Introduction

On the surface, the US has been saying it wants Russia's cooperation on Iran's nuclear program in the Security Council this week. So praktike wonders what to make of the timing of Cheney's anti-Russia speech in Lithuania, in which he accused the Russia government of using oil and natural gas as "tools for intimidation and blackmail," "unfairly and improperly restrict[ing] the rights of her people," and taking "actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor, or interfere with democratic movements."

After that bit of raw chutzpah, Cheney proceeded, in the words of the NYT, to wade into the energy battles in Kazakhstan while embracing Nazerbayev with smiling praise for Kazakhstan's "political development." Cheney finished his tour in Dubrovnik with the endorsement of NATO membership for an unlikely trio of candidates, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia.

Altogether, the trip was a tour de force -- a nicely judged combination of high-minded Cold War-style ideological conflict with cynical Great Game competition, carefully tailored at each stop to play to the specific anti-Russian (and pro-US) interests of key local players.

Strategic linkages

I don't think there can be any question that the Bush Admin has been making a number of anti-Russian moves in recent weeks and that Cheney's trip was deliberately designed to be provocative. It appears to me that the Russophobe hardliners within the Bush Admin, led by Cheney, have won the internal debates about how to deal with Russia leading up to next month's G-8 summit in St Petersburg.

As important, I also think the provocations directed toward Russia are part of a parallel program to delegitimize the UN process for dealing with Iran, where the US is transparently engaged in faux diplomacy.

In my view, recent moves by the Bush Admin are comprehensible only when they are seen as linked -- part of a broader "forward-leaning" effort to aggressively reassert US hegemony. My fear is that the tactics the US is using in playing the "diplomatic route" re Iran may not only be extremely dangerous as a way of dealing with Iran itself. Those tactics are likely to have far broader and more profound long-term effects on the structure of the international system.

Where are US foreign policy elites?

Why so little reaction to the Bush Admin's tougher line on Russia by American foreign policy elites ("realists" and "liberal internationalists") who aren't the natural allies ("neocons" and "national greatness" conservatives) of the Bush Admin? Perhaps it's because most foreign policy elites tend to be experts in one area or another with limited overlap -- e.g. nuclear proliferation, Middle East, former Soviet Union, China, Latin America, defense, etc. Or perhaps it's because they've lost the old Cold War habits of seeing linkages across diplomatic and security issues and across regions.

I also think, in part, it's because almost all "schools" of American foreign policy share unquestioningly the assumption that being the sole superpower is in the natural order of things. American hegemony is, at least in principle, assumed to be necessary and/or benign, and its maintenance and assertion is a good thing. What the various schools quarrel about is how best to maintain and assert American power (soft and hard) and "leadership." When liberal internationalists like John Ikenberry and Anne Marie Slaughter question whether maintenance of a unipolar system is actually in American interests, note how gingerly they approach the issue in order to avoid being treated as anti-American heretics.

"Realists" and "liberal internationalists" may tut at Cheney's confrontational style, and some may question his blatant hypocrisy on the subject of democracy. But I'm rarely seeing any challenge to the basic narrative that Russia deserves a smack-down from the US. First, it's become conventional wisdom (albeit of the ahistorical variety) that Russia is rolling back democracy and increasingly flirting with dictatorship at home [ed. - without really explaining why, it seems to be assumed that Putin's "soft authoritarianism" at home should automatically have a negative impact on US-Russia relations on everything from terrorism to trade]. Second, there's a general feeling that Russia has been getting a bit uppity abroad [ed. - Russia is seen as somehow "meddling" where it doesn't belong, even where some American elites actually agree more with Russia's position than that of the Bush Admin -- e.g. issues such as Iran or the Palestinians]

So maybe it's not surprising that it takes a rabid anti-imperialist who doesn't belong to any of the mainstream foreign policy schools, Justin Raimondo, to produce the first article I've read that condemns Cheney's anti-Russia attacks as something more than just undiplomatic and hypocritical. Even Raimondo, however, doesn't fully link Cheney's moves with the diplomatic games vis a vis Iran.

A five-pronged strategic offensive?

To see how recent Bush Admin policy moves are part of a broader strategy of reasserting hegemony, I find especially helpful the following observation by DrLeoStrauss (Stop the Spirit of Zossen).

