Moscow is not only seeking assurances from these countries that they will not seek to join the West. It is also seeking assurances from Western nations that they recognize this alleged sphere of special interest – and potentially give their tacit agreement to such new notions of limited sovereignty. That is one of the main issues embedded in a series of Russian policy pronouncements and the European security proposal of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. While no Western leader has yet endorsed this idea as official policy, one doesn’t have to travel very far in the diplomatic corridors before running across diplomats who are asking out loud whether some new and modern version of “Finlandization” might become an acceptable policy for countries whose prospects for Western integration seem to be sinking. ~Ronald Asmus

Something that never ceases to annoy me about Asmus’ sort of argument is the obliviousness to U.S. efforts to employ concepts of “balance of power, sphere of influence, and limited sovereignty” in its policies in different parts of the world. Humanitarian interventionists of the last two decades have taken it for granted that some states are not permitted to pursue their own internal policies free of interference. The idea of limited sovereignty was used to justify intervening in Kosovo, and it was the unspoken assumption behind the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq for twelve years. Neither of these had any international legal sanction. They were all obvious violations of state sovereignty, and hardly anyone in the political classes of the U.S. and western Europe batted an eye at any of them.

So it isn’t true that these concepts were abolished by a “belief in a new cooperative European security structure.” The vision the previous three Presidents pursued was one in which only the U.S. and our allies were permitted to put these concepts into practice. Over the last decade, especially after the recognition of Kosovo independence, Moscow started working on turning our own interventionist rhetoric and practice against neighboring states that the U.S. had made or was trying to make into clients. NATO expansion had brought the U.S. sphere of influence right up to Russia’s borders, and Washington wanted to continue expanding this sphere even farther into the former Soviet Union, despite the fact that pluralities or majorities in the relevant countries did not want to align themselves with the U.S. at the expense of good relations with Russia.

Washington wanted to create a balance of power that is distinctly unfavorable to Russia on Russia’s borders, and it wanted to secure a sphere of influence maintained by openly anti-Russian governments. It also wanted to make Kosovo an exceptional case, because it was fine to continue violating Serbian sovereignty, but it is now absolutey wrong to violate Georgian or Ukrainian sovereignty. The U.S. cannot trample on state sovereignty some of the time, actively expand its sphere of influence in the vicinity of other major powers and declare publicly an intention to create “a balance of power that favors freedom,” and then react with outrage and shock when other major powers imitate the U.S., attempt to limit the expansion of America’s sphere of influence and attempt to shift the balance of power back again in their direction.

As for this Finlandization talk, arguably the only country to which this really applies today might be Georgia. Very clearly, Russia does not want Georgia in NATO, and thanks to Saakashvili’s recklessness it has now made it virtually impossible for Georgia to gain admission to the alliance. As much as some Georgians may want to pursue a pro-Western orientation including membership in NATO, the reality is that NATO will not take Georgia in and Georgian foreign policy truly is constrained by what Russia will permit. No one in the West has to like this, but it is the reality. We can formally maintain the fiction that small states that are economically dependent on major powers are free to set their own foreign policies, but we are kidding ourselves if we think this is how things are going to work.

The separatist republics now under Russian protection are the important, complicating factors that Asmus does not discuss here. Prior to the war, Georgia was committed to “reintegrating” them, and theoretically the Georgian government is still committed to this virtually impossible goal, which created a major flashpoint between Georgia and Russia. Under those circumstances, Washington’s push to bring Georgia into NATO was disastrously provocative, because it raised the possibility that Georgia could gain Western protection and cover for forcibly reintegrating the separatist republics and because it would have provided a Western security guarantee to a government headed by someone who was virulently and vocally anti-Russian. Indeed, even before Georgia had gained membership Saakashvili believed that he could count on Western support in the event of a conflict over these territories. It is clear that the promise of “further enlargement of Western institutions” encouraged him in this reckless, ruinous course, and so it is hard to understand what could be gained by any of the parties involved by continuing the push for more enlargement.

