Via Isaac Chotiner, I see that Biden’s WSJ interview wasn’t the only place where he said inflammatory and stupid things about Russia. The NYTreports:

At the gathering with displaced Georgian children from South Ossetia, Mr. Biden saved his harshest words for Russia.

He said he believed that Moscow “used a pretext to invade your country,” [bold mine-DL] weighing in confidently on the question of whether Mr. Saakashvili should be blamed for ordering the Aug. 7 shelling of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital. He said Russia had paid dearly for invading Georgia, arguing that “all the countries that surround them are now saying very harsh things to Russia.” [bold mine-DL] He promised the children that the United States would press Russia to comply with the French-brokered cease-fire agreement, and that if they continued to defy it, “it is a problem for them.”

He noted the largess of Americans — “they said, ‘It’s O.K., take my money, raise my taxes’ ”[bold mine-DL] — in pledging $1 billion in aid to Georgia after the war.

“You should understand, America cares about you, cares about you personally [bold mine-DL],” Mr. Biden said. “We care about all of you, and we’re not going to leave you. It’s a hard journey, but we’re not going away.”

Well, there’s no “preemptive declinism” to be found here, that’s for sure! We knew that Biden was a hawk and was embarrassingly pro-Georgian during the August war, going so far as to visit Saakashvili that same month, and it was already clear how meaningless all of this “reset” talk was. Even so, I don’t know of any American politician other than McCain who has been so reckless and ideological in his statements about last summer’s war in Georgia. This can’t be written off simply as Biden’s normal idiocy. He was representing the administration on a major trip overseas, and this trip seems to have been calculated to serve as an insult and warning to Moscow based on Biden’s itinerary and his public remarks.

To take Biden’s claims in order, his claim about the Russian invasion is true only if by “pretext” he meant the Georgian government’s decision to escalate some small border disputes into full-scale war. It is worth noting that the ethnic Georgians who were unfortunately expelled from South Ossetia have not lived under Tbilisi’s authority for almost twenty years. There were probably not any children in the audience old enough to remember a time when South Ossetia was meaningfully part of Georgia. That doesn’t mean that they and their parents don’t think of it as part of Georgia, but it does draw our attention to an important distinction between the claims of the Georgian governmen and the political realities of the region. It also serves as a useful reminder that South Ossetia’s inclusion as part of Georgia is something relatively very recent and artificial.It has less history as part of Georgia than South Tyrol does as part of Italy. Correction: These statements were inaccurate. What is now South Ossetia does have a pre-tsarist history of inclusion as part of the kingdom of Georgia. I apologize for the error.

Russia’s neighbors are all saying “very harsh” things, Biden told the audience, but it is Georgia whose economy lies in ruins and whose people have been displaced by the tens of thousands. I don’t know what the political leanings of the refugees are, but you would think the victims of a crisis created by Saakashvili would be very hostile to the government that plunged them into their present predicament. Americans probably think $1 billion dollars spent on Georgia is $1 billion we don’t have for our own needs and under present circumstances even $1 billion, which is nothing in the grand scheme of the federal budget, is more than we can afford to waste as a show of goodwill. I would be fascinated to see the poll that shows how Americans are excited to have their taxes raised to subsidize an economic basketcase country ruled by a bellicose, authoritarian demagogue. Luckily for the Georgians, most Americans have already forgotten that Georgia exists and so will not be concerned that any of their money is being wasted there, but that drives home the final point, which is that Americans don’t care about Georgia. If the “hard journey” ahead was explained to them, they would probably be even less interested in aiding Georgia.

As Chotiner mentions at the end of his post, this is the sort of reckless rhetoric of support that could encourage Georgians to expect U.S. backing in a future confrontation, which would set them up for another deeply disillusioning fall. It is the kind of rhetoric from which the administration correctly refrained in Iran. It is also exactly the kind of reckless rhetoric of support that encouraged Saakashvili to make his disastrous blunders last year. If our officials continue to use this rhetoric even after everything Saakashvili has done, what would it take for our government to learn that unflagging solidarity with a state of marginal importance on Russia’s doorstep is very dangerous and contributes to a heightening of tensions between Russia and Georgia?

