As usual, Reihan is on to something:

The Palin pick is the politicial equivalent of bear-baiting. Yes, ridiculing Palin as a hick and a rube, and devaluing her experience, comes naturally to the kind of people who take Barack Obama seriously as a presidential candidate. Philip Gourevitch discussed the parallels between Palin and Obama — but of course Palin is in many respects the cultural and stylistic opposite of Obama. Obama speaks to the highest aspirations and self-conceptions of a certain kind of urban liberal. Palin, in contrast, speaks to the highest aspirations and self-conceptions of a different set of Americans. That’s why insults and ridicule are counter-productive for Democrats. Why? Because the kind of Americans inclined to like Obama, without the aid of Joe Biden or free factory-reviving supercars, will never vote for a Republican. The kind of Americans inclined to like Palin might vote for a Democrat, particularly this year.

There are at least four pitfalls for Democrats in Palin’s biography: 1) The “experience” charge. As Sonny has explained better than I could, it invites Obamaphiles to give in to their temptation to mock flyover country (not a good strategy to win those Western battleground states, is it?). But this charge is at least covered over by a patina of respectability. The other charges, not so much: 2) The “pandering” charge. To criticize McCain for picking this woman, as if just any woman would do to bring in woman voters, may only serve to remind Hillary’s disgruntled supporters that Obama himself could have chosen a (supposedly) eminently qualified woman but chose not to. 3) The “her family’s too young and too big for her to be VP” charge. Probably not the kind of argument that should be made by a party that has had trouble winning over married voters with children. 4) The “Alaskan secessionist” charge. Admittedly it’s a bizarre one, but not so strange that the Times didn’t see it as fit to print. And as for candidates with associations to fringe organizations, well, at least the Alaskan Independence Party hasn’t set off any bombs.

But that said, I have to part company with the conservatives who are thrilled with the Palin pick and count myself with Peggy Noonan, raw and uncut. The fact that Obama is also inexperienced doesn’t make McCain’s choice of an inexperienced running-mate any less troubling.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that #3 above isn’t a charge that will endear Obama to feminists, either.

President Bush arrives in Croatia on Friday. Croatia’s leadership’s all a-titter, having finally received some of the positive international attention it so cravenly craves. But keep your pants on, lads:

An EU diplomat with extensive knowledge of the region, said the visit had more important undertones. “The NATO invite and the Bush visit are coordinated. This is not because the West really cares so much about Croatia, but because they are protectively creating a safety cordon around Serbia and potential instability there,” the diplomat said.

That’s not the whole picture either. Admission into NATO makes a country’s borders virtually inviolable which ought to deter Serbia from lashing out at its neighbors. But almost more importantly, it discourages any of the new member countries from unilateral military adventurism outside their own borders—like Croatia intervening on behalf of its ethnic minority in Bosnia if that country begins to fray badly. I fully expect President Bush to sternly warn the PM and President against that sort of thing.

Matt Yglesias has written a good summary of the situation in Basra. Normally this would be an excellent lead-in for me to launch into a longish post about the talk I was at this afternoon at the Brookings Institution, wherein Matt’s general analysis was repeated almost verbatim by a Marine captain, which visibly flustered Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, who were also on the panel.

Alas, I’ve only slept two hours last night, so a longer post is out of the question. I’ll try to do it tomorrow.

Brad DeLong:

I think the answer is clear: if possible, the current superpower should embrace its possible successor. It should bind it as closely as possible with ties of blood, commerce, and culture—so that should the emerging superpower come to its full strength, it will to as great an extent possible share the world view of and regard itself as part of the same civilization as its predecessor: Romans to their Greeks.

In 1877, the rising superpower to the west across the ocean was the United States. The preeminent superpower was Britain. Today the preeminent superpower is the United States. The rising superpower to the west across the ocean is China.

I’d be curious to know what Brad thinks we can actually do to bind China to us. Putting aside the ethno-cultural dimension for the time being, the main problem as I see it is one of rootedness and tradition. In both of Brad’s examples, he’s describing an older society making way for a younger, more malleable one on which the elder can impress itself. The Chinese, however, are not upstarts—they’ve been around for literally thousands of years. There’s precious little we can do to mould China one way or another. China will be ineffably Chinese and will fashion a dominant place in this world according to its own precepts and self-understanding.

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.

The AP reports that dozens of UN and NATO soldiers were wounded in Mitrovica as they attempted to dislodge several Serb protesters who had barricaded themselves in a courthouse.

At this point, the outlines of a Kosovo endgame become discernible:

The U.N. said later it was pulling out of the Serb-dominated northern half of Mitrovica because of the shooting. NATO helicopters hovered above the city and NATO troops remained, but the U.N. withdrawal could fuel a widespread Kosovo Serb desire to split from largely ethnic Albanian Kosovo and rejoin Serbia. The Serb minority dominates about 15 percent of the territory in northern Kosovo, including about a third of Mitrovica, Kosovo’s second-largest city.”

