The Debatable Land

Clintonian Revisionism

In a post that otherwise makes good points, Matt Yglesias writes:

The absence of giant blow-ups between the United States and our main NATO allies ought to count as a real accomplishment of the Clinton years.

Riiight. Apart, that is, from the major disagreements in the Balkans - ie, a pretty important foreign policy issue of the time - which resulted in Blair and Clinton falling out rather severely and, among other things, saw a British general disobey an American general's direct order on the grounds that he wasn't comfortable with the idea of "starting World War Three" there weren't any "blow-ups" in the Clinton years. NATO in fact came perilously close to cracking-up altogether during the Clinton years.

But of course, in the end, it just about held together, even if its purpose was increasingly questioned as the 20th century drew to a close. More importantly there's nothing too much wrong with these disagreements: friends should be able to disagree! If they're not then the value of the friendship is dramatically over-stated and you're talking about a relationship between an Imperial power and it's vassal satellites, not a friendly alliance between a big lad and some smaller, but still independent, chaps.

Back on the "Special Relationship" Merry-go-round

Sure as eggs is eggs, the arrival of a new American president heralds fresh fretting in the British press over the precise state of the so-called "Special Relationship". Today's text comes courtesy of Rachel Sylvester, writing in the Times. It's worth considering in some detail:

The inauguration of a president who is adored by the British public could ironically spell the end of the special relationship between the UK and the US. Just as the voters in this country decide that it is time to get up close and personal with America, so the Yanks are losing their passion for the Brits. Just as the Prime Minister decides it is time to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US president, so he may find the cold shoulder turned on him.

This is partly but not entirely about Mr Obama. Certainly, the President-elect will be the least Anglophile American leader in living memory. Unlike Bill Clinton, who was educated at Oxford, or George Bush, who kept a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office, Mr Obama has no innate affection for this country - in fact, his grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by British colonialists in Kenya.

This isn't quite true. Or rather, it's a rewriting of history. Clinton may have been a Rhodes Scholar but he didn't hugely enjoy his time in Oxford. More to the point, when he came to power there was much talk in Washington about Germany replacing Britain as Washington's Best Pal in Europe. (The fact that the Major government had, foolishly, acceded to the Bush campaign's request for any dirt from Bill's time in Oxford didn't help.) More pertinently, with the exception of Kennedy (who got on well with Macmillan) Democratic presidents have tended, initially at least, to be less enamoured of the specialness of the "Special Relationship" than have Republicans (Nixon excepted).

Indeed, if memory serves, there's a passage in George Stephanopoulus's memoir of the Clinton White House when, prior to Clinton's first meeting with Major, his aides reminded him of the importance (to the British) of mentioning the magic phrase. "Ah yes" Clinton chuckled, "the Special Relationship". Well, he said the right words and everyone went home happy.

“The UK is part of the Bush baggage because of Iraq,” says a senior Foreign Office source. “Obama is not going to be emotional about the transatlantic alliance. He's a free-thinking politician, driven by science and facts. The UK and Europe look less significant than Asia and Latin America and even over here Europe seems a better focus than the UK.”

Well, yes. The post-Cold War era necessarily brings with it a decline in the central importance of the Atlantic Alliance. Equally, Obama doubtless appreciates that there's a limit to how much more Britain can do in, say, Afghanistan. No wonder he may ask for more from other European countries. Still, we swam in these waters in 1992 too and, as Macmillan put it, "events, dear boy, events" helped ensure matters turned out rather differently.

The British position has not been helped by Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the Ambassador to Washington, a career diplomat educated at Oxford, whose pin-striped demeanour does not fit easily with the open-necked attitude of the Obama camp. A memo, leaked last year, in which our man in DC described the President-elect as “aloof”, “insensitive” and lacking a track record did not go down well with a politician who already suspected the British of having a superiority complex.

Is this true? The memo was as controversial as a Financial Times profile. That is to say, it was not at all controversial and could have been written by any half-decent UK correspondent in DC. More to the point, in terms of future policy, the British do often seem to have a "superiority complex". We keep banging on - in the press at least - about how much smarter and more sophisticated our approach in Iraq and Afghanistan is than that favoured by those drop-a-cluster-bomb-first-ask-questions-later heavy-handed Yankee cowboys. This rather flatters us and, I suspect, often falsely so. The days of pretending to play Athens to Washington's Rome should be over.