I sometimes think that the so-called “pro-Georgian” politicians and pundits won’t be satisfied until Georgia has been occupied and annexed by Russia, because their sympathy for Georgia mostly has nothing to do with the well-being or independence of Georgia and has everything to do with providing an example of Russian “revisionism” that they can use to justify an anti-Russian stance. How else can we explain the continued support for the Georgian government’s most self-destructive behavior? How else can we explain the continued provocations that are making tensions in the region worse rather than defusing them? Real concern for Georgia and the welfare of its people would dictate that we stop using the country as bait to lure Russia into another international incident, but the “freedom agenda” and support for Saakashvili never had much to do with what was best for Georgia.

As usual, Greg Scoblete is making sense:

One of the problems with America’s promiscuous use of security guarantees and promises of support is that those on the receiving end of those promises are going to take you at your word. This was the unfortunate fate of Georgia in August 2008 when, after hearing the Bush administration loudly insist that they should be in NATO and are a vital interest of Washington, we did nothing when Russia invaded.

This is right, but I would add one other thing. In addition to encouraging allies to take risks on the (false) assumption that they have our absolute backing, these guarantees or promises of future guarantees reduce the meaning of “vital interest” to almost nothing. This not only leaves marginal, unimportant allies suffering the consequences of their ill-judged gambles, but it also ultimately causes all of our allies and their rivals to doubt the guarantees we have made to allied states. Once ridiculous, irrelevant commitments have been defined as “vital interests” that Washington is not really willing to defend, it won’t be very long before no one believes that Washington is willing to defend genuine “vital interests.”

Hawks are always whining about conciliatory moves and how these “embolden” rivals, but what they fail to see is that the endless promises of support and defense, which they make to other states and which can rarely be backed up, are what invite the sorts of humiliating challenges they pretend an aggressive, ‘forward’ posture prevents. Contra London, humiliating challenges are not the product of “declinist” thinking, but are direct consequences of the hyper-interventionism that London plainly endorses. As the war in Georgia showed, the promise to draw a red line on Russia’s frontier not only encouraged Saakashvili to be reckless with the lives and property of his countrymen and the territorial integrity of his country, but it also showed how unrealistic, indefensible and absurd Washington’s red lines can be. Despite all the talk of how U.S. interests and “values” were at stake in Georgia, very few Americans actually believed that there was anything there worth taking a risk to protect. This is not a callous, much less “isolationist,” reaction–it is a recognition of simple reality. For all of the talk of “bearing any burden” that Herbert London engages in, there are scarcely any Americans who would willingly bear even a light burden to protect Georgia from attack, because there is no reason why Americans should bear such a burden. However, if you actually say this out loud, you are labeled a “declinist.”

The more security guarantees Washington hands out or promises to hand out, the more unlikely it is that any of them will be backed up. Much as excessive regulation breeds contempt for law, excessive promises of defense to other nations destroy respect for security guarantees. London’s thesis that the administration is guided by “preemptive declinism” is so baseless that at first it seems pointless to refute it, but it will be very important in the coming years to understand that any blowback or negative outcomes that result from administration policy will not be coming from being too conciliatory, passive or accommodating with the rest of the world. London’s argument and those like it are being made to keep hegemonism and interventionism free from blame while they continue to harm American interests.

The claim of “preemptive declinism” has nothing to back it up. The administration does not accept that our current policies overseas are unsustainable, outmoded or misguided. It has either continued or intensified practically all of them, and that is the problem. This means that they take for granted that the U.S. is and ought to be predominant and has the right to interfere whenever and wherever it likes. The refusal to interfere in Iran was purely tactical, rather than being a truly principled acknowledgment of sovereignty, which the immediate willingness to interfere in Honduras made clear. Of course, Pakistani sovereignty has been ignored and violated from day one of this administration, just as it had been under Bush. Even those things that the administration theoretically finds misguided, such as our military presence in Iraq, it perpetuates for the time being for fear of what might happen if it ended them quickly.

