James has an unusual take Western attitudes towards Russia:

So here’s my peanut: bad relations with Russia make us feel so uncomfortable because they challenge and undermine our most cherished narratives about the moral and social progress of the global white community. I know even suggesting that we think analytically in terms of an ‘international white race’ sets off alarms, but it’s obvious that Russian disinterest in, or outright hostility to, liberal political norms is noteworthy primarily because virtually every other majority-white country in the world has embraced and institutionalized them. We (small-l) liberals recoil at the very idea that any white person could seriously appreciate or even live under a regime like Russia’s, because this is a reminder that white people are not the charmed winners of Earth’s civilizational marathon — contestants who can rest easy now that they’ve completed the course and won the race.

I have to give James high marks for creativity, but I don’t think so. The idea of a “global white community” doesn’t set off any alarms, because this refers to something that is a community in about the same way that “the international community” is actually a community. Discomfort with poor Russian relations is not anxiety caused by Russia’s subversion of some international white narrative. Put differently, what James is trying to say might not sound so strange. What annoys Westerners about Russia is that Russians are historically Christian, culturally European and are the most thoroughly Westernized so-called “Eastern” nation (in no small part because they have been part of “Western Civilization” for a millennium), but this does not lead most Russians to quite the same political preferences as their neighbors. That suggests that political preferences and constitutions are highly contingent and they are driven by particular interests and conditions. Western liberals seem to find this hard to believe, and they are reduced to explaining away such things by invoking irrationality as the cause.

It also suggests that a country’s history imposes limitations and constraints on how a polity develops, and it tells us yet again that there is no single model of modernity or modernization. Westerners may accept this in theory, but a lot of them don’t like it. However, before we get carried away in emphasizing Russian “disinterest” in or “hostility” to liberal norms, it is worth noting, as Lieven has done, that most Russians want a free media and the rule of law, or at least they say they do, but this does not therefore translate into what is conventionally defined as a “pro-Western” attitude on various matters of policy. This may help get at one of the real sources of Western frustration with Russia: the enduring importance of nationalism in international affairs.

If post-1989 central and eastern European liberal democrats embraced Western norms, they did so in part to reject Russia. As Lieven made clear in that item from earlier this month, liberal democracy succeeded in post-communist Europe where it did in part because it was grounded in an anti-Russian, nationalist reaction that the Russians themselves could never have. Instead, like every other post-communist nation (and like every still-officially communist state in existence), Russians have become or rather continued to be very nationalistic. Undomesticated, fierce nationalism in post-Soviet space is fine in the eyes of most Westerners, provided that its hostility is directed squarely at Moscow or its allies, but any expression of nationalism coming from Russia causes Westerners to worry, even though this resurgence of nationalism is something that is common to all post-communist nations.

This brings us back to a more basic issue, which is widespread and persistent hostility to Russia that taps into various old prejudices about tsarism, communism, Orthodoxy, Slavs and all things from “the East.” Were Russia somehow to become the vanguard of a global democratic revolutionary force, I can almost imagine many Westerners finding cause to celebrate authoritarian governments cropping up all over eastern Europe to help thwart the democratic Russian menace. After all, even a thoroughly liberal democratic Russia will not cease to have its own national interests and ambitions, and a liberal Russia would have far more pretexts for intervention in the affairs of its neighbors, perhaps beginning with the “liberations” of Belarus and Azerbaijan from the grip of their local despots. One can almost imagine all of the defenders of “liberal imperialism” from the last few years suddenly discover the dangers of ideologically-justified interference in the internal affairs of other nations.

I would say that Russia vexes Western liberals (broadly defined) because the Russian example suggests that historical memory, culture and the nation’s past are far from irrelevant to the constitution of a polity. Western liberals seem to want these things to be absolutely irrelevant, because they tend to get in the way of planting liberal democracies in other countries. I’ll wager the people who are made uncomfortable by bad relations with Russia are very few, and we are unlikely to be representative. Most people are either indifferent to this or may even be pleased by it. Nothing brings back comfortable, lazy policy-making and self-congratulatory rhetoric like being able to vilify “the Russkies” as in the old days. Unless ensuring bad relations with Russia is the deliberate goal, I cannot explain how else Washington can persist in policies that are guaranteed to result in bad relations.

