Matt Yglesias

Jackson Diehl Pronounces Obama’s Foreign Policy a Failure After Three Months

Jackson Diehl becomes the latest to erect the straw man that Obama’s supporters thought world problems would simply melt away in the face of his charm and willingness to negotiate, and point out that the world still has problems. To this I mostly recommend Ilan Goldenberg’s response but I think one other way of thinking about what Diehl has wrong here is to think about how we should assess George W. Bush’s dealings with China.

I think by Diehl standards you’d have to consider Bush’s China policy to be a catastrophic failure. After all, China’s not a democracy. It hasn’t dropped its claims to Taiwan. Nor has it dropped its territorial claims in the South China Sea. They still treat Tibetans poorly. They didn’t do what we wanted them to do with their currency. They continue to build up military forces. They haven’t totally done what we wanted on Iran or North Korea. They voted against us at the UN on Iraq. And wherever we’ve tried to isolate regimes in the world, China has proven willing to step up and fill the void. A disaster!

But in real life, this evaluation would be hideously unfair. The US-China relationship is an inherently problematic situation—the global hegemon and main architect of the existing international system vs a rapidly rising power whose massive population makes it a plausible contender to overtake us at some point in the future. China is too big too ignore, but also too big to be coerced or easily bribed. It’s a tough situation. And potentially it’s a dangerous one. “Success,” under the circumstances, means a continuation of cordial relations and brisk commerce rather than a downward spiral of recriminations and proxy wars. And the Bush administration did a perfectly admirable job of continuing the success of its predecessors in this score. You can think about it this way—Bush took us through a difficult period and left the relationship in good enough shape that nobody had a fainting spell when Obama shook Hu Jintao’s hand at the G-20 summit. The world’s two most important countries cooperating in a routine and non-dramatic manner is a good thing and preserving that dynamic as China gets richer and more powerful is both difficult and important. This is a real contrast to Bush’s approach to Russia, Europe, Latin America, and the broader Middle East where difficult situations just got more and more difficult thanks in part to terrible policymaking.

Back to Obama. Since late January, he’s succeeded in laying the groundwork for important bilateral cuts in US-Russian nuclear arsenals. He’s set the stage for possible normalization of relations with Cuba down the road and produced at least some positive signals from the government of Iran. He’s apparently ended the pointless and bizarre war of over-the-top rhetoric between the United States and Venezuela. And international cooperation against piracy seems to be intensifying. I’d say it’s a promising start. All the world’s most serious problems are still with us, but things have improved on several fronts. International relations is inherently complicated and there’s no short-time way of achieving a problem-free planet. If things are getting better rather than worse, you’re doing a good job.

Is Restraint Unpopular?

Ilan Goldenberg writes that one reason academic realists have become marginalized in policy debates is that politicians think a policy of restraint isn’t politically feasible:

These days the realist perspective is all but non-existent in Washington. A large part of that has to do with the fact that their ideas are so politically unpopular that they are simply dismissed out of hand as unrealistic. Many realists have come to the conclusion that as an unfettered unipolar power the United States will inevitably overextend itself and scare others into aligning against it, and thus over time weaken itself. The best prescription for this is retrenchment that includes dramatic reductions in military spending and the reduction of our presence around the world – very politically unpopular ideas.

These two formulations are slightly different, and I think it’s important to distinguish between them. The public doesn’t tend to have detailed views on foreign policy issues, but it’s generally sympathetic to the idea of more restrained foreign policy. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs does a regular biannual survey of the American public, and the 2008 edition found “that a strong majority of Americans (63%)
want the United States to play an active part in world affairs” but also that “as Chicago Council polls have found in the past, Americans do not want to play the role of world policeman, with 77 percent believing the United States is playing this role more than it should be.”

There can, however, be other kinds of political impediments besides public opinion. The congressional politics of a restrained defense budget are terrible, because the main projects are deliberately located in the districts of the key committee members. The incentives of the news media tend toward amplifying hysteria and overreactions when specific incidents emerge. Presidents tend to be biased toward foreign policy activism because they can play a more unrestrained hand in that field than they can on their domestic issues. And virtually all the key interest groups working on national security policy do so in order to advocate a forward-leaning posture.

And beyond all this, elite opinion in the United States is much more gung-ho about foreign involvements of various kinds than is the public at large. So there’s a lot going on besides popularity. And foreign policy is hardly the only issue on which that’s the case. Big-time politicians have pretty good reasons for not making single-payer health care the core of their domestic policy agenda, but those reasons aren’t really about what’s “popular,” they’re about what’s possible in a constrained system.

Paranoid Right-Wing Says Tiny, Isolated, Impoverished North Korea Has “Upper Hand” in Relations With U.S.

One of the strangest things about the American right’s thinking about foreign policy is it’s ability to combine sublime overconfidence in the likely efficacy of using military force with a panicky and paranoid view of America’s general position in the world. Thus we get things like Joseph Loconte, a contributor to The Weekly Standard, fretting that North Korea now has “the upper hand” in its relations with the world.

