The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake? ~Andrew Bacevich

During much of the presidential campaign, I kept reading argument after argument from Iraq war opponents in which they invested completely unreasonable and often entirely unfounded hopes in Obama. When he said that withdrawal from Iraq would be conditions-based and would still leave a large residual U.S. presence in Iraq (this was before the SOFA had been negotiated), most of them ignored that. Obama had been against the war “from the start,” they liked to tell me, and that seemed to be all that mattered. For my part, I kept reminding our friends that Obama really was a pretty conventional liberal internationalist, and he had rarely seen a U.S. or allied military intervention he couldn’t support. The invasion of Iraq was the only one Obama ever opposed on the record, and as I have pointed out more than once his opposition to the invasion was politically necessary for a state senator from Hyde Park running in a Senate primary.

Despite that, Obama’s opposition to the invasion was entirely pragmatic: the invasion would be a mistake because it was a foolish waste of resources, not because it was illegal or immoral. He was opposed to “rash” and “dumb” wars, but not all wars by any means. Unless it was in the service of showing that Obama was not “weak,” Obama supporters usually didn’t want to hear any of this. Even so, I don’t know what it can mean to say that Obama “manifestly does not believe” in the Afghan war. I have no idea if he truly believes the war to be the right and necessary thing, and I don’t know how most of us could know that one way or the other, but he seems to be acting as if he believes this.

Despite arguing for grudging support for Obama over two years ago (mostly because the GOP was so rotten and hopeless), Prof. Bacevich had one of the most sober assessments of what an Obama Presidency would actually mean:

When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism. His views are those of a conventional liberal. Nor has Obama expressed any interest in shrinking the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions.

Prof. Bacevich did not seem to have any illusions then that Obama would bring an “enlightened sensibility” to the White House. If “Americans see a cool, dispassionate, calculating president whose administration lacks a moral core,” as he says they see now, it seems to me that Prof. Bacevich and I saw something like this in Obama the candidate years ago. Then again, for an administration lacking a “moral core” it has pretty consistently followed through in doing what Obama pledged during the campaign on major policies. For anyone paying close attention, it is clear that most Americans got exactly what they voted for on Afghanistan. If many of them didn’t understand that at the time, the fault can hardly be entirely Obama’s.

Obama’s aversion to challenging power and entrenched interests made it hard to believe that he would completely extricate the U.S. from Iraq. It made it completely unreasonable to expect that he would do anything in Afghanistan other than what he said he would do during the campaign, and that was to increase the U.S. commitment there substantially, albeit for a limited period of time. If Obama’s supporters were deceived into expecting something else, they were mostly responsible for deceiving themselves. Had Obama set no limit on the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and had made boilerplate declarations about staying “as long as it takes to achieve victory,” Prof. Bacevich would hardly be congratulating him on his sureness of purpose and deep convictions. He would be correctly complaining that Obama had learned nothing from Iraq about the limits of American power.

When Obama began campaigning in 2007, he criticized the Bush administration’s management of the Afghanistan war for failing to provide sufficient resources and manpower, and he made it absolutely clear that he was going to remedy this if he were elected. He also specifically attacked the over-reliance on air power that was contributing to so many Afghan civilian casualties, which prompted one of Sarah Palin’s more idiotic complaints against him during the general election. Most of what he has done in sending additional soldiers to Afghanistan and selecting generals who have instituted restrictive rules of engagement has been an attempt to repair the damage done by years of neglect and insufficient resources. It is a little odd to claim that the President responsible for decisions aimed at minimizing civilian deaths in a war he inherited is obviously the one without the “moral core” in this debate. For that matter, the war in Afghanistan is one that most Iraq war opponents regarded as a legitimate and necessary war until last year, when it suddenly became the obvious antiwar imperative to oppose continued involvement in Afghanistan. Nothing changed, except that now supporting the Afghan war isn’t as easy as it once was when it was being treated as a sideshow.

A truly morally vacuous administration would take the far easier way out, which is to have a much smaller U.S. presence augmented by steady bombardment of the countryside for years to come: there would be far fewer American casualties, the humanitarian disaster created by such tactics would be shrugged off with Rumsfeldian indifference (“stuff happens”), and each new wave of strikes would create another generation of embittered and radicalized enemies whose existence would justify continuing the war indefinitely. This would be an essentially amoral policy that takes no account of the dangers of blowback, but it would be immensely popular and politically very expedient. What should concern us is that Obama’s instinct to accommodate will eventually lead him to embrace such an amoral policy, at which point he will be deserving of the contempt Prof. Bacevich evidently wants to heap on him now.

