Discussing the pitfalls of tying U.S. policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan to meddling in the Kashmir dispute, I noted the unfortunate tendency in U.S. foreign policy debate to create unnecessary links between different, unconnected issues in the same region as prelude to a supposedly “comprehensive” solution. Via Yglesias, I see that Peter Berkowitz has given a perfect example of how this works in commentary on Israel and Palestine. The parallels between “grand bargain” arguments related to Pakistan and Berkowitz’s argument about Israel and Palestine are striking, and this reflects important structural similarities between the two cases. In both cases you have hard-line defenders of an occupation who want to use an unrelated regional security matter to advance their objectives in the occupied territory. In the Israeli case, invoking Iran is a way of distracting attention from its own policies and claiming that nothing can be done in the territories until Iranian intervention stops and the Iranian threat is neutralized. This is mostly a delaying maneuver, but it is also a way to channel international attention away from the territories and towards Iran, which is something else hard-liners would like to see. Suddenly, it is not perpetuation of settlements that makes negotiations extremely difficult, but Iranian intervention, which loads up the agenda for any negotiations with so many extraneous issues related to Iran’s position in the region that any progress on relevant issues is sure to be thwarted. In the Pakistani case, the military floats the idea of outside mediation in Kashmir and uses promises to increase pressure on the Taliban as leverage to win concessions that it could otherwise never hope to win, and then uses the “failure” to make progress on the unrelated Kashmir dispute a justification for its “inability” to do more in western Pakistan. Unfortunately, there is every reason to think that Washington will buy into both of these misdirections.

Via Blake Hounshell at Passport, Tom Ricks spoke on Meet The Press this morning about Iraq and Afghanistan and his new book, The Gamble. His comments on Iraq are important and need to be considered very seriously. “All of the basic problems that the surge was meant to solve are still there,” Ricks said. That is similar to what I was saying yesterday in connection with the elections. As practically every “surge” opponent said for the last two years, on its own terms of facilitating political reconciliation the “surge” clearly failed. This is why it has never been clear to me why advocacy for the “surge”–deepening our commitment to a war that we ought to have brought to an end years ago–is supposed to win someone a reputation for insight and wisdom. I have also never understood why war opponents are supposed to feel chastened for refusing to support the prolonging and escalation of an unnecessary war.

The Post is overflowing with commentary on sending signals today. If you are not baffled by Kevin Hassettadvertising for the Valentine’s Day racket discussing the science of mating, there is always Broder to provide his own, er, unique brand of political analysis:

Still, if real-world confirmation of Brownstein’s thesis were needed, the Republican National Committee furnished it on Jan. 30 when it elected Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, as the first African American to hold that post.

It was the clearest possible signal that the GOP realizes it must escape the shackles of its ideologically binding Southern strategy and compete in a more diverse, pragmatic and intellectually challenging environment.

Brownstein’s thesis is that the Democrats have established a reliable bloc of 18 states (plus D.C.) that have voted for their presidential candidate for at least the last five elections. This “blue wall” gives the Democrats a more or less automatic 248 electoral votes, which makes it much easier now for Democrats to win presidential elections. The thesis seems reasonable enough, but I fail to see how RNC chairman elections could confirm or reject it. According to Broder, Steele’s election is supposed to be evidence that Republicans have recognized how far their party has sunk, but the more I think about it the more it seems to me to be another in a long line of fumbling efforts to “re-brand” the GOP.

Republican party leaders have been trying to compete “in a more diverse, pragmatic and intellectually challenging environment” for many cycles. This gave us Dole-Kemp, “empowerment zones,” school choice mania, “compassionate conservatism,” No Child Left Behind, amnesty and “the ownership society.” In pretty much every case, the policies the GOP adopted as part of their lame but consistent efforts at “outreach” were deeply misguided, wildly unpopular or both. The GOP has been breaking out of whatever ideological shackles that once held it for over a decade, and in the end the results have been almost uniformly bad for them and the country. It was during this same period of shackle-breaking and “outreach” that the “blue wall” was built up. There is no question that some kind of adaptation to demographic changes is needed, but the GOP’s difficulty is that their answers are almost always the wrong ones.