Equally, Gordon Brown's claims to have "saved the world" in the current economic crisis have not been endorsed by actual events and, quite reasonably, have irritated everyone else who might reasonably ask why they should take lectures from the man responsible for leaving Britain less well-placed than any other major power to deal with these frigid economic conditions.

Perhaps most important of all, the military alliance between Britain and America - which has cemented the political alliance since the First World War - is beginning to crack. I am told that a report circulating at the highest level in the Ministry of Defence concludes that there are now serious doubts in Washington about the effectiveness of the British Armed Forces. Senior military figures are said to have been surprised, and shocked, by feedback that arrived in Whitehall last month. Described as “highly sensitive”, it raised questions about the worth of the UK contribution to US-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It showed that the Americans don't value us much,” one source told me. “Britain's military ability is no longer rated as highly as we thought it was.”

“The US generals think the Brits need to be taken down a peg or two - that we have not performed well in Basra and Helmand province - and that has trickled up to the Pentagon,” says a Foreign Office insider. “It's not terminal but it's an important warning to us that if we are going to trade on our military partnership we are going to have to raise our game.”

This too seems fair enough. Given the appallingly under-funded, under-equipped nature of the UK armed forces it's entirely reasonable for the Americans to wonder if the advantages of the political cover Britain provides are beginning to be outwieghed by the shortfall in British military capability. Having spent a decade refusing to fund the armed forces properly, this is a situation for which Brown is largely responsible himself.

Then again, to be fair to the former Chancellor, he was only adhering to the long-standing British tradition of trying to do too much with too few resources. Even in times of Great National Effort we have routinely sent the boys into battle with lousy equipment. This is not a new phenomenon: in the Napoleonic Wars many, perhaps even most, of the Royal Navy's best ships were captured French and, especially, Spanish vessels that were better-built than their British counterparts built shoddily and cheaply in dockyards (both Royal and private) in which penny-pinching and corruption were the norm not the exception. So not much has changed.

Mr Obama won power promising change. Mr Brown wants nothing more than to bask in the reflected glory of that. But it looks as if the Anglo-American alliance will be one of the first targets for change. One minister says the “specialness” in the special relationship will be diluted. It may not survive at all.

Well, maybe. I'm all for Obama sticking it to Brown, but it would be nice if the transatlantic relationship weren't quite so humiliating and that we learnt that there's a price to be paid for fealty to American leadership, one, moreover, that is not necessarily in Britain's own national interests. As against that, the nature of things is that, regardless of press speculation, London and Washington are likelier than not to remain closer than Washington and most other capitals around the world if for no other reason than the intelligence and military experience they share is likely to remain a valuable resource for both parties. Nonetheless, on balance, it's a good thing if there's also better relations between Washington and Paris (and Berlin). That necessarily undermines the primacy of the DC-London axis, but that may not be a Bad Thing either.

The Ambassadors

The President of the United States often really seems to be a kind of elected Priest-Monarch. One area in which this is obviously apparent, is his ability to reward cronies and fundraisers with agreeable Ambassadorships overseas. Matt Yglesias, who is too wise to buy the wisdom himself, offers the official justificatory fig-leaf for this patronage:

I had always just thought of this is a kind of casual, widely accepted corruption. But recently I did learn the official story as to why this is good practice, namely that an important political supporter or a friend of the president is likely to have a much easier time of getting access to the Oval Office than any mere foreign service officer would. Thus, it’s arguably better for the host country to have a political appointee than a career FSO. Therefore, this practice helps build good-will and so forth.

Up to a point Lord Copper! It's true, for instance, that Jean Kennedy-Smith, appointed Ambassador to Ireland by Bill Clinton, found it easier to get a line to Tony Lake and the White House arguing that State should support an entry visa to the US for Gerry Adams in 1994, whereas Raymond Seitz, the first career diplomat to be Ambassador to the Court of St James in London, opposed the notion not least because Adams had not renounced violence. Seitz, mind you, further suffered from the fact that he'd originally been appointed by George HW Bush. (Seitz was accused, if memory serves, of "going native"; not an accusation ever levelled at one of his predecessors, Joe Kennedy.)

However, there are times - and they've been plentiful in recent years - when appointing Presidential Chums to plum posts has proved disastrous. Consider William Farrish, for example. In the years after 9/11, when the US needed an Ambassador prepared to explain and defend US policy, Farrish was an invisible man.