As John Boonstra points out this is nuts:

North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear plant — which persistent diplomacy succeeded in shutting down in in Bush’s second term — could not even be fully re-started for at least six to twelve months. In the meantime, the United States and Japan have put forth the names of companies to be targeted by the Security Council committee responsible for administering sanctions on North Korea. While it’s conventional to depict North Korea’s nuclear breakout as a ticking time bomb scenario, it’s really the country’s own leaders who are running out of time and credible options here.

With the climate so soured against it, any North Korean gambit to resume nuclear production seems designed to offer up bait to American hawks and split the United States off from the other six-party participants. China, not the United States, is the most important actor in this regional drama, and constructive Sino-American diplomacy here will bring far greater benefits than getting caught up in a war of rhetorical (let alone military) escalation with a feeble and desperate regime.

Iran is at least a legitimate regional military power in its part of the world. North Korea is weaker than South Korea, weaker than Japan, weaker than China, and of course also weaker than the United States. It’s poor and it’s isolated. It’s also a very frustrating situation. The DPRK leadership refuses to take a reasonable path and it does seem likely that until there’s some change at the top we’re going to see constant outbreaks of crises of one sort or another. But managing the problem is far from impossible. The DPRK doesn’t really have any cards to play beyond hoping that wild gambits will provoke wild counteractions that disrupt the coalition against it.

Non-Turnarounds on Afghanistan

Starting in 2002-2003, many Americans were opposed to the war in Iraq. And over time, that group grew to include more people. Since opposition to the war was pretty broad-based, war opponents including people with a great diversity of views on foreign policy and national security questions, including some people on both the right and the left who are very strongly opposed to foreign military operations writ large. All of which is fine. What’s not fine, I think, is the way that a lot of my colleagues here at the Center for American Progress are now finding themselves accused of hypocrisy or some sort of opportunistic turnaround for not thinking the same things about Afghanistan as some of their fellow opponents of the war in Iraq. This item from Justin Raimondo at The American Conservative caught my attention in particular since it mentions me by name:

The Center for American Progress, a liberal-Left think tank that sheltered many foreign-policy analysts who opposed the Iraq War and was beginning to develop a comprehensive critique of global interventionism, has recently issued a report on Afghanistan that includes a number of short-term, medium-term, and long-term (ten-year) goals, including among the latter:

* Assist in creating an Afghan state that is able to defend itself internally and externally, and that can provide for the basic needs of its own people.

* Prepare for the full military withdrawal from Afghanistan alongside continued diplomatic and economic measures to promote the sustainable security of Afghanistan.

Simply substitute Iraq for Afghanistan, and what we get is the war policy of the Bush era. That the center is run by John Podesta, who served as Obama’s transition chief, is perhaps explanation enough for the complete turnaround. One wonders, however, if the center’s more anti-interventionist scholars, such as Matthew Yglesias, whose popular blog has attracted a substantial audience, will be forced to toe the new line—or be forced out.

As I’ve said before there’s no need to find an “explanation” for the “turnaround.” The authors of CAP’s recent report on Afghanistan have long held the view that we should send more troops to Afghanistan. This is what they wanted in 2005, it’s what they wanted in 2006, it’s what they wanted in 2007 (and again). This became Barack Obama’s position during the 2008 campaign, and became his policy as President in 2009, but this is a case of Obama coming around to something similar to the CAP view and not the reverse.

Will I be toeing the line? Well, I think Raimondo and I won’t be in complete agreement about this issue, just as we’ve never been in complete agreement about the engagement of American military force abroad. But people are invited to read my posts on Afghanistan and draw their own conclusions. I would say that I’m cautiously supportive of what the administration’s outlined but I’m worried about the logic of escalation and think it’s necessary to put some meaningful benchmarks in place lest we get stuck in a hopeless quagmire.

But on the general subject of “intervention” I think it’s helpful to draw distinctions. This week I wrote one column arguing against folks who want to invade Somalia and another about how the defense budget should be cut. I’ve inveighed many times against the advocates of preventive military strikes against North Korea and Iran. And in general, I’m dubious that the United States should be using force outside of the cases of self-defense, defense of an ally, or a mission authorized through the United Nations Security Council. That makes me a lot less of an interventionist than most of the powers that be in Washington, though still more of an interventionist than many other people. But it’s not a form of hypocrisy; it’s a different opinion. Both the legal status and the situation on the ground in Afghanistan are different from the situation in Iraq.

Do We Need a Mexico Lobby? Should We Fear One?

Yesterday, someone asked what I thought of this post at the Latino Politics Blog calling for the creation of a “Mexico lobby” along the lines of the Israel lobby or the Cuba lobby. My first thought, of course, is that the author of the piece is a raging anti-semite as is everyone who thinks that the US-Israeli relationship is the result of domestic ethnic lobbying efforts rather than an exquisitely rational calculus of American national interests.

Joking aside, I think the issue here is that the Mexican-American population is probably too big to support a cohesive “lobby” pushing a very specific agenda. Beyond that, the US-Mexican relationship is already very close. Our countries are adjacent to one another, have very integrated markets in most goods and services, and obviously there’s a lot of flow of people across the boarder. This means that the main issues on the US-Mexico bilateral agenda—NAFTA and immigration—are both big time issues in American politics writ large. They’re not under-the-radar things that are amenable to narrow lobbying. The result is that Mexican-American participation in these issues, though both quite influential and quite real, has a totally different flavor from efforts to court Cuban or Jewish voters or donors through appeals related to Cuba policy or Israel policy.

