Mutter incoherently, and carry a big stick

Interesting essay, although I’ve read many of these points elsewhere before:

The first misperception is that oil, and Middle Eastern oil in particular, is a strategic resource of vital importance; therefore the United States must ensure that the flow of oil does not fall under the control of hostile powers. In reality, the economic and strategic significance of oil is greatly overrated. The United States long has derived most of its oil either from domestic sources or from the Americas. A cutoff of Middle Eastern oil might create some inconvenience but far less than it did in 1973. Indeed, the loss of around 40 percent of U.S. refining capacity in the wake of Hurricane Katrina caused only minor disruption.

Oil exists in a global market, so a serious blow to the flow of oil from the Middle East could cause oil prices to rise worldwide. You have a better point about the refineries, but they only handle a fraction of the world’s oil supply.

Moreover, some of our allies (and trading partners) are far more dependent on oil imports from the Middle East than us, and so instability there affect them much harder. Japan in particular imports a significant percentage of its oil supplies from the Middle East.

The role anti-communism played framing all of these interests shouldn’t be forgotten, whether it was explaining US oil interests initially (for Cold War allies in Europe and Japan) justifying the importance of the Israeli alliance, (especially post 67), or laying the foundations for the relationship with Iran (The Eisenhower administration was as ‘concerned’ about Mossadegh in a Cold War context as they were explicitly about oil.) I think people tend to overstate the extent to which US policy in the region as a whole is driven primarily by oil. Imo, just as with Iraq 2003, ideational factors are a more convincing explanation for US policy in the Middle East than material interests.

On Brett’s point, from the little I’ve read and understood on the topic, it seems to be an increasingly debatable position to argue that a ” serious blow to the flow of oil from the Middle East could cause oil prices to rise worldwide” – or, at least, that any price rises would be anything more than an inconvenience. (I might be overstating that)
I’m reading the book Carbon Democracy at the minute and coming to the realisation I know naught about oil economics, so I’d certainly appreciate any future posts on the topic.

w/r/t Oil & Policy

Yes, mind-reading (ideational factors) is always fun — though it will never have significant explanatory power… But we have left something on the table before even beginning to think properly about this:

Policy planners must take into consideration the ability of “rival” nations to access and/or control flows of this resource — and therefore how US actions might shape potentials for action by those rivals.

Looking only at the US’ own domestic oil requirements omits something rather significant from any analysis of oil’s “foreign policy” implications.

Well you have to look at two distinct phases of US military posture in the Middle East, or specifically the Persian Gulf, before and after the first Gulf War. I think US policy post 91 is a lot less defensible, which is becoming more or less the conventional wisdom in US policy making circles, it appears to me. You also have to look at the specifics, and not conflate US policy in North Africa and the Levant with that in the Gulf. The alliances in the Gulf are more easily defended on the grounds of national interests than those elsewhere in the region.

Even when arguing in favour of a US presence in the Gulf, to what extent has an explicit US military presence, (and interventions), been more important in maintaining stability than diplomatic support, security agreements and arms sales, especially to Saudi Arabia? It’s now pretty clear that stationing soldiers in the Middle East, becoming heavily involved in the regions politics and taking unpopular positions on certain issues (Palestine, the war in Lebanon, The Iran/Iraq war, Iraqi sanctions) has done more harm than good.
That’s before you get to the economics, which might not be as clear cut as you’re implying.

On China, their position in the region is now largely independent of the US, for better or worse.

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ASIA%20Program_China%20and%20the%20PG.pdf

Trying to gauge the potential economic impact of conflict in the Middle East needs to take into account not only how that conflict might affect global supplies, as per Tim @#7, but also the fact that oil is traded as a commodity in financial markets. The price of gasoline is affected by the price of oil commodity markets, which in turn is affected by perceptions of risk to the supply of oil. While it is true that this influence is felt more in short term than in long term prices, a major spike in prices due to a conflict in the Middle East could have pretty significant global economic consequences.

Tim W@7: Your number 2: Cutting supply off completely (as opposed to selling only to certain customers), would also cut off the primary GDP source of many of the states in question, making it essentially an economic suicide attack. Possible, sure, but it would literally hurt them more than it would hurt us.

I would concur with Tim @7. Any significant disruption in the volume of oil for sale worldwide would lead to an economically damaging price spike. Most likely all Persian Gulf oil would not be cut off, there are other physical export channels, pipelines that can take some of the volume without going through the straight of Hormuz etc. And I’d recon, it would still be possible to convoy some tankers through as well. But any shortfall of supply versus demand will create a bidding war for the available supplies. I’d recon that even a 5 million barrel per day shortfall would have serious consequences.

In relation to the upending of U.S. foreign policy by the Arab Spring, it might be helpful to acknowledge the extent to which the Arab Spring is a consequence of the effects of neoliberal economic policy, in the context of peak everything, on median per capita income and food security in the despotic Middle East.

So, they don’t want the flow of oil to fall under the control of hostile powers.
Why?
Presumably because ‘hostile powers’ would be able to blackmail them.

