Putin's Blues Prove Obama Is Great At Foreign Policy

So the Russian economy is melting down like various Soviet era nuclear reactors. Meanwhile we get to hear from Republican politicians and much of the foreign policy pundit community that President Obama is "bad" at foreign policy.

I feel like this is two trends intersecting. In our age of highly polarized political parties it makes sense to always attack the president always, for any reason you can come up with. The Middle East descending into chaos is obviously a good way to do this.

The other trend is for pundits to announce that basically everything that happens in the world is due to the foreign policy of the President. It's Green Lanterism, or maybe American self-obsession, writ large. Thus the "Arab Spring" was a great vindication of the policies of George W. Bush, until it started to not go well, and then it was proof that Obama was a feckless cretin.

The universal theme in Arab Spring punditry was of course, America. The idea that the political upheavals in Egypt were do to the choices, actions, and agency of 80 million Egyptians was of course ignored.

It's like reading Cosmopolitan Magazine's latest piece on how to get boys to like you, at the end of the day, it's all about me.

Which brings me back to the theme of Russian economic tribulations. Isn't the whole Russia meltdown a great example of how the idea of strengthening and enlarging global liberal institutions of the world was correct? We don't need to "arm moderates" or invade Russia in response to Crimean aggression, instead the liberal world order of states acting fairly inside international institutional constraints works very well.

That is to say the obvious way for Russia to deal with it's economic problems would be to run to the IMF for a bailout, but of course they can't do that. Putin has told everyone in the world that they can go fuck themselves time and time again. The world is now responding that he is in fact the person that can in fact go fuck himself.

Anyway I think Obama's foreign policy is going great.

No Arming The Syrian Rebels Wouldn’t Have Fixed Everything

One of the more annoying threads in Washington foreign policy punditry as of late focuses on the idea that if Obama had only intervened in the Syrian Civil War earlier, everything would be okay. Former Iraq hawks like Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Beinart are great examples of this, but you see it all over the place.

To be sure they are completely wrong. Marc Lynch recently pointed out in a great post on The Monkey Cage blog that the political science research is pretty conclusive that American intervention was highly unlikely to have made much of difference. Let alone replace the monstrous regimes of Assad and ISIS with a pleasant democracy.

And that’s just the beginning. As one expert put it on a War On The Rocks podcast, the whole idea of turning the Free Syrian Army into so guardian of liberal democracy was insane because it is, “neither free, nor Syrian, nor an Army.” Meanwhile the “moderate” rebels we were supposed to support are often Islamic extremists that just aren’t as extreme as ISIS or groups that styled themselves as western democrats but oftentimes cooperate with Islamic extremists. Oh and also the aid that was advocated was always pretty small compared to the mass quantities of money and weapons that have poured into Syria in the last three years from Russia, Iran, and the gulf.

Plus nobody ever talked about giving the Syrian rebels the types of weapons they’d need to really turn the tide of battle, that is sophisticated anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. And rightly so! You’d have to be insane, or possibly work for the Heritage Foundation, to advocate sending stinger missiles to Islamic extremists who style themselves as democrats to Jeff Goldberg.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see a nice article in The New York Times detailing a secret CIA report that outlined how poorly our attempts to arm various rebels have gone since the end of World War II:

The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration’s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.

The findings of the study, described in recent weeks by current and former American government officials, were presented in the White House Situation Room and led to deep skepticism among some senior Obama administration officials about the wisdom of arming and training members of a fractured Syrian opposition.

So yes, arming the Syrian rebels wouldn’t have fixed everything back when, and arming them now probably won’t either. Which isn’t to say Obama “was right” back then or is "wrong" now. Rather it’s to say that the Hawks that dominate foreign policy debates in our country don’t know what they are talking about.

The Falklands War Revisited

With the 2016 cycle approaching I think I need to step my foreign policy game up a little bit so I've been trying to read and write more about these sorts of things. It looks like Hillary is going to be the Democratic nominee so I guess if she wins we'll be in for a healthy dose of do-gooder interventionism. This isn't what I'd prefer (the great blog War On The Rocks made me recently discover that I'm a realist) oh well, I guess it can't be helped. But since war and peace are kind of important issues so I guess I should write about them in a broader context than why invading Iraq was a terrible idea.

