Following up on the previous post, I find it remarkable how quickly Clegg’s rise seems to be completely overtaking Cameron’s modest foreign policy re-positioning of the last few years. A few years ago, it was Cameron and his advisors who wanted to move away from a “slavish” relationship with Washington and spoke of their desire to have “lots of Love, Actually moments.” This referred to the scene when Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister dressed down the visiting American President and criticized him for bullying Britain. As Clegg complained back in March, the major parties basically abandoned distinguishing themselves from one another on foreign policy in the run-up to the election campaign. Now what seems to terrify some British and American conservatives (via Andrew) is that a government with Clegg in it might actually follow through on Cameron’s earlier rhetoric and perhaps go beyond it.

In his Chatham House address, Clegg said something that seems like simple common sense:

I do not believe that we can carry on in 2010, and beyond, thinking that the events of the 1950s and the place of America in it should continue to be the pivot around which we organise all of our foreign policy issues.

This view is a problem for the major parties in that it is quite reasonable and it is one that they seem absolutely unwilling to take seriously. It is much more of a problem for them when Clegg pairs this view with an affirmation of his own Atlanticism:

I’m an Atlanticist much like everyone else. I spent a happy time working in the United States. I think it is vital to our interests that we maintain a positive, strong and even uniquely warm relationship with the United States [bold mine-DL]. But it is not our only relationship and it mustn’t become a relationship that at every junction, every time a decision is made we have no choice but to follow the decisions made in the White House. And yet that seems to have been happening with greater velocity and frequency in recent years rather than less.

It is telling that his British conservative critics have to resort to denying Clegg’s Atlanticism. It is simply desperation when Tories are reduced to distorting Clegg’s position as an “anti-American” one. What Clegg protests against is the substitution of a reflexively “pro-American” stance for a foreign policy that serves British interests. The other problem for the major parties is that Clegg is telling a basic truth when he describes the relationship between Britain and America as “a lopsided asymmetrical relationship.” One can vehemently disagree with specific policy proposals Clegg makes, but his analysis of the quality of the relationship and his call for significant re-thinking seem correct. Obviously, I agree with this description, and I don’t see much evidence that there is a better way to describe it. It is a measure of how lopsided a relationship our governments have that the British party leader willing to describe it accurately is denounced as anti-American, and meanwhile the leaders of the two largest parties dare not even whisper this sort of statement for fear of receiving the same scorn.

Obviously, Clegg is an ardent Europhile, and I don’t sympathize with this view at all, but he delivers a very effective rhetorical shot at Tory Euroskeptics who feel compelled to back every U.S. initiative:

I’d like to see us repatriate our foreign policy interests so that we conduct a foreign policy which doesn’t just conclude that we have no choice in vital matters such as whether you go to war or not just because a vital strategic partner tells us we must. That is a loss of real sovereignty about which I never hear the swivel-eyed Eurosceptics worry about at all.

Remarkably, Clegg struck a far more defiant note verging on proud nationalism than many Euroskeptics themselves can muster when discussing how to balance the relationships with America and Europe:

It is in America’s own interests to have Britain standing tall in its European backyard. Acting not just as a bilateral bridge between Washington and London, but also as a leader of opinion and events in Europe as a whole.

Whether or not one agrees with Clegg’s entire speech, it is flatly dishonest to portray the views contained in it as “anti-American,” and it is misleading at best to say that Clegg is anti-Israel. Clegg will not be the next Prime Minister, but America and Britain would be much better off and would have a much stronger, more balanced relationship if the next Prime Minister paid attention to even some of Clegg’s ideas.

Update: Jerome Armstrong obviously has no idea what “neocon” means if he thinks I am one, and he certainly never bothered to read the post. One of the more significant obstacles to any left-right alliance against unnecesary wars and empire is the bad left-wing habit of assuming that they have some sort of monopoly on these issues.

