Live By Hitler, Die By Hitler

I don't like Chris Matthews per-se, but this is beautiful.

Thy Head, Please

This blog is all but a dead letter, but some things are so crazy I rouse myself. Here is Michael Novak in NRO using his imagination to see what the U.S. looks like under President Obama in 2012. He appears particularly concerned about Obama's foreign policy:

Given the historical record of the last 200 years (and more), what can we expect from this nursery-room fantasy? An untypical, even unprecedented era of peace? Or, on the contrary, the salivating determination of enemies to celebrate our visible moral weakness, and to slay their hated enemy while we bow our heads, standing there as weak and frightened supplicants? When a head is lowered from weakness, they strike it off.

Got it. Obama wins, I get beheaded.

VoIP Tragedy

At the Reporter's Notebook we learn of an unfortunate incident.

Submission

Robert Kagan takes to the Washington Post to warn that Chinese and Russian "autocracy" may... well, he's not really clear what the danger is. About the best we can surmise from Kagan's gloss on Russia and China's political development is that their evident success in fusing market reforms with political repression may be replicated elsewhere. And yeah, that's bad.

But the way in which Kagan positions this development is interesting:

Russia is a good example of how a nation's governance affects its relations with the world. A democratizing Russia, and even Mikhail Gorbachev's democratizing Soviet Union, took a fairly benign view of NATO and tended to have good relations with neighbors that were treading the same path toward democracy. But Vladimir Putin regards NATO as a hostile entity, calls its enlargement "a serious provocation" and asks "against whom is this expansion intended?" Yet NATO is less provocative and threatening toward Moscow today than it was in Gorbachev's time.

So what is it that Putin fears about NATO? It is not the military power. It is the democracy.

This I believe is not only wrong, but it's wrong in an way that illuminates just what, to Kagan, is the real issue. Gorbachev, and later Yeltsin, weren't exactly thrilled with NATO enlargement. To suggest that "democratic" Russia expressed a fairly benign view of NATO enlargmenet essentially ignores 1. Russia's actual reaction 2. the state of Russian power relative to the U.S. at the time NATO was pushing ever eastward.

It's also amusing to read of the "good relations" 1990s Russia had with its neighbors. Like, Chechneya? I heard things were just swell in Grozny.

Kagan understands fully that during the 1990s, Russia was weak, its economy in the doldrums. It most certainly was not thrilled with NATO expansion, but it lacked any real leverage or power to do much about it.

Today, thanks to a booming Russian economy, that's changed. I'd agree that Putin's autocratic tendencies have not helped the situtation, but the essential fact is that now that Russia is once again powerful (or at least, gaining power) it's not content to watch passively as its interests are ignored, or even flouted, by the West.

This, to Kagan, is the root of the problem with powerful autocracies. It's not their politics, it's that they will not do as they're told. To a neoimperialist like Kagan, that's a big no-no.

Unless or until China and Russia start making obvious moves that would endanger American security or vital interests, this is going to be the contours of the conservative case against China and Russia - that these nations have the temerity to pursue their own interests as they define them. It is a posture that is designed to provoke a conflict. But I guess it's not surprising. These are the same people who ginned up the notion that invading Iraq would precipitate a wave of political liberalization throughout the Middle East.

Hopefully!

Clark Stooksbury rounds up some of the White House press office, right wing blog reaction to President Bush's Mission Accomplished stunt.

He found this gem from Kathryn Lopez at NRO:

This is different, guys. And it’s not just because he is a Republican and I like him. It’s different because he is a leader of a nation that is winning a historically significant war. He is using the props of commander in chief to show the nation and the world—the day after the State Department announced that terrorism is at its lowest point in decades in the U.S.—to demonstrate that we are winning this long war on terrorism, even if we still have miles to go, to show that we support these guys who fought and those who died for our freedom and for the freedom of Iraqis, Afghans, and hopefully in the future, others in that part of the world. [emphasis mine]

We support the troops by hoping more of them die "in that part of the world."

Well, K-Lo, rest easy: Mission Accomplished.

Normative Empire

Zaki Laidi has an interesting essay in the Financial Times on Europe's position in the world. He argues that the EU should be a "normative power" by "promoting standards that are negotiated and legitimised within international institutions. Norms aim to discipline the behaviour of state and non-state actors. To be efficient, those norms should rely on soft and hard mechanisms of enforcement."

His priority list, in order: climate change, multilateral trade and human rights.

I don't necessarily agree with everything in the piece - I'd put nuclear proliferation at the top of any priority list, and I wonder what "hard" mechanisms Europe would be willing to employ for the protection of human rights. But it's interesting nonetheless.

(Hat tip: RCP)

Think About the Children!

At the Reporter's Notebook we ponder the effects of digital cameras on the young.

