Category Archives: United States

More Cairo Fallout: Zionism Must Remain as Liberal as Possible

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The bedrock of Israel’s claim to moral superiority in the Middle East (ME) is its liberal democratic pluralism. It is the only ME state ranked ‘free’ by Freedom House. This separates it from the dictatorships, openly islamist governance of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Gaza or the pan-Arabist nationalist narratives so common elsewhere. In a neighborhood filled with illiberal, particularistic ideologies rooted in the conservative communalism of race or religion, Israel has hewed to a liberal universalism. This morally elevates it above its neighbors and appeals to the West, to whom liberalism is modern, and Arabism and Islamism feel like 19th century reactionary throwbacks.

Yet this is only partially true, of course. Israel too has a nationalist-religious narrative – Zionism, the restoration of Eretz Israel. This narrative is well-known, but its formal proclamation as Israel’s legitimation would be problematic. That would place Israel’s intellectual justification in the same particularist/communalist realm as its neighbors. Instead of a liberal, open state contending with reactionary aggression, de jure Zionism would make the Middle East into a competition of religio-nationalist projects, in which one is triumphant through force of arms.

Arab and Islamist ideologies claim Palestine as national soil or holy ground. Western liberalism finds this reactionary and distasteful. To the extent that Israel argues for and practices a liberal use of this space (as it does, e.g., in permitting free worship for all in Jerusalem), then the West will sympathize with its attempt to defend liberalism against reaction. But if Israel overindulges a soil/blood/religion narrative too, then western sympathy diminishes. If Palestine is read as sacred Zion, holy soil, by Jews, then the conflict slides easily toward a religious or cultural contest in the vein of a clash of civilizations.

Clearly the settler movement endorses exactly this sort of thinking. For them, Eretz Israel is a holy and nationalist project. But more disturbing is when such logic is directed as justification at Americans who should not be expected to support a religious, nationalized project. This violates our liberal values, and opens the door for Arabists and Islamists to ask why we prefer the Jewish religio-national project for Palestine over their own. The answer, of course, is greater cultural and religious affinity between Americans and Israelis, as well as more political comfort with Israel over its (dangerous and badly governed) neighbors. But if we openly assert this, then we lose all moral claim to arbitrate neutrally the Arab-Israeli dispute. Then we become a partner to one side in a particularistic cultural showdown, rather than a defender of liberal universalist values. This is exactly the suspicion that Obama worthily tried to overcome in Cairo.

I am thinking here of M Peretz’ and Netanyahu’s rejection of Obama’s Cairo speech. Peretz is miffed that Obama did not validate the zionist narrative of Israel’s foundation. Obama sought “to diminish the determination of the Jewish people through the ages, and especially since the age of nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century, to reclaim their homeland, to bring its very earth out of desolation and restore its dispersed sons and daughters to Zion–all this not as a reparation [for the Holocaust], but as a right.’ And Netanyahu: “The right to establish our sovereign state here, in the Land of Israel arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People.” To boot, Netanyahu wants the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a “Jewish” state.

Yet Obama is exactly right to reject such illiberal logic. To endorse such conservative romantic metaphysics would be politically disastrous and violate core American liberal beliefs. It is exactly this sort of rhetoric, even from the avowedly liberal New Republic, that convinces Arabs and Muslims that Israel is just another religio-nationalist project they must contend with their own. This sort of ‘holy soil’ rhetoric fires the conflict, not softens it.

We all know that Israel was founded in great part on the intellectual basis that Peretz and Netanyahu describe. But this sort of religious nationalism no longer commands normative respect in the West. The reason the West today prefers Israel to its neighbors is its liberalism – civil rights, elections, religious freedom – not its Zionism (except for the US religious right). So every time Israeli leaders and defenders wander into zionist, antipluralist territory about the Jews’ ‘right’ to Palestine – well, then Westerners just can’t go down that road.  Invoking divine rights, national privilege from time immemorial, Moses, or God to claim territory is exactly the same logic Muslim ideologues use to denote parts of the world as ‘Muslim lands,’ which may therefore be purged of non-Muslim influences. The claim that Israel must be ‘Jewish’ has never been demanded of the Palestinians before. It is creepy, because it implies demographic control measures should Israel’s Jewish majority status be jeopardized. The US can hardly be expected to support such language.

Hence, the dilemma seems to be to square the zionist desire to have a de facto Jewish state with the liberal need to have Israel be a de jure pluralist democracy. This problem is similar to Quebec’s desire to be both liberal and francophone. An open constitutional declaration of a Jewish national-religious state would make Israel into a more liberal, Jewish version of Iran. But Judaism could heavily influence national life if Jews were a strong majority within a liberal democratic frame, as is the francophone case in Quebec. The best way to achieve that is to cut the occupied territories loose as soon as possible and keep the overt zionist jargon under wraps. Israel can be a Jewish-majority state, as the US is a Christian-majority state or Quebec is a francophone society, but Israel should never seek to constitutionally be a ‘Jewish state.’ This is what religious ideologues in places like Saudi Arabia or Calvin’s Geneva do. Zionism needs to try to be as liberal as possible. If not, Israel is just another competing tribe in the factionalized Middle East, with no principled claim on Western support.

Iran: Democratic Realism Didn’t Last Too Long

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Two months ago, I predicted the imminent death of foreign policy realism among US liberals and the Democratic party. It turns out I was right faster than I thought. The tumult in Iran has brought back all those basic US idealist instincts: democracy and liberalism are the only ‘real’ way to govern, the US should nag others to govern themselves the way we do, liberals’ pain anywhere in the world is a US concern, nondemocracies are run by thugs we should not cater to. In short, foreign policy idealism (if you like it) or imperialist hauteur on democracy and liberalism (if you dislike it) is back! And it only took five months under O.

Try F Kaplan, previously a biting critic of aggressive democratic idealism under W, or R Just on the sudden ‘re-rediscovery’ that the US should be in the democracy promotion business, or the Wall Street Journal‘s fear Obama won’t help the Iranian protestors.

