Caroline Glick columns aren’t usually sources of useful commentary, but there was one sentence in her new column that is worth noting:

Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal, which it has reportedly fielded for four decades, has not led to a regional nuclear arms race.

This is true. It raises the awkward question of why Israel’s nuclear arsenal has never triggered the regional arms race that Glick automatically assumes Iran’s possible future nuclear arsenal would trigger. It is conceivable that all of the states that are considered likely to build their own arsenals in response to an Iranian bomb are U.S. allies and have been dissuaded by Washington from doing so until now. If that’s the case, why then would an Iranian arsenal immediately drive these states to acquire their own? If it is “universally recognized” that an Iranian nuke would trigger a regional arms race, perhaps this is another widely-held, unquestioned assumption that is simply wrong.

Glick adds that “it is clear that Iran’s nuclear project is aggressive rather than defensive,” but this is not clear at all. It isn’t even all that clear that Iran is actually trying that hard to build a nuclear weapon. This is another one of those highly questionable assumptions that almost everyone spouts and for which there is no evidence. After all, which state in the last half century has started and escalated large-scale conflicts with its neighbors, and which one has relied entirely on proxies abroad and otherwise fought only defensive wars? On what basis does anyone assume that Iran’s program is intended for aggressive purposes?

Via Race for Iran, Hooman Majd has a valuable report on his recent visit to Tehran, and he mentions what happened at last month’s Tehran summit on non-proliferation:

Tehran’s nuclear summit in mid-April, dubbed “Nuclear Energy for All; Nuclear Weapons for None” and timed to contrast with Obama’s own summit in Washington (to which Iran was not invited), was, despite a paucity of media coverage in the West, successful in laying out Iran’s stated nuclear agenda — non-proliferation as well as complete disarmament — for a domestic audience and sympathetic listeners in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the developing world. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s opening address to the conference, read by his top foreign-policy advisor Ali Akbar Velayati, in which he emphatically proclaimed weapons of mass destruction haram, strictly forbidden in Islam, went a long way in convincing at least the pious that Iran is not developing nuclear arms [bold mine-DL] (although it begged the question of whether nuclear and Muslim Pakistan, present at the conference, is a sinner state, a question the Japanese representative put to Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency and a moderator at one panel I observed).

It is always possible that the Iranian government could be engaging in an elaborate diversion for international consumption to satisfy its sympathizers in the developing world and at home while pushing ahead with a nuclear weapons program that directly contradicts all of their public statements on the possession of nuclear weapons. Especially on important security matters, governments lie to their own people and the world often enough. That said, why would Iranian authorities repeatedly insist in public not only that they are not pursuing such weapons, but also state that they are absolutely prohibited from doing so according to the religion on which the regime claims to base so much of its legitimacy? If most Iranians accept these statements, and the government then develops and tests a nuclear weapon, would they not be directly attacking the foundations of the legitimacy and credibility of their entire system? It seems to me that this is rather different from cracking down on protesters or tolerating electoral fraud.

Developing a weapon that their highest authorities have repudiated as immoral in the strongest possible terms might actually result in the mass de-legitimization of the regime that Western pro-Green enthusiasts thought happened over the course of the last year. Would it not make more sense for the Iranian authorities to be going out of their way to lay the groundwork for justifying Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon? Instead of stating that such weapons are prohibited, why not leave the door open to their future development? I don’t propose that other governments accept Iranian government statements at face value, but in the absence of compelling evidence that Iran is actually pursuing nuclear weapons why would we continue to assume that their government is doing something that they claim is forbidden for them to do?

Yes, it’s also possible that the Iranian authorities are using religious language selectively and cynically for domestic and international consumption, but then why is it that hawks regard Shi’te millennarian ideas as critical to understanding the Iranian regime and how it will use a nuclear arsenal in the event that they ever build one? Is it not more likely that the hawks are engaging in half-baked speculation based on a partial and misleading understanding of the thinking of members of Iran’s government? Is it not also more likely that when theocrats declare that something is forbidden they are not making such statements lightly?

