No, Russia is not “in the lead” in isolating Iran. Yes, the “reset” is working in other ways, but it is still correct to argue that the last round of sanctions was significantly weakened in order to gain Russian and Chinese support. Anything resembling “biting” or “crippling” or severe sanctions of any kind was never going to receive their support. That is what matters, and on that point skeptics of all stripes were proved right. Hawks like to focus on Iran sanctions and Russia’s reluctant support for them when they argue that the “reset” has not paid off for the United States because they are anti-Russian and they are therefore offended by the “reset” itself. They like to make hay out of the purported linkage between Iran sanctions and shifting missile defense out of Poland and the Czech Republic because they want to bludgeon Obama for “selling out” allies to Russia. All of this is nonsense, but it has more to do with their dislike of Obama’s Russia policy than anything else.

What has prompted Moscow’s recent chastisement of Iran is the obvious displeasure with Ahmadinejad in the Kremlin after it did a significant amount to protect Iran from harsher sanctions only to be berated by Ahmadinejad for its supposed treachery. It is a fairly superficial diplomatic spat caused by the typically careless rhetoric of Iran’s demagogic president. Naturally, The Jerusalem Post gave the story a more dramatic headline to give the impression that Iran is losing its patrons, but if we look at the substance of the story we find that Moscow issued a stern rebuke and did nothing more. The Russian “turn” against Iran is about as real and significant as the “rift” between the U.S. and Israel over settlements, which means that it isn’t real or significant.

Jim Antle answers my criticisms of recent Republican and conservative critics of the war in Afghanistan:

I’d only offer two rejoinders. The first is that any successful political movement is going to include its share of opportunists. In the 1990s, the last time conservative Republicans opposed wars and nation-building exercises in large numbers, you saw a mix of people who were genuinely trying to move the right’s foreign policy in a less interventionist direction (Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, John Hostettler), partisan Republicans who simply disliked “Democrat wars,” GOP members of Congress trying to preserve their legislative power agaisnt a Democratic executive, and hawks who didn’t think Haiti and Kosovo were the best use of our military in light of other threats. That kind of coalition-building is necessary in practical politics.

Second, full-throated non-interventionism is not going to be the majority position among conservative Republicans in the foreseeable future. Reintroducing ideas like costs, unintended consequences, the intractability of various foreign conflicts, and even the level of restraint anticipated by the Powell-Weinberger Doctrine would all be steps in the right direction for conservatives who reject the idea of benevolent global hegemony.

These are sound points. Successful political movements do not require universal agreement on every policy, and the more successful a movement is the more opportunists it is likely to acquire. Such movements also require compromise and an ability to recognize the limited appeal of a purist message. Bringing a large number of Republicans around to being very reluctant to start wars and to use force by having them focus on the long term consequences of such actions would undeniably represent an improvement over the status quo, and it would create an additional obstacle that interventionists would have to overcome when they try to launch a new war.

However, it seems to me that a successful movement, if it is going to be an enduring movement, also requires some shared agenda beyond agreeing on the one policy it opposes. Even if we all agreed that it is now imperative to oppose the war in Afghanistan (and I don’t agree), a tactical alliance with impatient Iran hawks and reflexive opponents of Obama would last only as long as Afghanistan delayed confronting Iran or as long as Obama was still in office. For the sake of argument, let’s say that all non-interventionists cut new “antiwar” Republicans a lot more slack, stop pointing out their flaws, and encourage and support them in the future. Are they in turn going to become less aggressive towards Iran or Russia or whatever their preferred target of vilification happens to be that week? Probably not, because they believe those are the “real” threats we are ignoring while we are preoccupied elsewhere. That strikes me as a bad deal. So I am generally wary of war criticism that says, “We are being distracted from the real threat over there!” In the 1990s, one of the principal “real” threats opponents of Balkan interventions kept citing was Iraq, and within the first two years of a Republican administration the U.S. was invading Iraq. In exchange for a few years of largely ineffective, half-hearted resistance to Balkan adventurism and nation-building, the U.S. plunged into the worst foreign policy debacle of the last generation.