Update: Four years ago, Prof. Bacevich wrote a powerful op-ed denouncing American indifference to Iraqi civilian casualties. At one point, he wrote:

Moral questions aside, the toll of Iraqi noncombatant casualties has widespread political implications. Misdirected violence alienates those we are claiming to protect. It plays into the hands of the insurgents, advancing their cause and undercutting our own. It fatally undermines the campaign to win hearts and minds, suggesting to Iraqis and Americans alike that Iraqi civilians — and perhaps Arabs and Muslims more generally — are expendable.

This was right then, and it seems to me that it applies no less to Afghanistan now.

To understand why Democrats ever picked Mondale, you have to understand where the party — and where the country — was in 1982 and 1983, when the nation’s verdict on Reagan and his policies was far less positive. In those days, with unemployment surging over 10 percent and the president’s popularity slipping to sub-Carter levels, Democrats mistakenly assumed that the ’80 election had been a mirage. The electorate, they figured, had acted in haste and was rapidly returning to its senses. The results of the 1982 midterms, when Republicans (who had begun the cycle with claims that they’d win back the House) lost 26 House seats, only encouraged this thinking. To these Democrats, putting up Mondale made all the sense in the world. ~Steve Kornacki

I appreciated Kornacki’s argument. He makes several good points explaining how a party recovering from a presidential election defeat could so badly misread the political landscape and choose such a poor nominee. It could be that I am underestimating the effect that most Republicans’ sheer contempt for Obama will have on the next nomination contest. When it comes to channeling and expressing this contempt there are quite a few willing to do it, but there aren’t any prominent Republicans that take more delight in it than Palin. If Republicans choose to believe that 2008 was just a fluke and that a re-match of sorts would have a different outcome, Palin would become a very appealing candidate for them. Kornacki is right when he says:

In nominating her, Republicans would be saying to the country, “We have learned nothing these last four years. We have changed nothing.”

Indeed, they have learned nothing during the last four years, and they haven’t really changed much of anything, so Palin would be a good fit with the party’s leaders and activists for that reason, but I remain skeptical that they are really prepared to go down in flames out of little more than pride and spite. I won’t rehearse all of the reasons I have given before why I doubt the GOP would be so self-destructive as to nominate Palin, but there still seem to be too many structural reasons why someone occupying Palin’s political space cannot succeed in a Republican primary contest. The comparison with Mondale is instructive. Palin and Mondale are alike in that they represent the face of the party as it was when it was defeated, but they are quite different in their sources of support. Mondale was the candidate of the party establishment and important interest groups, and Palin has made a point of aligning herself with every possible anti-establishment, insurgent campaign she can find.

While there are some Washington pundits and journalists on the right that continue to take her seriously, she isn’t likely to have the insider support or backing from party leaders. That space is already being filled by Romney, who also enjoys the status of default frontrunner. Despite her positioning as a “populist” insurgent, she seems uninterested in building an organization to challenge better-funded, better-organized rivals, and she is quite unsuited to running as a party reformer brimming with innovative policy ideas. Her positioning as an insurgent puts her at a particular disadvantage in Republican primaries, which tend to favor runners-up and establishment favorites. Because of their overconfidence and their extremely low opinion of Obama, Republicans may end up nominating a Mondale-like candidate in 2012, but I still have a hard time seeing how Palin gets there. In many ways, Romney has a much easier path to the nomination, and he has just reminded everyone why he would be a spectacularly unsuccessful general election candidate.

There must be any number of other things Elena Kagan has done wrong that merit criticism. Ross identifies one here, and her deference to claims of executive power is even more worrisome. However, if we believe Jacob Sullum, one of the worst things Kagan did during her confirmation hearings is her claim that natural rights are irrelevant to interpreting the Constitution. Actually, they are irrelevant, and Sullum’s argument that they are “essential to understanding what the Framers were trying to do” is a good example of why they should be:

In addition to the Declaration of Independence, which reflects the Framers’ philosophical premises but does not have the force of law, the Constitution itself repeatedly refers to pre-existing rights.

The First Amendment does not say, “The people shall have a right to freedom of speech.” It says, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.” Likewise with “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” and “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

These are not rights the government creates; they are pre-existing rights the government is bound to respect. There is no other way to make sense of the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Of course, these are chartered and customary rights that pre-existed the creation of both the Confederation and the Republic. These were rights that the colonists possessed as part of their constitutional inheritance resulting from the struggles between Crown and Parliament in the 17th century, or which evolved as part of the colonial experience. Sullum has confused them with natural rights right from the start, and his entire argument suffers becauseof it.