The Russian example is discouraging to democracy enthusiasts, because it makes clear how vital strong legal institutions and limitations on state power are to a mass democracy if it is not going to become a plebiscitary authoritarian state. Even if the enthusiasts acknowledge this, they don’t like being reminded that liberal and good government is largely of a function of all the very un-democratic institutions and elements of our system. Whenever these people whine about Russian “backsliding” away from democracy, they don’t want to have to think about how the current Russian government is illiberal, authoritarian and interventionist in the economy because this is in many (though not all) ways what most of the people want.

When Ron Paul cast the lone vote against the House resolution condemning the Iranian government’s post-election actions, I expected to hear a great deal more wailing about the perils of “isolationism,” but thanks to an unusual coincidence the position Rep. Paul has taken also happens to be more or less the one that the President adopted at least for the first week or so. As time goes by, the two are likely to diverge in their views, but for the most part Paul’s lone nay has not been treated with as much scorn as I thought it would receive. Not until, that is, Grant Havers weighed in earlier this week. Havers writes:

Perhaps paleos who have recently gone on record opposing “interference” and “intervention” in Iran need to define exactly what they mean by these terms. Do interference and intervention refer to the unlikely act of sending in the Marines, or do these words also include any moral support for embattled democratic forces in Iran? While I support paleos who condemn military intervention in Iran in light of the sorry history of past interventions in the Middle East, I fail to see why democratic governments should hold their rhetorical fire against the mullahs. Surely we are not condemned to the dualistic and extreme choice between outright military intervention and eerie silence, which offers no hope to human beings like the frightened Iranian woman I mentioned earlier.

Something that I don’t quite understand is why anyone would conclude that silence or minimal comment condemning the Iranian government’s violence by government officials requires that private individuals refrain from expressing their moral support. There has been no small amount of moral support offered to the protesters by citizens of Western democracies. While I might find these enthusiasms a bit romantic, unduly earnest and misplaced (because it seems inevitably to lead to calls for the government to “do something”), other citizens are free to express their solidarity with Iranian protesters as they see fit. Interference refers obviously to actions taken by the government. The actions of the U.S. government have to be taken with American interests in mind, and representatives of the government ought to act accordingly. To borrow from the famous 1821 speech of then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, America has “abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.” We have grown so accustomed to interference that we seem incapable of grasping that it is deeply at odds with our earliest traditions of foreign policy. Does that mean that many American citizens did not openly sympathize with the Spanish and Italian liberals who were at that time being beaten down by Restoration forces? Of course not. It means that our government did not concern itself with things that were none of its business. So that is one part of the answer why the government should not interfere.

The other part is one that has already been thoroughly rehearsed over the last two weeks, which is that having our government hold its “rhetorical fire” may be more useful in aiding the protesters than a daily stream of outraged pronouncements from Washington. After all, if the call to interfere is merely a call for expressions of moral support, what good is it doing anyone? Will Washington’s moral support make the Basij militiaman more or less likely to see the Iranian protester in front of him as a fellow Iranian rather than a criminal? If it will make the protester’s situation more difficult, whose cause is served by showing solidarity?

Have the government make a statement expressing moral support, and you may feel very content, but it may have serious consequences for the very people you are trying to aid. Encouragement can easily bleed over into reckless promises of assistance, or it can be perceived wrongly as such, in which case the lost lives of protesters who trusted in empty words will be on the heads of those in government who made these statements. This would be the worst of both worlds: effectively uninvolved, but still bearing the moral responsibility for goading the dissidents into futile, bloody resistance. Unable and unwilling to take any greater direct action, perhaps it is best for the government to refrain from making statements in support of the protesters.