Many of my non-interventionist friends see the new Republican skepticism about nation-building as a bridge that can bring hawkish conservatives more towards our view, but what keeps worrying me is that the same people who now find nation-building wasteful and futile never seem to think that far ahead when it comes to starting wars that ruin whole nations. Instead of a recognition of limits on American power, impatience with nation-building (or even with the most minimal reconstruction efforts) seems just as often to be an unwillingness to take full responsibility for the decision to use force. While this reflects a desire to minimize costs to the U.S., which is a good start, this perversely makes the decision to use force easier and less politically risky, and that in turn tends to make interventions more frequent rather than less. Becoming more conscious of the costs of prolonged wars doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be more reluctance to use force next time. All that it does guarantee is that there will be less patience with any attempted reconstruction afterwards.

Jim was writing his original article on the Tea Party, so it is appropriate to consider the recent forays that Tea Party-aligned politicians and organizations into foreign policy debates. The Tea Party Caucus in the House could conceivably be one of the building blocks of the movement Jim describes, so it was unfortunate that almost half (22) of the 46-member caucus were among the co-sponsors of H.Res. 1553 the other day. (Via Scoblete) As you will remember, this is the resolution expressing support for an Israeli strike on Iran. Many other Republicans not identified with the Tea Party co-sponsored the resolution as well, but self-identified Tea Partiers among House Republicans disproportionately supported this resolution.

Getting out of a perceived quagmire to plunge the nation into a firestorm seems like a very large step in the wrong direction, but this is what Chaffetz would have us do, and many members of the Tea Party Caucus aren’t all that interested in the first part. Opposing the war in Afghanistan while plumping for war with Iran isn’t just an inconsistency or a minor point of disagreement between like-minded people. It reflects a fundamentally distorted understanding of American interests and represents a typical exaggeration of foreign threats. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but I confess that I don’t see many steps in the right direction when Republicans still claim to see an Iranian threat that doesn’t exist just as they saw an Iraqi threat that didn’t exist.

By chance, my column on Romney and START has come out on the same day that National Review has provided Romney with another opportunity to embarrass himself. Mitt Romney seems not to have learned anything from the thorough thrashing his first op-ed against START ratification received, as he has written a response to Sen. Lugar’s rebuttal that mostly just repeats previous errors and misleading statements.

For some reason, Romney continues to defend the odd claim that the language of the treaty’s preamble is binding and restrictive of missile defense. It isn’t either of these things. Romney is reduced to affirming the most pro-Russian spin on a non-binding preamble to make his objection seem credible. Romney also claims that “it [the treaty] accedes to Russia’s insistence that there is an interrelationship between strategic offensive weapons and missile defense.” This is not simply something that Russians insist on. There is a rather obvious interrelationship between the two things. Fred Kaplan addressed this in his thorough demolition of Romney’s original op-ed:

Yes, the treaty’s preamble notes that there is a relationship between strategic defense and strategic offense. This is Arms Control 101.

Acknowledging this in a preamble commits the United States to nothing in terms of limiting current or planned missile defense projects. There are no specific “missile-defense measures in the body of the treaty” that anyone responsible for our missile defense programs wants to have, and that includes the provision ruling out silo conversion. So there have been no real concessions to Russia here, and certainly no major ones. Kaplan also easily dismissed Romney’s objections to the treaty’s creation of a Bilateral Consultative Commission:

This is silly. Previous arms treaties—negotiated by Democrats and Republicans—have created similar commissions. This one, like the others, has no “broad latitude to amend the treaty.” In fact, Article XV of New START states explicitly that the commission can make no changes that affect “substantive rights and obligations.” Its purpose, as noted in several other sections (Articles V and XIII of the treaty, Part VI of its protocol), is to “resolve any ambiguities that may arise” over the 10 years that it remains in effect. These articles contain no “specific reference to missile defense,” by the way.

Romney re-states his vastly exaggerated claim of Russia’s advantage in tactical nuclear weapons, and he completely fails to address the argument that ratifying the new START is critical to making progress on negotiating on reductions in tactical nuclear warheads. Romney’s claim was misleading and factually incorrect earlier this month, and it is still misleading and factually incorrect. The same goes for his complaint that “America gives and Russia gets,” when this is an egregious distortion of the treaty’s provisions, and his objection about counting each bomber as one bomb is misplaced. As Kaplan said the first time:

New START counts each bomber as if it is carrying just one nuclear bomb, even though it almost certainly carries several. This counting rule was established for practical reasons. A bomber might carry three bombs one day, a dozen the next, with no need to alter its design. There’s no way to verify how many it’s carrying. So they agreed just to count one bomber as one bomb.

