Mr. Saakashvili took office in 2004 after spearheading the so-called Rose Revolution, which ousted a government with Soviet ties [bold mine-DL]. ~The New York Times

One could dismiss this as laziness or a case of clumsy phrasing, but considering how eager so many people in the West have been to portray contemporary Russia as a neo-Soviet empire it is worse than the average blunder. Shevardnadze had been foreign minister for the USSR among other things, so he had a history in Soviet government, but it was obviously impossible for the government of independent Georgia in 2003 or at any time since 1991 to have Soviet ties when there was no USSR to which it could have been tied. It’s not that important, I suppose, but when Georgian and Russian politics are as poorly understood in the West as they usually are every misrepresentation makes things a little worse.

My column on Pakistan for The Week is now up.

Alex Massie gets at the heart of what has been bothering me about so much of this Republican yapping about Obama’s so-called “apology tour” and the idea that Obama has been demeaning and denigrating the United States during his first trip abroad as President. It’s not just that these claims are false, which they clearly are, but that they have absolutely no connection to reality: there were no apologies, and there was no denigration. One might think that this would satisfy his Republican critics, but that is not the case.

Reading some of the complaints, such as Krauthammer‘s, one might think the critics were five years old. They seem to think that the hard work of rebuilding America’s reputation in the world, a reputation that the very same critics and their confreres spent years dousing in gasoline and setting on fire, yields instant gratification, as if repairing frayed relations and coordinating international policies could have overnight results. The same people who grew weepy at the thought of History vindicating Bush decades or centuries hence are prepared to declare his successor a failure after less than three months. The people who contributed directly to pushing the good name of our country into the muck are now crying that Obama has not yet, in his first set of meetings, successfully cleaned up their mess. They and their arguments deserve little more than scorn.

Specifically, the idea that Americans have been fighting wars over the last two decades for innocent Muslims* (!) would almost be precious–an example of the sort of naivete they accuse the President of displaying–if it were not part of an ostensibly serious critique. Massie sums up in response to Wehner’s claims on this point:

This is nonsense and anyone with any knowledge of these things must know that this is self-serving, delusional bullshit.

The mainstream right’s reaction to Obama’s European trip has reminded me of the claim some on the Anglophone right were making during the election that the election supposedly pitted an advocate of “global universalism” against a defender of American exceptionalism. As I saidthen, it was never clear which one was supposed to play which role, because both of the candidates were American exceptionalists and universalists in their respective ways, but this basic truth that Obama is an American exceptionalist and one steeped in Americanism is simply inadmissible for some of these people. I don’t know why I have to keep telling so many of you Republican globalists this, but on most of the major policy questions Obama is on your side.

Even though this is incontrovertible and well-established, it has to be denied vigorously in order for the critics to lay sole claim to Americanism and to define it in its most aggressive, nationalistic form. There is a partisan purpose in doing this, I suppose, but more important than mere political advantage is the need to claim some sort of monopoly on national pride. This is a bizarre mutant strain of nationalism on display. You would think American nationalists would tend to see the broad, bipartisan embrace of exceptionalism, hegemonism and national security ideology as vindication of their own views, but instead they look for reasons to complain that left-liberal adherents of these things are lacking in zeal and are somehow intent on insulting the U.S.

As ridiculous as it is, all of this seems misguided and counterproductive for the critics on their own terms. They have gone to the well of national security demagoguery too often in the last decade, and now it is virtually dry. Most people aren’t buying what these critics are selling, and the critics are destroying whatever credibility they might have still had. What is strangely amusing about all this is that some of these critics, such as Wehner, were once some of the most embarrassingly pro-Obama people on the right to be found back in 2007 and early 2008. Once it became clear that he would be the Democratic nominee, the old instincts re-emerged. As I concluded in a piece from March 2008:

Disenchantment with Obama started to set in when he, or at least those closely associated with him, seemed to fail some of the basic tests of American nationalism, which gave his opposition to the Iraq war a different, more ominous appearance. When he began to appear “ungrateful” in their eyes, or when his views struck them as unduly “pessimistic,” these mainstream Republicans began to find him and his associates distasteful. You used to hear the argument from these Republicans that Obama might represent doom for the right, but would be good from the country—you don’t hear that anymore. Instead, partly because of the more hostile treatment from the mainstream right, the dissident right has been giving him far more of a hearing on an essentially single-issue basis than it has ever done for any Republican on any one policy question. Having rejected the siren song of “the lesser of two evils” in successive elections, some now embrace the same logic that empowers the stifling two-party system and the establishment consensus that the system perpetuates. It is difficult not to sympathize a little with a candidate who is being excoriated mostly because of the few views that are relatively sane and closer to my own, but that simply reminds me that these views are by and large the exception for this particular candidate, who is in virtually every other respect as wedded to the establishment consensus as any of the Republicans who are now savaging him.