That is why I will continue to ask … difficult questions about foreign policy assumptions the other parties don’t want to question at all. ~Nick Clegg

The alliance with America is the sacred cow of British foreign policy, many of whose practioners dream, in unguarded moments, that Britain can play Greece to America’s Rome. Disparaging the relationship publicly is just not done. ~R.M., Democracy in America

Clegg is hardly the first one this year to disparage the relationship in public. Actually, disparage is the wrong word. It would be more accurate to say that Clegg was acknowledging the real nature of the relationship, just as the Select Foreign Affairs Committee’s report did last month. We all understand that Clegg is going to be more outspoken on this because his party is far more at odds with the British foreign policy consensus, and his position as the Liberal Democrat leader allows him an amount of greater freedom in making such criticisms. At present, the Liberal Democrats are surging in popularity partly because they offer an alternative, they are still marginal enough that they can attack the major parties without enduring too much scrutiny, and they can make refreshing critiques of stale consensus views. What we will probably find after the next debate is that Clegg is speaking for a huge number of people in Britain appalled by the one-sided nature of the U.S.-U.K. relationship.

Whatever the election outcome, it is still virtually impossible that Nick Clegg will become Prime Minister, so on one level Lib-Dem views on the relationship with the U.S. are not that important. Then again, the Liberal Democrats are most likely going to be an important part of any governing coalition, so their views cannot be dismissed as entirely irrelevant. At least as far as the alliance is concerned, my guess is that Clegg’s remarks reflect the views of far more people in Britain than the “default Atlanticism” of the major parties that he has been criticizing, and Washington would be unwise to ignore how poorly the “special relationship” is now viewed.

Washington’s obliviousness to the DPJ in Japan before the last election was a mistake. Because virtually no one had paid any attention to the possibility of an LDP loss, our government was forced to scramble blindly to make sense of what a DPJ win meant for the alliance with Japan. That led to a period of overreaction and confusion, which was followed by an even less productive period of assuming that everything could continue on exactly as it had done before. The quarreling over Futenma shows us that this was also mistaken. If the Liberal Democrats have a significant role in the next British government, Washington will have to take account of the changing attitudes of the British public. It would be another mistake to assume that Washington can continue to count on “default Atlanticism” after next month’s election.

Jonah Goldberg tries to explain the Tea Party movement as a “delayed Bush backlash” and claims that the prevailing attitude among Tea Partiers is that “we won’t be fooled again.” The first part of this might be true for the the 27% of Tea Partiers who view Bush unfavorably, but for the majority I doubt this is true. It might not be true in every case, but on the whole Bush’s 57% favorability rating probably came from those Tea Partiers who identify as Republicans (54%), and it is the remainder of mostly independents that has reservations or objections to Bush era policies. Partisan identification may not account for everything, but it explains the attitudes of at least a majority of those who identify with this movement.

As for not wanting to be fooled again, this is quite clearly not the case. If most Tea Partiers did not want to be fooled again, they would not enthusiastically latch onto the first pseudo-populist huckster who happens to say the things they like to hear. According to the survey, Palin’s favorability among Tea Partiers is at 66%, and her unfavorable rating is just 12%, which means that two-thirds of the anti-tax, anti-bailout, small-government protesters are extraordinarily well-disposed towards another under-prepared governor who sends all the right cultural signals. More to the point, this one has a short and unimpressive record of endorsing bailouts, hiking taxes and redistributing revenues to buy votes, and that was after she sank Wasilla into terrible debt before moving on. Of course, as with so many of her admirers, pro-Palin Tea Partiers must be uninterested in her actual record, because there is nothing in that record that an anti-tax, small-government conservative would find appealing.

I don’t doubt that the objections of most Tea Partiers are genuine and many of them were and are principled opponents of the policies they now decry when they happened earlier during a Republican administration. It’s just that most of those principled opponents were probably never Republicans, or they ceased being Republicans because of their objections. Partisan identification explains a large part of the pro-Palin sentiment, but it still cannot excuse the foolish enthusiasm for yet another deeply flawed Republican politician.