Instead, they want the flow of oil to fall under their control.
Why?
Well, by the same logic, in order to be able to blackmail hostile powers.

Perhaps it would’ve been in everyone’s interests to find a way (shouldn’t be too difficult) to make sure that oil can’t be used as a tool of blackmail.

A couple of questions in relation to oil:

(1) How important were the oil shocks in causing the recessions of the 70s and what sort of disruption would be needed to cause a serious economic crisis today?
(2) How exactly could a major disruption in oil supplies from the Middle East occur? (Accepting that oil producing countries are incentivised to keep prices reasonable due to a domestic reliance on oil revenues and to discourage investment in alternative energy) Even during the Iran/Iraq war, for example, Iranian production increased after a drop in response to the 79 revolution and global oil prices remained stable, afaik?

Stephen, fair enough on the first point, although in the narrow logical sense only: controlling the flow of oil certainly makes it easier to sanction Iran, for example.

On the second point, what about global trade agreements, international monitoring, WTO, WIPO, all that stuff?

The Benghazi story changes by the minute. CIA has changed its story at least three times: the confluence of the Muhammad Film and 9/11 provided cover for this attack.

This much seems clear enough: the people of Benghazi turned on the militias they believed responsible for Chris Stevens’ murder. In so doing, they took more casualties than the four dead Americans.

Expecting a coherent foreign policy at this stage is both facile and simplistic. The ruins of the Ottoman Empire were sawn into their current Procrustean borders, not by the Americans but by the French and British, who made sure the Kurdish people never got a nation. See also the creation of India and Pakistan and Afghanistan: the Durand Line made sure the Pashto never got a nation, either. On and on it goes: democracy can only arise in a nation where people put their nationality above their tribal affiliations.

In short, our current definitions are a dog’s dinner. As with all other such procrustean ex-colonial regimes, Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation being the sovereign case in point, only Strong Men could subdue the internecine tribal conflicts.

When the USA imprudently decided to invade Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein, Saddam made a curious prophecy: the invaders would learn why he had done these things and repeat them entirely. This prophecy came true, to the point where Saddam’s gruesome prison Abu Ghraib was used to torture captives, as Saddam himself had done.

How could the USA have a coherent foreign policy? With whom should we transact business? After Gulf War Part 1 of 2, having restored the autocratic Emir Sabah to the throne of Kuwait, the USA leaned on him a bit, asking him to have some democratic elections. And to his credit, he did have elections for his advisory council. When the ballots were counted, Islamic hard liners had won the day and Kuwait is even more backward and repressive than before.

America must deal with its own hard liners, who insist on blindly supporting the State of Israel, despite its manifestly undemocratic treatment of its Arabs.

Though we wish it were not so, we cannot export democracy. It must emerge from within a given society, replacing bullets with ballots. Revolutions seldom end well unless a coterie of Wise Men can write a proper constitution. It was a narrow scrape with the USA itself: the Constitution of 1789 swept the issue of slavery under the rug. The issue didn’t stay there: it would emerge in the form of a horrible Civil War.

America’s foreign policy seems incoherent because the national borders of these Procrustean regimes are incoherent. The most dangerous Outdated Assumption is the stupidity of believing these nations will be For Us or Against Us. The people of Libya and Syria and Iraq are now lapsing into confessional and tribal warfare, dragging Lebanon and Turkey into the cauldron with them. It will take at least three decades to sort it all out.

America must endure this madness, helping where we can, avoiding being dragged into the cauldron ourselves. Four million refugees have yet to return to their homes in Iraq: Iraq has become Ireland in the 1970s writ large. The USA has turned away from Iraq: now it lapses into civil war again. Don’t blame America for Iraq’s civil war: as with the death of Tito, no sooner was the last shovelful of soil thrown on his grave than Yugoslavia (yet another Procrustean regime) descended into civil war. Europe stood about with one thumb in its mouth and the other stuffed up its fundament, doing nothing else all the while.

We could help with refugee relief. There’s the one constructive thing America could do. The Arab Spring is only the overture. Worse is coming and it will get far worse before it gets any better.

Thanks for the response and link Nahim, that clears up a lot

Stephen, on the first point: I understand what you had in mind, but I was pointing out that controlling the flow of oil (a significant part of it) will still allow you to pressure hostile oil-producing states. You could, for example, damage Russian state budget by increasing OPEC production.

Of course I wasn’t suggesting that WIPO should regulate the oil market, it’s just an example of a global international trade agreement.

But, but … Wemust control the Near East. It is the vital route to Britain’s Indian Empire and we allowed Stalin to take over Eastern Europe at Yalta in exchange for securing it. How can we give it up, now, sixty-five years later? And besides it has oil.

I suppose the point that I am reaching for, but not grasping at 32 relates to comments I made earlier, in the comment thread on Corey Robin’s Forced to Choose: Capitalism as Existentialism post. That is, scarcity implies not just choice, but, also, conflict and coercion.