Indeed, partition has been on the table for quite some time. The most strident nationalists in Serbia don’t realistically hope to have all of Kosovo re-annexed. The genie is out of the bottle in almost every way imaginable, and if 2 million Albanians refused to be governed from 1989 through a few weeks ago, there’s precious little to suggest that they could ever be persuaded to join Serbia now.

The strategy is transparent. Just like in Bosnia, war has created relatively homogeneous communities, and Serbia, after bitterly complaining at having its heartland torn from its embrace,¹ will graciously concede to annexing only those territories which have Serbian majorities in them. This would be a monstrously cynical play because, again, just like in Bosnia, the majorities in questions only arose as a result of a war instigated by the Serbs themselves.

Why would Serbia agree to merely getting the north of Kosovo? Besides expediency, there is the small matter of natural resources—it just so happens that a healthy number of the country’s lead and zinc mines are located in the regions which now conveniently have Serbian majorities. And though the Albanians will protest bitterly that the viability of their state is being compromised, I can’t see the Europeans (or the Americans) having much appetite for compelling the Serbian parts of Kosovo to remain under Albanian control.

I hope I’m wrong.

I’ve long planned to read Petraeus’ praised counterinsurgency manual, but I just haven’t done it yet. With that said, I openly wonder what COIN orthodoxy says about suicide bombers.

Presumably, by ingratiating yourself with the local populace and ultimately gaining their trust, you will prevent insurgent groups from getting succour from an embittered population which resents your presence in the country. Using Mao’s famous metaphor for insurgent armies being fish swimming through the water of the general populace, you drain the water so the fish can’t swim.

Sounds good when applied to mobile guerilla bands who value their own lives and who occasionally fight real battles, however asymmetrical. But it sounds much less applicable to suicide bombers who have decided to forfeit their lives in advance and who don’t need a vast network of support to carry out their outrage.

I suppose one could hope that a sympathetic population will be able to rat out bomb-making nests and could point out suspicious activity to the authorities before an attack takes place. But the sheer susceptibility of even the most advanced, coherent societies such as ours to the irrational attacks of determined psychopaths suggests to me that past a certain population density, the full cooperation of a sympathetic population becomes much less effective than we’d like to believe.

I mean, what can we possibly do about acts such as these?

I’ve written about this before: Russia’s game over Kosovo has less to do with warm feelings viz. the Serbs and has more to do with securing energy monopolies over Eastern Europe, a region Russia clearly sees as its legitimate sphere of influence.

This article by Charlie Szrom in The Weekly Standard lays out the argument as clearly and as cogently as you can hope to read anywhere.

The West should recognize Moscow’s less-than-noble motives in opposing a free Kosovo, and it must blunt the power of the Nord and South Stream pipeline projects. Europe can either accept a grim future under Russia’s thrall, or it can begin walking a difficult, if necessary, path.

Do we care about Eastern Europe falling back into Russia’s orbit? Working through the implications of how you answer that question will yield a coherent policy for the United States. Any other approach will yield confused half-measures and disastrous prevarication.

McCain is courting Huckabee. He threw his delegates to him in West Virginia to spitefully thwart Romney, the candidate of the Republican establishment. During his victory speech, McCain warmly congratulated Huckabee on his unexpected successes and cooly mentioned Romney only as an afterthought. Could it be that the establishment Right’s hatred for McCain is only matched by McCain’s hatred of movement conservatives?

In a rambling essay, unfocused even by her standards, Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review hints at this dynamic:

If you want the base to work for you, Senator, it’s most important that you be honest. Don’t try to remake the conservative movement; don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. When you speak to conservatives, play it straight: You don’t listen to Rush. You’re not comfortable at the Family Research Council. Don’t pretend otherwise.

I don’t think McCain’s pretending about anything—he’s very much trying to remake the conservative movement. He’d like to do an end-run around these self-appointed gatekeepers and use his “maverick” status to connect with Republican-leaning independents in a big way.¹ Pairing with Huckabee would get him the support of the religious working class without having to kow-tow to the likes of James Dobson. It’s a win all around!

Even if this is his strategy, it may not play out like that. The pressure will be enormous on movement organs² to align behind McCain. They may ask for some symbolic gestures and commitments from him in exchange for their backing. The pressure will then build on McCain to mend fences in order to increase his chances against a very strong Democratic candidate.

But we’ll see. McCain is old and prickly and stubborn—and liable to be spiteful just because he can. He might think that realigning the Republican Party to his outlook is more important than getting elected. Or he might just enjoy marginalizing all the enemies he’s made during his years in office.

Who said that the Democratic race was the exciting one to watch?