One of my commenters pointed me to this bizarre item* by Michael Novak at one of the blogs at First Things. Novak writes:

We again need such Christian realism. Such tough-mindedness. The most dreadful war of all time is just ahead of us, is already well begun. Many of us want to save the Christian Holy Places, and Israel, too–our best ally in the world, the creator of the most economically creative and democratic society in its region.

Fulfilling this desire will not be easy in the next twelve months, fateful months, clock-ticking months. If the nuclear capacity of Iran is not destroyed before functioning nuclear weapons are in their silos or other weapons platforms, the whole world will experience blackmail.

To make an object lesson, one nation in particular is on notice that it is listed as first for destruction.

How will we live with ourselves if Israel is annihilated with nuclear bombs? How will we survive? How will our understanding of the Word of God survive, if the fleshly, tangible heart of Jewish and Christian faith is obliterated?

He goes on to urge a war of aggression against Iran to “prevent” the absurd fantasy of the Iranian destruction of the Holy Places. It is bad enough that Novak invokes Niebuhr (!) in support of this mad call for unprovoked, unnecessary war, but when he says that the “most dreadful war of all time is just ahead of us, is already well begun” we can safely say that he has lost all touch with reality. WWII remains the most dreadful war of all time, and nothing on the horizon even remotely compares to the loss of life and destruction that occurred in that war. So there is nothing realistic at all about Novak’s “Christian realism,” and neither is there anything Christian about it if that word is to have any connection to the teachings of Our Lord.

Even under very broad interpretations of just war theory, there cannot be a just war when the other party has inflicted no grave, lasting injury on us. By definition, preventive war cannot be just, and yet it is most certainly preventive war that Novak and other advocates of attacking Iran demand. War is sometimes necessary and permitted for the restoration of peace. There is no justification for destroying what peace exists to satisfy our irrational fears of a deterrable and containable threat. There is no conceivable justification for initiating hostilities to attempt to stop the potential future acquisition of a weapon that the other state is very unlikely to use against us or our allies. To start a war for such a reason would be a crime against God and man.

What would make such a war even more unjustifiable is the improbability of success: a war against Iran might delay an Iranian bomb, but it would not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program and it would almost certainly make the acquisition of such weapons an even higher priority to deter future attacks. Meanwhile, the consequences of such a war could be very bad for U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf states, as well as for Israel and our Gulf state allies, to say nothing of the potential damage it would do to the global economy and the hardship and suffering it would inflict on the Iranian people. Thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of people would die, many more would be injured and displaced, and our government and the governments of any states that helped us would obviously be implicated in yet another illegal war. Beyond the loss of life and resources, the damage to our national reputation would be staggering.

Novak warns against the “blackmail” that will follow if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, but the only one engaged in a sort of blackmail here is Novak. He would exploit the emotional and religious attachment Christians naturally have for the Holy Places to inspire support for massive, unnecessary bloodshed. The message is quite clear: if you treasure the sacred places where God revealed Himself, you will endorse my monstrous proposal, and otherwise you probably don’t really care about these places or the revelation itself. The proposal is horrible, and the manipulation being employed to advance the proposal is simply despicable.

As for the Iranian threat, Novak is simply wrong. The “whole world” will not experence blackmail from Iran. Most likely, no other state will experience anything of the kind. It is possible that Iranian nuclear weapons could push other states towards nuclearization, in which case the danger would be an arms race and not Iranian “blackmail.” That would be undesirable, but it would not be worse than the regional conflagration that an attack on Iran would cause. Israel’s nuclear arsenal will ensure that Iran would never attempt a nuclear first-strike against Israel.