Havers cites Solzhenitsyn’s call for greater Western interference inside the USSR to admonish the advocates of non-interference. It may be unthinkable for some to say so, but Solzhenitsyn’s perspective on what American foreign policy ought to have been was not always as wise and sober as his reflections on moral and religious truth. In his Harvard speech, Solzhenitsyn made the following remarks, which even the greatest admirers of Solzhenitsyn have to find more than a little embarrassing:

However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? The American Intelligentsia lost its [nerve] and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation’s courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?

Solzhenitsyn was in many ways a moral genius and a prophetic voice, and I think he was a good writer, but in this instance he was not, alas, a serious foreign policy thinker nor was he a strategist. One can understand why a man who suffered so deeply in the Gulag would adopt an unflinching, uncompromising attitude towards communism everywhere, but the alarmism that compelled him to warn of a looming “hundredfold Vietnam” a mere eleven years before the collapse of the USSR should make us think again about his equally insistent demand to interfere early and often. What devoted anticommunists could not then and to some extent today still cannot admit is that Vietnam was basically unnecessary and irrelevant to the greater success of the West in the Cold War. They furthermore cannot accept that the millions who died in the war and the millions who perished in its aftermath most likely would not have died had there never been a “crusade” to save South Vietnam. This is a bitter truth, and there are not many people who would want to accept this. Being wrong about this does not change all of the things that Solzhenitsyn got right, but thirty-one years later we might note that we have listened more often than not to people who have said that the West was lacking in willpower, needed to show more “resolve,” and had gone horribly wrong in withdrawing from Vietnam, and in almost every instance in the last three decades those people have been as wrong as can be. If we admire Solzhenitsyn and can find a record of Solzhenitsyn saying things that could be put into the mouths of interventionists today, we should take care not to expose Solzhenitsyn to ridicule.

Do we really believe that “there are no longer any internal affairs”? While I understand why a man who wished to see the Soviet monstrosity removed from his home country would say this in 1974, is this really the sort of claim that anyone would want to endorse today? Are there no internal affairs of the United States? Are there no internal affairs of Iran? Have we all been pressed together by our sheer numbers such that we cannot discern where one state begins and another ends? I think we know the answer. One might have asked the Solzhenitsyn of 2004 whether he still believed that “there are no longer any internal affairs” when it came to Western denunciations of Russia, and I tend to think that he would have changed his mind. I suspect that internal affairs would have come back into existence. I am not saying this to criticize Solzhenitsyn. A dissident against a monstrous system will seek aid where and how he can–that is his obligation, and he is doing what he can for his country as a patriot. However, it is not necessarily the job of the United States government to follow his lead, nor does the government have to accept his claims.

In the address Havers cited, Solzhenitsyn quoted a Russian proverb: “The yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.” I agree with this entirely. It applies to so many foreign policy debates past and present: the war in Iraq, Israel policy, America’s military presence abroad, and on and on. Turn it around and apply it to the dissenters in other countries. The advocates of interference want us not only to offer moral support to the dissenters, which probably will not help them, but they are positively urging us to become their cheerleaders and propagandists abroad. Following this proverb, this means that we will become their enemies, because we will be cheering them on in what might well be a disastrous course of action. It could be that the friend of Iranian reform and the protesters at this point will even go so far as to question whether the protesters are doing their own cause more harm than good in the long run. The meaning of the proverb is that unreflective, uncritical backing is dangerous; true concern for someone’s well-being will sometimes require disagreement and argument. I would add that sometimes it may require a government to remain mostly quiet while that person carries on his struggle, lest the government compromise or sabotage that struggle in a foolish attempt to affirm its own importance and status in the world.

Anyone familiar with the views of Barack Obama’s pastor of twenty years might wonder if Reverend Jeremiah Wright is the chief inspiration behind the president’s foreign policy. ~Mark Hyman

Well, anyone familiar with the foreign policy views of Barack Obama might wonder if Mark Hyman is very confused. First, he misrepresents what Obama has done in office as an “apology tour.” This is taken as a given in many conservative circles, but even this part isn’t correct. If anyone can show me where Obama has actually apologized (i.e., expressed regret, asked for forgiveness, etc.) for a single thing the United States has done, I would be very interested to see it. He has mostly acknowledged things that everyone already knows to be true, otherwise reiterated things that his predecessors have already said, and in other cases simply refused to take the bait offered him by ridiculous foreign leaders (e.g., Ortega). The pointed dismissal of Ortega is taken by Hyman as “deference,” which suggests that Hyman does not understand what deference is. Contemptuously ignoring someone is the opposite of deferring to him. A good example of deference would be what the now-disgraced Mark Sanford did when he yielded to Gingrich’s allegedly superior understanding in a discussion on North Korea.

