There were a few things I read while I was on my trip last week that still are worth addressing now. First, Greg Scoblete referred to an earlier Stephen Kinzer article in The American Prospect in which Kinzer made an intriguing proposal:

Improbable as it may seem right now, given the current regime in Iran, a partnership that unites Turkey, Iran, and the United States is the future and makes sense for two reasons: The three countries share strategic interests, and their people share values. Our evolving relationship with a changing Turkey offers a model for the kind of relationship we might one day–not necessarily tomorrow–have with a changing Iran. This is the tantalizing possibility of a new way for the U.S. to engage with the Middle East in the 21st century.

I am quite skeptical whenever someone tries to justify a present or future alliance even in part by invoking shared “values.” This is usually added to the mix when supporters of the alliance cannot point to any tangible or significant benefit from the alliance for the U.S. For example, pro-Georgian enthusiasts here in the U.S. have to lean heavily on Georgian democracy and Georgia’s market-oriented economic reforms to make sense of U.S. support for Georgia, which is in almost every other respect a stategic liability. There may be no American interest served in sending aid or selling weapons to Georgia, and it does complicate and sometimes damage relations with Russia to do these things, but if Georgians share our “values” then that makes everything all right. This doesn’t apply in the cases of Turkey and Iran, whose strategic importance is obvious but whose respective “values” are not entirely ours.

That said, I find Kinzer’s proposal interesting. Over the last few years, I have made it pretty clear that I think rapprochement with Iran is the obvious and wise course to pursue, and in the last month I have been emphasizing the value of the Turkish alliance at a time when many Americans seem to have decided that Turkey is no longer an ally. The trouble for Kinzer’s proposal and for my arguments is that much of the political class has been turning against Turkey partly because Turkey has become too accommodating with Iran. As Kinzer will have noticed, “our evolving relationship with a changing Turkey” has meant a deteriorating relationship with an increasingly alienated Turkey, and the relationship has deteriorated in no small part because Turkey has already started improving ties with Iran right now. Ankara isn’t waiting for the far-off day when the Iranian opposition becomes organized and effective enough to force some internal political change in Iran, in part because its “zero problems” approach does not require that Turkey’s neighbors share “values” with the Turks.

Kinzer is not quite so bold as to argue that this triple alliance will exist anytime soon:

A new triangular relationship involving the United States, Turkey, and Iran cannot emerge overnight. In order to become a reliable American partner, Iran would have to change dramatically. Turkey would also have to change, although not nearly as much. So would the United States. Our world, how-ever, advances only as a result of strategic vision. First must come a grand concept, a destination; once the destination is clear, all parties can concentrate on finding the way to reach it.

Unfortunately, leaving it to Iran to “change dramatically” before this realignment or new “triangle” of relationships could be established guarantees that it will not happen for decades. If we are going to wait until Iran dramatically changes, it may never happen at all. While the U.S. waits for Iran to undergo this transformation, Turkey will continue its own regional ambitions and pursue its desire to foster good relations with all of its neighbors. If the last few months are any indication, Washington will respond to this dismissively, contemptuously and angrily. Davutoglu has spoken of a “multi-dimensional” element to Turkish foreign policy in which good Turkish relations with Russia, for example, do not jeopardize good relations with the U.S. Davutoglu has argued that Turkey’s relationships are complementary to one another, but no other state seems to see it this way.

At one point, Kinzer writes:

No other nation is respected by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Taliban while also maintaining good ties with the Israeli, Lebanese, and Afghan governments.

What’s wrong with this sentence? I don’t dispute the last two, but surely Kinzer sees that in practice Hamas’ respect for Turkey and good ties with Israel are inversely related. As one has increased, the other has almost vanished. We can go through the arguments why Israel needs Turkey more and can’t afford to be as petulant and short-sighted as it has been, but the reality is that Turkey’s ability to serve as a mediator depends very much on the willingness of both sides in any given dispute to continue to trust and accept Turkish help. As of right now, Israel doesn’t trust Turkey, and as everyone knows their relations are a wreck.

The U.S. has publicly sided against Turkey twice in the last month precisely because it has been engaged in pursuing its regional ambitions and mediation efforts. Kinzer is rigt that Washington ought to pursue sustained engagement with Iran, but the administration made it clear long ago that their engagement policy was another means to the same dead end of limiting or ending Iran’s nuclear program. More than anything else, what has to change to make rapprochement with Iran and rebuilding the alliance with Turkey successful is the attitudes toward both countries’ goals of regional influence. Turkey is already in a position to help facilitate the early stages of reconciliation between the U.S. and Iran, but our political class continues to be held hostage by the idea that Turkish accommodation of Iran equals Turkish betrayal of the U.S. Until we get rid of that absurd idea, Kinzer’s arguments will unfortunately fall on deaf ears.