For that matter, Jerusalem is also considered holy in the eyes of Muslims. I have no idea how Westerners can claim to “know” that the Iranian government would be so moved by religious apocalyptic fervor that it would engage in suicidal nuclear warfare, but they also seem remarkably certain that the holy status of Jerusalem in the eyes of Muslims somehow doesn’t really “count” and will be tossed aside at a moment’s notice. We often see this selective reliance on the beliefs and statements of people in other states. When Ahmadinejad or some other figure of authority in Iran makes demagogic, bellicose statements against Israel, these statements are regarded as essential for understanding the thinking of the Iranian government. On the other hand, when their politico-religious authorities say repeatedly that they regard the use of nuclear weapons as abhorrent, we are supposed to dismiss these statements automatically.

* That is, it is genuinely bizarre, but it’s actually sadly predictable and normal for many of the people at First Things.

There is a new round of “where have you gone, John McCain?” liberalcommentary starting up. I used to find this amusing, but it is all based on a profound misunderstanding of McCain the politician. Recently, McCain has been making a fool of himself by repudiating the maverick label he once clung to for dear life in years past, and to head off a strong primary challenge from Hayward he has begun pretending that he has a problem with illegal immigration. This has led to quite a few liberals declaring that McCain is sacrificing his integrity for political purposes, but this gives him far too much credit. This takes for granted that McCain once had integrity as a politician that he could still destroy.

As the presidential campaign showed once again, McCain’s actual acquiantance with the substance of any policy, especially domestic policy, was extremely sketchy and poor. During at least the last ten years he never adopted a domestic policy position because he had studied the issue carefully and determined that a certain kind of legislation made the most practical sense or was the best expression of certain guiding principles. He determined that the fastest way to get attention and to aggrandize himself was by breaking with his party in melodramatic fashion over issues that happened to appeal to mainstream media journalists and pundits. The latter played along because they liked what he was saying, and they wanted to reward a Republican politician for strongly disagreeing with his party. They helped McCain to invent the myth of his being a “maverick,” when he was really the most predictable establishment “centrist” on almost every important issue. It helped that he always frames his disagreements with others in the most obnoxious, moralizing way possible, so that he is always playing the heroic crusader against corruption and his opponents are tainted villains on the take.

McCain’s primary fight with Bush in 1999-2000 seems to lend substance to the “maverick” myth, but this was misleading. McCain ran his campaign arguing against movement conservatives and rank-and-file Republicans because it was useful for the moment. This provided him with the free media coverage that gave his campaign enough oxygen to last for as long as it did, and it raised him to the level of a national Republican figure who would be the heir apparent for the next nomination. After a few years playing the aggrieved loser and critic of some of Bush’s domestic policies, McCain began to lose his liberal admirers as he became more and more reliably a team player.

On immigration, he and Bush were on the same page and were working for the same goals. This worked well for McCain in that it allowed him to play the part of a Bush supporter who was also advancing an amnesty policy that establishment “centrists” everywhere applauded. As 2007 wore on and his early presidential campaign was crumbling around him, he had to pivot away from his record on immigration and claim that he had “learned” why most Republicans were so furious with the legislation and with him. This didn’t persuade many people on the right, but it reduced his vulnerability on the issue because he refused to make it an important part of his campaign beginning in the fall of 2007.

Quite a few mainstream pundits completely misunderstood why McCain’s primary campaign had been faltering, and some began absurdly praising him for his supposedly principled support for the “surge” despite the damage they imagined this was doing to him. Of course, he supported the “surge” because he had been the hawkish interventionists’ preferred candidate for years, and because he had made a habit of supporting troop escalations regardless of circumstances going back at least to Kosovo in 1999. It didn’t hurt that the vast majority of Republicans remained convinced of the rightness of the war and had immediately gone into full purge mode against anyone who questioned or opposed the “surge.” During the primaries, he had no scruples about making the most outrageous claims against his opponents, including the lie that Romney favored “surrender” in Iraq, and we saw the same habits emerge during the general election campaign as well.

