The Free Thinker

With Obama's visit, India displays new power (Washington Post):

NEW DELHI -- For much of the last decade, New Delhi sold itself as "India Rising." Barack Obama's trip here delivered a new message: India has risen.

During his three day visit that ended Tuesday, the U.S. president delivered nearly everything on India's wish list, affirming the country's growing importance.

He endorsed India's role in nearby Afghanistan, even though such a statement was sure to annoy India's regional rival Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the Afghan war. He chided Pakistan for not cracking down heavily enough on anti-India militant groups operating there. He lifted export controls, allowing India to buy high-tech weaponry from the U.S., and he gave spirited support to Indian industry, maintaining it wasn't stealing American jobs, but helping create new ones.

Most importantly for India, he backed its bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, a mostly symbolic move that affirmed its place as a new global power.

Good, but we should go further. Endorse India, Japan, Indonesia, Brazil, Germany, Turkey and South Africa for permanent Security Council seats-- all the world's large and important democracies. But then curtail the veto power so that it takes two permanent members, instead of one, to use a veto. We would look magnanimous, surrendering our right to a solitary veto. But that wouldn't involve much risky really, since we have allies: the British, French, Germans and/or Japanese, and probably the Indians too, would back us up if our vital national interests were at stake. Russia and China, by contrast, have no real allies and could, if the change went through, be isolated and overruled on issues like Taiwan or Georgia. We would come across as champions of the global South. And since Russia and China would never agree to the change, we wouldn't even lose our sole veto after all.

On Georgia's Rose Revolution:

Mitchell feels that Georgians today resort too quickly to months-long street demonstrations and inflated rhetoric. (Actually, Georgian politics has always been lively, and protests were a part of the Tbilisi scene, to a limited degree, even during Soviet times.) Now, Mitchell argues, Georgians need to simmer down and work hard to consolidate civil structures and improve relations with their neighbors.

While Mitchell is genuinely sympathetic to Georgia, he has little patience for the ongoing David-versus-Goliath "narrative" with which Georgia woos US policymakers. Mitchell is skeptical about the political intentions of Mikheil Saakashvili (whose endorsement of the book, nevertheless, appears on its back cover)--and he questions the received wisdom that Georgia possesses unique strategic value, is a poster-boy for democracy, or even that it is, ipso facto, a Western nation.

Mitchell worries that America got suckered into an excessively "personal" relationship with Georgian officials, and that this led, ironically, to misperceptions about American intentions and capabilities in the event of a Georgian-Russian conflict. Now is the time, he asserts, for the United States to concentrate upon its fundamental interests in the region. Mitchell doubts that democratization is currently a top priority of the Georgian government, and says that it needs to keep its hands off the media, encourage free debate, and re-balance power between the legislature and the executive. (Steps, or at least promises of steps, in these areas have been taken.)

Georgia is not perfect, but Georgia does possess unique strategic value and America's "fundamental interests in the region" are identical with Georgia's.  Whatever the ethnic ambiguities of the region and its overlapping claims to national self-determination; whatever the doubts surrounding the events of August 2008; there can really be no question that Russia's actions constituted precisely aggression, and of a very sinister and globally destabilizing kind, since the intent and effect of the aggression was to create a credible threat of unpredictable future aggressions against whatever neighbors on Russia's borders do not tow its line.  This has been an age-old tactic of Russian realpolitik and has wrought untold woe for the peoples on Russia's borders and contributed to causing many European wars.  If we want-- and it ought to be the first priority of our foreign policy right now-- to restore in a new pro-democratic incarnation the international rule of law which was to some extent disrupted by the Iraq War (a price worth paying for the fall of Saddam's totalitarian regime and the delegitimization of dictators worldwide; but a high price nonetheless), Georgia is THE place to do it.  Hopefully in 2012 we'll get a president who understands that.

This seems classy:

Then, in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war in Iraq. The wrenching debate over the Iraq War is well-known and need not be repeated here. It is enough to say that for the next six years, the Iraq War drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention — and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world.

Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next summer, and all of our troops by the end of 2011. That we are doing so is a testament to the character of our men and women in uniform. Thanks to their courage, grit and perseverance, we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people.

But while we have achieved hard-earned milestones in Iraq...

Obama has used crude language in the past, calling Iraq "rash" and "dumb." Hopefully he's grown out of that for good. Of course, he later says:

I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions.

But of course we did "exercise restraint in the use of military force" and "consider the long-term consequences of our actions" in the run-up to and throughout the Iraq war.  We waited over a year between Bush's first signals of possible war and the decision to invade, as we cultivated international support.  During the occupation our military adhered, with some minor lapses such as Abu Ghraib, to civilized norms of conduct.  And the Bush administration had a very clear and publicly proclaimed vision for what it hoped the "long-term consequences of our actions" would be, a vision which has since been vindicated by events.

This is an unfortunate line:

It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united — bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear. I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again.