Far from “finding unlimited fault” with America, as Hyman claims, Obama can earnestly spout the most predictable self-congratulatory nostrums about the country and America’s role in the world. From the first convention speech that catapulted Obama to national prominence till now, Obama has never allowed acknowledgment of past mistakes to dominate his rhetoric about America. The Obama who has repeatedly praised an America of possibility and opportunity, which conservatives were so keen to cheer on in 2007, is the same Obama who gave the speeches in Cairo, Ankara and Berlin. Bizarrely, even though the Cairo speech was laced with as much pro-American rhetoric as one could ever expect in an address presumably designed to conciliate Muslims worldwide it has been taken as some sort of calculated insult. Contrary to the caricature Hyman and others have drawn, Obama can barely bring himself to find fault with America, and even when he does he is always offsetting this by drawing attention to the flaws of others. So while he said that Americans were sometimes “derisive” of Europeans, he accused Europeans of tolerating and practicing an “insidious” anti-Americanism. Which of the two statements is stronger and more critical? Clearly, it is the latter. Naturally, conservatives are whining about the first one, because even minimal acknowledgment of American error (especially when it is an error in which they participated so enthusiastically) is intolerable in their eyes. To attempt to link this to Wright’s vastly more aggressive, vehement condemnations of U.S. policies, almost all of which are the same policies that Obama fully endorses, is simply ludicrous.

As it happens, criticism of this kind makes it that much easier for Obama to pursue his agenda overseas, because his opposition is continually sabotaging its own credibility with wacky claims about how the boring establishmentarian Obama is taking his cues from Farrakhan and Wright.

But let us judge not, that we be not judged. ~Michael Gerson

Granted, this is probably intended to be read in context as sarcasm, but this is still a bit rich coming from Gerson. After all, Gerson specializes in portraying practically everyone who disagrees with him on anything as a hard-hearted, vicious monster who would deprive a dying child of his last wish (and occasionally as someone who probably would have participated in the slave trade and genocide if he had the chance). Instead of seeing the see-saw of political turmoil in the Near East as proof of the uncertainty in the region and the unpredictability of events, Gerson has returned four years after the so-called “Arab spring” to announce another spring. Even though he claims that he is not one of those overinterpreting events to fit preexisting views, his descriptions of what has happened are themselves based on flawed overinterpretations designed to fit preexisting views. He says that every idealist will have his day and every realist his night, but as in so many other things Gerson reminds us that he cannot even tell the difference between night and day. As in 2005, this requires being very selective in the use of evidence and unduly optimistic about what the limited evidence shows. It is also crucial that one misread the evidence or twist it to fit the argument. Gerson does all of the above:

Now spring is returning. January’s local elections in Iraq favored secular nationalists instead of clerical parties. In Lebanon, Hezbollah was defeated in an open and vigorous vote. Kuwaiti women have been elected to parliament for the first time. And in Iran, brave women and men have demonstrated that democracy, not just nihilism, counts martyrs in the Muslim world.

Actually, if we look at the people involved and the constituencies voting for the parties, Iraqi elections favored more or less the same parties that portrayed themselves in less sectarian terms. As in Lebanon, parties that are blatantly sectarian in their composition and interests claim to be secular. That may well be inevitable and may simply be something everyone has to live with, but we should not pretend that it is not the case. As in Lebanon, the elections represented no meaningful change in the distribution of power, but at least in Iraq I will grant that the majority of the population is represented in the (sectarian, Iran-leaning) government. The incumbent governments remained in power in both Lebanon and Iraq, which suggests that the election results of 2009 have more or less confirmed the 2005 distributions of power. If the “spring” of 2005 was a false one because of political instability and sectarian violence that followed, 2009 has so far offered little to make us think that anything has fundamentally changed. As in 2005, insignificant and superficial changes are being taken for major, profound ones. Regarding Iran, it is true that the protesters have been using the language of martyrdom to describe those who have been killed, but that also means that the protesters are losing the political fight, much as Husayn did at Karbala.