* Even though this claim about fighting on behalf of innocent Muslims is dubious (not least because several of our wars, especially the war in Iraq, have killed or led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of these people), it reflects something basic to Americanism. This is the idea that anytime the U.S. fights a war, no matter what the actual reasons for it are, whichever group or nation comes out ahead at the end of the fighting must show eternal gratitude to us. It is apparently an additional requirement that anytime the U.S. fights a war that may benefit some Muslims, all Muslims must similarly be grateful, even if the U.S. wages other wars and backs other policies and governments that harm and kill many other Muslims. 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.

Kimberley Strassel reports from an alternate universe in which the Tories opposed invading Iraq (and presumably where Peter Hitchens is Leader of the Opposition):

To the extent the party did engage in policy debates, it was in the context of factions warring with each other over issues such as support for the European Union. It failed to take a hard line on the corruption that hurt the party. As it floundered, it increasingly stoked populist passions, in particular anti-immigration fervor or opposition to the Iraq War [bold mine-DL].

Strassel is right that internecine battles over Europe consumed much of the party’s energy and made Tories seem removed from what concerned most British voters, but the idea that the Tory leadership stoked populist passions on anything over the last twelve years is amusing. The last twelve years have seen the steady growth of both the UKIP and BNP as alternatives on the right in part because the Tories played the role of “responsible” opposition. Hague and Duncan-Smith made noises about changing rules for admitting asylum-seekers, which stoked few passions. Theirs was the lot of the moderate restrictionist, the one who cannot generate enough interest on immigration policy because the changes he advocates are so minor and unremarkable and who nonetheless gets tarred as xenophobic by the press because he is dissatisfied with the flawed status quo. Howard was even less interested in this issue. For the most part, the only strong feeling Tory leaders were able to stoke was contempt for their ineffective leadership.

The claim about riling up opponents of the war is simply false. No Tory leader before Cameron opposed the war, and even today Cameron’s critique of interventionist foreign policy is a limited, targeted one. As far as I know, he has never repudiated his past support for the war and re-stated his support for the war when he became Opposition leader. It is conceivable that there have been backbenchers critical of the war from the beginning, but to use this as a description of the Tories as a whole would be like citing Ron Paul and Jimmy Duncan when describing the GOP. The amazing thing is that the Tories managed to stake out the wrong position on the war in a country where it was always extremely unpopular and nonetheless they have been profiting from the implosion of Labour, which was much more split over the invasion and the continuation of the war. It’s as if the Democrats had been poised to sweep back into the majority in 2006 after having been and having remained as hawkish as Bush.

Of course, even after we have corrected the record the lessons are not entirely clear. The Tories might have been able to ride antiwar sentiment to oust Labour in earlier general elections had they opposed the war from the beginning, but we will never know. As things stand now, warmongers should be pleased that a pro-war leadership has managed to engineer a political comeback in spite of being utterly wrong on the most important foreign policy question of the last generation. What makes no sense about this entire column is that Strassel’s WSJ Republican worldview is much more in line with that of the Cameroons than with that of many of his critics on the British (and American) right. She ought to understand that if Cameron loses or fails once in office the Tories will turn to leaders who are much less amenable to Republican globalists.

The obvious, natural role for the Tories as the opposition was to organize antiwar forces in Britain, including those in the Labour Party, against Blair, and they failed spectaculary in this regard. The rallying cry for Euroskeptics was to tie themselves even more inextricably to America and strike a pose of being more Atlanticist than Thatcher, which in practical terms during the Bush years meant signing off on U.S. foreign policy no matter how bad those policies were for Britain (and America!). Aside from some de rigueur swipes at neoconservatism, Cameron has never shown any hint that he disagrees with the positions Conservatives took on foreign policy over the last decade, and no leading member of the party has made any effort to rile up or organize antiwar voters despite the obvious incentives the Tories have had to do so. There are many policies the Cameroons embrace that would not necessarily work in the American context, and there are some that might if adapted properly, but no one can accuse Cameron or the Tories of having exploited antiwar sentiment. They not only never did this, but they never even put themselves in a position where this was possible.

