Matt Yglesias

Weekly Standard Prepping for War With Russia

Russian soldier in Kosovo

Justin Logan observes that The Weekly Standard seems to have spun its Great Wheel of Enemies again and today we’re supposed to be getting ready to fight not Iran or North Korea but Russia.

After three paragraphs of suggesting that we should be doing more to get involved in military confrontations with Russia, John Noonan tosses off “No one wants to be drawn into conflict with the Russians” but then comes the inevitable “but”:

But it’s useful to remember that time after time, we’ve extended our hand to Moscow only to have it slapped away. Putin clearly has grand aspirations for his burgeoning CSTO, with Poland shaping up to be the new Germany in another round of US-Russian geo-political chess. If Moscow only understands the stern language of action and resolve, then the Obama administration must atone for shabby treatment of our key Polish allies and move quickly to strengthen defensive ties between our two nations.

The part about Moscow only understanding the stern language of action and resolve appears to have been generated by a crude computer program of some sort. Stripping away Noonan’s oodles of overheated rhetoric, however, it appears that rather than “grand aspirations,” Putin has just about the most banal aspirations of all—under his rule Russia will seek to influence events in much smaller and weaker countries that are in its immediate geographic vicinity.

Meanwhile Michael Goldfarb appears to be coming out against the civil rights movement in this post, perhaps under the influence of Max Boot’s trenchant critique of Brown v Board of Education.

Foreign Political Reformers Are Also Patriotic Citizens of Their Country

Mehdi Karubi

In one of the most telling and least-perceptive columns of the year, Jackson Diehl went to hear a spokesman for Iranian opposition leader Mehdi Karoubi speak at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and came away appalled. Karoubi, you see, wants political reform in Iran and not the neoconservative political agenda for the region. But rather than inspiring any rethinking of anything, Diehl just huffs and puffs.

The basic reality that neocons are going to have to grapple with if their nominal pro-democracy agenda ever makes any headway is that opposition leaders in places like Iran, Russia, China, etc. are still patriotic citizens of their home countries. I wouldn’t go the whole realist hog and say that the nature of the domestic regime has no relevance to foreign policy, but it has much less than the American discourse often seems to assume. In general, countries that have some specific fear of being overwhelmed by a stronger neighbor (think Poland) are going to be interested in more American power in their area, whereas countries that see themselves as fighting for a place in the sun (think Iran or China) will chafe at American power. We often see a construction wherein Iranian pursuit of the knowledge necessary to construct a nuclear weapon is somehow an outgrowth of Islamist ideology when, in fact, countries such as Japan and Sweden have pursued this path and the majority of nuclear weapons states are democracies.

Political democracy is great. And it does make cooperation on issues of mutual interest easier. But it doesn’t change the fact that there isn’t always mutual interest. It’s hard to envision a Chinese government embracing the Tibet independence movement (imagine the head of a large Indian tribe raising funds in Russia for an independence drive) or a Russian government smiling at the prospect of Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO (imagine Mexico signing a military alliance with China) under any form of government.

An Administration Win on Honduras

Unfortunately, foreign policy achievements have a way of not getting noticed if they don’t involve killing anyone with high explosives. This is too bad, since finding ways to resolve conflicts that don’t involve killing anyone with high explosives is generally preferable to approaches based on death and destruction.

So let’s take a time out to note that the Obama administration’s approach to Honduras looks to be paying off in the form of a deal that will temporarily re-instate President Zelaya in advance of new elections to be held in January. The US has an unfortunate history of backing coups in Latin America and an unfortunate history of heavy-handed involvement in Latin American domestic politics, so threading the needle between heavy-handed involvement and coup-backing was difficult. But they got the job done, and as Tim Fernholz says the results are likely to be appreciated throughout the region.

Commitment to Development

The Center for Global Development has put together a cool web ap that lets you see how different countries do in terms of being helpful to the developing world:

The United States is about average overall. Our standout categories are trade and security, we do badly on environment and aid metrics. Nicest overall country is Sweden.