Unlike some advocates of engagement with Iran, the administration has always qualified its interest in engagement by stating that even if engagement failed to yield the desired results (i.e., Iranian submission) it would provide the U.S. with the credibility to rally international opinion against Iran. Even when the administration has appeared to pursue conciliatory moves, these have always been in service to the same bankrupt Iran and Russia policies that the former administration had pursued. Rather than recognizing that the objectives of those policies are unrealistic or foolish, they have argued that they can reach those objectives another way, and in the end what matters to the administration are those unrealistic and foolish objectives.

As I was saying in connection with the open letter of central and eastern European politicians, America’s allies need not worry about being abandoned by an administration looking to cut deals with rivals. In fact, what should worry them more is that they have the full-throated support of Washington, as this support could prove to be meaningless because of the very overstretch that made security guarantees to them possible in the first place. Arguably, it is the existence of outmoded security structures such as NATO that creates needless tensions and conflicts between Russia and its neighbors, which means that the vehicle designed to keep America as a “European power” may be creating flashpoints that endanger European security where none needs to exist. The EU accession of many of the same states in eastern Europe has taken place with few Russian complaints, but NATO expansion generates such anxiety because it means that NATO is not simply keeping America in western Europe, but it is also pulling American military commitments ever farther east.

Oddly enough, these central and eastern European states in NATO might be safer on their own than as front-line allies of an overstretched hegemon. In the meantime, the emptiness of the administration’s conciliatory gestures, which offer the other parties nothing and expect everything in return, will make it clear to rival states that Washington has no intention of entering into talks in good faith. Allies cannot fully trust our promises, and rivals have no reason to believe that our gestures of reconciliation are genuine. This is not a departure from past administrations, but a repetition of the mistakes of the last twenty years.

Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview that Russia’s economy is “withering,” and suggested the trend will force the country to make accommodations to the West on a wide range of national-security issues, including loosening its grip on former Soviet republics and shrinking its vast nuclear arsenal. ~The Wall Street Journal

What may be most remarkable about this is that this is not being treated as one of Biden’s legendary gaffes, but rather as an appropriate and acceptable comment. As I was saying earlier this week, the administration must think that Russia’s relatively greater weakness at present will make it more compliant, but I never expected any of its top members to come out and say exactly that. Bizarrely, Biden was offering all of this as evidence in favor of why the “reset” was going to work. In other words, for Biden the “reset” has always meant Russian concessions and submission, and it will “work” because Russia lacks the means to do anything else. This is staggeringly wrong.

It seems likely that the “reset” will now blow up in Obama’s face. This is not because it was wrong to repair relations with Russia, and it is not because of some supposed Russian intransigence that made the exercise futile from the beginning. It will backfire because it is fundamentally deceitful, which the Russians will realize quickly enough. The point is not that deceit is not part of international relations (it is always there to some degree), but that no bilateral relationship was ever repaired and improved by one party deliberately misleading and taking advantage of the other. Worse than that, Biden has just revealed to all the world what the con is, so Medvedev will know right away that he is being played. These comments are sure to deepen distrust between our governments. Even if Biden’s analysis had been right, it would have “worked” only if Moscow had been allowed to save face and conceal its concessions behind a mask of generosity, and Biden has just made sure that every concession Russia could have made would be perceived as humiliation forced upon it by its economic and other woes.

