James Poulos alerted me last week to a provocative piece his fine new outfit Culture11 published, and I’ve been meaning to write about it ever since. Indeed, I still intend to.

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.

After boisterously abusing UK foreign secretary David Miliband using colorful undiplomatic language the other day, it looks like Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov may be getting kicked up to vice premier. Medvedev apparently wants Lavrov out as the face of Russian diplomacy as he is the “living symbol of Russian-Western confrontation”, and steps are being taken to find his replacement:

Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily said that the informal working group on ‘moderate detente’ in relations with the West is headed by Deputy Chief of the Kremlin Staff Alexei Gromov. He has been entrusted with damage control after the Caucasus war, which include steps easing access for foreign investors, releasing persons, considered by the West as “political detainees”. Medvedev set up this group after the reaction of the US and EU on Moscow’s unilateral recognition of Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the daily claims. Several candidates are under consideration to fill Lavrov’s job, including Gromov himself, who is a career diplomat deputed to the Kremlin in 1996, according to the daily.

Detente! What a short Cold War it’s been.

It’s refreshing to see that intelligent people dealing with facts on the ground in Iraq—like David Petraeus—dismiss “victory” talk as too simplistic. It’s a shame that the Republican party, traditionally the party of cold-blooded realpolitik, has hitched its wagon to the neoconservative project, because it allows the other side to plausibly claim that mere sanity in foreign policy is somehow “progressive”.

ABC releases some snippets of the Palin interview:

GIBSON: Would you favor putting Georgia and Ukraine in NATO? PALIN: Ukraine, definitely, yes. Yes, and Georgia. GIBSON: Because Putin has said he would not tolerate NATO incursion into the Caucasus. PALIN: Well, you know, the Rose Revolution, the Orange Revolution, those actions have showed us that those democratic nations, I believe, deserve to be in NATO. Putin thinks otherwise. Obviously, he thinks otherwise, but… GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn’t we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia? PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help. But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I think that we need to — especially with new leadership coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO members. We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today. GIBSON: And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade. PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries. And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to. It doesn’t have to lead to war and it doesn’t have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries. His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that’s a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.

Where to begin…?

Sarah Palin is a quick study, a sharp pupil. Too bad she’s learning from some of the most dangerous people with the most pernicious ideas about foreign policy.

I know I’m a one-note kinda guy, but see Fukuyama:

If Cheney and McCain were really serious about protecting Georgia’s territorial integrity, why wait for NATO? We protect plenty of countries like Korea and Japan through bilateral arrangements, and could decide to deploy a battalion or two of American ground forces, or some squadrons of F-16s, to Georgia tomorrow.

Why not? Because if we could find the forces ready to go fight given our other global commitments, there would be no way to stop Russia from overwhelming them short of threatening nuclear war.

I don’t know if Palin’s thought through this with any amount of care, but that’s what her gambit boils down to: a nuclear standoff over Georgia and the Ukraine.

All while we’re trying to:

• contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions;
• deal with a deteriorating situation in Pakistan;
• if Kim Jong Il dies, contain the mess in North Korea;
• assure “victory” in Iraq, whatever that means.

This isn’t a criticism of Palin, of course. I’m assuming she’s just been indoctrinated. It’s a criticism of McCain’s reckless foreign policy which continues to scare the hell out of me.

[Edit: added the bullets. It was late and my writing was as clear as mud.]

A badly fractured (far right, pro-Russian) Radical Party in Serbia.

Yes, the Bush Administration approached Kosovo’s recognition reflexively and without much forethought. But in this case, their decision seems to be paying dividends.

(Why it matters: here and here.)

Ezra Klein (via Monsieur Poulos) reads an interview with McCain foreign policy guru Randy Scheunemann and rightly gets scared. I take issue with part of his great power conflict analysis, however (as does James):

One thing worth keeping in mind about great power conflicts is that they’re rarely inevitable. At times, France and England have been at war, and at times they’ve been allies. A lot of it has to do with how leaders interact with each other, and whether they aggressively court conflict or publicly seek a constructive relationship. If you court conflict, soon enough, the other country does, and both sides build up a narrative of slights and provocations — many of them quite real — that lead to war and discord. But it is a choice: You can decide whether you want a relationship defined by transgressions and stare-downs, or whether you want a relationship where the overriding narrative is of alliance and both sides work to play down points of disagreement. Scheunemann, here, is courting conflict, and as McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser, that’s a pretty good indicator for how a McCain administration would look.

Yes, the American electorate will choose one candidate over another. And some small subset of the voters may in fact base that choice on the candidate’s foreign policy views. So in that very narrow present tense sense, we do face a sort of choice between confrontationalist nationalism and consensus-building internationalism.

But in the grand historical scheme of things, I’d argue that great power conflict is indeed inevitable. One should look at Scheunemann and McCain as merely the latest incarnation of the “hard-liner” type, one that will forever be with us, and one that will sporadically come to power in our nation and in others. No number of institutional frameworks will prevent this all too human tendency from bubbling up at the most inopportune times in history.

To admit this is not to be fatalistic—this election matters and I find the McCain team’s rhetoric unsettling. I just reject the suggestion that great power conflict is a recurring simple error in judgment (one that can be implicitly corrected in the enlightened future) rather than one of the main, enduring motors of history.