Leslie Gelb once wrote (I can’t find the link) that Americans historically oscillate between idealistic interventionist optimism (‘make the world safe for democracy,’ Saving Private Ryan) and sullen realism stemming from disillusion when others reject our help (how could they?!), or worse, actually fight against us (Iraq debate 2004-07, Black Hawk Down). But I think on balance – since the US really joined world politics after Reconstruction – Americans have tilted toward idealism. We have this incorrigible belief that our lifestyle and constitutional order are the best on the planet, and that breeds an idealism (arrogance?) that can be suppressed by Vietnams and Iraqs, but not rooted out. You can see it in the sudden enthusiasm for leaning on Iran. Just two weeks ago, we were the country recovering from ideology and trying to deal with the world as it is. Now we are trying to decide what kind of intervention in Iran’s domestic politics would be best (here too).

It’s all rather amusing to watch; like a child, waves of exuberance and despondence come and go (always masquerading as ‘lessons of history’ or a ‘new paradigm’). But optimism and self-confidence are always psychologically more appealing to anyone or country. Americans are quite nationalistic and really believe in US exceptionalism, so Obama’s despondence and ‘apology tour’ hardly fit the deeper national psyche. What country likes think of itself as disdained and dismissed by others? So as soon as those Iranian students started waving democracy posters, all the old US habits and prejudices about foreign policy burst out.

What Presidents Lee (SK) & Obama Need to Say to Each Other Tomorrow

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The president of SK will meet with Obama tomorrow. Given the rapid growth of tension with NK, here are a few things they need to nail down and say publicly. (For my further thoughts on the NK mess, try here and here.)

1. A standard reaffirmation of the alliance is necessary, especially because the alliance is actually weakening and NK can see that. Also, a standard outreach to NK for talks is necessary. Obama should spin his magic about talking to those will unclench their fist. Of course, the DPRK will not respond, but it is important to establish the moral high ground by outreach first. Obama’s particular skill at diplomatic outreach will bolster the case and legitimacy for future tougher action in a way W never could after he put NK on the axis of evil.

2. It may be time to formally extend nuclear deterrence to SK. US nuclear weapons were removed from SK in the early 1990s. The Cold War had ended, and the US was trying to convince NK that it wanted the denuclearization of the peninsula. It is pretty obvious now, that NK is not really serious about giving up its nukes. Without them, it is impossible to justify so much suffering to its people. They have become existential legitimating props for this brittle regime that is about to become even more brittle. Hence it is probably time to formally state that mutually assured destruction now applies in Korea.

3. Obama should give an oblique hint that the US might tolerate SK nuclearization. Some sort of vague language about ‘understanding that the ROK must defend itself by all necessary means, now and in the future’ would be a useful signal to the North that creeping nuclearization will eventually be meet in kind. This would also signal to China that it needs to really start cooperating on NK, rather than just obfuscating. If it doesn’t seriously try to help, then the democracies will feel compelled to go their own way.

4. Both should make an overture to Japan, to 1) restrain itself vis NK, and 2) cooperate more with the the US and SK. 1 is because Japan is far more likely to go nuclear first in response to NK provocation. 2 is because only with more serious coordination among the democracies out here (Japan, SK, US) can NK be further isolated. Yes, China has the most influence over Pyongyang, but China is simply not cooperating. It would rather overawe a poor, weak NK than face a unified, US-allied Korea. So we (US, SK, Japan) should stop complaining about the PRC and hoping they’ll fix this, deus ex machina. Instead, let’s do what we can on our own, which means forging a unified front and joint response strategy.

5. However China should not go unpunished for its dithering, so Lee and Obama should formally declare the 6 party talks dead.  They didn’t help much anyway. China and especially Russia used them as a vehicle for global prestige-taking, not to actually work much on the issue of NK itself. So let the Chinese realize that free-riding for prestige purposes is irrelevant to the US, SK, and Japan on this question. They had their chance, proved to be insular and grandstanding instead of serious, so now is the time to walk away.

6. Commit publicly to passing the free trade area between the US and South Korea ASAP. It will send an important signal to China and NK that the US and Korea are committed allies, it will reduce consumer prices, especially in over-protected Korea, and most importantly, it will bring down the price of Sam Adams at my local grocery store here ($2/bottle!).

Remember the Russians on D-Day

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Every five years, D-Day celebrations unnerve me a bit. The heroism and gallantry are unquestioned, but the historical significance for the course of WWII and scale of sacrifice are always exaggerated. I feel like we overcelebreate this war, because we are somewhat uncomfortable with the morality of so many others we have fought – not just Vietnam of course, but the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, or Iraq 2. Indeed I bet Americans know more about Hitler than George III. For a good examination, try here. Consider also:

1. The staggering size of the Eastern Front is too often overlooked by Americans. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 20 million Soviet citizens died fighting (or otherwise being butchered by) the Nazis. That is about 14% of the Soviet population of the time. By contrast about 200 thousand Americans died in Europe, about .15% of the US population at the time. That means 100 times as many Soviets died fighting the Nazis as Americans. Something like 70 thousand Soviet villages were torched or otherwise eradicated as the Nazis conquered around 20% of the Soviet land mass. Consider that in a one month battle at Kiev in 1941, over 600,000 Soviet soldiers were killed or captured; had anything like this happened to American ground forces in North Africa or Western Europe, the domestic cry for a separate peace would have been irresistible. Conflict on a such as scale hadn’t been seen since the high days of the Golden Horde, and the US was a late and minor participant. It dwarfs even the one US experience of massive combat on US territory – the civil war.

2. The USSR had essentially stopped the Nazi drive by the fall of 1943. Stalingrad, the turning point, was over by February of 1943 (as was El Alamein, a British victory, in late 1942). The last major German offensive around Kursk in the summer of 1943 was halted. The enormous Soviet offensive of 1944 dwarfed anything the Western allies could put on the continent that same year. This event would have proceeded without the Allied invasion. To be sure, an unknown counterfactual is how the USSR would have fared if the Wehrmacht had not been forced to prepare for a western landing. Furthermore, allied bombing obviously took its toll. But nonetheless, the FDR administration was quite content to allow the Nazi and Soviet totalitarians to exhaust each other.