These days there seems to be major disagreements in the GOP between Marco Rubio style militaristic lunacy, Rand Paul style isolationist lunacy, and plain old lunacy lunacy embodied in this sage piece of advice offered by Ted Cruz that could have been said by George Marshall:

You can point to two points on the spectrum, where Republicans lie. On one side you have the views of John McCain. The other end of the spectrum, you have the views of Rand Paul. Now, with respect, my views are very much the views of Ronald Reagan, which I would suggest is a third point on the triangle.

When all else fails either start whipping the horse's eyes or invoke Ronald Reagan. But that's the modern GOP right? When you're a post policy party turning the spectrum into a triangle and announcing, "I do not support arming the rebels in Syria, because the administration has presented no coherent plan for distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys." Makes as much sense as anything else right?

BUT ANYWAY, a few weeks ago Robert Farley wrote a nice piece about the legacy of the Falklands War. I've always thought of the Falklands war as being one of the silliest wars ever fought, which isn't to say it wasn't an actual war. For the men, and they pretty much were all men, who were involved it was probably filled with horror and hardship and pain. All wars, even relatively small ones, are very real for the people who fight them, even if killing people to control windswept rocks covered in sheep shit is a very strange thing indeed.

Farley makes great points all around. (And yes this post is based on comments I wrote on the blog.)

Personally though I've always been impressed by the cultural impact of the war as well, particularly in Britain. Musical artists as different as Dire Straights, NOFX, The Fall, and Vampire Weekend have referenced the war (the best lyrics has to be Vampire Weekend's from their song "Mansard Roof "The Argentines collapse in defeat; The Admiralty surveys the remnants of the fleet"). Which when you think about it is strange. The Iraq War was a much bigger thing, but I only can think of a few songs about it. The best of course is Steve Earle's "Home To Houston."

Heck even The Simpsons have a joke about war for control of strategic sheep purposes and to solve domestic political problems. (Yeah and to also liberate those British subjects etc.)

But more than anything it I think the war reinforced the idea of Thatcherism as a political ideology in Britain. That is to say the idea that confrontation and destruction of your foes is the best way to go about conducting your political affairs. Accommodation? Compromise? Negotiation? "No! No! No!"

So you don't just make the miners accept cuts in subsides for their industry, you completely destroy their union and their way of life. You don't just criticize Michael Foot's politics, you humiliate him as a weakling and an eunuch on the front page of your tabloid paper daily. You don't just disagree with members of your cabinet, you scream at them at the top of your lungs until they resign or admit defeat. And you certainly don't let loyalty to the who woman plucked you out of obscurity (John Major I'm looking in your direction) stand in the way of your chance at glory. Thatcher had seen it work so well with the "Argies" so why not do the same thing at home?

Nicholas Kristof's Circular Logic

Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a column attacking Obama for his previous policy of not getting heavily involved in Syria's civil war. I think it encompasses a lot of the poor thinking that got us into the whole Iraq mess in the first point, and is filled with his naive tendency to divide the world into what Adam Curtis has called "goodies and baddies", but this one passage jumped out at me:

His [Obama's] “red line” about chemical weapons turned out to be more like a penciled suggestion. His rejection of the proposal by Hillary Rodham Clinton and David Petraeus to arm moderate Syrian factions tragically empowered both the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

Nick is rolling out the classic circular thinking of American military adventures: if war works then that shows that war is awesome and should be done more often. If war doesn't work (as it didn't in Iraq) then that means that what we need is more war. In short war can never fail to improve things, it can only be failed by presidents that don't do it enough or do it well enough.

Hence the idea that giving more weapons to various Syrian factions would have automatically made things better that Nick cites. There's no evidence of this at all in the real world, for example nobody has ever even suggested giving the Syrian rebels the weapons they would actually need to turn the tide of battle, that is sophisticated anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles. And rightly so! In Ukraine rebels used such weapons to shoot down a Malaysian jet liner recently. In fact the whole reason ISIS is so powerful right now is they were able to capture a huge amount of weapons this summer that we supplied the Iraqi Army with!