Outside of Republicans, she’s not popular at all. According to our NBC/WSJ poll, just 29% view her favorably, compared with 43% who view her unfavorably (not far from George W. Bush’s 29%-50% score). In addition, the poll shows that 52% have problems with a candidate who has been endorsed by Palin, versus only 25% who are comfortable with that attribute. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Palin is more of a political celebrity than a political figure. ~First Read

This is true, but there is nothing here about Palin that we know now that we didn’t already know a year or a year and a half ago. Her unfavorables among non-Republicans have gone up steadily since the Republican convention in 2008, and outside of a dedicated core of admirers and a few critics no one is taking her political chances seriously. This is the same as it has been for a very long time. As Josh Green notes, it would normally be absurd to think that someone with a 14-point favorability deficit was a serious presidential contender, and there aren’t that many non-partisans who think that she is anything of the kind. The reality is that the more independents and Democrats see of Palin, the less they like. In a country where these people make up at least 65% of the electorate, Palin is essentially unelectable in a general election. This isn’t a difficult call to make. The question to which we don’t know the answer yet is whether the GOP is so willfully blind to this reality and so bent on self-destruction in 2012 that the party nominates her anyway. For all of the reasons I have given before, I very much doubt that Republicans are this foolish. It is possible that the GOP will decide to immolate itself as part of an elaborate reality TV experiment, but they have every incentive not to want to do that.

We have good reason to expect that the 2012 Republican field will be large and support will once again be fairly evenly divided. This might give Palin a better chance than she would have otherwise, but many of her likely rivals are going to be going after the same voters who view Palin favorably. For that matter, she is not favorably viewed by all Republicans. That leaves a huge opening for a more credible, electable candidate to pull together some fraction of conservatives together with the primary anti-Palin vote. As it is, she has just 66% favorability with self-identified Tea Party supporters, and she is supposed to be one of their political heroes. If she can’t even consolidate all of the Tea Party’s approximately 18% of the vote, why does anyone think she can win at least a third of the vote in primaries that she will need to get the nomination?

If she did somehow pull it off, Democrats would spend most of the summer and fall of 2012 rubbing their eyes in disbelief at their good fortune. Even in a fairly polarized national electorate where McCain/Palin could manage to get 47% of the vote in the midst of a financial meltdown at the tail end of the second term of one of the three most unpopular postwar Presidents, a ticket headed by Palin would be hard-pressed to break 40%. Palin as the nominee would probably make 2012 the most lopsided election victory for the incumbent President since 1984.

As far as Western observers are concerned, keeping alive attachments to lost territories in post-communist and developing countries is normally considered a hindrance to modernization, reform and integration into the international order. In most cases, if a nation’s politics is dominated by antagonism with neighbors and nationalist desires for reunification with lost territories, Western observers tend to regard it as politically regressive, stunted, atavistic and stuck in the past. None of this applies in the case of Georgia, where the majority’s preoccupation with territorial “reintegration” is treated as a perfectly reasonable and appropriate priority deserving of no further comment. Kirchick can be given some credit for at least acknowledging the deficiencies in the recent municipal elections that others have simply ignored. For my part, I don’t really begrudge the Georgians their desire to make Abkhazia and South Ossetia part of Georgia again. Ultimately, it is their business, and they can pursue that (futile) direction if they wish, but I continue to marvel at how this sort of throwback nationalism never gives Georgia’s Western boosters pause when it would prompt a collective panic if it happened in, say, Serbia, Austria or Greece.

More worrisome is the paranoia that grips Georgian politics:

Yet Georgian leaders persist in warning of the Kyrgyz scenario. After deadly ethnic riots rocked southern Kyrgyzstan last month, one Georgian minister claimed that Russia has been behind the “ethnic cleansing” of Uzbeks. Indeed, Georgians see a Russian hand in everything that goes wrong in the region; about half of Georgians believe that the Kremlin was responsible for the April plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski.