This kind of strategy (via Yglesias), vague as it is, would work hand-in-glove with “dignity promotion”. And as a statement of purpose, it’s better and more hard-nosed than what Obama’s team offered. Nevertheless, passages like these give me pause:

Arrogant talk of helping rising powers become “responsible stakeholders” should be replaced with words of respect derived in part from America’s enduring position of strength. There is no obvious reason why China should be considered a strategic competitor rather than partner, and talk of inevitable conflict is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There’s an underlying assumption here that it’s American haughtiness which is leading to international instability. I couldn’t agree less. I’d say, rather, that words of respect ought to be derived from America’s recognition of the limits of its strength. There’s no obvious reason why we should assume a priori that China wants to partner with us rather than compete with us. We may want to cooperate with them because we realize that our era of dominating East Asia is at an end.

What’s required is candid assessment of our positions of strength and a retrenching of sorts. A healthy dose of “Smart Power” could help us reclaim a certain legitimacy in the world, to be sure, but we must not forget the uncompromising, bleak nature of the international system. There’s nothing to indicate that we, the human race, are past the bloody-minded scramble for supremacy that has marked every single epoch of our existence to date.

Spencer Ackerman’s done the legwork and interviewed a slew of Obama’s foreign policy advisors to get a sense of his administration’s direction and priorities. Spencer’s thrilled, I’m less so.

This is why, Obama’s advisers argue, national security depends in large part on dignity promotion. Without it, the U.S. will never be able to destroy al-Qaeda. Extremists will forever be able to demagogue conditions of misery, making continued U.S. involvement in asymmetric warfare an increasingly counterproductive exercise—because killing one terrorist creates five more in his place.

Dignity promotion sounds like something USAID or the World Bank should be doing. It’s a valid goal, one which an Obama’s administration ought to pursue by generously funding agencies tasked with achieving it. And as a means of fighting terrorist organizations, it makes far more sense than the balls-out military approach which has been so spectacularly failing these past 7 years.

But in his drive to transcend the mindset that got us into Iraq, Obama seems to be staking far too much on this new approach. We should be thinking about our relationships with China and Russia, about the extent of our commitment to Taiwan, Georgia and the Ukraine, and about energy security for us and our allies in the face of rising competitors. Dignity promotion gives short shrift to big picture geostrategic thinking by promoting nebulous notions of global welfare above those of individual state actors. We ignore the fact that China and Russia are playing a zero-sum self-aggrandizing game at our own peril.

Marko Hoare thinks McCain would be best for South-East Europe. He dismisses Hillary as a continuation of Bill Clinton’s unfocused performance on the world stage, and warns that Obama is pandering to Serbian and Greek domestic lobbies which are fairly right-wing (as such lobbies tend to be).

I’d like to examine this argument in more detail, and I’ll try to post something longer over the weekend. Briefly, though, I would argue that Hillary is America’s best hope for a smart yet assertive foreign policy; McCain scares me for a variety of reasons; and yes, Obama is the least convincing of the three. I’ll stick to writing about Obama for this post, and hopefully get around to expanding on my thoughts later.

I find Obama most troubling of all, because though I believe that he is the most capable and intelligent candidate, I get the sense that his gifts for oration and inspiration can get the better of him sometimes.

In his letter to the Serbian Unity Congress, he states:

I support and shall help in every possible way development of the dialog between all sides in Kosovo because I believe that peace and stability can be reached only by solutions acceptable for all sides.

Unlike Dr. Hoare, I don’t see this as a pander. I think he has a genuine concern that America’s recent moves in the region are sowing the seeds of a broader future conflict. He is calling for Kosovars and Serbs to get together and work out their differences in good faith. It’s a nice sentiment, and a nice template for solving conflicts in theory. In the practice of international relations, however, we’re frequently not dealing with good faith interlocutors, and a harder-nosed realpolitik is oftentimes called for.

I worry that Obama’s proven ability to motivate people in the domestic setting is making him believe that he can replicate this on the world stage. I worry Obama believes that the Balkan tragedy of the 1990’s came about because the Great Powers didn’t insist on negotiations hard enough. I worry that he thinks that the Russians, who are saying very similar things to what he’s saying above on Kosovo, are being honest and sensible, rather than duplicitous and deceitful. I worry that Obama, listening as he does to the Samantha Powers of the world, has an idealistic and naive idea of how the United States ought to behave.

When I read Samantha Power’s little interview with The Scotsman, I literally assumed she must’ve been drunk, cursing and speaking in run-on sentences as she was:

“We f***** up in Ohio,” she admitted. “In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win.

“She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything,” Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: “Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

“You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh’. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

Ergh? For someone slated to be high up in the Obama administration, she comes off awfully unstateswomanlike. And for a former Pulitzer prize winning journalist, she doesn’t seem to have internalized enough paranoia about speaking to reporters.

The Clinton camp is predictably enough asking for her resignation. Though from all indications losing Power would be a huge blow for the Obama team, I for one would feel much better if Power was replaced. She’s the biggest reason I don’t feel comfortable with Obama’s foreign policy direction to date.

UPDATE: And there she goes!