Via Andrew, here is a fearmongering Heritage Foundation ad pushing the tiresome advocacy of missile defense, which dovetails with much of the criticism of the new (expanded!) Pentagon budget. What the ad somehow manages not to mention between its homage to the 1964 campaign ad “Daisy” and an unfortunate Thatcher cameo is that neither North Korea nor Iran currently has the capability to build a missile that can reach the United States. It also seems to ignore that our government has a nuclear arsenal that would be used to retaliate against any such WMD missile attack with devastating effect on the state foolish or self-destructive enough to launch such an attack. Please, someone explain to me why any of these people should be taken seriously on matters of national security.

It is a shock, but Cathy Young is skeptical about the administration’s efforts to repair the relationship with Russia. This line jumped out at me:

The Kremlin treats pro-Western governments and politicians in former Soviet republics as presumptively anti-Russian and tends to view any increase in Western and especially American influence in the region as a weakening of Russian power.

The Kremlin does this in no small part because Western governments and media outlets treat anti-Russian, nationalist governments and politicians in former Soviet republics as presumptively pro-Western and the governments set policy accordingly. They all tend to see any increase in Russian influence in post-Soviet space as a challenge and a threat to Europe and the United States. Compare the routine Western hyperventilating about Russia wielding its “energy weapon” against Ukraine to any piece of Russian alarmism about the American military presence in central Asia, and I will show you two mirror images of irrational overreaction.

Naturally, when the Russians engage in these overreactions it is proof of their dangerous propaganda machine, while on our side it is all calm, sober analysis. If Moscow is erring here, it is by mirroring the reflexive distrust and hostility shown to Russia by Western governments and media and expressed in one policy decision after another. There are signs that this may be changing, which is good news, but it is at these moments when relations stand a chance of thawing that misrepresentations of the relationship can be particularly damaging.

Young cites the Kyrgyz decision to end the lease arrangement at Manas airbase as proof of Moscow’s “zero-sum mentality,” because, of course, Young applies an exceedingly narrow interpretation of this event in terms of jockeying between Moscow and Washington as if the Kyrgyz government and public had virtually nothing to do with any of it. It was Young, after all, who described the end of the Kyrgyz lease as a Russian “punch in the nose,” when it was primarily the result of popular backlash against the U.S. military presence. Where in the world would Moscow have ever picked up the idea that America’s loss is Russia’s gain? The funny thing is that this duplicates almost perfectly the official Russian reaction to all of the “color” revolutions, which portrayed those movements as purely foreign-backed conspiracies, and Young does this in the case of Kyrgyzstan with far less justification. That it was the authoritarian beneficiary of the supposedy democratic “Tulip” Revolution who decided to throw us out of Manas is oddly appropriate.

As it happens, this zero-sum equation is not true, but it is odd that one of the people most inclined to see the U.S.-Russian relationship in exactly these terms should find fault with it. Russian and American interests are much more complementary than Moscow’s Western critics and Russian hard-liners will ever allow. If we are ever going to reach a point where our governments can pursue common interests, we will need to begin by rejecting precisely the sort of zero-sum analysis that Western critics of Russia engage in on a regular basis.

Update: On a related note, Daria Vaisman’s article in Russia! (via Julia Ioffe) has a perfect summation of the main reason behind Russo-Georgian conflict in recent years:

And so it’s America that is being punished here – for turning Georgia into a symbol, but not the symbol that America thinks. Russia doesn’t hate Georgia because it’s an icon of democracy; it hates Georgia because it’s an icon of Russia-hating. Georgia was designed to function as synecdoche and premonition – into part of a whole and as more to come. Under these conditions, can you blame Russia? Imagine, as Medvedev recently did, if Russia had done the same.

I would also add that Georgia is paying the price for being made into a “front-line state” in what was ostensibly a contest between democracy and authoritarianism, East and West, etc. As we have noted before, whenever a state is turned into the symbol of a grandiose cause, it tends not to work out well for the people who live there.

