Jim Antle continues the discussion on Republican critics of the Afghanistan war plan. He is right that Republican opposition to Clinton’s Balkan and other interventions was driven by a number of different motives from strict non-interventionism to partisan opportunism. After all, Tom DeLay publicly cast doubt on the legitimacy and necessity of the 1998 airstrikes in Afghanistan and Sudan and later questioned the timing of Operation Desert Fox because of the rather convenient distraction these strikes provided during the impeachment struggle, and he voiced opposition to the bombing of Serbia, but none of this had much to do with concern that the military was being used inappropriately or unnecessarily. It was the sort of cynical posturing that typified everything DeLay did. As the Bush years made clear, these “allies” who happened to oppose military interventions when there was a Democratic President were worse than useless when the time came to resist far more destructive and dangerous policies under a Republican administration. Because so many Republicans had treated foreign policy debates as little more than an extension of domestic political rivalry during the Clinton years, the change in government dictated a significant change in policy views or, to be more precise, policy poses. The same thing will happen again under the next Republican administration, or at least it will if nothing is done in the interim to change foreign policy thinking on the right.

With respect to Afghanistan, this coalition of the unprincipled is particularly unwelcome, not least because the Afghan war has always been as legitimate as the Iraq war was not. If a significant part of the GOP opts to oppose Obama on Afghanistan after being lockstep followers of Bush on Iraq, they will show the public that it should never trust them on matters of national security. They will have managed to get both major foreign policy decisions of the last ten years completely wrong, and they will show that they erred not simply because of misunderstanding or even because of ideology, but most of all because of the partisan affiliation of the President at the time. I cannot think of anything more completely discrediting.

P.S. In addition to being foolish, this rejectionist stance on Afghanistan has the disadvantage of being on the wrong side of Republican and independent opinion. Democratic opinion is split, but even among Democrats opposition is much weaker now than it was a month ago. As Weigel notes, this is paired with the finding that the same groups that support the war in Afghanistan and approve of sending additional forces also disapprove of his handling of Afghanistan by similar margins, and the Democrats who are split are overwhelmingly positive on Obama’s handling of the war:

A majority of Republicans and a plurality of independents disapprove of Obama’s Afghanistan performance, even though the 36 percent support number from Republicans is Obama’s highest on any issue. But Democrats approve by a two-to-one majority.

So reflexive partisanship still holds sway on generic questions of overall approval of how Obama handles these issues, but things change considerably when we are discussing actual policy.

The D.C. Examiner has a pair of op-eds on the Afghanistan war plan, and they are interesting in that they show the yawning chasm that separates the reasonably informed (and in my view correct) position of Joe Sestak and the confused argument of Jason Chaffetz. Whether or not one agrees with the war plan, there is simply no comparison between the quality of the two arguments. Sestak’s demonstrates significantly greater understanding of the region, and Chaffetz’s op-ed is scarcely more than a repetition of generic mantras that could be (and have been) applied to any and every military operation for the last thirty years. Anyone looking for a more elaborate or detailed argument than we found in the statement published on his House website, which I have already addressed here, would be sorely disappointed.

Many readers will wonder why it is even worth our time to bother with Chaffetz’s arguments. After all, he is a freshman member of the minority. Right now, he is perhaps one of the least influential figures in Washington. That misses the point. The problem with Chaffetz’s awful foreign policy views is not what they mean in the present, but what they mean for the future of foreign policy thinking on the right. As much as I disagreed with his interpretation of the significance of Chaffetz’s Afghanistan position, Reihan was right that Chaffetz really is representative of a broad swath of the Republican Party. This just happens to mean something very different from what Reihan believed it to mean.

Chaffetz’s brief political career is worth reviewing here. Chaffetz represents much of the conservative protest sentiment that has been building for the last few years. Elected just last year for the first time, he is one of the newest Republican members of the House, which means that he is not closely tied to the legacy of the Bush years. He came to office as an insurgent candidate against a Republican establishment figure. He is not tainted by voting for the Iraq war, infringements on civil liberties or bailouts. His restrictionist position helped to propel him past Chris Cannon, which served as a reminder of how far removed from their constituents some Republican politicians had become on this question. In many ways, Chaffetz is a model for conservative insurgents running in reliably Republican areas, and on many issues he should be an example of how conservatives have learned to reject the errors of the Bush administration.