Biden says that the U.S. is underestimating the strength of its own hand, but what he underestimates is how deeply Moscow resents U.S. interference in its neighborhood. Biden misunderstands that past Russian economic strength did not create Russian attitudes about its near-abroad and U.S. policies, nor did it foster the rising nationalism in the country. These things were stoked during the ’90s, during Russia’s last period of serious weakness, and merely received greater expression over the last eight or nine years. Most Russians saw the ’90s as a period when the West took full advantage of Russian weakness to their detriment; the appeal of Putinism was that it would make sure that this did not happen again. Biden is pledging to do the same thing to Russia that Clinton did in the ’90s: combine phony expressions of goodwill with pursuit of a consistently anti-Russian agenda.

Economically, Russia may be in very bad shape, but that is why there is much less chance that Medvedev will have the luxury of accommodation on security issues. Bush missed the opportunity to build a constructive relationship with Russia while times were good, and now there is much less room in which Medvedev can maneuver. Medvedev is not Yeltsin, and the Russians are not going to fall for the same ploy twice. Think about it: if you are governing a country with a weak economy, do you start abandoning what you regard as important national security interests or do you re-double your commitment to them to mask or compensate for that weakness? Biden should be able to realize that Moscow isn’t going to give up on its previous objections to U.S. policies on NATO and missile defense, because it sees these policies as provocative and unreasonable, and it isn’t going to agree to arms reductions while these other policies are being advanced. Moscow isn’t going to become any more alarmed by Iranian or North Korean nuclear programs than it is. In the event that Iran did acquire a bomb, it is not clear that Iran would ever use it in a first strike, and it is even less clear that Moscow would be one of its main targets. Thanks to its relations with both governments, Russia has less to fear from an Iranian or North Korean bomb than most states. Biden cites their “geographic proximity” as a reason why Russia should be more concerned, but Iran and North Korea haven’t moved in the last few years, so there’s no reason why Russia would be more worried about these programs now than they have been in the past.

More important, Russian state interests have not changed since last year, and there is nothing fundamentally new in the demographic and economic problems Biden cites. If these factors have not made Moscow yield on certain fronts before, they are not going to make Moscow more interested in yielding now. Indeed, inasmuch as the Russian government is an authoritarian populist one, relative Russian weakness is likely to make its government more unyielding, less tolerant of domestic dissent and more intent on pursuing its interests in its neighborhood than it has been in the past. There may still be opportunities for cooperation on a few things, such as supply routes for soldiers in Afghanistan, but so long as the U.S. extends its sphere of influence to Russia’s borders and insists that Russia must not wield any significant influence over its neighbors there is no way that Russia, weak or strong, will be interested in new proposals coming from Washington.

Biden actually says in the same interview, “It is never smart to embarrass an individual or a country when they’re dealing with significant loss of face.” So at least Biden acknowledges that he is behaving stupidly, since he has made clear that he and this administration have every intention of embarrassing Russia on a regular basis. Once we get to the substance of policy, we can see that the new administration remains closely tied to the bankrupt and failed Russia policy of the last twenty years, which is just what I assumed last year during the campaign. A genuine “reset” would have been very wise and desirable, but this was never the administration’s goal.

James says I have exaggerated Peter Lawler’s charge against “isolationists” when I wrote:

[t]he idea that the central complaint among non-interventionists on the right is that U.S. wars are driven by anything so rational as pursuit of new markets is just hilariously wrong…

Now Lawler said plainly that he thinks so-called Midwestern isolationists indulge in a postpolitical fantasy, according to which “greedy capitalists” cause wars and that wars can therefore be cured by somehow eliminating said capitalists. It may be true that my description disfigured Lawler’s original statement, but only in that it tried to make sense of a nonsensical, false statement. Allow me to rephrase: the idea that non-interventionists on the right believe that wars are caused by “greedy capitalists” is hilariously wrong. James says that I didn’t like Lawler’s linking of “anti-capitalism” to isolationism, but the issue isn’t whether I like it or not–it simply isn’t true that the people Lawler was criticizing believe what he claims they believe.