"I refuse to accept the notion..."  Too bad, because the evidence points that way.  That is, points to the country not uniting behind Obama's plan.  Obama should probably not refuse to accept "notions" that are obvious truths.  But also-- and this is important-- the post-9/11 unity was not a good thing.  Democracies are disputatious, full of debate and disagreement; we should not wish that away.  A sinister political correctness set in after 9/11, when Le Monde was writing "we are all Americans," which made it socially hazardous, for example, to admit that while the 9/11 hijackers were misguided, they probably deserve to be described as "brave."  We don't want that shell-shocked, self-defensive, censorious unity back.  And President Obama shouldn't feel the need for it, either.  He should do what he thinks is right, and not mind too much it provokes some fierce opposition.  I'm not convinced that he is right, but I'm willing to root for his Afghan strategy to work.  Just don't try to "summon" me to any "unity."

"Where has the world headed after 1989?" (Ian Buruma):

The way it looks now, liberals, in the "progressive" American sense of the word, may actually have been among the losers of 1989. Social democrats were always despised by communists, and vice versa. But many socialdemocratic ideals, rooted in Marxist notions of social justice and equality, were thrown out, like the proverbial baby, with the bathwater of communism.

This process was already underway before the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the free-market radicalism of the Thatcher-Reagan era. Society, Margaret Thatcher once famously declared, doesn't exist. Only individuals and families counted. It was everyone for themselves.

For many people, this had the ring of liberation - from overregulated markets, overbearing trade unions, and class privilege. That is why it was called neo-liberalism . But free-market radicalism undermined the role of the state in building a better, more just, and more equal society. Neoliberals are not so much interested in justice as in greater efficiency, more productivity, the bottom line.

At the same time that neo-liberals were slashing and burning their way through old social-democratic arrangements , the left was dissipating its energies on cultural politics , "identity," and ideological multiculturalism. Democratic idealism was once the domain of the left, including social democrats and liberals. But, in the late twentieth century, it became more important to many leftists to save "Third World" culture, no matter how barbaric, from "neocolonialism ," than to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, et al) simply because they opposed "Western imperialism."

As a result, all politics that were derived, no matter how loosely, from Marxism, lost credibility, and finally died in 1989. This was naturally a disaster for communists and socialists , but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And, without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests.

This explains why Italians, and later Thais, chose business tycoons to lead their countries. They hoped that men who managed to accumulate so much personal wealth could do the same for their voters.

Yet the rhetoric of idealism has not quite disappeared. It merely shifted from left to right. Once the left abandoned the language of internationalism - democratic revolution, national liberation, and so forth - it was taken up by neoconservatives . Their promotion of American military force as the strong arm of democracy may have been misguided, crude, arrogant, ignorant, naïve , and deeply dangerous, but it was indisputably idealistic .

It was none of those things except the last. It was not naive, but shrewd; not crude, but subtle and farsighted; not ignorant, but based on a rich understanding both of the Middle East and, more broadly, of human nature and the meaning of political liberty; not arrogant, but humble enough to do for the other guy what we'd like him to do for us if we were in his situation; not misguided, but vindicated by the event.  It was not even dangerous relative to the alternative, for in the long run allowing totalitarian dictators who owe their rise to the West to oppress their people and defy international law is more dangerous than the short-run risks that were involved in the Iraq War.  But yes, it was idealistic.  And it is because it was idealistic rather than "realist" (i.e., amoralist) that it was shrewd, subtle, humble, courageous, and successful.  To try to deny or marginalize ideas and ideals is to rule out the existence, ab initio, of the main factor that matters in international affairs.  To think straight is to have an ideology.

Hillary Clinton:

The administration is making its intentions quite clear. Over the weekend, top Obama administration officials went on television to "lower the bar for success" in Afghanistan, stressing that the administration is seeking an exit strategy and holds "no illusions" (Fox News).

"We have no illusions. This is not the prior days when people would come on your show and talk about how we were going to help the Afghans build a modern democracy and build a more functioning state and do all of these wonderful things," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told ABC's "This Week."

I wonder whether she could actually come up with quotes from the Bush administration to back up this implicit charge.  Of course, it might be smart, in a Machiavellian way, to claim that we were planning to build an Afghan democracy even if privately we had little hope that the task was possible.  But I don't recall the Bush administration putting too much about democracy in Afghanistan as a war objective.  The emphasis was on democracy in Iraq, where the conditions were always far more favorable to the emergence of democracy, as events have proven.  Even if-- and this scenario doesn't seem very likely-- democracy in Iraq ultimately fails, its emergence has had enough success so far to put paid to any notion that democratizing Iraq was a pipe dream.  That, by the way, is why it was always backwards to say that Afghanistan was the good war and Iraq the dumb one.