Hard to Get

Robert Farley ends a post on Israeli dislike of the Bush-era Polish missile scheme with a nice observation:

It turns out, rather, that neither the Poles nor the Israelis care overmuch about the other; rhetorical support for the neocon vision of liberty/missile defense/bunker busting/awesomeness/sexy/democracy/whiskey collapses in the face of real world material interest. In the end, it’s almost as if our allies value material and institutional commitments to their defense more than they value a nebulous American reputation for “toughness”.

Something the United States seem to have lost site of, is that alliance with and assistance from the country with the biggest economy and the largest military on the planet is a valuable thing to have. This is especially true because since we’re geographically isolated up here in North America and also a friendly democracy with a somewhat robust commitment to human rights, most countries and organizations are going to see us as a more desirable partner than whatever the locally available alternative is. This is something that ought to be turned to our advantage. Pretty much everyone needs us more than we need them, which ought to give us all the leverage.

But a hawkish disposition and an obsession with toughness tend to erode our ability to play hard to get. For example, consider the widespread ideas that we’re fighting a “necessary” war in Afghanistan and that the cooperation of Hamid Karzai is vital to our success in that war. These two ideas, when put in combination, lead to the slightly absurd conclusion that securing the cooperation of Hamid Karzai is necessary for the national security of the most powerful country on earth. In the real world, it should be the other way around. We have interests in Afghanistan that it would be nice to successfully pursue. But Karzai’s interests are much more fundamental than ours. What’s necessary—or at least closer to necessary—is for him to secure our cooperation by acting in a way that’s helpful. And it’s the same for Poland and Georgia and all the rest. Relationships with friendly clients are nice to have, but the wise superpower should know how to play hard to get.

Neoconservatism’s Tradeoffs Problem

One of the signature elements of neoconservative foreign policy is a complete refusal to set priorities or talk about tradeoffs. Whatever problem we happen to be talking about right now needs to be met with bold and decisive action, casting caution to the wind, irrespective of how that impacts other things around the world. Matt Duss brings us a great example, the contradictions between the neocon approach to Russia and the neocon approach to Iran:

At an American Enterprise Institute event today — “Should Israel Attack Iran?” (yes, they’re obviously trying to get peoples’ attention) — former Ambassador Martin Indyk revealed an interesting wrinkle to the story of Eastern European missile defense system, which the Obama administration canceled last month, a move conservatives have heavily criticized as — what else? — appeasement.

Recounting recent meetings with Israeli national security officials, Indyk said that “the Israelis were upset at the way that Bush had offended Russia with missile defense” in Eastern Europe. The Israelis, like many Americans and most of the rest of the world, saw the deployment of untested missile defense technology in Poland and the Czech Republic as needlessly provocative of Russia, whose support is seen as necessary for any effort to bring Iran’s nuclear program under control.

A simple point but an easy one. Right-wing Israelis can easily afford to hope for the United States to take a neoconnish line on Iran. And right-wing Poles can afford to hope fro the United States to take a neoconnish line on Russia. But the desires of right-wing Israelis are in significant tension with those of right-wing Poles. And officials in the United States of America can’t realistically take a maximalist line on every point of geopolitical tension. Regional powers basically have their priorities set for them by circumstances. But the hegemon has the luxury of deciding what it cares about. That luxury, however, doesn’t eliminate the basic need to decide.

Was Irving Kristol a Neocon?

Nathan Glazer has an article about Irvin Kristol in TNR that, on its second page, makes the interesting argument that Kristol, despite being the “grandfather of neoconservatism,” didn’t actually hold the beliefs about national security policy that we now identify with that term:

Irving found the limitation of The Public Interest to domestic affairs confining and founded The National Interest, recruiting the wonderful Owen Harries from Australia to edit it and hoping it would provide a platform for a more realistic (I think that is the term he favored) approach to foreign policy. Oddly enough, such an approach was in contradiction with what came be known as “neoconservative” foreign policy: Irving was skeptical early on about imposing or promoting democracy in South Korea or Vietnam (he was wrong about South Korea), and, undoubtedly, he would have been equally skeptical about its prospects in Iraq and Afghanistan. The term “neoconservatism” was hijacked. In its early application, in the 1970s, it referred to the growing caution and skepticism among a group of liberals about the effects of social programs. It was later applied to a vigorous and expansionist democracy-promoting military and foreign policy, especially in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There was some reason to the hijacking–after all, a second generation of “neoconservatives,” some of it literally second-generation, was promoting this policy. But some of us who were labeled early as neoconservatives, a characterization not of our choosing, such as Daniel P. Moynihan, Daniel Bell, and myself, found it astonishing and unsettling.

