I’m sure the question of India and Pakistan will be at the top of Obama’s agenda; and, obviously, the issues of Afghanistan and the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran and North Korea–which he did mention–do involve Pakistan. But you have to imagine that another president-elect would have used his first big national security press conference to jump all over the national security issue currently getting the most headlines. ~Jason Zengerle

Zengerle also suggests that Obama neglected to say much about India and Pakistan out of a desire to be circumspect and non-dramatic. There may be some of that, but I think the explanation is slightly different. Having already seen the very negative Indian reaction to his Kashmir comments and his perceived “snub” of PM Singh, Obama probably wanted to avoid saying anything that might add to the already volatile situation. There is some similarity to his initial response to the war in Georgia, but he quickly adjusted his stance on that war to full-throated denunciation of Russia. There is already a great deal of suspicion about Obama’s intentions in India, which means that he probably thought it better to say nothing than to risk another controversy so soon and on the heels of a major terrorist attack. Had he re-stated his interest in mediating the Kashmir dispute in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, this would have gone down even more poorly in New Delhi than it did in recent months. As it is, what little he has said about possible Indian responses to the attacks is being interpreted in some Indian media as something like a green light for Indian retaliatory strikes inside Pakistan.

Peter Suderman declares his intention to pan Slumdog Millionaire, and Freddie says that he distrusts the growing consensus of admiration for the film. Having seen Slumdog this past Saturday, I found it thoroughly enjoyable, but you shouldn’t let anyone persuade you that it is a masterpiece. This is not normally my reaction to movies that I enjoyed as much as this one–I tend to suspend my critical faculties and indulge in the most over-the-top praise–but it’s not quite that good. It is very much worth seeing and certainly the best thing by Boyle I have seen, but comparisons with Serendipity, albeit a much grittier version of the same, keep popping into my head. That is an unfair comparison in some ways, as this is much better than that movie, but that is also the word that best describes the plot.

There are what I thought were some entertaining nods to Bollywood tradition, even though this is plainly not a Bollywood movie despite its Mumbai setting, and the story also acknowledges some of the themes of traditional romances. Indeed, the story could fairly be dubbed the dastan of Latika-Jamal. Showcasing the city’s riots of 1993 in one part of the film, it has all the hallmarks of secularist, intercommunal love stories such as Bombay and Jodha-Akbar. The one and only dance number, in a direct tribute to Bollywood films, comes at the end before the credits in an amusing send-up of the corny exuberance of Bollywood romances. These things are fun to notice, but they also remind the seasoned Bollywood fan how close to the saccharine romance and gangster films the entire plot really is. With all respect for the talent of Irrfan Khan, who continues to outshine his co-stars in everything he has been doing recently from The Namesake to Aaja, Naachle, the acting on the whole is good but not outstanding. Anil Kapoor does a passable job as the host. All the same, Omkara has more psychological complexity and depth. Boyle very artfully combines Jamal Malik’s (Dev Patel) appearance on the game show with the backstory, but Dev Patel’s stoic performance leaves you wanting more.

Keeping Gates in place sends the signal that Obama, who faces a host of hard jobs, is not eager to take on the Pentagon at the start of his presidency. ~David Corn

This seems right, but whether we’re talking about spending levels or anything else there was never much reason to think that Obama wanted to “take on” the Pentagon. This is the sort of thing that McCain surrogates wanted you to believe, but it was clearlynot so. Obama’s remarks that he wanted to cut out wasteful spending at the Pentagon could have been made just as easily by his opponent–and they were! As more than a few people noted at the time, Obama and McCain even supported cutting the same kinds of weapons programs. Now before Obama fans begin shrieking that I am saying that there are no differences between the two, let me state that this is not my point and I am not saying that. The point is that no one should ever have confused Obama for a Pentagon-fighting, “defense” budget-slashing type.

I wish I could hire whoever was responsible for managing Hagel’s P.R., because he continues to get credit for things he never did:

Obama may believe that Gates will give him the cover and continuity he needs to carry out his planned withdrawal from Iraq. But so could many others, including Republicans like Chuck Hagel who, at least, opposed the Iraq war.