The thing is, this counting rule is to the United States’ advantage, not Russia’s. We have 113 heavy bombers; they have 77. So, if this is what Romney’s ghostwriter meant to take note of, it’s not a problem with the treaty, not from the U.S. point of view.

Romney remains fixated on the dangers of rail-based ICBMs, to which Kaplan already replied the first time:

First, neither Russia nor the United States has any rail-based ICBMs or launchers. Second, the treaty does deal with mobile ICBMs, in two ways. Article IV, Section 1 states that ICBMs can be deployed “only at ICBM bases.” If, in some perverse wordplay, the Russians claim that a railroad line is a “base,” Article III, Section 5b notes that an ICBM is counted under the treaty’s limits the moment it leaves the production facility (which other sections of the treaty place under constant monitoring); it doesn’t matter where the missile goes afterward, it’s still counted as an ICBM. So while mobile missiles might not be “mentioned” by the treaty, they are, in effect, restricted.

Romney made no effort to incorporate or answer the objections of his critics. He simply re-phrased a large part of his original op-ed, sent it to a different outlet, and reiterated his senseless opposition to ratifying the treaty. It is somewhat telling that even Fred Hiatt’s editorial page came out in favor of ratification and dismissed Romney’s argument as lacking in substance. Ratification opponents might almost conclude that the Post rigged the debate in favor of the treaty by allowing Romney’s nonsense to serve as the main argument against it.

The most impressive thing about Romney’s second attempt is how he has managed to ignore almost everything Sen. Lugar (and every other critic) said in the course of dismissing Romney’s arguments as ill-informed and discredited. As far as I can tell, Romney’s so-called response to Lugar never engages Lugar’s rebuttal at any point. Many people have argued that Romney’s total lack of guiding convictions is actually an improvement over the stubbornness of George Bush, because Romney is so malleable and self-interested that he would never defend a foolish, discredited position once it became a political albatross. What we are seeing is that in practice Romney’s self-image as a well-informed, wonkish executive makes him just as resistant to admitting error as Bush’s willful ignorance ever did. Romney’s idea of leadership is to take soundings from a select group of experts and then act on what they have told him. In this case, Romney has decided that mistaken Heritage Foundation staffers are the best experts he can find, and now that he has received their advice nothing is going to dissuade him from attacking a treaty that most arms control experts believe ought to be ratified.

The takeout, from a first, fast reading: the U.S. is frustrated by evidence of continued Pakistani support for Afghan insurgents, and the war is not going well, according to the soldiers fighting it.

Neither of those facts is breaking news to anyone who’s been paying attention to the war, but the coordinated delivery of the stories to outlets in three of the largest troop-contributing nations to Afghanistan and sourced by the media-savvy WikiLeaks suggests the goal here is to catalyze an emerging consensus against the war. ~Laura Rozen

Rozen goes on to mention that the documents that have been released cover the years 2004-09, so they are necessarily going to provide an overwhelmingly negative picture of the war in Afghanistan as it was being managed according to the previous policy. That was the status quo before the current administration implemented its present plan, that was the default alternative that would have prevailed had the administration not made its changes, and it is also the approach favored by many of the war’s belated opponents. In other words, much of what is included in the leaked documents seems to discredit the way the war was being fought then, and it tells us much less about how it is being fought now. If the goal is to create a consensus against the war in Afghanistan, it might help if the leak told us something significant we didn’t already know.

As far as Pakistani complicity and “duplicity” are concerned, this is both old news and also somewhat misleading. The ISI sponsored the Taliban in the 1990s and had the blessing of Bhutto’s government to do so, and prior to the September 11 attacks Pakistan was one of three states in the world that recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan. There have been elements within the Pakistani military and intelligence services supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan all along after Musharraf officially turned against them. On the other hand, for the last several years the Pakistani military has been waging a major military campaign against Taliban militias inside Pakistan despite the misgivings of many Pakistani officers and their resentment of being asked to fight what many of them still see as a primarily American war. Despite public protestations against U.S. drone strikes, Pakistan’s government has permitted the launching of drones from within Pakistan.