On the main blog, Freddy noted yesterday that the April 9 movement* was gearing up for its protest against Saakashvili, which has begun in Tbilisi. So far, the riot Freddy predicted has not materialized, and we can hope that it will not. Contrary to what Saakashvili apologists will claim, his Western critics do not want to see the Georgian people suffer, but have long seen his presidency as the disaster for Georgia that it now clearly is. It would be best for Georgia if Saakashvili stepped down, but that would not be his style. Contrary to fears that riots in Moldova would make today’s protests more volatile, which did not make much sense, the protests in Tbilisi appear to be basically peaceful.

If violence does flare up, it is more likely that it will be Saakashvili’s government that will attack the protesters as it did during the protests in late 2007, but perhaps even Saakashvili has learned his lesson from the political backlash and international outcry his heavy-handed actions caused back then. My guess is that the April 9 demand for Saakashvili’s resignation will be ignored by the government, and the opposition lacks a clear alternative leader who can serve as a rallying point for anti-Saakashvili forces.

Crucially, unlike Saakashvili’s predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, Saakashvili continues to enjoy strong U.S. backing, this is not going to change anytime soon, and it was mainly the withdrawal of Washington’s approval that pushed Shevardnadze out in ’03. Meanwhile, I suspect that Moscow will leave Saakashvili to twist in the wind for a while and will probably not take any direct actions in the near future to force him out. (That doesn’t necessarily rule out some Russian involvement in funding or supporting today’s protesters, but then “color” revolutionaries would have to grant that turnabout is fair play.) The war Saakashvili escalated is now coming back to haunt him, and he is beginning to pay the price for it. The Kremlin has no need to oust or pressure any further a leader whose domestic political fortunes are already waning.

*The anti-Saakashvili movement has adopted the day commemorating a violent Soviet crackdown of Georgian protesters to link their cause to the memory of the national tragedy of April 9, 1989.

It would have been relatively easy for President Obama to divide the Republican coalition, peeling off less-partisan Republicans with genuine outreach. ~Michael Gerson

This would be an interesting point, except that Obama already did this during the election campaign. The Republicans and right-leaning independents he could reach have already been reached, and they are part of the 60-65% of the population who approve of Obama so far. The remaining Republicans who oppose him are for the most part all those Republicans who are quite partisan if not hard-liners. Andrew and Nate Silver have already made similar observations. What is completely missing from so many of the Republican responses to the Pew survey showing such great “polarization” is any acknowledgment that the roughly two-thirds of Republicans who disapprove of Obama make up not much more than a sizeable minority.

That doesn’t make their views irrelevant, but it does mean that they do not define the national response to the President’s first months in office. Neither can we primarily characterize Obama’s Presidency in terms of partisan polarization. Republicans have been clear from fairly early on that, at least when it comes to domestic policy and budget debates, they have decided on a course of pure rejectionism and the embrace of fiscal austerity. As the minority party, that is their prerogative, and there are good reasons to be skeptical of policies that are vastly increasing the debt (it would help even more to have alternative budgets that don’t invite mockery!), but if a party has opted to go down the rejectionist route it is silly to complain the President is having a polarizing effect as if this were a bad outcome.

If the GOP is to have any chance of reviving anytime soon, it will be by peeling off disillusioned and dissatisfied Obama supporters. Even if Obama were driving people away (so far, there is little evidence for this), the GOP still has to be able to attract them. At present, the GOP’s powers of repulsion remain far greater. So far, everything the GOP has been doing in Congress and in the media has reinforced all the habits that have pushed so many people into Obama’s arms. Shouting fascism and tyranny in ever-louder voices is not going to change this pattern, but will probably ensure that it keeps getting worse for Republicans.

No one outside the Beltway cares whether the post-partisan utopia has been realized, and many of us outside the Beltway understand that Washington does some of its greatest damage when the parties collaborate to give us the worst of both worlds. In the GOP’s worst-case scenario, Obama will become even more unpopular among Republican rank-and-file while the rest of the country remains favorably inclined, which means that Obama will technically become a more “polarizing” figure by Pew’s odd measurements, but this will only widen the considerable gap between how the GOP sees the political landscape and how everyone else sees it. The real danger for the GOP is that the Democrats are in the process of turning the idea of positive polarization around on them, and they might then be able to divide the country and come away with the much larger portion on a more permanent basis.

