Author Archive
Is Newt Gingrich Drawing on Camus or Carl Schmitt?
Andrew Sullivan points us to this report that Newt Gingrich is going to tell an audience at AEI that the Obama administration is engaging in “willful blindness” and “self-deception” about the threat posed to the United States by Islam. In the wake of his remarks urging the United States to emulate Saudi Arabian standards of religious freedom, Gingrich has promised to deploy “the lessons of Camus and Orwell” to illuminate our present predicament.
“Evading the confrontation with Evil may bring a second Holocaust. The mistakes made by the White House will exact a terrible price.”
What’s interesting is that this sort of thing is a long-standing trope in Gingrich’s rhetorical repertoire, although he has reserved it mostly for Israeli audiences. In 2007, Gingrich went to Israel and informed a group gathered at the Herzliya Conference that Israel was facing the prospect of a “second Holocaust.” Perhaps drawing on the lessons of Habermas, Gingrich explained that
We don’t have right language, goals, structure, or operating speed, to defeat our enemies. My hope is that being this candid and direct, I could open a dialogue that will force people to come to grips with how serious this is, how real it is, how much we are threatened. If that fails, at least we will be intellectually prepared for the correct results once we have lost one or more cities.
This year, Gingrich published a commentary in a right-wing Israeli tabloid owned by Sheldon Adelson repeating these arguments, with the paper promising readers that
The behavior of the Obama administration regarding Iran and terror is characterized by a complete disconnect from reality. Gingrich, a prominent Republican Party leader, warns that the Western Elites are evading a confrontation with Evil and that the flight from reality could bring a second Holocaust to the Jewish People. An alarm bell, before it’s too late.
Israel faces a range of important international security problems. Israelis have much more reason to be concerned about their national security than do Americans. And it’s entirely reasonable that people would disagree about the nature and breadth of the threats to Israel, let alone what to do about them. But this sort of thing is absolutely irresponsible. I find it striking that Gingrich has repeatedly lectured Israeli audiences and informed them–presumably based on his knowledge as a Washington insider–that his own government’s policy threatens a second Holocaust on the Jewish people. Is this a view he really holds? If so, I would think he would be much more alarmed than he is acting at present.
While Gingrich is claiming that his current proclamations are grounded in Orwell and Camus, it seems to me that his overall Friend-Enemy politics of late owe a good bit to Carl Schmitt.
On Differentiating ‘Realists’
Jacob Heilbrunn wrote a piece recently wondering “where have all the serious Republicans gone [on foreign policy]?” Heilbrunn observes correctly that the loudest Republican voices on national security these days are advancing a variety of zany views, taking as evidence Mitt Romney’s empirically-challenged attack on the new START treaty.
In a similar vein, Daniel Larison wonders whether a return to Republican “realism” is even anything to thirst for:
In practice, if the GOP “reclaimed its realist roots” I wonder how much would change for the better. Republican realism sounds good by comparison with what we have had for the last decade, but most actual Republican realists, especially those in elected office, did little or nothing to challenge the endless hyping of foreign threats and the frequent recourse to military intervention abroad in the ’90s… How many realists not affiliated with the Cato Institute expressed serious reservations about NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia before the August 2008 war? As sympathetic as I am to many realist arguments, and as much as I appreciate the efforts of the most sober realists to try to steer Republican foreign policy thinking in a constructive direction, until Republicans reject confrontational and aggressive foreign policy goals it will not matter very much if they adopt realist means and rhetoric.
The answer to Larison’s question about NATO expansion is that it was quite unpopular among non-Cato realists. John Lewis Gaddis wrote at the time [.pdf] that “historians — normally so contentious — are in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.” He “could recall no other moment…at which there was less support, within the community of historians, for an announced policy position.” That might have been putting things a bit too strongly when it came to realists, but not very much. That is, actual realists, who don’t, by and large, get called to Washington.
This, I think, is the crucial distinction to make. The bottom line here is that there is a big disconnect between people in the Beltway who call themselves realists and actual realists. Ur-realist Kenneth Waltz once described himself as “a fierce critic of American military policy and spending and strategy, at least since the 1970s.” John Mearsheimer points out that realists opposed the Vietnam War almost to a man (except for Henry Kissinger), and that realists opposed the Iraq War almost to a man (except for Henry Kissinger). Since at least the Johnson administration, realists have tended to be dovish relative to the Beltway consensus as it has existed at any point in time, and active dovishness is not permitted in polite company in Washington.