I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don’t see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They’re in one reality, he’s in another. ~Peggy Noonan

Of these three things, only the handling of the oil spill has the potential to be as much of a political disaster for the administration as it has been an environmental disaster for the Gulf coast. Oddly enough, Obama is in this position partly because he had tacked towards the center on offshore drilling as part of a bid to win Republican support for climate change legislation. Had he been adamantly against offshore drilling all along, he might have been called an environmentalist ideologue and “out of touch” with the blessed center, but he could point to the oil spill as an example of why he took that view. Were he actually the left-winger Republicans like to pretend that he is, his response to a major oil spill by a multinational corporation would have been much more aggressive and angrier, but that isn’t who he is. Unfortunately, he is all too often “in sync with the center,” by which I mean the Washington centrists’ center, and that means accommodation and support for entrenched and powerful interests. It is largely because of his instinct to accommodate that he finds himself in this mess. The latest Gallup poll finds that 53% regard Obama’s handling of the spill as poor or very poor, so there’s no question that most of the public does not approve. Even so, his average approval rating remains 47%, which is more or less where it has been during the three “disasters” Noonan thinks no one can survive.

It’s also probably true that his opposition is uniquely unsuited to take advantage of the administration’s vulnerability. The party of “drill here, drill now” is a strange one to lead the fight against an oil corporation and an administration perceived as being too deferential and easy on said corporation. Republicans have spent the last two years trying to be more pro-drilling than the oil companies and more hostile to financial regulation than the financial industry, but they also want to complain about administration collusion with corporate and financial interests. They can’t quite get their demagoguing script worked out, and so one day it is an attack on Obama the corporatist, which has the virtue of being the most accurate, and then the next it is an attack on Obama the radical leftist who hates capitalism. Amid all the contradictory and confusing messages, Obama seems to escape the attacks with minimal damage.

If the health care bill and the recent immigration debate have been political disasters for Obama, it doesn’t show. Obama’s opposition to the new law in Arizona was a mistake in that it did put him at odds with the majority, but it hardly counts as a disaster until he makes the real blunder of trying to get an immigration bill passed ths year. When seen from outside the camp of its opponents, the passage of the health care bill was one of the largest victories any President of either party has had in decades. Aside from a slight drop in polling numbers for Obama and the Democrats between January and April, the political damage does not appear very great. Noonan is making the mistake of confusing things Obama has done that she dislikes with political disasters.

There are other things that Noonan claims in this column that are misleading. For example, she writes:

The American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government spending would, in the end, undo the republic.

It is hard to know what it means that the people have been worrying about this. They haven’t changed their views on government spending. Majorities consistently want more spending in almost every area, except for dreaded foreign aid, and large pluralities oppose any spending cuts in almost every area. It would be excellent if the American people had as much republican zeal in the form of deficit hawkishness as Noonan thinks, but it isn’t the case.

Noonan also declares the oil spill a disaster also for Obama’s political assumptions. This is the part that makes the least sense:

His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

The trouble is that when we look at what Obama has actually done, or rather failed to do, we do not see someone pursuing a philosophy that the federal government should “occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America.” The actual complaint against the administration is that it has been too hands off, too uninvolved, too passive! Americans have conditioned themselves to think of Presidents as problem-solvers who are supposed to take an active role in addressing any and every major event that occurs, and conservatives no less than liberals have invested the Presidency with a moral and national leadership role quite apart from constitutional responsibilities.

If a President does not actively “take charge” and is not seen as “doing something,” he is ridiculed as weak and ineffective, when according to any vision of a less activist, less interventionist, less intrusive government the President would not involve himself closely in most events similar to this oil spill. It is a bit more absurd in the conservatives’ case. They are horrified by the tyranny of the individual mandate, but most otherwise seem content to demand the firm smack of a strong executive and the protections of an omnicompetent managerial state. Having mocked Obama’s more enthusiastic supporters for wanting him to be a savior of sorts, some Republicans seem genuinely annoyed that he has not been able to work miracles.

P.S. It didn’t occur to me until just now, but I realized that Noonan’s column reminds me very much of the Saturday Night Live character who keeps demanding that he wants someone to “fix it!”

Since June 12, U.S. realists and idealists have had an Iranian field day. The realists have dismissed the Green Movement, proclaimed a stolen election fair, and urged President Obama to toss aside human rights concerns and repair relations with Tehran in the American interest.

The idealists have rained renewed fury on Ahmadinejad, called for his overthrow and urged Obama to bury outreach and back Moussavi.

