America in Decline (February 9)

Part of the reason realism doesn’t catch on in American policy circles is that it is an often-gloomy worldview in a country full of sunny optimists. Over at the Washington Note, Ben Katcher provides a prime example of the everything-is-darkness approach with a post on NATO and Russia. Article V of the NATO treaty stipulates that an attack on any one signatory is an attack on all signatories. So, it is only natural that the alliance is drawing up contingency plans for Russian attacks on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as all three are NATO members.

Katcher, however, doesn’t think this is the best idea, as it is “only likely to generate hostility in Moscow.” Since America’s commitments abroad far outstretch its foreign-policy resources at the moment, it’s important not to antagonize the Russians. While we’re mired in a recession, it is very hard to have our cake and eat it too: “The fundamental issue with strategic implications is that the United States is burdened with massive security and political commitments throughout the globe that entail enormous political and economic costs.”

In a similar vein, Katcher seems upset with the Obama administration’s recent arms sale to Taiwan: “The situation in the Baltic States is analogous to the conundrum in East Asia, where the United States continues to provide huge amounts of arms to Taiwan that benefit the Taiwanese and American military contractors at the expense of U.S.-China relations.” Again, we can’t afford to offend a big-and-bad autocratic state because we’re becoming weaker. America has to prepare for a time (the “post-American international order”) when we’re not #1 in the pecking order.

Although he doesn’t explicitly come out and say it, it’s obvious that Katcher is annoyed with Taiwan and the Baltic states. If these pesky little nations just went away, America would have good relations with Russia! And we’d be friends with the Chinese! Even if your servant is overdoing it a bit, there’s no reason to assume that things would pan out this way if Taipei suddenly vanished, or if Estonia fell into the Baltic Sea. And, anyway, both of those countries are democratic polities—and pretty solid ones at that. We have a decades-long relationship with Taiwan, and the Baltics are the most European of the former Soviet republics. In contrast, China and Russia are authoritarian states that don’t seem to like us very much. Shouldn’t our cultural ties to the smaller, democratic countries count for something? And shouldn’t we be willing to offend Beijing and Moscow in the service of these ties, even if Washington doesn’t have as much power as she used to? If you’re interested in this America-in-decline debate, check out Robert Pape’s 2009 article for TNI, a Paul Kennedy op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, and James Fallows’ recent piece for the Atlantic.

Elsewhere, Matthew Yglesias is in a spat with former–Defense Department official Marc Thiessen. Apparently, Yglesias accused Thiessen of supporting torture methods reminiscent of those used during the Spanish Inquisition. Thiessen then claimed that the torture methods he supports really aren’t torture, and that, even if they were, they bear little resemblance to the techniques used during the medieval auto-de-fe. Yglesias then alleged that the analogy still holds despite the differences in Thiessen’s approach . . . you get the idea. For a better summation of America’s recent foray into enhanced interrogation, go read Alistair Horne’s excellent article on the subject in the November/December issue of TNI.

Euro Troubles (February 5)

Just as our economy showed signs of improving, American financial markets are tanking again as the EU’s budget problems start to spook investors on Wall Street. Apparently, Greece’s deficit has climbed so high that it is at risk of default. Since Athens is on the Euro, what would have previously been a national problem is now a supranational one, since all the Euro countries will be affected if one of their number implodes. National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford isn’t surprised at the calamity, as it was an inherent risk of the common-currency project. The Eurozone encompasses both advanced economies (France, Germany) and comparatively undeveloped ones (Greece, Portugal). Linking the financial systems of those four countries wasn’t the best idea.

As such, Stuttaford thinks that the richer EU countries have only one option: a massive bailout. Because “there is no realistic way in which an economically weak country could junk the euro, the only alternatives are truly savage budgetary austerity, default, or significant external support.” The first two options are implausible, owing to “domestic political considerations” and “fragility of the financial markets.” This means that the EU is going to have to endure a painful wealth transfer, revealing the huge political and economic costs of forcing integration on the Continent.

Elsewhere, Jillian Melchior has a dispatch on North Korea at Commentary. The Hermit Kingdom is experiencing a rare outburst of civil unrest after Pyongyang attempted to impose tighter central control over the nation’s black market. This has caused most average North Koreans to lose all their savings. Because of American and South Korean sanctions, the North is also suffering from a crippling food shortage. Melchior notes that although its “tough to say exactly what’s going on in North Korea, the food shortage seems to have elicited popular outrage, becoming a turning point for its citizenry.” Protests have forced the government to backtrack on its economic reforms, a rare concession for the totalitarian regime. Is Pyongyang starting to lose control? It’s very hard to say. But Melchior thinks its clear the administration’s policy of isolating North Korea is starting to work, as people are blaming the regime for the economic chaos and lack of food—not the outside world. He hopes “Obama and his friends” will “acknowledge that their sanctions can put Kim Jung-Il’s government in a corner. One of these punches may just be a deadringer.” Let’s hope so.

Carbon Tax (February 4)

Despite President Obama’s urgent calls to the contrary, Congress increasingly looks as if it is going to postpone dealing with climate change for yet another year. Instead of enacting a comprehensive environment bill, complete with an energy strategy and plan to reduce carbon emissions, some Democrats are floating the idea of simply passing an “energy-only” bill without carbon restrictions. Such a bill is probably more likely to pass than something like cap and trade, which is largely unpopular among Republicans and conservative Democrats. And if Congress did manage to ink an energy bill, it’d at least be doing something to help out the environment. So better to have a modest solution that everyone is happy with than an extensive one that doesn’t pass, right?

Lindsey Graham doesn’t think so. The New Republic’s Bradford Plumer notes that the South Carolina Republican is livid congressional Democrats are even considering the idea of passing a bill that doesn’t include limits on carbon emissions. Graham argues:

The money to be made in solving the carbon pollution problem can only happen when you price carbon in my view. So if the approach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that is moving the ball down the road, forget it with me.

Plumer believes that “Graham’s right.” In order to wean ourselves from pollution-heavy energy sources like oil, we need to make its use prohibitively expensive—or at least expensive enough that renewable energy sources will become price competitive. Unfortunately, Graham doesn’t have a solution to put forward: “No one knows yet what Graham’s preferred approach actually is, especially since he dislikes the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House last summer.”

While Lindsey Graham is busy blurring political lines, Matthew Yglesias is writing on political partisanship. Yglesias observes that President Obama’s economic policies usually don’t garner full-throated praise from liberal economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. President Bush, by contrast, could count on all sorts of conservative economists to laud his policies at every turn. What’s the deal with this enthusiasm gap?

Yglesisas thinks there are “three factors at work” dissuading liberal financial mavens from moonlighting as hacks for the Obama administration. During the Bush years, liberal economists hated the president and wanted to see him fail. These feelings probably influenced their work: “People inclined to be hostile to the incumbent administration are naturally disposed to believe that disaster looms around the corner.” Moreover, these left-of-center types were correct. The economy was in bad shape. A housing bubble burst and we almost entered a depression. Liberal economists understood this and were subsequently negative about our financial prospects. And, anyway, Yglesias believes that “left-wing politics and pessimism are generally correlated traits.”

Now that Obama’s in charge, Yglesias’s first reason for liberal pessimism isn’t operative anymore. But he thinks the other two conditions (the fact that the economy is still in dire straits and that left-wingers are generally not bullish about America’s prospects) are still very much in play. So we shouldn’t expect to see liberal economists hawking the Obama administration’s financial wares in the next few months.