Kirchick’s discussion of the upheaval in Kyrgyzstan is woefully inadequate in an article that spends so much time comparing Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. The Washington Post reported almost two weeks ago that pro-Bakiyev forces were responsible for initiating the unrest in Osh, and the anti-Uzbek rioting that followed was a violent response to Uzbek support for the interim government and the opposition protests that had ousted Bakiyev. In other words, for their own reasons Russia aided in toppling an authoritarian ruler whose supporters inside Kyrgyzstan have since resorted to the mass expulsion of an ethnic minority, and yet somehow a Western audience is supposed to look at this and conclude that Russia has wronged Kyrgyzstan? As the article explains:

But the back and forth on May 13-14 was a turning point. Because many in the crowd that prevailed were minority Uzbeks, the struggle for political control of the region began to be seen as a battle for ethnic survival, especially among the Kyrgyz majority here. That perception grew in the following weeks, fanned by local politicians as the national authorities in the north struggled to respond.

According to the reflexively anti-Russian view being entertained inside the Georgian government, Russia is somehow responsible both for toppling Bakiyev and for facilitating the expulsion of an ethnic group that supported the opposition Russia wanted to bring to power at Bakiyev’s expense. This is a virtue of conspiracy theorizing: it can contain blatant contradictions so long as the main theme of the conspiracy theory (in this case the absolute perfidy of Russia) remains intact. What I find strange is that members of the Georgian government and the government’s Western sympathizers actually want to promote the idea that the governments of Saakashvili and Bakiyev have anything in common.

This is one of the many problems with the “color” revolution story: it tries to treat three significantly different countries as comparable because they have all undergone what Westerners decided was a similar process because all of them were perceived as anti-Russian and therefore “pro-Western.” Of the three “color” revolutions since 2003 in the former USSR, the one led by Saakashvili probably had the most genuine, broad popular support. It certainly had significant Western sympathy and some outside support, but it was probably the least artificial of the three. Unlike Yushchenko, not even Saakashvili’s disastrous blunders have resulted in the collapse of political support for him and his agenda, and unlike Bakiyev’s coup the “Rose Revolution” could lay some real claim to representing democratic legitimacy. For both good and ill, what Saakashvili has done has broad popular backing.

The “color” governments have all been disasters for their countries in different ways, but at least in Georgia Saakashvili and his ministers have been much more in line with the wishes of the Georgian public than their counterparts in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Unlike the significant regional and ethnic differences that shape the politics of the other two, Georgia is sufficiently compact and relatively ethnically homogenous that the divisions that have paralyzed and wrecked Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in recent years are not as great. There is little chance of a “Kyrgyz scenario” in Georgia, and promoting the idea that Russia can and will topple Georgia’s government simply encourages conspiracy theorizing and paranoia in Tbilisi.

As for the claim that “few in the West predicted the August 2008 war either,” this is true up to a point, but it is also badly misleading. It wasn’t predicted because no one, not even Saakashvili’s Western critics, could have imagined he was so foolish as to escalate a war with Russia. There were certainly some of us who saw what the recognition of Kosovo and the promises made to Georgia in Bucharest could mean for Georgia. Some of us saw quite clearly that there would be increasing tensions and conflict over the separatist republics after Kosovo’s independence and the promise of future NATO membership. More were able to acknowledge the close connection between these things and the August 2008 war. It is possible that the Kremlin could be so reckless as to try to overthrow Saakashvili by force, but that would be so much more trouble for Russia than it was worth that it is hard to see why the Kremlin would attempt it. Fanning suspicions that this is probable or even likely may be eye-catching, but it isn’t very responsible or correct.

There is a lot to catch up after the last week away, but I thought I would start by saying a few things about Michael Steele’s Afghanistan remarks. They have predictably drawn the ire of Bill Kristol, who has called for Steele’s resignation, but Steele’s continued tenure at the RNC doesn’t interest me very much. What I do find interesting is how the utterly shameless, reflexive Republican opposition to everything Obama touches has finally run into the brick wall of one issue that most Republicans and mainstream conservatives consider to be completely non-negotiable. Incorrigible misrepresentation of every other foreign policy initiative Obama undertakes is permitted, but staking out a relatively less hawkish position than the administration is simply not tolerated.