In Defense of Norman Angell

I was pretty surprised to see Daniel Drezner list Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion as one of the ten worst international relations books ever, and even more surprised when it became clear that Drezner knows perfectly well what the book says:

This book has been widely misinterpreted, so let’s be clear about what Angell got right and got wrong. He argued that the benefits from international trade vastly exceeded the economic benefits of empire, and therefore the economic motive for empire no longer existed. He was mostly right about that. He then argued that an enlightened citizenry would glom onto this fact and render war obsolete. Writing this in 1908, he was historically, spectacularly wrong.

Let’s think this through. In pre-WWI intellectual circles you had Angell arguing that imperial competition and war would be self-destructive and therefore war wouldn’t happen. He was right about the analysis but mistaken about the prediction. But at the time, other main schools of thought included a nationalist approach which held that imperial competition and war would be awesome and therefore war should be welcomed and a Leninist approach which held that imperial competition and war were inevitable under capitalism and therefore Soviet-style revolution and Communism would be a good answer.

Put alongside the architects of the disasters of 1914-45, I think Angell comes out looking pretty good. Was there an important mistake in his analysis? Yes. But to this day, one can learn a lot of important things from Angell’s argument, and unlike the other ideas in the air at the time Angell’s didn’t cause any catastrophes. His book is an important one, and certainly not one of the ten worst ever.

Change on Cuba Policy

Obama administration announced some steps today to begin moving our Cuba policy in a more sensible direction:

– Lift all restrictions on transactions related to the travel of family members to Cuba.

– Remove restrictions on remittances to family members in Cuba.

– Authorize U.S. telecommunications network providers to enter into agreements to establish fiber-optic cable and satellite telecommunications facilities linking the United States and Cuba.

– License U.S. telecommunications service providers to enter into roaming service agreements with Cuba’s telecommunications service providers.

– License U.S. satellite radio and satellite television service providers to engage in transactions necessary to provide services to customers in Cuba.

– License persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction to activate and pay U.S. and third-country service providers for telecommunications, satellite radio and satellite television services provided to individuals in Cuba.

– Authorize the donation of certain consumer telecommunication devices without a license.

– Add certain humanitarian items to the list of items eligible for export through licensing exceptions.

What they’ve done here, pretty clearly, is tightly target those measures where a clear case can be made that relaxing restrictions does much more to weaken the regime than anything else. That’s clever politics and probably a smart start. But the plain fact of the matter is that the whole embargo is based on faulty logic. Making the Cuban population as poor as possible isn’t going to bring democracy to the island, and the idea that a more prosperous Cuba could somehow become so prosperous as to pose a security threat to the United States is ridiculous. A Communist economy running without subsidies from the USSR is bound to be pretty poor no matter what, but there’s no reason for us to contribute to the situation.

Passover and Sanctions

Daniel Drezner has a nice list of things Passover can teach us about international relations including this key point:

Sanctions against an autocratic regime will rarely yield significant concessions. To get the Pharaoh to let the Jews go, God imposes an escalating series of sanctions against Egypt. These sanctions crippled Egyptian agriculture, health, sanitation and, er, sunlight, inflicting great suffering against the Egyptian people. Not until the first-born male children are killed, however, does Pharaoh relent for a sufficiently long time for the Egyptians to make their escape. Not coincidentally, that plague is the only one to truly hurt the autocrat personally, as his son was killed in the plague as well. Compellence strategies would seem to have a greater chance of success if they target autocratic elites.

This is part of the reason that Ta-Nehisi Coates is right to slam Rep Bobby Rush for getting so lovey-dovey with Fidel Castro. The sanctions policy against Cuba is horribly misguided and has taken a terrible toll on innocent Cubans. But Castro personally is a dictator and a bad guy, and insofar as it’s possible to be hard on him personally rather than inflicting collective punishment on the entire population one should do so. I think there’s a limited amount that can be accomplished in this regard, but saying things like “It was almost like listening to an old friend” is not a promising start.

Envisioning a Post-Nuclear World

Life’s been a bit busy, so I accidentally wound up neglecting the fact that in a big speech in Prague, Barack Obama wound up endorsing one of my pet causes—recommitting the United States to the eventual total elimination of nuclear weapons. This was a policy the United States committed ourselves to when we signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, and it was a policy that Ronald Reagan consistently embraced during his presidency, but it’s fallen by the wayside in recent years.

I’ve seen some wiseasses on the right observing that just making this pledge hardly eliminates any nukes. This, however, misses the significance of the pledge to shorter-term non-proliferation goals. Simply put, if the world’s major powers really intend to keep large nuclear arsenals forever then that implies continues proliferation over the long run. The whole bargain of the multilateral non-proliferation regime was that the majority of countries would agree to eschew nuclear weapons in part because the existing nuclear powers were committing themselves to working toward disarmament. Non-proliferation facilitates disarmament, and disarmament facilities non-proliferation.