First Time Tragedy, Second Time Farce

The elections yesterday show that Americans are waking up after the crisis-numbed sleepwalking into the polls in November 2008. Christie's and McDonnell's victories are a tangible sign of what the polls have been showing for months: the ideological dominance of conservatism (whatever that means), the shifting of independents from the Democrats towards the GOP, the unpopularity of Obama's policies and of the Democratic Congress (and a rapid fall in Obama's own approval rating, which I expect will be lower than Bush's at every corresponding stage of his presidency). The American people are probably not such idiots as to fail to return fewer Dems and more GOPs in 2010, and a GOP takeover of Congress, as in 1994, seems likely. This should really be a no-brainer. It was the formula of the famous 1990s: as Brothers Judd slyly put it, the ideal might be a Democratic resident and a GOP Congress. Of course this is one of the thousand reasons why Americans were such idiots to vote for Obama in 2008: there was obviously going to be a Democratic Congress, and a President McCain was needed to check it, even aside from his superior judgment, experience, integrity, and intelligence. But the sheeple were in shock from the crisis, and did what CNN told them. Now they are beginning to get their wits back.

Maybe we'll be spared the tax-spend-and-regulate health care bill. Harry Reid hinted that it might not pass this year, and it's hard to imagine it will be easier to do so in 2010, an election year. On the other hand, the defeats in Virginia and New Jersey might convince some Dems that their careers are ending anyway, so why not make history while they have the chance. Of course, this was always the reason the Democratic leadership was focusing on health care this year in particular. It's obvious that, while it's tenable that our health care system is sub-optimal, this has little or nothing to do with the 2008 crisis or the high unemployment that is our main problem right now. A leadership confident it enjoyed real majority support would have focused on fighting the crisis now, and saved big structural changes until the economy was recovering, to avoid dumping a huge, gratuitous burden of political risk on entrepreneurs and investors at just the time they were least able to bear it. But the Democrats knew that their getting majorities this big was a sort of mistake, afforded them by the crisis, by the national BDS pandemic, and by the donation of most of the MSM's dwindling reputational capital to the cause. President McCain and a Democratic Congress would have had to focus on bipartisan issues. We might even have got the one thing that would stimulate the economy more than any other policy: immigration reform. But the Democrats had to use the one-party-rule moment to plow through the paleoliberal dream.

I think Marx said that "history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce." The dictum expresses the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Hoover-Roosevelt interventionism deepened and prolonged the Great Depression at home and worldwide, permanently altered America's economic constitution, largely discredited democratic capitalism in the eyes of the world, and opened a path for the rise of Hitler and the totalitarian Axis, culminating in World War II. Socialism, poverty, appeasement, retreat, war. Likewise, the comeback of Big Government under Obama has burdened business confidence, impeded recovery, and is altering the US economic constitution, while his weak, vacillating and cynical foreign policy has caused unease in allies from Poland to Israel to India to Japan to France while emboldening Putin-Medvedev and Ahmadinejad and the Taliban, and abetted the lethal blow to international law by letting Russia's thugocracy get away with the dismemberment of Georgia. But the difference of degree is so great as to be a difference of kind. America will not repeat the 1930s as France, to Marx's dismay, would not repeat the Revolution (the 1848 revolution, which led to a reaction and the rise of President-for-Life Napoleon III, was the "farce" to the "tragedy" of the 1789 revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte's world-historic career). Many of FDR's New Deal policies-- a top tax rate of 90%, show trials of leading industrialists and political opponents, an attempt to impose full-fledged planning on the economy-- amounted to very nearly an overthrow of the capitalist order. And it enjoyed strong public support as such. FDR was a formidable leader. By contrast, it is the essence of Obama to be the apotheosis of insubstantiality. "Hope and change" and "yes we can" succeeded not despite but because of their meaninglessness. How can meaninglessness be a virtue? To understand that, an interpretative glance at the past few years is needed.