For the most part, this is a function of pursuing minority voters least likely to be won over as a way of indirectly appealing to the sentiments of white moderates and independents rather than trying to craft policies that actually serve the interests of those moderates and independents. This is part of the GOP’s broader problem that it does not craft policies that serve the interests of most of the constituents it already has, but relies on signals, cues and lifestyle identity politics designed to mobilize people against the other party rather than to have any clear reason to support a Republican agenda. It is not surprising then that the GOP relies entirely on sending signals to moderates and independents through the adoption of bad policy proposals aimed theoretically at the benefit of entirely different groups, which creates a situation in which conservatives protest against these bad policies at the peril of sending contradictory signals that render the entire exercise pointless.

To the extent that housing policy of “the ownership society” brought about our current financial woes, the desire to be “compassionate” has helped plunge us into the worst recession in at least a generation. If Republican education reform ideas are now limited to school choice, it is little wonder that suburbanites now find little about the GOP that is attractive. Then again, considering the failure that has been NCLB, which punished the schools with the fewest resources by taking from what little they had to impose “accountability,” it might be better if Republicans steer clear of education all together. Indeed, at the national level this is exactly what they ought to do–make education once again entirely the concern of states and municipalities and give up on trying to craft some half-baked “market-oriented” federal education policy. Instead, as Steele has already indicated, the GOP is going to keep flogging school choice no matter how little the idea helps them.

All of this is guess-work, of course, but it has happened repeatedly throughout history. ~Michael Auslin

By “repeatedly throughout history,” Auslin seems to mean once. Naturally, this was during the ’30s and ’40s. One searches in vain for another example. Depressions in the 1870s and 1890s did not lead to general, large-scale conflicts among the major powers in any part of the world. The Panic of 1907 had no meaningful connection to the conflagration that followed many years later. The end of WWI saw an economic slump as the world adjusted to armistice and demobilization, but the war did not come about because of economic troubles. Looking back much earlier, we see that the bursting of the South Sea credit bubble happened to follow a prolonged period of warfare on the Continent, but the consequences of the end of the bubble did not facilitate war. The interwar period was extremely unusual in many ways, and if we use it as a model to base our expectations of what the next few years might bring we are going to be unnecessarily preoccupied with phantom threats. In the 1930s there was one major revisionist power deeply dissatisfied with the WWI peace settlement and an emerging, second-tier power that aspired to great power status, and you had a concert of status quo imperial powers that was going to resist them at some point. Conditions today in Asia are simply nothing like that.

Given the increasing dependence of the Taiwanese economy on China, China is more likely to buy out Taiwan than invade it. The Japanese public has no interest in military adventures. Regimes increasingly worried about social unrest enter into wars at the peril of being destroyed by revolution. It is stable, relatively prosperous states that can afford wars to distract their people. If Japan is facing “economic collapse,” it is not going to be in a position to engage in a war against its more heavily militarized and far more heavily populated Chinese neighbor. Anti-Japanese sentiment cultivated by Chinese nationalists is real enough, but the government is not going to make policy on the basis of that.

There has been a certain amount of cheering over the outcome of the Iraqi elections for a couple of reasons: the elections were not marred by serious violence, and the elections happened. This has led some to declare doubters of Iraqi democracy to have been wrong, but I am not quite sure how anyone comes to this conclusion. Four years in, most Westerners believed Russia to be an example of a largely successful transition to democratic government, and five or six years after that they would have had to conclude that the mass democratic element of the new system enabled the populist authoritarianism and illiberalism of Putin. This development is usually described as a “turn away” from democracy, but it is really just the natural end of democracy when democracy is not hedged roundabout with constitutional restrictions. Many of the same people who seem happy to claim that Russians are naturally prone to authoritarian government are horrified by the argument that democracy might not work well in a fissiparous multiethnic country with no significant tradition of constitutional government when it is part of one of our nation-building exercises. To some significant degree, Russians have rejected western European and American models because they associated them with national weakness and economic upheaval–how much more are Iraqis in the future going to associate the current system installed by a foreign occupation with the death and mayhem of the last five years? Do we really think that there is not going to be a backlash or political upheaval directed against the government?