U.S. foreign policy, historically, been ceded to the attention of interested parties, frequently of a vicious and greedy sort, by a naive idealism, which doesn’t take responsibility for choosing the aims, purposes and scope of coercion. The OP, in questioning whether the U.S. even needs a Mideast policy, seems as much committed to extending this idealistic negligence as correcting it.

@Bruce Wilder

My point is that coercion is not necessary to keep the oil flowing, that coercion is, in fact, counter-productive to that end, even if keeping the oil flowng were the be-all and end-all that people who imagine themselves to be pragmatists imagine it to be. In fact, I think the more realistic view of the matter is that these people have to posit some sort of tragic, oil-driven, necessity to the US behaving badly, because they have to believe that US policy has to make some sort of sense. You end up with even people who oppose US policy as immoral, accepting the idea that at least it makes pragmatic sense.

I really don’t see the main problem here as one of evil intentions, that the US does terrible things in the Middle East because it pursues its own interests ruthlessly and without concern for harm to others. Oh, the ruthlesness and the harm are real enough, but the truly frightful aspect is that it is all done were there is no need for ruthlessness or harm. Our policy is what it is because it would be too much trouble to keep it squared with reality, so inertia carries it on a course ever further away from any rational purpose it might once have served. We indulge the luxury of even war for no purpose beyond helping win the next midterm elections. And neither party dares to halt the course, or even deflect it slightly away from a path dictated by foolish and unnecessary fears, out of fear that another “terrorist” attack after any sort of pulling away from the Global War on Terror would be politically disastrous.

Are there really “domestic pressure groups” strongly lobbying for the U.S. to put military bases in Qatar instead of somewhere like Bahrain?

JQ@31
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that keeping a flow of cheap oil to China (and Japan, India, Australia, etc) is or has ever been a deliberate goal of US policy. Rather, that US policy in the Middle East has had different goals – some conflicting with others – but a consequence of reversing that policy could well be to mess up the economies of China, etc, probably with undesirable results, even if the US economy was less damaged.

How about a comparative advantage analysis? The US sole comparative advantage in the current world is its military power, but this comparative advantage is huge. All things being equal, we should expect the US/the US ruling elites to be much more prone to solutions involving military power, either in the form of outright warfare (Iraq, menaces agains Iran) or in the form of military aid (Egypt) and cooperation (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain). Because democracies tend to be more peaceful, more rational in their investments and decision process and to care less about military prestige (not to mention that they usually don’t need an army to discipline their own people), the US tends to back autocratic regimes. Note also the kind of veneration part of the American establishment seems to have for military power at a time when (as you often point out) it seems absolutely clear that any military intervention is bound to be a negative sum game.

This is not at all incoherent once granted the belief that the US is and should remain exceptional among the current powers. As for why the US elite regards that belief as sacrosanct, even though it seems almost psychotic by now, I would venture the guess that it is a useful mask to the hard truth that by several reasonable measure, the average American is now having it harder than average people from many comparable countries.

So I would amend your post title slightly in “When all that distinguishes you is a big stick, you might as well wave it around” or perhaps “You don’t have health care and you’ll finish your studies with a lifetime of debt, but at least you have a military basis in Barhain”.

There are no tracks in the ocean. Oil tankers have rudders. The fallacy of dedicated pie slices.

If we look at the US in the past, before WWII, we see a nation that disbanded its military, and intelligence services, down to a corporal’s guard in between wars, and yet suffered no consequences of that lack of a big stick, our trade did not stop flowing.

No, not really. The US got into WWII, if you’ll cast your mind back, because the Japanese navy attacked Pearl Harbor, which was (pardon me for shouting) AN ENORMOUS US NAVAL BASE FULL OF HUGE GREAT BATTLESHIPS AND CRUISERS AND DESTROYERS. The US was not a demilitarised country at any point between 1918 and 1941. It had one of the largest and most powerful navies in the world. If it had indeed “disbanded its military down to a corporal’s guard” then there wouldn’t have been anything in Pearl Harbor worth sinking, would there?

48: yes, and all the ships in Pearl Harbor were launched long before that happened. The US had a big navy in 1920 and it had a big navy in 1930 and it had a big navy in 1940. The idea that the US didn’t have world-class naval power at any point between the wars, as Glen suggests, is just ludicrous.

Bruce Wilder seems determined to locate the axis of evil in human affairs, or in political affairs at least, and it seems to me that he’s done a pretty good job of it. To take a fairly simple example which seems to confirm his observations, Bismarck by most historical accounts applied a combination of astute insight into the politics of his era, and the limited state power at his disposal, to reconcile a number of conflicting interests which at the time might have seemed irreconcilable to a lesser political thinker. By doing so successfully, he not only managed to weld the German comic-opera principalities into a modern nation state, but managed as well to keep Prussian Junkers who were his patrons in power long past their apparent sell-by date.

I very much doubt, however, that had Bismarck been in office, and at the height of his powers twenty five years later than he was, he would have been able to prevent, deflect, win, or even survive the World War which was at least partly the legacy of what were at the time — and are still today — considered his greatest accomplishments. In other words, even a brilliant politician can only work with the insights and resources at his disposal at the time, and no matter how careful such clever fellows are about what they wish for, events can and will outrun their best efforts. (And God help us, of course, if a shortage of smart people forces us to hand the tiller over to stupid people. The U.S. House of Representatives, anyone?)