The June issue of TAC has an excellent essay by Phillip Blond, which was partly adapted from a speech he gave at the Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown. In one of the responses to the essay, Dan McCarthy considers how Red Toryism might work in America. Nicholas Capaldi argues for the defense against Blond’s indictment of liberalism. Professor Patrick Deneen of Georgetown also has a response (not online) that is both sympathetic and critical. They are all worth reading, but I recommend beginning with Blond’s essay.

As someone who admiresthepolitical and philosophical writings of George Grant, the Canadian Red Tory philosopher and outstanding critic of American empire, and who finds much to recommend the political persuasion of the Country tradition championed by Bolingbroke and carried on in this country in modified form by the Jeffersonians, I have been very sympathetic to Mr. Blond’s ideas ever since I first came across them. To the extent that Red Tory ideas seem to have informed some part of the latest Tory manifesto, I have also become more sympathetic to what Cameron is proposing to do, but I don’t have nearly as much confidence as Mr. Blond does that Cameron represents the beginning of the “breaking” of liberal ideology. As Prof. Deneen says in his response, Mr. Blond may be too hopeful that the damage can be undone, but one of the things that is genuinely exciting and interesting about Blond’s recommendations is that he articulates a vision of order that is humane, realistic, and one that is based in our national civic and constitutional traditions.

Red Tories are really “red” only in that they believe we have obligations to all of our countrymen, and they hold that social solidarity is a vital part of love of one’s country. They regard the landscape as part of the nation’s heritage no less than its customs and institutions. Red Tories are also keenly aware that the commonwealth is not served if dependence on centralized government is replaced by dependence on concentrated private wealth, which is the reason for their emphasis on political and economic decentralization. Without both, relative political and economic independence of local communities is impossible, and once this has been lost self-government and liberty gradually erode and vanish.

In the American context, one could very easily call Red Tories Jeffersonians, and this is where we see the predicament for Red Toryism in the United States. The political inheritors of Jefferson’s party are overwhelmingly committed to centralist solutions for neoliberal ends, and the supposed vehicle of political conservatism in America has been antithetical to the Jeffersonian persuasion since its inception. As George Grant argued over forty years ago, American conservatives on the whole are dedicated to supporting and cheering a liberal, technological empire that is irreconcilable with the decentralized and humane political order Blond describes. Unfortunately, Mr. Capaldi’s critique seems to fit Grant’s description only too well.

When I began to mention the idea of political decentralization at a gathering at Princeton last year, someone immediately made the objection that this is not what businesses want. Indeed, uniformity across entire continents (and ultimately around the world) is what large firms would prefer, which is not actually an argument in favor of a highly-centralized system imposing uniform regulations. If anything, it should remind everyone of the pernicious collusion between governments and corporations. Perhaps I should have pressed the point, but I had the feeling that there was no use in trying to argue that conservatives should not be privileging what is useful to concentrated wealth, but that they should instead be concerned above all with what best serves the commonwealth. Judging by previous “debates” of this kind I have had in the last four years, I suspect it would have been a bit like talking to a wall.

That is probably what engaging with Mr. Capaldi’s critique will be like as well, but the subject is important enough that I think it is worth trying. Naturally, Capaldi argues that Blond has misunderstood the liberal tradition, but that is not the heart of Capaldi’s argument. He writes:

The drive to turn all of society into an enterprise association comes from people who have not made the transition to individuality. There is a whole complicated history behind this, but what is important is to recognize that the most serious problem within modern liberal societies is the presence of failed or incomplete individuals. Either unaware of or lacking faith in their ability to exercise self-discipline, incomplete individuals seek escape into the collective identity of communities insulated from the challenge of opportunity. These are people focused on avoiding failure rather than on achieving success. Incomplete individuals identify themselves by feelings of envy, resentment, self-distrust, victimization, and self-pity—in short, an inferiority complex. Anti-Americanism abroad and lack of faith in American Exceptionalism at home are the clearest manifestations [bold mine-DL].