It is difficult to square the careful, strict rules of engagement U.S. forces are expected to follow in Afghanistan with the massive displacement of hundreds of thousands of people resulting from Pakistan’s offensives, but we should be able to recognize that Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership are actually doing a lot of what Washington wants. So when we talk about Pakistani “duplicity,” we need to understand that what we are perceiving as duplicity is in large part a function of the fragmented nature of the Pakistani state in which some elements continue pursuing an earlier agenda that directly conflicts with current policy. We should also recognize that the top Pakistani military and civilian leaders are already doing more than most allied governments would do under similar conditions.

My new column on Republican opposition to START ratification for The Week is now online.

So, yes, libertarians should find a friendlier home in the GOP if their priority is pushing the traditional GOP agenda of low taxes and weaker regulation of the economy. But should this be their priority?

Over the same period that saw libertarian priorities in economics relatively ascendant, we have seen a distinctly negative trend in the growth of militarism and the national security state. In principle, this should worry libertarians as much as government intrusion in the economy. In practice, it should worry them more, for two reasons: first, the trend has been in the wrong direction for a while; second, while there are large organized interests fighting against government intrusion in the economy, there are no large organized interests similarly interested in fighting the growth of the national security state.

If what libertarians are interested in doing is shifting the national conversation, they could do the most good by organizing people who are not culturally liberal but who value freedom into opposition to military spending and the cult of national security. If Brink Lindsey and, say, Andrew Bacevich got together to say: listen: moving the national conversation on the security state security and our military posture matters more to freedom today than keeping taxes low, and matters more to each of us than stuff we disagree on like immigration and gay marriage – that would get noticed. Over time, commitments like that could have a real impact – opening up space in one or both parties for candidates to step outside the Washington consensus on these matters without fear of being trampled to death. ~Noah Millman

That would be a very healthy development, and it would get noticed, but Millman perhaps unintentionally reinforces Lindsey’s complaint against contemporary conservatives. Lindsey complains refers to the “it’s-always-1938-somewhere jingoism,” and he provides a litany of statist positions that dissident conservatives abhor no less than libertarians:

Notwithstanding the return of libertarian rhetoric, the right today is a fundamentally illiberal and authoritarian movement. It endorses the systematic use of torture. It defends unchecked presidential power over matters of national security. It excuses massive violations of Americans’ civil liberties committed in the name of fighting terrorism. It supports bloated military budgets, preventive war, and open-ended, nation-building occupations.

To the extent that a few conservative movement leaders have started criticizing some aspects of the security state (e.g., Keene, Norquist), this overstates things slightly, but only slightly. There are also some cultural conservatives who reject all of these things, and I count myself among them, but as we all know we are fairly unrepresentative. So libertarians have every reason to try building an anti-militarist, civil libertarian political alliance, but they lack politically influential partners among conservatives. I understand that Millman is talking about “shifting the national conversation,” so he takes for granted that the national conversation and especially the conversation among conservatives are very much oriented toward militarism and expansion of the security state. Lindsey doesn’t seem very interested in a long, hard, unpopular slog to reshape public opinion. After all, this is the same person who has spent so much time inflating the size and significance of the “libertarian vote” to make libertarians seem more relevant in electoral politics than they actually are. One of the main points Lindsey makes against contemporary conservatism is that it has become unpopular and its demographic base is declining in size and power over time:

God-and-country populism may still appeal to a large number of Americans (though certainly not a majority), but its future looks bleak.

Lindsey’s estimate of the staying power of what he calls “God-and-country populism” seems badly off. That “certainly not a majority” parenthetical remark seems unfounded. A cynical observer would point out that the only thing currently keeping the Republicans from collapsing as a national coalition is its embrace of “God-and-country populism.” The GOP’s exploitation of religious and patriotic sentiments is not what drags it down. It is the disastrous policy decisions Republicans have made abroad once it has exploited those sentiments to gain power that have resulted in its recent political downfall. Indeed, one of the reasons why “military spending and the cult of national security” are so difficult to challenge, much less roll back, is that it can reliably count on “God-and-country populism,” which easily commands the support of 55-60% of the population. Not only does Lindsey seem uninterested in changing that, but he simply assumes that “God-and-country populism” will gradually disappear as the country’s demographic make-up changes. It may find somewhat different expressions in the future, but it something enduring that anti-militarists have to contest and re-define if we want to see foreign and national security policies less injurious to American liberties.