Prudence in political affairs, it seems to me, particularly in so-called foreign policy, requires not only foresight and intelligence — and power, of course — but also the widest possible consultation with others, most especially with those who see politics as a regrettable necessity rather than a self-aggrandizing game, great or otherwise. We need to take democracy more seriously, ponderous and unpredictable as it is. We might not be able to significantly alter the evolution of human technologies and the societies which have come to depend upon them by doing so, but we just might reduce the horrific body count which has always been the side-effect of such evolution in the past. It certainly seems worth trying.

Barry is correct, of course. IIRC in 1939 it was the 19th largest army in the world, just behind Portugal.
But it’s the navy that mattered: that’s what gave the US the ability to maintain colonies like Hawaii and the Philippines and so on, thousands of miles from the mainland.
The oil issue is a red herring, of course; the US was an oil exporter in 1940, not an importer (hence the Pacific war in the first place).

@40 “Military bases tend to be a kind of sinecure for various officials. So there’s always pressure to keep old ones and build new ones within military bureaucracy.”

These officials aren’t really an effective domestic interest group, though.

Domestic interest groups may lobby for more U.S. aid/military support/diplomacy in the Middle East, but the specifics of where and how much is up to the government agencies involved.

And most of that just seems to be kneejerk reactions to whatever is happening there on a given day.

Interesting discussion. Apropos of nothing in particular, @Bruce/14: “enlightened self-interest”. Now, there’s a lovely term which at first blush appears to mean something, but the closer you look, the fuzzier it gets. At microscopic resolution it’s merely a sort of undifferentiated beige radiation. Seriously, that term would go up near the top of my list of things that “everybody understands”, but which many of us would find ourselves disagreeing about the details of. Attempting to make sense of it, we end up in a sort of ‘Clouseau’ zen-like state, where we understand everything, yet we understand nothing. For those who are interested, I’m way ahead of you.
As for the ME, there’s nothing wrong there that millions of years and oceans of beer couldn’t solve. Anything short of that is unlikely to put much of a dent in the problem. Humans just love to hate each other too much.

AJAY,

Oh, wait, my allcaps button must have got stuck. Seems that’s going around, so I’m sure you’ll understand.

At any rate, sure, we did not, before WWII, in fact, tend to reduce our interwar naval forces to nearly the same extent as we did with our land forces. The difference is embedded in the Constitution itself, which does not allow Congress to authorize land forces for longer than two years at a time, but which puts no such restriction on naval forces. Until the war of 1812, the two-year limit was taken seriously enough that every two years, we went through the motions of mustering every single soldier out of the ranks, only to re-enlist them later in the same day under a different regimental name. That’s why the Army’s regiments can trace no real, steady lineage to before 1812.

But we certainly did not, even by the years between WWI and WWII, when we were already sliding toward default imperialism, think as we do today, that we simply must have a navy powerful enough to defeat the combined navies of the rest of the world improbably all allied against us. Our navy at the time was small enough that it largely could all fit into Pearl Harbor. Good luck trying that today.

And yes, a goodly bit of the US Navy though it was, there really wasn’t much in Pearl Harbor worth sinking that day, certainly not the capital ships, or perhaps the CAPITALIZED SHIPS on your list, if you prefer. The Japanese wanted the carriers, but got unlucky. The oilers were worthwhile targets, but when the Japanese saw that there were no US carriers in the bag, the correct, though quite nervy, thing to have done would have been to leave the battleships unharmed. The USN would have been almost compelled to follow Plan Orange and send a relief fleet built around those battleships, led a by a battleship admiral, to the relief of the Phillipines. Not a ship of that expedition would have returned, including the transports loaded with two army divisions. It might have won the war for them.

Having a large interwar military establishment is bad military policy, quite aside from the expense, and quite aside from the temptation to imperialism it creates. A permanent force creates deadly institutional inertia. By sinking all those battleships, the Japanese forced us to rely on carriers, and the carrier count kept us from rashly trying to relieve the Phillipines. They saved us from ourselves. My idea is that we shouldn’t rely on enemies to help us out like that, we should free ourselves of institutional inertia by keeping interwar forces down to a test-bed and a mobilization base. Compared to what we maintain today, that would look like a corporal’s guard, so fregive for using that provocative description. If this comments engine permitted, I would put “corporal’s guard” in about 6 point font, but I’m sure you get the message.

I was responding to the posts immediately before mine, not to JQ. I have no quarrel with the gist of this thread. Excessive spending on military is bad economic policy for many reasons.

GT @ 40, that is, responding to Harold @ 48

The post isn’t specifically about US military policy though, but why the US has framed its interests in the region as it has, how it’s protected them and the costs and benefits of this, both for the US and the countries in the Middle East. Personally, I think a softer hand would have been more beneficial and encouraged greater regional security co-operation and lessened the need for US meddling. (US policy though has been purposely divisive, whether towards pan Arabism or more recently towards Iran in the Gulf) So why has US policy in the Middle East been so bad, consistently, even in comparison to other regions? Why indeed?!

