There is a bizarre but noteworthy feud erupting between the absurd “Spengler,” now a resident blogger at First Things, and some of the more appallingneoconservatives. In some ways, it resembles the dispute between Andy McCarthy and Max Boot I mentioned last week. On the one side, you have completely irrational fanatics who also favor perpetual war and on the other side the hawkish interventionists that are embarrassed by them. In light this comparison, it is appropriate that Goldman recently wrote an entire essay claiming that the non-story about Petraeus was a deeply significant episode in American politics.

It is true that David Goldman, a.k.a. Spengler, has been making absurd claims about Obama for years. I first noticed this about him a little over two years ago. It has been obvious to me for a while that there was something awry with Goldman. In April 2008 I made what I think is the most important criticism against Goldman’s thinking:

There is something far, far more insidious and twisted than cultures of defeat, and these are cults of triumphalism, to which Spengler makes his contribution here. A cult of triumphalism is far more dangerous first of all because it sanctifies violence in a way that Lost Causes cannot do, and because it implies that there are wars that are not only just, but that the victor in war can literally do no wrong (and in any case the defeated deserved whatever they got, according to this circular reasoning, because they lost). A culture of defeat teaches humility and reminds that justice and military strength do not have any necessary direct relationship with one another. Triumphalism teaches the opposite: victory is the proof of righteousness, and not only did the enemy deserve to die, but we should have killed more of them to keep them down longer. Spengler approves here of the abandonment of restraint and total war and endorses the narrative of the victors. In fact, he endorses not just the cause of Unionists, as he specifically does in this case, but the narrative of every victor, whether it is the Mauryans and the Romans or the Mongols, the Ottomans, or the Aztecs. It is, of course, a filthy lie that “whole peoples can go bad.” This is the argument of the genocidaire and the totalitarian, and it gives a pass to anyone who would commit genocide against a weaker people. After all, we must allow the losers to lose! Except that when Spengler says “lose,” he means “die.”

It is telling that it was not the abhorrent ideas contained in this article that prompted attacks on Spengler. No doubt many hawks will cite this article in his defense. Spengler’s error was instead simply a slightly more aggressive form of the garbage that anti-Obama hawks routinely encourage in every argument they make. He seems to have made the mistake of actually believing the nonsense that other Obama critics utter for political advantage.

The first round of Hungary’s recent parliamentary elections have seen the clear victory of the center-right liberal Fidesz under Viktor Orban. They have also resulted in the 26-seat gain for a nationalist protest party, Jobbik (from the Hungarian jobb for right), which Frank Furedi describes here (via Will at the League). Jobbik is the more successful, slightly updated partner of Igazsag es Elet (Justice and Life), which was generating the same worries a decade ago that Jobbik is generating now. As it turns out, MIEP’s appeal was a flash in the pan. Jobbik may have more staying power, but I doubt it.

The difference between the two parties is that Jobbik is tapping into far greater discontent brought on by the financial crisis and recession, and so for the moment it has enjoyed far greater success. Hungary was among the financially worst-hit European countries, and Hungarians have lost confidence in both capitalism and electoral democracy more than any other nation in Europe. Amid this gloom, a protest movement such as Jobbik was bound to make inroads when the incumbent Socialists were utterly discredited and a mainstream liberal party such as Fidesz is not going to appeal to the most disaffected and alienated segments of the population.

There will be a temptation for many Americans and western Europeans to wail and gnash their teeth about this result. No doubt Jackson Diehl will resume commenting ignorantly on Hungarian politics as he did eight years ago when he baselessly accused Orban of preaching a Nazi-esque policy of Lebensraum when Orban used a completely neutral Hungarian word, eletter, in the context of opening up Hungary to the labor of ethnic Hungarians from neighboring countries. As the late, great Balint Vazsonyi pointed out soon thereafter:

Apparently, during a morning radio program, Mr. Orban spoke of closer economic cooperation between Hungarians residing in the Hungarian living sphere and those 3 million Hungarians whose living sphere is within the borders of other countries. The discussion had to do with economic spheres, and nothing whatever with territorial revisions or demands.

I bring up this old disagreement to make an important point, which is that Orban and his politics have never been the danger that Diehl once claimed. Eight years ago, it was considered appropriate to try to demonize an utterly mainstream, center-right Hungarian political party in the most despicable way in a major American newspaper. We can now see how wrong Diehl was, and we can be grateful that Orban and Fidesz are nothing like what he tried to make them out to be. We can see that Orban represents the tradition of Hungarian right-liberalism, which is now arrayed against the forces that Jobbik represents.