As the GOP rebuilds, it seems likely that it will be producing more and more candidates like Chaffetz in its reduced core areas. This is why his awful foreign policy views are so unfortunate and in need of refutation. Like the rest of his party, he has learned nothing from the foreign policy mistakes of the last eight years, and he seems to have the same cookie-cutter, uninformed and ideological views on the subject that have dragged his party into political ruin. Unlike so many of his colleagues, Chaffetz could start fresh and pursue a different foreign policy direction unmarred by failure, but there is simply no evidence that he has the desire or the imagination to do so. Thus you get his mixture of partisan rejectionism and hegemonism all wrapped up together, which guards against acquiring a reputation of supporting a “weak” foreign policy while leaving room to oppose the administration on its most important foreign policy decision to date.

Coming back to the op-eds themselves, Sestak’s overstates the case for the plan when he conjures the specter of Pakistan’s nukes falling into the hands of jihadists, which is a scenario almost as far-fetched as the prospect of the Iranian government giving away a nuke to terrorists. Nonetheless, he is right when he stresses the importance of Pakistani stability, and he makes a plausible argument that a limited objective of improving security conditions can be reached. Sestak’s career in the Navy and his service in Afghanistan do not necessarily mean his arguments are superior, but they do lend his arguments credibility that Chaffetz cannot really match. In miniature, this Sestak-Chaffetz exchange symbolizes how much more credible rising Democratic politicians tend to be on foreign policy than their Republican counterparts.

What will be interesting to watch is how Sestak’s overall support for the war plan affects his chances against Specter in the primary next year. In his latest desperation move to save his job, Specter has embraced the progressive critique of sending additional forces to Afghanistan in an effort to win over the left of his new party despite repeatedly disappointing them on virtually every domestic issue. Even though Specter has a long record as a hawk and supporter of the war in Iraq, nothing is quite so important to him as his re-election, so this latest transformation is hardly surprising. If he had remained a Republican, he would probably now be echoing the arguments of Jason Chaffetz in equally opportunistic, rejectionist fashion to score points with conservative voters.

There’s not a “dove” movement of significance on the American Right. But there is a strong sentiment among Republicans toward a Jacksonian view of war and an antipathy toward “nation building,” though. Indeed, George W. Bush campaigned hard on that platform. Both Afghanistan and Iraq were sold in Realist national security terms, with a bit of National Greatness neoconservative Idealism thrown in for flavor. But, over time, the latter overtook the former.

There’s also a significant paleocon wing of the Republican Party, which has no moral qualms about war but nonetheless is very reluctant to intervene militarily. And when they are roused, they tend to want to pursue the enemy hammer and tong with none of the niceties of limited war. ~James Joyner

James is right that there is no “dove” movement on the right, and unfortunately Ron Paul’s primary results showed us how few non-interventionists there were in the GOP, but I can’t completely agree with this description. To take the last point first, paleocons arrive at non-interventionist conclusions for a number of reasons, and our view of how wars should be conducted and how limited they should be is not uniform. Almost all paleocons would agree that wars should be defensive and should be fought only when the national interest, which is usually very narrowly defined, requires it, but once such a war is being fought there is no single view of how limited it should be. Opposition to starting wars may not be universal, but it is close enough that one can generalize about paleocon opposition to aggressive warfare. To the extent that there is consensus among paleocons on this question, there is probably more opposition to total and unlimited warfare than there is support for it. It is common for some mainstream conservatives to invoke mass bombing campaigns in WWII as examples of tactics they find acceptable and would have no problem seeing employed again, and there is an enduring strain of Vietnam revisionism on the right that claims that Vietnam could have been won if the military had been allowed to use everything at its disposal, but for the most part paleocons don’t agree with this and often we find such arguments to be appalling.

It is true that “Jacksonians” on the right lose patience with nation-building, but they also have nationalist convictions that our interventions abroad are always benevolent and initially they are very keen to repeat the propaganda that we are fighting wars of liberation or wars against tyranny (or evil or some new form of fascism). They might support military interventions without the trappings of democratist rhetoric, but they readily re-use this rhetoric whenever they are confronted with arguments that the war in question is unjust or illegal or unnecessary. In other words, they will insist on having national security reasons for going to war, but they will embrace every argument that makes the war appear to be an expression of charity and goodwill. Where they will draw the line is when they conclude that the benevolent, “humanitarian” justifications get in the way of achieving whatever amorphous concept of “victory” they hold.