This is at JQ? If me then I haven’t really advocated this to the degree you suggest

Would the test-bed idea require enormous stockpiling of raw materials?

In the meantime, however, one wonders whether or not the shrunken manufacturing capacity of the U.S. would be quite up to the task of equipping a land army the size of the one the U.S. fielded in 1942-45 in anything like that length of time. Which is why, I suppose, that the folks who fancy themselves strategic planners in the U.S. these days want to hang on to as many ballistic missile submarines and aircraft carrier attack groups as they can.

Is fielding a huge army even the right response to military threats the USA may face? If the USA is up against another large uniformed trained force with guided munitions, I presume they’ll quickly cut each other to ribbons. Almost like nuclear warfare without radiation poisoning: a short intense spasm of violence (because most of the weapons now find their targets) instead of a prolonged WW II scenario. If it’s trying to occupy a nation without modern weapons and training, the USA will have a week of glory wiping out large weapons and uniformed soldiers and then endure 20 years of sniper attacks and improvised bombs.

Interesting post by Phil Arena on Obama/Romney FP, Gore invading Iraq so and and so forth

http://www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva/2012/10/the-difference-parties-dont-make.html

Matt @ 71

Yes, that’s pretty much the absurdity of U.S. military orthodoxy/arms procurement in a nutshell. The U.S. can punish just about anyone, but control almost nothing. It pays out a literally unimaginable fortune, turns its foreign policy establishment into a pack of technocratic hyenas in uniform, and winds up at the end of the day with only two choices: Either it goes about poking every beehive with a stick, or it reduces every offending neighborhood to molten slag. Neither is value-for-money.

No more intervention to prevent Genocide?

Fortunately, also fewer deformed babies in cities such as Falluja and Basra.

@77: Every single child in Iraq and Afghanistan has PTSD. The most fundamental deformation of a child’s mind starts with concussion. Every child knows someone who died a violent death in these wars.

Sure, here in America, we’re facing a tsunami of mental illness in our returning troops. But for a brief moment, consider what war does to children.

But we certainly did not, even by the years between WWI and WWII, when we were already sliding toward default imperialism, think as we do today, that we simply must have a navy powerful enough to defeat the combined navies of the rest of the world improbably all allied against us. Our navy at the time was small enough that it largely could all fit into Pearl Harbor…. The decision-makers of the time themselves thought that battleships were white elephants rather than strategic assets, or they wouldn’t have traded away force levels in capital ships in the Washington Treaty

Washington Treaty, 5:5:3 ratio, there was an Atlantic Fleet as well you know, trying to stop wars by disarming, fewer limits on carriers, why did they keep building battleships in the 40s then?…

Glen, there isn’t an actual need for someone on CT always to be talking ignorant rubbish about naval history. It is not an Internet Tradition (and I should know, I am aware of them.)

= = = The Middle East policy views and objectives of the US ruling class (however defined) are just as incoherent and unachievable as those of the US polity as a whole. = = =

Is it disembodied interests all the way down, or do individual actors/small teams ever come into play? I agree that US Middle Eastern policy from 2001 forward seems foolish and ill-advised, but I’m going to have to defer on “incoherent” until we understand a bit more about the role and goals of a Mr. Richard Cheney. That coterie set out to accomplish something and it is not clear to me how displeased they are with the overall results.

Cranky

there isn’t an actual need for someone on CT always to be talking ignorant rubbish about naval history

What we do need is some ignorant rubbish about cavalry and bayonettes.

Not sure how there’s bipartisan incoherence when no one knows what Romney would really do….

Not to mention Haiti and Central America.

Andrew F. @86: “US policy in the ME quite clearly takes into account all the factors . . . mentioned . . .”

Andrew’s comment well illustrates the schizophrenia of U.S. foreign policy, which is particularly acute in the Mideast. On top — meaning occasionally audible on op-ed pages in the U.S. or in discussions among supremely ignorant pundits on cable news or in the self-serving, self-congratulatory apologetics of U.S. politicians — there’s the U.S. foreign policy of “urging” this or that high-minded course on foreign governments, recommending that this dictator or that “go”, ultimatums, defense of human rights, endorsement of democracy (in principle, in response to riots), etc. In other words, the U.S. foreign policy that Andrew F takes cognizance of, and thinks is stymied by the complexity of the world, and the limits of U.S. power, given available levers of power to “control” events, precisely.

This is the frothy top-level foreign policy, the foreign policy, where American domestic public opinion matters enough that public relations principles must be followed in shaping its rhetorical rationalizations.

Below this are the bathyspheres of operational foreign policy, where bureaucracy meets bureaucracy, money changes hands, personal and “tribal” alliances are formed, spies and fraudsters ply their trades, and business interests make use of U.S. power. Occasionally, things go wrong in this “deep” foreign policy, and, in a blow-out, the ugly reality pops to the surface, in, say, the overthrow of an Allende, and attracts media attention for an instant.