Even when certain “paleo” critics recognize a close relationship between economic globalization and U.S. hegemony, or criticize the “empire of consumption,” they do not hold the views about war Lawler attributes to them. Indeed, a recurring theme in our criticism of most military interventions over the last two decades has been how draining and wasteful of American resources these have been. Quite often, we have criticized interventions because they have gained America nothing but casualties, debt and global hostility. On the whole, we have emphasized the ideological forces propelling the U.S. into one deployment after another. More basically, non-interventionists don’t disagree that the United States should be prepared to fight wars, and many of us consider a high level of preparedness for defensive warfare necessary to avoid entering into larger, costlier wars. Lawler’s remarks on these points were wrong and misguided from start to finish.

Jeffrey Goldberg has pointed to this Salon report from Tehran and highlighted this passage:

In an ever escalating competition of appropriation, Iranians are finding new and clever ways to turn the Revolution inside out. Most compelling of all is the exquisitely subversive “Death to Russia!” and its companion “Death to China!” “Marq bar Russi-e! Marq bar Chin!” For 30 years, ever since the Revolution, Iranians have been chanting “Death to America!” with the regime’s encouragement. It has long been a convenient outlet for any domestic discontent. Somehow the protesters have collectively decided that from now on, the U.S. will be left alone, all chants against that nation must cease. “Death to Russia” has become the new “Death to America.”

At first glance, this makes a lot of sense. After all, Russia and China are major patrons of the current regime, the protesters despise the current regime, and therefore they direct their contempt of their own government at its foreign backers as well. The protesters have been frustrated and stymied, so it is natural that they are venting their frustration in a variety of ways. This was more or less how the “Death to America” slogan started off before it turned into nothing more than an empty phrase to be dutifully repeated by regime loyalists to demonstrate their support. As every anti-Iranian voice in the West is so keen to remind us, this anti-American element became a major part of the revolutionary regime’s self-presentation. Almost as if the Iranian protesters want to confirm that their movement is like other “color” revolutions throughout Europe and Asia, they are now adopting anti-Russianism.

Internationally, these new slogans might win the protesters a little more sympathy in the West (if there is any more sympathy left for them to win). Nothing seems to bring out Western enthusiasm for foreign protesters like their expression of anti-Russian sentiment. That said, however understandable these outbursts are they seem extraordinarily ill-conceived. Russia and China obviously accept the status quo in Iran and so have no desire to aid the protesters, but until now they have not necessarily had any reason to fear that the success of the protesters threatened their interests in any way. The protests were the result of a domestic, internal dispute between the regime and dissidents, and foreign policy considerations were marginal at best–this was all to the advantage of the protesters. Now the protesters seem to be getting too “exquisitely subversive” for their own good. So long as they can wield the regime’s official rhetoric against it, appropriate the symbols and language of the revolution and Shi’ism for their own cause, and hold themselves up as the real defenders of the revolutionary legacy, the protesters have a better chance of getting at least some of what they want. Once they begin to dissociate themselves from that legacy, and then make a point of dropping the traditional anti-American rhetoric to replace it with a challenge to Iran’s current patrons, they are making themselves appear more like the front for an American agenda and are therefore reducing their chances of success.

Moscow especially loathes “color” revolutions because they have more often than not been explicitly anti-Russian in their focus, much as Washington finds populist movements in Latin America obnoxious because of their emphasis on opposition to U.S. influence in the region, but even in the “color” revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia Moscow’s acquiescence in the change of government was an important factor in resolving both crises. If the protesters make anti-Russian and anti-Chinese sentiment a significant part of their movement, they can be sure not only that these powers will do nothing to curb the regime in the event that it cracks down more severely but also that these powers will actively work to sabotage their movement any way they can.