The U.S. is currently conducting five separate strategic grand offensives:

(a) the roll back of the old Soviet imperial periphery across Eastern Europe, down through the Russian 'Near Abroad' of Ukraine and Georgia and Central Asia;

(b) the on again off again stuttering efforts to isolate China as the new 'Peer Competitor' across both the Asian Pacific rim and also in Central Asia [ed. - and in recent months, competition in Africa has been added to the list];

(c) conduct an international war on 'terrorism' (such as it is);

(d) lead new international cooperation regarding nuclear and WMD proliferation [ed. - "lead" is a charitably neutral way of describing the Bush Admin goals of (i) leaving to the US the determination of which countries are worthy of obtaining nuclear technology and weapons and (ii) ensuring that no unfriendly state can achieve deterrence against the US use of force]; and

(e) bootstrap the Middle East into modernity through unilateral American force of arms.

(Sprinkle 'democracy' on all of the above).

What's remarkable is that Iran intersects with all five "grand strategic offensives" plus "democracy." That helps explain how and why the Bush Admin has turned the nuclear dispute with Iran into a "crisis" (with considerable help from the Iranians themselves, of course). The Iranian situation offers the Bush Admin an opportunity to make "progress" on a number of its strategic offensives simultaneously -- not just with Iran or with the nuclear proliferation regime but with China and Russia as well.

The UN process is set up for "failure" in the sense that the Bush Admin is not going to obtain the sort of robust steps against Iran that it has sought. Either the Security Council negotiations will produce some sort of deadlock over the statement or, as Bolton has suggested this weekend, the US intends to proceed without Chinese and Russian support. Either outcome would give the US the excuse to ignore the Security Council going forward -- Rice has already been claiming that the Security Council would suffer a fatal "loss of credibility" if it fails to take action on Iran. Next stop, as again Rice has already suggested, is "coalitions of the wiling."

The Bush Admin will likely pin the blame for failure on the "ineffectiveness" of the UN (and international institutions), in general, and on China and Russia, in particular. We should expect the bill of particulars against China and Russia to be three-fold:

• they are authoritarian regimes that cozy up to tyrants for their own narrow economic and geopolitical purposes
• they threaten global energy security (in their roles as major consumer and major producer, respectively), and
• they are potential threats to their neighbors.

Marketing the program

This three-pronged attack draws on several different policy rationales or motives, each with a different way of defining "threats" to American interests:

• Cold War-style: ideologically-defined enemies, based on the "nature of the regime";
• Great Game-style: challenges to US influence/control of global energy;
• US "global leadership"-style: threats to US predominance in any region.

As DrLeoStrauss suggests, even if the Bush Admin's strategic goals were commendable (which I dispute), the simultaneous pursuit of such an ambitious collection of strategic objectives is likely to produce considerable incoherence in execution. Furthermore, as Cheney's trip illustrated, that incoherence will be compounded by relying on such a mix of "styles." It's difficult to reconcile the Cold War-style (e.g. Cheney's ideological assault on Putin's supposed lack of democracy) with the Great Game-style (e.g. fishing for gas deals with Nazerbayev while praising his fifteen-year contribution to Kazakhstan's "political development").

The advantage of this mixed bag of rationales, however, is the same the Bush Admin enjoyed in assembling support for the Iraq war: a bit of something for everyone -- liberal hawks, ideological warriors, "national greatness" conservatives, and old-fashioned military hawks. The fact that no one can explain the "real reason" the US went to war in Iraq isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Of course, such an ambitious program can't be left entirely to the Bush Admin. They need help from pundits and politicians to frame, legitimize and sell the program. Not surprisingly, we've already begun to hear from the usual suspects. A mere four days before Cheney's appearance in Lithuania, Robert Kagan warned in the op-ed pages of the WashPost of a global threat to liberalism potentially greater than Al Qaeda: a "League of Dictators" (read China and Russia) that will use their positions at the UN to undermine the promise of a new international order. Although Kagan's essay is primarily an example of the Cold War-style, he deftly weaves in the "energy security" card by showing how China's ideological and strategic interests (i.e., access to energy) are likely to coincide in places like Africa or Venezuela.

Max Boot has similarly been busy on the op-ed pages. The day before Cheney began his trip in Vilnius, Boot was lamenting the "dictatorship dividend" -- the windfall from rising oil prices enjoyed by "noxious dictators" like Putin and Chavez. Boot hit the trifecta -- the challenge to global "energy security," an ideological conflict, and the threat of "regional contagion."

Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez can buy off their publics with generous subsidies and ignore Western pressure while sabotaging democratic developments from Central America to Central Asia.

Since in this article Boot is concerned with nefarious energy suppliers, his list of villains doesn't include China, with which he is willing for the US to make common cause, at least as fellow energy consumers. In a longer piece, I'm confident he'd be able to find a way to lodge China in the enemy camp a la Kagan. As Matt Yglesias notes, Francis Fukuyama reminds us that the PNAC folks always need an enemy, and China was their pre-9/11 favorite. So they may just be reverting to form.

If John McCain's speech at the Brussels Forum on transatlantic relations a week ago is any indication, the "national greatness" conservatives are on the same page as the neocons and, according to Dan Drezner, the "muscular liberals" in the person of Richard Holbrooke are in full agreement with McCain. And of course the human rights folks and democracy true believers have long had China in their sights and are delighted to hear Cheney take on the Russians.

Reporting on his attendance at the Brussels Forum, Drezner notes:

The general tenor of the conference so far has been to focus less on transatlantic frictions and more on the geopolitical and geoeconomic difficulties that Russia and China are posing to the West as a whole. More later, but a question to readers -- will the realpolitik of a rising China and a renegade Russia... be the ultimate driver for a closer transatlantic partnership? And should that be the main driver?

Snark aside, Kagan and Boot give us a taste of the sort of arguments, from the same unholy alliance that brought us Iraq, that I expect to hear against Russia and China as the Bush Admin seeks to reassert American hegemony.

This post certainly requires quite a bit more fleshing out, so let's call it an "Intro." As and if I develop some of these thoughts further, I'll update with links to future posts.

cross-posted at American Footprints

Via the new MidEastWire.com service (free until Sept):

Al Seyassah, an independent Kuwaiti newspaper, reported on August 2, “An Iranian diplomat in Paris warned the Lebanese government that extremist Sunni groups linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi will go through with the threats spewed last week to kill nine Shiite leaders in Lebanon.”

[...]The diplomat told Al Seyassah that “the statement released by Al-Qaeda of the Soldiers of Damascus, which is believed to have a cell inside the Palestinian Ain el-Helewieh refugee camp in Lebanon, is probably true. ... Jordanian intelligence officers, who have been following Zarqawi’s movements and statements in Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon as well as other countries, have information about Islamist cells linked to and funded by Zarqawi – which send fighters to Iraq through Syria— in southern and northern Lebanon.”

The Iranian diplomat... advised the Lebanese government to take action and crack down on these organizations and cells, which are located in Palestinian refugee camps in northern and southern Lebanon.

Poor Lebanon. As Michael Young wrote last week, warning of a Middle East "shipwreck":

In fact the Arab world is utterly unprepared for all that lies ahead. It is unprepared to deal with a possible collapse in Iraq - though Arab states like Syria and Saudi Arabia continue to play sorcerer's apprentice there, as do Iran and Turkey. The Arab world is unprepared to deal creatively with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to take advantage of the Gaza pullout. It is unprepared to deal with alternatives to dictatorship and regime corruption, or to deal with economic development and the myriad other requirements made routine in a world demanding more openness.

In Lebanon, we will acutely feel the repercussions of our surroundings. We will pay a price for breakdown in Iraq, as we will for Assad's efforts to cling to power and to punish us for our independence. We will pay for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' limitations, and for the Palestinians' desire to retain their weapons in Lebanon (didn't Sultan Abu al-Aynain, the Palestinian delegate to the Lebanese, say days ago that disarming the Palestinians meant disarming a "resistance," placing himself in the same trench as Hizbullah?). We will pay the price for Ahmadinejad's victory in Iran. We will pay the price for the compulsive distress of a Middle East that has become a headache to the world, because all it seems to generate with any consistency are angry young men and an uncanny resistance to amelioration.

So praktike, now the tension in Lebanon with the Shi'a has diminished, you and the Shi'a leadership might want to be careful about some of those Sunni camp-dwellers. Sheesh, to put it politely.