Not only is it a mistake to hearken back to a Glory Day of Republican Realism, it is really a mistake to characterize any existing Beltway faction as “realist.” Belligerent nationalists, Wilsonians, liberal imperialists…all those we have. Realists, not so much.
Kilcullen Joins the ‘To Hell with Karzai’ Faction?
"No, really—tell him that. 'Hanging from a lamppost!'"
Three weeks ago I observed that Stephen Biddle, a Council on Foreign Relations scholar who previously had emphasized the centrality of Hamid Karzai to the prospects for success in Afghanistan, had coauthored an article in Foreign Affairs on Afghanistan that hardly mentioned Karzai.
Now one of the archbishops of counterinsurgency and close Petraeus confidante David Kilcullen appears to have joined the “To Hell with Karzai” caucus as well. First, in an interview with Doyle McManus of the LA Times, Kilcullen lamented that Karzai “has been treating us as if he’s got us over a barrel,” and suggested that we might want to remind the Afghan president that “he’s a guy who will be hanging from a lamppost a month after we leave if we don’t protect him.” Tough stuff!
Today Kilcullen piles on some more in a NPR interview, advising a strategy of bypassing the central government and “empowering” local constituencies to fight the Taliban themselves. Kilcullen says that the Afghan National Police have been “raping people’s children” at checkpoints and “shaking people down.” By contrast, Kilcullen says, the Afghan National Army is better but is far too small to take the reins from the Americans any time soon.
RIP Robert C. Byrd, the Last Defender of Congress
On the occasion of the death of Sen. Robert C. Byrd, libertarians will rightly think about the senator’s flamboyant defense of federal largesse rained down on West Virginia and the garish and unseemly tendency to name things purchased with this largesse after the senator. No doubt his membership in the Ku Klux Klan will be a centerpiece of the remembrance as well.
What hopefully will not go unremembered are a few additional facts. As Adam Clymer’s obituary observes, Byrd was a jealous defender of the rights of Congress against imperial presidentialism, likely the last of a breed. You probably could count on one hand the younger senators or congressmen who take as seriously as did Byrd their duty as members of the American legislature. Byrd frequently was seen wagging his copy of the Cato Institute reprint of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution in the face of his fellow legislators. (If I recall correctly, my colleague Roger Pilon, who wrote the introduction to the reprint, wondered aloud whether Byrd had read it, given his view that the Treasury could rightly be used as West Virginia’s piggybank.)
Byrd was also a man who turned dripping contempt into a high art form. You could see this in any number of his speeches, but in particular this attribute was on display during the Iraq War debate. Byrd, to his great credit, seemed to smell a rat from the outset, and he repeatedly and unsuccessfully spoke out against both the war and the executive deference that surrounded the debate. (Those supporters of the Iraq War who condemn Byrd’s porcine tendencies should ask themselves how many West Virginia bridges could have been purchased with the hundreds of billions and thousands of American lives we have poured into that disgraceful enterprise. And at least we could drive across them.)
The man had a sense of history, as well. Byrd’s anti-presidentialism, opposition to Iraq, and historical grounding were all on display in this characteristic clip from the Iraq War debate in 2002, in which Byrd had some thoughts on appeals to legislators’ duty to the “Commander in Chief.”
I will not miss the Senator’s penchant for pork, but I will certainly miss his lifelong defense of the prerogatives of the legislature. Rest in peace.
Reaping What We’ve Sown in Europe
Josef Joffe famously referred to the U.S. presence in Western Europe as “Europe’s pacifier.” The idea was that you stick the American pacifier in there and the *cough* recurring problem emanating from Europe goes away.
After the Cold War ended, and the official reason for the NATO alliance blew away as if in the wind, we never considered letting the alliance go with it. That tells you something. Instead of coming home, we pushed NATO “out of area” rather than allowing it to go “out of business.” Christopher Layne argues that this was all by design. U.S. policymakers never intended to allow Europe to establish its autonomy and worked diligently to ensure that efforts at autonomous European defense would fail. They succeeded.