Justin Vaïsse takes a more scholarly approach and reaches a similar conclusion in an FP article written about a month ago. I think this conclusion is pretty hard to square with the final five grafs of Kristol’s article on the “neoconservative persuasion” in the August 2003 Weekly Standard.

I think the way you put this together is with the observation that even though the high-level theoretical content of the realpolitiker 70s version of neoconservatism and the Wilsonian 2000s version of neoconservatism seem very different, the operational content is extremely similar. You have support for higher defense budgets, a tendency toward threat-inflation and hysteria, a belief in an aggressive military posture and extensive saber-rattling, hostility to negotiations, and hostility to international law both in theory and in practice. This was initially presented to the world as a “realistic” alternative to lefty critiques of US support for anti-communist dictators and more recently appeared as an “idealistic” critique of lefty reluctance to launch wars, but the continuity between the views is enormous.

Famine in Ethiopia

Ethiopia is in the grips of a new food crisis that the UN World Food Program says will require $285 million in international assistance over the next six months to avert mass starvation.

I don’t think we should construe the existence of famine conditions in the Horn of Africa (there are problems beyond Ethiopia) as a reason not to send additional troops to Afghanistan. But I do think it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t look at individual elements of our foreign policy in isolation, or see the Afghanistan situation with tunnel-vision. Is there some reasonable calculus of risks in which it makes sense to spend tens of billions of dollars on prevent a situation of chaos in Central Asia but doesn’t make sense to spend a fraction of that in the Horn of Africa? Alternatively, if the US lacks the tools and skills to solve profound governance and economic problems in the Horn of Africa why do we have the needed skills and tools to solve them in Central Asia?

Martin Plaut, the BBC’s Africa analyst, has this to say about the role of bad public policy in contributing to the situation:

There is no doubt poor and erratic rains have hit the Ethiopian harvest. But large parts of the country have not been hit by drought. So why the current crisis?

It is in part the result of policies designed to keep farmers on the land, which belongs to the state and cannot be sold. So farms are passed down the generations, divided and sub-divided. Many are so small and the land so overworked that it could not provide for the families that work it even with normal rainfall.

At present only 17% of Ethiopia’s 80 million people live in urban areas. Keeping people in the countryside is a way of preventing large-scale unemployment and the unrest that this might cause.

This does seem like a system that will make it very hard to increase agricultural productivity. Meanwhile, Oxfam has an excellent new report out called “Band Aids and Beyond” about the need for donors to do more in the way of giving communities the tools they need to prevent food crises, rather than just throwing them aid after disaster strikes. If I may toot my colleagues’ horn for a moment, CAP had a report on a similar, though somewhat broader, theme “The Price of Prevention: Getting Ahead of Global Crises” back in November.

Poland on Board for New US Missile Defense Plans

As predicted by neoconservatives, Poland continues to seethe with resentment at Barack Obama’s betrayal of their country:

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has declared his country ready to take part in a revised US missile defence plan. Mr Tusk told visiting US Vice-President Joe Biden that Poland was “ready to participate”. [...]

After meeting the Polish prime minister Mr Biden said: “We appreciate Poland has stepped up and agreed to host an element of the previous missile defence plan, and we now appreciate that Poland’s government agrees with us that there is now a better way… with new technology and new information, to defend against emerging ballistic missile threats.”

That was sarcasm, of course. Contra neocon bleating on the subject, Poland’s participation in the Bush-era scheme was always unpopular in Poland and the Czech Republic so finding an alternate approach is fine with everyone.

WHO/UNICEF: Diarrhea Kills 1.5 Million Children Per Year

UN officials calculate that 1.5 million children per year die of diarrhea, often easily preventable:

Ann Veneman, the head of Unicef said this was a ‘tragedy.’

‘Inexpensive and effective treatments for diarrhea exist, but in developing countries only 39 percent of children with diarrhea receive the recommended treatment,’ Veneman said.