Tell me again -- why is "stability" such a dirty word for neocons?

cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism

For some time, praktike and I have been observing a change in the way the Bush Administration is approaching the Global War on Terrorism, and I promised him I'd try to put some thoughts down in writing. Last week, Jim Hoagland confirmed our observations, flagging a shift underway to a Global War on Extremism, with some reassignment of bureaucratic roles. Then yesterday, Ivo Daalder of Brookings (with whom I am in agreement far more often than not) posted some observations about the changes in Bush's second term foreign policy. He basically concluded that Bush has lost interest in the war on terrorism and has reverted to his pre-9/11 policy priorities and worldview.

Praktike's reaction to Daalder's post was mixed. Among the points prak raises, he hits on the topic I promised to write about:

I also think Daalder is missing the Bush administration's shift away from a "global war on terrorism" to a "global war on extremism," which we've been tracking here. In truth, this change in emphasis from a primarily military to a primarily ideological struggle is what Democrats and counterterrorism experts have been talking about for some time. If done properly (always iffy with the Bush administration), it will be a good thing,..

I agree wholeheartedly. Here's a lengthy very-sketchy-first-draft-essay on why I agree with prak, together with some implications from the view of strategic doctrine.

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Like praktike, I am somewhat disappointed with Ivo Daalder's opening contribution to Josh Marshall's new policy blogging venture. Criticism of the Bush Administration's specific moves on dealing with terrorism are certainly merited. Where Bush's actions (or non-actions) notably diverge from his political rhetoric, he should be especially fair game for his electoral cynicism and fear-mongering.

But Daalder's critique of Bush as "all hat" on terror is pushing us in a direction we don't really want to go. Or rather, it's inadvertently hanging on to a set of Bush-defined narrow policies when Bush has himself begun to shift towards a strategic approach far more in keeping with policies liberals have long advocated. We should get out in front of that process.

The "Global War on Terrorism" as a flawed strategy

From the outset, the "Global War on Terrorism" was widely derided as a strategic concept by scholars and experienced policymakers both in the US and internationally, and within both the foreign policy and military establishments. As emphasized in the report of the 9/11 Commission and the Defense Advisory Board's recommendations on Public Diplomacy, the GWOT is a distinctly unhelpful way of thinking about the complex phenomena of politico-religious extremism which manifest themselves, in part, through terrorist acts aimed at the US or at US friends and interests. A GWOT provides little strategic guidance for defining objectives or for framing policy options, choosing actions, and assessing the effectiveness of those actions (e.g. Rumsfeld's "metrics" problem).

more below the fold

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As I've indicated previously, I've grown increasingly cranky about the amount of heat and smoke that's been generated over whether "democracy is on the march" in the Middle East, why, and what it should mean for America's (or Democrats', or the Left's, etc) grand strategy. A modest cure for my crankiness arrived from a surprising source today: Jim Hoagland. He offers a perspective I hope a great many people can embrace, so we can stop fighting the last (US civil) war over Iraq. It's time to look outward and forward to what should be the basic posture of US policy in the region.

The status quo is certainly shifting in the Middle East. Prospects for the resolution of long-frozen poisonous conflicts are emerging, with at least a reason to hope that resolution can take place within representative political structures rather than through violence, repressive autocracies, or foreign domination. And the US can support this process in a variety of constructive ways.

Jim Hoagland is being cautious about this Beirut Spring, not solely based on his first-hand experience in Lebanon over decades. His optimism is also tempered by some useful lessons he draws from the last two years in Iraq. As he notes:

Exaggerated optimism about Iraq -- mine included -- gave rise to post-invasion bitterness and exaggerated pessimism inside and outside the administration. The overreaction -- the swift, continuing alternation in perception between "success" and "failure" -- obscured the need for a speedy transfer of responsibility to Iraqis and helped delay elections there. The political runways in Iraq were overshot, successively, in opposite directions.

So what should the US be doing? Hoagland recommends the same recipe the US has begun to follow in Iraq -- first and foremost, staying focused on the really important goal, which is to facilitate the tortuous process by which the Lebanese themselves reach a new modus vivendi that will serve as the foundation for reconstructing their political system. From the US, what is required is a sense of balance, patience, and taking advantage of opportunities to collaborate with other nations with influence in the situation.

The best way to aid Lebanon's rebirth as a nation is to keep the focus on the intricate set of political negotiations over power-sharing that the Lebanese themselves must initiate, manage and make succeed once the Syrian boot is off their neck.
[...]
France and the United States have found common cause to press Syria's Bashar Assad to withdraw troops that were first sent to Beirut in 1976 with the approval of both powers. "Paris wants to stabilize Lebanon, and Washington wants to destabilize Syria," a diplomat in Europe said to me recently. "There's something for everyone."

