One of the stranger things in recent weeks has been Matt Yglesias’ preoccupation with mockingpeopleconcerned about the inflationary effects of the Fed’s grossly irresponsible, inflationary policies. It’s true that inflationary policies will help debtors, because these policies will ruin the value of the dollar. Perhaps there would be less reason to be concerned about 1970s-era problems if the central bank weren’t making the same disastrous moves made in the 1970s.

Alex Massie is right: the U.S.-British relationship is not like that of Jeeves and Wooster, because unlike Wooster’s deference to Jeeves’ advice Washington hardly ever* heeds British advice. On the contrary, the Jeeves-Wooster dynamic is the relationship that the British probably wished that our governments had, but which they are also keenly aware our governments do not have.

* I would say never, but there must be some isolated case where it happened, albeit probably by accident.

This will have to be a brief post, but before I stop posting for the next couple of days I do want to say a few words about Obama and recognition of the Armenian genocide. Alex Massie has a good post on the matter, and a new LA Timesstory gives the usual reasons for the administration’s shifting position. I have written quite a lot on this question, and I remain in favor of the recognition resolution. However, as I mentioned in my first column for The Week, U.S.-Turkish relations are abysmally poor, and there is some slight chance that the new administration’s positions on Iraq withdrawal and entering into talks with Iran will create some opportunity to repair the damage of the last six or seven years.

Last year, there was no prospect of any such improvement, which made the timing of the resolution seem less important. The vociferous and dishonest lobbying by pro-Ankara forces remains infuriating, the appalling shilling for Turkish revisionism on the American right remains a mark of shame, and it continues to be outrageous that one of our allies dictates what symbolic resolutions our Congress can or cannot pass. On those points, I will make the same arguments that I made last year when the occasion arises.

However, there is now also a possibility that Ankara will be opening up the border with Armenia after almost twenty years, and as a mere otar I submit humbly that this is more important for Armenians today and for the Republic of Armenia. It may be time for Diasporan Armenians to heed the words of the murdered Hrant Dink, who urged the Diaspora to focus on building up the Republic of Armenia. Sadly, it was the very words he was using to urge Diasporan Armenians to focus on the present and future that were used against him and which an irresponsible Turkish nationalist media used to whip up a frenzy against him that resulted in his death. Out of respect for the work that Hrant Dink did, Armenians should seize the opportunity to improve Turkish-Armenian relations in the present. The Armenian community should certainly not give up on commemorating and recognizing the genocide, and there will be a time for Congress to do this, but both Armenia and America will be better served if recognition by Congress is delayed at least a year.

P.S. The same goes for any presidential declaration on the subject.

Update: To address the reported frustration of Rep. Schiff, who has been a tireless supporter of recognition, I would add a few more points. Yes, it is true that many opponents of the resolution in the past have made a similar, “Wait for a better time” argument, and I understand how precarious this argument is. After all, supporters of recognition have been stymied by making this sort of argument year after year, but I do think things have changed in a couple important ways. First, reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia seems more likely than it has at any time in the last decade, and for the first time in decades there is a President and a majority in Congress sympathetic to recognizing the genocide. I think it is slightly better to delay so that relations with Ankara can recover a point where genocide recognition would not end up being the last straw that severely damages the alliance.

This Troy Senik column is Peters-esque in its unintentional self-parody. Amid the growing consensus that the Bush administration had no consistent or effective “freedom agenda,” and that the phrase was more propagandistic window dressing than policy agenda, Senik rises up to declare it a rousing success because a majority of Iraqis do not yet hate the form of government we destroyed their country to install. As I have said before, the cries of vindication and triumph from democratists seem unusually premature given their own complaints about Russia’s political development. Six years after the collapse of the USSR, most democratists who today lament Russia’s populist authoritarianism would probably have been cheering the success of liberal democracy in Russia. As they say, then some other stuff happened. For all of the ideological certainty that democratists possess that one type of regime is suitable for all places and all times, the desperate search for evidence that democratization in the last decade has led to anything other than a castastrophic mess reveals an incredibly insecure “school of thought.”

What few episodes of supposedly successful democracy promotion did occur during the Bush years have either resulted in empowered Islamist militias (Lebanon and Gaza), they have stalled and devolved into quasi-authoriarianism (Georgia) or failed from the beginning (the “Tulip Revolution”). Despite the important observation that the “surge” has failed on Mr. Bush’s own terms, Senik insists that it was “one of the boldest and most successful gambits in the history of presidential decision-making.” Sometimes I have wondered how detached from reality one must be to remain a steadfast Bush loyalist after so much failure, but rarely have I had the chance to see the distilled essence of such loyalism expressed with such perfect obliviousness about the realities of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy legacy.

Noemie* Emery takes over 700 words to make the claim that if Sarah Palin had been elected Vice President, we would apparently already have a functioning bank recovery plan, no stock market decline and resoundingly successful diplomatic relations with all nations. At least, I assume that’s what she must be saying. Otherwise, we would have to contemplate how much worse things would be had the other ticket prevailed. Instead of having the current mediocre administration with constant vetting problems and a White House out of its depth, we would have an ageing, hot-headed incompetent whose idea of economic reform is railing against astronomy funding and denouncing greed, and an even less well-informed successor to replace him if he were unable to serve.