The deeply hidden foreign policy operations, though, are not the cause of American foreign policy schizophrenia, though. That schizophrenia is rooted in ignorance of what is in plain sight, but ignored by the ignorant-of-all-things news pundits, who serve up the pablum of “the world is flat” and the bumperstickers of “globalization”, and the foreign policy establishment, and, therefore, the general (American) public. The ignorance of the American public of what is done in their name certainly seems to contain within it a callous indifference to bloody and horrific consequences, indistinguishable from collective psychopathology; at other times, politicians seem to think a few references to the oppression of women in far-off Afganistan should be enough to gain permission for a few more billion dollars weeks of military operations. I think it is the superficiality of narrative, which near-complete ignorance of even the moderately “informed” public, permits is the main feature, which enables the freedom of the bathyspheres, to do crazy stuff, ultimately destructive to the national interest. I am not saying, ignorance of the bathyspheric operations specifically, but ignorance of general conditions and trends and of broad policy consequences, and therefore any awareness of an American national interest in the Mideast or the world, frees the bathyspheres from having to be controlled from the top, from having to conform to a rational pursuit of broad, strategic conceptions of an American national interest.

To put this concretely, yes, the U.S. “pivoted” on support for Mubarak. Highly visible. Almost completely meaningless. And, no, the U.S. cannot “control” the chaos of a society sinking into mass rioting. Thanks for that brilliant foreign policy insight. The channelling of vast sums of U.S. foreign aid through the Egyptian military, with the predictable result that the Egyptian military forms the only strong institutional framework in the Egyptian political economy, operating and investing in all kinds of non-military enterprises, creating career paths for the ambitious, training people for adminstrative and political tasks, etc. — this, too, was American policy, but policy carried out in plain sight, with little or no awareness or concern for the probable long-term consequences. And, the neo-liberal economic “reforms” imposed at American urging (the Washington Consensus, not as originally formulated with its concern for strong institutions, rule of law, etc., but as corrupted into a Chicago school prescription for free-market looting and authoritarianism), which pushed the Egyptian working class to the edge of famine — what should we make of that?

If American foreign policy top-level principles cannot direct even the first level of policy — the foreign aid funding (which is, as a consequence, is nearly all military funding to support authoritarian police/military states) and the pushing of global trade policy harmonizations, which are nearly all neo-liberal crap to facilitate corporate looting — still less can anything be done on the bathyspheric, operational level. So, the American bureaucracies of intelligence make alliances with Egyptian torturers — oh so fun!

Anyway, this is the shape of my “furious agreement” with the OP: not that the U.S. has no genuine interest in the Mideast, but that the U.S. is so institutionally incapable of pursuing a genuine and benign interest that it would be better to pursue no interest at all, by cutting off its own means of pursuing its interests. Now, if only it were possible, to do the same in domestic policy, before the plutocracy loots the country into banana republic territory.

Sometimes I wonder who is making our policy. The 19th century doctrine of Papal infallibility did not repudiate the Pope’s “right to depose secular princes”, though a year after its promulgation the Pope Pius IX, noted that the right “rested on temporal reasons” and as these no longer exist it is no longer used. But as commenter notes that “though it lies in abeyance it is still a right”, dating from, no doubt, from “happier times” (i.e., the Middle Ages), which seem to have returned with the initiation of the Cold War.
http://books.google.com/books?id=NxA4AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA242&lpg=PA242&dq=J+B+Bury+History+of+the+Papacy+in+the+nineteenth+century&source=bl&ots=dBnNQHYMxx&sig=iGSJkPl-pfUcwaSFnjc7xZJmZck&hl=en&sa=X&ei=tNGGUOqpB4KB0AGknICADg&ved=0CFwQ6AEwCTgU#v=onepage&q=right%20to%20depose%20princes&f=false

B Wilder @91

…ignorance of general conditions and trends and of broad policy consequences, and therefore [of] any awareness of an American national interest in the Mideast or the world, frees the bathyspheres from having to be controlled from the top, from having to conform to a rational pursuit of broad, strategic conceptions of an American national interest.

B Wilder assumes that a more knowledgeable, less ignorant public and f-p establishment would lead to a more “rational” pursuit of ‘the national interest’. He implies that there is an objectively discoverable,”benign”, “genuine” nat’l interest and that only widespread ignorance blocks its pursuit. This ignores the obvious point that foreign policy is a political question, hence differences of values (not always reconcilable) and of concrete material interests come into play; it’s not simply, or necessarily even mainly, a matter of lack of knowledge. To suggest otherwise is wrong.

Andrew F @86
“complexity of the factors mentioned shapes US policy in the Middle East”.

Attempt, no doubt too simple, at describing factors shaping US policy, or policies, in ME.

Main though not always sole factor driving US government policy (other important US factors not necessarily concordant) in ME and other foreign parts: to help achieve re-election of current governing party, or at least to do nothing to prevent re-election.