P.S. Note to The New York Times–it is Fidesz, not Fidezs. The name is an abbreviation of the original Hungarian name for the Alliance of Young Democrats, and the name wouldn’t make sense if it were spelled the other way.

Jackson Diehl is bothered that Obama failed to meet with a demagogic nationalist warmonger, er, I mean the democratically-elected president of Georgia. Obama also met with Yanukovych (who committed to getting rid of Ukraine’s HEU stockpile) and leaders from Armenia and Turkey (whose bilateral relations the administration has been working to improve for the last year). Of course, these meetings are supposed to be unfortunate because these states are on good terms with Moscow, and Georgia most certainly is not. The most irritating thing about Diehl’s post is that he is fully aware of the significant nonproliferation gain that Ukraine’s commitment represents, he knows perfectly well that Turkish-Armenian rapprochement is an important priority, and he understands that Georgia has almost nothing to contribute to the securing of nuclear materials, but he still tries to find some insult towards Georgia in all of this.

Diehl continues:

Obama thanked Saakashvili for that help in their phone call last week. But according to a Georgian account of the call, Obama didn’t say anything about Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO, or about Georgia’s interest in buying defensive weapons from the United States, in order to deter a repeat of the 2008 Russian invasion.

In other words, the administration is pulling back from some of the more irrational, anti-Russian postures of the last few years. This is actually to Georgia’s benefit, as it will make Georgia realize that confrontational policies are a dead-end and Georgia will start to repair relations with Russia. It may mean that our government’s reckless backing for Georgian aspirations for territorial “reintegration” is being scaled back.

Following up on the last post, I would just add that hardly anyone in the West is celebrating Bakiyev’s overthrow (he has now offered to resign), singing the praises of Kyrgyz “people power” or writing lengthy, glowing profiles of acting PM Roza Otunbayeva. Having foolishly cheered the imposition of a far worse dictatorship on Kyrgyzstan than the authoritarian president the country had before, Western enthusiasts for popular revolution have become remarkably quiet as a real bloody tyrant has been deposed by a popular uprising.

Looked at one way, this muted reaction is a very good thing. It might suggest that Western observers are beginning to appreciate that violent political clashes on the other side of the planet are usually not what we believe them to be, and we might acknowledge that the reasons for the clashes have little or nothing to do with us in most cases. Our need to take sides or invest with one side with moral and political superiority almost always gets in the way of understanding what is happening, and it always gets in the way of correctly assessing what the American interest is. The fewer Western personality cults built around little-known foreign leaders, the better it will is abe for the quality of our foreign policy discussions and our political discourse generally. Of course, the muted reaction is also a reminder that democracy promoters and enthusiasts tend not to be interested in celebrating the downfall of despots aligned with Washington.

Nonetheless, it is striking how ready some are to complain that Russia contributed to the uprising. Bakiyev was a terrible ruler, the leadership of the new government appears at least marginally better, so far there is little reason to believe that the new Kyrgyz government will cut off U.S. access to Manas, and we now have the rather odd spectacle of Moscow aiding popular uprisings to remove governments that it believes are working against its interests. These all appear to be reasonably good developments by the very standards democracy enthusiasts usually apply.

Russian support for a popular uprising against an authoritarian regime reinforces my view that the Russian government is a pragmatic authoritarian populist government that will act to establish and maintain itself as a major world power, and it will not have ideological objections to aiding opposition movements against authoritarian rulers. Russia’s role in Bakiyev’s overthrow is one more reason to doubt Robert Kagan’s theory of a clear-cut ideological rivalry between democracy and authoritarianism (or what he insists on calling autocracy) defining great power politics in this century. It seems just as likely that continued democratization will lead to the alignment of new democracies and rising democratic powers with the authoritarian defenders of state sovereignty and the status quo. On many contentious international issues, we are already seeing cooperation among the BRIC states against the U.S. and Europe, and other large democracies are following suit. The major authoritarian powers are beginning to take advantage of the reality that democratization has tended to undermine rather than enhance U.S. hegemony, and they are exploiting the opportunities provided by the stronger expression of divergent interests resulting from democratization around the world.

The new situation in Kyrgyzstan leaves open the possibility that the U.S. and Russia might come to an understanding that Russia has far greater interests and influence in post-Soviet space, in part because this is apparently how many people in former Soviet republics want it, but that this does not have to preclude constructive relations between former Soviet republics and the United States. As the Gallup poll Greg cites also tells us, there are substantial constituencies in almost all former Soviet states that support maintaining good relations with America and Russia.