As The Economist noted Farrish almost never bothered to appear on the BBC's flagship political programmes. Given the sales job required to convince British opinion over Iraq this might be considered a pretty flagrant dereliction of duty. Not that his deputies were much better, mind you. And it wasn't just in Britain that this was a problem: US Ambassadors hid in their Embassies in Berlin and Paris and other european capitals. Doubtless they enjoyed the fine houses and the finer cellars, but they weren't doing their job. Of course, in some of those cases matters weren't helped by their inability to speak the native language. German is difficult you know?

You might say that the importance of the ambassador is less than once it was (though Charles Crawford might quibble with that) but there still remain times, even in lovely Paris and London when it matters that the ambassador be prepared to do their job. Even better, of course, is they're capable of doing so. That shouldn't be too much to ask.

UPDATE: In the comments, Anthony makes the excellent point that across large parts of the world foreign policy is really conducted by the US military. Robert Kaplan has written about how US generals act as "proconsuls" across the globe, from CENTCOM and West Africa to the Phillipines and Latin America. And so, yes, here too State is often bypassed. One imagines that HR Clinton, with her experience on the Armed Services committee, is likely to want, with Bob Gates, to have State and the Pentagon working more closely together. Still, the diplomatic corps retains an important PR and, well, ambassadorial role.

UPDATE 2: Commenters are smarter than me. Nadezhda correctly points out that Dana Priest's The Mission is actually the best book on the proconsular role of US generals. I don't know why I forgot that since not only have I read the book, but I reviewed it. Flatteringly, I think.

Hamilton vs Jefferson?

Is that the future of American foreign policy debate? Noah Millman, super as ever, considers this through a Beckettian lens here. Great stuff.

Obama's European Gambit

Matt Yglesias wrote a column last week in which he disputed what he termed the "counterintuitive" view that President Obama's relations with Europe will not necessarily improve as much or as swiftly as is commonly imagine. On the contray, he suggested, simpley a) not being George W Bush and b) not going out of his way to insult or alienate Europeans would indeed go a long way towards reviving a spirit of transatlantic comity. Robert Kaplan made some similar points in the Atlantic: Obama enters the market at a time when US foreign policy stock is so depressed, the only way is up.

Now clearly there's something to this. European public opinion is likely to be vastly more receptive to President Obama than it has been to President Bush and it's true that this may create some room for European governments to hop on board and enjoy the ride alongside the new American president. But at the risk of seeming a terrible spoilsport, might I suggest that  friendly and polite attitude may not be enough?

This week, for instance, NATO meets in Brussels and, for some reason, the idea of Georgia and the Ukraine joining the alliance is back on the agenda. Perhaps the new President will be able to persuade us that this is a fine and sensible idea, but it's not clear what arguments he can deploy that are not already in the field. And if he wants a favour on this then it's reasonable to suppose that there'll be a price to be paid elsewhere.

Then there's Iran. It's no secret that Obama's proposals for engagement with Tehran have worried some in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London. Now it may well be that Obama's ideas are good ones, but he hasn't yet (obviously) persuaded Europe that they are. Indeed, the Bush administration has pursued a kind of quasi-realist, multilateral approach in its second term that could itself be taken as a refutation of its more ill-tempered approach in its first four years. And yet despite this mollification and prudence, significant differences remain between the Atlantic allies.

No surprise there, perhaps. And the US cannot have it both ways: it cannot reasonably ask Europe to do more and then complain if Europe declines to fall into line behind US proposals. Doing more requires a greater degree of independence from Washington.

And so to Afghanistan. Obama, like Bush and SecDef Gates before him, is likely to ask Europe to pour more troops into Afghanistan and to loosen rules of engagement once the boys are in theatre. As Matt puts it, there's no guarantee that Obama can achieve this:

But what improved U.S. standing in Europe will do is transform the politics of the situation. At the moment, even those European political leaders who agree on the merits of the American perspective are terrified to say so. The combination of Bush's toxic unpopularity and the sense that help given to the U.S. in Afghanistan would, in effect, be assistance for what's widely viewed as a criminal enterprise in Iraq makes it a nonstarter. A new administration and a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq would clear the air. And steps to show that Europe's high hopes for Obama in terms of basic human rights, diplomatic courtesy, and engagement with issues like climate change would allow Obama to make his case to Europe's people and turn public opinion around. At a time when the United States is militarily and financially exhausted, but also desperate for a renewed approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan, that's change we need.