In ME, this reduces to two apparently incompatible goals:
a) to keep major oil-exporting states, or as many of them as possible, allied to US and happily oil-exporting. Failure here: oil exports fall into hostile hands (Russian, overtly islamist), oil shock, gas lines in US, recession in economically important states even if not directly in US.
b) to keep financing and arming Israel, whether for genuine belief (yes, even politicians sometimes have these) in Zionist project, or for domestic electoral considerations.
Problem is, large parts of population in major oil-exporting states bitterly hostile to (b), and humiliated by recurrent defeats of Muslim states consequent to (b).
Problem resolved by goal (c): to encourage and keep in power, as far as possible, governments of ME states that will ignore (b), suppress large parts of their dissenting populations, continue with goal (a).
Complicated further by goal (d), US enthusiasm for democracy [widely regarded outside US as efficient method, in some but not all circumstances, for achieving good government, which is not always absent in non-democratic states: in US, at least on paper, as a universal blessing] which often contradicts goal (c) and therefore imperils goal (b) which may contradict goal (a).

Or to put it more simply: if the US pulls out of the ME, what becomes of Israel, what are the prospects for peace there, or for the next Arab-Israeli or Iranian-Israeli war?

In the squirrel/nut category, Daniel Pipes on last night’s US Presidential debate

The European crisis got no mention, nor did India, Germany, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, or Australia. In contrast, Egypt was mentioned 11 times, Libya 12 times, Iraq 22 times, Pakistan 25 times, Syria 28 times, Afghanistan 30 times, Israel 34 times, and Iran 47 times.

Anyway, this is the shape of my “furious agreement” with the OP: not that the U.S. has no genuine interest in the Mideast, but that the U.S. is so institutionally incapable of pursuing a genuine and benign interest that it would be better to pursue no interest at all, by cutting off its own means of pursuing its interests.

This.

The objection to the navy (and the army, air force, and the rest of it) isn’t fundamentally that the means are too costly relative to the ends, but that the ends are bad.

Would the size of the US armed forces, or the expenditure, be justified by the existence a similar sized force from another nation? I have the impression that the end goal is ‘reduce US military size’ and ‘cost’ and ‘overwhelming nature’ is simply a means argument.

Question for B Wilder and JW Mason:
What is the “genuine” and “benign” natl interest of the US in the Mideast that it is “institutionally incapable” of pursuing? If your answer is an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, I’m not sure how the US “cutting off its…means of pursuing its interests” (whatever that means, exactly) would help. Exerting more leverage on Israel (however unlikely that is to occur) might help, but that’s different.

Matt @103
It also feels wildly implausible to me that you could ever have a big Great Powers brawl on the scale of WW II again without it descending into nuclear mayhem.
I have suggested repeatedly in CT threads — to little effect (although a few people have acknowledged the argument and one or two perhaps have agreed with it) — that the reason another great-power war is unlikely has much more to do w/ change in norms than anything else. This argument, which is not original with me, has gotten, as I say, little traction with the CT commentariat, which I’m beginning to think is, if anything, one piece of evidence that it may well have some merit.

“currently only one “great power””

well, this is a question of definitions obvs.

A few definitions are possible. One is Mearsheimer’s in Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p.5:

To qualify as a great power, a state must have sufficient military assets to put up a serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state in the world…. In the nuclear age great powers must have a nuclear deterrent that can survive a nuclear strike against it, as well as formidable conventional forces.

A definition that is less focused on mil. capability is in R. Jackson, The Global Covenant, p.173:

…a ‘great power’ is a state whose weight (in military power, in political prestige, in economic wealth) is of such magnitude that it is among a very select group of states whose policies and actions can affect the course of international affairs…. Power inevitably carries responsibility. Great powers…are answerable for their conduct regarding the most important international issues….

I prefer the second of these definitions, but under either one there is definitely more than one great power in the world.

LFC @ 95 and subsequently

I’ve read your several recent comments. I cannot say they make much sense to me.

Foreign policy is a political question. I have never imagined that it wasn’t.

“a change in norms”? Really?

I’m going to sound like a broken record, but: what about nuclear weapons? Giant conventional militaries are just big expensive targets in a nuclear war.

But nuclear wars don’t happen. They don’t happen against non-nuclear opponents – the US didn’t use nuclear weapons against North Korea or Iraq. The UK didn’t against Argentina. The USSR didn’t against Afghanistan.
And they don’t happen against nuclear opponents because no one wants to get their cities incinerated.
And in all those non-nuclear wars, it turns out that a large conventional military is actually rather handy.

But nuclear wars don’t happen. They don’t happen against non-nuclear opponents – the US didn’t use nuclear weapons against North Korea or Iraq. The UK didn’t against Argentina. The USSR didn’t against Afghanistan.
And they don’t happen against nuclear opponents because no one wants to get their cities incinerated.
And in all those non-nuclear wars, it turns out that a large conventional military is actually rather handy.