Unless our forces maintain a permanent presence in Iraq to prop up the government, what will prevent officers in the newly-established Iraqi armed forces from seizing power in the event that the civilian government becomes too corrupt or ineffectual? We have seen in Bangladesh and Thailand very recently how the military will insert itself in the political process to topple corrupt elected governments, or at the very least the military has used the government’s corruption as a pretext to settle disputes that it has with the civilian leadership. Is there any precedent in modern Near Eastern history that would give anyone confidence that democratically elected government in Iraq will survive or that we can be sure that Iraq’s government is anything like the relatively stable democratic government of Turkey of today? Judging from the Turkish example, it might be several decades interrupted by numerous military juntas before we see something comparable in Iraq, and in the Turkish case the Westernized republican system was something imposed from within by nationalists and not from without, and even then it was not readily accepted and had to be imposed. Indeed, what will deter a future U.S. administration from colluding in a coup against the civilian government (or at least approving it after the fact) if that government seems to be tilting too strongly towards Iran? What will keep future Iraqi leaders from meeting the fate of either Mossadegh or Bhutto? The democratist cheerleaders likely have no idea, but they are positive that one more round of elections vindicates their fantasy.

Iraq has had yet another round of elections, but elections, as many of the same people would readily admit when it comes to Palestinian elections, are not always sufficient to create functioning, effective self-government. They may instead enable what we would consider to be some of the worst political actors. Nothing fundamental has changed in Iraq. The ruling party is still sectarian and Islamic fundamentalist in nature, and most of the other parties are still defined by religion, ethnicity or “secularism” (which is the main expression of Sunni sectarian identity), which portends continued tensions and rivalries among politicized religious and ethnic blocs. Even if they emphasize these differences less and stress their Iraqi identity more, the composition of the parties has not changed that much. None of the fissures in the Iraqi state has been healed. They have merely been covered over, and they will likely be exposed as Iraq experiences the woes of the global recession and declining oil revenues. Above all, Iraq is a petro-state whose political and economic stability depends on revenues from natural resource extraction and exporting, and the internal problems that Venezuela, Iran and others are facing as their oil revenues evaporate apply to Iraq as well. The temptation to become more authoritarian in a petro-state when its revenues are falling is strong, and there is nothing in modern Iraqi history that suggests that populist authoritarianism will not prevail there as it has in other democratized petro-states. In other words, even if Iraqi democracy survives all of the dangers listed above there is not much reason to believe that this will lead to good government.

A few days ago, I was asked to write about the final season of BSG, which continues tonight with the fourth of the final ten episodes, so here are a few thoughts on the season and where I think it may be going. Numerous spoilers follow. Don’t keep reading if you haven’t seen any of the new episodes.

Based on what I have seen so far this season and what I have heard and read in various interviews with cast and crew, the remaining episodes are going to be progressively bleak, violent and unpleasant. If the last three episodes have been unusually grim and depressing even by Ron Moore’s standards, the coming episodes are going to make these seem dull and peaceful by comparison. Those who have watched “The Oath” know that there is a full-scale mutiny going on. There is good reason to think that many more well-known characters are going to be killed off in fairly short order. Racetrack and Seelix are not long for this world. Assuming that Adama et al. eventually prevail, as I think they will, the mutineers are going to be executed in large numbers. Gaeta and Zarek will have to die, which will probably lead to an insurgency against Adama and Roslin by many of the ships that sympathized with the coup.

My guess is that at least one of the final Cylons is killed during the mutiny (bye, Anders!), which will provoke the rebel Cylons either to seek revenge and/or to abandon the fleet, and the death of one of the Five will provide the writers another excuse to create some hokey addition to their Cylon mythology. Maybe the Five survive through some process of metempsychosis, which might help to make sense of how they ended up being born on the colonies, so even if they kill off one or more of them they may not be gone from the show. Shortly after the mutiny, Cavil and the other models that did not rebel will reappear to harrass the divided, self-destructing fleet, perhaps with Ellen Tigh in tow. It seems to me that Moore will have no trouble coming up with a scenario in which the entire fleet and most, if not all, of the Cylons are annihilated in a final battle. I don’t see how he will settle for a pat happy ending at this point.