John Schwenkler referred me to the open letter addressed to Obama by numerous central and eastern European politicians, and I was already going to say something about it, but John O’Sullivan’s very odd column on the same subject deserves some comment first. I call it odd because I would have thought O’Sullivan would be able to see by now that the “reset” is entirely one-sided and the fears of all these regional leaders are completely misplaced. At most, the “reset” now means that Washington will (probably) stop Cheney-like hectoring of the Kremlin about its internal affairs, and in return Washington expects the Russians to assist on any number of international problems while all of the old provocations with NATO expansion and missile defense proceed at a somewhat reduced pace. After a promising beginning earlier this year, conventional attitudes towards Russia are returning (I suppose they never really left), perhaps out of a mistaken belief that relatively greater Russian weakness will make Moscow more compliant and amenable to policies it regards as absolutely unacceptable. This ensures the same depressing dynamic of escalating hostility that has governed U.S.-Russian relations for at least the last fifteen years. Once again, the malign influence of Biden is there for all to see.

More remarkable than his misreading of current Russia policy is O’Sullivan’s unthinking repetition of the pro-Georgian line about last year’s war:

Such assurances would be more comforting to Central and Eastern Europe if Russia had not already violated such principles (and various international treaties) by invading Georgia and annexing two of its provinces – and done so with impunity and eventual Western acquiescence. What the restive Easterners want is closer integration with America so neither Russia nor other hostile powers will be tempted to future “revisionism.”

For one thing, the enclaves had already practically been annexed years before when the people in those enclaves began claiming Russian citizenship. Why did they do this? One reason was that the people in Abkhazia and South Ossetia don’t want to be Georgians. Tbilisi has wanted to reincorporate them into Georgia, which is what Saakashvili was attempting to do last year by force. Saakashvili’s attempt failed, and a consequence of this has been that the de facto separation of the enclaves has deepened and the desire not to live under Georgian rule has intensified. O’Sullivan portrays the war as if it were an unprovoked attack by Russia, when one investigation after another has placed the bulk of the blame for the war on Saakashvili. Perhaps the most irritating part of pro-Georgian arguments is this absurd charge of revisionism leveled against Moscow, when it is Tbilisi that has been trying to engage in revisionist policies to reclaim territories lost in the early ’90s. It is as if Belgrade had still been trying to take back control over Bosnia in 2008 and the EU were being accused of being a revisionist power by preventing this.

As for the letter itself, it is focused entirely on threats from Russia–there are no “other hostile powers” on the horizon for the signatories to the letter. One wonders what closer integration America could provide beyond NATO membership and strong existing bilateral trade and diplomatic ties that would put the minds of these leaders at ease. It also seems significant that all of the signatories are mostly former presidents, prime ministers and ministers. Far from necessarily being representative of their current governments or nations, the signatories to this letter could be displaying their pro-American or Atlanticist credentials for their own reasons. Perhaps this is unfair, but from the format and some of the individuals involved (e.g., Kwasniewski, Havel, etc.) I am unfortunately reminded of the so-called “letter of the eight” and the Vilnius letter from 2003, whence so many stupid ideas about “New Europe” derived.

It may be that an anti-Russian open letter is more representative of the views of the many nations of central and eastern Europe than were the pro-war letters of 2003, but we should be wary of taking this letter as the voice of the region. As far as the war was concerned, all of the governments that signed on to those letters were doing so against the wishes of vast majorities of their respective publics. It may be worth noting that the missile defense program proposed for Poland and the Czech Republic, which the signatories seem so intent on seeing completed, has not been terribly popular with actual Czechs and Poles. It is hardly a surprise to find European leaders embracing policies that do not command broad support from their voters, but we should keep this foremost in mind whenever we are discussing specific security and foreign policy questions concerning Europe.

As Biden’s visit to Kiev and his comments there make clear, the open letter was unnecessary, the “reset” is largely cosmetic, and it seems probable that Poland and Czech Republic are once again going to have a U.S. security policy imposed on them with the cooperation of their own political classes that are out of touch with broad swathes of both nations. In other words, it is business as usual.