George W. Bush ran on ideas in 2000, and many of them-- tax cuts, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the No Child Left Behind Act-- became law (Social Security reform didn't but Bush tried), while his foreign policy ideology, especially its liberationist side, seems to have been conceived in the wake of 9/11. Most importantly, Bush found a way to turn the illiberal imperatives of the War on Terror inside out. On domestic and foreign policy alike, Bush represented what might be called the radical center, and as such alienated the left especially, but also many on the right. He twisted America's ideological kaleidoscope. He ended up being unpopular, which is a rather less meaningful fact than might be thought. Suppose there are five issues, and person A is for B, for C, against D, against E, and for F, while person G expresses no views on B and C and leans in favor of D and E but is not sure and seems at various times to be both for and against F. A might be unpopular, if disagreement on one issue is reason enough to dislike him, for the set of people who agree on any position on all five issues is likely to be small, while G might be popular, managing by his vagueness and vacillation to leave a majority not antagonized, particularly if he has a pleasant face or manner. Of course, if G has to make decisions he must take stands and lose "popularity" or non-objectionableness. But the point is that A's unpopularity does not mean that a coherent coalition against him is possible. The Iraq War is a case in point. You can oppose the Iraq War because you are (a) totally pacifist, (b) a defend-the-borders-only type opposed to foreign entanglements, (c) a liberal internationalist of the kind that strongly believes in the "sovereignty" of other countries regardless of regime type, (d) a UN legitimist, (e) not opposed to overthrowing dictators in principle but unpersuaded that it's worth it in this case, (f) in favor of Saddam and other dictatorships for "primitive" non-Western peoples, (g) against all US intervention because you think the US is an incorrigible greedy capitalist imperialist hegemon. These seven groups (and others) might agree on opposing the Iraq War, but they wouldn't agree on any arguments against the Iraq War. So if they want to form a coalition, they'll need to be silent about their reasons for opposing Bush, since any discussion of reasons would shatter the coalition. How can they talk to each other then? By resorting to forms of communication that don't rise to the level of reason, i.e., sneering. If we want to claim we're the enlightened majority against the misguided Bush administration, we can't explain why Bush is wrong, lest we expose our own differences, but we can agree to call him dumb, over and over again. It takes a while to run out of epithets. And if we get tired of negativity, we can get some motivational-speakerish type to dress it up in language about "hope" and "change," by which we all know, however, that "not Bush," is meant. Thus Bush Derangement Syndrome metamorphosed into the Obama administration, and the intellectual poverty of the Obama administration is the intellectual poverty of the opposition to Bush. The word "disillusioned" seems too generous to apply to former Obama supporters; the promise of Obamism was so insubstantial as barely to qualify even as an illusion.

November 3, 2009 may mark the beginning of a return to commonsense, and the GOP takes Congress in 2010 and starts to clean up the mess (first order of business: the deficit), Great Depression II will be far shorter and less painful than Great Depression I. Nonetheless I think there is something irrevocable about America's lapse of judgment in 2008. At the end of the day, a nation capable of electing a man and a party so unfit to lead as Obama and the 2008 Democrats is unfit to lead the Free World.

Relative decline for America was always nearly inevitable and mostly desirable. The 5% of the world's population that are American citizens hold far more than their share of the wealth and power of mankind. This is not to say that Americans must become poorer: on the contrary, we can and may hope that the rest of the world will come closer to America's living standards, and this is not only feasible but will benefit America. A lot of people used to fulminated that the Bush administration was squandering America's moral standing in the world. I am not quite saying the opposite, namely that Obama is squandering the moral authority that the Bush administration won. Rather, as democracy spread, as foreign economies grew and developing countries grew more literate etc., America could no longer enjoy hegemony by virtue of its mere military and economic weight. If it were to lead at all-- and a group of people or nations can usually benefit from good leadership-- it had to articulate and champion an ideology with universal appeal that other nations could believe in and support. Democracy has, for the moment, just such a universal appeal. Under the Clinton administration the US was scandalously unwilling to risk the lives of US soldiers for the benefit of others: thus we pulled out of Somalia and relied wholly on air war in Kosovo and Iraq. The Bush administration broke this taboo, and showed how democracy could be spread not only passively and defensively, waiting for dictatorships to fall, but actively, and how dictators could be held accountable. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, though undertaken in support of UN resolutions and arguably essential to restore the UN's credibility in the face of Saddam's continued defiance and impunity, was at the same time a revolutionary strike against a notion of sovereignty that legitimized every thug who killed his way to the top. It was a risky yet potentially valuable precedent. Polls that showed a decline in favorable attitudes to the US and to Bush in the aftermath of the 2003 war belie the complexity of the world's attitude. Nowhere did a democratic electorate reject a government for supporting the Bush administration. On the contrary, Howard was re-elected, Blair was re-elected, Aznar's political heir Rajoy in Spain was on course for re-election until the Madrid bombings, while Bush adversaries Chirac of France, Schroeder of Germany, and Chretien of Canada lost elections in favor of leaders much more favorable to Bush and America. America's relations with Japan, India, and eastern Europe prospered; relations with western Europe recovered without any particular concessions on America's side. The war was a dangerous expedient; the world knew that and didn't particularly like it; but they didn't have a better alternative; and the fundamental presumption that America is uniquely trustworthy and beneficent which has defined the strategies of free nations since WWII was re-examined but was still, indeed was perhaps all the more, valid. The unholy alliance of Putin, Chirac and Schroeder that had tried to stop the war fell apart, with Chirac and Schroeder losing power and disgraced, while Putin withdrew his country into morbid paranoia. Diplomatically, the gambit succeeded. It seems to be succeeding on the ground in Iraq, too: elections were held, a constitution passed, Al Qaeda nearly sparked a civil war but was beaten back, and a new Iraqi democracy took shape, a development scarcely conceivable six years ago.