Having little or no sense of individuality, they are incapable of loving what is best in themselves; unable to love themselves, they are incapable of loving others; incapable of loving others, they cannot sustain life within the family; in fact, they find family life stultifying. What they substitute for love of self, others, and family is loyalty to a mythical community. Instead of an umpire, they want a leader, and they conceive of such leaders as protectors who will relieve them of all responsibility. This is what makes their sense of community pathological. What they end up with are leaders who are themselves incomplete individuals and who seek to control others because they cannot control themselves. They prize equality and not competition, and in place of a market economy and limited government, we get economic and political tyranny.

So Capaldi essentially believes that moral failures longing for fulfillment in “mythical community” are responsible for economic and political centralization. What is odd about this is that he has repeated parts of Blond’s argument explaining the interdependence of individualism and collectivism, but bizarrely has skipped the part that explains why there are few or no social institutions to fulfill the function that the “mythical community” fulfills so poorly. Capaldi seems to have completely missed how the “creative destruction” of the market contributed to the breakdown those institutions to make so many people turn to abstract “mythical communities,” and he has also missed that faith in “American Exceptionalism” is an expression of this effort to find meaning in an abstract identity that imposes no obligations and offers its adherents congratulatory praise. Capaldi seems to agree with most of Blond’s description of the state of affairs, but refuses to acknowledge that the reigning institutions of “a liberal order” have some significant responsibility for the state of modern liberal society.

Obviously, Blond isn’t really arguing that “political and economic freedom” is responsible. He is saying that we have steadily been losing both kinds of freedom on account of the centralizing tendencies in government and business. Indeed, throughout his entire essay he insists that we should not confuse neoliberal arrangements for those of a free society, and he proposes that we move towards a decentralized order to move towards a free society. He argues against a “rigged market” and says, “I believe in the free market, but we haven’t had a free market.”

Capaldi’s reaction is a common one. He sees Blond criticizing state capitalism and concludes that he is attacking “markets” generally, despite Blond’s repeated statements that he considers himself a “pro-market thinker” who believes in “popular capitalism.” What is strange about Capaldi’s resistance to Blond’s essay is that Capaldi has already conceded half of Blond’s argument, and he wouldn’t have to repudiate his support for “markets” in order to accept the other half, but for whatever reason he insists on investing a state capitalist system with virtues that it does not possess.

Cross-posted at Front Porch Republic

As I said earlier this year, the conservative enthusiasm for Scott Brown and the conservative hostility to Bob Bennett derived from the same source: total opposition to federal health care legislation. As arbitrary as it seems for conservatives to enthuse over a liberal Republican who defends Massachusetts’ universal health care system while condemning a largely conservative Republican for proposing something more or less identical to that system at the federal level, there is a certain simple consistency to it. It should be clear by now that it is laudable and praiseworthy to support Romneycare, so long as it stays in Massachusetts, but it is abominable to support anything like federal Romneycare under any circumstances. Scott Brown is a folk hero for being the 41st Republican against a health care bill that passed anyway, and Bob Bennett has to be sent packing for being the co-sponsor of a bill that has never been voted on. Makes sense, right? After all, why settle for someone with an ACU rating of 84? That’s the general thrust of National Review’s editorial today.

Speaking of Romney, it is worth noting that Bennett is one of the few candidates in a contested primary so far this cycle that Romney has actively supported. Bennett is probably going to be denied a chance to stand in the general election, and this will happen specifically because of his co-sponsorship of legislation not so very different from the Massachusetts plan Romney believes is working fine but which should on no account ever be imitated by anyone. It cannot help Romney’s already bad reputation for excruciating ideological contortionism that he has aligned himself with a candidate who is being voted down by his state party’s delegates on account of support for a version of federal health care legislation, and it certainly doesn’t help that he is doing this at the same time that he has been trying to re-cast himself as the tribune of pro-repeal voters.