In February, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was whining about the “demilitarization of Europe” and how the Europeans have grown “averse to military force.” I responded by pointing out that this was dumb. Mancur Olson’s logic and the history of American policy on the European continent that Layne documents show that we were as much to blame for this state of affairs as the Euros themselves.
And now here’s the Wall Street Journal pointing out that the Euros are slashing their defense budgets further still.
Has Biddle Given Up on Karzai?
Stephen Biddle
During the discussions in 2009 over what to do in Afghanistan, Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations emerged as an influential voice for staying in the country and ramping up a counterinsurgency campaign. In a widely-read article titled “Is It Worth It?” the author answered in the affirmative but warned that an expanded war would be “costly, risky and worth waging—but only barely so.”
In support of the administration’s Afghanistan policy, Biddle has argued repeatedly that our cart is hitched to Hamid Karzai’s horse. In January of this year Biddle declared that winning the war “is going to require, among other things, a conscious decision by Hamid Karzai to…implement reforms. If we cannot persuade him to do that, we are not going to succeed.“ In a 2009 interview making the case for staying in Afghanistan, Biddle had argued that
The key issue is whether or not the governance reform campaign can succeed. I tend to think that’s co-equal with security provision. Both are necessary; neither is sufficient for success.
So Biddle’s basic plan then was to lean on Karzai to support necessary political change in the national government and to support this objective with an expanded population-centric counterinsurgency campaign.
Now Biddle and two co-authors have an article in the current Foreign Affairs promising to “define success in Afghanistan.” In the new piece, Biddle et al. argue for acceptance of pretty radical decentralization—seemingly marginalizing Karzai, relative to Biddle’s previous writings—and for supporting this decentralized approach with…well, more population-centric counterinsurgency.
Perfidious Albion?
Today’s Wall Street Journal excerpted a Peter Hitchens Daily Mail column and then inexplicably tried to stick it behind the pay wall on their website. (Peter is the “Anti-War, Pro-God” Hitchens, not the “Pro-War, Anti-God” Hitchens.)
Because I’m feeling subversive–and because the column was a good piece of prose–let’s take a look. Hitchens is talking about the Obama White House vs. BP in the context of the US-England relationship, and lets loose: Read the rest of this post »
Sanctions Won’t Stop Iran’s Nuke Program
The Obama administration labored strenuously to produce a fourth round of sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. The broader question is whether more sanctions are likely to persuade Iran to give up its pursuit of an indigenous nuclear capability—or even to get the regime to stop enriching uranium.
I know of no expert or government official who believes that will happen. It is always possible that this pessimism is wrong. Miracles occasionally happen. But the sanctions approach is unlikely to solve the problem.
Neither is the diplomatic offer brokered by Brazil and Turkey but rejected by Washington. Still, given the limited dividends promised by sanctions, Washington should have considered foregoing the sanctions in favor of the deal. The impact of the agreement, like the impact of the sanctions, would be limited, but it would have removed more than half of Iran’s existing fissile material and held a small possibility of a diplomatic resolution of the problem.
Instead, we are left waiting to see whether the new sanctions will cause a fundamental shift in Iran’s behavior.
Problems with Nationalism?
I try to avoid Sunday morning talk shows like the plague, but somehow I happened to catch five minutes of Fareed Zakaria’s “GPS” show on CNN International. Elliott Abrams and Peter Beinart were arguing about the Gaza flotilla and Beinart’s New York Review of Books article about liberal Zionism.
What I found interesting about the segment was the exchange between the two men about the argument Beinart made in the article: that many young Jews saw the choice before them not as being between liberal Zionism and conservative Zionism, but rather between conservative Zionism and no Zionism. Beinart spelled out the argument, and this is what followed:
ZAKARIA: Elliott, you can briefly respond to this, and then we’ve got to go.
ABRAMS: OK. I think it’s quite historical.
What Peter is forgetting, that Jewish liberals have never supported Israel. They didn’t support the founding of the state of Israel. The reform movement was anti-Zionist for decades and decades.
Jewish liberals have a problem with particularism, nationalism, Zionism, and they always have. And it isn’t due to anything that is going on in Israel, it’s due to things that are going on inside their heads. They need to grow up and realize that Israel has a right to defend itself. (emphasis mine)
I’ve included his whole response for context, but I’m only really interested in the italicized part of the argument. Aren’t all Americans supposed to have problems with nationalism? Not our own nationalism, of course, which we have re-labeled “exceptionalism.” But foreign nationalism? Isn’t that supposed to be pernicious?