I would be fascinated to know when Vanden Heuvel thinks Hagel actually opposed the war. If we define opposition broadly, every Democrat in the Senate save Lieberman “opposed the war” at some point because they came around to opposing it openly even though many of them voted for it. By contrast, Hagel voted for it and never really went into opposition in the same way that, say, Clinton eventually did. His critiques of the administration were the sort of thing we come to expect from most Republican realists–carping about tactical mistakes while having no fundamental disagreement with the strategy. What Hagel opposed, and what earned him all of that glowing press coverage starting in late ’06 and early ’07, was the “surge,” which is different from opposing the war. Republicans treated him as if he were a war opponent, which he never was, and antiwar activists desperate for a “credible” mainstream Republican to rally around liked to make the most out of his criticisms of the administration, but it simply has not been the case. Indeed, had Hagel been selected to Obama’s Cabinet we would have seen people rediscover all of this to drive home the point that there are no original war opponents among the principals in his national security team.

Instead, as one longtime observer of US-Russian relations reminded me the other day, in Gates, a veteran Cold Warrior, you have “an establishment figure with the longest institutional involvement in our failed Russia policies of anyone in DC.” ~Katrina vanden Heuvel

Well, yes, as I noted earlier, but even without Gates you have Biden and…Obama, who are both entirely on board with our failed Russia policies. Looked at this way, why wouldn’t they want someone like Gates at the Pentagon? Bill Richardson probably guaranteed that he would not get the State appointment when he made it clear earlier this year that he had at least half a clue regarding Russia when he said, “The problem, though, is that we don’t have the kind of influence and strength in our relationship with Russia to persuade them.” Keeping Gates on is one way to make sure that we won’t have these things in the future.

In the same post in which Freddie has given James and his realists a hiding, he said:

Ah, but of course, if there is one iron-clad rule to our foreign policy debate, one insisted on by realists, liberal internationalists and cons, paleo and neo [bold mine-DL], it’s that there is no “moral equivalence” between America’s actions and those of our antagonists.

Now this is odd. Paleos have been accused of many things over the years, but holding any identical view with these other groups with respect to U.S. foreign policy is not usually one of them. I suppose it does depend on what actions we’re talking about, but on the whole I think Freddie has rather badly misunderstood paleos if he thinks that we assume our government’s actions can never be morally equivalent to those of other states or of our enemies.

I think Freddie would find that this is one of many iron-clad rules of conventional debates that we do not follow, and I’m surprised that he doesn’t already know this about us, but it’s important to understand why we don’t. It isn’t to be contrarian, and it isn’t simply to play a senseless game of “well, what about [fill in with some past wrongdoing by U.S. government to score cheap point]?”, but it is to keep perspective that our government’s use of coercion and force is extremely dangerous and prone to abuse, just as it is with every state, and justice and a respect for truth demand that we try to keep our government from abusing such power and acknowledge when it has abused it. This is tied to our hostility to various triumphalist ideologies and armed doctrines and our critiques of nationalism, all of which have done more to justify dehumanizing other peoples than just about anything else.

If we’re discussing aggressive warfare, for example, I would make the case that over just the last twenty years the U.S. government has outdone pretty much every other state in waging such wars, at least if we’re talking about the sheer number of unprovoked military campaigns launched. These are illegal and unjust acts, and they are just as illegal and unjust when our government does them as when they are committed by other states. For all of the conventional talk of Russian aggression these days, for instance, Washington has been responsible for more aggressive wars just during my lifetime (at least three) than Moscow. That’s a rather troubling thought, isn’t it? I would agree with Freddie that it is hard to imagine someone from any of those other groups saying as much, but then that’s one of the reasons why paleos disagree with all of those people as often as we do.

As a realist and self-proclaimed “moderate hawk” (a gosling, perhaps?), James is also not happy with the term Hamiltonian to describe his foreign policy views. I can hardly blame him. Offhand, I’d say a chastened Hamilton looks rather like Hamilton post-duel, but that would be cruel.