I should add that Bennett also supported the TARP, so I don’t really have any sympathy for his political plight. My point is not that Bennett isn’t wrong from a consistent, small-government conservative perspective, but that he is so perfectly typical of the overwhelming majority of his Senate colleagues that it is hard to understand what it was that he did that was so uniquely awful. It is more than a little odd that many other leading Republicans who also supported the TARP can turn their coats, denounce the TARP after the fact and be taken seriously as potential presidential nominees and party leaders. Meanwhile, Bennett gets the axe for being no different from Romney, Thune, McConnell, Boehner and Cantor and thirty other Republican Senators who cravenly backed the measure and have since found it useful to pretend that they had nothing to do with it.

Except for McCain, none of the seven other pro-TARP Republican Senators up for re-election this year faces any primary challenge worth mentioning. If Bennett is unacceptably at odds with his party, why isn’t there similar outrage being directed at Burr, Isakson, Grassley, Coburn, Thune and Murkowski? If Wyden-Bennett was an intolerable error, shouldn’t 2007 co-sponsor Chuck Grassley and 2007/09 co-sponsor Mike Crapo face the same revolt?

Obviously, Utah’s Republican Party delegates are free to support the candidates they prefer, and Bob Bennett has no guaranteed right of re-nomination. Utah is such a heavily Republican state that it will almost certainly make no difference in the outcome in the fall, and Bennett will presumably abide by his party convention’s decision. Still, it will be interesting to see how the state electorate reacts to the eventual Republican nominee after Bennett’s humiliating defeat.

It doesn’t really surprise me that Sarah Palin has endorsed Carly Fiorina in the Republican Senate primary in California. After all, who would appreciate a failed corporate executive better than a failed state executive?

It is interesting that Palin chose a primary candidate with no discernible connection to any of her Tea Party enthusiasts. This has caused more than a little anger among her fans, as Palin has ignored the more long-shot insurgent Chuck DeVore. Instead, she has rallied around Fiorina as the anti-Campbell candidate, describing Campbell as a “liberal Republican” no different from Boxer. As Boaz points out, this is not really true. It also doesn’t seem true that Fiorina can beat Boxer. I doubt that Boxer will lose, but she certainly isn’t going to lose to Fiorina.

Perhaps most important in explaining this decision is Fiorina’s connection to the McCain camp. The backlash against Palin that I predicted (a little too confidently) would occur if she actively backed McCain now seems to be happening in response to her endorsement of a McCain crony. I underestimated how many excuses her fans would make for her after she endorsed McCain, and I overestimated how important political principles were for many of them, but it seems that there is one part of my earlier prediction that is now coming true after the Fiorina endorsement:

Perhaps Palin could come up with some tortured rationale that siding with the establishment-friendly incumbent would be the crazy “maverick” thing to do, much as she claimed that staying in office would be the easy way out and quitting would be the courageous, bold move, but she would destroy the foundation of rank-and-file conservatives’ love for her.

This is just the latest in a string of episodes that show Palin’s “populism” to be phony and no more than an exercise in sending the right cultural signals. Having said all that, what may be most remarkable about Palin’s endorsement is that it is the sort of cautious, pro-establishment move one expects from Mitt Romney, who actually is running for President in 2012. It is not what we would expect to see from the celebrity entertainer who has done none of the things a future presidential candidate would do. This is a move that a pragmatist eager to build a political and fundraising network would make. For someone engaged in the steady building-up of a cult of personality and a profitable television career, this is extremely foolish.