3. The anglophone leadership (Canada, Britain and the US) realized by 1943, that this war, as Stalin famously said, was unlike any other in that the victor’s political ideology would imposed as far as his tanks could get. Patton knew this, which is why he wanted to drive on Berlin in 1945 and agitated to provoke a postwar conflict with the USSR while it was still exhausted. Hence, the allies waited to land. Stalin wanted a second front as early as 1942, but the English-speaking powers were content to play off-shore balancer – allowing the USSR to exhaust itself (so its postwar power would be that much weaker) and the Nazis to exhaust themselves too (so that the eventual Allied landing and eastward push would be that much easier).

This was excellent strategy. It husbanded Allied resources and allowed to two potential opponents to weaken each other. Churchill, Ike, Bradley and others were under no illusions about the brutality of Soviet governance and were willing to allow the Nazis to bleed the Soviets white. It also kept American casualties low, insuring a continued US domestic consensus to stay in the war. But this intelligent realpolitik clashes badly with the moral imperative of fighting fascism and the overtly moral way we celebrate US involvement against the Nazis. Watch Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan, and contrast that with the strategic logic of waiting to land until mid-1944 so that the western land war war would be easier and Stalin wouldn’t be able to march to the Atlantic.

4. I didn’t really realize this much until I went to Russia to learn the language and travelled around. The legacy of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ is everywhere. Everyone lost someone, and frequently in brutal circumstances Americans can’t imagine. Every Russian guide you get will tell you how Americans don’t know much about war, because we were never invaded, occupied, and exterminated. The first time I heard that, I just didn’t know what to say. You can only listen in silent horror as the guides tell you about how the SS massacred everyone with more than a grammar school degree in some village you never heard of before, or how tens of thousands of those Kiev PoWs starved or froze to death because the Wehrmacht was unprepared for such numbers and the Nazi leadership just didn’t care. Just because Stalin was awful, that does not mitigate the enormity of Soviet suffering or their contribution. Remember that the next time you hear about how America saved Europe from itself, or watch some movie lionizing the average GI, or play a video game depicting the relatively minor Battle of the Bulge as a turning point. If Speilberg really wants to make a great WWII epic, how about one about the eastern front?

Obama’s Grand Slam in Cairo also Illustrates the Lack of Secular Politics in the Middle East

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He certainly is talented! I have been in Korea since August 2008, so I have not seen many Obama speeches. I am just floored by the difference with W. No wonder the press is swooning. Unlike the faux-authority projected by Cheney’s crossed hands and low voice (he was just too wrong too many times), Obama has the magic in that imperious, super well-educated look when he lifts his chin, creases his brow, and narrows his eyes. He must have been a great lawyer to see in court; he reminds me of my best grad school teachers.

1. I am intellectually pleased at how well my predictions of the speech fared. I got most everything right, both in the topics he selected and how he treated them. He did engage in lots of praise of Islam that will make Bushies, neo-cons, and evangelicals squirm. As I suspected he threw in the PBUH and references to Islamic scientific achievements. This laid the groundwork for the criticisms, so it was necessary, and thankfully there were no real eye-rolling sycophancies. But I do think calling the Koran ‘holy’ all the time did not project the political secularism needed to encourage religious pluralism in the ME, and the line about ‘battling negative stereotypes of Islam’ was a lame multicultural sop to the Muslim identity politics that lead to Durban II and the bogus, free speech-squelching notion of ‘islamophobia.’ I expect the Fox News-set will harp on that one. On the up side, Obama added a few extra themes: women’s rights, democracy, and development.

2. Just about all his comments were right.

As I argued, but hardly expected in the speech, Obama referenced Japan and Korea as examples of modernization without cultural loss.

He identified the war of necessity in South Asia and admitted that Iraq was a war of choice, while also noting that Iraqis are better of without Saddam. He didn’t apologize for Iraq, which would have set off a national-conservative backlash at home, but he seemed to imply it was an error. Very smooth.

He noted the concerns over women’s rights and modernization, but rightfully blew threw that reactionary posture pretty fast to say what needed to be said: that the ME is falling behind the rest of the world and that this feeds both poverty and radicalism.

He basically dumped ME peace back in their hands by saying we can’t do it for them. He said lots of right things about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. He attacked Muslim anti-semitism and Holocaust denial and openly declared the illegitimacy of the Israeli West Bank settlement to an Arab audience. Nice! And he backed that with a subtle and correct shot that too many Arab regimes don’t really care to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Also correct.

He even had the courage to touch on religious tolerance in the Muslim ME, which I think is a critical breakpoint with the West. The defense of the Copts was an important gesture, particularly to western Christians who think the Islam demands wide latitude for its practitioners in the West while denying it in the ME (basically accurate).

He also went to bat for the freedom agenda – important because it signals a continuity of US commitment to democracy across quite different administrations. Unfortunately he passed on singling out his host Mubarak, exactly the sort of US-supported ME despot that fires al Qaeda.

Finally, did you catch the subtle end of Bush-era grand strategy: “no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other”? That is pretty much the end of regime change and preemption.

3. I can’t say he really missed much. But for the PC bit about stereotypes and the missed swipe at Mubarak, this was pretty much a grand slam.

4. I was pleased with the audience reaction. At no point did it get nationalist, islamist or otherwise jingoistic. They applauded not only at the complements, but also the criticisms. Very good.

5. But there is an important and deep political theory insight to be gleaned from the language of the talk. It was not intentional but should be revelatory to secular westerners unaccustomed to ME political discourse. Obama’s constant reference to Islam and his use of religious quotations and invocation of Islamic and religious values was a deep indication of the cultural cleft between the West and Islam, albeit more between secular Europe and the religious ME. And I suspect that an upper class secular Democrat like O found it somewhat uncomfortable to be constantly referring to ‘faith.’ To this day, I admire Howard Dean’s response to G Stephanopoulos’ mandatory and obnoxious question about the role of religion in his politics. Dean simply said there was no role.

Yet Obama can’t talk that way in the ME for two reasons. First, Islamism as a social movement has exploded in the ME since 1967. The ME is alive with religion in the way of Massachusetts Bay Colony or the Amish. Islam is in the middle of a ‘great awakening’ period, and the language of religion is spilling into all areas. Hence the upsurge of Muslim identity politics and discovery of something called ‘islamophobia,’ which here is defined so broadly as to include just about any criticism. So Islam must be genuflected to and wrapped into any serious socio-political discussion in the ME. For contrast, look at Southeast Asia where is Islam is more secular.