An America which exercised its power for the general good, to spread freedom and uphold international security, might be able to hold continued sway over the free world through moral suasion, initiative, and good example. Near the end of the Bush years this seemed to be taking place: al-Qaeda had been drawn into the trap of Iraq and self-defeated; no one questioned the legitimacy of the new Iraqi democracy; the bonds between the Western allies were being reforged with the Iraqi precedent unrepudiated; and the Free World alliance of the Cold War years had now been definitely expanded to eastern Europe and India, and was strengthened in Japan. A McCain administration might have made a cause celebre of Georgia as the Bush administration had done with Iraq, thus reaffirming the commitment to international law which the Iraq war had seemed to undermine-- but international law, please note, in the sense that democracies' borders are inviolable, not in the sense that tyrants are sacrosanct-- and immigration reform at home would have strengthened the foundations of American democracy from below, reaffirming America's egalitarian ideals and signalling its openness to the world. The scenario seems to have the force of destiny, but one can flunk one's destiny, one can miss one's moment.

I'm not sure that the moment can be recovered. Why should allies trust us again if we treat them as shabbily as the Obama administration has done to Poland and Georgia? Indeed, the Obama administration's manner of dismissing the war-- "a dumb war, a rash war"-- is an insulted to Tony Blair and all of America's most faithful allies. It would be an entirely different matter if he had limited himself to respectful disagreement. Obama's ignorant remarks about the impossibility of one nation imposing democracy on another have just enough of the flavor of a new false orthodoxy to make strategic thinking difficult going forward. The situation in Afghanistan is especially sad. The Democrats embraced Afghanistan as "the good war" opportunistically, as a means to outflank Bush's "war president" credentials, but Afghanistan never offered hopes of a conclusion as satisfactory as was possible in Iraq. Iraq is urban and literate and middle-class and densely populated and civilized modern enough to have a decent chance of making democracy work; moreover, Americans were in a position really to run the country for a while, and lay the foundations of a new politico-institutional matrix. In Afghanistan a democratic outcome always stretched the bounds of plausibility, which made objectives harder to define, since our ideology makes democracy obligatory. At this point, we should probably abandon objectives other than to avoid the disgrace of having the Afghans who allied with us be left at the mercy of the Taliban. Maybe we defend the cities; maybe we accept some Afghans as refugees in the US, as we did after Vietnam; maybe we try to negotiate some power-sharing federalist deal. But the Obama administration is far from having made it clear that they have a strategy and are determined to pursue it through to success. The contrast with the Bush administration in 2007 is striking. It seems likely to end in quagmire, attrition, retreat, compromises, a blot on our record.

We have ceased to be the comparative free-market paragon we were in the 1990s. It is not just that we've gotten worse; other countries have gotten better. Western European countries have been comparatively reformist; and now they almost all have right-leaning governments with an interest in fiscal discipline and/or market reform. Now our unemployment rates are above Europe's and may stay there for a while. Asia, not surprisingly, is showing a much more robust recovery from the 2008 recession. America is ceasing to be the cutting edge of prosperity. I think we'll recover, more quickly than in the 1930s, both economically and ideologically. There will be a shift back in the direction of supporting freedom abroad and limited government at home. But by that time the world will have begun to move on, to find ways to rely less on American leadership and example. We probably have decades of prosperity before us, and American ideas, not least the liberationist credo of the Bush administration which is now incarnate in Iraq, will continue to be influential, but the American people, the escapist rubes who voted for "hope" and "change," will cease to be the most important carriers of those ideas.

The Wages of Appeasement

"India's China Obsession":

On June 21, two Chinese military helicopters swooped low over Demchok, a tiny Indian hamlet high in the Hima-layas along the northwestern border with China. The helicopters dropped canned food over a barren expanse and then returned to bases in China. India's military scrambled helicopters to the scene but did not seem unduly alarmed. This sort of Cold War cat-and-mouse game has played out on the 4,057-kilometer India-China border for decades. But the incident fed a media frenzy about "the Chinese dragon." Beginning in August, stories about new Chinese incursions into India have dominated the 24-hour TV news networks and the newspaper headlines.

China claims some 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory. And most of those claims are tangled up with Tibet. Large swaths of India's northern mountains were once part of Tibet. Other stretches belonged to semi-independent kingdoms that paid fealty to Lhasa. Because Beijing now claims Tibet as part of China, it has by extension sought to claim parts of India that it sees as historically Tibetan, a claim that has become increasingly flammable in recent months.

Ever since the anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet last year, progress toward settling the border dispute has stalled, and the situation has taken a dangerous turn. The emergence of videos showing Tibetans beating up Han Chinese shopkeepers in Lhasa and other Tibetan cities created immense domestic pressure on Beijing to crack down. The Communist Party leadership worries that agitation by Tibetans will only encourage unrest by the country's other ethnic minorities, such as Uighurs in Xinjiang or ethnic Mongolians in Inner Mongolia, threatening China's integrity as a nation. Susan Shirk, a former Clinton-administration official and expert on China, says that "in the past, Taiwan was the 'core issue of sovereignty,' as they call it, and Tibet was not very salient to the public." Now, says Shirk, Tibet is considered a "core issue of national sovereignty" on par with Taiwan.