McCain reacted to his defeat in 2008 in much the same way that he reacted to losing to Bush in 2000: he became a petulant, angry and frequent critic. Of necessity, this meant that McCain had to align himself closely with the anti-Obama stands of his party. At first glance, this seems to be at odds with how McCain conducted himself in the past. There was a time when he was the embodiment of “centrism” and enthusiasm for bipartisanship, but that was when Republicans were in the majority and McCain’s personal advantage dictated breaking with them. Now McCain’s personal advantage dictates that he become a reliable partisan and that he must tack sharply to the right to prevent the rank-and-file conservatives he has spent much of his career insulting from defeating him in the primary. All of this is by way of saying that almost all of the liberal praise for McCain in the past was a product of McCain’s adoption of positions that liberals favored. Back then, he had high-minded principle, integrity and political courage because he said things that matched up with liberal assumptions. Now that the political landscape has changed and McCain’s calculations have changed to match it, he has supposedly betrayed “core principles.” Of course, these “core principles” that liberals thought that he had were nothing of the kind.

Naturally, when I go looking for informed commentary on Russian foreign policy the names Judith Miller and Doug Schoen are the first to come to mind. Who wouldn’t want to have the international affairs insights of a journalist best known for funneling pro-Iraq war agit-prop to The New York Times and some pollster? Their argument boils down to the usual “nefarious Russians are thwarting our noble intentions” story, and it all hinges on this claim:

Opposition leaders have long said they would eject Western forces from the base at Manas, as Russia desires.

Yes, they have said this for some time. The provisional government under Otunbayeva has also confirmed that the commitments made to the U.S. by the previous government would be honored. Everyone can acknowledge that Moscow encouraged opposition to Bakiyev and wanted him gone, but if this were solely aimed at getting the U.S. out of Manas the plan seems to have failed. Viewing it as an effort to reverse the results of the last “color” revolution in the “near-abroad” makes much more sense. Viewed that way, Bakiyev’s downfall should be greeted more with relief than with alarm in Washington.

I am also writing on this topic for my next column for The Week, so I won’t say much more right now, but there is something truly twisted in our national discourse regarding Russia and the former Soviet Union that anyone can regard it as a bad thing that Bakiyev is out of power, especially when the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is not going to suffer as a result. Surely the popular coup in Kyrgyzstan should show us how absurd it is to have “an ongoing U.S.-Russian struggle for influence in Eurasia,” and it should also show us that America has nothing to gain and risks real national security interests in connection with Afghanistan by contesting for influence in these countries.

As someone quite sympathetic to the new Tory emphasis on decentralization and localism, I partly agree with Ross that the polling surge for the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives’ fading support could have very bad effects on the American right as well. Ross writes:

Whatever came of its exertions in the end, a Cameron government would at least put a particular set of right-of-center ideas to the test, and produce an actual record for American right-wingers to chew over. A hung Parliament, by contrast, will just confirm all the prejudices that stateside conservatives harbor about the Tories: Not only are they all Oxbridge squishes, but their squishiness doesn’t even win elections! (I see Jonah Goldberg is already striking this note.)

There are aspects of Cameronism — statist, paternalist, and eco-utopian — that may merit this kind of dismissal. But the core of the current Tory project is an attempt to apply Tocqueville’s insights about American society to the bloated British state.

Then again, it’s not as if movement conservatives are terribly interested in decentralization and localism in the first place. Nonetheless, there are quite a few American pundits who will take some satisfaction in a poor electoral showing for “Big Society” decentralism. Movement conservatives have always seemed remarkably hostile to the ideas of Red Tories, Front Porch republicans, “crunchy” conservatives and generally anyone on the right not convinced of the boundless virtues of “creative destruction” and economies of scale.