Moreover, Mousavi’s positions have changed, just as he has. He is far different today from the Mousavi who began this electoral campaign. ~Charles Krauthammer

Yes, the dramatic changes are overwhelming. Just consider this new statement from Mousavi:

I’d like to thank you again for your peaceful objections which have received widespread coverage across the world, and would like to ask you that by using all legal channels, and by remaining faithful to the sacred system of the Islamic Republic, to make sure that your objections are heard by the authorities in the country. I am fully aware that your justified demands have nothing to do with groups who do not believe in the sacred Islamic Republic of Iran’s system. It is up to you to distance yourself from them, and do not allow them to misuse the current situation.

Oddly enough, it is because Mousavi hasn’t changed very much that he can continue to be a credible opposition leader. Unlike Russian liberals, who have never missed an opportunity to alienate themselves from the majority of Russians, Mousavi hasn’t made any great display of willing subservience to Western interests, which is why Obama’s recognition of the policy similarities between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad remains one of the most appropriate, correct and potentially helpful things he has said in the last two weeks about Iran. Americanists believe that any statement from the President that fails to build up and anoint Mousavi as the preferred candidate is discouraging to Mousavi and his supporters, because they apparently cannot grasp that being our preferred candidate is to be tainted with suspicion of disloyalty to the nation. It is strange how nationalists often have the least awareness of the importance of the nationalism of another people. Many of the same silly people who couldn’t say enough about Hamas’ so-called “endorsement” of Obama as somehow indicative of his Israel policy views, as well as those who could not shut up about his warm reception in Europe, do not see how an American endorsement of a candidate in another country’s election might be viewed with similiar and perhaps even greater distaste by the people in that country. As Anatol Lieven explains here, Russian liberals destroyed their political chances by being and being seen as stooges for Western interests and allies of every anti-Russian policy that came down the pike. A perfect example of this is Garry Kasparov, whose call for more direct support for the protesters in Iran is as poorly judged as Kasparov’s own domestic political alliances with neo-fascists.

Krauthammer uses the word radicalize many times in the latest column, but what he misses is that even if Mousavi were being radicalized by recent events to take a more adamant stand against the current leadership he would be going back to his Khomeinist roots. As his latest remarks suggest, though, rumors of his radicalization are greatly exaggerated, and one thing we can be quite sure of is that Mousavi is the one leading figure in all of this who has changed the least. The pragmatists in government seem to have no problem with altering the constitution of the system as they see fit and as it suits their needs. Mousavi is the one being inflexible and resistant to accommodation, which is what you would expect from someone leading a mass protest against the government. What you have is an opposition leader who is demanding a return to the pre-June 12 status quo. Back then, the fiction of the “Islamic republic” remained at least somewhat credible. Mousavi has correctly observed that the current leadership has moved to scrap important parts of the republican element of the system, and it is against this that he has been protesting. The reformer has shown himself to be more of a “principalist” than the so-called principalists, which is, of course, what most reformers claim they are doing: restoring what has been corrupted, rather than overturning and destroying the system.