One of my commenters alerted me to House Res. 1553, which states:

Expressing support for the State of Israel’s right to defend Israeli sovereignty, to protect the lives and safety of the Israeli people, and to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force if no other peaceful solution can be found within reasonable time to protect against such an immediate and existential threat to the State of Israel.

Naturally, Rep. Jason Chaffetz is among the resolution’s 46 co-sponsors. The National Iranian American Council has called on Minority Leader Boehner to reject the measure, but why would he bother? Two of his leadership colleagues, Mike Pence and Thaddeus McCotter, co-sponsored the resolution, and it has the support of other high-profile Republican members, including Paul Ryan and Dan Burton. That tells me that this is not just a product of hard-liners such as Michelle Bachmann and Peter Steve King, but that it expresses the views of a fairly broad-cross section of the Republican members in the House. I guess I can’t stop “nitpicking,” but this seems like an awfully strange resolution for an “antiwar” Republican to co-sponsor. It is also thoroughly depressing that Paul Ryan, one of the few credible figures in the conference when it comes to fiscal responsibility, is among the supporters of such a ludicrous measure.

Why is it ludicrous? Where do we start? First, Iran poses no nuclear threats of any kind at present, so the threat cannot possibly be immediate and it cannot possibly be existential. When there is no threat to eliminate, this resolution is simply an endorsement of unnecessary aggression by a U.S. ally. That aggression is directed against a regional power that could inflict significant damage on U.S. forces, bases and allies, including Israel, in any retaliatory strikes it would launch in response to an unprovoked attack against its nuclear facilities. That doesn’t begin to cover the harm such a conflict could cause to the global economy and the stability of the broader region. There is obviously no understanding among the resolution’s supporters of what an Israeli attack on Iran would do to American interests in the Near East, and there is apparently no awareness of the escalation by Hizbullah to which Israel would be exposed as a result.

What may be worse still is that Israel has less of a chance of successfully destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities than U.S. forces would have, and it is unlikely that a U.S. attack would do anything more than briefly delay Iran’s nuclear program. Even if we granted that Iran posed a “nuclear threat” to Israel, Israel could not eliminate it if it tried, so the resolution is little more than an invitation to senseless warfare that has no hope of accomplishing its objective. An attack on Iran would be a strategic disaster and it would be grossly unjust whether Israel or the U.S. launched it, but there is something especially unseemly about American hawks backing an Israeli attack. This allows them to pretend that they are “merely” affirming support for an ally and they can try to claim that they are not putting Americans in harm’s way. In reality, they are jeopardizing the safety of U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf states, and they are risking the security of Israel so that they may be seen as zealously “pro-Israel” here at home.

Earlier this month, Rep. Chaffetz voted against Afghanistan war funding. While expressing appropriate skepticism, Dan McCarthy wrote last week:

With Chaffetz voting against the Afghan War and Ann Coulter breaking with Bill Kristol, the Right’s foreign policy for the next decade is far from settled.

I have made my view of Chaffetz’s “antiwar” position pretty clear already, so I won’t rehearse that again, but I do find it a little odd that Dan gives Coulter any credit for her column bashing Kristol. Consider one of the main points Coulter makes in her column:

Then Bush declared success and turned his attention to Iraq, leaving minimal troops behind in Afghanistan to prevent Osama bin Laden from regrouping, swat down al-Qaida fighters and gather intelligence.

Coulter cites the main foreign policy blunder of Bush’s Presidency as if it were the appropriate, correct course of action. Afghanistan was the one place where those of us with “some vague concept of America’s national interest” could at least see some justification for military action, and Coulter approves of the diversion away from that for the sake of an entirely unnecessary war against a government that posed no threat to the United States. One of the main reasons why there is still a U.S. presence in Afghanistan is that the “minimal troops” available after Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq were insufficient to prevent the regrouping of Taliban militias that threatened the “American-friendly government” established in Kabul.