On a more serious note, James said this:

Of course, people get antsy when you won’t cough up a grand ideology to match your grand strategy, but that’s sort of the point; and now I’ll make what looks like an about-face and suggest that, for someone not tethered to realism or neoconservatism as a matter of ideological principle, the Iraq war was not terribly chastening, even if it was formative, because some of us suspected from the beginning that there was really only one Iraq, and that the perfect storm of possibility, capability, timing, interest, and passion developed there in a way that simply won’t appear in any other country any time soon — especially given the way Iraq went down. Yes, for a minute there it looked like we could tip the extremely weak and craven regime in Damascus out of power, but in all the really serious cases — North Korea, Iran, Burma, or even Zimbabwe or Sudan or Somalia or Pakistan or Venezuela or Cuba! — the Iraq model of foreign policy simply won’t, because it can’t, apply. Iraq was a world-historical one-off that should offer a host of wisdom about what sort of businesses the US should and shouldn’t be in. But in the main I think the “lessons learned” in Iraq are ones we already knew or should have known, and that includes the lessons that could have made the occupation of Iraq far more successful.

Well, that’s one answer to my question, and it is just as unsatisfying as I thought it would be. It’s true enough that the Iraq model won’t ever really apply again, because the many contingencies that made this war possible will not recur. There will never be quite the same confluence of a pompous Baathist dictator, unchecked American power, a decade-long, U.N.-approved siege of an entire country, an equally long propaganda campaign to get the public used to attacking Iraq and an opportune moment to wrap a random invasion in the mantle of antiterrorism and non-proliferation. That doesn’t rule out making similarly awesome blunders in different ways in another part of the world. The next great blunder will probably not be a preventive war, but will be some other inadvisable form of power projection in a region Americans poorly understand (i.e., any region outside of the United States). The central problem with the argument for the war in Iraq was not the particulars of the case regarding WMDs, Al Qaeda or even the supposed Iraqi threat to its neighbors, but that it took for granted that our government essentially has the right to shape and dominate the politics of other parts of the world and to use force to quash resistance to its efforts.

Bearing that in mind, several items on James’ internationalist agenda seem to me to have the potential to be quite calamitous in their own ways, and most of them partake of the same mistaken pursuit of hegemony. To the extent that his agenda does not endorse the pursuit of greater hegemony, it assumes that the means exist to accomplish some remarkably ambitious goals. As Freddie objects, James’ agenda includes quite a few items that entail the United States managing, dominating or otherwise dictating terms to the rest of the world:

I count one two three four five of the eight that are simple questions of imposing American wishes onto foreign shores, and I’m not confident the other three can possibly be undertaken by this America without become [sic] yet more excuses for military aggression, destructive espionage and adventurism.

James protests that there has to be something in between what he calls “foreign policy autism” and “globo-cop faux imperialism.” Indeed there is something, since no one actually defends the former and I am fairly sure James wants nothing to do with the latter. More important, there are many different alternatives between the (non-existent) foreign policy autistic and the “faux-imperialist,” and some of these would involve not confusing management of/interference in other states’ affairs with engagement with other states. The trouble that I and Freddie are having with realist internationalists is that they tend to treat their alternative as the only thing available besides reckless jingoism and terrapinesque withdrawal, which is a foreign policy debate way of saying, “We’re the only other game in town” or “Don’t throw your vote away.”

There are items on James’ agenda with which I am somewhat sympathetic. Not wanting Russia to be our enemy is good, albeit entirely negative. Wanting India to be the leading power in its region is not necessarily a bad idea, but it is something that will happen with or without our “help” and it is not obviously in the American interest to entwine ourselves too closely with India, or else we could wind up as an outside guarantor of Indian interests in a way that commits us to supporting New Delhi in future conflicts. There is a separate problem that “managing” China’s rise and helping build up India are create a dangerous dynamic where India becomes our front-line state in an anti-China containment policy (indeed, this has been more or less the stated reason for improved relations with India over the last decade), which tends to make it more likely that China’s rise will be undermined and that in any case it will not be peaceful.