When Russia got away with naked aggression in the Caucasus, it showed bad guys everywhere what's possible. If this catastrophe happens, the West will be to blame for, as McCain put it in the last great statement of American purpose we're likely to hear for years, his brilliant Republican National Convention speech, "turning a blind eye to aggression."  Meanwhile, Russia's delusional insolence is accelerating:

"Let Medvedev Share Nobel with Obama":

It is a pity that President Dmitry Medvedev will not share the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize with U.S. President Barack Obama. In my view, he deserves it no less than Obama, whose principal accomplishments are still in the future.

Together with Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Medvedev is responsible for changing the tone and direction of international politics to craft a better world.

Not unlike Obama, Medvedev inherited a foreign policy plate that was driving his country into isolationism and debilitating self-pity.

In fits and starts in less than two years, he has managed to transform Russia’s international role from that of an estranged spoiler to that of a constructive problem-solver with a stake in a functional world order. Medvedev has gradually steered Russia away from the unilateralist initiatives taken by his predecessor.

He shares Obama’s penchant for multilateral diplomacy and has worked to make international institutions — from the United Nations to the nascent Group of 20 — stronger and more efficient.  His more pragmatic position on Iran is likely to make global efforts to stop Tehran’s secretive nuclear program more effective.

Medvedev commanded a successful war that was forced upon him. Like Obama in Afghanistan, he did not go wobbly in Georgia and proved his resolve to defend Russia’s interests and citizens. Medvedev’s toughest foreign policy decision has been to unilaterally recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Despite broad international criticism, Medvedev’s perseverance on this issue casts him as a world leader with a strong set of values. He does not crave popularity, just respect for his country.

I think it's true that Russians crave respect. That's why rolling back Russia could be so cheap: merely to send a loud signal that the world despised the cowardly, lying, thieving thugs and bullies of the Putin-Medvedev regime-- merely to, for example, announce a boycott of the 2014 Olympics-- while stating a justifiable high regard for the country's historic cultural and scientific achievements which contemporary Russia's aggression is sadly eclipsing, just might do the trick. But that would require a degree of geostrategic insight not seen since... well, the Bush administration.

Obama's Nobel

In a twisted way, there's something edifying about the Nobel committee's decision to award Obama the Nobel Peace Prize.  They must have known they would make themselves a laughingstock, but they sacrificed their honor in hopes of influencing US policy by appealing to Obama's famous vanity.  It might work.  Why not?  This is an opportunity for Obama to re-brand his presidency as unproblematically lefty-peacenik, and as far as I'm concerned, I'd be happy to see him do it.  I think there are a lot of places in the world where an assertion of US power could be useful, but only under a leader with a moral compass.  On Honduras, on Iran, on Russia/eastern Europe/Georgia, Obama again and again has seemed wilfully to take the cynical position in order to distance himself from the ideals of democracy and freedom which are now indelibly associated with the Bush administration.  Even a cynical exercise of US power is better than the alternative in many parts of the world, so I would not wish a full retreat into isolationism.  But a partial retreat into isolationism would probably be better than the incompetent and unprincipled interventionism which is the likely alternative.  The other good thing about this is that it debases Jimmy Carter's 2002 Nobel Peace Prize by making it clear that the Prize is sometimes awarded on grounds unrelated to the merits of the recipient in order to try to influence US politics.

The looming question now is how much damage will have been done to the US and the world by the time the Obama interregnum is over.  How many man-years of unemployment will we have suffered, and what will be its long-term financial and psychic costs?  How far will America's alliances have frayed due to acts of petty neglect, cynicism, and betrayal?  What new totalitarian ideologies will have been incubated in the friendly climate of American weakness?  How many hostile regimes will have gone nuclear?  How much land will Russia and other aggressors have grabbed?  How much will the national debt have risen?  How will the institutions of American economic governance have been degraded?  For now, though, we're not thinking about those things.  Escapism is triumphant.

Books

Thoughts on some books I've read recently:  

Paris 1919: Six months that changed the world.  The story of Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando, and of the botched peace conference at the end of World War I.  Perhaps my chief reaction to this book was to think how nasty and wicked a sentiment nationalism is.  Just about every nation in eastern Europe-- Poland, Romania, Serbia, Italy, and Greece, to name a few-- was engaged in land-grabbing, manipulating history and demographic statistics and parroting Wilsonian ideals in efforts to make their case to the West and America.  It's interesting, too, what high hopes everyone had of America-- high hopes, but quite incompatible.  Michael Mandelbaum has argued in The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century that Woodrow Wilson failed as a politician but succeeded as a prophet, and that the ideals articulated by Wilson then have become worldwide norms in the decades since, especially after World War II.  That's true for better and for worse.  The principle of national self-determination has had dire consequences, and underlies many episodes of ethnic cleansing.  In that sense, 1919 seems modern in a way that 1913 does not.  Alien systems of values embodied in the ancient monarchies of Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire still existed in 1913 but had vanished by 1919.  Yet the crude self-seeking and open imperialism of the peace conference still seem strange: today, nation-states would be more truthful and gracious than they were then.  What wicked times those were!  An element that is hardly the most important yet seems somehow to express the situation is the sexual corruption of the British and French leaders: Lloyd George had a mistress, and Clemenceau had had various liaisons.  Also, I couldn't help but share a feeling of anger on behalf of Germany at their treatment.  