Those “minimal troops” were also so spread out in the countryside that they had to rely heavily on air power to protect themselves against attack, which resulted in many civilian deaths, and that in turn created waves of “accidential” insurgents. All of this significantly compounded the security problems in the country, which the previous administration was mostly content to neglect. It is this same policy of neglect that created the poor security conditions in recent years that Coulter praises and wants the current administration to emulate. For his part, Chaffetz objects to the war in Afghanistan largely because U.S. forces have their “hands tied,” which means that he dislikes stricter rules of engagement that are designed to prevent civilian casualties.

It is hard to get around the reality that Coulter’s column is full of pro-Iraq war lies. For example, she writes:

Iraq had a young, educated, pro-Western populace that was ideal for regime change.

Surely if there was one thing that everyone could agree on by now, it is that most of the population was not particularly “pro-Western” as Coulter means it, and most of the educated professionals who could get away from the chaos created by the invasion fled the country en masse. The war for regime change that Coulter cannot stop defending gutted the Iraqi professional classes and robbed the country of many of its best-educated people, which is one of the reasons why Iraq is and will remain an economic basketcase. For that matter, decades of war and sanctions had significantly changed Iraqi society for the worse. So when Coulter says these things about Iraq, she is simply repeating standard pro-war propaganda c. 2002-03. Coulter calls for Bill Kristol’s resignation, but she is still reliably spouting the nonsense that he and so many other advocates of invasion were using to sell the war in Iraq. It’s as if she has put up a giant, blinking sign saying, “You cannot trust a word I say,” and everyone seems to have missed it.

I’m not trying to overlook opportunities for the antiwar right, and I don’t like being the constant naysayer who has to keep pointing out that Chaffetz, Coulter et al. cannot be taken seriously, but just judging by their own arguments they cannot be taken seriously. The “to hell with them” hawks may be up for grabs, but they are unlikely to be won over by people who don’t harbor irrational fears about Iran and who believe that the Iraq war was a strategic disaster for the United States, because these people remain very aggressive hawks who perceive threats where none exists.

When you have a House member who votes against funding for the war in Afghanistan, but would never dream of voting against Iraq war funding and wants the President to “take out” Iran’s nuclear facilities, you do not have someone coming to these conclusions based on anything resembling a sober understanding of the limits of American power or the national interest. At the very least, there has to be some honest accounting that overwhelming Republican and mainstream conservative support for the Iraq war was one of the worst mistakes they have made in decades, and there has to be some willingness to face up to the obvious lies that they embraced or happily repeated and recognize them as untrue. Simply turning Democratic rhetoric around and dubbing Iraq the “good war,” as Coulter has effectively done, merits contempt rather than sympathy.

Noah Millman correctly dismisses Frum’s case for the Israel alliance as a “Cold War relic.” There is almost nothing in Frum’s argument that comes from the last twenty years, and much that has happened in the last twenty years weighs against continuing the alliance in its current form. First, as Millman says, the Cold War is long over, and whatever strategic advantage Israel provided back then disappeared along with the Soviet Union. If the “realist case for a strong relationship with Israel today revolves primarily around the claim that we have common enemies,” as Millman writes, it is not at all clear that there is much that supports this case. As dreadful as they are, Hamas and Hizbullah are not enemies of the United States, and we largely treat Iran as our enemy because our Gulf allies and Israel insist that we do. At present and in the future, the U.S. has many reasons to find a modus vivendi with Iran and to improve relations, not least because one of our most important regional allies, Turkey, has made improved relations with Iran a priority. The claim that “we have common enemies” is based in no small part on the conflation of all Islamic revolutionary, resistance and jihadist groups into one camp in which Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbullah, and the IRGC are all placed regardless of their differences with one another or the threat they pose to U.S. interests. Meanwhile, the cold-eyed realist would not be overly concerned about Israeli policies in the territories unless the U.S. was seen as the enabler and supporter of the immiseration of Palestinians, but of course the U.S. is seen this way, it does damage America’s reputation throughout the region, and it is becoming a greater source of tension with our major allies in the region. There is nothing that the Israel alliance provides that merited taking Israel’s side against Turkey in the wake of the flotilla raid, but that is what Washington did even at the risk of permanently damaging the alliance with Turkey.