Both are wrong. ~Roger Cohen

Cohen then goes on to say that the U.S. should pursue engagement and give the Turkish-Brazilian deal “skeptical consideration,” which is to say that on the main points of contention in the Iran policy debate right now Cohen has sided quite clearly with the realists. He doesn’t like that some realists have dismissed the Green movement, even though these realists were apparently right all along that the Green movement was unrepresentative and was growing weaker as time went by. Those of us who said this did not take any pleasure in the weakness and setbacks of the Iranian opposition, but we refused to pretend that emotionally-satisfying boosterism for a protest movement that was not going to succeed was an acceptable substitute for critical thinking about what U.S. Iran policy should be.

Cohen doesn’t like that some realists have argued that Ahmadinejad would have avoided a run-off even without fraud, but there is reason to believe this is correct and there is not much evidence supporting the “coup” interpretation of last year’s election. Since a large part of the argument against engagement hinges on whether or not the Iranian government is seen by most Iranians as legitimate, it is very important to make the correct determination about the extent of the government’s support at the last election. If Cohen starts from the assumption that fraud changed the election’s outcome, he will also assume that there is a much broader base of support for the opposition protesters than there actually seems to be. This distorts everything else in his analysis, and causes him to find fault with the realists who have been almost entirely right on the most important points of contention for the last year.

It could be that the U.S. could speak out about abuse and pursue engagement at the same time, but what if making engagement the priority provides the U.S. with leverage and influence to improve the treatment of dissidents that it currently does not have? Even if it required some temporary silence on the subject of government abuses (at least in public), wouldn’t that move towards Cohen’s goal more effectively than condemning abuses while simultaneously trying (and failing) to engage with Iran’s government? Would it be acceptable to Cohen for the government to try to end the isolation that Cohen says “only serves the horror merchants” before engaging in a lot of public criticism of human rights abuses? If isolation “only serves the horror merchants,” doesn’t engagement serve the interests of dissidents and the regime’s other victims? What if engagement leads to significant long-term improvements in the treatment of dissidents, but comes at the price of briefly suspending public criticism? Is that a trade-off sympathizers with Iranian dissidents could make, or will they insist on putting their anti-regime rhetoric ahead of getting the policy right?

Cohen has been right on Iran more often than he has been wrong, but supporters of engagement aren’t going to get anywhere with Cohen’s odd brand of anti-realist realism that is mixed with his anti-idealist idealism.

Consider China, by many measures the most significant emerging country in the world. It wants to maintain preferred access to Iran’s energy resources, but if conflict results from Iran’s nuclear aspirations, China will be paying much higher a price for those resources. The prospect of a threat to the stability of the greater Middle East and to the flow of oil should give China an incentive to support robust sanctions against Iran. But it is not clear whether China’s leaders will recognize this and act in their country’s own long-term self interest. ~Richard Haass

Put another way, China ought to align itself completely with America’s diplomatic agenda on Iran sanctions, because the U.S. or one of our allies might attack Iran and create serious economic difficulties for China if sanctions are unsuccessful in getting Iran to limit a nuclear program that Iran is never going to limit. Of course, as far as Chinese economic interests are concerned, sanctions are already a form of conflict that will raise their costs. “Robust” sanctions would involve choking off vital supplies to Iran and making normal economic life in Iran very difficult, which would in turn harm Chinese economic interests. China doesn’t recognize that “robust” Iran sanctions are in its long-term self-interest because they aren’t, so it is hard to see why China is going act in a way that conflicts with their self-interest.

Haass’ position is that China should go along with a confrontational diplomatic track that conflicts with its interests under threat that the U.S. could pursue an even more confrontational military track that will conflict with its interests even more. This is essentially an ultimatum, but Haass overlooks that following through on the “threat” is something that will harm the U.S. and our allies just as much as, if not more than, it will harm China. Once we get to the heart of the argument (“Do something you don’t want to do because we say so, or else we will make things very difficult for you”), it is no wonder that China wants no part of “robust” sanctions. It seems that China is acting fairly rationally as far as its own interests are concerned. The real question we should be asking is why we are pursuing a policy course that is both futile and could ultimately lead to a conflict that would do significant damage to us and our allies. Perhaps if we spent less time assuming that we know the long-term interests of other states and more on assessing what is in America’s interest, we would not find ourselves in these ridiculous predicaments.