Perhaps Obama really can persuade European public opinion. But since, as matters stand, no-one thinks there's a military solution to the Afghan problem I'm not quite sure what Obama can offer to make the mission any more appealling. Put yourself in Danish or Portuguese or Italian shoes: what's in it for you? Why would you join a mission no-one thinks is winnable? (Maybe a new strategy can change that, but that too is something that remains to be seen.) It isn't simply Iraq; it's the growing perception that many people feel they have little to know idea why, nearly seven years later, we're still in Afghanistan. What are we actually doing there? What can we actually realistically hope to achieve?

And I'm afraid that closing Guantanamo and (officially at least) putting an end to torture are necessary first steps, not an end in themselves. That's the bare minimum required and no-one should think Washington will get credit for this. It's like asking to be applauded for ceasing to beat your wife. Sure it's better than continuining to beat her but just stopping doesn't change the fact that she's a bloody mess. 

It would be lovely to think that Obama can bring a new period of transatlantic harmony. But it just isn't the case that American interests are necessarily the same as European interests. The Security Card trumped everything during the Cold War but these are changed times. And there were, in any case, always more differences than seemed the case then too, these days they're much clearer to see. A new President may find it difficult to change that. Or, to put it another way, he may need to give something up himself to advance American interests in other areas.

Meet the New Boss, Not So Different From the Old Boss?

Sure, last month Barack Obama was an un-American, terrorist-coddling, muslim threat to every American Ideal every true-blooded, stout-hearted, tub-thumping patriot held dear. Now, however, things are a little different. We can seem more clearly these days, now the nonsense has receded. Ross Douthat offers a prediction:

Among right-wing hawks, there will be strange-new-respectful talk about Obama's centrist instincts, his Scoop Jackson-ish tendencies, his Reaganesque blend of idealism, pragmatism and strength. Meanwhile, the rest of the right-wing coalition will be getting steamrolled.

Quite so. Viewed from outside the United States, the foreign policy "debate" in Washington is a curiously curtailed affair. It concentrates on means, not ends and this rather tends to obscure the fact that, on many and perhaps even most issues, there's less between the parties than might be thought.

Take Iran, for instance: as the world knows, Obama has talked a good deal about talking with Tehran. (Ignoring, conveniently, that there's already a good deal of "dialogue" between Iran and the West). This is all very well and good. It would be a fine thing if Iran were persuaded to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Perhaps it can be. But what if it can't? Obama has repeatedly said that a nuclear Iran is "unacceptable". That means military action remains an option. It is still - as you may say it must be - on the table. Which is to say that the goal of American policy has not changed, only the emphasis placed, perhaps, on the various possible ways of reaching that goal.

Similarly, in Afghanistan, the goal of American policy remains just what it would have been had John McCain somehow won the election. Again, I make no judgment (now) on whether American policy is sensible or realistic, I merely suggest that either candidate would have found themselves retooling and, indeed, tooling up in the Hindu Kush. The difference, to the extent there was one, lay in Obama's greater willingness to openly support incursions into Pakistan. Again, this may or may not be a Good Thing but it's hardly the sort of policy likely to endear him to his own party's left-wing is it?

Ditto in Latin America. Obama has, to my knowledge, shown few if any signs of breaking with Washington orthodoxy on issues such as Plan Colombia or the wider drug war. And anyone hoping that relations with Cuba might be normalised is likely, I'd hazard, to be disappointed.

So too in Europe. Obama may well be in a better position to demand more from europe in, say Afghanistan, but that too, generally speaking, represents an intensification of existing US policy, not a break from it. And recall, also, that the new President also supports, like McCain, NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine. Maybe that won't happen, of course, but right now you'd be hard pressed to make the case that Obama's foreign policy thinking marks any substantial break from the general Washington consensus.

What's more likely, I think, is a reordering of priorities and shifts in emphasis but little alteration to long-standing US goals. Perhaps, as Steve Clemons suggests, Hillary will play "bad cop" to Obama's "good cop" in a renewed push for a solution to the Israeli-Palestine problem. That would not be a bad thing, though I confess I've little idea how it can happen, absent a renewed willingness to talk on the part of the warring parties themselves.

But what about Iraq? True, Obama has talked about bringing the boys home by the summer of 2010. And that may yet happen (though don't be surprised if there's slippage on the timetable). That is a difference from McCain, but either man would have been charged with managing and making the best of a mess.

Still, at the most basic level, the new President whistles the same old tune. His job is to maintain, preserve and protect american hegemony. Like his predecessors, Obama is of the view that the United States has the right to intervene in any part of the planet it sees fit. This may (Pakistan) be in the pursuit of the national interest or, more nebulously, on humanitarian grounds (the Sudan) if Obama, as seems perfectly possible, picks up the Albright-Clinton baton and runs with it.

