Currently viewing the tag: "Foreign Policy"

The Frauds Always Eventually Screw Up

by Lev on 3 August 2012
One of my beliefs, one which is optimistic but has a fair amount of evidence to support it, is that eventually the cynics always get found out, bad ideologies eventually fall to pieces, and the phony leaders eventually get found out and lose favor. It often takes much more time than we’d like, but it does happen. Case in point.
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Romney’s Credential-Burnishing Foreign Policy Trip Is Going Well…

by Lev on 26 July 2012

Via TPM: “Romney managed to insult his British hosts, knocking their management of the Summer Olympics in comparison to his run with the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002.” Prime Minister Cameron is none too pleased.

I have no doubt we’re getting a glimpse of Mitt’s foreign policy in advance. Romney has taken some heat both for what he’s said and what he hasn’t on the subject, but there has been some debate about whether he’s just saying it to please the base or whether he believes it. After this incident, it seems pretty clear that Romney just doesn’t have much interest in diplomacy at all. Romney has committed a number of gaffes in this campaign, but typically they’re gaffes where he goes overboard trying to ingratiate himself with whatever target he’s aiming for. Saying that you ran the Olympics better than the current team furthers his campaign’s bizarre belief that his running of the Olympics matters to voters, and insults a long-time ally that he’s supposedly trying to befriend, but there’s no pandering element to it that I’m aware of. My instinct would be to say that Romney’s “credential-burnishing” tour is probably intended to give Mitt plenty of opportunities to be rude to foreign leaders that conservatives don’t like as some sort of weird nationalist play for their affections (which would be sort of a natural follow-through after Romney’s silly VFW speech), except conservatives don’t hate Britain or Cameron. So I don’t make this as pandering to them. Then what? Romney’s gaffe here is one of burnishing his own ego, not of pandering to the group he’s in front of. Which leaves only the interpretation that he doesn’t care about handling foreign policy, outside of the red meat nationalistic parts that he can use to make conservative voters happy. It wouldn’t have taken much effort for Romney not to say this, but he did.

What is deliciously ironic about this is that Romney frequently talks about how President Obama has insulted American allies, which isn’t true of him, but now is true of Romney. Nobody outside the wingularity cared about returning Churchill’s bust or whatever, but to my knowledge no UK leader has never slammed Obama in this kind of way. All the more proof that we ought to expect a Romney Administration to have a foreign policy similar to the one he’s outlined, perhaps combined with some of the fictitious criticisms he’s made of Obama. No wonder he wants to increase military spending!

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Obama And The Middle East

by Lev on 21 June 2012

John Cole turned me onto this:

A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.

The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.

It’s difficult to know from the article exactly what’s going on here, but it sure looks as though we’re again putting our hands where they don’t belong.

I think the interesting part of Obama’s Middle Eastern policy is how it’s more a refactoring, than a rebooting, of Bush’s. Refactoring, in case you don’t know, is a software term meaning that you change the code to something else that does basically the same thing. For example, maybe you change something in favor of a more elegant design, but you want to preserve the functionality. Obama ended the U.S. War in Iraq, and he says he intends to end the U.S. War in Afghanistan next year. I believe him. But he has shown no intention of ending the U.S. War in the Middle East, and I suspect that Republicans were relatively silent about the former two developments because Obama has substantially increased the level of militarism outside of these specific theaters. I suspect that the medium-range liberal freakout over the Times’s Kill List story a few weeks back had a lot to do with this–the idea that Obama will end the specific, declared, Congressionally-approved wars we stupidly decided to fight, while continuing the non-approved, shadier, morally-ambiguous activities that have become so prevalent in the past three years. And that if soldiers aren’t dying, nobody will pay much attention. Refactoring, simply put.

Obama’s tactics are quite different from Bush’s, as are some of his assumptions. Bush blithely sent troops in harms way based on hunches, while Obama seems deeply resistant to doing so. Of course, doing this is also politically much more perilous. So drones, starting private little wars, and relying on air power have become more prevalent weapons in accomplishing the big strategy here. But the strategy is unchanged–some combination of regime change where possible/applicable, blowback-inducing violence to try to take out the bad guys, all of which seems geared toward transmitting some sort of ideal that simply won’t take if helped along by foreign intervention. Of all the Arab Spring uprisings, the most successful has been Tunisia, in which America had no role. The least successful was Libya, in which America had the most significant role. The jury is still out on Egypt, though it seems unlikely that they’ll blaze a new, liberal trail in the Middle East at this point. Obama seems to have surrendered the realpolitik that he initially offered, in exchange for the same failed redraw-the-map schemes that the Bush Administration failed to implement. I have no idea why this occurred, perhaps the impulse to just do something is irresistible to a domestically-stymied chief executive, especially if all these grand visions seem so achievable.