A new vaccine was developed for Rotavirus, an organism responsible for more than 40 percent of all diarrhea, but it remains out of reach in most of the developing world, the UN said.

That’s former Bush cabinet member Ann Veneman, so it’s not like this is special socialist math or anything. I find it endlessly frustrating that these kind of stories go unremarked in elite political commentary circles, but whenever there’s some pseudo-plausible argument that launching a bloody, multi-billion dollar invasion of Iraq or Sudan or Burma or whatnot everyone’s buzzing about it.

The GAVI Alliance funds a rotavirus program in conjunction with the CDC and the WHO that could almost certainly use more funding. This kind of issue is also an excellent example of the kind of health problem where we should be trying to rely more on prizes than on patents to finance R&D.

Mutual Nuclear Inspections Are a Gain for the U.S. Not a “Concession” to Russia

Verifiable reductions in Russia nuclear missile stockpiles are a large gain for American national security. In order to get Russia to agree to reductions in their nuclear stockpiles, we need to agree to reduce our own stockpiles. Reductions in U.S. stockpiles are a gain for Russian national security, but they’re not a loss to American national security. We have no intention of launching a nuclear first strike on Russia, after all, and there’s nothing we could possibly gain from doing so. But of course American political leaders don’t want to agree to mutual reductions in weapons stockpiles unless the reductions are verifiable. Even though conservatives seem, in general, to have no comprehension of national security issues whatsoever I would think they could grasp this point since “trust, but verify” is inscribed in the Little Red Book of Quotations from Ronaldus Magnus.

And, again, for us to verify Russian disarmament we need to let the Russians verify American disarmament. And, again, there’s no loss to us in the this. The United States isn’t going to secretly keep missiles on line and we’re not going to launch a nuclear war with Russia. A deal for verifiable mutual disarmament is a huge, huge win for America. But as Joe Cirincione tweets out, the right is spinning the deal as some kind of unilateral concession to Russia.

Decline: It’s Not Really a Choice

Charles Krauthammer has a fantastically silly Weekly Standard article headlined “Decline Is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy.” Robert Farley makes some good observations about the piece but I think he lets Krauthammer’s central conceit off too easy, offering only a parenthetical remark about “a curious inability to admit that basic shifts in the international economy are occurring, and that these shifts make change in the political structure of international politics inevitable.”

This, however, totally undermines Krauthammer’s central point.

Nobody has proposed a halfway plausible mechanism by which the United States can alter the fact that India and China have a larger population than ours, or the fact that India and China and Brazil have economies that are growing faster than ours. Nor does there seem to be a plausibly method by which we can prevent the slow-but-steady progress of European political and economic integration. These trends are, however, steadily eroding the basis of American global dominance. They don’t make the end of American global dominance inevitable—I find it very plausible that China will enter a period of political meltdown and chaos long before it achieves economic parity with the United States, and it’s at least somewhat plausible that the same could happen to India. But this kind of thing is largely out of our control. For now, the trends are what they are and the question is how to respond to them.

Krauthammer’s central conceit ever since the end of the Cold War has been that bold acts of will can prolong the “unipolar moment” indefinitely. And he’s just wrong. He’s always been wrong, he continues to be wrong, and this interpretation of world affairs will always be wrong. It’s a remarkably elementary mistake that seems to evince no understanding of how the United States came to be the dominant global player in the first place. As if he thinks we’re top dog and nobody cares about Australia or Finland is because we just have more of a bad-ass attitude. Those are, however, actually some pretty bad-ass countries. They’re just, you know, small so nobody cares. If China and India were richer, we’d look small to them!

The main practical consequence of Krauthammer-style policies for international relations is to speed the spread of nuclear weapons. Having us behave in an alarming manner increases the desire of regional powers to acquire nuclear weapons and decreases the extent to which other great powers are inclined to collaborate with us on preventing nuclear proliferation.

Give Up Your Nuclear Weapons Program Or Else We’ll Damage Your Nuclear Weapons Program!

I understand the argument that the United States should give up on diplomacy with Iran and then follow that up with a hysterical overreaction and an unprovoked military assault. I disagree with it, but I understand what it’s proponents are saying. But when I read this kind of thing from Jeffrey Herf in The New Republic, I’m really baffled:

This brings us to the one policy option that Tehran truly fears–and thus the only one that gives these negotiations any realistic chance of success: a credible threat of military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States, perhaps joined by Britain and France, or Israel. If the Iranian leadership believed that such an attack was a real possibility, it, or some parts of it, might be persuaded to change course.