I don't say that any, let alone all, of these are necessarily illegitimate ambitions, merely that, when you get down to the bottom of it, Obama hasn't yet given much indication that he either wants to, let alone will, break from the broad thrust of the Washington foreign policy consensus. That being so, why should hawks on either side of the aisle have anything to fear from him? Means matter, of course, but so do ends.

Things Fall Apart

Now I may have actually heard it all. Ralph Peters offers an unintentionally hilarious tour round the globe predicting famine and pestilence and death should Americans be mad enough to elect Barack Obama next month. Apparently America will be fatally weakened and the world will fall apart. I mean, you do realise that Obama will be responsible for losing Bolivia, right? Are you prepared for that?

Chavez client President Evo Morales could order his military to seize control of his country’s dissident eastern provinces, whose citizens resist his repression, extortion and semi-literate Leninism. President Obama would do nothing as yet another democracy toppled and bled.

Hat-tip to Daniel Larison who has some fun with the rest of this laughable - but enjoyable! - poppycock.

Caption Contest!

Whatever one might say about Sarah Palin, this photograph is disturbing on many, many levels... And, for the people who pay attention to these things, it's a blunder too. Because, you know, seeing Sarah Palin perched on a sofa chattering away with Henry Kissinger emphasises rather than reduces the validity of concerns about her experience and knowledge. Daft.

[Plundered shamelessly from Mike Crowley]

Did you know Putin is really (another) Hitler?

How about this for an opening sentence?

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important.

Who, you ask, is this clown? None other than Robert Kagan, writing today in the Washington Post. His second sentence is also a doozy:

Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia?

And how about this?

Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia's attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition, complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory, and even -- though it shocks our 21st-century sensibilities -- the use of military power to obtain geopolitical objectives.

Isn't this also, of course, a rather good description of the United States' invasion of Iraq? An invasion for which Mr Kagan prepared much of the intellectual justification...

Anyway, all these comparisons of the state of Russia today with that of Nazi Germany do rather make one wonder how many "modern-day Hitlers" the world can accommodate at any one time? What's the over/under on that?

[Via James Poulos whose article at Comment is Free I also recommend.]

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias, ensconced in his new digs, also responds to Kagan:

It seems to me that rather than specifically informing us of each and every time something happens in the world that reminds neocons of the Sudetenland crisis, maybe they should let us know on those rare occasions when a world event doesn’t spark a Munich analogy.

Barack Obama, Isolationist!

Really? Says who? Says Jamie Kirchick in a piece at Standpoint. Kirchick hangs this dubious thesis upon a single shoogly nail:

If the Democrats learned a lesson from their last presidential election defeat, however, it’s that they were not isolationist enough. In a little noticed remark earlier this month, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama expressed exactly the same sentiment as Kerry four years ago, using almost exactly the same language. Outlining his economic agenda delivered at a speech delivered in Raleigh, North Carolina, Obama stated that “Instead of spending $12 billion a month to rebuild Iraq, I think it's time we invested in our roads and schools and bridges and started to rebuild America.”

It would have been one thing had Obama assailed the cost of maintaining America’s military presence in Iraq. After all, he has hardly made a secret of his opposition to the war, and has criticized nearly every aspect of its execution up to and including the successful surge in forces and counterinsurgency plan executed so masterfully by General David Petraeus. But Obama’s slight last week was not directed at the cost of stationing over 100,000 armed men in Iraq – an iteration of his oft-repeated line that there is “no military solution” to the conflict there – but specifically at reconstruction aid. That’s the money that goes to building schools, health clinics, government ministries and the like. In other words, Obama believes we should stop constructing the edifices (literal and figurative) of the sort of liberal society that was impossible under the reign of Saddam Hussein. Criticizing the continuation of an effort that he believes never should have started would at least have had the virtue of being vaguely principled, as opposed to a crude expression of isolationism.

Why stop at Iraq? There is no limit to Obama’s admonition. He happened to choose Iraq reconstruction aid as the target of his ire because anything associated with that poor country has become unpopular with the American electorate. Yet the underlying logic of Obama’s statement is that we shouldn’t spend money on projects overseas if that money could likewise be spent here at home. Why not go after the billions of dollars we spend to combat the spread of AIDS in Africa? Why not attack the programs we spend on democracy promotion in some of the world’s darkest tyrannies? Come to think of it, why is the United States offering so much aid to cyclone-ravaged Burma, when those dollars could be spent on flood relief in the Midwest?