Obviously, most of the Framers at Philadelphia were satisfied to conclude their work in 1787 without including any specific mention of these rights. It was only later, in response to the objections of Antifederalists, that a Bill of Rights was included. Many of the Framers regarded such an enumeration of protected rights as redundant or unnecessary. Antifederalists correctly feared that if there were not specific protections written in as part of the fundamental law that there would be nothing to prevent the new, more consolidated government created by the Constitution from running roughshod over their liberties. The Ninth Amendment was written in such a way as to address Antifederalist concerns that a Bill of Rights might be interpreted as an exhaustive list of all the rights citizens had rather than as a series of prohibitions against the power of the federal government.

Just because the Constitution acknowledges rights that pre-existed the creation of a new federal government, it does not remotely follow that theories of natural rights are in any way relevant to interpreting the Constitution. Many of the Framers believed in natural rights that pre-existed the state, but it is not necessary to believe this pleasant, completely ahistorical fiction to believe that there were customary, inherited legal rights that existed before 1791 and were acknowledged and confirmed in the Bill of Rights. It is even less necessary to believe in natural rights to believe that these protections are vitally important and essential to restraining the excesses of the state.

Least persuasive is Sullum’s concluding claim:

Constitutional interpretation aside, Kagan’s reluctance to endorse the concept of pre-existing rights was troubling because without it we cannot draw moral distinctions between legal regimes. How can we condemn a dictator for legally authorized oppression, or say that our own Constitution is better now that it bans slavery than it was when it tacitly approved the practice?

Of course, it isn’t true that we can’t “draw moral distinctions between legal regimes” without a “concept of pre-existing rights.” It is perfectly possible to recognize that slavery is an evil insulting to human dignity without recourse to the concept of such rights, and it is even easier to criticize a regime that abuses its power and thereby undermines its claim to lawful authority. We have rich philosophical and religious traditions on which we can draw that do not rely on one of the more dubious assumptions of 17th and 18th century English philosophy.

In addition to what I linked to yesterday, Romney’s argument against the new START has been thoroughly destroyed here, here and here, so we don’t need to dwell on Romney’s failure much more. What is a little bit more remarkable is that there has been hardly one right-of-center politician, analyst or pundit who has objected to Romney’s embarrassing op-ed. It is instructive to compare the very negative reactions to Michael Steele’s anti-Obama remarks on Afghanistan with the indifference or approving comments for Romney’s effort.

Whether one agrees with them or not, Steele’s remarks were not nearly as absurd as what Romney wrote. Even if you believe that they were utterly cynical and mistaken, as I do, some part of what Steele said is at least debatable. Nonetheless, the response on the right was instant and almost universal condemnation. Romney’s op-ed was pure nonsense from almost start to finish. Put it another way: Romney’s op-ed made Michael Steele seem like a reasonably well-informed, serious public figure by comparison. If any conservatives could be bothered to take notice of Romney’s op-ed, they have usually quoted from itwithout comment or simplyapproved of it. The only criticism from the right other than mine that I have been able to find is this bit of Palinite propaganda.

These reactions are quite consistent in that most conservative critics of Steele were offended by his remarks because they are reflexively hostile to any dissent from a hawkish position regardless of the merits of it, and most conservatives are pleased with Romney’s argument because it supports a foolish, super-hawkish position and because they are reflexively hostile to the idea of arms control and arms reduction regardless of the merits. Automatic hawkishness and anti-Obama sentiment did not align at all in Steele’s case, but they align quite nicely for Romney. Unfortunately, far from being discredited by his sheer ignorance of the relevant issues concerning the treaty he is attacking, Romney is going to prosper within the GOP because his ignorant arguments reaffirm what many in the movement and the party already believe. In this case, what they believe is that diplomacy is usually ineffective, authoritarian governments should never be diplomatically engaged, much less trusted, and that Obama is selling out the country to rivals and enemies. The new START is probably the worst example to use to argue for this already ridiculous view, but that doesn’t seem to bother them.

Ambinder tries to understand the politics of Romney’s horribleop-ed on the Prague treaty:

Does he believe opposition to Senate ratification is a political winner? As the privately acknowledged “invisible primary” frontrunner, is he attempting to use what leverage he has to make sure that his party does not capitulate on this issue, depriving him of the chance to draw a clear contrast with Obama? Or does he see this as an opportunity to burnish his foreign policy chops ahead of 2012?