Second, Islam has become the shield for opposition in the ME, just like Orthodoxy was in the USSR. Islam has become the channel for political resistance to atrocious government of the ME, and so it has become increasingly politicized. Politicized religion is almost always apocalyptic and absolutist, and the contemporary ME is no different. New ideas, policy proposals, criticism must invariably cite koranic verse and treat it as font of authority – as O did last yesterday. (For parallels, think about how the US right uses the writings of the Founders and Framers as touchstones for just about everything, or the way the Soviets and Chinese used to comb through Marx for quotations to support whatever new policy they wanted to pursue.)

This more than anything else betrays the bankruptcy of politics in the ME. It badly lacks a public-spirited, nondenominational language of citizenship. It is trapped in the religious and chronological parochialism of a 1400 year old revelation. This both cripples and exacerbates politics. Cripples, because the Koran (and the hadith) hardly fit the needs of social phenomena like the discovery of the New World, industrialization, space travel, or globalization. (Think of the ridiculous anti-modern intransigence of the Haredim.) And it exacerbates politics by injecting religion at every turn and so constantly raises political difference to the level of religious confrontation. Part of this is inevitably parochialism. If the Koran is the basis of wisdom and the good life, then how to deal with non-Muslims? As an example of all these problems cumulated, look at Saudi Arabia. It has no constitution, because it claims the Koran is that, and hence has all sorts of ‘religious’ problems over what should be simple technical issues questions like women drivers or proper license plates. By contrast political theory in the West has long strived to build a public-spirited universalist language (Habermas and Rawls spring to mind). This helps western democracies build citizenship across religious cleavages and also ties them internationally to each other better than any other ‘family of nations.’

Obama In Cairo

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Just about everybody has an idea for what the Great O should say. So here’s my run down:

1. Propaganda: One of the basic elements to successfully criticizing someone is to build up them before you tear them down. This is pretty simple psychology. Teachers use it all the time in trying to break it to students that their work is actually pretty bad.

Expect this from Obama, because Arab/Muslim prestige is such a big factor in Middle East politics. The ME has made it clear it would rather be right and poor than admit mistakes, flex, and get wealthy. Thomas Friedman (as well as B Lewis, F Zakaria, F Ajami, and countless others) has argued for years about just how deeply Arabs and Muslims want to fight to hang on to their ‘olive trees,’ regardless what it does to their economy, relations with the West, and overall ME power in world politics. And now, but for Africa, the Middle East is the worst governed region on earth. Yet the ME remains downright recalcitrant when it comes to learning from the West (Khomeini’s classic ‘westoxification’).

This is folly of course. One need only look at China, Japan and Korea to see how well emulation can work, and that it does not mean cultural Americanization, religious betrayal/Christianization, or wild Khomeinist Jewish conspiracy theories. Instead it it is the route to growth and weight in the international system. So 50 years ago, Nasser was more important than Mao, but today China is forging the future, and globalization is passing the ME by.

Nevertheless Obama must cater to this sensibility. He must throw out multicultural softballs about how Americans respect Islam, see it as one of the world’s great religions, value its past cultural achievements in areas like mathematics, etc. The irony of course is that none of this is true. Islam makes the West pretty nervous; its theology is radically simpler than Christianity, much less the western philosophical tradition serious thinkers must engage (and that helped make Christianity so much intellectually richer), so its unlikely most educated westerners ‘respect’ it; and who really cares about Islamic scientific progress several centuries ago? Who cares if Americans invited the lightbulb years ago? You don’t see the Chinese telling the West to respect it because of gunpowder, but rather because it is a growth dynamo, and we desperately need their savers.

2. Truth: Somehow Obama needs to say the same stuff W did about democracy, freedom, rights for women, open markets, and the US commitment to reduce terrorism. Thankfully Obama is a vastly better salesman for the ‘freedom agenda.’ 1. He is not an evangelical, but only mildly religious and mostly secular. 2. He is a Democrat, the party generally associated with multilateralism and internationalism in US foreign policy. 3. He is an intellectual and so probably understands what the freedom agenda actually is (unlike W who repeated it mantra-like, even as his administration undermined it at home). 4. His personal history speaks volumes.

So when Muslims hear a black secular liberal Democrat with the middle name Hussein who lived in Indonesia still say the same thing W did, then hopefully they will know we mean it. Just because Obama is new, young, black, more secular, whatever, doesn’t mean the region’s religious fanatics (including zionist settlers), autocrats, and terrorists should get a pass.

If Obama welches on this, if he avoids criticizing Mubarak, or if he looks a like he is accommodating Muslim supremacist thinking in order to end the GWoT, he will face crushing conservative criticism at home, and deservedly so.

3. Really Tough Truth: If Obama really has guts, he will talk about religious pluralism. To my mind, this is central cultural breakpoint between the West and Islam today. Islam as practiced today in the Middle East does not meaningful embrace religious pluralism or politically accept it. (Note: It does in Indonesia and SE Asia, which is exactly why the Saudi clerical establishment has funded the building of schools and mosques there.) ME Islam particularly seems unwilling to admit the equality of all religions before a neutral secular state. Parts of the world are still designated ‘Muslim lands;’ apostasy is still a crime in at least 8 Muslim-majority states; and even Iraq’s constitution declares it a Muslim state in which the Koran can be a source of law. So long as the supremacy of Islam is a defining feature of politics in the region, it will be hard for non-Muslims to ‘respect’ or feel comfortable with the ME. No other part of the world mixes religion and politics like this anymore. In the West, secular politics dates to the Enlightenment, if not the Reformation. When Westerners look at politicized religion in the ME, they see their own dangerous past of the religious wars of the 16th C.