P.S. It occurs to me that one of the reasons why so many Americans cultivate a distrust of Russia is this song-and-dance our government engages in at the start of every new administration in which Washington pretends to want to start afresh, changes nothing in its policies and then uses the Russians’ annoyed, negative reactions as proof that good relations are impossible. Because Bush patted Putin on the back and said stupid things about his soul, we are meant to believe that this was supposed to make Moscow forget Kosovo, NATO expansion and scrapping the ABM Treaty. Now that Obama and Biden have said pleasant things about a “reset” and complimented Medvedev a few times, things can continue on much as they did before, and the political class will later express its bewilderment when the Russians grow impatient with this completely one-sided arrangement.

My column for The Week on the administration’s India policy and Clinton’s visit is now online.

Rod quotes Gail Collins in a conversation with David Brooks:

The way you stop that is definitely not by declaring yourself an independent and leaving your party to the hard-core right [bold mine-DL] that brought it to its current disastrous state. It’s by working from within. A conservative independent is just a Republican who’s had his heart broken, David. I think they need you.

I’ve done more than my share of Brooks-bashing in my time, and for the most part it doesn’t interest me to do more of it, but all of this talk of Brooks’ “alienation” from the Republican Party and his poor, broken heart has to be qualified by the recognition that for the first five or six years of the Bush administration Brooks was not only a team player, but he was also a leading cheerleader of most of the disastrous moves that reduced the GOP to its current state. Brooks’ disillusionment with the party began around the same time that everything the administration had done, particularly as it related to Iraq, began going horribly wrong.

The culture of incompetence, ignorance, cronyism and bluster that had always prevailed in the administration may have finally become too much for Brooks to stomach, but on the substance of policy it is rather crucial to remember that it was not anything like a “hard-core right” Republican agenda that destroyed the party. Such labeling makes no sense, unless you insist on labeling the mainstream GOP “hard-core right” and prefer calling its right-wing critics moderates. The GOP was destroyed by its support for a war waged in the name of nonproliferation, democracy promotion, nation-building, and the enforcement of United Nations resolutions, none of which can really be called “hard-core right” priorities. This war was most loudly cheered on by those “progressive globalists,” as Brooks might call them, inside the Republican Party who see America as the superpower needed to ensure global governance. The most zealous and die-hard supporters of that war were those in the Republican Party whose policy views typically fall in the center or the left of the GOP, and this included Brooks. The “hard-core right” of the party did not by and large distinguish itself in any of this, either, but they are the ones left to take a disproportionate share of the blame as moderates such as Brooks take cover behind the label independent. The independent label can sometimes be accurate and necessary, but it is just as often a refuge for partisans who want to distance themselves from the consequences of the policies they favored back when they referred to themselves by a partisan label.

As DougJ noticed in Brooks’ latest column, the Iraq war figured nowhere in his story of Republican collapse and self-destruction, which is what we might expect from Brooks. Like most Republican war supporters, he refuses to acknowledge the war’s role in destroying the party and instead can’t stop talking about excessive spending. If Brooks’ heart has been broken by Republican failure, it is a self-inflicted wound.

Peter Lawler has written a strange, disjointed post at Postmodern Conservative in which he makes the following bizarre claims:

Thinking in terms of nations and wars and all that is part of getting over the postpolitical fantasy characteristic of contemporary elites, especially in Europe. A variant of that fantasy seems present in the resurgence of Midwestern isolationism on the “American conservative” right. Wars, that isolationist thought is, is [sic] caused by greedy capitalists, and so no more greedy capitalism, no more war [bold mine-DL]. There’s also the libertarian (Ron Paul) variant of that theory: War is caused by people who want to be more than greedy capitalists by intervening politically in the affairs of others. As long as we don’t bother them, they won’t bother us. But we postmodern conservatives who think politically–although not only politically–believe that it’s always prudent to be ready for war.