It is hard to say what exactly Romney hopes to accomplish by trying to put a wonkish face on an absurd anti-ratification, “nuclear anarchy” position in an op-ed in The Washington Post, but it is very likely that this is intended almost purely for consumption by movement and party activists. No one else could possibly take it seriously. As Paul Podvig explains here, Romney’s op-ed is even worse than I originally argued, and Romney’s arguments are meeting with outright mockery from those who understand these issues well. Concerning tactical nuclear weapons, Podvig makes an important point:

Interestingly enough, when talking about tactical warheads, Romney makes a point that underscores importance of the treaty – he asks, “[W]ho can know how those tactical nuclear warheads might be reconfigured?” This is a legitimate question. This is why the treaty, in fact, addresses it – its explicit limit on the the number of strategic launchers, which serves to ensure that “those tactical nuclear warheads” cannot be reconfigured into anything that they are not.

So Romney grossly exaggerates the Russian advantage in deployed tactical nuclear weapons, misrepresents the treaty’s implications for tactical nuclear weapons, and generally shows that he has no idea what he’s talking about.

In the last presidential cycle, Romney decided that he had to stake out a zealous social conservative position to neutralize criticism of his earlier social liberalism and to give him some credibility with the activists and voters whose support he needed to win the nomination. For the next cycle, Romney apparently decided some time ago that attempting to out-hawk the administration and any potential Republican rivals and pretending that he knew something about foreign policy were the keys to winning in 2012. At some point during the last year and a half, Romney decided that his next presidential bid required him to jump into the deep end of American nationalism and become a champion of American exceptionalism against the ostensibly post-American worldview of Obama. This has involved embarrassing himself by showing how poorly he understands the subject he has chosen to make one of the main themes of his future campaign, and he has just done it again. This is the sort of thing that activists will cheer, which is unfortunate, because it is also the sort of thing that tells us why Romney should never be President.

But democracy promotion has also been unfairly discredited by the invasion of Iraq, a decision too often remembered as nothing more than a foolish “war for democracy” that went predictably wrong. The subsequent failure of Iraq to metamorphose overnight into the Switzerland of the Middle East is cited as an example of why democracy should never be pushed or promoted. This silly argument has had a strong echo: Since becoming president, Barack Obama has shied away from the word democracy in foreign contexts — he prefers “our common security and prosperity” — as if it might be some dangerous Bushism. ~Anne Applebaum

Applebaum is attacking the wrong “silly argument.” The silliest argument was the one made by war advocates who insisted that democratization would contribute to regional stability on the bizarre assumption that democracies are inherently more peaceful. That certainly hasn’t happened, and I’m not referring just to the countries that went through “color” revolutions and U.S. wars of “liberation.” Thailand, Kenya and Ivory Coast are among the countries in the last decade that have suffered tremendous upheaval as a result of tensions heightened and exaggerated by democratic politics. Another silly argument that war supporters made on a fairly regular basis was that a democratic Iraq would necessarily be relatively pro-Western. As it has turned out, Iraq has quite naturally come under increasing Iranian influence and has become more sympathetic to Iran than it ever was in the past. All things considered, that may not be such a bad outcome, but it flatly contradicts what most of the war supporters and democracy promoters said would happen. Fans of democracy promotion seem to have an unusually bad understanding of what democratization would actually mean in most other parts of the world, and so it is fortunate that we seem to have an administration that is suitably more wary of the idea.

It’s true that the Bush administration’s rhetoric of liberation and democracy promotion was mainly an afterthought when it came to Iraq. It was something the administration threw in to win over skeptics that doubted the wisdom of preventive war and questioned the claims about WMDs, and it only became a centerpiece of Iraq policy when the claims that led us into the war were shown to be false. It’s also true that it is fairly ridiculous to treat the liberty-subverting, Constitution-trampling, executive power-worshipping Bush administration as if it were some band of true believing zealots for freedom and popular participatory politics. There is some mania among Wilsonian idealists that requires attacking the things at home that we are supposed to be exporting elsewhere. Nonetheless, it’s equally true that many advocates of democracy promotion jumped on the Iraq war bandwagon as a result. The Iraq war doesn’t necessarily discredit any and all democracy promotion, but it is a cautionary tale of how the government can invoke freedom and democracy to advance and sell completely appalling policies. (Mind you, it isn’t just that Iraq hasn’t become Switzerland, which was never going to happen, but that its political institutions haven’t even risen to the level of Lebanon’s.)