The idea that the threat of a bombing raid that would partially damage the Iranian nuclear program would inspire the Iranian government to voluntarily give up the nuclear program makes no sense whatsoever. Suppose I wanted Herf to give me $10. I figured maybe I could offer him various incentives in exchange for the $10. But it turns out that Herf is irrational or whatever and hell-bent on holding on to his $10. Reaching into his pocket and stealing $7 might have some merit as a response. But threatening to steal $7 in hopes of persuading him to give me $10 would be ridiculous.

I assume Herf actually understands this and just wants to see the United States launch an illegal preventive military attack on Iran. But he thinks that conclusion is likely to be unpalatable to his audience. So the idea that the credible threat of an attack is likely to produce a diplomatic win serves as basically the sugary coating to make the warmongering go down more sweetly.

Armenia and Turkey Making Peace

Good news:

Turkey and Armenia have signed a historic accord normalising relations after a century of hostility. The deal was signed by the two foreign ministers after last-minute problems delayed the ceremony in Switzerland. Under the agreement, Turkey and Armenia are to establish diplomatic ties and reopen their shared border.

Some Armenians aren’t happy about this. Tellingly, opposition seems especially concentrated in the diaspora community where they don’t need to worry about little things like the concrete ways in which reconciliation will benefit Armenian people. At any rate, times like this one can only wish there were some sort of widely-known prize that was awarded to peacemakers.

Putting Relative Decline in Perspective

I found a lot to like in Roger Cohen’s latest column, but I did think his point that Barack Obama is “setting the tone for coming decades that — whatever else they bring — will see America’s relative economic power decline” could use a bit of perspective.

If what you mean by relative economic power is America’s share of global output, then it’s important to recognize that we’ve been in a state of decline ever since the mid-1940s. In 1946, almost every industrialized nation on earth lay in a state of rubble and the US was something like half of world output. We’ve been declining, in relative terms, ever since. The other thing that’s happened is that countries have split and recombined in different ways. The Soviet Union was a much larger country than Russia, dividing it up into pieces made us look relatively bigger. At the same time, Western European countries have started to agglomerate. If you think that alongside the US, Japan, and China the world’s other major economy is Germany then we look a lot bigger than Germany. But if you think that it should be the European Union, the US, Japan, and China then we’re quite a bit smaller than the EU. Or if you want to make it the Eurozone, rather than the EU as a whole, then we’re slightly smaller. But of course in terms of political power the EU doesn’t have the kind of decision-making mechanism that can transform the large scope of its economy into strategic influence.

That leaves you with Japan, relative to whom we’re getting stronger, and China. China is important, but it’s still basically a country full of impoverished people. And even when you lump them all together, the total is much, much smaller than ours. In other words, insofar as we’re losing relative economic power this is mainly a result of already-rich European countries becoming more coordinated in their activities. Where they’re very coordinated, they’re very powerful—their central bank probably matters more than ours at this point. But where they’re not coordinated, things are much as they’ve been for decades and the US is by far the world’s leading power.

Meet the Zapateros (and remember how crazy John McCain was)

Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero posed for a photo with his family and the Obamas when he met with Obama when they were in New York for the UN meeting. The photo wound up posted on the White House Flickr page:

As Bobby Peirce points out at Foreign Policy, this wound up taking the Spanish press by surprise since over there they take the privacy of the family thing super-seriously and the public had never before seen photos of Zapatero’s daughters.

That’s mostly just a funny story, but it is worth recalling that this whole incident could have been avoided had America elected John McCain last November since he promised to continue the Bush administration’s insane policy of snubbing Zapatero. No meeting, no photo snafu. Except, again, refusing to meet with the head of government of a NATO ally in good standing was nuts.

Today I Found My Enemies; They’re in My Head

Spencer Ackerman recommended this post on lithium from CNAS’ “natural security” blog. I enjoyed parts of it, but this leapt out at me as a red flag:

But going forward, the center of lithium influence is likely to shift to Bolivia, since vast reserves lie beneath its Salar de Uyuni salt flats. For the United States, this could be a problem: the Morales government remains hostile to U.S. concerns, and there is potential for instability given serious rifts in Bolivian politics.