4. Payoff: 2 and 3 would be pretty tough to swallow for the Islamic ME, so here is a great payoff that is good for the US (and Israel in the long-run) anyway: serious pressue on the Israelis to finally exit the West Bank and get the two-state solution rolling. The debate on this has changed enormously. For the first time since the first Bush administration, we have an adminisration ready to take on the Israel lobby at home and the Israeli government. The intellectual center of gravity has really shifted, so Obama and Clinton are now well-grounded in an emerging consensus in the US. Thanks for this most especially to Stephen Walt‘s tireless, much-derided but actually quite even-handed writing on this. You may have hated his book, but it did a lot to make clear how the the Israel lobby in the US has abetted the worst imperialist instincts of the settler movement and so made a meaning two-state deal impossible for decades. It is now clear to everybody but the most recalcitrant that Israel needs to get out. US pressure to this end will help the ME swallow points 2 and 3 at no cost to the US, because a two-state solution is now clearly in American’s interest anyway.

5. Prediction: Obama will overdose on the propaganda (watch especially, if he mentions Muhammad, if next he says ‘PBUH’ or ‘praise by upon Him’), ride gently with the truth, talk moderately but firmly in support of the two-state solution, and slide by the tough pluralist part. The reason, I think, is his desire to end the GWoT or at least tone it down, to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan as fast as possible, and then do what he really wants to do and spend where he really wants the US budget to go – on the US welfare state. If he can pull us out of the wars, draw a cool peace with the ME, and then add universal health care and green energy to the New Deal and Great Society, he will go down in history as one of the greatest presidents ever.

The Deficit Matters After All…

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Sometimes the dark or quirky side of me misses the Bush administration. Who can forget those ‘great’ Rumsfeld press conferences where he would attack the media (‘back off,’ ‘freedom is messy’)? Or Bush for his mind-blowing sillinesses (‘heckuva job,’ the ‘moo-lahs’ of Iran) and catastrophic English. Or Cheney (‘no doubt Iraq has nuclear weapons, ‘ deficits don’t matter’)? The political scientist in me can’t help, a little bit, but miss the sheer fun provoked by the endless stream of foolishness from the bad old days. R Gates is vastly superior SecDef, but for sheer entertainment value, you could always count on Rumsfeld to say something ridiculous on TV or Capital Hill and to provoke you. My top three ballonhead moments for W are:

1. When he ran in 2000, he was asked to name his favorite political philosopher and he said Jesus. For a nanosecond, the academic in me thought of Thomas Pangle. The moderate centrist citizen in me gaped in astonishment. To this day I remember that that line sealed my decision to vote for Gore.

2. In 2004 (I think), W was asked in a press conference what mistakes he had made. He said nothing for 15 seconds, before ducking the question. I remember exactly where I was when that happened, it stunned me so much.

3. In one of the State of the Union addresses, Bush said we could balance the budget without raising taxes. I was playing a SotU drinking game with a friend. I think I just about fell off the sofa laughing when I heard that one, and then again when I had to drill my whole cocktail in payment.

So now that reality has returned a little under the great O, another fine Bush era fantasy has just proven to be the illusion serious people always knew it was. It turns out the deficit does matter. How nice to learn once again what my freshmen learn in basic IR when we cover IPE and American power.

When W became POTUS, the deficit was under $6T. When he left, it was over $9T. Even while the economy was growing, we couldn’t balance the budget – which is a basic requirement if you want to borrow during the hard times (Clinton did this in his second term). Now the not-so-great-after-all O will give us trillion dollar plus deficits every year! Gah! I tell my Asian students this (gasp!) and then remind them who we expect to buy all those T-bills (GASP!). If Obama thinks they will just buy, buy, buy, he’s wrong. They may be great savers out here, but they’re not stupid.

Just in case you needed another W-era failure to reinforce your scope of what Obama has to fix, this is probably W’s worst pedestrian, everyday failure. It does not have the media glare and awful human toll of Katrina or Iraq, but this will effect the average American much more than those ‘highlights.’ And it is worse, because so few people understand it. You can see the awfulness of Iraq or Guantanamo on TV or when you travel and meet foreigners who loathe W and you have to tell them you come from Canada. But the deficit and the staggering debt have the kind of micro-effects only someone trained in economics can see in detail. This is not an argument for social science intellectual superiority; I mean only that it takes weeks of classtime for me to explain budgeting to my undergraduates, whereas they could grasp the Iraq mess pretty easily. The budget trainwreck is a complex topic. It is a failure that is easy to hide, dissemble about, or just ignore, as Cheney’s locution makes clear. But in myriad little ways, we must pay for this everyday. It sucks money from the budget to pay for interest on the debt (so we can keep a AAA credit rating in order to borrow MORE); it threatens higher interest rates and inflation should we lose the ability to finance it; it weakens US superpowerdom by placing vast dollar reserves in the hands of foreigners, especially China, who may not share our values. Consider, if China and Taiwan get in a shooting war, how hard it will be for the US to help Taiwan if China threatens to dump all its dollars abruptly.

So at least these people are out of government and some measure of sanity has returned. At least the Republicans can now be the voice of fiscal sanity in opposition they failed to be when in power. The irony is rich – an inverse of the ‘only Nixon can go to China’ notion. Only Clinton would try to balance the budget, because Dems are open and sensitive to the charge they tax and spend. The GOP under W went wild with the fiscus, because the usual voices for spending restraint (the Wall Street Journal, e.g.) were quiet.

Perhaps the larger problem though is we the taxpayers. It increasingly seems like the dominant problem is that Americans want government, but don’t want to pay for it. And ‘deficits don’t matter’ fits perfectly with such an attitude.

Guantanamo Recidivism

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The Pentagon seems ready to assert that 1 in 7 Guantanamo inmates return to terrorism. It seems likely that this will encourage the recent backtracking on Guantanamo’s closure. Once again, we will hear about how the inmates are hardened killers who hate America, threaten it, do not deserve due process, deserve to rot in a hole, etc. Clearly some of them do. But it must also be admitted that 1 in 7 is not such a bad recidivism rate. 14.28% is actually not that exceptional; compared to US rates it even seems low. It is also not clear just what kind of terrorism they return to.

The knee-jerk response is to say that even 1 in 7 is unacceptable, so W was right that we should just ‘lock ‘em up.’ This is an overreaction I think. There is a political choice here to be made, unless we adopt Cheney’s 1% doctrine that even 1 in 100 is too much. But by this logic, just about anyone we pick up in the GWoT should wind up in a hole, because who knows what he might do if we let him out.