* Incorrect spelling has been corrected.

The other main response to Zakaria at Foreign Policy came from Christian Brose:

The real sticking point is how a Syria or a Russia defines some of its “interests.” Damascus’s desire to dominate Lebanon is not an interest. Nor is Russia’s attempt to create a sphere of influence in its old imperial stomping grounds and prevent sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies. Such “interests” should be, in Zakaria’s words, “by definition unacceptable.”

Greg Scoblete replies:

I think this only serves to confirm Zakaria’s point. According to Brose, the U.S. is the arbiter of which interests are legitimate, and which are not. And the standard is not exactly uniform. The Russians can’t exercise a “veto” over nations directly on their border, but when the U.S. decides it wants to travel halfway around the world and depose Saddam Hussein on the grounds that he’s an intolerable threat to our interests, that’s acceptable. The Russians can’t have a sphere of influence immediately adjacent their national border, but the U.S. can claim the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Western Hemisphere as arenas of its primacy and veto the foreign policy decisions of governments therein. The Russians can’t corner the Central Asian energy market through cozy relationships with dictators and related thugs, but the U.S.-Saudi alliance is another matter – one born of a mutual and abiding respect for pluralism and human rights. Or something.

Most striking is Brose’s lack of any sense of irony when he complains that Russia “prevent[s] sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies” as part of his argument against Zakaria. A considerable part of U.S. policy overseas is to try to “prevent sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies” and to get them to do what Washington wants instead. More than a little of U.S. policy is dedicated to preventing sovereign nations from making free choices about their own domestic policies, and indeed we routinely discuss the alternatives means available for coercing other governments into making concessions to our demands regarding matters that are often entirely internal to those states. For Brose, this is all just diplomacy properly understood: “are we aligning our tools of engagement and coercion to get our desired result?” It goes without saying that our desired result is always legitimate.

If I read Brose right, other states do not get to have any tools of coercion, because their use of such tools is automatically unacceptable, and naturally this is all part of his “serious discussion” of diplomacy. These tools of coercion are apparently reserved only for us and those we deem fit to possess them. Our desire to have secure access to the Gulf and its oil is apparently a real interest, but we can’t let anyone else have spheres of influence, because we have increasingly defined the exercise of significant influence by other states to be something akin to aggression, whereas our actual wars of aggression are seriously considered either wars of self-defense or the fulfillment of some high-minded international obligations.

When Russia tries to discourage neighbors from joining a military alliance organized against it, this is gross interference, which is what you would expect Washington to say, since it is the one leading said alliance. On the other hand, we reserve the right to arbitrarily bomb and partition other states for no other reason than that we disapprove of how they are handling domestic insurgents (see war in Kosovo, recognition of Kosovo) or deem their legal development of nuclear energy to be the beginning of an intolerable threat. Depending on who violates it, state sovereignty is either obsolete or sacred. If Russia reduces its subsidy on natural gas to its neighbors, which it has been providing artificially cheap energy to for decades, it is engaged in cruel blackmail and intimidation because it actually requires the recipients to pay something closer to market price for the goods they are receiving. If we impose sanctions on an entire country for more than a decade and they result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, we are merely doing what is necessary for the greater good and it is all “worth it” if it works to undermine the country’s government (even though the sanctions did not actually undermine it). In all these things, I am not referring to the views of a handful of ideologues. Just as Zakaria has said, these are the views of a broad consensus of the Washington establishment, and they are not going to produce an effective foreign policy.

P.S. Damir Marusic, David Polansky and Chris Dierkes have more. Dierkes’ post is particularly good in criticizing Brose’s bizarre idea that Mr. Bush failed to exploit the post-invasion period to force Iran into making concessions.

My new column for The Week on Russia and Obama’s “secret letter” is now up.

As I said earlier, there is not much point in addressing this sort of garbage, but the lying does get tiresome after a while. Noah Pollak says that TAC “attempts to undermine the democratic legitimacy of the contribution of Jews to the public debate,” which is simply a lie and one easily exposed as such. Any references to a “fifth column” in the first piece cited referred specifically to individuals who are under indictment for espionage, and in the second (Pollak’s link is broken, but the article is here) it refers to advocates for a war with Iran, which is a war that is manifestly not in the interests of the United States.

No one here is questioning the democratic legitimacy of anyone’s contributions to public debate–that is the sort of trashy, despicable behavior that we have come to expect from opponents in debate. I don’t think the phrase “fifth column” is terribly helpful, and the word “un-American,” like “anti-American,” gets thrown around far too freely and quickly loses whatever significance that it may have had in the past, but no one should trust Noah Pollak to characterize anyone else’s views honestly. He has utterly and completely misrepresented TAC‘s work, which is typical but hardly defensible.

On a related matter, does Andrew actually disagree with anything Mr. Buchanan said in his latest column on Freeman?