Hoagland's warning about avoiding the roller-coaster of excessive enthusiasm and despair is not only a way of saying we must give the Lebanese opposition the time and space to negotiate with the other Lebanese political groups. It's also important that Americans don't lose their heads if things get sticky; to think that Syrian push-back or the political expression of Hizbollah require rushing in to ensure a desired outcome. The US won't be doing either itself or the Lebanese any favors if it allows itself to get sucked into one side or another of their semi-eternal multifaceted internal power struggles. As Hoagland notes, without even mentioning the Palestinians, whose presence in Lebanon has played a far from insignificant role:

Each of Lebanon's three large population groups -- Christians, Sunnis and Shiites -- has competitively and disastrously relied on outsiders to provide a margin of domination that none can achieve alone.

I personally have a good deal of sympathy for the reported reluctance of the Bush Administration to begin discussing the possible expansion of the UN's Interim Force in Lebanon to potentially fill the vacuums left by Syrian withdrawal and/or disarmament of Hizbollah. Lots of time to get to the point of asking "who, what, when, whether and how much." Offering the prospect of another outside force in the middle would seem to just encourage the Lebanese to continue their old ways of using outsiders for their own purposes.

The Bush Administration also appears to be alive to the same danger in Iraq -- of being pulled in by one group or another to "sort things out." A danger all the more acute given the necessity of some form of US military presence in Iraq for some time to come. Complete neutrality among the contending factions is clearly impossible -- all the more so when some of those factions are trying to kill your troops. Nor am I proposing the US is or should be indifferent to the broad outlines of a final outcome.

A delicate tightrope to walk, but one that will be easier to navigate if there is a widely shared view -- at least within the less extreme of American political groupings -- that US policy should focus on supporting a participatory process in which the locals sort out their own conflicts.

Stephen Hadley, briefing the press on President Bush's itinerary for his round of European fence-mending:

On Monday afternoon, the President will deliver a speech at the Concert Noble. The speech will focus on his vision of a united transatlantic community, working together to promote freedom and democracy, particularly in the broader Middle East. The speech will build upon the President's inaugural address and State of the Union remarks. It will be an opportunity for him to communicate directly with the people of Europe, and will show America's desire to work in partnership with Europe, based on common values, to advance the cause of freedom.

To be followed by a working dinner with Chirac.

This could be interesting. Get ready with your text parsers, your dog-earred copies of the inaugural and the SOTU, and tune your browsers to your favorite Continental rags.

{update Feb 7 2005} by nadezhda

This article generated an interesting discusson when I posted it a week ago. It identifies a common -- and to my mind highly objectionable -- strain in the policies of the Bush Adminstiration both in foreign policy and in domestic politics.

For those of you interested in the topic, I've taken up the same theme, the inseparability of basic princples of democratic governance both at home and abroad -- in a new post at Liberals Against Terrorism. It's a response to David Adesnik of OxBlog regarding the promotion of Elliott Abrams to a deputy National Security Adviser position on the National Security Council, with the government's portfolio for democracy promotion and Middle East policy, including Iran.

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originally posted Jan 27 2005 by nadezhda

I had not expected to be writing anything lengthy tonight, but praktike has produced two excellent pieces at LaT (No on Gonzales and Clarification) that I view as being part of a single piece, and I felt compelled to spell out how I see them fitting together.
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Praktike has had several discussions going concerning the issues of detainees, torture and extradition over at Liberals Against Terrorism. This lengthy post was written as a comment to Torture Is a National Security Issue. It's really sort of part 1 of a multi-part essay, which has been floating around in my head and, hopefully, one of these days I'll manage to extract it. Hence it sufers from some overly broad sweeping-everything-up-in-it generalizations, but here goes.

The various justifications for abuse of detainees, whether technically torture and whether in Iraq or Guantanmo, ultimately rely on a "torture as self-defense" argument. Whether the rationalizers attempt to justify the behavior itself, or explain it away as just part of the unavoidable ugliness of war, the arguments come down to the imperative to save innocent lives and reduce injury to our troops. This is, in the final analysis, the same sort of position taken by the unilateralist (or Jacksonian) right on a variety of foreign policy issues. They want to be able to use any means (including pre-emption or any type of weapon invented or to be invented) to prevent the possibility of direct harm to American persons and property. And the "rightness" of their position is defined in terms of the right to protect oneself.