As long as our government does not insist that these states define their relationship with Washington with hostility to Russia and Russian influence, and as long as Washington understands the limited and temporary nature of security cooperation with many of these states, there does not need to be contest for influence that ultimately harms these states and poisons our bilateral relations. Before 2005, Akayev had maintained the balance between Washington and Moscow fairly well. The previous administration’s inexplicable anti-Russian obsession helped to wreck this. Perhaps now there is an opportunity to repair that damage.

Obviously, Kyrgyzstan is geographically very close to Russia, around one million Kyrgyz work in Russia, and as a result economic and political ties between the two are very strong. Russia will naturally exercise influence over a small, impoverished neighbor such as Kyrgyzstan, just as it exercises influence in all of the former Soviet republics. Was it a planned uprising? There is reason to think so, but it is improbable that the uprising would have succeeded as quickly as it did had there not been a significant groundswell of popular discontent with Bakiyev’s rule.

Following the war in Georgia in 2008, Yanukovych’s election in Ukraine earlier this year, and now Bakiyev’s overthrow, supporters of the “freedom agenda” as a vehicle for advancing U.S. hegemony in post-Soviet space have to acknowledge that their concerted anti-Russian campaign has failed completely. In the process, U.S.-Russian relations were badly damaged and are only now beginning to be repaired, and in the meantime the United States gained nothing we did not already have and contributed to the rise of three failed governments, at least two of which were more brutal and authoritarian than the ones that preceded them, and all of which have presided over terrible periods of misrule. It is now time to try to retrieve something from the wreckage, and that begins by establishing full relations with the new Kyrgyz government and making clear to Moscow that we are not going to try to prise former Soviet republics from its orbit.

I wonder if such a pose – democracy promotion when it aligns with our strategic interests – is really all that tenable. Isn’t this a rather bald-faced hypocrisy? Why would anyone take the idea of political liberalism seriously if the U.S. – the supposed standard-bearer of the concept – holds it as nothing so much as a cynical cudgel to wield against regimes it disapproves of? ~Greg Scoblete

It is tenable enough as far as our domestic debate is concerned. What Boot proposes is more or less what the U.S. has done for at least the last ten years: preach the “freedom agenda” for all but only lend support to dissidents and protesters in countries with regimes Washington wants replaced. Left-populist movements in Latin America that have won power in elections are regularly regarded with suspicion and hostility here in the U.S. because they are social democratic or even genuinely socialist movements, and they are movements that stand in direct opposition to U.S. influence in Latin America.

Very few Americans seriously propose a sustained effort at democracy promotion in any of the allied Arab states, but a great many Americans still seem to believe that the “color” revolutions were full-fledged democratic protest movements that were going to usher in new liberal democratic governments. Those “revolutions” just happened to serve a perceived U.S. interest in the region. Of course, all the “color” revolutions have either stalled or ended in disaster for their countries with Kyrgyzstan as the latest to suffer, but a surprisingly large number of people retain some confidence in their original purpose. The trouble is not so much that the “freedom agenda” is hypocritical or cynical, but that it tends to impose worse governments on the countries that it was supposedly helping to free and ultimately manages to weaken U.S. influence in those countries when the failed “revolutionary” governments discredit or destroy themselves. If one wanted to come up with a proposal that would contribute to the ruin of the countries in question and have stated U.S. goals in their regions mostly or completely undone, pursuing the “freedom agenda” would be the way to do it.

There are other times when democracy promoters have misjudged the relationship between promoting democracy and securing perceived U.S. interests. Before the invasion of Iraq, advocates of democracy promotion had convinced themselves that a democratic Iraq would not fall into Iran’s orbit. There was a lot of talk about the significance of Iraqi nationalism that would prevent this, and as I recall there were even one or two amateur attempts to discern nascent Jeffersonianism in the Shi’ites’ hostility to the caliphate after Ali. Not only was there a willingness to use democracy promotion as a “cynical cudgel” against unapproved regimes over the last ten years, but there was the strange, unwise notion that all newly-democratic regimes would almost of necessity be friendlier towards U.S. and Western interests than their authoritarian predecessors. We have heard this countless times in connection with the Iranian protests. Part of this was informed by ahistorical “democratic peace” theory, and part of it was an attempt to reconcile perceived U.S. strategic interests and the results of democratization. As should be readily apparent to us now, the results of democratization are often in tension or at odds with those interests as Washington defines them.

