Larison first:

Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.

Sullivan writes, “I don’t buy the argument that in the long run, autocracies are more stable than democracies, even in the Middle East,” and goes on to cite Iran as proof of the instability of the autocratic model when it comes to succession.

He’s missing the point, though. I’m not sure even steely Larison would go so far as to argue that autocratic succession is any kind of ideal. Autocracies by their very nature change leaders amidst a tension that can at any time spill over into war. Indeed, the greatest achievement of democracy has been that power transfers have been institutionalized to the point of violence being a nearly unthinkable outcome.

What Daniel is correctly railing against, however, is the by far most questionable aspect of Democratic Peace theory: namely that democracies do not go to war against each other. Democratic Peace theorists like the claim, with some sleights of hand, that history bears out this claim. But Daniel’s counter-example is a powerful one. Is there much doubt that the Arab Street, if given access to the reins of power, would demand anything but the annihilation of Israel?

Indeed, over the past half-century, progress has been so rapid that perhaps with distance we might come to think of it as the Great Era of Moral Progress.

I get what he’s saying: Obama’s ascent to the presidency represents an important event in the civil rights struggle in this country. But am I being willfully difficult if I insist that I don’t count that as any kind of consolidated progress towards a better social arrangement, but rather a brief blip in the long and miserable history of humanity from which we will descend back to our natural barbaric state?

By all means, people, celebrate this day. Feel happy that we live in a relatively more just society than our parents did. But let’s not congratulate ourselves too much. We’re still all a bunch of venal, rutting animals who fight wars of conquest and domination out of hurt pride or fear or ignorance. We may occasionally reason our way out of repressing others, but we have short memories and base instincts. After all, the barbarisms of Auschwitz, the Killing Fields, Srebrenica—all events during Wilkinson’s Great Era of Moral Progress—were perpetrated by people just like us, not some exotic “other” we must struggle to comprehend. We are irredeemable, never beyond our worst potential.

Bush will rightly go down in history as the president who authorized the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody. But whether he has any self-awareness in this regard is worth asking. I wonder sometimes just how deep the crisis in American government was these past eight years. The entire system, in the end, rested on a man who wasn’t there.

I disagree: it absolutely is not worth asking. Whether he is truly morally bankrupt or merely staggeringly incompetent and/or out to lunch, it happened during his presidency and is therefore his responsibility. The actual workings of his murky mind should be of no concern to anyone. End of story.

The most important thing Bush’s stonewalling and denial tell us is that he is less politically astute than Ronald Reagan. Reagan, faced with a nasty scandal of his own, at least had the sense to symbolically and publicly accept the responsibility for it:

First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds — well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch.

More cynical people like my parents at the time thought it was a cheap, sentimental tactic to have the president own up to his ignorance and plead for forgiveness with the American people, thereby insulating himself from the fallout. I’m sure Reaganites like Andrew were perfectly happy to take the president at his word.

But then as now, the actual mental state of the president is completely immaterial. Crimes were committed during both presidencies, and both presidencies are forever tarred in the history books. Good enough for me!

In the meantime, however, Andrew Sullivan praised the piece as an attempt to rebuild “a conservative foreign policy” in the wake of Bush/Cheney and in the face of the perilous promise of McCain. If by “conservative”, Andrew meant “not reckless”, then yes, I agree: the above-mentioned piece (by Nick Gvosdev, formerly of The National Interest) is a good place to start the discussion.

But the term “conservative” grates on my ear when applied to foreign policy much like it rankles when Matt Yglesias bandies about a “progressive” agenda for foreign affairs. Quite simply put, such categories do not exist in any meaningful way. There’s a tradition of skeptical isolationism in American foreign policy, which I’d argue Gvosdev’s piece flirts with. And there’s a tradition that seeks to keep America engaged in the world. Among the latter branch, you’ll find realists, liberal internationalists, neoconservatives (or “assertive nationalists”), and a whole bevy of people who fall somewhere in between those three large categories.

Claims for “progressive” or “conservative” foreign policy, to my ear at least, seem to be attempts at capturing one or more of the above traditions in the service of some larger organizing political movement. As such, they are misleading and are not welcome. Neither party, nor either “political persuasion”, has had a monopoly on wisdom or on folly when it comes to these things. Given the enormous challenges we face, finding a “conservative” or “progressive” foreign policy is counter-productive. We should be concentrating on finding the best solutions, period.

I can face the idea of a president Obama taking on and finally defeating Osama. In fact, that’s the major reason why I favor his candidacy… . Obama will try to correct the massive stretegic error of the Iraq invasion and pivot Western allies toward a greater focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. I believe that Obama will be able to do this with much less global p.r. blowback than McCain and that the support president Obama will get from our European allies will dwarf McCain’s.

First of all, I should point out that I, too, would welcome a President Obama “taking on and finally defeating Osama.” For what it’s worth, I could face a Honeydew-Beaker Administration “taking on and finally defeating Osama.” (Hey, I wouldn’t even mind if it happened in the next 3-4 months, under Bush, but I get the feeling that happenstance might upset someone…)

What I really wanted to draw attention to is Sullivan’s assumption that Obama will be able to formally and officially expand the Afghanistan problem into an Afghanistan-Pakistan problem with “much less global p.r. blowback than McCain.” Au contraire. I expect there will be more blowback against Obama.

Right now, he can ride high on a wave of global public support, but those thronging masses in Berlin and elsewhere are supporting him because they expect something in return: a massive rupture with Bush-era foreign policy. Since this is inchoate mob opinion we’re talking about here, it wouldn’t do to overanalyze it; basically they want more talk, fewer bombs, and they think he’s the one who’s going to give that to them. Americans, on the other hand, seem more inclined to take him at his word on his promises to get tough with Pakistan (though they still favor McCain on national security issues).

Something tells me that, if it comes to a choice between upsetting Americans’ expectations, and upsetting the world’s, the President of the United States is going to side with…well, the United States. And this is going to cut across a number of issues besides Afghanistan/Pakistan, as Slate pointed out awhile back:

If his diplomats or military advisers told him that the Iranians perceived his willingness to talk as a sign of weakness, he might reconsider his pledge to meet with the Iranian president as quickly as he now promises. Maybe when presented with confidential data gathered by eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, he would be less keen to drop all the measures taken by Bush and criticized by the opposition. Maybe his belief that “the United States needs to lead the world in ending this genocide” in Darfur would put him at odds with reality or with some members of the international community. In each of these cases, Obama would suffer the consequences of high expectations. He would be trapped between the desire to preserve his high standing in the world and the need to act in ways that would erode that standing. Of course—his advisers would argue—it is better to have this political goodwill in the first place. But even if that were true, political goodwill should always be handled delicately. Starting modestly and building up is also an option, sometimes a better one if you aim to keep expectations realistic. (This, I think, is the way John McCain would play his cards internationally.)

It’s undeniable that the “get tough on Pakistan” rhetoric is good for Obama’s short-term political interests. The world simply isn’t listening as closely to the candidates’ statements as are Americans, so it’s easier for them to bask in the unadulterated glow of St. Barack. But if Obama wins in November, he may soon come to realize that hell hath no fury like a Berliner scorned.

I just had a Jager shot, and hope to get drunk very soon. So this is my last post of the night. Here’s what I’ll do in the morning: find out who won the most delegates in the March 4 states, and check someone else’s math (yes, I’m not going to get it wrong myself) to see who subsequently has the numbers to win. And then take a deep breath. And say what I think. Right now, emotion clouds the mind. Oh, and Jager.

It’s uncomfortable to read him at times like these, especially given that most of the time I quite enjoy his blog. Warts and all, I guess, is the name of the game.