Elsewhere, National Review’s Daniel Foster reports that Senator Blanche Lincoln thinks there may be more Democrats willing to support a bill barring funding for terror trials in civilian courts. If passed, the measure would throw a monkey wrench into Obama’s “law-enforcement” approach to terrorism.

Ignoring Baghdad (February 2)

President Obama barely mentioned Iraq in his State of the Union address last week. But not that many people seemed to care. After all, the war is winding down, and as the president stated in his speech, it’s time to shift our focus from Iraq to where it should have been all along—Afghanistan. If only this were possible. Unfortunately, there are some disturbing signs that Baghdad is on its way to renewed civil strife, just as the only reliable peacekeepers in the country (American troops) begin to withdrawal en masse. Steve Clemons chronicles the disturbing news at the Washington Note. First, the government of Nuri al-Maliki (a Shia) decided to arbitrarily ban 500 mostly Sunni parliamentary candidates from the upcoming March elections. Iraq has also stopped providing security for military convoys coming from Jordan. While this might seem largely inconsequential, Clemons writes that: “Sources with whom I have spoken state that this cutoff of the supply route is designed to punish Sunni Iraqis in Western Iraq and in Jordan, and to punish the Jordanian government for its efforts to check Iran's influence in the region.” Of course, the suppliers of these Jordanian convoys are mostly “Sunni-dominant business interests that Prime Minister Maliki and his political and business allies, including Iranian interests, want to squeeze off.” So . . . Maliki’s government is disenfranchising Sunnis and trying to promote the interests of Iran. Not a recipe for regime stability—or one that is at all favorable to the United States. As Clemons astutely points out “The Iraq pot seems to be getting back to a boil.”

A side note: if you are a loyal National Interest reader (which you really should become if you aren’t already), you knew all about these Iraqi issues long ago, thanks to Ken Pollack’s fantastic article on the country’s growing instability and sectarian strife. If you didn’t get around to it when it came out in September, or would like to read it again, check it out here.

Alas, the bad foreign-policy news isn’t confined to Iraq. The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Schwartz has a depressing update on the rise of Islamic extremism in Kosovo. Apparently, Wahhabi radicals have begun roughing up moderate clerics and agitating against Christian communities in Kosovo and western Macedonia, which has an ethnic Albanian (and hence, Muslim) majority. Schwartz fears that this isolated violence will soon morph into terrorism, as it did in other post-Communist states (Chechnya) that conflated nationalist struggle with religious fundamentalism. If this happened, it would be very dangerous, amounting to an Islamist threat at Europe’s backdoor. And, although Schwartz doesn’t note it, there’d be a hint of irony that a state America worked so hard to create (by ripping Kosovo away from Christian Serbia) ended up being plagued by Islamic radicals.

Al-Qaeda’s New Front (February 1)

Apparently, Osama bin Laden’s lengthy habitation in a guano-strewn cave has turned him into a bit of an environmentalist. According to the Daily Telegraph, the al-Qaeda leader’s latest bloviation blames global warming on—who else?—industrialized (read: Western) nations. Blogging at Contentions, Michael J. Totten wonders why it’s taken so long for al-Qaeda to develop a sophisticated PR operation. Other terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah aggressively court Western public opinion, and have been relatively successful at gathering left-wing supporters by quoting Noam Chomsky and depicting their struggle against Israel as one to liberate the Palestinians from a racist oppressor. Osama “must be paying attention” to the exploits of his coconspirators, “because now even he hopes to broaden his appeal by passing himself off as a green activist.” Even so, Totten rightly notes that it is extremely unlikely al-Qaeda and bin Laden are going to find any support in the West: “There isn’t a chance that the likes of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or even Jimmy Carter will ever fall for this kind of nonsense.” Although it is “too late for Osama bin Laden to polish his image,” Totten “can’t really blame him for thinking he could.”

Elsewhere, the American Prospect’s Adam Serwer reports that the Obama administration is going to let the Bush administration officials who authored the “torture memos” off the hook. Serwer, to put it mildly, is upset. Why on earth is the White House protecting people who broke the law, and now are conducting a rearguard campaign against Obama, accusing him of being weak on national security because he refuses to break the same laws they did? Serwer sees the media as complicit in all this. Instead of interpreting it as a shameful failure of justice, “there’s a consistent theme here that is both bipartisan and supported by elite opinionmakers in the press: The powerful should never be held accountable for their lawbreaking.” And it’s no coincidence, Serwer writes, that the Obama administration is having trouble convincing the American people that torture (or enhanced interrogation or whatever) isn’t necessary. “The administration's actions have given the public the impression that no laws were broken, and no one did anything wrong or worth being punished for.”

Over in Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is having trouble with political consistency as well. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg notes that Tehran looks like it is changing the colors on its flag from red, white and green to red, white and blue. Why the sudden shift in décor? Well, according to Radio Free Europe, the regime doesn’t want to legitimize the Green Movement. Alas, as Goldberg points out, the new red, white and blue formulation has its own problems: “The color green, it should be noted, is also the color of Islam. The color blue is the color of ‘Avatar.’ In ‘Avatar,’ evil is eventually defeated. Coincidence?” Perhaps not. Go here to check out the Islamic Republic’s snazzy new flag design.

The Deficit (January 29)

Since President Obama went into the State of the Union address on the political defensive, he had to pepper his speech with things that a liberal politician normally wouldn’t want to talk about. Like taxes. Nuclear energy. And our ballooning deficit. The national debt has especially become a hot-button issue as of late, as Americans worry about runaway federal spending. Matthew Yglesias has a simple solution: raise taxes and cut spending. “You need a combination of tax increases and overall spending cuts, with defense and Medicare on the table,” he writes. Of course, this is much easier said than done. Yglesias rightly notes that Congress won’t pass such measures “because it’s politically impossible” to do so. In order to force the legislature’s hand, there’d have to be some sort of disaster, like a “crisis in the market for US treasury bonds.”

Shame on Congress for having to wait for a fiscal mess to do anything meaningful, says the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan. He thinks “a political system that cannot take steps to avert disaster until disaster strikes is not a political system. It’s a kindergarten.” The ultimate irony of our inability to tackle the deficit problem is that doing so would benefit our economy in the long run. “If we got a bipartisan agreement to raise some taxes and cut entitlements and defense, say, five years from now, and bound that into the system,” Sullivan argues, “you’d see confidence in this economy rebound and growth strengthen.”

Elsewhere, National Review’s Stephen Spruiell has some intriguing information about the KSM trial. Apparently the Obama administration, bowing to pressure from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, instructed the Justice Department to find a new place to try the infamous terrorist. It’s unlikely he’ll be sent to a military base, because the Obama administration doesn’t want to use a military commission to convict him. In any case, this new headache for the White House reveals the problem (some would say absurdity) of trying a terror suspect in civilian court—after committing an act of war in New York (9/11), it makes sense to try him there. We’ll keep you posted on any subsequent developments.