Speaking of ideology and petty exercises in enforcement, Lee Siegel calls out Paul Berman for being one of the worst offenders:

In the sense that it recalls the heated solipsism of Partisan Review’s early politicized days, Mr. Berman’s “smackdown” reflects the worst tendencies of intellectual life, not the best. He has a simple point to make: Tariq Ramadan-a Muslim intellectual based in Oxford and taken up by some Western intellectuals as the spokesman for a moderate Islam-is a secret fanatic and a dangerous fraud. The intellectuals who defend him have betrayed Western civilization. On the other hand, Ayan Hirsi Ali-a Muslim intellectual, now based in Washington, D.C., who is highly critical of Islamic culture and is criticized by some of the same Western intellectuals for what they regard as her belligerent posturing-is a hero. The intellectuals who attack her have betrayed Western civilization. Though Berman sees Munich-like appeasement everywhere, there are, to my mind, good arguments, constructed in good faith, to be made for and against both these figures. But the arguments are irrelevant to the point of being ludicrous.

Here Siegel is reviewing The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman’s book-length expansion of his impossibly long and not very interesting New Republic critique of Tariq Ramadan. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I actually read the entire critique when it came out, and then wondered why I had bothered. Nonetheless, I was curious to see what Siegel had to say after coming across it in a separate column by Jacob Heilbrunn (via Andrew). Then as now, what matters is not Berman’s argument against Ramadan or his argument for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but how Berman’s obsessive writing on this subject captures so perfectly the absurd, alarmist nature of so much anti-jihadist writing.

As Siegel points out, the true meaning of Tariq Ramadan’s ideas, whatever it may be, “poses no threat to Western democracy.” One of the main problems that many anti-jihadists have is that they want to liken anti-jihadism to anticommunism and anti-fascism, and they very much want to make the jihadist threat seem as threatening as, if not more threatening than, communism and Nazism at their strongest. These comparisons are all wrong and the power of jihadism is grossly exaggerated in the process, and so it isn’t surprising that the overreaction to Islamists in the West is similarly overblown. This is itself a sort of “idealistic posturing” that allows the people who engage in it to declare their own virtue and correct thinking while portraying themselves as defenders of an endangered civilization. Meanwhile, of course, all the risks and losses are taken by other people, and entire countries are ruined by the wars these people insist are absolutely vital. More than that, these wars are treated as vital not simply for specific security interests, which might at least be debated rationally, but for our very survival.

Several years ago, Berman’s arch-nemesis, Ian Buruma, wrote a good column in which he pointed to the true danger coming from certain Western intellectuals today:

But if one sees our current problems in less apocalyptic terms, then another kind of “trahison des clercs” comes into view: the blind cheering on of a sometimes foolish military power embarked on unnecessary wars that cost more lives than they were intended to save.

As we have discussed before, there has been a growing recognition on the left that the interventionism that this blind cheering enables has been disastrous, and as a result of that disaster liberal interventionism has been in decline for many years. We should welcome this, much as we should be glad that Berman’s irrelevant alarmism is receiving the scorn it deserves.

P.S. If you have nothing better to do, you may want to read Michael Totten’s interview of Berman from earlier this month to have a better appreciation of just how smugly self-righteous and wrong Berman is.

Republicans in Idaho’s First District had their primary election yesterday to determine the nominee who will face incumbent Democrat Rep. Walt Minnick. As I have mentioned before and many know already, Minnick has the distinction of being the only House Democratic candidate endorsed by a major Tea Party organization. This report by Kyle Trygstad helps to explain why: Minnick is a fiscally conservative former Republican and now Blue Dog Democrat who has voted with his party only 70% of the time. By comparison, even Joseph Cao, who represents deepest-blue LA-02, has voted with his party 82% of the time. Minnick is the least reliable partisan in the entire House (or the most independent politician in the House, if you prefer), which may also give him the best chance of all of the Blue Dogs to hold his seat in the fall. Following Raul Labrador’s decisive 48-39% win in a five-way race over the mistake-prone, ridiculous Vaughn Ward, Minnick’s task has become much more difficult than it would have been.