This mostly strikes me as an example of how the American foreign policy establishment’s ability to gin up “threats” to our national security is really impressive, and paranoia will be a renewal resource in our political discourse for the foreseeable future. Tom Lee informs me that this account is wrong in several technical aspects but even if it is this kind of “war for lithium” thinking is misguided.

Probably the best case for why it’s misguided is to just remind everyone about the Hugo Chavez experience. Venezuela controls lots of oil. Oil is a valuable resource. Not only does America use a lot of oil, but we really use a uniquely large amount of oil. And Chavez is hostile to US concerns. In the current parlance, he’s “anti-American.” And he’s got us over the barrel!

Except . . . he doesn’t. What happens is that at the margin Americans have lots of money and want more oil whereas Venezuela has lots of oil and wants more money so in exchange for money we get oil from Venezuela. It’ll be just the same with Evo Morales and his lithium. If US firms and consumers want lithium, they’ll have to pay money to the people who own it. But if the world’s largest lithium reserves were in Italy or Iceland or Ireland or Illinois it would still be the same—people who want access to lithium ore will need to pay money to the people who control it. Ownership of natural resources is useful insofar as it helps you get money. But developing countries whose economies depend on exporting natural resources need their customers more than we need them (if Iran stopped exporting oil it’d be a disaster for the US but a much bigger disaster for Iran) and it’s in everyone’s interests to keep the commerce flowing.

The Idea of a Bargain

Kevin Drum rounds up the latest in conservative humor:

Ponnuru: Chicago is out of contention….But I’m sure that Obama will be a lot more persuasive with the Iranians.

Miller: Wow, what an embarrassment for Obama. If he can’t work his personal magic with the Olympians, why does he expect it to work with the Iranians?

Lowry: We Can Take Some Comfort….in this distressing hour that the Iranians, Russians, Chinese et al. are push-overs compared to the International Olympic Committee. Right?

These are lame jokes, yes, but I also think they reveal the profound misunderstanding of how international relations works that exists on the right. The competition to host the 2016 Olympics is just that, a competition. It’s a friendly competition, yes, but it’s still a competition. It’s zero sum. If Rio wins, then Chicago and Sao Paulo and Tokyo lose. But the overall relationship between the United States and Iran is not a zero-sum competition. A world in which Iran accepts verifiable safeguards on its nuclear program in exchange for security guarantees and a relaxation of American sanctions is a world in which both the United States and Iran wind up better off. A world in which the US and Iran cooperate in Afghanistan is a world is which both the United States and Iran wind up better off. If we fight in Iran, we both wind up worse off.

That’s the idea, at any rate, and it’s just the same with US-Russia relations and all the rest. The idea isn’t that Obama is going to use his Mighty Death Stare and win concessions. The idea is that there are mutually beneficial deals to be struck.

“Appeasement” of Russia Paying Dividends

If every foreign leader had Adolf Hitler’s approach to international politics, then it would make sense to treat every foreign leader like Adolf Hitler. But somehow the American right doesn’t understand that Hitler was an unusual kind of guy, and insists on viewing every effort to engage in practical international behavior as the second coming of the Munich Agreement. In the real world, Obama’s approach is working:

President Obama, in his first visit to the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, made progress Wednesday on two key issues, wringing a concession from Russia to consider tough new sanctions against Iran and securing support from Moscow and Beijing for a Security Council resolution to curb nuclear weapons.

It shouldn’t be this hard to remember, but international conflict tends to hurt both sides (certainly Germany wound up much worse off as a result of starting WWII) and cooperation hurts both sides. Cooperation is often hard to achieve, but usually it’s possible and it’s always worth trying for.

The Lessons of Munich

When consider the right’s “everything is the same as appeasement of Hitler” approach to foreign policy, it’s worth wondering what general principle it is they think the failure of the Munich conference demonstrates. Obviously the calculation by France and (especially) Britain that allowing Hitler to integrate Austria and the German-speaking portions of the Czechoslovakia into a unified Germany would secure “peace in our time” was mistaken. At the same time, it’s important to remember (something that I suppose is easier to recall when you’re in Dresden) that invading Poland and launching World War II was a disaster for Germany. The strategy of appeasement on Czechoslovakia plus guarantees to Poland should have worked; everyone would have been much better off had the deal stuck.