State of the Union (January 28)

President Obama gave his first State of the Union address last night. How’d he do? As you might expect, reactions are split largely along party lines. Max Boot, blogging at Commentary, was shocked that the president’s speech—which was very long—contained very little on foreign policy and national security. And “given how little room he devoted to foreign affairs,” Boot notes, “the State of the Union address was more remarkable for what he didn’t say than for what he did.” In Obama’s line on Afghanistan, Boot notices a few gaping holes. The president claimed that “we are increasing our troops and training Afghan Security Forces so they can begin to take the lead in July of 2011, and our troops can begin to come home.” If this is our objective, why did Obama send “an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, bringing our troop total eventually to some 100,000”? So they “can come home?” If that was our objective all along, Boot thinks those 30,000 should have never left America in the first place.

Boot is also miffed that Obama made little mention of Iraq, other than to reiterate “his top objective, which is heading for the exits.” He also gave Iran scant attention, lumping together a reference to the Green Movement with disaster relief in Haiti and an odd appeal to help victims of nepotism in Guinea. Boot asks: “Is corruption in Guinea really on a par as an American foreign-policy priority with Tehran’s repression of human rights and support for terrorism and nuclear proliferation?” With so many domestic troubles, Boot thought Obama would move toward foreign policy as time progresses, and focus on “dealing with real crises abroad rather than manufactured crises, such as health care, at home.” But the State of the Union made it clear the president hasn’t done so.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait thinks the speech, while not pretty, was rather effective. Though he found the prose clunky, “the substance seemed to work quite well.” Obama stayed the course on finance reform and health care, and he effectively silenced the GOP’s doubts through humor. And it achieved what was perhaps its main purpose: steeling the wills of congressional Democrats. “Stemming the Democratic panic was the primary task of this speech,” argues Chait. “We’ll soon see if it succeeded. I’d bet that it did.”

If you’re craving other reactions, check out Steve Clemons’ somewhat disappointed take on the speech at the Washington Note and Adam Serwer’s cheery assessment at the American Prospect. And if you’d like to form your own opinions of the State of the Union address, missed it, or would just like to read it again, the New York Times helpfully posted the full text of the speech on its website.

Our Paranoid Friend (January 27)

Pakistan has a lot of problems. With a historically hostile nuclear neighbor, corrupt and squabbling political class and a burgeoning Islamic insurgency, it can be excused if it sometimes drops the ball. In addition, America’s alliance with the country has always been fraught with tension, some of it of our own making. Sometimes we lavish Islamabad with attention and aid (the Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush administrations); other times we ignore and scold it (the presidencies of Johnson, Carter, George H.W. Bush and Clinton). This fluctuation could partly explain Pakistan’s deepening paranoia and growing anti-Americanism—or maybe not. Sometimes Islamabad just seems plain crazy, which Michael Crowley ably chronicles in a post at the New Republic.

Pakistan’s latest anti-American outburst was sparked by an offhand remark by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who recently visited the country. Gates was asked to comment on allegations that the U.S. government was contracting with Xe (the company formerly known as Blackwater) in Pakistan—a deal that “that allegedly includes everything from intelligence collection to aiding assassination plots.” The secretary offered a flubbed answer that was misinterpreted as a confirmation that Xe is operating in Pakistan (which, according to DoD, it is not). Oops.

Of course, the Pentagon tried to spin Gates’s statement. But Crowley notes that “it would appear that the damage has been done.” The Pakistani media is in a tizzy over the issue. And this episode only adds fuel to the fire of false rumors floating around Islamabad. Earlier this year, the Pakistanis freaked out over unsubstantiated allegations that America would try to steal its nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, “dark designs and deeds--real or imagined--are what all too many Pakistanis think America is about.”

Back in Washington, the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes notes that a number of Republican lawmakers are angry at Attorney General Eric Holder for treating terror suspects as common criminals. A letter to Mr. Holder, singed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans, blasted the Obama administration for its “preoccupation with reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights.” Hayes states that a draft obtained by the Standard indicates that “the letter raises pointed questions about the attempted attack and the botched response by the Obama administration and the intelligence community.” Check it out here.

Miracle Worker (January 26)

A year ago, President Obama came into office pledging to be a bipartisan consensus builder who would repair America’s reputation abroad, improve the economy and heal divisions at home. A year later, America is more partisan than ever, has a cornucopia of foreign-policy problems and is still in the economic doldrums. How did things go so wrong so quickly?

Given the administration’s lack of progress on many fronts, even some of Obama’s erstwhile supporters are starting to get upset. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan is miffed that the president still hasn’t closed Guantánamo, despite pledging that he’d do so within a year of taking office. But Sullivan is at least willing to blame that lack of follow through on “the chaotic state the Bush-Cheney crew left the paperwork in; the nihilism and fear-mongering of the GOP; and the usual lack of nerve among Democrats.” In other words, Obama can’t be held solely responsible, because there were a lot of external factors that prevented him from closing the prison.

Marc Lynch is a bit less charitable when it comes to Obama’s claim that he would restart the Israel-Palestine peace process. The administration was quite “right to put dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue at the center of his Middle East foreign policy, regardless of whether Israeli or Palestinian leaders are serious about it.” The wisdom of this initial decision makes the White House’s “failure to make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front,” all the more frustrating and “dangerous for American national security interests.”

Daniel Drezner is curious as to why Sullivan and Lynch are so upset. What did they expect? The Obama administration’s lack of resolve isn’t the only reason Gitmo hasn’t been closed, or that we haven’t achieved world peace. External events matter too. With the peace process, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t going to respond to American pressure when he has Israeli public opinion on his side. Guantánamo is still open because “Americans like closing Gitmo down in theory more than in practice,” which Obama discovered during his initial bid to shut the facility. After he learned the extent of the opposition, “Obama then acted... politically” and eased up. In either area, then, the president hasn’t acted all that unreasonably, and is responding as any normal politician. Then again, perhaps the reason people are so angry at Obama for his lack of follow through is because they expected—as he promised during his campaign—that he wouldn’t be a normal politician.

Not Part of Europe (January 25)

Despite the fact that it is not really a part of Europe and its enormous cultural differences with the Continent, Turkey is still desperately trying to become part of the European Union. While the more zealous EU enthusiasts have been trying to force Brussels to admit Ankara for many years now, some European leaders have seen sense and don’t want Turkey to join the exclusive club. Herman Van Rompuy, the recently appointed “president” of the European Union, bluntly stated in 2004 that “Turkey is not a part of Europe and will never be part of Europe.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy doesn’t like the idea either. He made it plainly obvious he didn’t want Ankara to join the Union during his 2007 presidential campaign, and recently told President Obama to stop pontificating in favor of Turkey’s admission. And now he has joined forces with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to give Turkey a “privileged partnership” with the EU—in lieu of the long-term prospect of joining the body.

Ben Katcher is distressed at Turkey’s declining fortunes, but notes that the Franco-German opposition to Ankara’s bid might be weakening. Blogging at the Washington Note, he states “there are signs that French and German attitudes are softening as their respective leaderships digest the consequences of alienating a country as strategically significant as Turkey.” In the meantime, Spain is campaigning for Turkey’s eventual admission to the EU. Katcher praises Madrid for its support, arguing “setting the discourse on a more constructive path is a necessary precursor to rebuilding popular support on both sides of the Dardanelles.” This is an odd statement. If the measure isn’t popular among the citizens of the EU’s constituent states—or in Ankara, for that matter—why should the body have any obligation to admit Turkey to what was, and is, a private economic club? Then, of course, the EU isn’t big on respecting the wishes of its people—otherwise it would be little more than a free-trade zone.