One danger of making democracy promotion an important priority of U.S. policy or even of official rhetoric is that it becomes an ideological slogan entirely detached from the substance of fostering a more liberal and participatory political order. In that way, Bakiyev’s coup against Akayev could be dressed up in the West as an example of “people power” triumphing over authoritarianism. A run-of-the-mill power struggle in Kyrgyzstan was treated as part of the global democratic revolution Bush had insanely lauded in his Second Inaugural, and Kyrgyzstan is still bleeding and suffering today partly as a result of the genuinely stupid, unfocused enthusiasm for spreading democracy that the government could use to cloak its agenda of reducing Russian influence in the former Soviet Union. Enthusiasm for democracy blinded Westerners to the errors and flaws of Saakashvili, and even when he was wrecking his country by escalating an unwinnable war quite a few democratists were still defending him and the “democratically elected government of Georgia” no matter what.

Another danger is that this emphasis on democracy promotion conflates U.S. interests in a region with the aspirations of other peoples to govern themselves democratically when these two may not be complementary. Most enthusiasts for democracy promotion seem rarely to contemplate the possibility of such a conflict between the political goals of democrats in other countries and U.S. policies, and there usually seems to be a casual assumption that American interests and “values” advance in tandem. Much of the sympathy for the Green movement in the U.S. is predicated on two basically false beliefs that most Green movement members want to topple their government and want to adopt policies more amenable to the U.S. Many Western sympathizers with the Green movement would suddenly start singing a very different tune if they understood that neither of these things is true.

At times, as in Iraq, we seem to give no thought as to whether democratization will undermine U.S. interests, because promoting democracy was always a tertiary consideration when we launched our invasion, and at other times we seem to favor only those protest movements that we believe will become reliable supporters of U.S. influence in their region. In practice, democracy promotion gets a bad name because it is used in the most obviously cynical way to justify a policy decision after the fact, or it is used in a highly selective manner to favor only those regime opponents who are willing to become our yes-men. Its fair-weather supporters also contribute to the bad reputation democracy promotion has acquired. Many of the same people who clamed to be so thrilled by the so-called Arab Spring of 2005, the “color” revolutions in the former USSR and purple Iraqi thumbs were completely horrified when more fully mature democratic governments and allies of the United States, such as Japan and Turkey, began pursuing mildy independent courses of action that clashed slightly with current U.S. policies.

The reality is that hegemonists and interventionists don’t really want to promote democracy unless it undermines rival powers’ influence or installs a clique that wants to align its country with the U.S., and that leaves people interested in democracy promotion in its own right in a difficult bind. These people could accept this selective, occasional interest in democratization as better than nothing, or they could insist on opposing the cynics and partisan opportunists who try to co-opt the language of democracy promotion every time they want to use it as political cover for an entirely different agenda. Until they do a better job of distinguishing themselves from the hawks and interventionists who have dragged their cause through the mud, they aren’t going to get a lot of sympathy from the rest of us who have seen how their rhetoric has been used to start wars, stir up instability and foment riot and conflict.

How many dishonest and misleading things can Mitt Romney pack into one op-ed? There are a few. Romney’s first lie was remarkably brazen even for him:

He [Obama] castigated Israel at the United Nations but was silent about Hamas having launched 7,000 rockets from the Gaza Strip.

Neither of these things happened. One will look in vain for any speech Obama has ever given in which he actually castigated Israel, but it is even more certain that he never did this at the U.N. Castigate means censure, and if there is one thing Obama has never done it is censure Israel. The only thing Obama has been silent about with regard to Gaza was the excessive military operations Israel launched there immediately before he took office. A couple sentences later, Romney lies about missile defense in Europe:

He acceded to Russia’s No. 1 foreign policy objective, the abandonment of our Europe-based missile defense program, and obtained nothing whatsoever in return.

The missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic were scrapped, and they have since been replaced by proposed new installations in southeastern Europe. Unlike the previous plan, which guarded against non-existent Iranian ICBMs, this one could theoretically defend against medium-range missiles that Iran actually has. So missile defense in Europe has not been abandoned, and despite what Moscow may say the Prague treaty apparently does not rule out missile defense, either, so Romney is complaining about something that hasn’t happened.

Romney repeats a common misrepresentation of the Prague treaty, which is that it “impedes missile defense.” Dr. Jeffrey Lewis had a very useful review of the relevant parts of the new treaty that he wrote earlier this year, and his conclusion is worth citing here:

I think it is very hard to conclude that the treaty “limits” missile defenses. The treaty may have some implications for missile defense programs, but on the whole it is written in such a way as to create space for current and planned missile defense programs, including language that exempts interceptors from the definition of an ICBM [bold mine-DL] and the provision to “grandfather” the converted silos at Vandenberg.