As a representative of what I suppose must be called Midwestern isolationism, I have to say that I have no idea what Lawler is talking about. The idea that the central complaint among non-interventionists on the right is that U.S. wars are driven by anything so rational as pursuit of new markets is just hilariously wrong. Many non-interventionists may also be critical of corporate power and influence, but perhaps aside from a very few firms the only ones profiting or gaining from war are governments, and they typically start or enter into wars to pursue state interests. As for Ron Paul, he can speak for himself, but my guess is that he thinks that wars are caused by governments that start wars to increase the power of the state, control more territory and resources or project power over and against rivals.

Some “postmodern conservatives” (I suppose we can all use scare quotes) may not be interested in opposing aggressive warfare and empire, but they could at least make some minimal effort to understand the positions of those who do. If they bothered to make that effort, they would understand that non-interventionists are quite interested in being prepared for wars that provide for the common defense of this country, which will normally mean not preparing to fight wars in territories on the other side of the planet where no American interests are at stake. In other words, we think that the military should be concerned primarily with American defense, which will likely never have anything to do with going to war against China.

As I made clearbefore vacation, I have also beenbaffled by the U.S. government’s reaction to the deposition of Zelaya last month. Bunch cites Chris Caldwell’s latest on the Honduran constitutional crisis, and in the article Caldwell reiterates things that critics of the administration were quite rightly saying in the first few days after Zelaya’s removal from office. The more time that has passed, the clearer it becomes that Zelaya was in the wrong and deserved to be removed. The curfew and restrictions that the transitional government put in place in their initial panic and overreaction are now gone. That has not stopped the efforts by the OAS to try to re-install Zelaya, but these efforts seem sure to fail. It is time for Washington to accept the fait accompli, recognize the new government and push for an end to the attempted international isolation of Honduras.

The one thing that has bothered me about most of the other criticisms of Obama’s response is how obsessed with Hugo Chavez they always seems to be. Caldwell’s article also has this flaw. The Honduran crisis interests many of these critics not for any of the lessons about the dangers of executive usurpation and the importance of constitutional rules to the functioning of democratic government that it might offer, but because they choose to see it primarily as a battle between Chavismo and its enemies. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Chavez is irrelevant to what has happened in Honduras, but Chavez is certainly not centrally important, either, yet so much of the criticism of Obama from the right has fixated on Obama siding with Chavez and his allies. This invests Chavez with far more importance in all of this than he deserves.

One might call Zelaya’s removal a “setback” for Chavez, as Caldwell does, except that the “success” of Chavez’s influence on Zelaya was partly responsible for generating the tremendous opposition to Zelaya. What this means is that Chavez ultimately loses influence even in those places where he seems to be winning. The Kirchners in Argentina have been very cozy with Chavez as well, and they are already experiencing popular repudiation in recent congressional elections. The rest of the region tolerates, but does not follow, him. All over Latin America the backlash against neoliberalism that aided Chavez’s influence has not translated into sustainable support for Chavez or his proteges. Hawks in this country are so interested in building Chavez up as a regional menace that they cannot see how weak and unimportant he really is.

What is telling about the background to the crisis is how weak Chavez’s preferred politician had become and how unpopular the import of anything resembling Chavismo or “participatory democracy” seems to have been. If Zelaya was so spectacularly unsuccessful in promoting such an agenda in one of the poorest of Central American nations, and if he formed such a broad consensus of political, military and religious institutions against him in the process, Chavez’s influence outside Venezuela is perhaps even more limited and strategically insignificant than I had thought. Perhaps Honduras’ elite feared that Zelaya might somehow succeeed in imitating Chavez, but the important thing to remember about this is that Zelaya made his legal removal possible simply by taking the first steps in that direction whether or not he had any chance of succeeding. To put it another way, it never mattered legally whether Caesar intended to become a dictator after he crossed the Rubicon, but simply whether he had entered Italy under arms. Even if Zelaya was certain to fail in changing the constitution, he was not permitted to make the attempt. Surely Zelaya’s defenders, so deeply concerned with proper procedure as they are, can see now why his removal was required.