Obviously Steele’s Afghanistan comments are not derived from any serious principled objection to an American presence in Afghanistan, and they certainly don’t reflect any fundamental opposition to foreign entanglements. As far as I can tell, Steele has rarely given these questions any attention at all until now, and he was a reliable backer of the Iraq war all along just like virtually every other aspiring Republican office-seeker and elected official. Steele evidently believes that Afghanistan is now a political liability for Obama, and he wants to take advantage of this, but far from being a potential “turning point” it is just another example of how clueless and hopeless Steele is when it comes to serving in a leadership capacity for Republicans. I can hardly wait to hear how Steele’s cynical posturing is another sign of the rise of antiwar Republicanism.

However, even if Steele were sincere and principled in his objections, it would be important to explain why he is wrong. It is true that last year Obama chose to increase the number of soldiers in Afghanistan, where the war effort had been chronically under-manned and under-resourced for most of the last decade, but this has been the one war in the last fifteen years that the U.S. did not choose to enter. It probably grates on many Republicans that the one war that comes closest to anything resembling a just or necessary war in the last decade is the one that they quite deliberately starved of resources and manpower. It is also probably discomforting that they did this to pursue a war in Iraq that has consumed far more lives, both American and Iraqi, and which had not even the remotest connection to American interests. Steele says that there are “other ways to engage in Afghanistan,” which confirms that he has no desire to disengage fully from the country, but if other “antiwar” Republican arguments are anything to go by he means that we should bombard Afghanistan from afar and hope for the best. Steele doesn’t really mean what he’s saying, but even if he did we shouldn’t take it seriously.

Rejecting the previous arguments of one Robert Kagan, Robert Kagan has decided that Obama’s handling of Russia and Georgia has not produced a “wave of insecurity” throughout the region. Apparently, the administration has not abandoned Georgia to ravenous Russian hordes (or whatever it is that Kagan thought had happened) after all, but obviously has continued supporting Georgia and objecting to Russia’s presence in the separatist republics as it did all along. This is both unwise and unnecessary, but it is U.S. policy. It is true that this administration is generally less combative and obnoxious about the dispute between Russia and Georgia than its predecessor, and it seems that there is some scaling back of U.S./NATO ambitions in the region, but Obama has largely continued Bush’s misguided approach towards Russia’s neighbors as much as it realistically can.

Just as Obama cannot work magic and topple the Iranian government with a few well-chosen words of solidarity for the opposition, he does not control the dynamics of Ukranian politics, nor can he expel Russian forces from territories whose inhabitants do not want to be part of Georgia. As Samuel Charap correctly argued earlier this month, there has been no sell-out of U.S. allies along Russia’s borders. One wonders how Kagan will reconcile this reality with the satisfying story of Obama’s betrayal of allies that hawks have been telling themselves for the last year and a half. Having given Obama a little credit this month, he will presumably return to the satisfying story in July and go back to making ridiculous attacks.

What is strange is that Kagan seems to have just discovered the administration’s support for Georgia. His praise for Obama’s backing of Georgia comes just a month after he lamented Obama’s betrayal of Georgia. Kagan’s entire view of how Obama is handling Georgia changes wildly depending on what press release he has read most recently. There seems to be no awareness of the major continuities in U.S. policy from one administration to the next and from one year to the next. For that matter, Kagan doesn’t seem to remember his own columns from one month to the next. In May, the U.N. security resolution on Iran was “hollow” and worthless, and certainly not worth the supposed betrayals of U.S. allies and concessions to Russia that bothered Kagan so much. Now Kagan has endorsed the resolution as one of Obama’s five main foreign policy victories. Yes, his endorsement was filled with qualifications, but in just a few weeks a resolution that was absolutely worthless became much more valuable. As far as I can tell, the only thing that changed was that two rising powers went against Washington at the Security Council, Washington slapped them down, and this mistreatment of Brazil and Turkey for the sake of what Kagan used to think was a “hollow” resolution was enough to earn Kagan’s admiration.

On the whole, the more abrasively and stupidly Obama has acted toward genuinely valuable allies in pursuit of questionable or foolish policies, the more Kagan cheers. Kagan regards Washington’s mistreatment of Turkey when it foolishly dismissed and insulted Turkish efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran as part of Obama’s success in foreign policy. He likewise sees the downfall of Japanese PM Hatoyama as a boon for the alliance and another Obama success. It is actually a sign of the profound dysfunction of the alliance and one of Obama’s biggest mistakes so far. Kagan has taken the two most clear examples of how important allies actually are being mistreated and abused by this administration and makes them out to be examples of wise and appropriate statecraft. It’s safe to say that Kagan’s judgment on these matters isn’t very reliable, and it’s even more certain that whatever Kagan regards as one of the administration’s foreign policy successes should probably be counted as one of its blunders.