Indeed, so long as Washington defines U.S. interests in such a way that Iran must severely limit or abolish its nuclear program, a fully democratic Iran would be no less intransigent on this issue and possibly even more so. A democratic Iran would probably expect to be treated as the regional power that it is, and it would probably seek to wield influence and project power as any regional power would. Many Westerners seem to assume that a democratic Iran would “solve” the “problem” of an empowered Iran that is not effectively checked by any of its Arab neighbors. Having supported the destruction of the Iraqi government that would and could have balanced Iran, anti-Iranian hawks have been eager to find some way to change the regime in Iran that they helped empower. In the short and medium-term, this will not work. Iran’s government is not going to succumb to opposition forces in the foreseeable future, because it is a much stronger, deeper and more entrenched state apparatus than the ramshackle post-Soviet governments that fell and keep falling.

Boot states quite clearly what many Western Green movement sympathizers have believed all along: support for the Green movement is appropriate and necessary mainly because it provides the U.S. with a way to “solve” the problem with Iran’s regime, and it does so with minimal risk to us. This is why the Green protests received intense coverage for months, and why the protests that are destabilizing an Asian ally in Thailand barely register. Given the relative weakness of the opposition in Iran, it was always far-fetched that the protests would significantly change or topple the Iranian government. There are other problems with the administration’s Iran policy, but its unwillingness to spend much time or energy on the Green movement has not been one of them.

Either way, however, the extraordinary salience of partisan identity leads me to believe that things like George Will’s op-ed calling for withdrawal for Afghanistan and a recent admission from Reps. Rohrabacher and McClintock that “almost all” their Republican colleagues on the Hill think the Iraq War was a mistake are hugely important developments [bold mine-DL].

There needs to be room for conservatives and Republicans to believe that it is okay for “people like us” to hold antiwar beliefs. But as long as the public face of opposition to the war remains Nancy Pelosi and Code Pink, many conservatives and Republicans seem likely to continue in their passionate support for the wars. ~Justin Logan

Via Scoblete

Are these hugely important developments? As I have said before, George Will isn’t taking an antiwar position. He wants to extricate us from “nation-building” and replace a population-centered counterinsurgency with frequent use of air strikes and special ops teams. If that means more instability in the region and more dead Afghan civilians, well, those are the breaks. The result of this would be to continue to keep the American costs of meddlesome interventionism relatively low in order to make it possible to intervene more frequently in the future. Will’s call for withdrawal from Afghanistan does not tell us that he will oppose the next bipartisan consensus-backed war fever, and indeed there is nothing in his record that suggests that he would.

As much as I would like to believe that what Rohrabacher and McClintock are saying means something, even if the claim is true it has had almost no effect on the foreign policy thinking of most Republican members of Congress even as it relates to Iraq. Noah Millman described three groups of conservative Republican war supporters who have since come to the conclusion that the war was a mistake:

In my experience, conservatives who have changed their mind fall into three broad camps: minimizers, avoiders, and abandoners. Minimizers admit the war didn’t work out as planned, but spend their energies on damage control – arguing that intentions were good, or that knowledge was limited, or that some aspects did work out, or whatever. Avoiders show signs that they know the whole enterprise was rotten to the core – so they avoid the topic and avoid drawing any broader conclusions about, well, anything from the fiasco of Iraq [bold mine-DL]. And abandoners, well, they feel obliged, when they face the depth of their mistake, to abandon their political home altogether, either for the other side or for a relatively un-engaged posture.

In other words, there’s a general sense among conservative thinkers that the die was cast long ago: within the context of the conservative political world, it is not an option to seriously rethink the decision for war [bold mine-DL]. Doing so is tantamount to abandoning their political identity. Why that is, I’m not sure, though I suspect guilt has more to do with it than anything.

Aside from a few other members who I think may have genuinely come to see and really understand their error of supporting the war, such as Walter Jones and Dana Rohrabacher, we do not see the recognition of the “terrible mistake” translating into any re-thinking of any policy. If most Republican members of Congress now believe that the Iraq war was a “terrible mistake,” they have since become minimizers or avoiders. As Millman said, there has been no serious re-thinking. For his part, Rohrabacher has been a skeptic and critic of administration Afghanistan policy, and he has considerable familiarity with matters of Afghanistan policy, so I don’t easily reject what he proposes. What I do want to stress here is how incredibly unrepresentative Rohrabacher and those few other Republicans are when it comes to taking public policy positions at odds with the prevailing view inside the party.