What makes “Jacksonians” weary of nation-building is not the goal of establishing new political institutions in another country. It is instead the time that it takes to do this and the “ingratitude” of the alleged beneficiaries of our interventions that tend to turn them against prolonged deployments. The charge of “ingratitude,” of course, is inevitable if you believe that you have been doing another nation a favor by invading and wrecking their country. Jacksonians’ instinctive deference to the executive and their belief that criticizing a President in wartime is a kind of disloyalty force them to focus on nation-building and “political correctness” (i.e., refraining from bombing civilians) (as Rep. Chaffetz did) in order to criticize a President and his conduct of a war without suggesting that they lack in support for the military and military interventions in general. This is why “Jacksonians” may be critical of certain details in how a war is conducted, or they might, like Chaffetz, even favor starting a new war that cannot easily be started until the current war ends, but they could never seriously be described as antiwar.

This is how you get critics of the Afghan war plan from the right who want to be more pro-military than the military, and who believe that the rules of engagement that the theater commanders insist on imposing are driven not by military necessity but by “political correctness.” It may be that they cannot imagine why a military commander would want this kind of discipline, which just drives home how instinctive and visceral their “pro-military” views are and how unrelated these views are to actual military needs. This is an echo of that Vietnam revisionist sentiment that insists that the military should have the fewest possible constraints on what they do. Strategy and geopolitical considerations never enter into any of this. Hence you have someone like Chaffetz who says that Iran’s nuclear program should just be “taken out,” as if he thinks this is simply a matter of will and as if there are no costs or consequences to doing this. Even pragmatic considerations that less restrictive rules of engagement could prove to be extremely counterproductive in a counterinsurgency seem to be irrelevant to such “Jacksonians.”

James is mistaken when he writes that “Iraq and Afghanistan will once again remind us of the limits of American power and cause Republicans to be more skeptical of future wars, both in terms of intervening to begin with and in setting realistic war aims.” The wars do remind us of the limits of American power, but it is the Jacksonians who are most averse to admitting that these limits exist. To the extent that most rank-and-file Republicans could be described as Jacksonians according to Mead’s usage, they are not going to become more skeptical of warfare, but will instead become more insistent on an increasingly aggressive and unrestrained posture around the world. Vietnam did not make Republicans less hawkish, and it was by several orders of magnitude a greater debacle than Iraq has been. On the contrary, the aftermath of Vietnam pushed many Democratic hawks into the GOP, and movement conservatives have become accustomed over the last three decades to advocating for both a larger military and for a greater willingness to use force around the world. Skepticism of peacekeeping and humanitarian missions has tended to come from the belief that threats are ubiquitous and the military cannot be distracted by such irrelevancies, but this is absolutely not skepticism about deploying forces overseas and initiating force against a variety of other state and non-state actors. It is actually evidence of the depressing lack of skepticism Republicans have when it comes to entering into or starting wars.

If multiple military interventions are straining the military, the Jacksonian answer will often be that we should increase the size of the military. To the extent that Jacksonians are turning against Afghanistan, it is probably only because they have been led to believe that we need to free up more resources in order to start a war with Iran. The flaw in emphasizing imperial overstretch and strains on the military when arguing against a military intervention is that this part of the argument wins over a Jacksonian audience only insofar as it succeeds in exploiting their irrational fears of another exaggerated or non-existent threat.

Reihan:

By its very nature, a counterinsurgency campaign is a limited war, one that relies on winning over the civilian population through the careful use of military force combined with deft diplomacy. The idea is to use persuasion as much as possible and coercion as little as possible. So when Chaffetz writes that we’ve tied the hands of our military, he means that vanquishing enemies, not nation-building, should be our core goal.