But think more politically about it. 1 in 7 is bad, but it could be a lot worse. 1 in 7 is a ‘reasonable’ or ‘manageable’ number unless we assert that the goal of the GWoT is to kill every terrorist on the planet. This is impossible and would require such extreme means that it would create more problems that it would solve. As we learned in Iraq, we cannot kill (or imprison, torture, etc.) our way to victory. We don’t want the cure to kill the patient. And clearly, the side costs of Guantanamo have been enormous – the reduction of trust in the US, prestige loss, the temptation to torture, hedging by traditional allies, etc. The reasons to close Guantanamo are obvious. Idealistically, it violates core American beliefs of due process, civil liberties, human treatment of prisoners, etc. Realistically, Guantanamo’s damage to America’s reputation and its use in inspiring moderate Moslems that extremists are right about the US, almost certainly outweighs its value. In short, if we learn good intel at Guantanamo, but inspire new terrorists and betray our values in doing so, is it worth it? Is it worth 1 in 7?

Probably not. The answer to 1 in 7 is not the 1% doctrine. Instead it suggests what the lawyers and centrists have sought all along – some kind of investigative and legal process for these people. It is amazing that almost 8 years after 9/11, there is still no proper legal framework for detainees. In the place of ‘lock ‘em all up,’ we need a method to investigate, rules of evidence & appeal, punishment guidelines, special courts if necessary, etc. This process may be different for terrorist suspects and illegal combatants, but the framework must be open for public debate, authorized by congressional statute, constitutional consonant (i.e., acceptable to the Supreme Court), and with proper oversight mechanisms. Problems like this will continue arise as the GWoT rolls on, and the executive branch ad hocery of the last 8 years is both legally confused and insufficient for the burden of people to be processed.

In short, we need to create a legal framework that will allow us to investigate, and if warranted, prosecute and punish these people. This is what we normally do with other lawbreakers. Let’s adapt it to these new circumstances. Clearly some of these people are threats, but also 6 in 7 are not. That is a pretty sizeable number. Instead of absolutist positions like the 1% doctrine, we need a more nuanced, professional and sustainable approach that tries to discriminate the redeemable from the truly awful. This is what courts and investigations do everyday. The requirement to do that here is no different, even if the method will be. And we must be prepared for some recidivism nonetheless. This is the price we pay for being a liberal democracy. We can do as much as we can, within limits, to reduce our exposure, but the 1% doctrine betrays the very openness, generosity, and liberality of our society that we are trying to protect.

Did W really believe he was doing God’s work?

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I am surprised how little play this story has received. SecDef Rumsfeld apparently lathered Bible phraseology on reports for W as the Iraq war went south. If I were a Muslim, I would be saying I told you so! All this suggests that W was not only too weak-minded to manage a globe-spanning conflict, but also needed simplistic black/white language, and believed, as was widely-suspected, that he was doing God’s work.

The problems are obvious of course. One reason the MBA president was a terrible manager was that he didn’t have the ability to synthesize and reflect on complex data that did not fit easy, pre-existing categories like ‘evil.’ Here both Clinton and Obama exceed W significantly. But we kinda already knew that already.

More important is the role of Christianity as a secret or hidden motivator. Bush long adopted a liberal or secular language to describe the GWoT. We were fighting for US national security, to drain the ME swamp, kill international outlaws, to spread democracy, etc. But Bush’s own deep personal history with evangelical Protestantism raised persistent questions that these revelations obviously justify. Bush, an evangelical devoutly committed to Jesus, was a terrible choice to convince Muslims we weren’t fighting their religion.

There are several possible ideological frames for the GWoT that I develop when I teach it.

1. To the left, the GWoT is more American exceptionalist imperialism. This is the school of Noam Chomsky, Hugo Chavez, the Chinese scholar I encountered last week, Why We Fight, and Chalmers Johnson (the most serious leftist on this issue, IMO, but who still said US democracy is close to collapsing because of militarism!). The idea here is that the US has a history of imperialism (cf Walter LaFeber) and that the GWoT is just the latest extension of this. Frequently this critique includes a capitalist subsection – that US wars are about oil or arms contracts. I must say I find this childish and reflexive (even though I think Johnson and Chomsky are great scholars). Haven’t we heard this about every US foreign conflict? I think it betrays an ignorance of the Muslim revival since 1967 and just how deeply it has penetrated ME politics, which has both politicized ME Islam and radicalized it because the governments there are so generally corrupt and repressive.

2. To the right, the GWoT is epochal. It is Huntington’s clash of civilizations, Norman Podhoretz’ WWIV, or Bernard Lewis’ argument that the current GWoT is just the latest round in the millennium-long conflict between Christianity and Islam. The most extreme version of this is the evangelical Protestant spin that this is indeed a religious war. Both Huntington and Lewis also channel the religious war theme, without openly advocating a Judeo-Christian strategy or victory. Huntington defines his civilizations mainly through religion, and Lewis sees just another chapter in a long on-again-off-again struggle. Podhoretz gives you a secular version: Islam has become infected with a fascistoid cult of death, glorification of violence, and totalitarian governing impulse. Hence “Islamofascism.” But I find Podhoreetz’ language actually more frightening than Lewis or Huntington’s. The latter two just analyze. They don’t prescribe a WWIV-style national mobilization for a limitless “long war” (D Rumsfeld) with no realistic benchmarks of victory. Podhoretz openly embraces the global neo-con strategy of a wide-ranging, long-term campaign. The US would become like Israel – a barracks democracy engaged in long-term hostile commitments in various places across Barnett’s "arc of instability." Yikes! Does it really have to be that bad?!