But though Bush 41 was in many respects a smashing foreign policy success, he also made a number of egregious missteps, including the notorious “Chicken Kiev” speech, in which he essentially endorsed the survival of the multinational Soviet empire and not the nationalist aspirations of Eastern Europe. ~Reihan Salam

That Kiev speech really sticks in the craw, doesn’t it? I haven’t heard so much about the elder Bush’s 1991 Kiev speech in the last fifteen years as I have heard about it in the last week and a half. It seems to be a touchstone for everyone dissatisfied with “crabbed realism,” as if the “nationalist aspirations of Eastern Europe” didn’t include the aspirations to displace and slaughter one’s neighbors, expel entire populations and pursue self-destructive policies in the name of restoring national glory. All of a sudden, nationalism in Europe, which was once the scourge that neoconservatives wanted to squash in the ’90s and which horrifies them when it takes peaceful, democratic forms in western Europe, has become something in retrospect that it was wrong to discourage at the end of the Cold War.*

Over the last eighteen years, the idea that there was something unforgiveably wrong in urging Ukrainians–whose country is now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy under the rule of squabbling kleptocrats–to resist seeking independence seems increasingly absurd. Warning against the dangers of nationalism as a multinational empire was coming apart at the seams was very sensible. The example of how the Ottoman Empire had come apart in the late 19th and early 20th centuries offered a sobering reminder that political fragmentation along nationalist lines in ethnically mixed societies can carry a high cost in human suffering. Given the experience of the Balkans and the Caucasus over the last eighteen years, does anyone want to look back and say that the President of the United States should have endorsed nationalist aspirations?

* I should add that neoconservatives have never had any trouble with anti-Russian nationalism, no matter what form it takes and no matter where it crops up, which is at least part of the reason why the Kiev speech must be so irritating.

Update: Of course, it doesn’t hurt to revisit what Bush actually said in 1991. For starters, there is this part:

I come here to tell you: We support the struggle in this great country for democracy and economic reform. And I would like to talk to you today about how the United States views this complex and exciting period in your history, how we intend to relate to the Soviet central Government and the Republican governments.

In Moscow, I outlined our approach: We will support those in the center and the Republics who pursue freedom, democracy, and economic liberty. We will determine our support not on the basis of personalities but on the basis of principles. We cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America [bold mine-DL].

Do not doubt our real commitment, however, to reform. But do not think we can presume to solve your problems for you. Theodore Roosevelt, one of our great Presidents, once wrote: To be patronized is as offensive as to be insulted. No one of us cares permanently to have someone else conscientiously striving to do him good; what we want is to work with that someone else for the good of both of us. That’s what our former President said. We will work for the good of both of us, which means that we will not meddle in your internal affairs.

O, the villainy! Who would want to have these words on his conscience? I mean, treating other nations as if they weren’t children to be scolded and ordered about–what was the man thinking?

Looking back over the last eighteen years, during which time Washington has been obsessed with personalities, not principles, and preoccupied with picking winners and losers and telling people how to reform their societies, one wishes that there had been more of the wisdom the former President showed in Kiev and a lot less of the carping from his detractors.

Second Update: Reihan responds with a long, interesting post. It is well worth reading.

Rather than reassure the Iranians with a wink and a nod that we’re ready to do business, President Obama should be building an international coalition to isolate a recalcitrant Iran as thoroughly as the the West once isolated apartheid-era South Africa. Bush, to the chagrin of the neocons, could never pull this off [bold mine-DL]. But Obama can. ~Reihan Salam

I don’t mean to beat this one column into the ground, but there are a lot of problems with it. It would help Reihan’s argument a lot if neoconservatives had actually been chagrined by Bush’s inability to mobilize international support for his policies, but when they weren’t elaborating on the grand possibilities of the “unipolar moment” they were for the most part busily mocking the impulse to work through multilateral institutions. At the same time, they wanted credit for enforcing U.N. resolutions. They were a little too preoccupied celebrating the glories of “New Europe” and the “coalition of the willing” and pretending that cajoling the governments of small, weak countries into aligning with us on Iraq represented diplomatic triumphs on par with those of Bush’s father. When Turkey refused to permit our forces to launch part of the invasion from their territory, I don’t recall any neoconservatives complaining that Bush was bungling the diplomacy. Instead, they railed against Turkish anti-Americanism, which they found as inexplicable as it was offensive to them.