Millman also has a very reasonable conclusion:

In truth, I’m not sure what point is served by debating whether we should be “allied” with Israel. I’m not even sure what “ending” our alliance would mean, given that we don’t have any treaty obligations to them and we are hardly going to stop sharing intelligence or what have you. We’re allied with all sorts of countries with whom we have a variety of disputes – we don’t agree with everything our allies do or want to do, and sometimes we take a very hard line on their behavior. We were extremely forceful in getting the British and the French to withdraw from Suez in 1956. Heck, Pakistan is officially a major non-NATO ally and we’ve been dropping bombs on their territory! The real question is not whether America should continue to be Israel’s ally but whether America should be much tougher on its Israeli ally than it is, whether a tougher line would serve American interests or whether it would backfire.

Millman is basically right. We aren’t formally obligated by treaty commitments, so theoretically the alliance could “end” tomorrow if that is what Washington decided, but everyone realistically understands that some sort of alliance will remain for the foreseeable future. In many ways, the Israel alliance is like NATO: a once valuable and even necessary arrangement that served the security needs of all parties, but which now longer has much of a reason to exist. For the last twenty years, people in the U.S. and Israel have been trying to find a new reason for both the Israel alliance and NATO to continue, and each new model that has been tried has led to a dead end. Both of the alliances are largely obsolete, but neither is likely to end.

What does need to happen is to re-balance the relationship with Israel so that the political, diplomatic and financial costs of the alliance are matched by what the U.S. receives from it (which isn’t very much these days). At present, even the smallest moves in that direction are considered unspeakable betrayals. That is one reason why proponents of re-balancing the U.S.-Israel relationship are not interested in arguing for ending the alliance outright. It is difficult enough to argue for conditional reductions in economic aid that calling for a complete break would be rejected out of hand.

That is what makes Frum’s detour about Charles Freeman at the end of the same post especially ridiculous. Freeman outlined some of the costs that the alliance imposes on the U.S., and he may have understated the case, but he then made very modest recommendations for what the U.S. government should do to pressure Israel to halt settlements. My guess is that the “pathetically disproportionate” recommendations reflect Freeman’s understanding of what is politically possible here in the U.S. As it is, Freeman’s proposal to reduce economic aid to Israel to compel a halt to settlement activity is more than anyone in the administration or J Street is willing to advocate publicly. Had Freeman made a more radical proposal, Frum would not be congratulating him on his consistency or his boldness, but would instead be declaring him a lunatic.

Speaking of “Islamofascism,” Marc Lynch picks up on this recurring error in his very thorough review of Paul Berman’s Flight of the Intellectuals:

Many of the valuable debates that The Flight of the Intellectuals could have sparked are drowned out by Berman’s ludicrous efforts to construct an intellectual and organizational genealogy linking Nazi Germany and contemporary Islamism. His insistence on the usefulness of the concept of “Islamic fascism” — despite the fact that virtually all Muslims consider it a profound insult to their faith and identity — is one of the surest clues to his indifference to Muslim reality in favor of intellectual gamesmanship.

For the last three yearsat least, I have been railing against the complete stupidity of the term Islamofascism and all such related concepts. It is ludicrous to keep trying to tie modern Islamist movements to fascism, but there seems to be some sort of compulsion among anti-jihadists such as Berman to keep recycling this claim, if only to defy the “apologists” they think they are so brilliantly chastising. As I was suggesting in my 2007 column, the attempts to blur the differences between Islamists and then to link Islamists to Nazis are obviously not aimed at understanding the groups in question, but they are intended to vilify and tar all of them with ideological association with a movement everyone loathes. It is an exercise in propaganda and political mobilization instead of analysis, and so it is little surprise that the analysis written in support of it is so shoddy. Perhaps the most important thing the confusion between Islamism and fascism does is to grossly inflate the power and threat from Islamism to Western countries and to frame any remotely accommodating approach towards Muslim countries or Muslim communities in the West as “appeasement” and “surrender” on par with making concessions to Hitler.

Update: Thanks to commenter Norwegian Shooter for alerting me to this Lynch post that led me to his review.