Apologies for the light blogging this week. I have been getting ready for a trip that will require even less blogging next week, so I have been falling behind in following the latest news. McChrystal’s departure is obviously the most significant story of the month, and there is a lot here worth discussing. I’ll start with a few observations. They will be far from exhaustive. Retaining McChrystal would have been untenable, and it would have fed the story of an indecisive Obama that critics of administration policy on Afghanistan have been eager to push from the beginning. Replacing him with Petraeus was the sort of cynical, politically savvy move that will help to sustain support for the war in Congress and the media, which is what Petraeus did fairly well for the Iraq war in 2007, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the wrong choice.

After more than seven years of being under-resourced and undermanned, the war in Afghanistan was steadily alienating the civilian population and gradually contributing to U.S. failure. The administration’s Afghanistan plan has led to some improvement in that it has reduced the numbers of Afghan civilians killed by U.S. and NATO actions, and considering the failing status quo approach and the awful “counter-terrorist” alternative that was the default choice in 2009 the administration’s plan still looks as if it was the best realistic option available. As in Iraq, having a “conditions-based” withdrawal in Afghanistan has always left U.S. policy at the mercy of insurgents to some extent and it will prolong U.S. involvement there more than it should, but it remains the case that the administration’s plan was the only one that was both politically viable in Washington and the most realistic way to create conditions for a final U.S. withdrawal.

As Andrew Exum wrote shortly after the Rolling Stone piece came out, “In a weird way, Hastings is making the argument to readers of Rolling Stone (Rolling Stone!) that counterinsurgency sucks because it doesn’t allow our soldiers to kill enough people.” That has also been one of the principal criticisms of administration policy coming from the right: the rules of engagement are too strict and do not allow for enough aimless violence. This is what I find so frustrating about a lot of phony Republican “antiwar” arguments, as I have explained before in my criticisms of George Will and others. These critics are all for withdrawal, provided that “withdrawal” still allows air strikes against targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan for years and decades to come regardless of the effects on the civilian population. These critics really have no problem with an endless military campaign in the region so long as there is no immediate risk to any Americans. This is one reason why it is somewhat misleading to describe the “counter-terrorist” approach as a more “limited” one, when it is certain to be far less limited in time because it is fairly certain to push the population into the arms of the groups that would be targeted by these strikes. What advocates of genuine disengagement and withdrawal often overlook is that the fastest way to get to a point where the administration can leave Afghanistan entirely is to shore up the Afghan government and military enough that they will not disintegrate soon after U.S. forces depart.

Reihan follows up on his column and explains what he was trying to do:

My column was uncharacteristically intemperate, and I fear my argument has been misunderstood. Rather than single out the Obama administration for blame, I was speaking to a human tendency to vilify outsiders. I get the impression that BP has been doing an impressively bad job of managing environmental as well as health and safety risks for a long time. But now, when this view is universally shared, I’m suspicious of get-tough tactics that short-circuit a deliberative process. This is all very abstract — more abstract than I’d like to be or than I ought to be.

Now that I have had some more time to think about it and have read his clarifications, I’m actually very sympathetic to what Reihan was trying to do. It is very similar to many of the foreign policy arguments I make on a regular basis, which are likewise contrarian and frequently misunderstood. It seems to me that the BP fund was a poor example to use in making what I see to be a very important point, which is that outrage is no substitute for good judgment and critical thinking and that the impulse to score quick, emotionally satisfying victories at expense of unsympathetic, relatively weaker parties frequently leads to terrible abuses and errors. That is something that should be kept in mind in every debate. It would certainly be very valuable when thinking about international relations and assessing the existence and significance of perceived threats.

There is also a need for arguments that challenge what everyone readily assumes to be true, and there should be much more caution against automatically agreeing with what “everyone knows.” As we have seen many times in the past, consensus views often enjoy broad support not because they are true or persuasive but because they are comforting and convenient. For example, there seems to be a broad consensus in the U.S. that Turkey has become a destabilizing or dangerous actor in the Near East, which seems entirely unreasonable and unfounded to me, and we are hearing a lot of wild talk about the revival of the Ottoman Empire that is just as crazy as all of the “neo-Soviet” alarmism of the last few years was. In the past, I have usually been more critical of the Turkish government than most, and I am hardly unaware of the flaws and abuses of the current government, but like Reihan in this discussion I have reacted sharply against the suddenly unanimous (and painfully incorrect) certainty that Turkey has been the villain responsible for wrecking relations with Israel and “abandoning” the West. So I definitely don’t want to discourage skepticism and criticism of consensus views that rely on the vilification of outsiders and “others.” Reihan’s argument does not hold up that well in this case, but his instinct to challenge the prevailing view and not jump on the bandwagon remains a sound one.