Jim Geraghty points to a new poll on the Democratic primary race for Pennsylvania Senate showing Rep. Joe Sestak tied with Specter. I have been watching Sestak’s improving numbers over the last few months with some interest. Back in 2006, his race against Curt Weldon in a suburban House district in southeastern Pennsylvania was one of the contests I noticed pretty early on, and I thought his victory that fall represented the public’s turn against the Iraq war, which Sestak opposed, and against the GOP majority’s culture of corruption that had come to taint Weldon himself. When Specter switched parties, Sestak launched a seemingly quixotic primary challenge against an incumbent Senator who enjoyed overwhelming Democratic establishment support. As soon as the possibility of his challenge had been raised, I was quite confident that he could defeat Specter in the primary and would be able to go on to win against Toomey. As I wrote almost exactly one year ago:

Not only would Sestak have an advantage in enthusiasm and turnout, neither of which Specter could count on, but he would also head off any third party challenge from the left that might come about if the general election pitted two pro-war candidates in a heavily antiwar state, as it would if Specter were the Democratic nominee. Sestak has impeccable credentials on national security–he is a retired rear admiral who served as part of the operations in Afghanistan–and he opposed the Iraq war. Even though Pennsylvanians are likely to be much more concerned about domestic matters, a stark contrast between an antiwar former military officer and a pro-war political activist does not work to the Republicans’ advantage. A Sestak-Toomey match-up would be a possibly more lopsided replay of the 2006 results. This is why Toomey’s challenge never made much sense, even if Specter had not flipped to the other side, because in a general election that isn’t against Specter I don’t see how Toomey possibly wins*. His chances are considerably worse against a real Democrat.

Obviously, other issues are more important now and probably were more important a year ago than national security and foreign policy issues, but I do think it is important for him that Sestak has both national security credibility and antiwar credentials. This could either completely neutralize any Toomey criticism on national security, or it could put Toomey at a disadvantage and on the defensive. Having served in support of the war in Afghanistan, Sestak has remained consistently supportive of the war there. As a retired officer and veteran, he is also not reckless in his foreign policy views. Of course, he is also a fairly progressive Democrat, but this is another reason why he will prove to be a better fit for the Pennsylvania electorate than Specter or Toomey.

My latest InoSMI column is now online.

Michael Auslin has written an interesting response to severalcritiques of his “Three Strikes Against U.S. Global Presence,” including my arguments in theseposts. Mr. Auslin has given his critics very fair treatment and has offered constructive answers to some of our questions, and I’d like to thank him for that. We still differ on some important points, but I was pleased to find that his original argument was not intended to be as much of an exaggerated lament for eroding hegemony as much as it was a reflection on the uncertainty and unknowability of how the world might change as it moves towards a multipolar order. As Auslin writes:

The point I was trying to make, constrained in an op-ed length piece, is that once the American role diminishes, we really have no way of knowing what replaces it or how other actors react.

That’s true. We can’t know what will replace it. It is appropriate to be wary of any great change in world affairs, but something that we should bear in mind is the extent to which the continued expansion of “free trade and market liberalization” may not have to depend on U.S. power in the future. Many more states have a significant stake in sustaining and increasing global trade. Emerging-market nations are beginning to acquire more economic and political clout, and with this the global balance of power is gradually shifting in the direction of the developing world. It is this part of the world that sees the greatest advantage in eliminating barriers to trade and migration, and it is the reluctance of the major industrialized nations to abandon their agricultural and other subsidies that has repeatedly stalled the Doha round of trade talks. It is developing nations that would like to strengthen the “rules of the game,” so to speak, by opening up markets to their goods and labor even more than they already are. As I have said before, both advocates and critics of globalization have seen it as being closely tied to American power, and for a long time it was. Now what is becoming readily more evident every year is that globalization has facilitated the emergence of many other centers of power. This greatly reduces the desirability of hegemony for all parties, as it makes hegemony increasingly difficult and costly to sustain in the face of its obsolescence. My view is that defenders of this role for the United States have helped to hasten its obsolescence by acting out that role very aggressively and intensively for the last twenty years, and thereby exhausted American resources and the patience of much of the rest of the world.