As Trygstad explained and as Dave Weigel has reported previously, Ward has suffered a number of embarrassing setbacks in recent months. The more significant problems were charges of plagiarism against him, including his near-verbatim recitation of passages from Obama’s 2004 keynote address as if it were his own. No less embarrassing, but possibly less politically damaging, was his claim that he thought Puerto Rico was a foreign country in the context of answering a question on Puerto Rican statehood.

There’s no question that Republicans are better off in this district with Labrador as the nominee. It looks bad for the NRCC that one of the ten top recruits lost the primary, and it doesn’t help Palin’s reputation that she keeps backing losers in House races, but the good news for Republicans is that they have come out of t this week with a better chance to retake the seat than if the national and state party leadership had had its way. Labrador’s platform is run-of-the-mill Republicanism, and I wasn’t expecting anything creative or refreshing, but what is mildly encouraging about Labrador’s win is that the clueless NRCC and party leaders were unable to foist such a poor candidate on people in ID-01. It is much better that the actual local Idahoan and state representative prevailed. Needless to say, ID-01 is one of the most vulnerable Democratic districts in the country, and any Republican hopes of major gains depend on their being able to recover a seat that is this heavily Republican.

Prof. Soli Özel has an interesting essay in World Affairs on the Turkish-Brazilian nuclear deal (via Scoblete). I was struck in particular by this observation:

Looking at the way the press in the US covered this story, I was deeply surprised to see pundits and other members of the American news media once again commenting on world events as if the Iraq War had never happened. Without recognizing how damaged American credibility has become as a result of the war — no less because it so egregiously abused the UN process through misinformation, bullying, and manipulation — it will be difficult for the American public to appreciate what other countries are doing.

This is right. What is more striking is how oblivious American pundits and journalists are to how diminished U.S. credibility, especially when it concerns disarmament and nonproliferation issues in the Near East, constantly undermines U.S. efforts to compel Iran to limit or eliminate its nuclear program. This is especially true for those who are supposed to understand such things, or who at least build their reputations around the illusion that they understand them. Leave it to Friedman, the globalization guru himself, to misunderstand completely the changing dynamics of international relations in a multipolar world order. Just as Prof. Özel says, Friedman continues to view the world before the Iraq war as if it were still the early 2000s, and so he seems to understand the cooperation of emerging-market democracies with an authoritarian Islamic government within the shoddy framework of “democracy vs. stability” and concludes that anything that contributes to international stability must necessarily come at the expense of democratic reform and human rights. If Turkey and Brazil have made a deal with Iran, they must be on Iran’s “side” and therefore against Iran’s democrats. Obviously, this is a simplistic, absurd way of seeing the world, but this is the way that so many punidts and journalists saw it before the war started.

Noah Millman has very carefully dissected the flaws in Friedman’s argument that I criticized last night, and we agree that Friedman’s wish to aid Iran’s opposition is directly at odds with the confrontational policy course he supports. Millman writes:

Meanwhile, there’s precious little evidence that a confrontational policy – granting for the sake of argument that such a policy could be successful in delaying or even ending the Iranian nuclear program – does anything to bolster the opposition or to improve the prospects for liberalization. The leadership of the opposition opposes harsh sanctions and emphatically opposes any military action by the West against Iran.

One of the more cynical political maneuvers of the last year has been the adoption of the cause of the Green movement by Iran hawks in the West. It has been quite effective for the purposes of lending the political cover of opposition to authoritarian rule to a confrontational course of sanctions and perhaps eventually military action. This has allowed Iran hawks to win over other Westerners who genuinely sympathize with the opposition and have come to loathe the Iranian government to such an extent that they cannot tolerate the thought of fully engaging with it. Even though a confrontational course will do nothing for the opposition, and it will almost certainly destroy its political hopes, many of the opposition’s would-be friends in the West have sided with the Iran hawks because they find the hawks’ hostility to the Iranian government emotionally and morally satisfying. Millman wonders how Friedman could fail to see the importance of several of his favorite themes when it comes to Iran, but I think Millman underestimates how important this emotionally satisfying anti-regime posturing is to people like Friedman.