As Millman suggests, support for the Iraq war has become an important part of modern conservative, and I would add Republican partisan, political identity. The Iraq war produced “the most polarized distribution of partisan opinions on a president and a war ever measured,” as Gary Jacobson says. The strong identification of conservatives and Republicans with the Iraq war was at first a point of pride and then a source of increasingly defensive self-justification as the vast majority of the country turned against the war and against conservatives and the GOP. Even if most Republican members of Congress recognize that the war was a “terrible mistake,” they refuse to acknowledge publicly that their support for the war and public discontent with the war were responsible for costing them their majorities in Congress. That tells me that even as a matter of crude electoral calculations the Congressional GOP has learned nothing. As a practical matter, mass Congressional Republican recognition of the error of invading Iraq has not led to any significant political or policy changes. As far as most Republican voters and conservatives are still concerned, “people like us” do not oppose foreign wars, and they especially don’t oppose the Iraq war in any meaningful way, and one reason for this is that the public face of opposition simply does not include mainstream Republicans, much less Republicans in any position of leadership or influence.

Kevin Sullivan raises a fair objection to my post on Karzai:

I’m sympathetic to this argument, and he’s probably right, but so what? Obviously, the president is going to make policy mistakes, and if your fallback position is to simply attack everything that he does, eventually, you’re going to get one right! Blind squirrel —> nut.

But if the United States is truly invested in securing and nurturing Afghanistan’s fragile young democracy, what then is the point in publicly humiliating the democratically elected-ish leader of said investment? There’s nothing wrong with pressuring Karzai behind closed doors; publicly equivocating when asked if Karzai is even a U.S. ally is another matter entirely.

It’s true that Obama’s Republican critics will eventually get something right, even if it is simply a function of constant rejectionism, but one of the flaws of constant rejectionism is that everyone begins to assume that Republican foreign policy arguments are nothing more than reflexive partisan whining. Perhaps as far as public opinion is concerned, reflexive partisanship is what matters most, but when it comes to judging arguments on their merits the habit of reflexive partisan opposition makes it so that reasonable criticisms and absurd ones are blurred together.

The necessary, appropriate warning that Obama is doing something foolish will be ignored after so many ridiculous warnings have proven false. Suppose for a moment that Obama has blundered in his handling of Karzai and that it could prove costly for the United States. If that is the case, most of the people saying so have spent at least the last year and a half crying wolf, and now the rest of us are accustomed to ignoring them or treating their arguments with disdain. I don’t say that this is a wise response, but it is hard to avoid. It is exceedingly difficult to take this kind of criticism seriously when some of its loudest exponents are known to be either profoundly wrong (Cheney) or staggeringly ignorant (Palin) about U.S. foreign policy.

That said, just because foolish people happen to take a position does not necessarily make the position foolish. Just because hawkish Republican interventionists always favor troop escalations and therefore favored the escalation in Afghanistan did not necessarily make the troop escalation in Afghanistan the wrong thing to do. Now that some of their allies have decided that Karzai must be treated with kid gloves, it is not necessarily wrong to agree. Nonetheless, I still find Ackerman’s argument for pressing Karzai far more persuasive.

Zakaria recently made an argument that the administration has been treating Karzai the wrong way, and it is probably just about the best case can be made for this view, which is why I find the “hands off Karzai” argument so unpersuasive. Most of Zakaria’s argument is that Karzai cannot be replaced, and his successor would be no better and probably worse. As it happens, I already made the “no alternative” case for Karzai after the fraud-marred presidential election last year, so Zakaria will get no argument from me on that score. The idea of replacing Karzai is a distraction. No one is proposing such a thing, and no sane person would attempt it. However, if Washington accepts that there is no alternative to Karzai, and if he believes that as well, he will assume that he can do anything and Washington will tolerate it. If there is no realistic alternative to Karzai, we do have to make the best of having Karzai as Afghan president, and part of that means bringing pressure to bear on him when necessary.

For quite some time, we have been in the very odd position of insisting that this or that policy is absolutely vital to American interests and then effectively putting ourselves and the success of our policy largely at the mercy of the local client government. We must never think of applying significant pressure, we must never even raise the possibility of reducing or cutting off aid, we must never feud with the client in public, and we must never make the client unhappy. Of course, the client state is effectively free to do whatever provocative thing it wishes. The client will continue to benefit just as before, and U.S. support must continue to be for all intents and purposes unconditional because of the even more vital interests that the client supposedly helps us to secure. Client states want all the benefits and privileges of independence and sovereignty, but they also want all of the security and political advantages that come from being a client and aid recipient. If they want the former, they have to be willing to risk losing the latter, and the U.S. has to be willing to take support and aid away from them if the American interest requires it.