Is the conservative view that, in general, when you offer foreign countries a deal that they rationally ought to accept they will, as a general matter, usually back out of the deal even though doing so will have disastrous consequences for them? That can’t be right. At the end of the day, the reason analogies to World War II strike people so vividly is that they were so unusual. You can’t base your everyday decision-making on an extreme historical outlier.

Eastern European Missile Shield is Unpopular in Eastern Europe

Something that’s gone missing in neocon hyperventilating about Barack Obama not wanting to build an expensive-but-useless missile shield system in Eastern Europe, is that Eastern Europeans don’t want us to build a missile shield in Eastern Europe. Here’s Andrew Roberts of Northwestern University breaking it down:

More to the point, the public in both countries has been decidedly lukewarm about the treaty to put it mildly. Below is a graph of Czech public opinion showing that over the past three years, a nearly unchanged two-thirds of the public has been opposed to construction of the radar and an even higher percentage has desired a referendum on the issue (presumably in order to vote against it; the data used to construct the graph are available here.) And this despite considerable government propaganda and public antipathy towards Russia.

I don’t have similar data on Poland, but a poll from August 2008 (when the treaty was signed) showed that 56% of the public opposed the missiles and only 27% supported supported them. Support rose somewhat in October 2008 (after the Russia-Georgia crisis), but a majority still opposed the radar (46% to 41%).

It can’t be much of a betrayal of our Czech and Polish allies to decline to build a radar system that neither the Czech population nor the Russian population wants us to build. The right wants us to at great expensive build a missile shield that doesn’t work, in places it’s not wanted, to protect Western Europe from Iranian missiles that don’t exist, in order to antagonize the Russians. The fact that it would make the Russians happy to kill the system somehow makes it a bad idea to kill the system. The Russians would also be mad if we bombed their naval bases—is it appeasement to decline to do so?

Spite-Based National Security Policy

Prague Clock Tower, Czech Republic

Today, the Obama administration announced officially that it will kill a Bush administration initiative to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic in order to protect Europe from Iranian missiles. This is a good call. Bush’s idea was hugely expensive, and massively illogical. For one thing, Poland and the Czech Republic aren’t in any sense between Iran and Europe. Nor is Iran actually threatening Europe with any missiles. Which is why nobody in Europe particularly wanted this thing built. The exception was the Poles and Czechs themselves who liked the idea as a token of America’s commitment to defend them against Russia. Which is how we wound up situation an anti-Iranian missile shield in a place that doesn’t make sense as an anti-Iranian measure, but does piss off Russia.

Conservatives, because they’re stupid and immoral, have decided that antagonizing the Russians is a feature rather than a bug of the program. Thus, Senator Jim DeMint thinks it shows “weakness” to stop wasting money on a useless but annoying-to-Russia program. Michael Goldfarb deems it “appeasement”. This is another example of inane spite-based thinking in foreign policy. Basically the idea is that if the Russians don’t want us to do something, we have to do it because otherwise we’re appeasing them and next thing you know Vladimir Putin will be marching on Paris.

Common sense indicates the exact reverse. In general, you should avoid antagonizing other countries and especially other major countries with which you have a complicated bilateral relationship. If you have some very good reason to want to do something that will antagonize Russia, then maybe you have to do it. But antagonizing them counts as a cost of the policy, not a benefit. When you take a program with a huge financial cost and no real security benefit, and then add the “Russia will be mad” factor into the mix the policy looks worse not better as a result. Matt Duss rightly sees conservatives’ anger at Obama’s decision as part of the catechism of Reaganism and the cult of missile defense, but it should also be seen as part of a broader conservative worldview that wants to lodge the United States in a lot of negative-sum conflicts and fails to see the possibility for positive-sum cooperation.