During his address to the Turkish parliament, President Obama said:

I know there have been difficulties these last few years. I know that the trust that binds us has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced. Let me say this as clearly as I can: the United States is not at war with Islam.

Naturally, this acknowledgment of what some of us call reality proves to Matt Lewis that Obama is “apologizing” to Turks and Muslims the world over, and more than this he is supposedly “breaking the tradition of not criticizing your own country abroad.” If anyone can locate anywhere in this statement where Obama has actually criticized the United States, he should consult a doctor, because it means he can see things that do not exist. Unless Lewis would like to argue that relations with Turkey and the Islamic world as a whole have not been strained, which would be a rather unique interpretation of the last decade, he should target some other part of the speech to criticize. Unless Lewis thinks that we are at war with Islam and would actually like to stand behind this claim, perhaps he should just not speak about these matters.

This is all par for the course for Lewis, a TownHall blogger for whom there is no lame cliche or movement conservative trope that he will not happily repeat. As a good example of this, take his unusually unimaginative attack on Ross Douthat in this bloggingheads segment. Ross, you see, is “what conservatism is if you live in New York City,” the sort favored by those who attend New York cocktail parties (!), and “not part of the conservative movement.” Worst of all, he is someone whom liberals do not automatically dismiss as an idiot. Lewis’ entire criticism is an exercise in the sort of mindless pseudo-sociological analysis that now passes for a lot of intra-conservative argument, according to which anyone whose writings are of interest to people outside the confines of the movement is inherently suspect and untrustworthy. No doubt in years to come Ross will be accused by such towering giants as Lewis of “criticizing his own movement” in so-called “foreign territory” when he acknowledges other realities that movement conservatives find unpleasant, and it will make just as much sense then as his useless attack on the President’s speech in Ankara has made today.

I would always defer to my former boss [Newt Gingrich], if you will, as I was a pup freshman as he was speaker, on issues of foreign policy. ~Gov. Mark Sanford

Via Will at Ordinary Gentlemen

Well, I would say this pretty much puts to rest Reihan’s fears of burgeoning antiwar sentiment on the right. Then again, one might point out that on any number of issues Sanford has not deferred to Gingrich’s judgment. Gingrich quite publicly backed the invasion of Iraq, and just a few weeks back Sanford relayed his objections to the war in Iraq to Michael in his profile of the governor. One assumes that the skepticism he showed regarding the bombing of Yugoslavia made him wary of backing the invasion at the time. As for Gingrich’s view on Kosovo, I don’t think Gingrich was doing much publicly to back the campaign so soon after his resignation, but it is basically unimaginable that he would have been in opposition to it. It’s not just that Sanford defers to Gingrich on North Korea policy, but that he pretends that he would never disagree with him, when we already know that he has agreed with him and the general direction of foreign policy Gingrich et al. represent.

Now I understand that Sanford is a member of the Republican Party, he was appearing on FoxNews, and he might actually want to be elected to another office someday, so I can’t say I am surprised. I suppose I am not so much disappointed in such an embarrassing statement from Sanford as I am depressed that the range of acceptable foreign policy debate in leading Republican circles stretches all the way from “attack them” (it does not really matter which state we’re discussing) to the cliche of “actions, not words.” When Chris Wallace is the one playing the role of the reasonable skeptic of military action to Sanford’s relative belligerence, there is no hope for sane foreign policy taking root in the GOP.

P.S. Yes, Freddy, some people might be a tad disappointed.

Update: After thinking about it a little more, I realize that Sanford’s deference to Gingrich is worse than it seemed at first. He isn’t just deferring to him to obscure the non-interventionist streak in his own record, but he is also doing it because governors always feel obliged to defer in this area to supposed wonks. In practical terms, this means that any governor, no matter how good his instincts and no matter how sound his past views, will end up deferring to more interventionist wonks for the simple reason that the GOP is lousy with interventionist wonks and has very few representing another side of the debate. At the risk of exaggerating, I don’t think it’s too much to say that we saw the basic reason for Republican foreign policy dysfunction on display in that one clip: all the most likely potential candidates for presidential office (i.e., governors) end up receiving horrible advice from entrenched wonks, and many of the former don’t know or care enough to recognize how bad the latter are at what they do, and the governors don’t have the confidence to risk pushing back or challenging them even when the wonks say crazy things about attacking North Korea.