Zakaria is correct that venting is not foreign policy, but calculated displays of disapproval do not have to be mere venting. Voicing dissatisfaction behind closed doors can only achieve so much, and for that matter public expressions of dissatisfaction can only achieve so much, but no administration should be expected to limit itself solely to making objections in private if this has little or no effect. So long as the leader of a client state assumes that he and the client state are indispensable, and as long as he believes that there are no consequences to ignoring or rejecting U.S. requests and pressure, nothing in the relationship or the client government will change for the better. For the sake of the interests of both countries, both need to improve, and laying off Karzai isn’t going to make that happen.

Masscare may be to Romney in 2012 what abortion was in 2008—an issue where a critical mass of conservatives don’t quite buy his explanations (and I say this as someone who likes and respects Romney and wishes him well). The best thing for Romney to say, I think, is that he flat-out made a mistake, that he tried an idea that ran off the rails. It would also have the advantage of being true. But he can’t bring himself to go there yet. ~Rich Lowry

Jim Antle ably points out the problems with this, but I would add two other observations. Whatever appeal Romney has is built around his reputation for competence and policy wonkery. When it is a subject he has actually bothered to learn something out (i.e., not foreign policy), he can speak very knowledgeably and in great detail. Given that reputation, how could the competent, wonkish executive sign off on a piece of legislation that he should have known would create a fiscal nightmare for the state in a few years’ time? There is another point related to this. Romney does not have much experience in political office, and so has leaned heavily on his record in the private sector to supplement his short time in government. His signature achievement does not include any of the containment or reduction in costs that was typical of Romney’s work for Bain. If MassCare is the result of bringing Romney’s business acumen to government, what exactly would be the benefit of his election as President?

When Romney is being “himself,” we are told, he is the problem-solving pragmatist, but all that he really did in Massachusetts was to exacerbate the problem of health care costs and now he desperately hides behind federalist arguments to excuse his remarkably poor judgment. Indeed, the federalist argument for state-by-state health care legislation requires that the person making it point to Massachusetts as an example of a terrible, failed experiment. If we want to liken states to laboratories, Romney set his lab on fire on the way out the door. That hasn’t stopped him from proudly pointing to the burning structure he left behind as evidence of his effectiveness as an executive and a reason why he should be entrusted with even greater power.

One advantage that Romney’s perpetual position-switching used to give him was that it created the impression that Romney was very pliable and would not persist stubbornly in a position out of deep-seated conviction or arrogance. The argument went something like this: however untrustworthy Romney seemed, and no matter how much he would pander to every audience to win votes, he would never be as willfully blind to reality as Bush was. Since the beginning of the health care debate, Romney has started to combine the worst traits of his previous presidential campaign and that stubborn obliviousness that defined Bush: he cannot let go of the Massachusetts health care bill, he cannot really acknowledge the mistakes that he helped to make, and yet he wants to make himself the standard-bearer of the opposition to the very same kind of thing he supported just a few years ago and still will not repudiate.

This is related to what distinguished Romney from other panderers and opportunists. All politicians tell us what they think we want to hear, and many of them will engage in the most absurd contortionism to run away from previous positions that are no longer popular or useful, but very few of them will do all of that and then claim to be some high-minded, principled, newly-converted opponent of all the things that they endorsed yesterday. There is a passage in Game Change about Romney’s presidential campaign that sums this up nicely:

Unlike Giuliani, Romney had no reticence about slashing at his rivals. But the perception of him as a man without convictions made him a less-than-effective delivery system for policy contrasts. The combination of the vitriol of his attacks and his apparent corelessness explained the antipathy the other candidates had toward him. (p.294)

So Romney now insists that the Massachusetts legislation is working when it isn’t, and that he never made an error in judgment when he did, and he will probably then start denouncing anyone on his side who does not want to make repeal the heart of the Republican platform. What is important to remember here is that the policy issue could be almost anything. It need not be health care. Romney would still engage in the same holier-than-thou latecomer routine that he has been practicing for at least five years.