Meanwhile, National Review’s Mark Steyn is musing on China’s geostrategic prospects at the Corner. Although many people argue that China will become a hegemonic power in the twenty-first century, Steyn thinks these claims are wrong. In addition to its governance, corruption and environmental problems, China also has a demographic one. Steyn correctly observes that Beijing’s one-child policy has created a gender imbalance—there are a lot more Chinese men then women. If Chinese women get pregnant with a girl, they will frequently abort the child, in hopes of conceiving a son. Steyn catalogues the unfortunate result: “Millions and millions of young men who’ll never get a date. Not a recipe for social stability.” Marriage and family life is a powerful influence on men, allowing them to settle down and dispense with the vagaries of their youth. If China’s economy stalls, these bachelors could also become unemployed. Millions of jobless, rootless men wouldn’t bode well for any society—and would be even worse for a developing country like China. For more reasons why Beijing won’t be the center of the universe in the next few decades, check out Andrew Nathan’s superb review on the subject in the January/February issue of The National Interest.

Foreign-Policy President (January 22)

Even though President Obama has spent a lot of time on foreign affairs, he seems much more personally invested in his domestic policies. One gets a sense that health-care reform is important to him in a way that stopping Iran from going nuclear is not. Slate’s Fred Kaplan, however, thinks the recent Republican resurgence will change Obama’s interests pretty quickly. As the Democrats lose their supermajority in the Senate, the administration’s domestic policies will be increasingly hard to pass. They’ll either have to cut deals or waste time fighting with obstructionist Republicans (who are largely united against Obama’s agenda) to get anything done—and the results probably won’t be what Obama wants. So what’s a constricted president to do?

Kaplan thinks Obama will begin to focus more and more on foreign policy. Presidents are “constitutionally and practically . . . allowed much more leeway in foreign affairs—and thus more opportunity to display the qualities of executive leadership” It’s relatively easy for the executive branch to get money to fund its foreign adventures, as congressmen of all stripes are loath to be tarred as unsupportive of American soldiers. This will be helpful as the president expands our involvement in Afghanistan, and looks to counter rising terrorist hotspots like Yemen and Somalia. And Obama can easily use the power of his office to conduct personal diplomacy with other heads of state in an attempt to improve our relations with countries that don’t like us very much (China, Russia, Iran, etc.). If he can’t get what he wants at home, he might as well try to get his way abroad.

Kaplan’s prescription sounds well and good. But Matthew Yglesias thinks he is overlooking an inconvenient truth. To get anything meaningful done in international affairs, the White House needs the approval of Congress. Things like environmental and arms-control treaties wont’ go anywhere without support in the House and Senate. And even issues that lend themselves to executive power, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have a potential to flounder if Obama doesn’t have backing from the legislature. In fact, in the peace process “part of the key to Bibi Netanyahu’s strategy has been his (accurate, in my [Yglesias’s] view) sense that he could win any necessary congressional battle if Obama tried to deploy leverage against him.” As such, it’d be a good idea for the president to develop a working relationship with Congress—including the Republicans—if he wants any part of his agenda, foreign or domestic, to be passed.

Elsewhere, David Frum has an interesting post at FrumForum on Venezuela, where he is currently on a trip. As we briefly noted yesterday, Venezuela’s crime rate has soared since Hugo Chavez came to power a decade ago. Frum posits that the regime is deliberately scaling back policing in an effort to terrorize the urban middle classes, who are among the most strident critics of the Chavez junta. If your home is in constant threat of being burglarized or your family at risk of being kidnapped, you’re not going to spend a lot of time thinking about political repression. And, on the plus side for the regime, they get none of the blame—it’s those nasty criminal gangs that are at fault. Frum sees this as a clandestine class war, using a lack of critical services to suppress political opposition: “At the same time as protection has been withdrawn, the regime engages in the deliberate incitement of hatred against the people on the receiving end of the kidnappings.”

An Imperiled Caudillo (January 21)

Earlier this week, we noted that buffoonish Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chávez claimed that U.S. marines in Haiti are part of a secret plot to place the country under American control. He then upped the ante by alleging that the United States actually caused the Haitian earthquake by testing a weapon. Blogging at the Weekly Standard, Jamie Daremblum notes that although “we’ve come to expect such risible comments from Chávez,” this “doesn’t make them any less outrageous.” In any case, Daremblum thinks Chávez should focus less on exposing Yankee imperialism and more on improving Venezuela’s finances. Under Chávez’s watch, Venezuela has deteriorated from a relatively prosperous country to one with a failing economy, rising crime and a crumbling infrastructure:

[Chávez’s] country has been rationing water, electricity, and health care services. Its government finances are a mess, its public health system is falling apart, its physical infrastructure is crumbling, its capital city (Caracas) is the most dangerous in Latin America, and its inflation rate is surging.

Daremblum believes Chávez has always been “more concerned with cultivating his ideological allies abroad than with tackling Venezuela’s domestic economic troubles (which own disastrous policies created).” And, sure enough, he’s planning a trip to announce a massive foreign-aid package to fellow traveler Nicaragua. But as the wannabe caudillo ignores Venezuela’s domestic troubles, anger is sure to rise—meaning we may not have to deal with Chávez’s blustering for much longer.

Over at the American Prospect, Monica Potts is upset with Jonah Goldberg. In an article for National Review’s website, Goldberg claimed that sending tons of foreign aid to Haiti wouldn’t break the nation’s chronic poverty. Instead, Haitians needed to stop relying on the (often unasked for) generosity of others and start building “intangible assets,” like respect for law, institutional honesty, encouraging entrepreneurs, etc. Only through self-reliance would it be able to improve its situation.

Potts thinks this is bunk. Her response, dripping with sarcasm, notes that Goldberg overlooked a few things. Is he sure that the country’s predicament “has nothing to do with the fact that Haiti had to buy its freedom from the French” or that “its entire population had been enslaved”? Fair points. But a more accurate assessment of Haiti’s problems lies in a combination of Potts’s emphasis on history and Goldberg’s disdain for the country’s culture of poverty. Check out columns by David Brooks and Bret Stephens for opinions on Haiti that ably blend the two.

Backlash (January 20)

In a stunning upset, Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley yesterday in Massachusetts’s special Senate election. While most political commentators have limited themselves to the domestic impact of Brown’s victory—especially the potential for the Republicans to filibuster President Obama’s health-care policy—Daniel Drezner wonders if there are any foreign-policy implications to the election results. How will international policymakers react to the GOP’s resurgence?

The “first and simplest answer” to that question is that Brown’s win has “no effect” whatsoever on foreign relations. After all, it’s “just a single Senate election.” And, oddly enough, Scott Brown’s stances on foreign policy, in some ways, are actually “closer to Barack Obama” than Martha Coakley’s: “Brown supports Obama’s Afghanistan plan -- Coakley opposes it.” As such, it’s quite possible Brown won’t rock the boat.

But Drezner also thinks “the election will also be interpreted as a signal of Obama’s domestic political strength.” Seeing as the candidate he stumped for lost by a pretty decisive margin, some foreign leaders could view the results as evincing:

1) Obama’s domestic weakness; and

2) The depths of populist outrage in the United States -- populist outrage that could bleed over into increased protectionism, isolationism, or “kill them all and let God sort them out” provocation on the foreign policy front.