Reihan:

Shakedowns of this kind have a long and undistinguished history. And let’s acknowledge that they aren’t partisan, or even American, in nature. Republican presidents have engaged in similar tactics, like the so-called “voluntary restraint agreement” the Reagan administration reached with Japanese automobile exporters. During the westward expansion of the United States, the federal government “negotiated” with sovereign Indian nations in a similar spirit. European powers engaged in a truly extraordinary shakedown of China during the 19th century, forcing a then-vulnerable empire to accept the spread of opium and surrender treaty ports like Hong Kong. Resentment of the West lingers still.

This seems a bit overstated. Dave Weigel reported earlier this week that some Republican members of Congress, including Louisiana’s Joseph Cao, had been pushing for BP to establish the fund weeks ago. BP voluntarily decided to establish the fund, and then after the fact Obama took some credit for the establishment of the fund. I don’t quite see how this is comparable to the disparity and abuse of power in the Opium Wars, the forced relocations of whole nations or communal riots in Ahmedabad. For that matter, I missed the part in all of this where “a stronger party, ignoring the conventions of a good-faith negotiation, all but forces a weaker party to bend to its will.”

It appears that the corporation responsible for the spill is attempting to take responsibility for the consequences of its negligence, and it doesn’t appear that much coercion was involved. I can understand that Reihan does not want to encourage a spirit of vindictiveness, and he probably doesn’t want to encourage anti-corporate populism that this spill has been fueling (if you’ll pardon the expression), but anything less than some gesture from BP like this one would have ensured that both would have become much stronger. I haven’t heard such tone-deaf arguments from the right since the Republican leadership was rallying around the financial industry to defeat a financial regulation bill that made major financial firms responsible for covering liquidation costs of failing firms. Back then we heard about how it was a fund for “endless bailouts,” and today we hear that this fund is a shakedown. There are other similarities between the two cases, except that in this case many people on the right are trying to be more pro-corporate than the corporation under scrutiny. Even if it this weren’t politically insane given the public’s mood, it would still be wrong on the merits.

I can much more readily imagine how people whose industries, beaches and wetlands are being wrecked every day by this spill might see the fund as an insulting attempt to buy sympathy and to try to ward off more significant payouts later on. When it comes to disparities of power, one could do worse than looking at the disparity between BP and the Gulf coast residents whose lands and livelihoods are being destroyed by the results of BP’s failures. It is only proper that these people are compensated for losses they incurred through no fault of their own.

Attacking the creation of this fund as somehow disreputable or comparable to grave, violent crimes not only shows a staggering disconnect with the views of most Americans, but it also hints at a bizarre favoritism for the interests of the economically powerful over people of modest and limited means. It is a favoritism that seems to have nothing to do with legitimate concerns about excessive or distorting government regulation or principled objections to unnecessary state interference in the marketplace. What exactly is the threat to orderly society here? This is not a case of a mob wielding torches and laying waste to BP’s corporate offices. It is not even a case of demagogic politicians imposing draconian penalties on the company.

What is worse is that Reihan is trying to advance this terrible argument by claiming that it is a matter of speaking up for the unsympathetic victim of injustice and inhumanity. Sometimes the despised are despised for good reason. That doesn’t mean that we abandon good judgment and reason and give in to ruthlessness, much less violence, but it does mean that we don’t complain that a culprit is being unfairly crucified when he offers to pay for his disastrous mistake.

Update: Reihan replies in the comments below, and elsewhere he says that he has changed his mind.

Ataturk’s western orientation was partly about cementing Turkey’s place in the richer and more technologically advanced west; it was also about sealing Turkey off from the divisive conflicts in the east. Frustration with the west is understandably leading some Turks to look east; the results are more likely to vindicate Ataturk’s view of Turkish national strategy than to refute it. ~Walter Russell Mead

This description is incomplete in a couple important ways that help Mead to exaggerate the current Turkish government’s divergence from “Ataturk’s view.” When Atatürk was head of state, Turkey was involved in “eastern” disputes as it quarreled over control of the vilayet of Mosul, which remained an unresolved issue for years after the establishment of Iraq. Turkey later annexed the short-lived Republic of Hatay on its southern frontier. More recently, the struggle with the PKK brought Turkey to the brink of war with Syria in 1998 when the latter was harboring Ocalan. After Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia, Turkey aligned itself with the Azeris and closed the border with Armenia, which remains closed to this day. Of necessity, there has always been an “eastern” dimension to Turkish policy.