First, I think Ygelsias is somewhat misrepresenting that dominant conservative position. I’d argue that conservatives seem to agree that some aspects of the world are indeed positive sum: the U.S. military as a global police force protects our interests but also lets allied states peacefully pursues theirs. They do not see the accumulation of U.S. power as a zero-sum affair because American power supports the positions and interests of a host of other nations. ~Greg Scoblete

One reason why Yglesias might think that conservatives typically view international relations as a zero-sum game is that many of the top foreign policy conservative commentators insist that this is how they see the world (and that this is how Obama should see it, too). Robert Kagan has an entire series of articles dedicated to mocking Obama’s supposed rejection of the zero-sum view, based originally on one throwaway line in Obama’s Cairo speech that I very much doubt he meant.

Nonetheless, Greg is partly right here, and I have argued before that defenders of Pax Americana and U.S. hegemony or primacy frequently assume that what is good for America (as they understand this) is good for the world, so much so that they have some difficulty grasping that other nations might resist U.S. “leadership” out of anything other than ideological fanaticism, anti-American hatred or greed. As I said in January:

For believers in Pax Americana, the only time when there are “zero-sum games” is when other states resist the supposedly benevolent intervention of the U.S.

Put another way, when other nations align themselves with the U.S. and do what Washington wants, these people believe that everyone benefits (even if the U.S. and our allies are embarked on a disastrous course that harms international stability and security). It is only opposition and resistance to the U.S. that create the conflicts where only one side can gain. A key difference between right and left, or rather between the prevailing view on the right and progressive realism, is that the former tends to see (or imagine) far more opposition and resistance to the U.S. around the world and it seems far more likely to view this opposition in terms of threats, challenges and unwavering ideological hostility. A key difference between the non-interventionist right and progressive realism is that progressive realists still insist on trying to solve all of the same “problems” through international institutions and “smart power” that the interventionist right believes can be solved through power projection and freedom-babble, whereas the non-interventionist right is much less likely to see these “problems” as American problems in the first place.

In the last ten years, something else has distinguished the prevailing foreign policy views of right and left, and this is their relative amount of respect for state sovereignty and international law. While there continue to be humanitarian interventionists preaching the “responsibility to protect,” humanitarian interventionism has been losing ground on the left as the terrible costs of these interventions have increased. The absurdity of destroying entire countries as a way of aiding and freeing them has begun to dawn on more people on the left. As Mark Mazower has observed in his interesting World Affairs essay:

But the more thoughtful of them [interventionists] have come to realize that the way leaders treat their people is not the only problem that counts in international affairs. On the contrary, if the history of the past century showed anything, it was that clear legal norms, and the securing of international stability more generally, also serve the cause of human welfare [bold mine-DL]. Let alone the fact that it is much easier to destroy institutions than to build them. Liberalism’s characteristic indifference to institutions, both domestic and international, has thus been called into question. In short, the ending of the era of humanitarian interventionism may come to be seen as a sign of the waning of Western power, and mourned as consigning more of the world’s peoples to the mercies of the tyrants who rule them. But it is possible to view it more positively, as the belated emergence of a new maturity in international relations.

Contrast this more sober-minded progressive realism with the interventionist sabre-rattling and freedom-babble of Michael Barone, who cited Mazower’s essay to use as his foil for reciting an already very tired complaint against Obama. You see, Obama’s foreign policy “has shown a cold indifference to human rights that contrasts vividly with those of his five predecessors.” Leave aside the accuracy of this observation for a moment, and consider that it is the Republican and supposed conservative writer here who is complaining that a President is not engaged in enough preaching, lecturing and warmongering on account of human rights abuses in other countries.

Yglesias claims that mainstream conservatives don’t actually believe the human rights rhetoric they’ve been using in the last decade, and he says that their “professions of humanitarian concern” are “hollow and opportunistic,” but in my view the far more worrisome possibility is that they are absolutely sincere and have no idea what a dangerous position it is that they have taken, tied as it is to hegemonism and support for perpetual war. No doubt some mainstream conservatives simply use human rights claims as a cudgel with which to beat their opponents, and some use other regimes’ human rights abuses as a pretext for aggressive policies they already want to see realized, but for the time being humanitarian interventionism is not so much dying as it has simply migrated from its theoretically more natural home on the left to its new environs on the mainstream right.

In a strange move, Barone then drags in Walter Russell Mead’s article declaring the twilight of liberal internationalism to try to counter Mazower, but Barone seems not to understand that Mead is to a large extent talking about something else. Mead’s main point was this:

The world is inexorably developing in directions that undermine the authority and efficacy of big international institutions, and American power (not, I think, doomed to decline) will increasingly have to operate outside of institutional frameworks, like it or not.