I certainly don’t see something “closer to a post-Rome” scenario occurring. The collapse of the western empire took with it much of the apparatus of administration, taxation, security and commerce on which the peoples of western Europe and Africa had depended. The decentralization and de-urbanization that followed were at least partly the results of the weakness of the western polities in the late fifth and sixth centuries. Even if Auslin is right that a post-hegemonic world would see much greater security competition and constraints on trade, this is still very different from a post-Roman scenario. If anything, the problem Auslin sees is that there will be too many states fully exercising their military and economic power against one another, when many of the economic and political woes of the territories of the western empire were the product of a lack of state military and economic power.

It’s also true that we can’t know how China would act in a world where the U.S. role is significantly reduced, We can reasonably guess based on Chinese economic activity in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America that Beijing’s overriding goal for the foreseeable future is to operate in as many markets and to acquire as many natural resources as it can to continue fueling its economic growth. What is likely to make China far more actively interventionist abroad is their perception of ongoing threats to their access to these markets and resources. This is why I assume Beijing is more likely to want to avoid disrupting a trading system whose relative openness is very useful to China.

First, Tony Blair is not running for office, which is too bad, since he was the best British prime minister America has had since Maggie Thatcher (who was, herself, the best since Winston Churchill). ~Tunku Varadarajan

One can begin to appreciate why so many people in Britain are tired of the “special relationship” when the best British PMs “America has had” have tended to have very mixed or rather bad records when it came to Britain. It is also fairly easy to argue against the claim that Blair is among the best PMs from the U.S. perspective. Blair was an enabler of our worst national instincts in both Yugoslavia and Iraq, and he identified Britain so closely with the U.S. that British interests were completely ignored along the way and real American interests were damaged when Blair’s support for invading Iraq gave Bush political cover with the American left and with many other European nations. If that is what it takes to be a good British PM for America, I would very much like to see Britain governed by someone entirely different, and so would most Britons.

For a column dedicated to telling “ten truths” about the British election, it is a pity that at least six of them aren’t true and that some of them are profoundly dishonest. To start, Nick Clegg is not anti-American, and he is certainly not the “most anti-American politician” to head a party in modern Britain. One has to ignore quite willfully everything Clegg actually saysabout America and the alliance to believe this. Likewise, neither Obama nor Cameron is anti-Atlanticist in the least. It’s not really possible politically to become the leader of the Conservative Party or President of the United States if one is anti-Atlanticist.

Even Clegg is a self-professed Atlanticist, and one reason he attacks Cameron is that Clegg thinks Cameron is too much of a supporter of the status quo in the relationship with the U.S. If Americans expect Cameron to lead Britain as a reliable “muscular smaller ally” anywhere except in Afghanistan, they are going to be disappointed. First of all, British defense spending isn’t going to escape the cuts that the “age of austerity” will require, and Cameron doesn’t automatically subscribe to Britain’s role as America’s deputy whenever and wherever Washington demands. This is where Cameron’s “candid friend” rhetoric becomes relevant. Cameron did support the war in Iraq, but it’s very unlikely that Britain could afford another major campaign or that Cameron’s government could survive politically if it embarked on one with the U.S.

Via Democracy in America, a new Rasmussen poll on the Florida Senate race shows Crist with a modest four-point lead in the three-way race with Rubio and Meek. It may be that Crist’s considerable backing from Democrats (44%) and Republicans (30%) will evaporate as Meek becomes better known and Republican voters rally around their nominee after August, but unfortunately* it appears that Crist still has a significant advantage in favorability. Crist is so much more well-known than Meek that it could be Meek who loses his supporters to him.

Despite jumping ship, Crist still has 41% favorability with Republicans, and he has a favorability of 58% with independents, and his net favorability is +17. It is not entirely surprising that Rubio already has net negative favorability overall (-6), and his fav-unfav with independents is 29-50. Once the general election begins, that could change, but it isn’t a promising beginning for the politician who predicted the “single greatest pushback in American history.”