Neocons were not chagrined by Bush’s failure to mobilize international support behind the Iraq war. They were instead furious at the Russians, French and Germans for daring to oppose the war, and ultimately didn’t care whether there was international support because they believed that the war served the “greater international good,” at least as they saw it through the lens of shoring up and advancing U.S. hegemony. Neoconservatives will go through international institutions if necessary, but take for granted that it is our government that is ultimately responsible for what they understand to be global governance or, put another way, imperial management. They were not chagrined by Bush’s failure to bring greater international pressure on Iran, but rather they were embarrassed by his willingness in his second term to contemplate diplomatic approaches with Tehran, which they have always believed to be futile. To the extent that Bush was engaged in coordinating international support in his second term on Israel-Palestine, that didn’t just embarrass them, but positively outraged them.

When Obama wanted to exercise restraint and say little, many neocons demanded that he say more and say it more forcefully. Once he does that, they will demand sanctions. Once he proposes sanctions, they will demand covert action to topple the regime. Should he actually authorize covert action, they will call for bombings. This is how it works: if Obama adopts anything resembling a hawkish approach, they will praise the hawkishness but always demand escalation. Short of war with Iran, which is where the isolationist policy Reihan is proposing ultimately leads, I doubt there is anything Obama could do that would be deemed sufficient by most neoconservatives.

In the same column I responded to below, Reihan gets something else pretty badly wrong:

If the regime can’t do business with the likes of Mousavi, they certainly can’t do business with Obama, no matter how many barbecues he invites them to.

Reihan must know that this doesn’t make sense. If an authoritarian regime won’t “do business” with an internal critic and would-be opposition leader, does it follow that it won’t and can’t “do business” with a foreign government? It’s one of those things that sounds good at first (“they are implacable fanatics!”), but it is something that we know simply isn’t true. Repressive regimes have been happy to “do business” with the U.S. and other major powers for decades while simultaneously suppressing internal opponents, and as we know perfectly well Washington has been prepared to not only “do business” but also to forge decades-long alliances with authoritarian states that refuse to tolerate a viable political opposition. No one could take this kind of question seriously if it had been applied to Mubarak and Nour today, or Musharraf and Sharif a couple years ago, or even Putin and Khodorkovsky. One may or may not approve of the business being done, but the idea that the authoritarian government is the one that cannot by its very nature do business with Washington is just completely wrong.

The problem the regime has with the “likes of Mousavi” is ironically that Mousavi and those like him are too close to the leaders of the regime in his professed beliefs. He represents competition for the definition of the regime’s worldview. Heretics are always perceived as more dangerous than non-believers. He can threaten them in a way our government never could because he can replace them or show them to be frauds and shabby dealers. His time in political exile and his personal connection to Khomeini lend him credibility as a “real” revolutionary that threatens to expose them as much less than what they claimed. For these purposes, it doesn’t matter that he is allied to the shabbiest dealer of them all in Rafsanjani. At this point, they can’t risk permitting Mousavi to offer a counter-example of what the Islamic revolution ought to be. At the same time, if they can reach some sort of agreement with Washington that advances their interests, they will do so. We have seen clearly that the current leaders of the regime have no trouble engaging in the necessary ideological acrobatics to justify what they do.

The great danger of Obama’s response to the street protests in Iran has been that he’d choose Iran’s thuggish ruling class over Iran’s masses on the grounds that Serious People don’t fret about human rights when grand strategy is at stake. ~Reihan Salam

The great danger of Obama’s response is not, as Reihan suggests, that he would express too much support for an illegitimate clique of rulers. It’s that he would, like Reihan does, transfer our sympathy for the protesters onto an imagined version of Iran, one in which the population suffers together beneath an oppressive “ruling class.” ~Matt Frost

Reihan’s remark is clever, but, as Matt makes clear, it is not really accurate. While I appreciate the Greenwaldian flourish of capitalizing the word serious, Reihan must know that a large number of supposedly Serious People seem to do nothing but fret about human rights and pretend that this fretting is a grand strategy. Reihan knows or knows of many of these people, so it should be easy to remember. There is a set of old diplomats from the last century who are still rolled out on television shows during every major event overseas, and it’s fair to say that these people do not “fret” much on this score, because they understand, however poorly in some cases, that foreign policy involves the pursuit of national interests, full stop. Most would-be Serious People do their best to make clear why, even if they consider themselves to be realists, they are not as callous and unfeeling as these people are supposed to be. If they want to be Really Serious, they will sigh and gravely intone about “the nature of the regime” making normal diplomacy impossible and, perhaps if they are on track to become the Most Serious they will earnestly announce our “responsibility to protect” the people of another country.