What should also be stressed here is that the rise of the Liberal Democrats and the ongoing collapse of Tory support make clear that the Tories are operating in a remarkably inhospitable political climate. As disastrous as Labour’s tenure has been, it enjoys built-in electoral advantages that would rightly infuriate Republicans if they existed here. The Tories have had a series of leaders before Cameron convinced that hewing to Republican-like hawkishness and largely acquiescing to Blair’s egregious trampling of civil liberties were the right moves. Instead of acting like a proper opposition party on these matters, the Tories mostly enabled Blair to run roughshod over British liberties and commit Britain to a prolonged military campaign in Iraq that most people in Britain opposed all along.

It should be no surprise that the Liberal Democrats are much more of a civil libertarian and antiwar party, and this will probably help boost the Liberal share of the vote come May 6. That is ground that the Tories could have tried to occupy over the last seven years, but they never attempted it. When at least 60% of the electorate prefers the center-left and left-liberal parties, the center-right party is going to be very constrained in how radical it can be on domestic policies. In light of all these things, the “Big Society” platform for all its limitations is a fairly bold statement of some kind of guiding principle for a leader who has far too often given the impression of being bereft of substance.

Alex Massie points out that a Tory-Liberal coalition emerging out of the electoral mess might have some advantages:

And it’s not as if there isn’t plenty of common ground for the Tories and Liberals to work together on. The “Big Society”, civil liberties, decentralisation, localism, public spending restraint and so on provide plenty of room for the parties to work together, whether formally or in an informal arrangement.

Regardless of how American conservatives react to such a coalition, that could be the best outcome for the quality of British government from among the available options.

Matt Steinglass at Democracy in America picks up on the debate about the “dimming of our age” and notes that the claim of European and East Asian military free-riding is basically wrong:

I’ve written on this before, but I’ll say it again: “the fact that much of metropolitan Europe and East Asia ‘free-rides’ on American military power”, as Mr Salam puts it, seems to me to be a non-fact. Which countries in East Asia does Mr Salam believe spend too little on their own defence? South Korea, with 600,000 men under arms, currently ramping spending up to 3% of GDP despite declining North Korean capabilities? Taiwan, which has also raised defence spending to 3% of GDP and just finished buying $6 billion worth of arms from America? How much need Thailand spend to ensure victory in its border dispute with Cambodia? What is the threat to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, or (apart from tussles with China over undersea mineral rights in the Yellow Sea) Japan? True, Vietnam is buying Russian submarines with a view to denying Chinese superiority in the South China Sea. And perhaps the Philippines could stand to beef up its military to put down insurgents in Mindanao. But what do either of these have to do with “free-riding on American military power”?

The claim fails for the same reasons with regard to Europe: 1. The major European powers spend a healthy 2%-plus of GDP on defence, and 2. No major European country faces any serious military threat [bold mine-DL]. In fact, I don’t believe the phrase “free-riding on American military power” describes any actual countries in the world in the year 2010.

It is the lack of serious threats that needs to be emphasized. Suppose that Russia becomes even more assertive in post-Soviet space. Is this going to trigger a significant European arms build-up? It seems unlikely. It is European governments that have been consistently trying to block moves that would appear provocative to Russia. The Germans in particular are far more interested in building a constructive trading relationship with Russia than they are interested in feuding over political influence on Russia’s periphery. In the last decade, Washington has not been providing protection against a growing Russian threat to Europe, but has instead been trying to goad Russia with continued NATO expansion that most other members of NATO didn’t want and refused to accept. On the whole, American hawks have made a habit of perceiving threats to Europe that most Europeans do not see. Then they congratulate the U.S. for shielding Europe from these threats, marvel at European weakness in the face of said threats, and demand European gratitude and deference to U.S. initiatives on account of the protection we provide. This tends to color hawks’ views of everything else.