This world view has little or no appreciation of the probability that certain tactics are likely to be self-defeating. The unilateralists can't/won't think through the next step or two to see what other probable consequences will result from their action. Inextricably linked to this attitude is the reluctance to deny ourselves any arrow in the quiver, even though its presence may damage the utility of the rest of our arsenal or change the "correlation of forces" to our detriment -- it might come in handy some day when we need to defend ourselves. It is an overly constricted understanding of "interests" to be pursued and protected. And when actual military force is used, it is a fatally narrow understanding of "victory," by ignoring the ultimate objective which is to win the peace. In the terms of William Lind and Fourth Generation Warfare, we ignore the "moral level" of conflict at our peril, because by doing so we make it easy for others to deny us the fruits of victory.

So whether it's invading Iraq, or changing the nuclear equation via missile defense or developing "small" nuclear weapons, or threatening rogue states who are on the road to acquiring nuclear weapons, or blowing up the Cancun meetings with a major high-subsidy Agriculture bill the week before, or refusing to apply international law to Guantanamo detainees, the justification is always protecting Americans from the possibility of harm by outsiders. We hear little or no recognition that the protection is at best temporary, and that the likelihood of greater harm may have been substantially increased.

Yet aggressive acts of "self-defense" inevitably have longer-term impacts because they change, often for the worse, a complex set of relations that, together, provide a global security environment (or in the case of trade or finance, a global economic system). Lost in the chest-beating about saving innocents and self-defense is (1) the need to focus on improving the security environment itself and (2) the broader damage to the security environment that will result from the "self-defense" action.

In the case of Iraq, the unlilateralists will sincerely say that their policy wasn't intended to produce Salafis terrorizing the population and aid providers with bombings, kidnappings and beheadings. These are "unintended consequences," and certainly not their responsibility, but the responsibility of evil perpetrators.

"Unintended" results they certainly are, but the results certainly shouldn't be put into the category of "unanticipated consequences." Nor should we treat as unanticipated consequences the fact that Iraq is turning into the preferred battleground for Pakistani jihadis. Or that Osama bin Laden is being converted into the revered spokesman for a global ideological movement. Or that we are overseeing the collapse of the Iraqi public health system. Or that the level of repression in neighboring authoritarian states is on the rise. Or that Iran's mullahs are accelerating nuclearization and cracking down on reformers. Or that the US has forfeited enormous public credibility in international institutions. Or that the US is seen by most of the world as, at best, a hypocritical bully.

These are all "collateral damage" of the self-inflicted kind -- consequences that can be, and were, anticipated. The military studies what types and amounts of collateral damage are likely to result from certain ways of using force. There are always trade-offs, and "effectiveness" in obtaining military objectives involves an implicit cost/benefit analysis.

The unilateralists don't seem to understand that you have to ask the same sort of questions whenever you use power aggressively, whether against a prisoner or against a country:

• What are the likely reactions of the people you act against directly.
• What are the likely responses of people who have close relations with those who have been harmed by your action.
• How will it affect your reputation -- which, by the way, is an invaluable asset that takes a long time to earn and little time to lose.
• Will others watching from afar change their assessment of how you might behave in the future and modify their own behavior in ways that aren't necessarily beneficial to you.
• Will others who have been willing to work with you before change their mind and withdraw support you've counted on.
• Will others who previously saw you as unfriendly now see you as a danger and decide to erect protections against ways you might threaten them in the future or actively work to undermine relationships or assets of value to you.

And with regard to each of these "other people" groups, you have to try to understand them -- their reasoning, motivation, values, fears, histories of how they've behaved in the past, etc. Even if they are "evil enemies," you have to try to understand them to identify possible responses and assess probabilities.

Now these are simple home truths we all know from everyday life. I could usefully apply that list of questions to deciding how to launch a controversial business initiative within a corporation. It's called politics. But somehow "politics" has become lost in these debates in which the unilateralists defend their actions by appealing to the overriding legal and moral right of self-defense. Or ignore or dismiss the harm to others in comparison to potential harm to themselves.