Still, I suspect we will continue hear from some quarters that the treaty “limits” missile defense. This is a form of special pleading. The common-sense test is that no one would claim that the treaty “limits” conventional bombers, despite some provisions to separate conventional bombers from their nuclear-equipped brethren. By any consistent standard, the treaty limits neither.

As for Romney’s objection that the treaty “explicitly forbids the United States from converting intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos into missile defense sites,” Dr. Lewis makes what seems like a very sensible observation:

The advantages of this are obvious: otherwise, you would have Russian inspectors crawling all over US missile defense interceptors to ensure they weren’t stocked with contraband treaty-limited equipment.

In other words, this is something that seems like a concession but which could actually aid the development of missile defense.

Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb recently wrote an op-ed in support of the treaty that addressed the missile defense question:

While some have alleged that the New START treaty will inhibit missile defense, this claim has been strongly refuted by Republican elder statesmen in their Senate testimony on the treaty. Former Secretary of State James Baker stated plainly, “There is, in fact, no restriction on the United States of America’s ability to move forward on missile defense in whatever way it wants.” Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft was equally direct, testifying, “The treaty is amply clear, it does not restrict us … I don’t think there’s substance to this argument.”

In fact, Baker and Scowcroft are joined in supporting the treaty by almost every senior Republican national security leader from the past three decades, including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Schlesinger, George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and the Senate’s foremost current expert on nuclear policy, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana. They are joined by leading Democratic national security leaders, such as former Defense Secretary William Perry and former senator Nunn.

Romney’s other objections are more technical, but they don’t appear to be much better. One of the standard objections to the new treaty has been that warhead reduction could do Russia a favor, because Russia does not want the expense of maintaining such a large arsenal, but Romney claims instead that loopholes in the treaty will permit a Russian build-up of warheads. For Romney’s objections to mean very much, one would have to believe that Russia is intent on a massive arms build-up and is looking for some means to achieve this without formally violating arms control agreements. In fact, the more substantive criticism that advocates of disarmament could make against the treaty is that there are not going to be many reductions at all on either side, and the loopholes in the treaty will permit both governments to maintain their arsenals near their current levels:

Due to the loophole, the United States could avoid counting roughly 450 of its 2,100 presently deployed warheads, while around 860 weapons in Russia’s 2,600-warhead arsenal would not be counted, Kristensen said. As a result, the United States would only need to place 100 deployed warheads in storage and Russia would only need to remove 190 weapons.

It is therefore quite difficult to credit Romney’s claim that “New-START gives Russia a massive nuclear weapon advantage over the United States.” Were that to happen, the same withdrawal provision in Article XIV of the treaty that Russia could exercise could also be exercised by the United States. If we view the Prague treaty as a beginning rather than a dramatic accomplishment on its own, we could then build on it to negotiate reductions in tactical nuclear weapons. Rejecting the treaty because it has not solved every arms reduction problem in one move is just the sort of short-sighted opportunism we have come to expect from Romney and other leading Republicans when it comes to important matters of U.S. foreign policy.

Of course, it could be that Romney is just incredibly uninformed and knows none of these things, but this is supposedly someone who prides himself on his mastery of whatever subject he discusses. He is supposed to be consumed by policy details and fascinated by wonkery. Somehow when it comes to foreign policy, which he now pretends to understand and wants to use as a club with which to bludgeon Obama, he has a fairly poor grasp of the subject.

Update: Max Bergmann makes an important point that the alternative to ratification is to accept the collapse of the arms control framework that has existed for at least two decades.

There is something obviously wrong when Fred Hiatt, friend of warmongers and torture apologists, holds forth on the dangers to liberty around the world. Here was the line that was the most jarring to me:

Taking advantage of their control of television, they mobilized ideologies of nationalism and anti-terrorism to undermine the rhetoric of freedom.

Of course, Hiatt is referring here to various authoritarian states, but he seems to have no notion that apart from the reference to television that statement could just as easily be applied to his own op-ed pages and the politicians he has defended over the last decade. For that matter, the measures he and his allies have favored haven’t just undermined the rhetoric of freedom, but have seriously undermined the limits on government power and significantly damaged the substance of American liberty and the liberty of people in other nations as well. More perversely, they did all of this while pretending to celebrate American freedoms. One might ask why Hiatt expects freedom to be flourishing elsewhere in the world when our own authoritarians have worked so hard to harm it here at home with security measures, power grabs and grossly illegal activities.