With his call for spending money at home “instead” of abroad, Obama establishes a false choice, creating a dichotomy where none exists.

But of course Obama is not "creating a dichotomy" quite possibly because, as Kirchick admits, "none exists". Why stop at Iraq? Probably because Obama thinks the war has been a terrible blunder and American attention might be better, and more profitably, focsed elsewhere. One may disagree with this analysis but doing so does not render Obama's position "isolationist". Indeed, if Obama were the sort of (terrible!) isolationist Kirchick accuses him of being, he might indeed consider spending American tax-payer's cash on Africans an irresponsible waste of money. In fact he proposes doubling the amount of money the US spends on "foreign assistance". So it seems there is in fact a "limit to Obama's admonition".

Equally, Obama is such an "isolationist" that, last time I checked, he wanted to increase US efforts in Afghanistan, to the point that he has, sensibly or not, promised to attack - and deploy troops to - north-west Pakistan if circumstances warrant. Depending upon your perspective nvading a notional ally may be thought reckless or a necessary evil, but it's hardly the sort of thing Pat Buchanan - to whom Kirchick absurdly compares Obama - is likely to recommend.

Nor, last time I checked, has Obama suggested the US should end its presence in Colombia. Indeed he fully supports Plan Colombia and agrees that the United States must also "take on the Mexican drug cartels". In the middle east he says the US would "never distance itself from Israel", while his ambitions for Africa seem all but limitless. One could go on...

Nor does he believe that the United States should close its military bases around the world and bring the boys home. On the contrary, like everyone else who's won a major party nomination in recent decades he reserves the right to intervene in other countries where he judges it necessary. He may not express this hegemonic view as fiercely as Kirchick might like, but it's fanciful to suppose that Obama wants to "withdraw" from the rest of the world. On the contrary, he often says "We can restore America's leadership in the world." Some isolationism that!

And with regard to Iraq, it's worth noting that Obama's "plan" calls for US troops to be brought home within 16 months of his taking office. In other words, even this scandalously isolationist candidate envisages US troops being in Iraq for another two years. And there seems every possibility that Obama's policy will change and he'll find himself prepared to countenance an American military presence in Iraq for rather longer than his most devoted supporters would like. Thats why some of them are unhappy with his perceived drift to the centre...

But, none of this - nor the all but endless litany of areas for international engagement that are hidden in plain sight on his website - are enough. No, one line in a single speech cofirms that Obama is an "isolationist". Well, if so, he's an isolationist who bears some resemblance to another candidate who plpedged to end an unpopular war: Richard Milhouse Nixon. That being so, Obama is an isolationist only if the word isolationist doesn't mean what it actually means.

The Importance of Being Stubborn

Charles Crawford, formerly Our Man in Warsaw, Sarajevo and Belgrade, thinks we should have told the Saudis to hop off and let the BAE corruption trial proceed. Not because anti-corruption investigations are good in themselves but because it would have been a demonstration of toughness. In the longer term, then, the national interest would have been better served by exposing the Saudis. But that's not our style...

The Russians too are outstanding negotiators, but in a different sense. They are taught negotiating technique in a way which is quite foreign to British and European methods.

Russian diplomats' First Rule of Negotiating is simple and profound: "Never move position, even when you agree with someone, without trying to extract something first."

This attitude gives them all sorts of advantages. Above all they usually convey the impression (a) that they are tough, and (b) that they move only on their terms. Plus they come over as (c) ready to take considerable pain in defending their principles, while (d) being ready, nay keen, to hit you harder (and if possible below the belt) than you hit them.

Which is why Russian diplomats are rarely kidnapped or humiliated. Even the dimmest terrorist out there knows that if he does something bad to the Russians, they will not hesitate to something Very Bad, and preferably very personal, to him - and his family.

Our British problem is that we (maybe especially in the FCO?) in a baffling post-modern way are increasingly uncomfortable if not embarrassed with any talk of 'power' (theirs or ours). We seem to be drifting into a hazy miasma of collective ineffectualness. Psychological and practical 'safety' is all. Confrontation necessarily is aggressive (and therefore bad). Winning is undesirable if it means someone loses.