We see this again with the fear of an Iranian bomb. Most of the other major and rising powers in the region do not regard Iran’s nuclear program as a problem, much less a threat, and even important U.S. allies such as Turkey and India are far more interested in trade with Iran than they are in isolating or punishing it for a program Iran is actually entitled to have. On the whole, Iran’s neighbors do not see why the region should be subjected to another destabilizing conflict that has no realistic chance of halting Iran’s nuclear program in any case.

From the American perspective, it would seem to make fiscal and strategic sense to encourage allies to assume additional responsibilities for regional security. Auslin exaggerated the extent to which America was “hollowing out” its military capabilities, but Americans should welcome the prospect of wealthy allies providing for even more of their own defense. How and when allied states choose to do this will largely be up to them, but it should not be regarded as a calamity for them or the U.S. when it happens. Greater allied burden-sharing will reduce or eliminate the need for American military presence in many parts of the world, and that could help to trim the budget and it could help to keep the U.S. out of long, expensive military campaigns.

P.S. This is the 7,000th post on Eunomia.

Earlier this month I was arguing that a post-hegemonic world would not be nearly as terrible as Michael Auslin claimed, and that many of the things that he warned would happen in such a world are already happening and are largely out of American control anyway. Reihan wrote an interesting response that I didn’t answer at the time, and I was reminded of it by The Economist’s article on the BRIC countries. First, Reihan:

But for those of us who believe that global trade flows, the free flow of capital, relatively free migration, and market-friendly governments are a good thing, Auslin raises an important question, namely whether the fact that much of metropolitan Europe and East Asia “free-rides” on American military power creates benefits that outweigh the costs. Perhaps the security competition that would result from a U.S. grand strategy that focused on offshore balancing rather than the more active and interventionist posture of the present would prove manageable. Military budgets would swell slightly, but new collective security arrangements would emerge to keep the peace at reasonable costs. Or perhaps the security competition would spark dangerous spirals of aggression and counter-aggression. It’s difficult to tell, though I tend to think that the former scenario is somewhat more likely.

Let’s assume a middle series projection in which military budgets do indeed increase, and, as Auslin suggests, states pursue more activist economic policies — including aggressive capital controls and migration controls — to finance this military expansion. Is this a friendlier world for classical liberals than one in which the benevolent global hegemony of the U.S. persists, or rather efforts to extend BGH persist?

Again, I’m not sure. I do think that such a world would prove somewhat less prosperous and more dangerous at the margin, though I can also imagine a comparatively freer United States flourishing in this environment.

Auslin had warned that Chinese military build-up, Russian influence in post-Soviet space and an Iranian bomb would lead to a situation in which “global trade flows will be stressed, the free flow of capital will be constrained, and foreign governments will expand their regulatory and confiscatory powers against their domestic economies in order to fund their own military expansions.”

One of the reasons I didn’t originally address these concerns is that I don’t find these to be the likely consequences of China’s continued rise, Russian resurgence in its own neighborhood and Iranian membership in the nuclear club. Why will global trade flows be stressed? China is heavily dependent on its export trade to sustain economic growth at home. It has no incentive to disrupt or “stress” trade flows or to embark on policies abroad that would lead to this. At present we see increasing economic integration of Taiwan with the mainland, and the Hatoyama government has held out the possibility, however remote it is at the moment, of forming an East Asian economic community modeled on the European Union. China is investing in (and exploiting) markets all over the world in states where Western companies typically do not go or where they are not allowed to go. So why will the free flow of capital be constrained if China continues to increase its military power? Are we not instead seeing increased trade carried out by and among the BRIC nations? Aren’t emerging-market countries, including China, engaging in noticeable economic innovation?

The article on BRIC countries brought this discussion to mind when I was reading this section:

But there are other reasons why the BRICs might damage the global economic system, rather than buttress it. They might, for example, undermine the role of the IMF and World Bank, abandon attempts to expand free trade or even just ride roughshod over aid conditions in poor countries. But Mr Hormats thinks they will not. “They understand,” he argues, “that the openness and smooth functioning of the system is vital to them and so far there has been very little evidence that they want to change it dramatically.” When world output was plummeting last year, the BRICs’ economic stimulus programmes did a lot to stabilise it [bold mine-DL]. And on the question of reforming the international financial institutions, America and the BRICs find themselves on the same side.