One problem with this is that “vanquishing enemies” in a war against a domestic insurgency is a goal that cannot really be achieved without strict rules of engagement and respect for the civilian population. To a large degree, the enemy is “vanquished” by not adding to his numbers with tactics that harm the civilian population. The trouble with Chaffetz’s brand of “antiwar” stance is that he conceives of a “withdrawal” from Afghanistan being a prelude to the perpetual use of air strikes and targeted assassinations. His alternative of “going big” and eliminating strict rules of engagement is a pose of “freeing” the military from constraints that the top commanders themselves insist on having to give their mission the best chance of success. Barring the deployment of an even larger force with few constraints on how they operate, Chaffetz advocates a “withdrawal” from Afghanistan that will be as non-interventionist as Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. In this approach, we will reserve the right to launch attacks on their territory with impunity whenever we wish, but otherwise we will wash our hands of the place and the consequences of our actions. This will not only ensure the alienation of the population from any allied government that might still be in power, but it will contribute to the very radicalization and militancy that Chaffetz presumably would like to see weakened. If the Iraq “surge” failed in its political objectives, and it did, Chaffetz’s proposal would simply ignore the importance of creating conditions for any possible political settlement that is the prerequisite of any withdrawal from Afghanistan that will not lead to greater regional instability.

Critics of the Afghanistan plan such as Chaffetz want to make Afghanistan into a shooting gallery and call it peace. In this way, they can still pretend that they take national security and strategy questions seriously, when they are just reverting to a default position of advocating less restraint, more force and greater indifference to the moral and strategic consequences of our actions. As Chaffetz’s later remarks on Iran make clear, this is not someone interested in reducing the strain on our military or reducing unnecessary risks to American soldiers, as he actively calls for military action that will greatly strain and endanger all of our forces in the Gulf and central Asia. Neither does he give any hint of thinking strategically about how distastrous an Iranian war would be for U.S. and allied interests.

P.S. If so-called Jacksonians don’t believe in limited wars, as Reihan says, their instincts are decidedly not conservative. If self-described conservatives embrace the idea of unlimited and total war, that simply reveals how far removed they are from temperamental conservatism and how great the gap is between movement conservatism and a conservative disposition. Limiting the horror and destruction of war is something that is certainly basic to civilized behavior, and there is reason to think that the desire to impose those limits is a conservative one.

Update: Donald Douglas demonstrates just how dense (or dishonest) militarists can be. As anyone can see, I am defending the proposed war plan against Chaffetz’s insipid criticisms, and I will be defending the war plan in my next column. These are odd things for an “oppose-war-at-all-costs” and so-called defeatist to do. It is a useful reminder that hawks such as Douglas are completely shameless and will say whatever serves them in the moment.

The new Pew survey (via RCP) that purports to show a record-high level of “isolationist sentiment” is fairly misleading. No doubt, there was a higher percentage that answered that the U.S. should “mind its own business and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,” but the alternative was to answer that the U.S. “is the most powerful nation in the world, we should go our own way in international matters, not worrying about whether other countries agree with us or not.” Given that choice between something that sounds reasonable and something that sounds idiotic, a great many non-“isolationists” would prefer the former response. Essentially, the survey offered two choices. On the one hand, the respondent can choose arrogant hegemonism and disregard the interests of all other nations, or he can choose something less obviously obnoxious. One depressing thing about the survey results is that hegemonism still gets 44%. The other depressing thing is that the 49% don’t really mean what they claim to believe.

This survey is a bit like generic poll questions on the size and role of government. You can routinely get pluralities or even majorities to say that they want smaller government, they want the government to do less, they think the government spends too much, and so on, but you can’t actually get very many people to vote for a politician who proposes to eliminate programs or reduce spending when it might affect a large number of voters. The terrifying thing is that even after the last eight years there is not even a majority that theoretically supports “minding our own business,” whatever people might think this means, and if we were to probe deeper I think we would find that most of these so-called “isolationists” wouldn’t actively support the policy changes that would have to be made to “mind our own business.”

The phrase “mind our own business” is unfortunately imprecise. Certainly, I think we should “mind our own business,” but what I would define as “our business” is very different from the definitions many of these respondents would offer. After all, Bush’s Second Inaugural held out the idea that the liberty of every nation on the planet was necessarily “our business” and closely tied to American liberty. This was insane, but in his way even George W. Bush believed he was “minding our business” by promoting global democratic revolution and launching unnecessary wars. The trouble is that Bush and those like him define “our business,” “the national interest” and “American security” in such absurdly broad ways that they encompass virtually everything.