This might make our allies (Europe) more willing to deal with Obama, and our enemies (Iran, Venezuela, etc.) more prone to provoke him. In the end, “the one sure effect of the election is that it will throw a monkey wrench into international negotiations that require legislative approval.” So it’s not only health care that is now subject to a filibuster, but also any environmental and arms-control treaties. If high-profile international agreements are stymied by the Senate, it’d be pretty embarrassing for President Obama.

Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin is also blogging about the Massachusetts election, but considers a different implication of its results. She’s curious if Obama will start firing his helpers in the White House for their seeming incompetence. Unfortunately, the Obama administration isn’t as hot as it thought it was:

It seems that the Obama political brain trust — which thought its expertise extended to Afghanistan war strategy and the Middle East “peace process” — wasn’t very good at the jobs in which they were supposedly expert. Rahm Emanuel understood Congress. David Axelrod understood political salesmanship. But they, along with Obama of course, made a perfect mess in only a year.

Rubin thinks it would be “smart” for Obama to replace some leading members of his team. In addition to making the White House seem less partisan, “it would be a message to the country that the president has learned a lesson and is setting a new direction.”

In non-election-related news, National Review’s Andy McCarthy has a worrying update on a recent attempt to assassinate Israeli diplomats in Jordan. According to an article in the Jerusalem Post, the attack was not run-of-the-mill violence from Palestinian terror groups like Hamas. Instead, the Israelis think that the attack may have been ordered by Iran—and carried out with explosives smuggled in from the rogue state. Israel still isn’t sure who actually set up the bombing, but they haven’t ruled out al-Qaeda or Palestinian organizations. If Iran really did instigate the bombing, however—or worse, collaborated with al-Qaeda in doing so—it’d be very bad news. We’ll keep you posted on any further developments.

Gridlock (January 19)

Today’s big news is the Senate race in Massachusetts. Due Ted Kennedy’s death last year, the Bay State is holding a special election to choose a new senator. In a shocking turn of events, incredibly liberal Massachusetts looks as if it actually might send a moderately conservative Republican to Washington. This would be bad news for the Obama administration, as the loss of a Senate seat would destroy the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the upper house, raising the possibility that Obama’s marquee social issue—health-care reform—won’t pass.

Steve Clemons thinks that Obama’s health-care morass is starting to resemble another planning debacle that ensnared the president late last year: Afghanistan. Both issues resemble “a pit into which America pours a never ending stream of rationalizations, compromises, resources and effort, looking paralyzed and neutralized in the process.” The inability of our politicians to overcome ideological differences and work out some sort of compromise on health care projects “weakness, inattention and impotence on virtually every other policy front.” In other words, foreign governments pay attention to our domestic political debates. If they see that Congress is unable to come to basic agreement on many different issues, it could have negative results for some of Obama’s foreign-policy priorities—especially things that require multilateral cooperation, like climate change and the war on terrorism.

Speaking of terrorism, the FBI is in a bit of hot water due to a story in today’s Washington Post. The Post alleges that the Bureau “illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records.” The FBI admitted the snafu and told the Post that “they are confident that the safeguards enacted in 2007 have ended the problems.”

Well, that’s good. Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum, however, isn’t very impressed. Why would any government agency manufacture allegations “fake terrorism” to seize phone records? And Drum seemingly believes that the matter deserves further scrutiny, regardless of whether the FBI claims they’ve stopped behaving badly: “Good hearted! And anyway, the FBI is confident it won't happen again. Nothing to see here. Go about your business, citizens.”

Elsewhere, Think Progress relays that Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez is blustering about America’s effort to provide disaster relief in Haiti. According to him, we are actually sending humanitarian aid and soldiers to the island in order to occupy “Haiti undercover.” Think Progress finds this statement ridiculous. The only reason American troops were sent to Haiti is to enable “the recovery effort to proceed.” And we’ve been pretty successful, providing security at airports, allowing disaster relief to be flown in. As always, Chavez’s remarks are uninformed—and horribly insensitive. Let’s hope they further stymie the wannabe caudillo’s influence across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Freedom (January 15)

Over at Contentions, Abe Greenwald has an update on the Google-China standoff. On Thursday, the Chinese government responded to Google’s decision to stop self-censoring its search engine. And, predictably, Beijing isn’t very happy. Communist Party hack Wang Chen voiced the usual boilerplate about the need to maintain a harmonious society, and how internet tools that don’t consider “nurturing positive, progressive mainstream opinion an important duty” don’t have a place in China.

Greenwald compares Chen’s hapless musings to those of New York Times columnist and China-cheerleader Thomas Friedman—and finds that latter’s writings are quite similar to the former’s speech. Friedman believes that Beijing’s emphasis on the “E.T. [energy technology] revolution” will be the foundation of Chinese power in the twenty-first century, while America is wasting its time and resources trying to “fix Afghanistan.” In other words, Washington is spending money killing terrorists while Beijing is spending money preparing for the next big thing—which means America is in relative decline, at least compared with China.

Greenwald wonders if Google’s decision to leave China will have any impact on Friedman’s views. Beijing’s rise is far from inevitable. In fact, the Communist Party

doesn’t enjoy enough legitimacy to allow its citizens to hear dissenting opinions. Without the free flow of ideas, China’s citizens will, in turn, remain insufficient to the task of true innovation. Instead, government-backed quasi-corporations will continue to tinker with gadgets from the disco era — bullet trains and solar power.

By contrast, America’s protection of individual liberty and free flow of information fosters innovation and allows us to develop new technologies. Future advances in technology, both civilian and military, “will come from a part of the world where disagreement and tension give birth to genius, not information blockades.”

Meanwhile, Steve Clemons has some thoughts on the humanitarian crisis in Haiti. At the Washington Note, Clemons writes that the island nation’s great misfortune highlights the importance of American foreign aid, particularly government entities like the United States Agency for International Development (US AID). The organization is a huge help to nations like Haiti, which don’t have capable emergency-response programs. It also benefits America’s image around the world, boosting our soft power. Unfortunately, the group “is one of America’s most vital yet under-resourced federal agencies that everyone respects in a time of crisis and neglects when things calm down.” This “boom and bust approach” isn’t good from a strategic perspective, as it constrains the resources the agency can mobilize when disaster strikes. The Obama administration is attempting to strengthen USAID through bureaucratic reforms and giving the agency head a seat on the National Security Council.

Red Ink (January 14)

President Obama’s massive spending outlays to pay for everything from the economic stimulus to the war in Afghanistan has caused our national debt to skyrocket. Despite promises to reduce the deficit, the White House is going to have a lot of trouble doing so in 2010. As liberals are usually not concerned with such things, it’s somewhat unusual that Mother Jones's Kevin Drum is worried about the amount of red ink being spilled by the government. He has an easy solution to our budgetary woes: raise taxes; however, this is just another typical liberal solution. America could make up a lot of its lost revenue by going back to Clinton-era tax rates. “Let the Bush tax cuts expire,” Drum writes. “Nobody was overtaxed in the 90s.” We also could save a lot of money by performing basic cost-cutting measures on Social Security and Medicare. If we added in “a modest assortment of spending cuts (smaller military, unprivatized [sic] student loan, reduced ag subsidies) and revenue increases (estate taxes, carbon taxes, financial transaction taxes),” our debt would decline even further.