As I said before, I think Rubio did everyone in Florida a service by making Crist reveal how exceptionally opportunistic and unscrupulous he is, but for Republicans it might be worth asking how much sense it made to challenge and ultimately run off a popular candidate in a seat that ought to have been an easy hold for the GOP. Now it is possible that the easy Republican hold could effectively become a Democratic pick-up, which would be the fourth Republican-held seat in Congress and the second in the Senate lost on account of making the stimulus a major litmus test. Given the nature of Crist’s support and the likelihood that the Democrats will still control the Senate next year, it seems more than likely that Crist would caucus with the Democrats.

It would be easy to understand why. When Lieberman left his party to run as an independent, he could still count on a number of Congressional Democrats to support him over Lamont (including Obama) in the general election, but every state or national Republican of any consequence has dropped Crist like a hot brick. The curious thing about this is that Crist and Lieberman are doing almost exactly the same thing (even though Lieberman waited until after losing the primary election), but Lieberman was much more sharply at odds with his party base over a far more significant issue than Crist was.

In the view of Lieberman fans, this is what made his self-serving move defensible, but it actually shows how much worse Lieberman’s independent candidacy was than Crist’s is today. Lieberman was profoundly at odds not only with his party, but also with most of his state on the Iraq war, and he simply refused to accept this. Had the Republicans had any self-respect and run a halfway credible candidate of their own, Lieberman’s gamble would not have worked.

National Democrats are not throwing all their weight behind Crist, and there is no steady flow of whining op-eds from every liberal pundit that Charlie Crist has been “purged” as there was among conservative writers on behalf of Lieberman four years ago. Of course, if this polling is accurate there may be no need to do this, and it could prove to be a win-win scenario for Democrats: either Crist fades, and Meek picks up most of his supporters while Crist continues to pull away enough normally Republican-leaning voters, or Meek falters and Crist wins. Most of the undecided vote is coming from moderates and liberals, which are the ideological groups Crist is easily carrying right now, and from independents and Democrats, which are groups that give Crist twelve and nine point leads over Rubio and Meek respectively. Rubio is at 34%, and he may be at or near his ceiling of support in a three-way race. How will Rubio and his fans make sense of the result if the great pushback ends up being against Rubio?

* I say unfortunately because Crist seems to have suffered no loss of public approval from his self-serving party change, and not because I have any horse in this race.

The reason the Shah even signed the NPT in the first place was so that he could develop and expand his country’s nuclear energy program. Fast forward 40 years, and that one little signature is essentially the spine of the international community’s charge of nuclear malfeasance against Iran and its current regime. Without it, Tehran’s behavior would legally be no different than India and Japan’s, and in fact less “rogue” than Israel’s. Without that little signature, we wouldn’t even be having a debate over “targeted” multilateral sanctions vs. “crippling” sanctions. There’d be no hand-wringing over Chinese waivers and watered-down measures, because the case for punishing Iran’s nuclear behavior would have zero international basis. ~Kevin Sullivan

This is right and it is a very important detail that ought to be emphasized more often. No doubt hawks would point to this as proof that the NPT is not very useful, since any regime that wishes to acquire nuclear weapons strongly enough will simply do so and will withdraw from the treaty if necessary. Following up on the previous post, suppose that Iran is ultimately not all that interested in acquiring nuclear weapons. If it were that interested, what would stop Iran’s government from withdrawing from a treaty its own leaders recognize as a failure in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons? Yes, it’s possible that Iran wants to use the protections of the NPT for as long as it can before withdrawing, but it is also possible that Iran more or less continues to abide by the treaty because its primary goal in developing nuclear power is to realize its civilian applications. If true, that would be compeletely devastating to the “mad mullah” cottage industry of alarmist commentary coming from Western hawks.