But in Nick's military adventure world this contention proves itself. Since things are bad and we didn't give weapons to Islamic extremists not named ISIS (which is basically what a lot of the "moderates" are) Obama made a mistake, because weapons would automatically have made things better. And indeed in an alternative universe where we did give them weapons and things didn't get better Nick could say, "Obama didn't give enough weapons soon enough!" Or whatever. Likewise nobody thinks the bombing proposed by Obama last year would have ended the war, but again it was a failure because we didn't bomb and bad things happened.

In short, this is a bizarre way to think about the world. Unfortunately it's a pretty popular in our foreign policy establishment.

Some Thoughts On Egypt

Please don't ask me or anyone else what the recent developments in Egypt "means." Not even Egyptians can tell you what the two revolutions that have happened in their country in the last two years will lead too, it is simply too complicated with two many unknowns. With that in mind I noticed a few trends emerging in the past few weeks.

The Need for Narrative: The first trend I noticed is how quickly elites in America move to make the chaotic events that have been unfolding fit into a neat little narrative of what Adam Curtis calls "Goodies and Baddies." Where the complex reality of politics in a revolutionary time are turned into a simple narrative in which all the various factions in  Egypt are divided into the forces of lightness and the forces of darkness. It only took a few days for that elites from reliable font of Washington groupthink David Brooks to Eric Cantor to begin defending the coup by the Egyptian Military as a sort of democratic uprising. It will be interesting to see if anyone in the beltway changes their mind now the army is arresting all sorts of people and shooting demonstrators.

The Smart Kids Aren't So Smart: Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a column in which he managed to show how ignorant elite opinion makers can be about politics in the Middle East. He asks rhetorically "How did the US lose the Egyptian people" and then doesn't even use the word "Israel" or "Palestinian" when he seeks to answer it. Goldberg was a huge supporter of the Iraq War (I'd go so far as to call him a neo-conservative in foreign policy) but if even he hasn't sought to educate himself over basic facts about the Middle East in the last ten years I don't know what hope we have for some of our journalistic elites in this country. Goldberg showed his ignorance and/or poor analysis in another important way he claimed:

The crisis of the past few days, which may end in a military coup (which would then start the next crisis), might have been avoided had the Obama administration used its leverage — the $1.5 billion in aid the U.S. is giving Egypt this year, for starters — to force Mursi to include the opposition in his government from the outset.

That's just standard "Green Lanterism" and like all "Green Lanterism" statements it has the benefit of being non-falsifiable. Maybe a beer summit would get the Israelis and Palestinians to agree to a two state solution. Maybe, but probably not. Furthermore it is a pretty bizarre statement if you get down to it. The US is going to pressure Morsi by cutting off aid to the military that has been his main political enemy and then overthrew him? That's like saying if Goldberg doesn't read more books about the Middle East I'm going to force him to, by cutting the staff at the New York Time Magazine (Jeff works for the Atlantic.) This type of thing is just weird. 

Democracy Promotion has Always Been Window Dressing: I don't think Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood are nice people and I don't think they would be good for Egypt, but what kind of democracy is it if can easily be overthrown by the military once it does unpopular things? I'd agree with Obama that "democracy is more than just elections" but the corollary to that is democracy is impossible without free and fair elections. A country simply can't be called a democracy if the results of elections can be overturned by force of arms or big protests. It reminds me a lot of a point raised in Rashid Khalidi's book "Resurrecting Empire" where he argues that US policy in the Middle East, indeed all Western policy in the Middle East, has always been about geo-strategy and oil. People roll out arguments for democracy promotion to suit their domestic political concerns, but it's never been much in the way of a major goal. I've always been skeptical of this claim, but Egypt seems to add a lot of evidence to it.

The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics Is Alive and Well: A while ago Matt Ygleisas (full argument here) coined the term "The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics" as a way to criticize conservatives and other backers of the Iraq War who seems to believe that "the only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower" when it comes to foreign policy. In short the Middle East is clay in the hands of us Americans, we can make their societies into anything we like as long as we work harder or don't make mistakes. Goldberg's little post above (and a lot of his other work) is full of this. It's a remarkable terrible idea that has proven to be completely wrong by the Iraq War: nowhere since the American effort in Vietnam has an attempt to change a society via American power been more embraced, nowhere have more resources been expended and nowhere has the failure been more obvious and greater. But some of us still think an American president can change the course of a country of 85 million people by adopting better talking points.