As soon as the US border is crossed, they insist we are in a Hobbesian state, denying the interconnectedness of people, nations, commerce and culture. They measure the acceptability of institutions by how effective they are at leveraging US power to get what the US wants, not by how effective those institutions are at contributing to a a more secure and prosperous environment within which the US and its citizens live and operate. Their attacks on the UN, among other international institutions, for "ineffectiveness" is disingenuousness of the worst sort, because their only measure of "effectiveness" is how well it helps the US get what it wants in specific situations, not how well it accomplishes the collective objectives for which its members created it. By their own actions and attitudes the unilateralists help break the interconnectedness, strengthen adversaries on the "moral level," and produce the very Hobbesian conditions they fear. A series of self-fulfilling prophecy.

The contrast with the internationalist branch of the US conservative tradition is striking. One may disagree with the priorities of the presidency of Bush the Elder, but not the commitment to an interconnected world where the long-term consequences of US actions were considered carefully. They were not naive "one Worlders," nor did they see it as necessarily desirable that the UN take on some sort of independent global governance function. But they did see the world as a system of people and nations that formed an interconnected political community.

Not surprisingly, that consummate politician, James Baker, entitled his memoirs as Secretary of State "The Politics of Diplomacy." I quote liberally from its preface, because I find it an eloquent rebuttal to the unilateralist worldview that has dominated our foreign policy for the past four years.

Politics (in its larger sense -- as opposed to specific electoral campaigns) and policy are inextricably linked. It's only through politics that we can transform philosophy into policy. This is particularly true in geopolitics, where the difference between success and failure is often measured by the ability (or lack thereof) to understand how political constraints inevitably shape the outcome of any negotiation Indeed, I would argue, with a nod to Clausewitz, that diplomacy is the continuation of politics -- whether in revolution, war or peace.

We sometimes overlook the fact that most foreign leaders are themselves politicians, frequently elected or members of some ruling party. These senior foreign officials view their problems, and opportunities, through political eyes. To persuade them, it is often helpful to put oneself in their shoes -- to determine how to help them explain, justify, or even rationalize positions to their colleagues and publics. [...]

The political skill extends beyond one-on-one relations to the task of building coalitions. Effective U.S. leadership often depends on the ability to persuade others to join with us so we can extend our influence; to build a coalition, a diplomat needs to appreciate what objectives, arguments, and trade-offs are important to would-be partners. To be successful over time, the politician-diplomat also needs to win the confidence of others. That means words must be matched by deeds and promises must be kept.
[...]
Ultimately, good politicians, like successful diplomats, appreciate power -- its uses and limits. An effective leader recognizes how success can enhance power, and he or she also knows how to husband that precious asset until the timing is right. Power comes in many forms -- economic and military might, group expectations and pressure, and most lastingly, through ideas. And an American political diplomat should always remember that power divorced from the purposes valued by our democracy will ultimately prove empty.

I speculate that, if George W Bush were not the son of George HW Bush, James Baker would find Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo the exercise of power divorced from our most valued purposes.

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[UPDATE 4:45PM EST 12-4-04] I wrote the foregoing about Baker's approach to geopolitics before I'd caught his op-ed in the NYT on Thursday about restarting the Israeli-Palestinian negotiation process. It's a blueprint for taking the political approach --finding the win-win solutions and marginalizing those whose only desire is to destroy any chance of progress.

In his discussion of Baker in Slate, Fred Kaplan reminds us of Baker's position during the run up to the Iraq War, which was to not pay attention to the Cheneys and Rumsfelds who were willing to go it alone without even a gesture to the international community. Bush listened to that advice at least for a time.

Clearly, simple continuing unstinting support for Ariel Sharon isn't going to cut it in the coming period. My concern about the ability of Bush to pursue a political approach is that it seems, in this White House, that anything to do with Israel-Palestine requires the direct engagement of the President. We've not seen the President setting the direction and parameters and then giving a Baker or a Kissinger the authority to go do the deal. The President should come in to close the deal, but there are too many other foreign policy irons in the fire for the Israeli-Palestinian process to be dependent on the President's constant personal attention. And never fear, that particular mare's nest will require constant attention and then some just to keep it from blowing up in everyone's face.

You may have wondered why in my prior post I insisted that the most urgent agenda item for the Democrats is to articulate a strong, clear, disciplined alternative vision to the Bush Admin in foreign policy. I would enlarge that claim to include like-thinkiing Republicans (both traditional internationalists and traditional conservatives).