The hard part, of course, is how to get from here to there. And it really is hard. But it’s actually pretty easy to see what the first steps are. We need to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which Obama supports), we need to follow through on the Obama-Medvedev commitment to steep bilateral nuclear arms reduction (very good progress has already been made), and we need to get China, France, and the U.K. to avoid building-up their stockpiles as the US and Russian arsenals move down toward their level. Getting all the way to global zero would presumably take decades, but making progress toward that goal is one of the very most important things we can do.

Israeli Minister Denounces U.S. Influence Over Israeli Policy

The interesting developments continue in Israel:

“Israel does not take orders from [US President Barack] Obama,” Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) said on Monday, responding to an earlier statement by the US president in which he reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to all previous understandings between Israel and the Palestinians, including the process launched at Annapolis in 2007.

Erdan, who is also in charge of coordinating between the Knesset and the cabinet, also praised Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who only last week said that Israel was not bound by the Annapolis talks.

I seem to recall my rabbi back in the early 1990s—the High Peace Process Era—opining that it might be better if the United States and Israel basically went their separate ways. The United States wouldn’t hand out all this aid, and Israel would be responsible for making its own decisions regarding the Palestinians. He has some fairly complicated view about how that would actually make the Israelis more inclined to compromise on things like settlements, because the issue would be seen through the eyes of Israeli interests rather than through the lens of Israel’s pseudo-interest in pushing back on whatever issues they’re getting pushed on.

I have my doubts about all that. But the fact remains that Israel doesn’t “take orders” from Washington, Israel has fought for a very close special relationship between the United States and Israel. We give them a lot of money, and a lot of close defense cooperation, and they don’t have much to offer in return. Consequently, we’re in a position to boss them around to a substantial extent. On the other hand, a lot of people in the United States seem to feel that it’s wrong, as a matter of principle, for the United States to actually use its leverage over Israeli policy. So it’s quite possible that, in practice, the Israeli government could tell Obama that they don’t care what he thinks and manage to continue to get whatever they want out of congress.

Useful Clever People

Baron YoungSmith remarks on the fact that the very same neoconservatives who argued themselves hoarse that the election of Barack Obama would lead to imminent dhimmitude at the hands of a Sino-Islamo-Fascisto-Cuban alliance are now seeming remarkably supportive of an Obama policy agenda whose content—take troops out of Iraq and put a smaller number of troops into Afghanistan while not acting like a jerk on the world stage—is exactly the same as the one they hated during the campaign.

It’s important to understand that this isn’t a softening of neocon madness, it’s exactly what they did in the 1990s. After spending the George H.W. Bush administration in their customary role as the “totally insane” faction of conservative movement foreign policy thinking (key episodes being the insistence that Bush should have marched on Baghdad and commenced an occupation of Iraq, and the 1992 defense planning guidance draft) they spent the 1990s being the less partisan faction of the movement with regard to Clinton’s foreign policy. Basically any president sometimes orders military action somewhere, and whenever Clinton did so neocons would applaud and call politely for even more forceful action while criticizing those Republicans who asked questions. By making themselves useful to Clinton and his supporters, while maintaining an appropriate level of critical distance, the neocons were able to elevate their status within the conservative coalition and emerge as a more influential faction in the W. Bush administration than they’d been in the H.W. Bush or Reagan administration.

Going back to these tactics is integral to neocon plans to regain power. And I think it’s working. When PNAC 2.0 was launched, John Nagl head of CNAS spoke at the debut event, and Fred Kagan is speaking at CAP today. Neocons are out of power, but they’re not being banished to the fringes of the discussion, key progressives groups have made them the preferred interlocutors on high-profile issues. In the domestic political context, in other words, neocons very clearly appreciate the tactical and strategic utility of sometimes being nice, of accommodating the interests of others, and of strategic restraint. If only they could figure out a way to apply these lessons to foreign policy.

G-20 Communiqué

Get your official G-20 Communiqué text here.

The inability to get the Europeans to commit to more fiscal stimulus is disappointing, if expected. But I think the part about increased support for the multilateral economic institutions is very important, and the statement on trade is very encouraging. On top of that there was the side agreement with Russia on nuclear arms reductions that’s extremely important. All in all you see here that diplomacy can’t transcend fundamental differences of perspective on the issues. At the same time, I think we also saw the difference between a situation in which, at the margin, world leaders would prefer to be seen as cooperating with the President of the United States and the situation that previously prevailed in which, at the margin, world leaders would prefer to be seen as hostile to the President of the United States.

IMF Reform at the G-20

In the Blogger’s Handbook they tell you that if you want to drive pageviews you need as many posts as possible on the thrill-a-minute subject of IMF governance reform. But it’s not just a topic to boost traffic, it’s also important. The IMF’s ability to function as a lender of last resort is crucial to resolving financial crises, but some poor decision-making at the IMF over the past 15 years has caused a lot of problems for the world. And it looks like the Obama administration has succeeded in pushing for some positive changes in this regard. Simon Johnson More »« Less:

The IMF currently has about $250bn to lend; this is not enough to really make a difference in a world of trillion dollar problems. The Europeans proposed to raise this to $500bn, which seems still low – particularly as it’s mostly European countries that have a pressing need to borrow; you guessed it, the Germans don’t want to put up more. The Obama Administration is pushing for closer to $1trn in total IMF funding and, after a lot of hard work, seem likely to get close to this target. [...] But that’s not all. The masterstroke is simple and also brilliant. The US is pushing for – and likely to get – the Managing Director (known as the MD) of the IMF to be selected through an open, competitive and merit-based selection process.