Richard Spencer makes a fair point that the 19th century saw an impressive degree of global economic integration at the same time that modern nation-states were gaining strength. By the end of the “long 19th century” in 1914, the world was as interconnected economically as it would be until the post-Cold War drive for integration that we have experienced for the past twenty years. The “long 19th century” was indeed the age of nationalism, and so it was also the dawn of the age of mass politics and mass mobilization for warfare, and the results of this age discredited fanciful notions that economic interdependence promotes everlasting peace and brotherhood. Specifically in its nationalist character, that age was the forerunner and preparation of many of the nightmares of the last century, and it was the cauldron out of which the original ideas behind most of the other nightmares emerged.

To the extent that the ruin of remaining traditional European civilization in WWI can be laid at the door of mass politics, nationalism and mass mobilization for warfare, these elements of 19th century history offer warnings of the damage that can be done to social and political order as a result of breaking down barriers and loyalties as part of a political and economic project to consolidate power and organize resources inside larger nation-states at the expense of their various regions. Once nationalism was triumphant and nearly universal in Europe, it encountered some limited resistance from holdouts of traditional societies, which it mostly co-opted or marginalized, but then mostly faced the strongest competition from different varieties of international socialism. Nationalism eventually ate away at the latter from within because of its greater mobilizing power. After the second war, modified forms of liberal economic regimes had grown up in the midst of the social democratic West with an increasing emphasis on neoliberal trade abroad and a continuation of state capitalism at home. Finally, the social democratic West outlasted its communist rivals.

Inside the social democratic West, with some exception here in the U.S., nationalism was giving way to larger projects of political consolidation and economic “openness.” Within the U.S., nationalism was harnessed to what Bacevich has called “the strategy of openness” to make an American-led globalism palatable to people in the one Western country where there was still widespread resistance to transnational organizations and rules. For most Western nationalists, globalization is of questionable benefit both culturally and economically, but in the American context most globalists embrace American exceptionalism/Americanism to provide the popular rhetoric for their agenda and most American nationalists end up either supporting or acquiescing in globalist policies because they believe them to be necessary to preserve U.S. hegemony, which they, as nationalists, are unwilling to abandon, just as they are largely unwilling to reject the foreign wars fought theoretically to shore up or expand that hegemony. It should be the case that nationalism in the U.S. produces steady resistance to globalism, but in a way similar to the British experience in the late 19th and early 20th centuries our nationalists’ energy has largely been channeled into support for aggressive or ‘forward’ foreign policy, and so it is not really an accident that the most nationalist party in the U.S. also happens to be most in favor of globalist trade policies.

Actual Bastiat-style economic liberalism perished in the West as a matter of government policy in the latter half of the 19th century and never really returned, which has not stopped globalists from dredging up classical liberal texts, including those of Bastiat, to browbeat people on the political right into accepting their policies. More than a few libertarians and “economic conservatives” today recite the lessons from these texts whenever someone challenges some aspect of the state capitalist system, usually pertaining to trade or immigration, and they vehemently insist that in doing this they are protecting economic liberty against encroaching statism or something of the sort.

Speaking of state capitalism and related matters, I have a new article in this month’s Chronicles discussing Lincoln and modern Lincolnism. Be sure to check out the entire issue in print, and look in at Chronicles‘ website for online versions of some of the articles.

As I was saying earlier, refusal to provide humanitarian aid to Gazans will not only embitter the population against those withholding aid they could send but will present Hamas with the opportunity to maintain and improve on its position as the provider of services and supplies. Haaretz reports that Hamas is doing just that very aggressively. In fact, Hamas has been so aggressive that it is attacking U.N. warehouses to seize the goods inside so that they can be seen as the ones distributing them, which is very much like biting the hand that feeds them, but Hamas has every incentive to take advantage of the siege conditions in this way.

Meanwhile, the debate outside Gaza seems to be mostly about the different methods to be used in punishing the Gazan population to “educate” them, as Friedman might say, in the folly of supporting Hamas. It is not just that the Gazans are going to learn a very different lesson from their misery than the one Friedman, Inbar, et al. expect them to learn, but that when it comes to competing for the loyalties of the population Hamas is currently the only serious competitor in a position to act. Isolation, sieges and coercion do not undermine Hamas, as should be obvious by now. Naturally, then, Israelis are poised to vote into power a coalition made up of parties that do not understand this at all and either believe that current policy is succeeding or that it has failed because it has not been “tough” enough.