What Atatürk most wanted to avoid in the east was the temptation of Pan-Turkish nationalism that could have led Turkey into the sort of self-destructive adventurism that resulted from the Greek Megali Idea. Atatürk was certainly a Turkish nationalist, but he envisioned a Turkish nation rooted in and limited to Anatolia. The Pan-Turkish delusions that led Enver off on his hopeless mission in exile to rally the Turkic peoples of Central Asia were never supposed to guide Turkish foreign policy, and aside from the occasional visit to Urumqi while in China Erdogan has not shown any interest in this. Instead, Atatürk believed Turkey was supposed to pursue strict neutrality and peace with all of Turkey’s neighbors.

Obviously, Turkey abandoned neutrality when it joined NATO, but it is important to understand that that was a far more significant departure from Atatürk‘s legacy than anything Erdogan and the AKP have ever proposed doing. We should avoid the easy conflation of what later Kemalists did with what Atatürk recommended that they do. In some respects, the AKP’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy is much more in line with the original foreign policy pursued by Atatürk and initially by Inönü than the anti-Soviet and later anti-Hussein policies of their Kemalist successors. Now that the Soviet threat has disappeared, Turkey’s departure from its original foreign policy stance understandably makes less and less sense.

After all, why should Turkey effectively continue to operate as a front-line state when the old Soviet threat is gone? Why should Turkey function as a staging area for U.S. military operations against its neighbors, especially when many Turks do not see their neighbors as being particularly threatening to them? What is remarkable in the last few years is not that Turkey is trying to improve relations with its neighbors, including governments Washington views as threats, but that Turkey remains integrated in Western security structures when the U.S. insists on making its membership conflict with its own national interests and the Turkish republic’s original foreign policy tradition. If Turkey adopted strict neutrality again, that would be much more in keeping with the legacy of Atatürk. As the U.S. continues to benefit from the Turkish alliance, Americans should be pleased that Turkey’s current government is willing to preserve the post-WWII shift in its foreign policy even though it directly contradicts what Atatürk wanted for his country. Then again, perhaps both Americans and Turks would stand to benefit if we both embraced our founders’ neutralist convictions.

Mort Zuckerman makes a lot of questionable claims in this article, but the most exaggerated claims might be the ones that most readers probably won’t give a second thought:

We also benefit from the fact that most countries distrust the United States far less than they distrust one another [bold mine-DL], so we uniquely have the power to build coalitions. As a result, most of the world still looks to Washington for help in their region and protection against potential regional threats.

These are badly misleading half-truths. There are perhaps a dozen or so countries that truly fit these descriptions, but for the other 180-odd nations these are false or irrelevant. It may be true that Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast distrust one another more than either distrusts the U.S., but that has no practical significance. In most cases, there are no major potential regional threats, or at least there are no meaningful threats from state actors, so the need for U.S. protection is minimal or non-existent across much of the world. The U.S. does have client states that our government arms, and it is certainly true that several of these states trust the U.S. more than they trust their neighbors, but one reason for this is that the U.S. has armed them specifically to use their military power for questionable goals of regional destabilization in the name of fighting terrorism or subverting authoritarian governments Washington dislikes. One example that comes to mind is Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia at Washington’s behest. Often enough when distrust exists, the U.S. stokes it to keep some client states firmly in our orbit. I don’t think that’s what Zuckerman had in mind.

There are some states bordering Russia, the Gulf states, and a handful of East Asian states where these claims make more sense. However, all of those states are not only a distinct minority of the world’s nations, but they are also atypical and unrepresentative of “most countries.” Once we move beyond the state level to public opinion, Zuckerman’s statements go from being arguably true in some instances to being extremely shaky. It is probably still true that the Turkish government trusts the U.S. than it trusts some neighboring states, but it is harder to assume that the same is true of the Turkish public.