Hiatt is quite happy to complain that Obama does not embrace a “freedom agenda” like that of the previous administration, but he completely fails to acknowledge the results of this agenda have been extremely destructive and destabilizing in many cases and outright failures in others. Of all the supposed beneficiaries of the “freedom agenda,” just one country, Ukraine, is listed as free. To Freedom House’s credit, it doesn’t whitewash the flaws of countries that have been held up as examples of democratic reform and liberalization. According to Freedom House’s own report for the previous year, Georgia is only “partly free” and is not considered an electoral democracy, and the same is true for Lebanon. As Hiatt mentions, “[e]leven of the 12 non-Baltic former Soviet republics are worse off than a decade ago [bold mine-DL],” but he neglects to add that two of the eleven underwent “color” revolutions and were supposed to be becoming more free. If this description from Freedom House is correct, not only has Kyrgyzstan gone backwards since the days of Akayev, which anyone can see, but Georgia has actually lost ground compared to when Shevardnadze was in office. That seems hard to believe, but I don’t find it all that surprising.

Not only is Iraq ranked as not free, but it also has the dubious distinction of being seventh in Foreign Policy’s failed state rankings for yet another year. Georgia is 37th and Kyrgyzstan 45th in those rankings. Just three years ago, Georgia was 58th, and it’s unclear whether Kyrgyzstan’s modest improvement in the rankings takes into account Bakiyev’s overthrow and the recent ethnic violence and refugee crisis. Being anywhere in the “borderline,” “in danger” or “critical” tiers of those rankings significantly qualifies any gains in terms of political reform. Potential failed states are among the worst places to test out an agenda of liberalization and democratization.

It is appropriate to be “skittish” about a “freedom agenda” when past attempts have yielded mostly bitter fruit. We would have to question Obama’s judgment and sanity if he were as enthusiastic and zealous as his predecessor. When so much upheaval and instability have been caused in the name of promoting freedom and democracy, it is no wonder that rising democratic powers do not want to replicate this chaos in their own neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, Russia continues to be marked by domestic authoritarianism and aggression beyond its borders. The harassment and murder of journalists and human rights advocates continues unabated. Press freedom has declined precipitously since Prime Minister Vladimir Putin came to power 10 years ago. Baton-wielding riot police regularly break up peaceful demonstrations. A recently “leaked” Russian foreign policy document cites NATO enlargement – the consensual process by which sovereign states, once held captive behind the Iron Curtain, decide to join an alliance of free and democratic nations – as the greatest threat to Russian security, underscoring the paranoid mind-set that dominates Kremlin thinking. And nearly two years after its invasion of Georgia, Russia continues to occupy 20% of the country’s territory, has illegally recognized two separatist provinces as “independent” states and stands in violation of a European Union-brokered ceasefire. ~James Kirchick

No one denies the authoritarianism, but as Kirchick’s statements show the evidence for Russia’s “aggression beyond its borders” is very, very thin. When the one concrete example of “aggression” Kirchick can come up with is the Russian military presence in the separatist republics, we know we shouldn’t take the charge very seriously. Yes, officially these republics are still considered part of Georgia, and in a parallel universe where state sovereignty and territorial integrity are actually respected by major powers this would mean something. Which is more outrageous: a Russian military presence in territories whose inhabitants welcome them and do not want to be part of Georgia, or an American military presence in Iraq where a large percentage of the population does not want us to be there and never has? Hawks usually bristle at the word occupation when it is applied to Iraq or the Palestinian territories, but they throw it around quite freely when discussing a case that is much more ambiguous.

Was Russian recognition of the independence of the separatist republics illegal? Of course. So was the recognition of Kosovo independence by the U.S. and much of Europe. It is pretty widely accepted now that it was recognition of Kosovo independence that led to Russia’s recognition of the separatist republics. Western governments wanted to make Kosovo a “special” case, and Russia was going to make sure that it became a precedent that had unhappy consequences for a U.S. ally. Georgian escalation made it very easy for Moscow to do just that.

The main difference between the conflicts prior to recognition is that the U.S. and NATO launched the attack on Serbia that later led to this partition, while Russia was repelling an attack from Georgia against the statelets that had effectively broken away decades ago. It was the U.S. and NATO that launched an unprovoked war against a traditional Russian ally eleven years ago after assuring Russia that it had no reason to worry about eastward NATO expansion. It was also the U.S. and many of our NATO allies that arbitrarily partitioned that country’s territory two years ago with those recognitions of Kosovo independence. Perhaps it isn’t exactly paranoia to see an expanding NATO as some sort of threat to Russia and its allies.