This underscores that actual Iranian democratization and liberalization matter far less even to many of the Green movement’s sympathizers than we might think. What seems to matter more is staking out a sufficiently anti-regime position that allows these people to hold themselves out as friends of Iranian reform, which then allows them to denounce the governments that are actually doing the constructive work of engaging with and investing in Iran. As for the hawks, Iranian democratization and liberalization are secondary or tertiary concerns to the extent that they matter at all, and hawks express support for these things mainly because they believe that a more democratic, liberal Iran would be a more compliant, pro-American one. Of course, as we have seen with Turkey and Brazil’s diplomatic free-lancing and greater assertiveness in international affairs, democratization does not necessarily produce the obedient regional powers that many in the U.S. would like to have.

Where Millman may be slightly mistaken is in his proposed offer of a “carrot” to Iran. Overall, I think he is right that the U.S. has a lot to offer Iran in terms of economic exchange and investment, and it would benefit both countries to integrate Iran more fully into the global economy, but Millman may overstate the extent to which Iran’s ability to make this transition depends on the goodwill and cooperation of the U.S. Increasing trade with Turkey and Brazil is one hint that Iran’s integration into the global economy is happening with or without U.S. help or approval. Emerging-market nations may account for as much as 51% of global GDP in 2014, and already made up 45% of it two years ago, and their share will only grow larger over time. The largest emerging-market economies are in countries whose governments are friendly or willing to do business with Iran. Apparently the administration and much of the chattering class are unwilling to see it, but Turkey and Brazil have done the U.S. a favor by demonstrating rather dramatically that we cannot continue to count on our political and economic power, great as it still is, to be able to pull the rest of the world in directions it does not want to go.

The administration has been operating on the assumption that Iran is increasingly isolated in the world, but Turkey and Brazil have shown clearly that this was never true. Iran’s economic integration with the rest of the world will continue despite Washington’s best efforts to isolate it. Instead of Iran missing its chance to “board,” Washington may find that it has missed its best opportunity to make a sustained, constructive opening to Iran, and various emerging-market nations will take advantage of our continued self-imposed isolation from Iran and its market.

No one will claim that Thomas Friedman knows what he’s talking about, but even for one of his columns this was remarkably bad:

I confess that when I first saw the May 17 picture of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joining his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with raised arms — after their signing of a putative deal to defuse the crisis over Iran’s nuclear weapons program — all I could think of was: Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table?

No, that’s about as ugly as it gets.

Apparently Friedman has lived a rather sheltered life. Was it as “ugly as it gets” when FDR and Churchill sat with Stalin at Yalta and carved up Europe, condemning half of it to oppression and domination? It wasn’t pleasant, but it was most likely necessary to avoid another general war. What about when Nixon met with Mao, one of the most destructive rulers in modern history, for the sake of American strategic advantage? Was that an example of prudent statecraft, or was it “as ugly as it gets”? I ask because the crimes of the Iranian regime, while very real and awful, are as nothing compared to the crimes of totalitarian governments that the U.S. has on occasion treated as allies or diplomatic partners. Despite that, we’re going to condemn two democratic governments for attempting a constructive solution to a diplomatic impasse that our government seems incapable of resolving?

Turkey and Brazil did not do this “just to tweak the U.S.” I can’t rule out that some in their governments might have found upstaging America attractive, and rising powers inevitably clash with established ones when they begin to act more assertively, but how hopelessly self-absorbed can Americans be that we think this is purely a gesture directed against us? Turkey and Brazil have economic and diplomatic relations with Iran that they want to cultivate, they simply don’t believe in the Iranian threat as Washington does, and they are taking their moment as non-permanent members of the Security Council to use their growing economic and political clout. This is not insidious or outrageous. It is part of the reality of international relations today, and it has far more to do with relations among Turkey, Brazil and Iran than it has to with with “tweaking” America. That most American observers seem incapable of seeing that is dispiriting.