3. The liberal/centrist take on the GWoT is actually what George Bush tried to argue, although it was obscured by Iraq, his evangelical Christianity, and persistent brain-failures like the “axis of evil” or “bring ‘em on.”  Zakaria and Friedman are better. The Middle East is experiencing a dramatic religious upheaval as reactionaries clash with modernists (a fight as old as the Ottoman Empire in the 18th C, but fired anew after the 6-Day War). This conflict did not interest us much until it crashed into the WTC. Now, the US must advance the liberalization of the ME; it has become a matter of national security. This involves not just pursuing terrorists, but promoting good governance, democracy, and liberalization. This is a secular approach that emphasizes counter-terrorism, state-building, democratization, and, most importantly, an internal conflict inside Islam rather than an external one with other religions. This narrative invokes liberal values that just about everyone supports. It avoids the hair-raising language of the Christian right about religious war, or a possible ‘forever war’ suggested by calling it WWIV.

Which position one adopts is influenced by both reality and political desire. E.g., Muslims are likely to prefer 1 because it defers criticism from the atrocious governance of the ME and generally changes the subject to the well-springs of US foreign policy, Israel, US energy needs, etc. 9/11 is a passing blip in the long history of US imperialism. 2 is also attractive because it rewrites Iraq and Afghanistan as religious imperialism, against which there is a clear global norm today. Devout Christians ironically are probably also driven to position 2, because OBL has so consistently argued for the clash of civilizations; US evangelicalism (as well as Orthodoxy) is so conservative; and the ME seems so chaotic, backward, and violent on TV.

The liberal position (3) is the polite, PC one. I genuinely hope it is correct too; I think it is. 1 is clearly incorrect. It is a simplistic hangover from Vietnam uninformed by recent developments in Islam. 2 might be correct. OBL and a good chunk of ME opinion think this is a religious war. If enough Muslims (and evangelicals in the US, orthodox in Russia, and Hindu nationalists in India) think this is a religious war, does that make it one?

So ultimately the problem for this PC version of the GWoT (3) – the one we desperately want to be true, even if it isn’t – is that Bush and the GOP are the wrong salesman for it; they may genuinely believe in 2 also.  The story motivating this post makes it pretty clear that Bush was somewhere between 2 and 3, as many (Muslims and Westerners) suspected. And the GOP has become increasingly Christian and increasingly contemptuous of due-process and secular good government: Rove’s christianization of GOP voter mobiliization, Schiavo, Katrina, torture/Guantanamo. In short, only the liberal internationalist center of US politics has the ingrained attitudes – secularism, liberalism, dislike for the culture wars -  necessary to pursue the GWoT without it becoming a religious war. There is just no way that an evangelical like W, with the backing of a christianist GOP and belligerent Fox News, could sell the GWoT to Muslims as a liberal, limited, modernizing endeavor.

“Obama’s Foreign Policy and Its Influence on East Asia”

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The following is my response to a paper by this title at the Northeast Asian security and cooperation conference discussed in my previous post.

“Before my theoretical comments, let me say as a citizen that I am both alarmed and embarrassed by the content of the paper. Alarmed because if the author is correct, then the US and China will be at war soon. Embarrassed, because if this is how Chinese or Asians or non-Americans generally see the US, than the Bush administration was even more disastrous than I thought. I am ashamed that serious people would believe the US seeks “world domination,” wants to invade NK, or unleash a militarized Japan on an unsuspecting East Asia. I certainly don’t want that, nor do I believe that most Americans see their foreign policy this way. Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ public opinion surveys of US popular foreign policy attitudes hardly substantiate these claims either. Chalk this up as more fallout from the disastrous Bush administration.

My comments will focus on IR theory, but the paper’s real focus is normative public policy, not political science.

1. This paper presents the US in a mix of offensive realism and power transition theory. The US is expansionist and a declining, angry hegemon using a neo-imperial grand strategy in Asia to prop up declining prestige and influence. Specifically, the United States is pursuing “world domination,” and the language used is pretty strong. The US is “arrogant,” “selfish,” engaged in a “conspiracy,” “infiltrating East Asia," and “besieging China.” The US is not just a unipole but a revisionist hegemon deploying tools of overt dominance. The US is remilitarizing Japan and purposefully preventing a Korean settlement as an “excuse” to stay in the region.

I doubt most Americans would accept this image or support such an aggressive line. I also challenge anyone to find policy statements (not just policy papers from think-tanks or something), leaks, or State Department foreign relations papers that support this. Also, someone needs to write a dissertation on the idea of a revisionist hegemon; this is new in IR theory, but a good insight based on Bush administration behavior.

2. The author misuses the notion of the security dilemma by asserting that the US is primarily responsible for tension in East Asia. A security dilemma is a common problem in regions and does not require outside intervention to ignite. The SD explains the unhappy logic of states arming and counter-arming, all while claiming this only for defense. The regional security literature shows how much this process accelerates among proximate states, and lateral pressure explains why it can lead to genuinely explosive arms races. A far simpler, less conspiratorial approach would see that North East Asia is a tightly packed geographic region and consequently has a built-in likelihood of a tough SD. Local grievances over history, territory, and ideology all worsen it, as does the lateral pressure of so much regional growth occurring so rapidly. In short, closely proximate, wealthy, and growing states with lots of disagreements will certainly have a nasty SD.

History suggests this too. Long before US power seriously arrived in East Asia in the 1940s, East Asian societies were warring with one another. Indeed, most Korean, Japanese, and American IR tags the US as a stabilizer or offshore balancer over the horizon, not an instigator. And it seems far more likely that a US abandonment of Korea and Japan would spur much more serious arms racing spirals. Without US extended deterrence, it is likely Japan and SK would feel strong pressure even to go nuclear. Finally the USFK and USFJ are here with popular assent. If these states voted the US military out, the US would leave. It left France in the 60s and the Philippines in the 80s. Like NATO, American ‘empire’ in East Asia is one of invitation, not imposition.  The problems between East Asian states exist despite the US presence and would persist should it leave. The US has little impact on the historical conflict over Japanese imperialism and textbooks, the border disputes over Dokdo, Taiwan, or the South China Sea, or the ideological splits between communism and democracy.