An Edible History of Humanity and A Splendid Exchange.  These two books cover some of the same ground; in particular, both deal a good deal with the Age of Exploration and the voyages of Columbus, and a bit with the plague.  Some memories.  The Caribbean sugar islands in the 17th century sound truly hellish.  I hadn't appreciated before how much the Portuguese were the bad guys in the 16th-century Indian ocean.  They committed all kinds of crimes against the local people, and treated their own badly too, losing many soldiers.  Later, the Dutch East India Company behaved very wickedly in the spice islands of modern Indonesia, too.  Horticulture was a major source of national prestige in the 17th century: that the English could grow pineapples in British hothouses displayed their technological prowess rather like nuclear weapons do today.  I also noticed that for most of history it seems as if long-distance trade was mainly in natural resources, as opposed to reflecting specialization and division of labor.  Both these historians are a bit disdainful of the demand for spices, which are nutritionally superfluous, yet the exorbitant prices of which helped shape world history.  The Edible History also describes primitive tribes that shared food, and their strongly egalitarian norms, which require that successful hunters be disparaged in order to prevent them from becoming proud.  I thought that sounded horrible.  To me, being able to admire others, to recognize someone as having talents far exceeding one's own and to praise them for it, is one of the great innocent pleasures of life.

Anna Karenina.  "Hate the sin but love the sinner."  I think the remarkable thing about this book is how well Tolstoy does that.  Tolstoy is very good at describing characters, feelings, scenes, conversations, etc. with great realism, but he does not limit himself to that: he often steps in, as author, with his own value judgments.  In these, without drily or pedantically repeated traditional morality, Tolstoy is nonetheless firmly and consistently against the adulterous affair committed by the novel's heroine, Anna.  Certain scenes bring out especially poignantly how horrible and evil adultery is, of which perhaps the most poignant is when Dolly, the jilted wife of Anna's brother Stiva who forgave her husband, trusts completely in her beloved sister-in-law's innocence and pleads on her behalf to Anna's husband.  So Tolstoy hates the sin; yet he does not hate Anna, but engages the reader's sympathy with her throughout.  The reader continues to see the good, both in her, and in her lover Vronsky, throughout; good mixed with evil, yet enough good to make one wish the characters well.  That said, I am conscious of regarding Tolstoy's characters differently than I did when I first read Tolstoy, and with a little condescension.  There is no really good character in this novel, like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov.  Perhaps Konstantin Levin is supposed to be good, but if so, that only shows the limitations of Tolstoy's conception of the good life, for Levin, though he has some good features and is always trying to improve, does many stupid things.  For example, he avoids the woman he loves, and who also wants to marry him, for a whole summer, when she came to live near him in the countryside for a summer, out of mere pig-headed pride, since sometime before she had refused his proposal when she was in love with another man.  Levin also aspires to be a sort of economist-agricultural-reformer, but he has a peculiarly Russian conceitedness that makes him ignore and disdain advice from the more advanced West.  I become impatient with such characters as Vronsky, Anna, and Levin.  "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness" says the Gospel.  That's how I feel.  I want a novel with characters I can look up to, admire, emulate.

Genghis: The Birth of an Empire.  This historical novel about the youth of Genghis Khan is one of the most suspenseful books I've read in some time, very exciting.  More than that, the portrayal of the ethos of the society of tribal Mongolia is fascinating-- the ethos, and also the economy, which is bound up with the ethos.  Crucial to the story and to the setting is the concept of a "khan," a tribal leader or strongman, whose "word is law" in the tribe, who "cannot be refused" by the tribe's women, who must always succeed.  The young man who will become Genghis Khan-- his name is Temujin; Genghis is a title acquired later-- is the second of the five sons of Yesugei, "the khan of the Wolves," the "wolves" being the name of one of the tribes.  But Yesugei is betrayed and murdered by Tartars when his sons are still boys.  Yesugei's bondsman-- a bondsman is a warrior bound by oath to a khan, a member of a khan's inner circle-- Eluk declares himself khan, and orders that Yesugei's wife and sons be expelled from the tribe, left with nothing on the Mongolian plain, not even a pony or a bow, the most basic necessities of life, doomed-- it is presumed-- to starve.  They manage to survive, first by hunting with makeshift bows-- but Temujin kills his older brother Bekhter, who "steals food" by eating what he catches secretly and then taking his share of the family's small meals-- then by killing two herdsmen and taking their bows, ponies, and flocks.  They manage to establish a homestead of sorts, but live in fear of the Wolves, who traveled south for a time but can be expected to return, and Eluk to seek to eliminate Yesugei's line, which will continue to be a threat to them.  Temujin and his brothers make preparations for this and fight the Wolf warriors who come after them, but Temujin is captured, sacrificing himself to help his brothers make their getaway.  Temujin is shamed and imprisoned in a latrine, and expects to be killed, but a swordsmith who years before had been invited to join the Wolves by Yesugei's father frees him, and he and his son Jelma become Temujin's bondsmen.  Temujin now goes north, establishes a base to raid the Tartars, accepts tribeless wanderers, and begins to organize a sort of small, makeshift tribe, among whom he is a "khan" of sorts.  He makes an alliance with another khan, Togrul of the Kerait, against the Tartars, and becomes their war leader.  The Tartars are provoked to the point where the whole Tartar nation marches against the Mongols.  Temujin is not merely an increasingly daring, desperate and successful war leader, but a visionary of sorts: he wants to unite the Mongols, "the Silver People," and put an end to a thousand years of war among the tribes.  His rise is rapid and bloody, and depends on his own prowess and cunning, and also a trait that I think must be called courage, in the sense of an indifference to physical pain and danger.

