsi, president of NIAC, which bills itself as the largest Iranian American group in the United States.

“While the Iranian government has not needed a pretext to harass its own population, it would behoove Congress not to provide it with one.”

The activists said that the Iranian government sees the US funding, in a program launched in 2006, as designed to enforce regime change, and conservative leadership elements had used it as a pretext for a crackdown.

In a letter to lawmakers who will merge Senate and House of Representatives appropriations bills containing the funding, the group said the money would be better spent on activities outside Iran to promote civil society.

“We believe this program, intended to aid the cause of democracy in Iran, has failed and has instead invigorated a campaign by conservative regime elements to harass and intimidate those seeking reform and greater openness.”

“Iranian reformers believe democracy cannot be imported,” they wrote.

Kirk doesn’t even attempt to engage with this claim, and I’m fairly sure he would dismiss it out of hand. Like much of the rest of Kirk’s essay, he takes for granted that direct, overt American government support for Iranian dissidents is the best and really only way to lend support to their cause, and more than that he concludes on the basis of this that the “failure” to provide such support demonstrates a lack of “basic American values.” Some of these people are so far gone that they actually believe that the administration is somehow betraying or failing to live up to American values because it is not actively subverting another government on ideological grounds. What makes the accusation that much more odd is that many Iranian dissidents would see the halt to U.S. funding as a desirable development. How could it mean that the administration has “lost its way” concerning basic American values when Iranian democrats don’t want this kind of “help”? Obviously, it can’t, but that won’t stop Kirk and those like him from making support for reckless democratism into a litmus test of what it means to be a true American.

Near the end of his essay, Kirk repeats a couple of overused canards that also deserve some scrutiny:

A dictatorship that murders its own people in the streets on television will not be an honest broker in international affairs. A country that denies its citizens their basic freedoms will not be at peace with its neighbors.

Of course, it is possible for repressive regimes to keep their agreements with other governments, and it often happens that authoritarian regimes are at peace with their neighbors. If Kirk doesn’t want the U.S. to negotiate with Iran on anything so long as it engages in repressive behavior, he can say so, but the one doesn’t actually have much to do with the other. Democratists want to link them because they believe foreign relations should center around using American influence to dictate the internal affairs of other states, but there is no necessary connection between the two things. Internal repression does not have to be associated with deal-breaking or aggression abroad, and governments that mostly do not violate their citizens’ rights do not have to be respectful of international law or peaceful. Indeed, the latter have made a bad habit of breaking international law and starting or escalating wars in recent years, and that has happened partly because shoddy arguments similar to Mark Kirk’s have been taken seriously.