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Mitt Romney: Still Not A Technocrat

by Lev on 30 April 2012

I’d like to answer this question:

The perception of Bush as inexperienced and unprepared on this front was not wrong. This is arguably more worrisome in Romney’s case because he appears to have no firm principles, which makes him more vulnerable to influence from his advisers, and because he usually has a reputation for being very detail-oriented in his understanding of other subjects. Bush was poorly informed about foreign affairs, but that was a function of his lack of intellectual curiosity. What accounts for Romney’s apparent lack of interest in a subject that he still can’t seem to stop bringing up? I don’t know, but I submit that it’s not a good sign.

I propose that this can be entirely explained by what we already know about Romney. We know already that Romney switched from being pro-choice to being pro-life due to a political need, but that process (as this Slate piece I’ve linked to before suggested) wasn’t one where Romney just decided one day that he wanted to be president and that he was changing his position to win votes. The piece makes it clear that ambition was the driving factor in the change, but not on a conscious level–it’s almost as though Romney supplied the goal and delegated the job of getting there to his brain, while still being able to maintain a consistent throughline.

Why couldn’t he have done the same with foreign policy? Daniel frequently notes that Romney’s complaints against Obama are all from 2009, but doesn’t this make sense if Romney was keyed into FOX News in 2009–a fair assumption–and heard over and over again that Obama was the worst foreign policy president ever and was using rapidly-forgotten detritus like, who knows, the Churchill’s bust incident, and that that was the goal he set his brain to get to? Obama’s foreign policy has hardly been perfect, but it has been perfectly bipartisan, and it’s hard to come up with a single action Obama took on foreign policy that ought to infuriate Republicans on general principle. The only thing that comes to mind are Obama’s intermittent attempts to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, which do deserve credit from us liberals as they count as one of those points where Obama was willing to swim upstream to accomplish a key progressive goal. But those efforts have not been entirely successful, and thus are of limited propaganda value. What else are you going to bash Obama about? His bipartisan Afghanistan policy? Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? Ending the Iraq War? Hell, there aren’t even very many obvious ways to hit Obama on not intervening in other nations’ affairs. He went into Libya, after all. He didn’t go into Iran or Syria (thank God!), so Romney has attacked him on those, of course. But after that, the pickings get thin.

So, the basic problem here for Romney is that he’s tried to perfectly mimic the Republican brand, particularly the FOX News variety. This includes a liberal amount of ignorant hawkery, and constructs a narrative of how Obama is, like, Jimmy Carter times a thousand, unable to face our enemies (USSR Iran), not being nice to our friends (The Shah Israel), and just won’t stop apologizing for America (when?). This narrative only makes sense if you ignore substantial portions of Obama’s record on foreign policy (and add a few things to them that didn’t happen), and the key themes of his record are (1) following through on winding down America’s wars, while (2) essentially continuing all of Bush’s security policies and building on them in several ways (e.g. drones, Libya), and (3) working with Republican and Democratic hawks, rather than, I don’t know, just outright saying we won’t bomb Iran. That’s a mixed bag, though it’s relatively hard for Republicans to argue with on the whole. Ultimately, I suspect Romney cares very little about this on an intuitive level because, as Larison notes, he hasn’t taken even the most basic steps to understand the situation or formulate any real vision. But he will keep shouting about it because he’s talked himself into thinking that the Honduras coup is one of the most important historical events ever, because the pundits on FOX were yammering about it right when he was forming his critiques of Obama for 2012, and he’s responsive to what his electorate wants, to say the least. Sure, Mitt Romney might not feel it matters deep down in his soul, but how could you? Honduras resolved all that years ago, it’s the deadest of horses. But Romney will shout about it for as long as he can. This is just a reminder that the idea that Mitt Romney will be some sort of sober, low-key technocrat in office is quite simply fanciful–a guy who can convince himself of the cosmic importance of such ephemeral twaddle is not someone you want anywhere near power.