When Boot says that “no one” worries about U.S. and U.S.-allied nuclear arsenals, he means no one in the West worries about them, because there is little chance that those weapons will ever be directed at other Western countries. If we take their public statements at all seriously, officials from many states in the Near East worry about Israel’s nuclear weapons, and if we put any stock in the claim that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons capability one of the reasons why Iran would want to have this technology is to have the ability to offset Israel’s nuclear advantage if necessary. There are probably more than a few Iranians who would find it strange that nuclear-weapons states that start or escalate international wars fairly often over the last thirty years worry about the eventual Iranian acquisition of a few warheads.

At the heart of all this is the basic contradiction in most Americans’ thinking on non-proliferation: the U.S. and our allies have vital security concerns that make our possession of nuclear weapons legitimate and even beneficial to global stability, while the possession of these weapons by non-allied and rival states represents a grave threat to international security and cannot be tolerated. This view depends almost entirely on believing that the internal character of a regime dictates the nature of its external policies, and pretty clearly this belief is false. Indeed, when the Shah was in power in Iran one would have never heard about how the repressive, brutal dictator’s tactics against political opponents at home meant that his foreign policy would be destabilizing, reckless or aggressive. What mattered and what still matters to Wasington is not the regime type, but the government’s alignment with the U.S.

The argument that “stable” democracies can be trusted with a nuclear arsenal and “unstable” dictatorships cannot be trusted with one is just an extension of very questionable democratic peace theory, and it has become more fashionable as more of our allies have democratized and as more democratic nuclear-weapons states have become closer allies. According to this theory, democracies do not start wars and they do not wage war on other democracies. Historically, this is false on both counts, and it is obviously false when it concerns new democracies. The assumption is that there are more institutional and popular checks and constraints on what a democratic government can do, and therefore there are fewer risks when such governments control such terrible weapons.

However, in both well-established and fragile democracies in which there are strong military institutions and/or a powerful executive, we see that many crucial national security and military decisions are often made with little or no legislative and public oversight. In some weak democracies with a strong military establishment, as in Pakistan, sometimes the military moves towards disastrous escalation without the knowledge of the civilian government, which is what happened during the Kargil war before Sharif was overthrown. In practice, there are very few internal checks on democratic governments when the leadership decides to use force, and even fewer when it comes to executive decisions about the kinds of weapons that will be used in war. Our government reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in a first strike, and if such a horrible decision were ever being seriously considered it would obviously not be subjected to legislative scrutiny and public debate. The decision to use atomic bombs on Japanese cities was a purely executive one. One might also consider the grim possibility that in an atmosphere of alarmism and panic a large majority might all too readily support the first use of nuclear weapons against a state that has been regularly portrayed as insane, suicidal and bent on our destruction.

Regardless of the type of regime, there will always be the same ends-justify-the-means, total war calculations and rationalizations when it comes to contemplating the use of such horrific weapons, and there will also be the same self-interested calculations that pull political and military leaders back from the abyss. Iran hawks would like everyone to believe that the Iranian government is headed by people so fanatical and insane that these calculations no longer apply, but there has never been a government so ideological and unhinged that it would risk its survival by engaging in a war that it knew for certain would lead to its annihilation. Iran seems like a particularly poor candidate to be the first one to do this.

Boot notes that Iran has no safeguards against the “capricious” use of nukes. I would just observe that Iran at present has no safeguards in place concerning the use of nuclear weapons because it does not have any nuclear weapons. Does anyone think that Iran’s extensive military and security apparatus would not create such safeguards in the event that Iran acquired such weapons? Hasn’t every military establishment in every nuclear-weapons state developed such safeguards? Of course, all of them have done so, because that is what any minimally self-interested government does when it develops weapons as powerful as these. When China acquired nuclear weapons, they were in the hands of revolutionary zealots who jailed and killed anyone opposed to them, and yet somehow forty years have gone by and China has still never used its weapons in war. The burden of proof is on the alarmists to prove that Iran would be different if it ever does acquire the weapons they always claim it is just on the verge of acquiring.