All of this sounds easy enough. But Drum doesn’t think any of these simple measures have any chance of happening: “We could do it in a single legislative session and 99% of the country would barely notice the effects. And yet it’s the next best thing to impossible. It doesn’t speak well for our future.”

The Economist, however, thinks that America’s future is much sunnier—at least when it comes to our relative standing with our competitors. In a post on the magazine’s blog, an anonymous correspondent writes that China is going to have a lot of trouble becoming the next global hegemon. The Economist correspondent rightly pointed out that as China improves its standing, everyone else is too. China has a lot of people, sure. But so do America and Europe. And places like Latin America are getting richer and more powerful as time goes by. So the argument that Beijing is going to emerge unchallenged in the global power sweepstakes is pretty shortsighted.

Matthew Yglesias agrees. He adds that “a lot of analysis of this issue is weirdly complacent about the idea that if China can go from a per capita GDP of $2,000 to $6,000 that there’s nothing stopping them from getting to $12,000 or $24,000.” It is entirely possible that China could “reach a Jamaica-esque level of prosperity and then stall out. Not necessarily stop growing, but stop super-fast catchup growth.” And remain a second world country for a long-time.

Yglesias also rightly observes that China’s size means it can be the world’s largest economy without necessarily being the world’s most developed economy. In other words, it can have a massive GDP but still be a very poor nation. Yglesias wonders what things will look like if a developing country is also the “most important economic power on the planet.” It might have “a lot of interesting impacts on the nature of the international agenda.”

Googled (January 13)

American businesses operating in international markets have to make some tricky decisions. Opening an office or marketing products in a foreign country, of course, forces U.S. companies to follow local laws and regulations that might be quite different than what they’re accustomed to in America. Google, one of our largest conglomerates and recently ranked the most powerful brand in the world, has encountered these dilemmas more often than most, especially in its dealings with China. As an internet search engine, Google facilitates access to all sorts of information. In an authoritarian state like China, this openness can get the company into trouble. So, in order to operate in the lucrative Chinese market, Google willingly adopted some constraints on what it could provide to its customers. Images of the Dalai Llama and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were verboten, as were some news sources critical of the Chinese government. Although Google encountered some criticism in the West, the system has worked quite well for the company—until now.

Yesterday, Google announced it was throwing in the towel and was no longer self-censoring its searches, meaning that it might leave the Chinese market. The decision was sparked by Beijing’s attacks on the email accounts of human-rights activists. Veteran China watcher James Fallows thinks this the Google news is a pretty big development for China’s relations with the rest of the world. Blogging at the Atlantic, he suggests that Beijing may be entering a “Bush-Cheney era,” adopting a confrontational posture in its dealings with other governments. Fallows notes that China has been pretty cranky lately, ruining the Copenhagen climate summit and jailing political activists. Seeing as the Chinese government probably could have worked with Google to avoid this spat, the company’s announcement signals that Beijing probably wasn’t willing to give any ground. Seen in this context, the Google fracas is the latest example that China’s “is on a path at the moment that courts resistance around the world.”

Elsewhere, Daniel Drezner has an update on Israel’s deteriorating relationship with Turkey. Previously a staunch ally of the Jewish state, Ankara has been decidedly unfriendly toward Israel since the election of Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In the past few years, Erdogan has been whipping up anti-Israel sentiment in an attempt to curry favor with Arab governments and increase Turkey’s influence in the Middle East. And Israel is getting tired of it. Following Erdogan’s latest outburst, Israel summoned a Turkish delegation to its Foreign Ministry, and publicly snubbed the group by seating them on lower chairs and refusing to include a customary Turkish flag on the table separating the two diplomatic entourages. Drezner thinks this move was pretty silly: “Yes, because heaping petty humiliations on another country will always shift their attitude in a more favorable direction.”

But it may not be just a stupid overreaction. Instead, the sideshow could reflect an attempt by hard-line Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to sabotage Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s upcoming trip to Turkey. Drezner thinks this possibility raises a disturbing question: “what does it say about the state of Israel’s body politic that Avigdor Lieberman thinks he can enhance his political position by snubbing one of the few semi-friendly countries in the region?”

Sanction Iran (January 12)

As you might have heard or read, think tankers Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett sparked a storm in Washington last week with a New York Times op-ed on the futility of supporting Iran’s fledging opposition movement—and the necessity of continuing diplomacy with the current regime. Seeing as the Leveretts’ position involves accommodating a brutal dictatorship that hates America, it’s easy to see why their suggestions made many people uncomfortable. But their argument was enough to give pause to opponents of the clerical regime. What if the Leveretts are right? What if the green movement really isn’t going anywhere, and the only figures in Iran’s future are Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and their odious coterie of merciless thugs?

Fortunately, Jeffrey Goldberg notes that the Leveretts’ gloomy assessment is proving to be inaccurate. Blogging at the Atlantic, he directs our attention to a Wall Street Journal article detailing Washington’s response to the growing turmoil in Tehran. According to the Journal, the Obama administration, hardly the most hawkish collection of American foreign-policy experts, is starting to believe that the clerical regime is falling apart. As such, the White House is crafting a new sanctions package designed to harm the people and organizations involved in the crackdown on the green movement—the Revolutionary Guard, Ahmadeinjad and his circle, pro-regime clerics, etc. So it’s clear that the Leveretts’ version of events isn’t catching on.

Goldberg is also curious as to why Hillary Mann Leverett believes the things she does. Apparently, Mrs. Leverett was a pretty hawkish critic of Iran in the 1990s, advocating sanctions against the comparably moderate regime of President Khatemi. Now she’s behaving as an apologist for the regime. What happened? At team Leverett’s blog, the Race for Iran, Hillary Mann responds to Goldberg’s barbed query. When she became a foreign-service officer and actually gained practical experience talking with the Iranians, Leverett writes, her opinion of the regime changed. Iranian officials were more open to American diplomacy than she had originally anticipated. Thus, she came to believe that rapprochement was more effective than bellicosity.

Goldberg isn’t convinced. In addition to being morally reprehensible, the Leveretts’ positions don’t make any sense, even from a realist point of view. Her experiences with Iranian officials in the late 1990s/early 2000s are irrelevant, because those officials probably aren’t in power anymore:

The people who conducted Iran's negotiating in the pre-Ahmadinejad period aren't the same ones who would do the negotiating today (Some of these officials have been purged from the system and face imprisonment.) Imagine a foreign leader stating that he believed he could successfully negotiate with George W. Bush because he once successfully negotiated with Jimmy Carter; this is what Hillary Mann Leverett, in essence, is saying.

The people conducting the negotiations aren’t the only thing that has changed. The international dynamic has as well. After our robust response to 9/11 in Afghanistan, and the initial shock-and-awe phase of our invasion of Iraq, America looked pretty tough. Iran was scared and didn’t want to mess with us—which probably led them to be more conciliatory in negotiations. But as time passed and we became bogged down in Iraq, the Iranians saw “the limits of U.S. power in the Middle East (they learned, through their own political and battlefield experiments,” and learned “how easy it was to do damage to the American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan).” As such, they’re “not quite so easily impressed” anymore—and thus less likely to respond to our diplomatic overtures.

Finally, Goldberg astutely observes that the Leveretts are overlooking one simple fact: the Iranians don’t like us. Tehran’s “actions against America’s various allies in the Middle East suggest that the regime sees itself in a zero-sum struggle with the U.S. for domination of the Middle East.” And no amount of negotiating is going to make this nasty reality disappear. In the end, the Leveretts, for all their study of U.S.-Iran relations, haven’t learned the most important lesson: “It is always better for America to side with the people of Iran, and not with its rulers.”