Then again, maybe Moscow is mistaken to see NATO expansion as a major threat. As NATO has expanded, it has steadily gone from being what some of us used to call the greatest alliance in history to something more like a club for the politically correct. Belonging to it has had far less to do with collective defense against a foreign threat, which has steadily receded for the last twenty years, and more to do with burnishing the credentials of one’s country as a truly Western one. Certainly, many new and aspiring NATO members have contributed to the war in Afghanistan, and many have also inexplicably contributed to the war in Iraq, but for the most part these have been symbolic commitments that underscore just how militarily useless most of the new allies are. To the extent that NATO continues to have any real military function at all, it has been to serve as America’s posse in military campaigns that have nothing to do with the alliance’s reason for existing. What continues to amaze is not the limited support NATO allies are giving to the war in Afghanistan, but that they continue to provide any support when they no longer really have any obligation to do so. Meanwhile, it is exactly those countries where Western security guarantees are truly risky and dangerous that stood no chance of gaining entry, because Ukraine or Georgia in NATO might have eventually required NATO to fulfill its pledge to defend against an attack on any member, and no current member of NATO had any intention of doing that.

In the back-and-forth between Fareed Zakaria and Leon Wieseltier over John McCain and Iran last month, what slipped by unnoticed was the best example of how “fantasy substitutes for foreign policy” in McCain’s speech. McCain said:

For this reason, I believe that it will only be a change in the Iranian regime itself—a peaceful change, chosen by and led by the people of Iran—that can finally produce the changes we seek in Iran’s policies.

As Kevin Sullivan notes, McCain’s interest in both military action against Iran and regime change in Iran are well-established and go back many years. It is hardly a secret that Iran hawks became Green movement enthusiasts primarily because they exaggerated the power and significance of the movement and assumed that it could topple the Iranian government and replace it with a more compliant, obedient one. As a matter of analysis, this was wrong. It always invested the Green movement with too much importance, and it quite deliberately misrepresented what Americans and Westerners could expect in terms of policy changes from a Green government. This is what McCain did again in his speech, and McCain’s position is actually very close to the one taken by Richard Haass earlier this year. Like Haass, McCain has made clear that he wishes to change the Iranian regime by opposition proxy. What divides realists from fantasists and ideologues in this case has been the ability to assess more or less correctly the strength of the Iranian opposition and the weakness of the Iranian government. Haass joined with the fantasists at a moment when it was becoming increasingly clear that the opposition was making no headway and was gradually weakening.

Wieseltier completely missed Zakaria’s most important point while writing his ridiculous response, and this was that whether or not one would like to have regime change in Iran at the hands of the Iranian opposition it isn’t going to happen. Making something that is far-fetched and highly unlikely into the centerpiece of Iran policy is not credible, and it is certainly not realism of any kind, but that is what McCain, Wieseltier and Haass have done. In the end, Wieseltier’s response amounted to a lot of pouting that Zakaria did not confuse his sympathy for the Green movement with his estimates for their chance of success. It seems clear that the main problem Zakaria had with McCain’s speech and with his general worldview was that McCain was proposing a piece of wishful thinking as if it were a meaningful solution to disputes between the U.S. and Iran. It is just another case of fetishizing democracy and claiming that democratization has pro-Americanizing effects that there is no evidence that it has. No less worrisome, McCain compounded his first error by repeating the lunacy he uttered during the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia (“we are all Georgians now”) and applying it to the Iranian opposition:

We need to make their goals our goals, their interests our interests, their work our work.

What McCain never considers is that the goals, interests and work of the Iranian opposition may not have anything to do with the goals, interests and work of the U.S., especially not when those are defined by such dangerous hawks as John McCain. After all, we have good reason to believe that the opposition’s goals are not as far-reaching and radical as some Westerners would like. If the Green movement is actually an Iranian civil rights movement, and we have every reason to believe that this is what it is, then its concern is to make changes to the existing system rather than toppling it outright. If it is the character of the regime that causes Iran hawks to fear and loathe it, the Green movement is not even a plausible means to change the fundamental character of the regime because this is not what interests the opposition. Even if we all agreed that ousting the current Iranian government was the only option left available to secure American interests, much of the Green movement would want no part of our effort, because they do not wish to be seen as the tools of foreigners, and they would probably resent and maybe even resist our efforts. More than anything, it is sheer ignorance of or indifference to the Green movement’s objectives and an equally great ignorance of Iranian society that inform these regime change fantasies. My guess is that it was mainly McCain’s “startling ignorance” that made Zakaria relieved that McCain was not elected President, and on that point I heartily agree.