Where exactly did Turkey and Brazil “sell out other democrats”? In fact, they did nothing of the sort. It’s true, they didn’t engage in the useless posturing that Iran hawks have insisted the President engage in over the last year, but frankly that is to their credit rather than their shame. They offered the beginning of a way to settle the Iranian nuclear issue, which would, if successful, reduce the international pressure on Iran that provides Iran’s authoritarian government with unearned political capital that it can use to strengthen its position at home. That can only help the opposition. The deal would have permitted Iran to develop a nuclear program that most of its people support, and it could have avoided the continued pursuit of additional sanctions that the Iranian opposition clearly opposes. If Iran hawks got the sanctions they wanted imposed, Iran’s opposition would probably wither and disappear. Nothing could be more useful to Iran’s authoriarians than the constant outside vilification directed at Iran on account of its nuclear program. It is laughable that Friedman thinks he is “on the side of the angels” by endorsing Washington’s current confrontational course, which will do no more to delay Iran’s possible acquisition of a bomb than the deal Turkey and Brazil proposed. Instead, it will almost certainly hasten the day when Iran’s government believes it has no choice but to build nuclear weapons.

In the meantime, this confrontational course will create the crisis atmosphere in which a repressive government thrives and a peaceful democratic opposition suffocates. It is not Lula and Erdogan that have sold out Iran’s democrats. On the contrary, it has been their short-sighted enthusiasts in the West who offer them nothing but lip service and then turn around and pursue the policies that will badly weaken or even destroy their chances at realizing peaceful political change.

Ross has replied to my my earlier post. There are several things I would like to say in response, but I want to start with his concluding point:

If the “old right” is ever going to be anything more than a sideshow in conservative politics, it needs to take its own beliefs about the limits of ideological thinking more seriously, and apply its criticisms of neoconservatives and liberals to its own leaders, writers, and institutions. Physician, heal thyself.

Of course, that is what some of us have been working on for many years now. This has been happening not only at this magazine since its inception, but has been a mark of “paleoconservatism at its best” for some time. We have not only provided outlets for dissident conservatives and libertarians of various stripes, but here at TAC in particular we have tried to bring in writers from across the spectrum to rethink conventional ideological categories, challengeourown prevailing views, and publish criticism of our own leaders. Comically, the intellectual curiosity and honesty that lead us to do these things are frequently used against us as proof of our “phony” conservatism and our supposed crypto-leftism. Considering how many more pressing issues there are to discuss, and considering how many more dangerous, powerful ideologies exist, it is remarkable that we spend as much time on this as we do.

It is disappointing but hardly surprising that Ross mostly glosses over all of this and has lumped all of us together with paleoconservatism “at its worst” as interpreted in the most polemical and hostile way. The “no-enemies-to-the-right” instinct that Ross denounces is actually proof of how sick most of us are of ideological purity tests. If we spent more time expelling undesirables, we would be having even more of the purity tests and outbreaks of factionalism that Ross claims are also proof of our ideological habits. In other words, there is no way for paleoconservatives to win this game: either we refuse to engage in purges, because we find ideological purity tests to be mind-numbing and petty exercises, or we engage in many more and impose all sorts of arbitrary standards of what people can and cannot say. One way or another, we will indict ourselves as ideologues according to Ross’ standards. Essentially, unless we wish to remain a “sideshow” we must become increasingly indistinguishable from the largely unimaginative, ideologically-stifled conservative movement that we have been criticizing for years for its lack of imagination and ideological mentality.

Ross wrote earlier in this post:

And finally, there’s the impulse to take an admirable principle — whether it’s Rand Paul’s staunch federalism or Pat Buchanan’s non-interventionism — and push it so far that people begin to doubt your intellectual judgment and your moral soundness alike.

Put another way, there is an impulse (by no means universally or equally shared) to question received wisdom from official American historiography that puts major events in U.S. history beyond any serious criticism. No doubt it would be more politically expedient and useful to offer no opinions on any major or controversial past event. What is worth noting here is that this stubborn insistence on revisiting old, settled debates is evidence that ideological thinking is not really one of our problems. Something that needs to be said here in this discussion is that principle is not ideology. Ideology exists first and foremost to acquire and justify the exercise of power, and this requires frequent, convenient forgetting and the superficial synthesizing of incompatible arguments. Nationalists are quite good at this: they can idolize political figures and causes centuries apart that are diametrically opposed to one another provided that they contributed in some way to an increase in the power of the nation, and they will likewise demonize very similar political figures and causes if they happen to be on the “wrong” side of the nationalist narrative at a particular time.