A Family Affair (January 11)

The Cheney family really does not like President Obama. Since leaving office, the former vice president has abandoned all precedent and decorum in favor of launching broadsides against what he sees as the Obama administration’s weak-kneed terrorism policies. Now, his daughter Liz is getting in on the act too, blasting the president’s handling of the near-miss Christmas Day attack on a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit. To get a taste of Ms. Cheney’s point of view, check out a new ad spot produced by her pressure group, the straightforwardly titled Keep America Safe. (If you’d rather not look at the video, it details what President Obama did (read: very little) in the “100 Hours” after the Christmas Day attack. Oh, and it’s done in a style reminiscent of 24. Are you sure you don’t want to see it? Go here.)

The Cheney brood’s tenacity is starting to annoy Steve Benen. Blogging at the Washington Monthly, Benen notes that it’s silly to criticize Obama for avoiding a knee-jerk, public reaction to the attempted terror attack. Conservative criticism of his lack of instant action reveals that “strategic thinking is not one of the right’s strengths.” Part of the reason the president didn’t rush to the news cameras on Christmas Day is because “the White House chose to delay the public response to deliberately send a message and deny terrorists a p.r. victory.” And Liz Cheney is being pretty hypocritical by framing her attack by counting the hours until President Obama made a public response. President Bush’s response to a “nearly identical terrorist attempt in 2001” (the Richard Reid shoe bombing) was pretty much the same as President Obama’s. Benen notes:

If we're counting hours -- and "Keep America Safe" thinks we should -- it took Bush 144 hours to even acknowledge that the attempted attack had occurred. A total of 168 hours later, Bush delivered a weekly address, and ignored the failed attack altogether. Obama, in contrast, delivered three public speeches and a weekly address in the wake of the failed Christmas plot, and released a security review and a new directive on corrective actions. Which president seemed more engaged?

So not only is the attack ad missing the point of a delayed response, it also just isn’t fair. In the long run, however, it doesn’t really matter. Benen points out that “Liz Cheney, however, is . . . a fixture in American media,” which sees her efforts as “reasonable, legitimate, and mainstream,”—or at least doesn’t subject them to a necessary level of scrutiny.

Attacking Jihad (January 8)

Although France has a lot of problems, it has never suffered a lack of grandeur or pomposity. Daniel Drezner, blogging at Foreign Policy, notes that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has planned an ambitious agenda for his tenure as president of the G-8 and G-20—not only does he want to stabilize global exchange rates using an international monetary system, he also wants to institute a multilateral carbon tax to help stop global warming. Unfortunately, Sarkozy has given no indication of how he plans to achieve either of these lofty goals. In reality, Drezner writes that the French president’s “ability to influence currency politics in particular is limited at best -- not to mention contradictory.” The financial powers that be have no interest in his new monetary structure. And no one is going to listen to his pontifications on environmental policy. Even so, Drezner suspects “none of this will silence Sarkozy -- but his words aren't going to change anything either.”

Over at the New Republic, Mary Peretz has an interesting post on President Obama’s attitude toward Islam. In Peretz’s view,

. . . you can’t have a true view of routine mass murder in the contemporary world without having quite a harsh view of Islam today. It is unfair to the American people and to the peoples of the liberal world for the administration to pretend that the perpetrators of terror are not animated by some all-consuming ideology. It is not an abstraction that animates them. It is not a game of hide-and-seek with the CIA.

Whatever his faults, President Bush at least accused jihadists of subscribing to a violent, all-consuming ideology that put it at odds with the West. There wasn’t going to be a way to negotiate with al-Qaeda, because our mere existence was non-negotiable for them.

Although Peretz doesn’t mention Bush, he seems to be angry with Obama for being wishy-washy and not adopting a similar stance. When Islamists are branded as implacable ideologues, it’s easy to separate them from the much larger group of Muslims who aren’t interested in jihad—making jihadism the target of our ire, not Islam. As such, Peretz thinks it is time for the Obama administration to “make this distinction” and identify “the adversary in all its savagery.” Until it does, “the responsibility for any confusion will rest with them.”

Matthew Yglesias doesn’t agree with Peretz’s post—or what he takes Peretz’s musings to mean. Instead of taking stock of the nuances in Peretz’s thought, Yglesias writes: “New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz says that what the country needs is more anti-Muslim sentiment.” He goes even further and states:

You can grow horse [sic] talking about this, but there are over 300 million Americans and a few thousand al-Qaeda members on the planet. Those are not winning odds for Osama bin Laden. But there are over a billion Muslims who bin Laden claims to represent. When influential Americans echo bin Laden’s claim about this, they shift the odds closer to his favor.

This, of course, is true. But it isn’t at all what Peretz was doing—in fact, he was attempting to do the exact opposite, namely separate the rest of Islam from bin Laden’s wacky interpretation of it. Oops.

Tehran in Turmoil (January 7)

For whatever one might think of their views, it’s impossible to deny that Iran watchers (some would say apologists) Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett are provocative. Their New York Times op-ed on the weakness of the green movement certainly caused quite a stir. Andrew Sullivan, as you might expect, didn’t like the Leveretts article, labeling their op-ed as part of an ongoing “campaign to diminish the significance of the Iranian uprising.” He also demolishes one of the main planks of their argument—namely that counterdemonstrations organized by the Iranian government against the green movement drew far more attendants than the opposition protests. “There is a clear distinction,” Sullivan writes, “between government workers told to march and bussed in to demonstrate, at no risk to themselves, and hundred of thousands risking their lives and bodies to demonstrate against a wicked and fraudulently elected regime.”

The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison isn’t moved by Sullivan’s analysis. He thinks that America’s general hostility toward Iran is a bit silly. Larison correctly observes that twenty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, we had normalized relations with the country. Why haven’t we normalized relations with Iran thirty years after a hostage crisis? Larison states: “Considering how much more reason many Americans had to dislike and distrust Vietnam’s communist government, it is extraordinary that it has taken us less time to bury the hatchet with Hanoi than it has with Tehran.”

Larison also has a problem with the green movement’s cheerleaders in the West, who he sees as “exploiting the protests to push for more confrontational, hard-line policies against Iran.” Ironically, in their haste to destroy the Iranian regime, these staunch proponents of the Iranian opposition movement may end up harming it—if America suddenly bombed Tehran, its likely that the green movement would fall in line behind their national leadership, no matter how odious it is. Larison concedes Sullivan’s point that demonstrators coerced by the government are probably less enthusiastic about their cause then ones that risk their lives to protest. But in the long run, this really isn’t important: “The government’s rallies may be fake and the opposition protests may be heartfelt and courageous, but so long as an authoritarian state can limit and divide its opposition and retains the loyalty of its security forces none of that matters.” If you’re craving more sparring on the Iran issue, Sullivan has a response to Larison’s response, which you can check out here.