If Mead is right, and there are reasons to doubt this, that does not necessarily contradict what Mazower says in his essay. On the whole, Mazower’s essay was descriptive and provided an account of developments over the last twenty years. Indeed, if the authority and efficacy of international institutions are being undermined, that could improve the stability of internationally recognized borders and reduce the chances of future humanitarian interventions. After all, it is U.N. sanctions and Security Council resolutions that have served as the legal fig leaves for unnecessary and illegal warfare in the recent past. The developments that are undermining international institutions, and which are making the fictions of an “international community” and “rogue states” more preposterous every day, are also developments that will tend to reinforce state sovereignty. Regardless of the efficacy and authority of international institutions, it was unipolarity that made humanitarian interventionism possible, and the shift to multipolarity means that there will probably be fewer and fewer states that can be treated as Yugoslavia and Iraq have been treated in the last twenty years. Other major and rising powers, such as Russia, China, India and even Brazil and Indonesia, have no interest in encouraging more border changes, especially not if they are in service to ethnic separatist causes. Almost all of them have enough concerns with ethnic tensions and separatist movements already that they have no incentive to intervene on behalf of separatists or repressed ethnic groups inside another state.

On the whole, it has not been the non-Western states that have engaged in gross violations of international law and state sovereignty in the last twenty years. Even the partition of Georgia by Russia was a direct response to the partition of Serbia, which was entirely the work of western European and American governments. It has been European and American governments that have been intervening in strictly internal affairs, carving up sovereign states and occupying other states. Strange as it may seem, it has been the non-Euro-Americans, to use Mead’s term, plus the Russians that have consistently opposed these moves. For whatever combination of reasons, it has been Europeans and Americans who have wanted to increase international instability, foment political upheaval and spread revolution. The relative decline of Europe and America may not lead to a situation where “rising new powers will continue to lead the world down the path the Americans laid down,” but it very well could lead to a world in which certain international norms, such as state sovereignty, are more fully respected and where international stability has increased.

P.S. On a related note, I recommend picking up the new issue of TAC or subscribing and reading online our Left/Right symposium on the prospects of forging a left-right alliance against empire and the warfare state.

U.S. policymakers increasingly view Central Asia as a transit point to somewhere else. ~Tom Malinowski

, “How Not to Run an Empire”

We can grant that concerns about the abuses of Bakiyev’s regime took a backseat to the need to retain an air base for supplying Afghanistan. But why was it necessary to seek Bakiyev’s favor so obsequiously in order to keep the U.S. lease at Manas? Let’s dig a bit deeper.

Early in 2009, not long after Obama had been sworn in, the Kyrgyz parliament voted to end the U.S. lease at Manas, because the U.S. military presence in Kyrgyzstan was the cause of some accidents and civilian deaths in the vicinity and so was deeply unpopular. Of course, it didn’t help that any of the business generated by activity at the base primarily benefited members of the ruling family, whether it was Akayev’s or Bakiyev’s. All of this predated Bakiyev’s electoral fraud and the discontent that exploded this past week on account of utility rate hikes. Analysts obsessed with the sinister power of Moscow focused entirely on a Russian loan to Kyrgyzstan, which was supposed to have been the reason why the U.S. would have to leave, and missed the broad popular discontent with Kyrgyzstan’s role as a transit point for an American war. When Bakiyev changed his position and permitted the continuation of the lease in exchange for more rent, the U.S. became reliant on Bakiyev even more than it had ever been on Akayev. The habit of definining U.S.-Kyrgyz relations around the basing issue to the exclusion of everything else and the unpopularity of the base itself predated Bakiyev and they long predated the political turmoil of recent years.

As I wrote in February 2009 in The Week:

The quality of the U.S.-Kyrgyz relationship had already worsened considerably long before the Russian offer of aid, and it was the base that was a major cause of the deterioration. As Kyrgyzstan’s former Ambassador to the U.S. Baktybek Abdrisaev explained in a recent Washington Post op-ed, U.S. interest in Kyrgyzstan became narrowly focused on the base to the detriment of all other issues, including human rights—which meant that the entire bilateral relationship was sure to suffer disproportionately once the base became a flashpoint of controversy.

If the U.S. would like to have sustainable and stable good bilateral relations with Kyrgyzstan, it should not reduce those relations to the issue of U.S. use of Manas. In other words, the U.S. should not treat Kyrgyzstan as a transit point or a satrapy, but should treat it as a sovereign state struggling with the political consequences of becoming a willing ally in the war in Afghanistan.

P.S. As it happens, Mr. Abdrisaev co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post that was published yesterday. It is also worth reading.