3. The author seems to argue for a security community in East Asia, but ultimately suggests that a concert, dominated by the US and PRC, is necessary. The problem is the US presence. Yet the security community literature is quite skeptical about its possibility here. The grievances listed above are deep.  Without agreed norms and borders, it is hard to see NE Asia building a multilateral system. It took Europe centuries of war to agree on borders and that war is an illegitimate tool of diplomacy. Asia is simply not there yet. The level of trust and ‘we-ness’ necessary is lacking, and the US is not the cause of this, unless one argues that the US presence freezes grievances that could otherwise be worked out in a confrontation. Again, the disputes over memory, territory, and ideology are massive impediments hardly related to the US. The existing evidence on successful and failed security communities indentifies no major role for a US presence. In Western Europe and Latin America, successful security communities were established with and without a US presence. In NE Asia and South Asia, security communities have failed with and without a US presence.

4. Regarding US ‘neocontainment’ of China, the author slides to fantasy quite honestly.  The author asserts that the US is aligning with India to create a great power check on China; is aligning with Australia and SE Asia to contain China in the South China Sea; wants to either “invade NK” (!) or foment chaos there to suck in China and “drag China down;” and most fantastically, remilitarize Japan “to give it a free hand to create trouble in East Asia.” I do not know of evidence to support any of this. Certainly nothing in NSC National Security Strategies has ever spoken this way, and much of this can easily be explained away.

The US is engaging India, because, 1. Democracies naturally feel a comradery that the CW strangely damaged between India and the US. 2. The US is desperate to avoid a nuclear arms race in South Asia, as well as the possibility of proliferation. 3. The US desperately wants a reduction in Indo-Pakistani tension so that Pakistan can redeploy its best forces from its eastern border to the northwestern frontier to battle the Taliban-Pashtun insurgency. None of this has anything to do with China; indeed stability in Pakistan is clearly in China’s interest. No one wants a talibanized nuclear Pakistan.

The US is similarly engaged in SE Asia. It is all-driven by the GWoT. The US does not want Indonesia to slide toward radical Islam, and the US assistance program there has focused on police and counterinsurgency training, not naval strategy or large-scale warfighting. Nor is it even clear if the Indonesians want to be roped into a US-led neo-containment ring. In the Philippines, the US is doing the same. It wants to help Manila control its island fringe. I know of no US naval or large-scale assistance, nor of a return to the large bases of the past.

In NE Asia, it is just maoist fantasy that the US wants to invade NK. There is no evidence of that. Nor does the US want to bring China down. As Secretary Clinton herself said a few months ago, the US is grateful to the Chinese for buying its debt. I have seen nothing suggesting there is a US plot to reduce China. And remilitarizing Japan so it can bully East Asia? Where is the proof of such an outlandish claim? If anything, the US would like to see Japan normalize so that its history fights recede; this would lower the temperature in East Asia. As with Germany after WWII, the US would like Japan to be an integrated, well-behaved democracy tied to the West. A resurgent Japanese militarism would create huge headaches for the US and likely pull it into a war again if one occurred.

5. The author’s disappointing conclusion is that Obama will not change his obviously Bush-inspired vision of US foreign policy. Both are exponents of American exceptionalism and therefore will pursue adventurism. This is probably inaccurate.

a . This suggests to me a lack of understanding of elections in democracies. Obama has in fact changed US foreign policy. His charm offensive of the last few months has explicitly focused on undoing the Bush legacy of the US as revisionist hegemon. He is reaching out to Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. Bush would never have done this.

b. It underrates the importance of US pubic opinion and its powerful rejection of the Bush administration. Bush left office with the lowest approval rating since President Truman. US elections are usually focused on domestic politics, but Bush made such a foreign policy mess, that Obama was able to build an issue out of it. Further, only a huge rejection of Bushism made it possible for a Democrat as liberal as Obama to achieve the White House. The last 3 Democratic presidents were all moderate southerners. Obama is a genuine liberal, and there is no way he would have been viable without a major rejection of Bush’s legacy, which includes his belligerent foreign policy.

6. Finally, a few large comments on US foreign policy are required. It is true that the US has an exceptionalist vision of itself – the last best hope for mankind (Lincoln), the end of history (Fukuyama), God has a special mission for the United States (Bush 2). But it is important to see that this exceptionalism leads to isolationism, not imperialism. In US foreign policy mythology, Eurasia is the old world of nobility, land and class conflict, world-breaking fanaticisms, dynastic wars, etc. By contrast the US is the new world – where all men are equal, with no history of radicalism and ideology. The US is starting history anew. And so US foreign policy should avoid the corruption of the old world. The US should be a beacon as a “city on the hill” to the world. Hence President Washington counseled the US to avoid “entangling alliances.” John Quincy Adams said the US should “not go forth in search of monsters to destroy.” In short, yes, the US is arrogant about itself, but that arrogance leads to overseas avoidance out of contempt, not to imperialism based on a civilizing mission. I know foreigners loathe it when Americans celebrate themselves this way, but what’s important here is that American exceptionalism does NOT counsel “world domination,” but isolationism.

And in fact, US foreign policy followed this generally, and even after major wars, the first US inclination has been to leave, not stay and dominate, much less colonize. So the US joined WWI very late, fought a few battles in the spring of 1918, and then went home. If anything, the conventional wisdom today is that the US was not ‘imperialist’ enough in the interwar period. By not joining the League of Nations and world affairs more generally, the US made no contribution to slowing fascism in the 20s and 30s.

Again in WWII the US joined relatively late, only after it was forced in by Pearl Harbor. Even after Pearl Harbor, FDR did not believe he could get a war declaration against Germany. Hitler declared war first. When the war ended, the US population called ‘to bring the boys back home’ – a constant postwar rallying cry hardly consonant with imperialism. Indeed the US was pulling out of both Europe and Asia, until the Europeans invited US presence in NATO, and NK invaded SK, convincing the US it had to stay.

And after the Cold War, isolationism again returned. The Republican party retreated to tradition realpolitik on issues like Haiti and Bosnia. After Iraq 1, the US pulled out most of ‘the boys.’ NATO was questioned. US forces in Asia and Europe shrank. Only another surprise attack, 9/11, convinced the US to once more ramp up in Eurasia. And even this was short-lived. US public opinion support for Iraq 2 slid below 50% in 2004 and never returned. The US has been looking for a way to leave Iraq and Afghanistan ever since.

Maybe the US is an imperialist. Certainly Chalmers Johnson and Noam Chomsky think so, but there is a lot of counter-evidence that questions the “world domination” argument. This is not not considered in this paper.”