Why is this a big deal? Governance of the IMF has been for too long dominated by Europeans – by convention, every MD has been European since the founding of the organization; the results have been questionable. The MD has enormous power and great discretion on almost all questions – the IMF is subject only to its own rules and its executive board is dominated by… Europeans. This combination wore thin with much of the rest of the world a long time ago.

Deeper governance reform and de-Europeanization of the Fund (e.g., Europe is massively overrepresented in terms of board seats) is long overdue, but the Europeans have been strong enough to slow down the process in the past. As a result, middle income and poorer countries rightly question if the IMF really works for them or just for the Europeans (and, it must be said, for the United States.)

This should not only help the United States improve its relationship with key developing economies, but more importantly will make sure that the IMF can continue to function as an important and valuable element of international governance. Getting this done would probably constitute more diplomatic work than the Bush administration managed to pull off in eight years.

America’s Comprehension Porblem

Here’s a very important quote that Spencer Ackerman got that has implications well beyond issues in our policy toward Pakistan:

Some in the administration are skeptical that the Pakistanis will meet their commitments under the new strategy. “You have people there who just lie to our face, like Zardari, who just lies to us,” said one official who requested anonymity, referring to the Pakistani president. “Honestly, I don’t believe there’s a war going on in the tribal areas. The Pakistanis tell us that, but they’re just baldfaced lies.” The official believes that U.S. diplomats in Pakistan accept Pakistani claims of maximal warfighting efforts at face value: “They don’t speak Urdu, they don’t speak Pashto, and they eat it all up.”

This sort of thing is, in my view, really the achilles heel of the American imperial project. The economic and military might of the United States gives us enormous power to influence events in distant lands. But having a lot of ability to influence events is unlikely to achieve anything useful unless you actually understand what’s happening. And when we get involves in things like the internal politics of Pakistan, or political reform in Egypt, or wars in the Horn of Africa, and so forth we’re dealing in situations where the level of understanding is incredibly asymmetric. If you go to pretty much any country in the world, you’ll find that educated people there know more about the United States than you do about their country. Nobody at highest levels of the American government speaks Urdu. Or Arabic. Or Amharic or Somali or Pashto or Tajik.

Lots of people at high levels in the Pakistani government speak English. President Zardari can deliver a speech in English and his staff can write one for him. If they want to figure out what’s going on in the U.S., they have a vast bounty of media outlets to peruse to gather intelligence. And year-in and year-out Pakistan cares about the same smallish set of countries—Pakistani officials are always focused on issue in their region and issues with the United States. Our officials dance around—the Balkans are important this decade, Central Asia the next, Russia and the Persian Gulf flit on and off the radar, sometimes we notice what’s happening in Mexico, etc.

In other words, in a straightforward contest of power between the United States and Pakistan, we can of course win. But in a scenario where we are trying to manipulate the situation in Pakistan in such-and-such a way and Pakistani actors are trying to manipulate the situation for their own ends, the odds of us actually outwitting the Pakistanis are terrible. They’re in a much better position to manipulate us than we are them.

Note that during the FDR and Truman years, American elites were generally more familiar with Europe than European elites were with the United States. I think that’s an important element in understanding why the institution-building of that era largely worked.

Protocol Fail

When Gordon Brown came to Washington, he brought a thoughtful gift with him—a pen holder made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute to match the White House’s famous desk. Barack Obama, by contrast, got Brown a set of DVDs. And as if that gaffe wasn’t bad enough now we learn:

Alas, when the PM settled down to begin watching them the other night, he found there was a problem.

The films only worked in DVD players made in North America and the words “wrong region” came up on his screen. Although he mournfully had to put the popcorn away, he is unlikely to jeopardise the special relationship – or “special partnership”, as we are now supposed to call it – by registering a complaint.

In order to permit price discrimination between different markets, you see, DVDs and DVD players are region-restricted. Normally, a North American disk won’t play in a European player and vice versa. They do, however, make some “universal” DVD players that can play disks from all regions. Maybe the embassy in London can get one for the PM.

One assumes this won’t actually shatter the foundations of the US-British relationship, but still it’s a pretty sorry showing.

Zakaria vs The Washington Post

Fareed Zakaria is making sense, and The Washington Post editorial page is not:

Consider the gambit with Russia. The Washington establishment is united in the view that Iran’s nuclear program poses the greatest challenge for the new administration. Many were skeptical that Obama would take the problem seriously. But he has done so, maintaining the push for more effective sanctions, seeing if there is anything to be gained by talking to the Iranians, and starting conversations with the Russians. The only outside power that has any significant leverage over Tehran is Russia, which is building Iran’s nuclear reactor and supplying it with uranium. Exploring whether Moscow might press the Iranians would be useful, right?