One thing that strikes me in the stories of these great conquerors-- Genghis Khan, Caesar, Alexander-- is that while superficially mere lust for power seems to be their motive, insecurity is at least as important.  Temujin's career, first fighting the Tartars, then murdering the khan of another tribe, the Olhunut, in his tent, then fighting Eluk, is all connected, as it turns out, to his duty to avenge his father's death and his mother and brothers' disinheritance and abandonment by the treacherous Eluk.  Julius Caesar, too, was betrayed by his friend Pompey, and had reason to fear for his life at the hands of the Nobiles party in Rome by the time he marched his armies across the Rubicon and ended the Roman Republic.  Indeed he was murdered by his political opponents in the end.  Alexander, too, was supposed to have been targeted for assassination by Darius of Persia, and cited this as part of his grounds for his invasion of Persia.  Later Alexander's wife and son were murdered by his generals after his early death.  Strangely but truly, all these conquerors were also victims, and their conquerorhood and their victimhood are linked together.  No one, perhaps, would have taken the risks that Temujin of the Wolves took, the risks that made him Genghis Khan, without a motive higher than mere personal ambition, for the simple reason that, ex ante, he was much likelier to be killed than to succeed.  Only because his life was already threatened, and because honor required him to avenge his father's death, did he set out on the course of desperate courage that made him the glorious but grim figure he became.

It would be false, and it would impoverish the soul, not to pay tribute to that glory, and Conn Iggledon, the author of Genghis, makes it very hard not to be exhilarated by the young Temujin's agony and redemption through victory.  Can we put that exhilaration to use, without condoning the aggression, the murder by stealth, the rape and even cannibalism which the Mongol tribes he portrays take for granted?  Yes, we can.  St. Steven and St. Lawrence were no less brave than Temujin of the Wolves, but they served a better King.  "We are more than conquerors," writes Paul (Romans 8:37).  And indeed, where is the empire of Genghis Khan today?  But that of the Prince of Peace lives on.

From The Moscow Times:

In his speech before the United Nations General Assembly last week, U.S. President Barack Obama said we are entering a new historical era. He declared that the United States would cease taking unilateral actions and called on all people of all nations to join together in combating the challenges facing the world. Obama said we need the “cooperative effort of the whole world.” His foreign policy leitmotif has become the call to cooperate based on shared values. He made similar appeals during visits to Prague, Cairo and Moscow...

A recent survey by the Levada Center revealed that only 2.1 percent of all Russians consider the United States a friend, but 50.2 percent see Belarus as one, 17.6 see China that way and 17.4 percent consider Germany a friend. By contrast, 61.8 percent of respondents considered Georgia as Russia’s enemy, with the United States in second place at 45.4 percent.

The survey also found that 50.4 percent of Russians had either a “basically bad” or “very bad” attitude toward the United States, with only 1.4 percent holding a “very good” attitude and 34 percent feeling “basically good” toward Washington. What is most surprising to me is that Russians’ attitudes toward the United States have actually worsened during Obama’s first year in office compared with what they were during the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush, Russia’s heretofore-favorite whipping boy.

"His foreign policy leitmotif has become the call to cooperate based on shared values."  Wow.  It's the most damning summary I've read yet, precisely because it's so decorous and superficially favorable.  How provincial, how uncurious, how narcissistic, how trapped in an echo chamber of admirers do you have to be not to realize that much of the world doesn't share the values that America has traditionally stood for.  If we want to live by and promote values like freedom, democracy, and peace, that will sometimes bring us into conflict with others.  It would certainly bring us into conflict (though well short of war) with Putin's Russia.

Russians are right to continue mistrusting us.  Obama may wish to conduct an amoral foreign policy for the next four years, but he can't commit America permanently to ignoring democratic freedoms and appeasing aggressors.  The first order of business for the next Republican president will be to apologize for Obama's apologies and for shabby treatment of our allies in eastern Europe and elsewhere.  Then get back to leading the Free World.