Our unique coalition-building power is also not so unique. Regional trading blocs and security organizations have been coming together all over the world for the last two decades, and while many of them are still in their early stages of development their existence alone suggests that mutual distrust among “most countries” is not nearly as great as Zuckerman imagines. If Zuckerman is referring to building a coalition to invade or needlessly penalize other countries, he is correct that no other government can build coalitions quite like the U.S., but then hardly any other governments are prepared or willing to do this. It is also unclear how any of this actually serves international security or American interests.

If the key assumptions in Zuckerman’s article are so questionable, it won’t be a surprise that the rest of it is badly mistaken about many things. He has resorted to the old crutch of invoking “the American people” to state his own criticisms, except that here he presumes to speak on behalf of “the global community”:

The reviews of Obama’s performance have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America’s role in the world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama bowing to some of the world’s leaders and surprised by his gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America’s foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush.

Actually, the “global community” wasn’t puzzled by the bowing at all. They didn’t care. As I recall, the only people who even noticed it were Republican critics of the administration. The “global community” couldn’t have been surprised by “gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America’s foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush,” because on the whole Obama has refrained from making very many specific criticisms of Bush when he has been abroad and there have been no apologies. Again, practically the only people on the planet who have identified a so-called “apology tour” are American Republicans, because they are the only ones with an incentive to invent something that never happened in order to score points against Obama. The idea that Obama is uncomfortable with American leadership and American exceptionalism is false and it is one that is almost unique to conservative pundits and politicians in the U.S. The only people abroad who seem to share in this delusion are their center-right Anglosphere counterparts.

The funniest part of the column might be this line:

One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one’s own tribe while in the lands of others.

Zuckerman carefully omits that this “authority” is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal and a reliable defender of almost everything the Bush administration ever did or tried to do in the Near East. His job for the last eighteen months has been to find fault with anything the administration does in the region. To believe that Ajami has correctly described the reaction to Obama’s “apologies” and criticisms, one first has to believe that Obama has issued apologies and made particularly withering criticisms of past U.S. government policies. Since Obama has become President, this isn’t the case, at least not for those of us living in the real world.

Other items in Zuckerman’s indictment are even less persuasive. Sarkozy has scorned Obama’s idea of a world without nuclear weapons, but that doesn’t mean very much. Obama has shown over the last year and a half that he has no intention of trying to eliminate U.S. and allied arsenals, and there was no reason to think that he would. The British have been talking about the end of the “special relationship” for a long time, and the main reason why many of their politicians began openly ridiculing or challenging the definition of the relationship more recently was their resentment of British subservience to the U.S. during the Bush administration. Putin will say what he likes, but U.S.-Russian relations have meaningfully improved in the last 18 months and this has yielded tangible benefits for the U.S. Zuckerman’s criticism of Obama’s China visit is the conventional one much of the American media made at the time, which was completely superficial. At the time, the media missed out on the limited but real substantive success of that visit.

On Iran sanctions, Zuckerman makes one of the more insipid hawkish criticisms of Obama:

Could it be that these long-standing U.S. allies [Turkey and Brazil], who gave cover to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, have decided that there is no cost in lining up with America’s most serious enemies and no gain in lining up with this administration?

Could it be that the governments of Turkey and Brazil make decisions that they believe serve international stability and help the U.S. out of an impasse? That this obviously never even occurred to Zuckerman tells us just how superficial and shoddy his criticisms are. Zuckerman makes no mention of the nuclear deal Turkey and Brazil negotiated with Iran, so he cannot acknowledge that they voted against sanctions to try to keep their fuel-swap deal alive. Having decided that voting against the weak sanctions resolution represents treachery and evidence that Turkey and Brazil are ” lining up with America’s most serious enemies,” Zuckerman inevitably concludes that these allies have been “lost” because Obama has not been arrogant and confrontational strong enough. He cannot seem to grasp that these governments would have opposed sanctions regardless of who was in the White House, because they correctly regard imposing additional sanctions on Iran as futile and unnecessary. That would entail actually thinking about the nuclear issue as something more than a loyalty test that we force other governments to take, and Zuckerman clearly has no intention of doing that.

I could go on, as the rest of the article is not much better, but it is already pretty clear that the only incompetence and amateurism Zuckerman has demonstrated here is that of his own criticisms. It’s just another reminder that Obama continues to be extraordinarily lucky in his critics and opponents. Obama has made his share of mistakes, and a more capable, honest opposition could do a lot of damage to him between now and the next presidential election, but his hawkish critics seem to prefer dwelling in a fantasy world and like to attack Obama for things he didn’t do or blame him for things for which he is not responsible.