Wrong. The Washington Post reacted by worrying that Obama might be capitulating to Russian power. His sin was to point out in a letter to the Russian president that were Moscow to help in blunting the threat of missile attacks from Tehran, the United States would not feel as pressed to position missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic—since those defenses were meant to protect against Iranian missiles. This is elementary logic. It also strikes me as a very good trade since right now the technology for an effective missile shield against Iran is, in the words of one expert cited by the Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman: “a system that won’t work, against a threat that doesn’t exist, paid for with money that we don’t have.”

As Zakaria observes, the problems of the Bush years were not just the personal failings of George W. Bush; they reflected the pathologies of an establishment “that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise and negotiations as appeasement.” But to operate in the world and advance our key goals, we need to understand that other countries have interests and objectives of their own.

Obama Administration Seeking Direct Line to Khamenei

Earlier this week, the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss said we needed less Kremlinology about Iranian politics and more focus on the Supreme Leader as the key decision-maker. Today, the Wall Street Journal reports that the administration is taking that advice to heart and “looking at ways to develop a direct line of communication to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.”

Sounds about right to me. There are a lot of issues we can (and should) be talking to Iranian officials about that are fairly low-level. We have not-so-different interests in Iraq and Afghanistan and there are lots of discussions that can be had at various levels about those things. But the Iranian nuclear program involves very deep questions about the strategic orientations of the United States and Iran. Only Khamenei can make those decisions.

There’s a Reason They Call Him the “Supreme” Leader

Matt Duss makes the excellent point that we could probably do with less close-reading of Iranian political developments:

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that one of former Iranian president — and current presidential candidate — Mohamed Khatami’s most prominent backers, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, switched to support one of Khatami’s rivals, Mehdi Kharroubi. Both candidates are considered reformers, and have been critical of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Today the Washington Post reports that another critic of Ahamedinejad, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi has also announced his candidacy. But while it’s fair to see all of this as evidence of popular discontent with Ahmadinejad’s poor stewardship of the economy, as always it’s unclear what, if anything, any of this says about Iranian supreme leader Khamenei’s orientation toward rapprochement with the U.S., which is the key consideration.

As Duss says, whatever relevance this may have to purely domestic Iranian issues, Americans need to remember that “Regardless of which leaders and factions are up or down at any given moment, Ayatollah Khamenei is always up.” This was a point beloved of the right-wing back during the Khatami era as it was seen to undermine the case for engagement. But the real case for engagement isn’t based on assessing Iranian personalities, it’s a calculation of strategic interests. And that means engaging with the guy calling the shots—Khamenei. It may be impossible to reach a rapprochement, perhaps he doesn’t want one. But it’s worth trying. And that means trying in good faith, which means trying with the man in charge, not trying to think of clever ways to bypass him.

Democracy Promotion Requires Peace Promotion

Over at the Wonk Room, Peter Juul calls attention to our CAP colleague Brian Katulis’ paper on democracy promotion in the Middle East for the Century Foundation. It features the following bullets:

1. Restore U.S. credibility by disconnecting democracy and human rights promotion from U.S. security goals and reforming our own human rights and civil liberties practices. The Obama administration has already taken big step in this direction by directing the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp by next January.

2. Use diplomacy to promote national consensus in key countries and address conflicts in the region. Internal conflicts in countries throughout the region – form Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories to Iraq and Yemen — are driven by the lack of a national political consensus on basic structures of governance. Moreover, resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict will create an environment in the region more conducive to democratic reform.

3. Integrate U.S. approaches to supporting democracy and governance reform in the region. All U.S. government assistance – from USAID to the State Department to military aid — should be coordinated to better encourage better governance by recipients of American funding and assistance.

4. Increase positive incentives for democratic reform. The model of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which provided incentives to promote economic development and improved governance, is one the new administration can encourage reforms.

5. Diversify funding for democracy promotion in the region. Private philanthropy, endowments, partnerships and the like in the Middle East should be encouraged to take on political reform, building a stronger organic base for democracy and human rights.

6. Recognize the political power of Islamist forces. Like it or not, Islamist groups are potent political forces in many countries in the Middle East. Reform efforts that ignore them are at best incomplete, and the United States needs to take non-violent religious-political movements into account.

These are all excellent points. One thing I would add that I think has a tendency to go missing in these discussions is that the essential background for effective and sustainable democracy promotion is a relatively benign international climate. The end of the Cold War wound up being a boon to democracy not just because several Soviet-dominated countries in Central and Eastern Europe turned into democracies. It also helped spread democracy in Asia and Latin America, too, primarily because the United States no longer felt the need to support “our bastards” regimes and could, instead, make it clear that close relations with the U.S. depended on a proper respect for basic human and political rights. Great power conflict, by contrast, merely ensure than any actual or would-be dictator or revolutionary can always count on the support of one or the other external players.

That’s something to keep in mind in general as we try to stay true to our values while negotiating a transition to a more multipolar world. An emphasis on democracy and human rights implies some level of tension with the government of China. But at the same time, maintaining a basically friendly relationship with China is actually crucial to fostering an environment in which democracy and respect for human rights can blossom. That’s a difficult line to walk, but it’s important. And the general idea has application to the specific region. Working on the Israeli-Arab conflict or on trying to work toward an improved relationship with Iran can be seen as contrasting goals with democracy promotion. But at the same time, lowering international tensions in the Middle East would in many ways make it easier to move forward on democracy.