Anyway it's a screwed up situation, and it will take a long to time to fix it and there's not a whole lot America can do.

How We Talk About Foreign Policy

I have a theory about how foreign policy is discussed in our media: foreign policy is barley discussed at all, what is discussed is how foreign events might influence politicians and politics in Washington.  This is not to say that people don't discuss other countries, they do.  But they don't discuss foreign policy as I understand it, that is the question of what policies our country should have when dealing with other countries.  Instead, when most people discuss foreign policy, or more properly "Foreign Policy," they are really just talking about American politics.  In particular, how the President is failing to magically transform the rest of the world into societies that we approve of more.

Jim Newell had a funny round up of today's Sunday news shows over at Salon and his summation of how they discuss events in Syria are telling.  First up "This Week" :

First, and solely because it starts a half-hour earlier than the other shows, we’ll check out “This Week,” where Jonathan Karl is substituting for George Stephanopoulos. “Is the U.S. going to get involved in another war in the Middle East?” Always, Jonathan Karl, always. Let’s see what Marco Rubio has to say.

Rubio, a war-friendly Republican, says that President Obama blew it by waiting so long to get involved in Syria. (Assuming this really is the broad change in strategy it’s been billed as.) Now who are we giving arms to? Al-Qaida “elements.” What would President Rubio have done? Karl asks. Well, Rubio never would have allowed it to get to this point, of course. If Rubio were president, Syria would be a sunny democratic Utopia already, because he would have managed it so perfectly, you just have no idea how perfectly President Rubio would have done things.

So basically we have someone running for president criticizing the current president who happens to be from another party.  But wait there's a pannel on foreign policy too:

Jeremy Bash, “former chief of staff to the CIA director,” is here to defend Obama’s decision. “Now is the right time to arm the rebels,” after Syria “barreled” across that red line of using chemical weapons. ABC News’ Martha Raddatz would like a no-fly zone, if the point is to make a significant difference whatsoever. Bash is talking about how difficult it is being in the room where these decisions are made, so everybody calm down.

How does the use of chemical weapons change our national interest anyway? George Will asks. (No one ever answers this question.)

Glory be, it’s a panel with Newt Gingrich. “This will turn out to be one of those cases where the United States sets itself up to be defeated,” and Putin will be smiling.

So the panel gave us, at most, a charlatan who resigned in disgrace making bad Cold War analogizes and an incredibly broad question (what are "national interests" anyway) nobody even acknowledges.

The other Sunday shows don't do much better.  Here's the discussion about Syria on "Meet The Press":

“ARE WE RAMPING UP FOR WAR IN SYRIA?” David Gregory asks super-seriously in his opening blast...

Lindsey Graham, hawk of hawks, is of course the first guest. “It seems like ‘not being Bush’ is our foreign policy.” Doesn’t sound like a bad foreign policy when you put it that way. “AK-47s will not neutralize [Assad's] advantage over the rebels … we need to do more.” What forced the president’s hand on this, David Ignatius? The use of chemical weapons forced a decision that was already made “in embryo” within the administration. Andrea Mitchell believes that Iran is the factor that tipped this. The administration realizes “that they are now at war with Iran.” Maybe want to throw a “proxy” in there?

Gregory shows a graphic that more than 90,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war so far. Why can’t America make it all happy again? A “political negotiation can only happen” when the military calculus on the ground changes, Graham says, and he believes, as he always believes, that that means a no-fly zone. We can “crater the runways with cruise missiles.” He trusts that the American people believe we need to “do something” in Syria.

Not much better.  Note that while some "expert" named Andrea Mitchell mentioned Iran, she didn't bother to talk about the election that just happened which brought moderates to the power for the first time since the 90's!  Also no mention of what's going on in Turkey.

This is not a discussion about whats going on in the world, why it's going on and what we should do about it.  It is a discussion of the politics of Washington DC, the attempts by some to further their careers in journalism and politics and the rattling off of talking points.  The interesting thing is that you can get more from five minutes of non-traditional news than from watching three hours of the important Sunday shows with all the important people.