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Time For Dr. End The Wars

by Lev on 12 January 2012

You’ve probably heard the news that the Administration is negotiating with the Taliban to end the Afghan War. On the whole, I think this is a very good thing. Yeah, they’re scumbags. We all know that. But thanks to a number of reasons (read: seven years of ineptitude from the Bush Administration), they’re there and they’re not going away, and we can’t defeat them without a WWII-level deployment (and probably not even then). I truly wish Bush had been happy with his one war and had focused like a laser on wiping out the Taliban back when he could, but he didn’t and here we are. And given these parameters, the best case scenario is some kind of negotiated compromise to end the fighting. The media doesn’t seem to know what the big issues are–apparently the Administration has insisted on a few preconditions related to human rights and accepting the Afghan Constitution–and so it’s too early to tell if the ultimate agreement will be any good (or if it’s likely). Still, the prospect of ending the war quickly is tempting, and I could see it being a sleeper issue against Mitt Romney, who has argued many times that we should basically stay in Afghanistan forever. Talk about a good possible contrast for November…

This, though, is another interesting step:

Iran has said it has agreed to talks with six world powers on its controversial nuclear programme, days after the UN confirmed Tehran was producing 20% enriched uranium.

Visiting Turkey, parliament speaker Ali Larijani said he had accepted Ankara’s offer to try to restart the talks.

Negotiations have stalled since a meeting in Istanbul a year ago.

I’m absolutely certain that this will bring up another round of Republican hawks spreading alarmism, accompanied by the public roundly ignoring them and favoring negotiations 2-to-1 in the polls. Still, it’s an interesting situation, and it’s possible that Iran might actually want a deal. Now that they can produce 20% enriched uranium, they have some amount of leverage to get a deal to their liking. And they have some things they definitely want, like lifting of the embargo. Of course, if the hawks are correct and Iran really cares for nothing more than wiping out Israel, they wouldn’t trade anything for their ability to have nuclear weapons, though if that were the case why waste time on discussions? I guess we’ll find out if Iran hawks know what they’re talking about (who wants odds?). In any event, after the recent threats against the Strait of Hormuz, it’s a much better sign, and since both sides have things that they really want and have leverage over the other, who knows?

It’s too early to tell if any of this will go anywhere, but it’s something to hope for. And it’s worth remembering that nothing would come of either in a Romney Administration. I can only hope his obnoxious hawkishness wears poorly with the electorate, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it diminishes once the primary contests are over. I hope Obama makes the most of these chances, and successful diplomacy would help build on one of his strengths, and whatever risk needs to be taken is worth it.

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Party Like It’s 1959

by Lev on 16 December 2011

If you asked me for one reason why mainstream conservatives shouldn’t be trusted with foreign policy, my basic response would probably be that most of them never got over the Cold War ending, and are desperate to either reignite it with Russia or find a substitute in “Islamofascism,” which by the way is one of the dumbest words ever created and needs to be retired*. Daniel Larison’s blog frequently flags this rhetoric, and it is just endless from these guys. The sheer quantity of it just shows how much pent-up mistrust and hatred is still out there for Russia 21 years after the end of the Cold War. Admittedly, Russia should be treated with caution and skepticism, but it hasn’t ever attacked us or even looked interested in doing so. To spend more than a second worrying about its threat to us seems excessive to me unless something changes. But that’s not how it is among conservative elites. Larison catches Krauthammer contradicting himself by trying to push two separate Russophobic lines of reasoning simultaneously, and says:

As ever, what annoys Krauthammer is not that the “reset” has failed, but that it has been a successful policy that isn’t likely to be abandoned unless there is a change of party in our government.

Something to think about. If you listen to the GOP candidates, one cold war isn’t nearly enough for them. Me, I’m still fuming over Obama’s cave on the NDAA and various foreign policy/national security letdowns. But when you consider that Republican behavior consists of needless antagonism of countries that don’t threaten us because most of their base still thinks that showing one sign of weakness to Russia will lead to Red Dawn, and much of their elites basically agree, well it’s pretty much all there is to it.

* Right? I mean, how can they at once be trying to re-establish a pan-Islamic Caliphate while also worshiping their individual nation-states? I’m no sympathizer of al-Qaeda, but a near-anarchist, stateless group of thugs and murderers doesn’t bear the slightest bit of resemblance to an organized political movement. It’s an insult to Fascism, honestly, though that doesn’t exactly break my heart.

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The Worst Foreign Policy Post Of The Day

by Lev on 18 October 2011
You’re welcome.
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