A Valentine From Steven Walt

Steven Walt offers us an international relations perspective on relationships:

To begin with, any romantic partnership is essentially an alliance, and alliances are a core concept on international relations. Alliances bring many benefits to the members (or else why would we form them?) but as we also know, they sometimes reflect irrational passions and inevitably limit each member’s autonomy. Many IR theorists believe that institutionalizing an alliance makes it more effective and enduring, but that’s also why making a relationship more formal is a significant step that needs to be carefully considered.

Of course, IR theorists have also warned that allies face the twin dangers of abandonment and entrapment: the more we fear that our partners might leave us in the lurch (abandonment), the more likely we are to let them drag us into obligations that we didn’t originally foresee (entrapment). When you find yourself gamely attending your partner’s high school reunion or traveling to your in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner every single year, you’ll know what I mean.

I bet Man, the State, and War could sell more copies if they wound a way to reposition it as a dating advice book.

Alan Wolfe on Liberal Hawks

Alan Wolfe has an interesting essay on liberal hawks (via Jon Chait) that I think winds up going a bit awry by running together humanitarian arguments about the desirability of military intervention in particular (whether or not the arguer wanted to invade Iraq), with national security arguments about the desirability of invading Iraq that were offered by liberals (whether or not the arguer was making any distinctively “liberal” appeals). Thus you get a strange effort to simultaneously treat Samantha Power, who didn’t want to invade Iraq, and Kenneth Pollack, who wasn’t saying anything particularly liberal about Iraq. The fact that Wolfe doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about the narrow national security issues would further argue for just leaving it aside.

What I think’s missing from Wolfe’s account of the “humanitarian” case is the extent to which it was an idiosyncratic case. Because the proponents of this argument were influential in the media, lots of people in the media are very aware of it and talk about it a lot. But it’s not as if the world’s major human rights organizations were clamoring for this invasion. Nor is it the case that governments known for their commitment to international humanitarian causes (Norway, say) were pushing for war. You didn’t see international civil society mobilizing for the liberation of Iraq the way you saw people all around the world standing in solidarity with the people of South Africa. And you certainly didn’t see the Arab public sphere praising George W. Bush’s bold intervention on behalf of Iraqi well-being. What you saw was a handful of writers plus Bernard Kouchner making this case. You also saw a lot of people who believed they had independent security-based reasons for favoring war offering up humanitarian rationales as a kind of “gravy” and/or noting the alleged “irony” that liberals who claim to support humanitarian causes were against launching an unprovoked war.

I think that if you look at history, you’ll find that wars of aggression are essentially always cloaked in high ideals. Certainly the classic imperialism of nineteenth century Europe was associated with an enormous amount of idealistic rhetoric about civilizing missions and improving the well-being of the to-be-conquered population. It’s difficult to say, in retrospect, how much of that was sincere and how much merely cynical. But surely it wasn’t all cynical. But sincerity ultimately does you little good—aggressive warfare combines lawlessness, violence, and coercion and that’s not a very good recipe for humanitarianism. It’s one thing to go to war in self-defense or to see another group fighting a war of self-defense and come to their assistance, and another thing entirely to launch a war allegedly on behalf of another population.

Sarkozy: Freedom as Self-Determination

Yesterday I got a chance to read an English translation of French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s speech from at the Munich security conference over the weekend. I thought this part was interesting:

What has history taught us? That no empire, even the largest, can defeat the longing for freedom. All of us, in the course of our history, have found ourselves confronted with this painful reality. All of us, not just in the twentieth century, with the dissillusionment of the USSR, but when we look back at our history, at some point have thought we were an empire able to treat others’ longing for freedom with disdain.

It isn’t just in Europe that there’s a longing for freedom; it’s all over the world. We have all — and, in her history, like others, France has — had to deal with great disillusionment when we forgot that freedom was for everyone.

Not so long ago this kind of anti-imperialist sentiment would have been commonplace in the United States. Certainly FDR and Harry Truman took the view that part of forging the alliance with England and France to fight Nazism and Communism required the U.S. to pressure those countries to disband their empires. More recently, we’ve lost sight of these issues, and under the administration of George W. Bush it became commonplace to argue that to support an international agenda aimed at “freedom” actually required the United States to espouse the coercive military domination of foreign countries. Sarkozy has found a way to push back on that attitude that, both rightly and politely, puts the recent errors of American policy in a broader context not as some unique sin of ours but as a sin of hubris that’s been repeatedly engaged in by a variety of countries and that we all need to collectively overcome.

The Madman Strategy

Israeli officials explain to Noah Shachtman that their recent policies haven’t been erratic and irrational, they’ve been calculated to appear erratic and irrational:

Israeli leaders believe they’ve accomplished that task. “The Arab view is now that Israel is a crazed animal, locked in a cage, fuming to get out all the time,” a senior Foreign Ministry official tells Danger Room, approvingly. “Now, it’s the responsibility of the Arab leadership to keep the animal in the cage, by not provoking it.”