Looking at some of the other items, Europe may or may not take on the role of a “global assertive power,” but once we get beyond euphemisms about “burden-sharing” what this means is that the U.S. will try to get Europe to become stronger internationally than it already is to supplement continuing U.S. power projection rather than replace it. Contra James, I think building up Europe as a “robust, self-respecting, great-power” will ensure that Russia becomes more hostile to the West. When we talk about preventing Pakistan from doing or becoming anything, we have to bear in mind that Washington has little leverage or is unwilling to use it. In South America, we would not need to support Morales, but simply stop pretending that Morales and Chavez matter and cultivate normal, productive relations with the states that do matter.

As I have been, Freddie is understandably frustrated by the narrow range of options that are considered viable alternatives, especially when we are told time and again that the only other real alternative to this and the perpetual war crowd is to shrink inside our shell. Clearly, there are other alternatives, including those offered by different kinds of conservative and libertarian realists, that are much more restrained in their goals.

So one of two things happened. Either Clinton has embraced Obama’s vision for fundamental change, or Obama has succumbed to “conventional Washington thinking.” ~Philip Klein

Notto be a broken record, but of course it is the latter. Well, except that he didn’t “succumb”–he embraces the conventional thinking, just as he does wherever he goes. As his political universe has changed and expanded, the conventional thinking he has had to embrace changed as well. This is what his friends and admirers call pragmatism, and it is a function of the temperament that Obamacons invoke when pressed to explain their support. This has been reasonably clear for at least the past several months. When running against conventional Washington thinking suited him as an outsider and challenger candidate, he did that. Now that he is firmly ensconced in Washington, conventional Washington thinking will be all right. This isn’t an accusation or even that much of a complaint–I have given up complaining about Obama’s conventional ways. At this point, it is merely a description. As I said immediately after his election:

If you have a high opinion of the Washington establishment and bipartisan consensus politics, Obama’s election should come as a relief. If you believe, as I do, that most of our policy failures stretching back beyond the last eight years are the product of a failed establishment and a bankrupt consensus, an Obama administration represents the perpetuation of a system that is fundamentally broken.

Most people in the broad “middle” seem to be relieved by Obama’s moves in the last few weeks, so I have to conclude that they don’t have much of a problem with conventional Washington thinking, either. The majority is not just getting the government they deserve, but apparently it is also the government they want. When it fails them, as it is going to do, I don’t want to hear them complaining about the problems of the status quo.

Barack Obama has rightly recognised the ability of Kashmir to unsettle India and Pakistan, and distract both from fighting terrorism. He has said that he wants to help to resolve it. India’s traditional position is that outside intervention is unjustified and unwelcome; Kashmir, it says, is purely a bilateral dispute.

But at this point, that stance looks myopic. India is right to call for pressure on Pakistan – but that makes sense only if it is done in a way that recognises how fractured that country now is, and how its own urgent need for stability gives it different priorities from the West. One of the few things that India, and other countries, can help do is to move towards agreement over Kashmir. Obama is right that if it is not solved, this will be the cause of wider terrorism. ~Bronwen Maddox

This is an odd thing to conclude. When India is struck by gruesome terrorist attacks in one of their major urban centers, the imperative thing they must do is to yield on an issue many of them consider basically non-negotiable? This would be perceived in India as rewarding the jihadis who attacked Mumbai and their sponsors, whoever they may have been, as well as rewarding the Pakistani military for playing their old double game of sponsoring cross-border terrorism while claiming to oppose extremism at home*. Westerners have an odd habit of identifying the solution to a foreign problem in the one place where at least one of the nations involved is least likely to give any ground. Indo-Pak talks on Kashmir had already stalled, and they are even less likely to be revived now. It is therefore obviously the key to the region’s problems, because some new settlement of the dispute is now completely out of reach.

Maddox has made Obama’s interestin Kashmir seem much more even-handed than it is. The Ahmad Rashid argument for including Kashmir in a grand bargain is that it will provide Pakistan with recognized, secure borders, which he believes will make the Pakistani government more willing to collaborate in the west, and this is essentially the same as Obama’s position. Neither Rashid nor Obama is particularly interested in whether Kashmir distracts from India’s other antiterrorism efforts; they are concerned that the status quo in Kashmir distracts Pakistan from fighting in the west. One reason that Indian reaction to the suggestion of mediation has been so negative is that it is clear that India is being pulled into the “grand bargain” only insofar as it helps to put the Pakistani government at ease; the grand bargain is indeed a bargain for Pakistan, but it is not at all clear what India would get from cooperating.