Ideologues try to craft “usable pasts” that facilitate the success of their present-day agenda. Probably nothing could be less “usable” or helpful to the cause of non-interventionism today than to argue that America should never have entered WWI and WWII because these wars did not serve American national security interests. If we non-interventionists were more ideologically-minded and therefore more flexible in our principles, we should have no difficulty pretending that entering these wars served the American interest and leave it at that, but there is the problem that many of us don’t think it is true. If we don’t think something is true, we have this incorrigible habit of saying so.

It might be worth having Ross provide some concrete examples of how paleoconservatives have been taking principles so far in relevant, current policy debates that he has begun to doubt our intellectual judgment and moral soundness.

Robert Kagan must think that no one will check the Bush administration’s record on Russia policy, or else he would not have written this column. Kagan focuses entirely on Russian support for watered-down Iran sanctions to make his argument that the “reset” has achieved absolutely nothing, which is what you would have to focus on to make this argument. As I have said many times, the administration was foolish to link Russian help on pressuring Iran to the other “reset” efforts, because that help would either not be forthcoming or would be so minimal as to be irrelevant. Having made Russian support for Iran sanctions into the measure of success for Obama’s Russia policy, the administration needlessly set themselves up for criticism just like Kagan’s.

Last year I had impatiently declared the “reset” to be empty and meaningless because it seemed that the administration was going to change nothing, but that was a bit of an overreaction. The administration later addressed Russian complaints about the proposed missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic and changed the missile defense plan to one that was somewhat less irritating to Moscow. Kagan noticeably fails to mention that the administration has been pursuing an alternative missile defense program elsewhere in Europe. The Prague treaty on arms reduction was another tangible result of a less openly confrontational policy against Russia. Russian support for supply lines for Afghanistan has been another. Naturally, both of these are nowhere to be found in Kagan’s column.

Then Kagan objects to things the administration has no power to stop or change:

Obama has officially declared that Russia’s continued illegal military occupation of Georgia is no “obstacle” to U.S.-Russian civilian nuclear cooperation. The recent deal between Russia and Ukraine granting Russia control of a Crimean naval base through 2042 was shrugged off by Obama officials, as have been Putin’s suggestions for merging Russian and Ukrainian industries in a blatant bid to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty.

By “continued illegal military occupation of Georgia,” Kagan means the Russian military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia that has been there in one form or another for almost twenty years. Of course, he skates by the reason why Russia’s military presence continues there and why it increased in the last two years, namely the Georgian-escalated war that targeted Tshkinvali and killed Russian soldiers stationed there. Kagan does not mention that both separatist republics want Russian protection and many of the inhabitants of the republics, especially South Ossetia, have taken Russian passports and may ultimately want to have their territories annexed to Russia. He ignores all of this because it would make the administration’s position seem reasonable and understandable.

How could the Russian presence in the separatist republics be an obstacle to civil nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and Russia? Is India’s control of Kashmir an obstacle to the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal? Is Turkey’s military presence in northern Cyprus an obstacle to U.S.-Turkish relations? Are we actually in the habit of linking such contentious political and territorial issues to other aspects of bilateral relations? What could the administration have realistically done in response to the Black Sea Fleet agreement or the natural gas deal between Ukraine and Russia? Is Washington going to start spouting the Ukrainian opposition line and try to be more concerned for Ukrainian sovereignty than Ukraine’s own government? That’s silly. When there is nothing that the U.S. can do, there is no purpose served in throwing a fit and denouncing agreements that both states have accepted and ratified. The natural gas deal might well be a horrible, corrupt rip-off of Ukrainian consumers, but what is Washington supposed to do about it?

So Kagan’s critique of the “reset” is hard to take seriously. His description of the current state of affairs is simply wrong. There is no “wave of insecurity” sweeping the region, and it is misleading to refer to “expansive Russia” as if it posed a threat to the territorial integrity of its neighbors. Instead of contentious relations between Russia and its neighbors that Washington was constantly stoking and trying to worsen with its encouragement of reckless, anti-Russian leaders, there is now relatively greater stability throughout the region and warmer Ukrainian-Russian relations, all of which serve the interests of all nations involved and the interests of Europe as a whole. At the same time, U.S.-Russian relations have slowly but genuinely improved, which was the main point of the “reset” all along.