It is a mistake to identify the “mind our own business” response with “isolationist sentiment” insofar as both possible responses convey an attitude that ignores the possibility of any sort of international alliances or partnerships. After all, the security of an ally is “our business” in a way that the security of other states simply isn’t. This is one reason why a thoroughgoing non-interventionist would insist that we have as few permanent alliances as possible. If we posed the question another way and asked whether America should defend its allies, we would get a dramatically different result, but thanks to the sheer number of security guarantees our government has made this means that “minding our own business” entails minding the business of much of the rest of the world. So it depends very much on what Americans think “our business” is to determine whether or not they are interested in less aggressive policies overseas. One could just as easily say that the other response (“going our own way”) is “isolationist” in certain respects inasmuch as it shows indifference to other nations. Since “isolationist” is an utterly pejorative label, there is no substantive agenda or set of policies to which it can be attached, and this is why it is unusually unproductive to use it to describe public opinion.

In practice, the U.S. has never actually been “isolationist” in any meaningful way, and very few people have identfied themselves by this name because of the tremendously negative associations with which the label was tarred during and after WWII. The bogey of an instinctively “isolationist” American public that must be saved from itself by wise internationalist leaders is trotted out on a regular basis, but there is nothing real behind it. As Prof. Bacevich observed in American Empire, the bogey of “isolationism” has regularly been summoned to justify each new intervention abroad and it is invoked as a domestic political threat that requires a constant struggle to overcome:

As would be the case with Clinton, Bush professed to be mightily concerned that Americans after the Cold War would again succumb to the temptation to which he believed they were peculiarly susceptible: turning inward and ignoring the rest of the world.

No cause was more important than saving his fellow citizens from this error. Decrying the danger of isolationism became a frequent theme of the president’s speeches. Bush denounced those who would “retreat into an isolationist cocoon.” He railed against those “on the right and left [who] are working right now to breathe life into those old flat-Earth theories of protectionism, of isolationism.”

Bacevich writes a little later:

There were in fact few indications that the American people after the Cold War were inclined to “turn their backs on the world”–few, indeed, that they had ever done so throughout their history. But by reviving this shopworn refrain–and by portraying every foreign policy issue as a test of whether Americans would stay the course or shirk their duty to the world–Bush used isolationism as a calculated device for shoring up popular and congressional deference to the executive branch. Bill Clinton would do likewise.

Obviously, George W. Bush did the same during the six years after American Empire was published.

Other results from this very survey show how shallow and meaningless this “mind our own business” response really is:

Among the public, 63% approve of the use of U.S. military force against Iran if it were certain that Iran had produced a nuclear weapon; just 33% of CFR members agree.

That means that at least a third of the “mind our own business” respondents have no problem reconciling that “isolationist” sentiment with starting a completely unprovoked, unjust war against yet another country. That calculation takes for granted that all of the other 44% automatically favor attacking Iran under these circumstances, which may not necessarily be the case. It is possible that there are even more respondents who believe we should “mind our own business” and should attack Iran.

What may be even more dispiriting for non-interventionists is the degree of support “pre-emptive” (i.e., aggressive) war receives. While the 52% figure is considerably lower than it has been in recent years, it remains very high. Support for attacking Iran is highest among Republicans, but an attack has majority support among Democrats and independents as well. This is not the product of a nation on the verge of “turning inward,” much less is it one interested in an America First policy of non-intervention and peace. This a nation that has been whipped up into a paranoid fear of non-existent and exaggerated threats. As ever, “isolationism” is not what should concern us. On the contrary, it is the constant willingness to meddle in, interfere with and lash out at the world that continues to represent the greatest threat to our security.

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny— in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving. ~Thomas Friedman

I would say that this is blinkered, but we’re talking about Thomas Friedman, so that would be redundant. One of the most irritating things I have noticed during the last decade has been the whining from American pundits about how ungrateful the world’s Muslims have been in response to our alleged beneficence on their behalf. The grimly amusing part of this is that the whining pundits accept the assumptions of pan-Islamists, but put them to different, limited use: Muslims everywhere must feel gratitude for any assistance we have ever rendered to a Muslim population. Of course, if our policies have ever adversely affected a Muslim population, Muslims everywhere should not think that they have any particular interest in this, but should instead resist the siren song of pan-Islamism. I have made this observation before:

In other words, Americanists want Muslims to think like Pan-Islamists when it serves Washington’s purposes (i.e., when it is supposed to make Muslims favorably disposed to us), but Muslims must never think like Pan-Islamists when it doesn’t.