Indeed, to the extent that India’s antiterrorism is primarily an effort to fight cross-border terrorism from Pakistan and PoK and terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir, Kashmir is at the center of India’s “war on terror.” The Indians might just as easily reply to any suggestion of American “mediation” of the Kashmir dispute that the U.S. should give up on Afghanistan and forget about Al Qaeda, and even that would not really begin to explain how unrealistic a suggestion it is for India to “move towards agreement over Kashmir.”

* I am assuming for the moment that elements of the Pakistani military were not involved in sponsoring these attacks.

Ross:

But the conservative coalition ought to naturally produce realists from its ranks, for their sake and its own, because realism’s cold-eyed pursuit of the national interest is the most logical and productive elite-level expression of the Jacksonian, don’t-tread-on-me nationalism that holds sway among a large swathe of the conservative base. Neoconservatism can and should speak for part of the American Right, but it can’t speak for the whole of it; it’s [sic] Wilsonian impulses will always be a bridge too far for many conservatives whose instincts run instead toward “to hell with them” hawkery. This “more rubble, less trouble” tendency within the Right’s coalition needs to be channeled in a constructive direction by the right-wing elite, or else it runs toward jingoism and folly of various sorts.

Reading Ross’ earlier post in light of his more recent comments, I am a bit puzzled. Proposing that a “coalition of the introverts” (i.e., an America First coalition on the right) would be unsuitable to govern, Ross nonetheless seemed to concede in his later post that the most logical, if perhaps not the most productive, expression of don’t-tread-on-me nationalism would have been Ron Paul-style “Jeffersonianism.” Leaving aside certain direct symbolic appeals to libertarian populist, don’t-tread-on-me sentiment (e.g., the frequent appearance of Gadsden flags at Ron Paul events and the flag’s popularity among Ron Paul supporters), it is not clear why realists/”Hamiltonians” offer the better elite expression of the “Jacksonian” nationalist view.

If Jacksonians tend to support wars when they are declared/launched far longer than any other group because of strong cultural habits and traditions of military service, but are themselves unconcerned and usually uninformed about international affairs, the typical elite complaint about them is that they are not zealous enough for this or that grand mission that Wilsonian and Hamiltonian elites have planned for them. This is what had Fukuyama (who must now be also be classed among the “Hamiltonians”?) agitated several years ago. To be blunt, jingoism and folly are the provinces of the Wilsonians and Hamiltonian elites who by and large pushed for or acquiesced in the Iraq war. These elites have not channeled Jacksonian nationalism in a constructive direction, but on the whole exploited it in a crisis and pushed the Jacksonians in rather destructive directions, and I do not see what will change in this dynamic in the future. “More rubble, less trouble” and “to hell with them” hawks are expressing the frustration of Jacksonians who have been conned or misled into foreign adventures on what were supposed to have been national security grounds that later gave way to woolly-minded nation-building projects. Had they not been incited by elites to support the adventure based on exaggerated threats abroad, they might not have been hawks in the first place. Before they said “to hell with them,” Jacksonians said, “Why bother?”

It is also taken for granted here that Jacksonian nationalists are not to have elites from their own ranks, because they are otherwise ruled unfit for government, and so they must be led, channeled, and directed by others. Even though the Wilsonians erred very badly, as Wilsonians will, and, as Ross said, “many of [Hamiltonianism’s] practitioners, starting with the buffoonish Chuck Hagel, did not exactly distinguish themselves during the debates over the Iraq War,” these groups are still going to be permitted a leadership role in formulating center-right foreign policy thinking? On what grounds? If realists/Hamiltonians failed to lead and failed to distinguish themselves during one of the most important foreign policy debates of the last 20 years, why should Jacksonians or anyone else want to be “channeled” anywhere by them in the future? If up and coming realists were chastened by Iraq, what exactly have they learned that would distinguish them from the older realists who failed?