Despite my Forbes-based reputation for empiricism, in philosophical terms I’ve always put my allegiance with the pragmatists. In other words, I believe that a strategy that’s indistinguishable from an erratic and irrational one is an erratic and irrational strategy. Robert Farley observes:

The danger, of course, is that while erratic behavior might seem a plus in relations with the Arab world (not really, but stay with it), such a reputation most definitely isn’t a positive with the rest of the world. Some Israelis may sincere believe that they don’t need anyone; I suspect that this is the greatest strategic error of all.

To take an example, as Jon Chait points out Israel has traditionally counted on the United States declining to take an even-handed approach to Israel’s conflicts with the Arab world. That’s been accomplished in part by the use of institutions like The New Republic as ideological enforcers, but as Ezra Klein says the clout of such enforcers is often overstated. The larger factor has been a genuine lack of even-handed sentiment. But behaving in a “crazed” and brutal manner is not a good way to build social capital. When you ask, “why should Israel be, by far, the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid money?” The response, “well, Israel is like a crazed animal, locked in a cage, fuming to get out all the time” isn’t a persuasive reply.

It’s also worth repeating Rob’s parenthetic. People sometimes think that a reputation for erratic behavior is an asset in international relations, but they’re wrong. This is related to what I was saying yesterday about democracies and cooperation. You want the kind of reputation that makes your commitments credible to potential partners and potential adversaries.

By Request: Democratic Cooperation

Neil “the ethical werewolf” wants to know:

A bunch of times, you’ve suggested that dictatorships can’t cooperate with each other as well as democracies can. Could you expound on this?

I haven’t looked into it or anything, but I don’t see why a bunch of kings (who are basically dictators) couldn’t maintain stable alliances as well as democratically elected leaders. Please offer evidence and an explanation!

This falls into the category of “ideas I poached from John Ikenberry.” This article gets at some of the issues as do the latter chapters of After Victory. But as a preface to an explanation, note that one big problem with international relations is that you never really get the kind of firm empirical evidence one would ideally like to see—the number of cases is too low and the number of factors too high.

But the basic empirical regularity that we’re looking at is that you simply don’t ever see authoritarian countries forming the sort of enduring, deep, and complicated cooperative relationships that characterize NATO or the European Union or the bilateral relationships between the US and Australia/Korea/Japan in Asia or the long unguarded border with Canada here in North America. Authoritarian countries form partnerships, of course, but they tend to be much more short-term, shallow, or opportunistic.

The main theoretical issue is that the conditions that sustain liberal democracy also sustain cooperation because they increase trust and accountability. A democratic government needs to deal with a free press and with opposition political parties, which means that efforts to cheat on agreements or hatch secret plots are more likely to be exposed. And because political disagreement takes place out in the open, other countries get to have a sense of what range of policies might plausibly be adopted and have the opportunity to see large shifts in strategic thinking coming around the corner. Similarly, democratic political leaders typical operate under various kinds of formal restraints that make it difficult-or-impossible to suddenly turn on a dime. In a related way, the actual structure of democratic polities is relatively transparent. One kind find out, fairly definitively, what the institutional prerogatives of different officeholders are and therefore what the significance of their views and attitudes are. When faced with an authoritarian system, by contrast, it’s often not clear who the real decision-makers are (or which decisions have been made) especially when you start talking about people below the “one top guy.” A certain amount of “palace intrigue” takes place in democracies and some “kremlinology” may be required to figure out what’s really happening, but there’s a reason those terms all come form authoritarian systems.

Long story short: democracies can cooperate more credibly, because they’re more transparent and more predictable. Clearly, though, these things are a matter of degree—democracies can be more transparent or less transparent and authoritarian systems can be more rule-bound or less rule-bound. This highlights an important misconception of the conservative movement, namely their view that liberal democracies are hampered in the international arena by their greater difficulty cheating or launching secret initiatives. This is short-sighted. It’s the possession of these very “handicaps” that makes democracies credible allies and partners—even in the eyes of non-democracies—and that gives most countries a reason, at the margin, to prefer that a democratic state like the U.S. play a hegemonic role than a state like China. Much the same is true in the individual context. It might seem like an inability to lie would be a problem in life, but in a lot of ways if it was impossible for you to know and possible for you to signal this credibly that could be a huge asset. Everyone would rather be in business with the “must be honest” guy than with the “might be scamming you” guy.

A Friend in Need

Benjamin Friedman is pleased with Barack Obama’s observation that “our power grows through its prudent use.” But he objects on realist grounds to this passage:

And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

I think Friedman’s gone too far here. Realism doesn’t require Americans or America to adopt an actual posture of indifference to the fate of human rights and human security around the world. John Quincy Adams famously spoke for the realist tradition when he said that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” But that passage was surrounded by Obama-esque notes:

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

Adams is striking here exactly the notes that Bush never seemed capable of grasping—namely that the mere observation that freedom and democracy are good does not justify the idea that our foreign policy should be oriented around an effort to coercively re-order politics in foreign nations. Adams observed that a policy along these lines undertaken with even the best of intentions would eventually become corrupting as the “fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” It’s a fitting coda to the Bush years, but not at all at odds with Obama’s insistence that we are friends to those who seek “a future of peace and dignity.”