Elswhere, Thomas Joscelyn has an unnerving update on terrorist detention at the Weekly Standard’s snazzy new blog. The Obama administration (and to a lesser extent, the Bush administration before it) is getting a lot of human-rights accolades for releasing Gitmo detainees. But is it really such a good idea to let hardened terrorists run free? According to a new Pentagon report, it probably is not. Joscelyn notes that a Defense Department report shows that roughly one in five of the released detainees have returned to their violent ways—a “a recidivism rate of ‘about’ 20 percent.” This is a dramatic increase from older recidivism data, which indicated a much lower proportion of relapsed terrorists. “For now,” Joscelyn says, “it is getting more and more difficult for the critics to claim that the number of recidivists isn’t climbing dramatically.”

Stay Out (January 6)

Kevin Drum has “kept silent about Yemen so far because I don’t want to even begin to pretend that I know anything about the place.” That probably goes for every pundit in DC who has been talking about the impoverished country for the past week. But Drum has been reading about Yemen, and has some thoughts on a Los Angeles Times op-ed written by CNAS fellows Richard Fontaine and Andrew Exum. In the piece, they argue that Yemen has a lot of problems. Its government gets most of its income from oil money. But Yemen’s oil reserves are slated to run out by 2017. Meanwhile, the population is increasing exponentially—and it is expected to double by 2035. 45 percent of Yemen’s current population is under fifteen. These youngsters have little economic opportunity, because the unemployment rate is 35 percent. Oh, and the country is running out of water. The capital won’t have any left in five years.

So . . . not really a recipe for a stable state. Given the potential Yemen has for becoming the next hotbed of global jihadism, Fontaine and Exum advocate a closer relationship with the country, and expanding our financial aid beyond counterterrorism to include economic development. But the specific programs they argue for—training troops and bolstering border protection services—aren’t development intensive. Drum thinks this strategy is a fool’s errand: “frankly, it’s a little hard to see how anything is likely to have much impact on a country with problems that severe.” Committing massive amounts of resources to a country that is soon to become a hot mess probably isn’t a good idea for an already overextended United States.

Elsewhere, Marty Peretz has a fun link to a modest proposal from a Financial Times reader. As you might have heard, Greece is having a lot of economic trouble—and might be at risk of defaulting on its debt. In a letter to the FT, a David Frost suggests that Europe buy the nation of Greece and make it the capital state of the European Union. Peretz rightly observes that Belgium would be quite upset—and little more than “two nationalities fighting each other”—if Athens wrested the mantle of Union center from Brussels. All joking aside, if you’d like to learn more about Greece’s financial crisis, check out this article from the Economist.

Yemen! (January 5)

Yesterday, we noted that a number of people are rushing to the defense of embattled Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Maureen Dowd gave her a sympathetic interview. David Broder wrote a laudatory column about her. And Senators and former Bush administration officials voiced their support for the secretary on the Sunday morning talk shows. Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus wonders exactly what Napolitano has done to engender all this goodwill. In his opinion, she hasn’t done a very good job:

She gave an awful public performance in the wake of the Flt. 253 terror incident--assuring air travelers that “the system worked” when the one obvious thing was that for whatever reason the system didn't work, as President Obama acknowledged a few days later.

From his perch in California, Kaus believes the DC chattering classes’ decision to circle its wagons around the secretary “looks bizarre.” And “what is there that’s so golden about a seemingly bland centrist governor from Arizona?” A fair question. Perhaps the true answer lies behind the tendency of “America’s bureaucratic capital” to “simply overvalue those whose first instinct is to defend their bureaucracy.”

While Obama administration officials continue to deal with the PR fallout from the aborted Christmas day attack, more ambitious policy wonks are starting to look toward Yemen, the country that spawned Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his vile comrades. Many in Washington want to increase counterterrorism aid to the impoverished backwater. And former Bush administration official Frances Fragos Townshend even went as far to suggest what sounds like a preemptive strike on the country, stating that the message to the Yemeni leadership from Washington should go something like this: “Take care of the terrorism problem within your borders so you are no longer a threat to the United States and our allies in the region, or allow the international community to come in and clean it up for you.”

Matthew Yglesias thinks we need to take a deep breath and put our fear of all things Yemen in perspective. “The idea,” he writes, “that instability in Yemen is a ‘global threat’ seems obviously overblown.” Our sudden fascination with the country is an illustration of the limits of what Yglesias calls “safe-haven theory,” or the idea that American national security rests upon policing areas where al-Qaeda has a free hand, regardless of what country they are operating in. If followed to the letter, this approach would mean we’d be fighting wars not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Yemen and Somalia. “Where exactly to draw the line is going to be hard to say,” argues Yglesias. But since we can’t be everywhere at once, we need to have some sort of “exercise in line-drawing.” If this discussion about Yemen has piqued your interest in the country, go check out this Yemeni primer of sorts at the New Republic.

Keep Napolitano (January 4)

After the near-miss terror attack on a Christmas day Northwest Airlines flight, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has faced harsh criticism from some quarters for her claims that disaster was averted because “the system worked.” Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin is one of those who is unhappy with Ms. Napolitano’s conduct, and berates the secretary for an interview she gave with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. In her discussion with Dowd, Napolitano seemed to argue that passengers are part of the flight security “system,” in that they can play a role in stopping attacks. Rubin is miffed that the secretary is engaging in a “not very subtle shifting of responsibility for travel security from the government to the public.” Travelers shouldn’t have to bear the responsibility for protecting themselves, or be part of some “terrorist look-out shift.” Instead of inconveniencing innocent Americans, the government should “stop frisking toddlers and help the public keep an eye on those individuals most likely to set their drawers on fire.”

But the anti-Napolitano campaign might have already burnt out. At the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen notes that the effort to have Napolitano ousted is running in to trouble, as her critics can’t “actually identify anything that she’d done wrong.” Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, voiced confidence in Napolitano in a Meet the Press interview. And senators Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman have done the same. Benen thinks that “we’ll almost certainly hear some more ranting and raving from the usual suspects,” but that the worst is probably over for Napolitano.

Elsewhere, Daniel Drezner notes that the Russians have rung in the New Year in their usual fashion: cutting off energy supplies to a struggling Eastern European country. After a price dispute with Belarus, Moscow stopped sending oil to the beleaguered former-Soviet state. Drezner isn’t too optimistic about Belarus’ prospects: “Belarus’ geostrategic problem is that its [sic] a buffer state with no natural ally, no natural resources, and a human rights situation that is so God-awful that no one in the West likes the country very much.” Western Europe could get spooked by Moscow’s attempt to strong-arm Minsk, however, which may turn a minor spat into a large diplomatic problem.

Other Articles by The National Interest:

02.09.10

Foreign Policy Advisory Index

Gates says sanctions on Iran are coming soon while worrying about France’s warship sale to Russia; Holbrooke clears up Taliban confusion; Clinton and Geithner try to get banking data from Europe.

02.04.10

Not That Into You

Obama doesn’t care about Europe. Someone should tell the Europeans.

11.19.09

TNI Interview with Andranik Migranyan

09.09.09

TNI Interview with Ken Pollack

Ken Pollack, in an interview with TNI, discusses whether we would’ve been better off with Saddam Hussein, if the American military is on the brink of being kicked out of Baghdad and what the Iraq War was about in the first place. Click here to see the video.

07.27.09

TNI Interview with David Keene

David Keene discusses the future of the Republican Party and whether (and how) the GOP can be resuscitated. Click here to see the video.

07.16.09

Bruce Riedel on Pakistan's Implosion

Bruce Riedel discusses just how close Islamabad is to collapse and why we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking the situation is getting better there. Click here to see the video.