It is hard to know where all this rubbish comes from explicitly. Part of it is the fact that at the national level we find ourselves sucked in to a 'European' style of negotiating, a restless but incoherent striving for 'middle ground'. The default instinct when confronted with a new demand is not to say loudly "get lost", but rather to sigh "oh dear, they want something again - what might we offer them this time?"

In short, we can come across not as Powerfully Purposeful, but Lamely Malleable. When in fact we aren't, or at least do not need to be.

Indeed. I'd also suggest that this is what happened in Northern Ireland too. London wanted a deal so badly that, in the end, the actual details of an agreement were less important than the existence of a piece of paper everyone could sign. Knowing this, Sinn Fein and the IRA had an enormous advantage in the negotiating process (boosted by the awareness that Washington would bat for the "Green" side of the argument every time). When the Republicans said "No" they were rewarded, when Unionists pointed out their concerns London was likely to see them as an obstacle to be overcome. In the end, the most unreasonable people in the room did best while the reasonable parties were eclipsed.

Sarko's NATO Problem

Here's The Economist reporting developments in France:

THE Gaullist backlash against Nicolas Sarkozy's new Atlanticism has begun in earnest, and its new poster boy is Dominique de Villepin...

Not only did he denounce the French president's decision, which was warmly greeted by George Bush at last week's NATO summit in Bucharest, to send an extra French battalion (some 700 troops) to Afghanistan. He went on to chastise Sarkozy for planning to reintegrate France into NATO's military command structure. "Not only is the return of France to NATO not in our country's interests, but I also think it's dangerous," he said: "We will lose space to manoeuvre, space to be independent" as well as "an ability to act alone". NATO, after all, he said "is an organisation under American domination".

I have no brief for Monsieur de Villepin but his analysis is, of course, entirely correct. It is hard to see what France gains from full NATO membership and easy to see what it could very easily lose. Even if one holds the view that reintegration into NATO's command structure is as much a symbolic move as anything else it is indisputable that NATO is, and will remain, an "organisation under American domination".

Which is, equally understandably, how the United States likes it. One quite often runs across liberals (in the debased, modern American sense of the term) who deplore what they term George W Bush's imperialism while pining for the good old days of returning to, and respecting, international organisations and the great brotherhood of man. Well, up to a point. It turns out that they generally mean organisations such as NATO that are themselves part of the American imperial project. Soft empire counts and so does indirect empire and NATO has obviously been an important element in maintaining and, these days, seeking to expand American hegemony.

Now it's true that some on the American right complain that europe doesn't spend enough on defence and, in some respects, this may be a legitimate complaint. but the United States has also done everything it can to prevent the emergence of any viable, independent european defence capability, insisting that all defence measures be channelled through NATO - an organisation that, of course, the United States controls. Hence the paranoia with which any moves to a greater European defence capability are met on the American right, hence too that the site of a British prime minister even talking about defence to europeans prompts cries of treachery and rabid complaints that Britain is jeopardising the so-called "Special Relationship".

That being so, it's rich to complain that european countries are failing to pay enough for defence when, in the larger scheme of matters, the United States has indeed been prepared to pay for the defence of western europe against the Soviet menace. Who would pay for a chocolate bar themselves if they could also wait 15 minutes and receive one for free?

NATO's imbalance has other unfortunate consequences. The fact that the United States spends so much more on efence than do european countries while remaining, if you like, the defender of last resort creates a sense in Washington that, damn it, the ungrateful europeans should be grateful and fall into line with American objectives. (This is not a situation confined to the Bush years; it was present throughout the drab and often squalid Clinton interventions in the Balkans).

And what could be more imperial than the demand that allied vassals fall into line with the mother power's wishes? Cue, the displeasure felt in Wahsington when europe actually did something and blocked the startlnig suggestion that the Ukraine and Georgia become members of the alliance.

NATO exists as a means of advancing American interests and that it is, at bottom, an American plaything. Hence, for instance, Rudy Giuliani's lunatic proposal to brin Israel into NATO. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it's hard to see why a closer relationship with NATO should necessarily or automatically also be in the French national interests. I should also say that it would be quite possible to welcome all this and see it as a positive example of the power and benefits of Empire. What seems silly is pretending that a pipe is not in fact a pipe.

PS: I also have limited time for US complaints that NATO ain't pulling its weight in Afghanistan: NATO offered help in Afghanistan in 2001 but was told that there was no need to trouble itself or worry since the United States had everythng in hand and, in any case, all these europeans would just get in the way.