Matt’s reminder that there are real political divisions and genuine pro-regime sentiment among millions of non-elite Iranians is a much-needed one, but I would qualify his concluding remarks by stressing how so much of this contest is a contest over which elites will dominate the state apparatus. If Obama chose to side more openly with the protesters, he would not be siding with “the masses” against “the ruling class,” but would be for all intents and purposes allying himself with Rafsanjani’s power play inside the Iranian ruling class. Say what you will about him and his corruption, but Rafsanjani is not stupid–Mousavi takes all the risks, while Rafsanjani stands to reap the rewards if the play succeeds. If it doesn’t, he will bide his time until another opportunity arises. Oligarchs use factions of the people against each other in their competitions for position, and some try to identify their cause with that of “the people,” and this has gone on for ages. It now takes place in an era of mass politics, and so we have massive factions arrayed behind different oligarchs, which are deceptively large enough to be treated as being representative of “the people.” The tragic thing is that there are probably millions of Iranians who genuinely desire a very different kind of government and if they are lucky will get Rafsanjani’s clique instead. If the critics entirely had their way, Obama would participate in this farce by investing the triumph of one clique of oligarchs with some greater meaning.

Unfortunately, Reihan gets other things wrong. He writes:

Now, however, at least some of the engagers are coming to understand that the violence in the streets is clear evidence that Khamenei’s gang is less pragmatic than they enthusiastically believed.

This isn’t clear evidence of any such thing. I do wish we would stop using the word pragmatic as if it automatically implied something moderate and decent. Nothing has made it more clear that these are shabby dealers interested only in self-preservation than the last ten days. These are precisely the people with whom one cuts deals. There are people who are fanatical about religious claims because they are genuinely willing to sacrifice everything on their behalf, which ironically means that they can sometimes be constrained and controlled by the dictates of their own religion, and there are people who use religion instrumentally for control. For whatever reason, Western hawks have desperately sought to make the world believe that Ahmadinejad in particular and the Iranian regime in general were the former, while conveniently ignoring things like the holy status of Jerusalem that might complicate their imagined doomsday scenarios, but the last ten days have shown that they are the latter. This is a crew of shameless political operators who have no qualms about cynically using religious rhetoric, even going so far as investing their fraud with divine approval, in order to hold on to power.

Pragmatic is exactly what they are, which is why we know we can make a deal with them. They have made clear that their self-interest and the self-preservation of the regime are what they value. Pragmatic people can nonetheless be violent and cruel to get what they want. Being pragmatic does not mean that one is friendly, humane or pleasant. It is a means to acquiring what one wants, and what this crew wants is simply power. The truly great danger at this point would be to mistake the regime’s violence as proof of zeal and unpredictability rather than see it as the regime’s means of self-preservation.

But now, if the clerical junta prevails, anyone who shakes hands with Ahmadinejad will have a hard time washing the blood off his own hands. ~Jonah Goldberg

This will come as news to some, but metaphorical blood is non-transferable. Nixon did not pick it up from Brezhnev or Mao, Reagan did not somehow acquire the blood of Afghans by engaging with Gorbachev throughout his two terms while Afghanistan was under Soviet occupation, nor Kennedy did leave Vienna screaming, “Out, damn spot!” If negotiating with thuggish regimes means that our leaders partake of the crimes of that regime, I assume Goldberg must be in high dudgeon about the bloody taint afflicting…well, pretty much every President since FDR. There was a time when people on the right were more resistant to the temptation to reduce foreign policy to a morality play or some sort of childish game in which negotiating with “bad guys” gave you cooties. For almost the last ten years, they have been far less so, and it’s pretty embarrassing.