I draw your attention to the post-election checklist for the foreign policies of Bush II. Prepared by one of the more enthusiastic supporters of the neo-conservative vision and agenda, and appearing in Friday's National Review Online, it merits careful study. The list, part of an article by Frank Graffney, is published in its entirety below. Since the purpose of its original publication was undoubtedly to maximize its broad dissemination, we will assist Mr Gaffney in his distribution efforts.

The important thing now, of course, is not simply to acknowledge past achievements [sic], but to build upon them. This will require, among other things:

• The reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq � a necessary precondition not only to holding elections there next year, but to the establishment of institutions essential to a functioning and stable democracy;
• Regime change � one way or another � in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining "Axis of Evil" states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions;
• Providing the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence "reforms" contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV;
• Providing, to the fullest extent possible, for the protection of our homeland � including the adoption of sensible policies on securing our borders and contending with illegal aliens, and by deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore;
• Keeping faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and for the same reasons � i.e., our shared, "moral values") � especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to "solve" the Mideast problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries;
• Contending with the underlying dynamic that made France and Germany so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit, and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution � as well as other international institutions and mechanisms � to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington;
• Adapting appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America.

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[UPDATE] This essay is one of three on the recommended reading list of the "Grand Strategic Choices Working Group" of the Princeton Project on National Security (Woodrow Wilson School). The group is one of seven organized for the academic year 2004-05. John Ikenberry is co-chair of this working group along with Francis Fukuyama. The other two recommended essays are Fukuyama's article from the Summer 2004 issue of National Interest, "The Neoconservative Moment," (sub reqd) and "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World" by Charles Krauthammer (Speech to American Enterprise Institute, February 12, 2004) .

See praktike's Democratic Realism is a Joke, which discusses this debate.

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John Ikenberry's piece from Britain's Prospect magazine, written prior to the election, sets out the case for liberal hegemony. It is a vision in sharp distinction to the conservative hegemony that the Bush Administration has been pursuing, especially since 9/11, and which Ikenberry explains will lead to tears. The shape of his overall argument, reflected in the excerpts selected below, is of more interest than his descriptions of the familiar set of actions and attitudes of the Bush Admin that he uses to illustrate and reinforce his analysis. We

Let's start with his conclusion, also the title of the piece.

A traditional realist strategy of reconstructing a Westphalian balance of power order that reaffirms state sovereignty is quite unrealistic, particularly given unipolarity and the character of the new security threats. There is no going back.

What the world needs is an order where the US continues to underwrite global security but does so within a framework of rules and bargains that render the resulting system legitimate and sustainable. We need to move beyond balance of power and empire towards an international order that combines American unipolar power with widely agreed upon rules and institutions. The world needs a liberal leviathan.

His conclusion is not surprising -- it reflects the basic premises of those who set the grand strategy for the US, and therefore defined the key structures of the liberal international system in the West, during and after WWII. With the interim Cold War brought to an end, there is a return to the logic of the system that was installed by the Western allies and elaborated through building regional and international institutions and arrangements.

As such, his analysis is part of the overall "empire" debates that have sprung up, especially post 9-11. Falling in the camp of "in a unipolar system the world needs a hegemon" he takes the argument further beyond debates that view the world through the US perspective -- type of empire, whether empire is the right term, whether managing an empire is consistent with other key features of the American character or system -- and instead discusses the US role within the context of a new and challenging international system.

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From Daniel Drezner I see that a collection of 650+ international relations professors, calling themselves Security Scholars for Sensible Foreign Policy, have signed an open letter of protest decrying the Bush administration's foreign policy. Professor Bacevich of several courses past and currently the American Military Experience is a signatory, which is not a big surprise given how much he's made his disgust for the invasion of Iraq apparent in class, as is Professor Corgan, who teaches the introductory IR course to all the freshman IR majors. I wouldn't call either of them wishy-washy liberals, but then I also don't have as great a handle on figures in academia as Drezner or other members of it might.

This of course makes the SSSFP about the umpteen-billionth group of Knowledgeable People Against Bush, whether it's economists, professional diplomats, generals or whoever, and ultimately it will probably have a neglible effect on the vote since god knows John Kerry has too many endorsements to run through in the available time as it is, but maybe it's worth at least consulting briefly with the professionals on stuff like this, from time to time.