It isn’t always reliable, but the rule I follow is that if an administration has done something to bother David Broder it has probably done something right or at least something smart. Regarding the Daschle mess, Broder writes:

Even when the White House belatedly learned of Daschle’s tax troubles, it misjudged the political fallout. Despite the glaring contradiction between Obama’s proclaimed ethical standards and Daschle’s lucrative expense-account life that led to his tax underpayment, Obama said he “absolutely” stood by his choice. One day later, he accepted Daschle’s withdrawal. This is a blow to Obama’s credibility that will not be easily forgotten.

Of all the things to criticize about Obama’s mistakes in the first few weeks, this seems the strangest one to hold up as damaging. Arguably, appointing Daschle or failing to investigate Daschle’s tax problems and insurance industry connections was the major blunder; quickly climbing down from support for the nominee was not. At what point did Obama’s habit of dropping inconvenient political allies and associates start to be seen as damaging to his credibility by establishment pundits. No matter how close to Obama they have been, friends and allies are thrown overboard with the greatest of ease after having issued ringing declarations of fidelity and everlasting bonds of trust. Remember “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community” or “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother”? The disowning followed a little later. Granted, it wasn’t the next day, but it is the same idea. After the Philadelphia speech where he made those remarks, in which he defended his membership at Trinity, it took all of a couple months for him to cut his ties with the church, too, after it had become just a little too embarrassing. Power says something offensive about his opponent? She is banished for the remainder of the campaign, and has returned to his camp only much later.

Now that Daschle, one of his patrons and long-time supporters, had become a millstone around his neck, he casts him away, and in this case the decision to drop him was obviously the right and smart move under the circumstances. This is how the man operates: when what is useful to his advancement at one point becomes a burden, he abandons it after a display of support to make it seem as if the abandonment is reluctant. It seems to be very politically effective, as Obama’s continued rise demonstrates. His fans will read this as a very hostile criticism, but it seems to me that it is just a description. After the last administration, when corrupt or incompetent officials had to be pried out of their positions with tremendous public pressure and criticism, and then only after some catastrophic failure on their watch, it is a welcome change to have a President who will throw his people to the wolves almost immediately.

The people who should be most upset by the Cabinet troubles are probably progressives, especially those interested in seeing some major health care legislation in the 111th Congress. Daschle was one of the few Cabinet selections whom progressives found unobjectionable, and some were even enthused by the choice, so it may be a sign of the administration’s priorities that he was made into the sacrificial offering while Geithner, whose competence and judgement in his last post are questionable at best, was kept on. Faced with comparable scandals, the relative centrist with Goldman Sachs ties stays on and the relative progressive health care advocate is dropped. Guardians of the status quo ought to be well pleased, which makes Broder’s complaints all the more strange.

Most would grant that Newsweek has been very favorable to Obama over the last year, so it is remarkable to find Michael Hirsh declaring that Obama has lost control and already has to mount a “comeback.” This is a measure of how badly things have gone for the administration in the last week. There is certainly something different about a President who can admit publicly and without much coaxing that he made mistakes, but it doesn’t inspire confidence that while just in its third week the administration has already managed to bungle the handling of multiple major Cabinet choices and finds itself criticized by friendly pundits for a lack of leadership. The comedy of the Commerce appointment continues after the embarrassment of Richardson’s withdrawal, which was only made necessary because of the need to placate interest groups who wanted to see Richardson in a significant Cabinet post and were disappointed that Clinton received the spot at State that they expected him to fill. The strange chain reaction can be traced back to the decision not to select Clinton as VP and the supposedly “clever” move to neutralize Clinton by bringing her into the Cabinet. That “clever” move, besides freezing out many Obama loyalists from top slots at the State Department and elevating to the top foreign policy post in the government a rival whose foreign policy judgement he regularly derided as poor, continues to have negative effects on the administration weeks later.