Foreign Aid at Work

(wikimedia)

Via Heather Hurlburt, the ONE Campaign notes the massive progress made recently in reducing child mortality:

“This enormous global progress-10,000 fewer children dying each day than in 1990-is something to celebrate and carry forward,” said ONE President and CEO David Lane. “We know that in countries where we invest in smart ways, we get results that save children’s lives. But 8.8 million children are still dying each year. There is much more work to do. Now is the time to accelerate the progress we’ve seen by expanding investments to tackle diseases that have yet to be targeted and to reach countries that are not seeing gains.”

UNICEF reports:

Public health experts attribute the continuing decline to increased use of key health interventions, such as immunizations, including measles vaccinations, the use of insecticide-treated bednets to prevent malaria and Vitamin A supplementation. Where these interventions have increased, positive results have followed.

Of course problems remain:

“A handful of countries with large populations bear a disproportionate burden of under-five deaths, with forty per cent of the world’s under-five deaths occurring in just three countries: India, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo,” said Veneman. “Unless mortality in these countries can be significantly reduced, the MDG targets will not be met.”

Trying to see what we can do to help India out with this problem seems to me like a much more realistic “democracy promotion” opportunity than trying to sponsor the overthrow of foreign governments.

Maybe We Shouldn’t Take Our Cues From the Delusions of Fringe Radicals?

Bret Stephens says we can’t ever leave Afghanistan:

In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. A little less than a decade later, the Soviets left, humiliated and defeated. Within months the Berlin Wall fell and two years later the USSR was no more. Westerners may debate whether credit for these events belongs chiefly to Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Charlie Wilson or any number of people who stuck a needle in the Soviet balloon. But in Islamist mythology, it was Afghan and Arab mujahedeen who brought down the godless superpower. And if one superpower could be brought down, why not the other?

Put simply, it was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan that laid much of the imaginative groundwork for 9/11. So imagine the sorts of notions that would take root in the minds of jihadists — and the possibilities that would open up to them — if the U.S. was to withdraw from Afghanistan in its own turn.

Whatever you think about Afghanistan, this is crazy. For one thing, as Matt Duss says, obviously al-Qeda is going to make propaganda hay out of whatever we do since that’s just what you do. But I would say the crucial issue here is that at the end of the day objective reality mattered much more to the Soviet Union than did the subjective feelings of the mujahedeen. The Soviet economy was actually dysfunctional. Popular resentment in the satellite states of Eastern Europe was running high. The regime lacked legitimacy. Ultimately all this proved much more important to the fate of the USSR than anything that happened in Afghanistan.

Fortunately, the United States is in much better shape than the USSR was. But it’s still the case that fundamentals matter most. Will we continue to have a productive, growing economy? Will we continue to have a cooperate relationship with other major economic and military powers? And as far as al-Qaeda goes, capabilities will always matter more than feelings. Do people want to perpetrate terrorist attacks against western targets? Can they acquire powerful weapons? In Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world we need to be focused on practical issues—mitigating the risk of terrorism through cost-effective measures, not worrying about what al-Qaeda’s going to say about us.

Drought in Kenya

The NYT’s Jeffrey Gettleman reports on drought conditions in Kenya:

So much of his green pasture land has turned to dust. His once mighty herd of goats, sheep and camels have died of thirst. He says his 3-year-old son recently died of hunger. And Mr. Lolua does not look to be far from death himself.

“If nobody comes to help us, I will die here, right here,” he said, emphatically patting the earth with a cracked, ancient-looking hand.

The same climate change that’s causing a surge in wildfires in California is also going to give us more droughts, more crop failures, and more famines. Human societies have, over the years, located their farms and population centers based on certain expectations about rainfall patterns. Upsetting those patterns upsets all those human arrangements and leads to starvation and death. Alternatively, as people try to relocate themselves to more viable land we’ll have war and death (and probably starvation too).

The World Food Program says there are four million Kenyans in need of assistance. That’ll cost $576 million but less than half the required amount has been raised. This is the sort of thing that makes it hard for me to take seriously the neoconnish mindset that’s extremely interested in international humanitarian issues if and only if humanitarian problems can allegedly be ameliorated by bombing someone or deploying American troops somewhere. The total bill for saving millions of people from starvation would be tiny compared to any military adventure. And yet the folks eager to wave the banner of “idealism” on behalf of launching wars are going to be nowhere to be found on this issue.