Give and Take

John McCain's top foreign policy advisor thinks traditional diplomacy is out-moded. In an interview about the admission of Georgia into NATO and it's impact on Russian goodwill, Randy Scheunemann remarked (via Yglesias):

Well, I think first of all the administration has said very clearly and publicly that there will be no trade-offs. Trade-offs like that are kind of a relic of a bygone era of power politics.

I think this is a pretty ridiculous stance, although what we've come to expect from the maximalists in the McCain camp. That said, Judah Grunstein has a smart take:

The Bush administration's stance on trade-offs that Scheunemann cites is based on the misguided notion that each dossier can somehow be approached "objectively," and decided on the merits, independently of other dossiers. From this perspective, trading off concessions on one dossier (e.g. Kosovo) against advantages on another (e.g. NATO expansion) is unnecessary, because each individual conflict will be resolved based on a universal (and universally accessible) standard of fairness and justice....

The proliferation of regional multilateral institutions to confer legitimacy on a coalition-based intervention, for instance, will increasingly dilute the veto-power of the permanent Security Council nations. Obviously, there will still be overlap; Russia's stance on Georgia can only be understood as a reaction to Kosovo's declaration of independence. But the opportunities for blocking diplomatic progress that make trade-offs necessary and possible will become increasingly rare as the available detours around them become more accessible.

This kind of strategic environment almost demands that trade-offs be replaced by short memories and the ability to compartmentalize both crisis interventions and conflict resolutions, in order to resist the inherently destabilizing effect such a fluidity of tactical alliances might have.

I think the diplomats involved don't have short memories though, and the ability to "forum shop" doesn't change that.

Trying to get around the reality of great power politics by a wave of the hand simply won't cut it. We have to do the hard work of setting priorities and be willing to let some issues, no matter how morally compelling, fall by the wayside if it means sacrificing the larger good. To govern is to choose. Even for super powers.

Obligated to Obliderate

Were Iran to precipitate a nuclear exchange with Israel, the results would be calamitous for both sides. In a study for the Center For Strategic and International Studies in 2007, Anthony Cordesman concluded that Israel could lose between 200,000 to 800,000 people while Iran could suffer as many as 16 to 28 million fatalities. The large disparity in death toll derives in part from Israel's quantitative and qualitative nuclear superiority: they would deliver significantly more weapons at much higher yields (i.e. destructive force) than Iran, and far more accurately to boot.

Though Iran is a large country, its vulnerabilities are numerous: Tehran, a city of some 15 million, sits in a "topographic basin with a mountain reflector" Cordesman wrote. "Nearly ideal nuclear killing ground." Iran also lacks the kind of medical, civil and missile defenses that the Israelis possess. These weaknesses led Cordesman to conclude that though Israel would suffer grievously, it could emerge from such an exchange. On the other hand, he wrote, "Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term."

If Iran is undeterrable, as some suggest, then they are undeterrable whether threatened by Israeli or American nukes. If the Mullahs don't wish to embrace national suicide, then Israel's nuclear weapons are a sufficient deterrent.

- My latest RealClearPolitics essay is up.

So Long

Thomas Barnett:

Between Obama's trade pandering and McCain's war pandering, you really have to wonder if America is hell-bent on destroying an international liberal economic order that is our gift to humanity, doing so right at its moment of global apogee.

Self inflicted wounds hurt the most.

The Cold War II

Leon Hadar recounts a recent conference hosted by the National Interest:

Indeed, since the topic that Harding and Nikolas Gvosdev were discussing was “Avoiding Catstrophe: The Future of U.S. Relations with China and Russia,” it’s important that Americans understand that the way the elites in Washington define U.S. policy explains why we could end up with a “catsrophe” on our hands here. While Russia is trying to preserve its status as a regional superpower in its “near abroad” and China is attempting to establish its position as a regional superpower in East Asia (in a way, the application of their own forms of the Monroe Dcotrine, in their respective spheres of influence), Washington, reflecting a bipartisan consensus or definition, is continuing to secure its position as a global superpower which supposedly has the right and the obligation to promote its interests and values around the world, including in Russia’s “near abroad” and in East Asia.

This is not an academic issue. The reason we ascribe to Russia and China “aggressive” tendencies and are willing to confront them, is because we define as “aggression” any move to challenge our global supremacy. That should be the starting point for any serious debate in Washington and around the country over our foreign policy.

Spot on. Clearly the U.S. has global interests: secure sea lanes, the reduction of nuclear proliferation, the removal of al Qaeda safe havens, and the deepening of global trade. Securing these interests, however, does not require the world to kowtow to our will. It does not require a confrontation with China or Russia, indeed just the opposite, most of our key interests cannot be meaningfully advanced without their active participation.

However, if we continue to define our global interests more expansively - as George W. Bush has done in locating American security with the global acceptance of American values - if we remain unwilling to trade off lesser priorities like Georgia in NATO, for the sake of the top-level priorities, then we're in for trouble. Trouble we will have invited on ourselves.