U.S. foreign policy has not been “largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny.” U.S. foreign policy has worked to support the causes of certain Muslim groups, provided they had the “right” enemies (i.e., states that we already opposed or disliked), and to undermine the causes of other Muslim groups that had the “wrong” enemies. The same people who could not rush to the aid of Bosniaks and Albanian Muslims fast enough are perfectly content to see thousands and tens of thousands of Arabs killed by U.S. and U.S.-backed forces. The people who pretend to weep for Chechnya do not even blink at the displacement of entire provinces in Pakistan. The would-be champions of democracy in the Islamic world have happily embraced anti-jihadi dictators in Uzkbekistan and Pakistan as necessary. My point here is not that Washington was right or wrong in backing one group and opposing another, which is an argument for another day, but simply that it would not be hard for Muslims around the world to notice the far more devastating effects of U.S. and U.S.-allied hostility to certain Muslim causes more than they notice the relatively more obscure cases in which Washington backed Muslim causes.

We wrongfully and unjustly bombed Serbia on behalf of Albanian Muslims, and now the Friedmans of the world want Muslims elsewhere to give us credit for taking the “Muslim side” in a conflict that means nothing to them while conveniently ignoring the far more obvious and ongoing support for governments that mistreat or oppress Muslim populations in several countries. When the counter-Narrative is so transparently silly (America is the friend of Muslims!), it is not too surprising that “the Narrative” gains ground. So long as our political and pundit class genuinely believes that we have been almost entirely good to Muslims, we will never understand why so many Muslims distrust and resent U.S. policies and U.S. influence and we will not be able to correct the impressions that our policies have spawned.

A declaration intended as the defining statement of conservative Christian principle in the post-2008 political landscape – endorsed by over 150 people over a period of a month – found room for not a single Mormon signatory. Mormons may contribute generously to social conservative causes like the National Organization for Marriage and the campaign against same-sex marriage in California. But when it comes time to define what is Christian and what is not, Mormons are not to be included. I have to think that’s ominous news for the Romney 2012 campaign. ~David Frum

In the last two years I have written extensively on Romney’s religious problem, and on this point I think Frum’s analysis is somewhat correct about problems for Romney in the future, but this is not because there were no Mormon signatories to this declaration. One qualification I would make is that conservative Christian leaders are not the ones who normally have strong objections to Romney’s religion. It is simply that rank-and-file conservative Christians, and not just evangelicals, will not support someone whom they do not regard as a Christian. The leaders may not regard him as a Christian, but they do not automatically refuse to work together with him in political causes.

The declaration itself makes clear that it is expressing the view of conservative Christian leaders on specific moral issues within the confines of churches that can claim membership in what conservative ecumenists like to call “the Great Tradition.” Despite enduring theological differences, members of these three confessional traditions have enough of a consensus on basic doctrine and moral teachings that they can make statements on moral questions that carry some authority. The broader the theological coalition one assembles, the weaker and vaguer the statements necessarily become. This does not automatically rule out claims to Christianity made by members of other churches. It is probably true that most of the signatories would deny that Mormons are Christians in the same way that Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants are Christians, but Mormons were “excluded” here just as much as Armenian Apostolic and Assyrian Christians were “excluded.” It could be that there were no Mormon signatories because they could not agree to the simple doctrinal assumptions made in the declaration’s first paragraph; it is possible that there were no Mormon signatories because conservative Mormon figures were not able to define themselves in the way that the others could.

P.S. As an aside, it is fascinating to find a document that can win the support of Patrick Deneen, Metropolitan Jonah and Jody Bottum.

The Economist had a strange leader on Obama’s foreign policy (subscription required). The title was “The quiet American,” and the leader went on to ask:

Does this president have a strategy, backed if necessary by force, to reorder the world? Or is he merely a presidential version of Alden Pyle, Graham Greene’s idealistic, clever Quiet American who wants to change the world, but underestimates how bad the world is–and ends up causing harm?

