Matt Yglesias

Krauthammer: Keep Digging!

The lede of Charles Krauthammer’s latest:

Last week I made the open-and-shut case for John McCain: In a dangerous world entering an era of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, the choice between the most prepared foreign policy candidate in memory vs. a novice with zero experience and the wobbliest one-world instincts is not a close call.

I find this pretty striking. The case for McCain is that the previous eight years of conservative national security policy have worked so badly that we can ill-afford to abandon them. The world is dangerous! We’re facing uncontrolled nuclear proliferation! Clearly, says Krauthammer, you can’t change horses amidst a stream like that. But whose fault is it that the world is so dangerous? Whose fault is it that we’re facing uncontrolled nuclear proliferation? Could it be that when conservative governance keeps making things more and more dangerous, that the right option is to stop having conservative governance?

Neoconservatism Today, Neoconservatism Tomorrow, Neoconservatism Forever!

Charles Krauthammer tries to refocus attention on national security issues:

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

This is a common conservative conceit — that progressive approaches to national security might be good enough if you don’t really care, but in a dangerous world you need to turn to conservative ideas. Here it’s instructive to consider the record. Even if you engage in the conservative conceit that George W. Bush deserves no blame for 9/11 even though his administration came into office and explicitly chose to put al-Qaeda on the back-burner, it can’t be said often enough that more Americans — and orders of magnitude more people — have died as a result of invading Iraq than died on 9/11. In non-proliferation terms, the situation is worse in Iran than it was when Bush took office. And the situation is much worse in North Korea than it was when Bush took office. Russia starting to push the limits of revanchism isn’t something that “just happened” it was a predictable — and, indeed, widely predicted — consequence of the Bush administration’s approach to Russia and general embrace of unilateralism. America’s standing in the eyes of the world is at its lowest ebb ever. Our level of influence in Latin America has declined precipitously on Bush’s watch. Israel’s security is more at risk than it was eight years ago, and Palestinian suffering is more intense than it was eight years ago. Osama bin Laden remains at large.

In March of 2001, Charles Krauthammer laid out the argument for a new approach to the world, one he believed — rightly — that George W. Bush would embrace:

In the liberal internationalist view of the world, the U.S. is merely one among many–a stronger country, yes, but one that has to adapt itself to the will and the needs of “the international community.” That is why the Clinton Administration was almost manic in pursuit of multilateral treaties–on chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear testing, proliferation. No matter that they could not be enforced. Our very signing would show us to be a good international citizen.

This is folly. America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.

We’ve been following Krauthammer’s advice for years. Has it delivered a peaceful and secure world? No, it has not. Not just according to me, but according to Krauthammer himself. To Krauthammer the “solution” to the peace and prosperity of the Clinton years was neoconservatism. With neoconservatism having created a dangerous and insecure world, his solution is — more neoconservatism. And yet somehow it’s supposed to be the people who want to stop pursuing failed policies who are said to be blind to the troubled nature of the present.

Hail Mary

Charles Krauthammer thinks Barack Obama is going to win the election. More interestingly, he uses a revealing metaphor: “Krauthammer’s Hail Mary Rule: You get only two per game. John McCain, unfortunately, has already thrown three. The first was his bet on the surge, a deep pass to David Petraeus who miraculously ran it all the way into the end zone.”

In case you’re not a football fan, the essential characteristic of a “hail Mary” pass (just hurling the ball downfield in the direction of the end zone) is that it’s a bad play. Which is to say that the expected value of such a pass is extremely low. But sometimes you throw one at the end of a game if you’re in a situation where any play other than a successful “hail Mary” will result in your team losing the game. Under those circumstances, the fact that the play has only a low chance of succeeding isn’t relevant. It’s important to note, however, that the logic behind the play depends crucially on the fact that a football game is a zero-sum enterprise with bivalent outcomes. You either win or lose, there’s no middle ground. And if the other guys win, you lose.

Some things in life are like that. Notably, many games. But also US Presidential elections. Significantly, though, prolonged wars of choice aren’t like that at all. Iraq is the kind of situation where a whole range of possible outcomes is possible, it involves more than two players, and the interactions between the players aren’t zero sum. It’s not, in other words, at all the kind of situation in which it’s appropriate to throw a metaphorical hail Mary. Unless, that is, you’re thinking of Iraq policy primarily as an electioneering gambit.

Krauthammer: Russia Must Leave Georgia by 2014 . . . Or Else!

You wouldn’t expect Charles Krauthammer to turn in a sensible column ever. In particular, you really wouldn’t expect him to turn in a sensible column about the Russia-Georgia war. But I feel like today’s effort is an uncommonly silly one. Through his powers of clairvoyance, Krauthammer discerns that Russia’s “real objective is the Finlandization of Georgia through the removal of President Mikheil Saakashvili and his replacement by a Russian puppet” which reveals, among other things, a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Cold War Finland. But Krauthammer darkly warns that the Finlandization of Georgia will let “Russia become master of the Caspian basin” (oh noes! the Caspian basin!) and then this, through magic, would lead to “re-establishing Russian hegemony” throughout its “former Baltic and East European satellites.”

I don’t know how many different ways there are to say this, but to think that Russia’s ability to detach two miniature provinces that don’t want to be ruled from Tblisi from a tiny country with a GDP of $20 billion will suddenly lead to Russian hegemony over, say, Poland with its GDP of $620 billion is daft.

But beyond all that, considering the high stakes Krauthammer thinks we’re playing for, his proposed remedies are pathetic. One, he wants to “suspend the NATO-Russia Council” that nobody’s heard of but that apparently was founded in 2002. Second, he wants to block Russian entry into the WTO which is already being blocked. Third, he wants to kick Russia out of the G-8. And then we get this:

4. Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene. Sochi is 15 miles from Abkhazia, the other Georgian province just invaded by Russia. The Games will become a riveting contest between the Russian, Belarusian and Jamaican bobsled teams.

All of these steps (except dissolution of the G-8, which should be irreversible) would be subject to reconsideration depending upon Russian action — most importantly and minimally, its withdrawal of troops from Georgia proper to South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Basically, Krauthammer thinks that it’s extremely important to American security for Russia to withdraw forces from Georgia proper and his idea of a good way to make them do that is to . . . threaten to boycott an Olympics (note that this didn’t work in 1980) . . . that’s happening six years from now. That would seem to me to give Russia plenty of time to muck around in Georgia. Indeed, I see no indication whatsoever that Russia so much as aspires to have its forces in Georgia proper by 2014; certainly it won’t take them anywhere near that long to finish wrecking Georgia’s military. This seems to me to be an excellent example of what (via Dan Nexon) Jack Snyder calls “The Myth of the Paper Tiger” whose adherents hold that:

[Enemies are] capable of becoming fiercely threatening if appeased, but easily crumpled by a resolute attack. These images are often not only wrong, but self-contradictory. For example, Japanese militarists saw the United States as so strong and insatiably aggressive that Japan would have to conquer a huge, self-sufficient empire to get the resources to defend itself; yet at the same time, the Japanese regime saw the United States as so vulnerable and irresolute that a sharp rap against Pearl Harbor would discourage it from fighting back.

That sums up Krauthammer’s view perfectly. If we don’t stop Russia from having its way with Georgia, next thing you know the entire Soviet sphere of influence will be reconstituted, but Russia might be coerced into backing down by mild gestures.