The Saintly American

Among the many idiocies stuffed into Mitt Romney's race-quitting speech at CPAC, this one, for which admittedly he cannot bear full responsibility, is a peach:

Simon Peres, in a visit to Boston, was asked what he thought about the war in Iraq. “First,” he said, “I must put something in context. America is unique in the history of the world. In the history of the world, whenever there has been conflict, the nation that wins takes land from the nation that loses. One nation in history, and this during the last century, laid down hundreds of thousands of lives and took no land. No land from Germany, no land from Japan, no land from Korea. America is unique in the sacrifice it has made for liberty, for itself and for freedom loving people around the world.” The best ally peace has ever known, and will ever know, is a strong America!

This is, of course, complete balderdash. Ask the Sioux or the Lakota or the Apache or the Navajo if you don't believe me.

Ah, but you may say, that's ancient history. Just like the Monroe Doctrine which, you might recall, warned the European powers off the western hemisphere. This was, they were told in no uncertain terms, the United States' backyard.

Still, what about the Second World War? Well, Germany and Japan have been occupied for 60 years now. That's fine. But only a fool would suppose that there's no political or military advantages - to Washington - from the presence of US troops in so many countries around the world. Heck, if one of the prerogatives of empire is demanding tribute from one's conquered enemies then one might recall that both Germany and Japan were expected to pay handsomely for the First Gulf War. So too, of course, were America's allies in the Persian Gulf.

But, no, rather too many of our American friends persist in deluding themselves that a) there's only one model for empire and b) uniquely in the history of the world the United States acts only out of altruism and concern for the well-being of mankind around the globe. Both of these fantasies, needless to say, make it more difficult fo American politicians to see the world as it really is.

And what of the modern Empire? Well, much of it is indirect isn't it? You'd have to be naive to suppose that there's no quid pro quo involved in an issue such as missile defence. It may well - and one can see why they would think it would be - in the interests of Prague and Warsaw to be protected by a US missile shield. But such protection comes at a price, even if the bill isn't sent immediately. These things don't come free.

That's all fine and dandy. But one would have more respect (OK, some) for the Mitt Romneys of the world if they occasionally stopped preening themselves to ask why their view of the Saintly America is rejected, or at least seen in a more nuanced light, by so many people around the world - including by many people who like and admire the US.

No One likes Us, We Don't Care

National Review's Andy McCarthy on a foreign policy difference between John McCain and Rudy Giuliani:

McCain is business as usual — even though there is no good reason why the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians should be a priority, much less that we should intensify our commitment to a settlement in the absence of Palestinian fitness for statehood. Giuliani says we can talk about it after the Palestinians grow up. That's rather a large difference, and it's far from the only one.  McCain, for example, would perpetuate the State Department way of doing things (as part of restoring our allegedly tarnished image in the world) while Giuliani argues that we need to make major changes in the State Department and Foreign Service so that they are judged by how clearly they advocate U.S. policy.

Well, I confess I have no great idea for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian problem. But resolving it would seem to be a good thing on the merits of the matter even if doing so had no other consequences or implications for American (or anyone else's) interests.

But let me simply observe that anyone who thinks the United States' image in the rest of the world has only allegedly (ie, it hasn't) been tarnished is, well, either someone who rarely speaks to foreigners or an idiot.

It may also be the case that McCain's ideas for repairing the US's image overseas would come to nothing but Giuliani seems to be of the view that foreigners will come to heel if only the United States is prepared to treat them roughly enough. This is, to put it kindly, arrant nonsense.

Furthermore, anyone who believes that these are trivial matters that can be ignored if The Right Tough Guy is in the White House comes close to automatically disqualifying themselves from being treated with any degree of seriousness on any foreign-policy-related matter in the future.

Better than a chaffinch, I suppose

Mike Huckabee might not be ready for prime time. Here he is on national security:

During the Cold War, we had hawks and doves, but this new war requires us to be a phoenix, rising reborn to meet each new challenge and seize each new opportunity.

Really, governor? Yes, really:

When the sun rose on September 11, we were the only superpower in the world; when the sun set that day, we were still the only superpower, but how different the world looked. During the Cold War, you were a hawk or a dove, but this new world requires us to be a phoenix, to rise from the ashes of the twin towers with a whole new game plan for this very different enemy. Being a phoenix means constantly reinventing ourselves, dying to [sic] mistakes and miscalculations, changing tactics and strategies, rising reborn to meet each new challenge and seize each new opportunity.

But why not see if the US and its allies can do this without the bit about dying over and over again?

[Hat-tip: The Plank]