Fareed Zakaria criticized the foreign policy establishment sharply in his last column, which has provoked some predictable howls of protest. Peter Feaver accuses Zakaria of offering “whitewashed assessments” of Obama’s record to date. This is what the so-called whitewashing actually looked like:

The administration has signaled a willingness to start engaging with troublesome regimes like Syria and Iran. Clinton publicly affirmed that the United States would work with China on the economic crisis and energy and environmental issues despite differences on human rights. She has also offered the prospect of a more constructive relationship with Russia. Obama said he was open to the prospect of talking to some elements of the Taliban in an effort to isolate its hard-core jihadis.

These are initial, small steps but all in the right direction— deserving of praise, one might think. But no, the Washington establishment is mostly fretting, dismayed in one way or another by most of these moves. The conservative backlash has been almost comical in its fury.

Feaver wants “more robust and evenhanded engagement” when discussing foreign policy challenges, but does not engage with anything that Zakaria said. Is it true that the administration has done what Zakaria says they have done? Well, yes, actually, it is. Is it true that these are small but promising signs of moving in the right direction? It certainly seems that way. Has the Washington establishment been fretting? Fretting might be too weak of a word, but the anxiety Zakaria describes seems real enough. Has the conservative backlash been almost comical in its fury? Again, yes it has.

For that matter, there is nothing “cartoonish” about Zakaria’s judgment that Bush was a foreign policy failure. On the whole, this judgment is correct. Yes, one can point to successes in improving the relationship with India and some achievements in Africa and one can even credit Bush with mostly benign neglect of China, but when someone scores 40% on a test we do not regard him as anything other than a failure. Should we actually be glad that the government embarked on the “surge,” which has failed on Mr. Bush’s own terms? Feaver’s remarks on the “surge” are the sort of conventional assertions that one might think our best foreign policy thinkers would eschew in favor of something resembling analysis.

I agree that there are reasons to be skeptical of Obama’s Pakistan policy, or lack thereof, and I think that his handlingof relations with India has so far been less than stellar. These are substantive policy questions that merit some serious consideration. Instead, what do we get from Feaver? Complaints about vetting and symbolism. Regarding Freeman, one reason Zakaria might not have raised the matter in this column is that he doesn’t see that appointment as a blunder. His interview with Freeman the other day on GPS was a model of that evenhanded engagement Feaver desires so greatly. If anything, the reaction to Freeman tends to support Zakaria’s description of unreasonable establishment dismay and comical conservative backlash. Given the number of foreign policy establishment figures who vouched for Freeman’s integrity and intellect during the controversy, one might suppose that one of the main causes of dismay in some establishment circles was the White House’s failure to defend the appointment rather than the appointment itself.

Feaver’s post seems an almost perfect example of the phony calls for “balance” in which matters of vastly different importance are supposed to offset and cancel each other. Bungling Zinni’s appointment as ambassador to Iraq was embarrassing, but on the whole that has not been the sort of thing that most of Obama’s critics have been emphasizing. Presumably, if one mentions that the administration is trying to thaw relations with Russia in order to advance certain policies that the Washington establishment supports, one must then “balance” this by mentioning that someone screwed up the translation on the gimmicky button they gave Lavrov and thereby negate the far more significant part of the story.

Now that Avigdor Lieberman has been named Israel’s Foreign Minister, it might be worth revisiting an earlier, speculative post written before the election. In that post, I was offering a guide to understanding when the U.S., western European governments and, of course, all of civilized humanity would treat another government as an anti-democratic monstrosity for including nationalist parties in its coalition and when they would ignore electoral victories by far more aggressive nationalist parties or even hail them as great democratic triumphs. The rule is simple: adhere to policies that either Washington or Brussels endorses, and your government is seen as either unremarkable or even as positively heroic, but resist or criticize them in any meaningful way and your government will be made into a pariah and possibly a target of sanctions. Unlike the Western treatment of Austria ten years ago for bringing the FPO into government, there has so far been some criticism of Lieberman, but almost none at all of the government or state in question following Israel’s inclusion of Lieberman’s party in government and his position as Foreign Minister. There have so far been no Western diplomatic protests or political sanctions, and it would be shocking if we did see any. This is the case despite the fact that Lieberman’s policy proposals that he actually wishes to see enacted are far more outrageous and illiberal than anything coming from European nationalists over the last ten years.

If we used the same standards applied when Israel recalled of its ambassador from Austria and Western governments made a concerted effort to isolate and humiliate Austria for respecting the outcome of one of its own elections, we would expect Israel to be subjected to an intense campaign of international condemnation led by Western governments. As it happens, the absence of official protest is the appropriate response, or non-response, just as the appropriate response in a number of cases involving European nationalist parties should have been similarly restrained and muted. If one wishes to weaken such political forces, it does nothing but build them up if other states target them, attempt to bully the governments of the countries where these parties exist or otherwise gin up hysterical overreactions to their political success. If one has even the slightest respect for the normal functioning of liberal democracy, electoral results should never be portrayed as anti-democratic as they so often were in Europe over the last decade. Lieberman and his attitudes toward Israeli Arabs are appalling, and far more so than anything that provoked such hysteria against Flemish nationalists or even Pim Fortuyn, but he and his party will only gain strength if they and Israel are singled out for penalties or sanctions.