This is very odd. First of all, Alden Pyle was the character who had a strategy backed by force (to be precise, the employment of terrorism to undermine the current government) to reorder Vietnam, and it proved to be a disaster for all concerned. Pyle was certainly idealistic, and it was this trait that blinded him to dangers of his meddling in the affairs of another country that he didn’t really understand. The problem with the Pyle character wasn’t that he underestimated “how bad the world is,” but that he grossly overestimated his own abilities (and the abilities of Americans in general) to “reorder the world” as desired. In other words, The Economist wants Obama to be more like Alden Pyle and they don’t seem to understand that this is what they want. One would have thought that we had had quite enough of ambitious, world-reordering Presidents ready and willing to use force quite often.

Andrew is making entirely too much of thesenewsstories that Fallows has tracked down. Fallows was right to reject the excessive criticism of Obama’s Asia trip. For my part, I didn’t think the trip should be judged on the basis of winning concessions on issues on which China was unlikely to budge. If the trip yielded a few minimal gestures of cooperation on contentious issues, so much the better, but that is not why the critics of the Asia trip were wrong. When push comes to shove, Russia and China are not going to join a new round of sanctions against Iran, and it seems improbable that China will follow through on any of the pledges it has started to make, so we should not expect the “gains” now being reported to lead to anything significant. What Obama did manage to do was to maintain and improve the quality of our relationships with several major powers. This is valuable in itself. If that is considered a waste of presidential time and prestige, perhaps we have an all together too elevated and inflated view of the President’s importance in world affairs.

As minor as the Russian and Chinese gestures are, these recent reports do put the odd complaints of Leslie Gelb and Peggy Noonan in a different light. Noonan leaned heavily on Gelb’s charge of “amateurism” to support her argument this weekend. Gelb’s main complaint is that Obama did not push for some preeminent American role in East Asia’s own organizations, but there’s no reason to think that he should have been doing this. Gelb wants to see Obama imitate post-WWII Atlanticist policies and apply them to East Asia, which obviously takes no account of how very different East Asia today is from the Europe of sixty years ago. Noonan took Gelb’s dissatisfaction as evidence that Obama was losing the “foreign policy establishment,” which is a pretty big conclusion to draw from one op-ed, and given Gelb’s track record I’m not sure that I would want to hear him praising my administration if I were Obama. One thing that’s quite remarkable about the “foreign policy establishment” is how wrong it gets most of the big questions. If they are clamoring for Obama to do more in Asia, he should probably ignore them.

The U.S. is not in any position to act as an “architect” of new economic or security structures in Asia beyond what already exists. We are going to participate to some extent in the structures that Asian nations create, but the preeminence and centrality of U.S. leadership are never going to be as great in East Asia in the coming decades as it was in western Europe in the ’40s and ’50s. Because of that, the U.S. is going to make big “gains” less often and sometimes not at all, and that is a reality we have to recognize and adapt to in the years to come.

I strenuously disagree that a little mystic nationalism is “a good and healthy thing.” But I heartily agree with what I take Jonah to imply: that patriotism has little emotional substance without mystic nationalism. ~Will Wilkinson

Via Conor Friedersdorf

This is a lot of nonsense, which is just what we should expect from Wilkinsononthistopic. For Wilkinson, patriotism and nationalism are virtually indistinguishable, so it suits him to accept Goldberg’s mistaken “mystic nationalism” line when he can use it to indict the former. In fact, patriotism has considerable emotional substance that nationalists have exploited for centuries. “Mystic nationalism” in itself is usually the product of a simplistic retelling of history mixed with a hefty dose of self-congratulation. It is the antithesis of patriotism as much as anything can be.

Goldberg is utterly, laughably wrong when he says that Thanksiving is “America’s only nationalist holiday.” There is nothing even remotely nationalist about Thanksgiving. Nationalism elevates the nation and, in its later manifestations, the nation-state to a position of virtual religious sanctity. Few things are capable of greater impiety than nationalism. To the extent that it has any political dimension, Thanksgiving is the negation of the arrogance, presumption and self-absorption that nationalism teaches. The celebration of Thanksgiving is supposed to be a recognition that all things are owed to God’s Providence, and that without Him we can do nothing. Nationalism is an obsession with our own virtues and a boast of our own strength. An act of thanksgiving is an acknowledgment that we are utterly dependent on God for everything.

If nationalists have since tried to hijack the story of the Pilgrims, who were as far removed in spirit from ideas of national greatness and power as possible (as they were both religious dissidents and political exiles), that has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. It is a reminder that nationalists have no respect for history, and that they will distort the past in whatever way they can to advance their cause.