Hormats’ analysis seems right to me. We should also bear in mind something that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wrote last week in The Times of India on the BRIC nations ahead of the Brasilia summit that concluded yesterday:

By strengthening the economic framework of the multipolar world, BRIC countries are objectively contributing to creating conditions for strengthening international security. We share an imperative that the international community should resolve conflicts through politico-diplomatic and legal means, rather than the use of military force. In our view, it is necessary to strengthen collective principles in international relations and to establish a just and democratic world order.

Some of this is just rhetoric and propaganda, of course, but it expresses the real interest that the BRIC nations have in stability and economic integration. We need not take that last sentence at face value to appreciate that all major emerging-market countries, including Russia and China, generally want international stability, economic expansion and non-interference in their internal affairs. We also don’t need to exaggerate the significance or cohesiveness of the BRIC group to recognize that the relative increase in the individual states’ influence and economic clout is not going to usher in the “dimming of our age” Auslin predicts.

Samuel Goldman at Postmodern Conservative responds to the previous post with a fair point:

Does that mean that they can’t also be populists? I’m not sure. On the one hand, populism can refer a particular tradition of redistributionist, anti-corporate, usually agrarian political ideas. Most Tea Partiers reject that tradition. On the other hand, populism can describe a conception of the appropriate relation between governors and governed in a representative democracy. On this view, policy should be much more closely tied to public opinion, or to direct popular decision, than to the judgment of legislative or bureaucratic elites.

Many of the Tea Partiers, it seems to me, are populists in the latter sense. If you prefer, call them plebiscitarians rather than populists.

Goldman could be right that plebiscitarian describes Tea Partiers better. Let’s think about this. 84% of the respondents said that they believe their views “reflect the views of most Americans,” so that as far as they are concerned they speak for the majority on policy. However, to the extent that Tea Partiers actually are strongly in favor of spending cuts and deficit reduction as top priorities, they do not reflect the views of most. On entitlement spending, for example, Tea Partiers’ views are more in line with the views of the general public, but this is because most Tea Partiers do not support reductions in entitlement spending. It seems likely that the Tea Partiers are speaking for an imaginary majority that would approve of shrinking government and cutting spending. My guess is that most Tea Partiers would be plebiscitarian only as long as they believed that they represent a majority.

The attention of Tea Party protests is pretty much entirely trained on the federal government and what it does. Congress remains an institution of representatives that is not constrained or guided by the sort of popular initiatives and referenda that progressive political reforms made possible in many states. The institution the protesters loathe and want to influence is one of the institutions least bound by “direct popular decision.” Originally, initiative and referendum mechanisms were designed to enable citizens to get around state legislatures dominated by wealthy and well-connected interests, but I don’t know of anyone on the right, Tea Partier or not, who would favor something like a national referendum to get around the “judgment of legislative or bureaucratic elites.” Failing something like a referendum, I’m not sure how federal policy would be “closely tied to public opinion” in this way, unless the idea is to craft legislation according to fluctuating poll numbers that are quite malleable and potentially misleading.

Conservatives actually know very well that they do not speak for a majority in this country, and they are also well aware that changes that would allow for more direct, plebiscitary democracy, whether in presidential elections or in passing legislation, would work to the detriment of their smaller states and their overall political interests. There is a Jeffersonian tradition available to conservatives that could make them more sympathetic to critiques of concentrated wealth and power and distributist and agrarian ideas for keeping such things in check, and this would not necessarily be at odds with the interests of smaller states and conservative interests, but as Goldman correctly observes most Tea Partiers and most conservatives generally reject that tradition. When they have married themselves to a centralist and corporatist party, how could they not?