The way in which Abrams presented the argument struck me as being a normative claim, not positive. That is, “particularism, nationalism, and Zionism” were not just things that Jewish liberals have problems with, but rather they were things that Jewish liberals have problems with but should not.
Abrams’ inclusion of Zionism alongside nationalism ought perhaps to caution him about Zionism’s susceptibility to the perils that have plagued other nationalisms through history.
Adam Smith Quote of the Day
“In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war.”
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book 5, Chapter 3
Political Science and Washington D.C.
The Columbia Journalism Review has an article on political science and journalism. It cites the Monkey Cage blog as an example and explains:
[P]erhaps The Monkey Cage’s greatest influence has been in fostering a nascent poli-sci blogosphere, and in making the field’s insights accessible to a small but influential set of journalists and other commentators who have the inclination—and the opportunity—to approach politics from a different perspective.
That perspective differs from the standard journalistic point of view in emphasizing structural, rather than personality-based, explanations for political outcomes… [C]onsider the president. In press accounts, he comes across as alternately a tragic or a heroic figure, his stock fluctuating almost daily depending on his ability to “connect” with voters. But political-science research, while not questioning that a president’s effectiveness matters, suggests that the occupant of the Oval Office is, in many ways, a prisoner of circumstance. His approval ratings—and re-election prospects—rise and fall with the economy. His agenda lives or dies on Capitol Hill. And his ability to move Congress, or the public, with a good speech or a savvy messaging strategy is, while not nonexistent, sharply constrained.
These powerful, simple explanations are often married to an almost monastic skepticism of narratives that can’t be substantiated, or that are based in data—like voter’s accounts of their own thinking about politics—that are unreliable. Think about that for a moment, and the challenge to journalists becomes obvious: If much of what’s important about politics is either stable and predictable or unknowable, what’s the value of the sort of news—a hyperactive chronicle of the day’s events, coupled with instant speculation about their meaning—that has become a staple of modern political reporting? (emphasis mine)
Political science can, at its worst, be hopelessly abstruse, cliquish, and regressive. But at its best it can illuminate our thinking about issues, up to and including raising the possibility that certain things may be unknowable (at least by a journalist’s or policymaker’s deadline), or that things may be structurally determined. As the snip above suggests, journalists, for understandable reasons, tend to privilege what you could call “agent-based” explanations for phenomena. They tell Americans that the president’s poll numbers are rising or falling on the basis of some speech he gave (or didn’t give), or that some particular point of a political campaign determined the outcome. Turn on a cable news program and you see this sort of uninformed and unfalsifiable popping off all the time. In most cases, those claims, and even those sorts of claims, are completely wrong, as political scientists know. On the other hand, journalists’ incentives do not lead them to highlight the latest political science research or write articles that could be headlined “Economic Conditions Set to Determine Another Election.” People like stories, so that’s what journalists give them.
Question: What political science articles should journalists and policymakers be forced to read–and comprehend–before writing about/making policy on their particular issue area?
War and the Intellectuals
Apologies in advance for the epic-length post.
There’s been a fair bit of wailing and garment-rending about war on the op-ed pages. In addition to the cloying and tiresome Mark Helprin piece to which David links below, E.J. Dionne, Glenn Greenwald, and Fred Hiatt have all touched on the subject in recent days. One common theme is the idea that Americans are insulated from the costs and benefits of war, and that this is a problem.
To their credit, some of the writers offer proposals for redressing matters: Helprin suggests American citizens should force congressional declarations of war characterized by “extraordinary, penetrating debate” in order to ensure that decisions to go to war have been “ratified unambiguously by the American people through their constitutional and republican institutions.” (Do we also owe the troops good decisions?) Further, citizens must recognize that it is “unacceptable” to “starve the means to fight” in order to defray the costs of war. “If the general population must do with less, so be it, for the problem is only imagined.”
What planet does Helprin live on? The ways in which citizens and legislators behave when it comes to war are shaped by the incentives each group faces. Helprin — and the other writers — should try to think about those incentives if they actually care about solving these problems.
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