The bolded case seems central here. You don’t see anyone seriously threatening nuclear powers with conventional forces either, because (again) no one wants to get their cities incinerated. Nuclear powers are basically off-limits for invasion by rational actors, no matter how large the conventional forces. China doesn’t need more soldiers to counter the USA and the USA doesn’t need more soldiers to counter China. Knock the world’s nuclear powers off your list of potential conventional-war foes and the largest useful conventional military shrinks considerably.

As for a large conventional military being rather handy for non-nuclear wars, I would prefer the phrase “acts as an attractive nuisance.” North Korea, Iraq, Argentina, and Afghanistan were never in a position to take the fight to the USA, UK, or USSR. Nor could Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia threaten the USA, Hungary or Czechoslovakia threaten the USSR, or Malaya threaten the UK, if you were looking for other good examples of conventional power projection. Thank goodness the UK, USSR, and USA had the strong conventional forces to do so much good for their own citizens and foreigners as well.

But the US military as a ‘deterrent’ works in a number of more subtle ways short of large scale great power annihilation, arguably reinforcing the international system and encouraging global order. I think the argument is probably over made, but it seems more desirable than a global order built on the threat of mass destruction.

Also, thinking that the US is a ‘force for good in the world’, as subjective as that may be, and finding its policy towards certain regions at certain times to be problematic, to say the least, aren’t mutually exclusive positions to hold, but a lot of the above is perhaps going a little far in conflating the two.

Bruce Wilder:
Regarding “norms”, I probably should have been clearer that my incredulous response is not to the notion that “norms” are in the mix, so to speak, but that anyone would think “norms” are a good place in an explanatory structure to pound a nail and hang a picture

We disagree. There are various places to pound a nail and hang a picture, and ideas and norms can sometimes be one such place, in my view. Regrettably I don’t have time to get into an extended discussion of this, which may be just as well, since I would not convince you and vice versa. But I might just refer you to Weber’s remark that “very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.”

Stephen @117
WW 1 marked a change in how many (not all) writers, publicists, academics, opinion-molders, politicians etc. in some of the countries involved thought about war, in terms of purported benefits vs. obvious costs. That WW2 happened does not alter the long-term importance of that change.

General question posed above, nowhere answered.

Suppose as per OP and others, US decides armed forces are largely superfluous, withdraws to minimal status for continental defence.

What are likely effects on
a) security of Israel
b) future Israeli/neighbour wars, nuclear or otherwise
c) re-election of supporters of responsible US government ?

Answers?

ajay@81,

Speaking truth to power is not nearly so hard as speaking truth to rubbish, so I can sympathize. But since speaking truth to what you imagine is rubbish is a blog tradition, is in fact the essence of the blog experience, why don’t you give it a whirl just one more time? You certainly can’t be under any illusion that anybody on this thread knows as much about naval history as yourself, so I assume you have some tolerance for refuting rubbish.

My point about the Washingtion Treaty is that the fact that the US at that time would accept ratios of 5:1.75, 5:3, and even a 5:5 with GB, is a pretty solid proof that US miltary policy lived on a whole different planet and breathed a completely alien atmosphere than we do now. Draw on your great fund of knowledge of naval history and contemporary military policy to give us your shoot-from-the-hip estimate of what sort of ratio of comparative forces we insist on now. Don’t go with tonnage, some cheap out like that is what we would expect from some rubbish monger. Nowadays a big obsolete ship like the General Belgrano may displace a lot of tons, but is more of a threat to its crew than the enemy. In terms of capability, I’ll throw out my completely ill-informed conjecture that today’s ratio is somewhere in the neighborhood of 100:5:3:1.75:1:75. Please give us a more informed ratio.

Now, look at your ratio for 2012, and look at the Washington Treaty ratio of 1922. I look at the Washington Treaty numbers, and I see a military policy that had as its goal a navy strength designed to stand up, in concert with potential allies, to the strength of potential alliances of rival naval powers. Whatever else our policy maers of that time might have got wrong, you can alt least ground their thinking in principles that are alt least understandable. But when I contemplate what the ratio is today, I see no thought process at all. To call it incoherent muttering is overly kind. We’re not looking for balance, we’re not planning for potential wars and to deter potential adversaries. We have force levels that could be cut in half, and cut in half again, and still overmatch any potential combination of adversaries. Why?

I’ld be happy to respond to any of the particulars of what I had to say that struck you as rubbish. But I ask you to limit this response to just this one issue, the idea that US military policy and force levels used to be tethered to the military policies and force levels of potential adversaries, but has now become untethered. What are your thoughts on that? True? Untrue? If true, why? If untrue, what is your proposed rationale for current force levels?

I ask for that limit because I don’t have a sense that you are bothering to keep to any sort of purpose behind your contributions to this thread. For mysef, I find Quiggins’ point, that he can’t discern anything but incoherent muttering guiding the big stick the US carries today, compelling, and everything I’ve contributed has been to try to respond to that idea. What are you doing on this thread? Agree with Quiggins? Yes? No? Why? I look at your responses, to me and to others, and I can’t see that you’re intrerested in making any sense of the store of knowledge you possess about military affairs, at least not to the point of engaging with ideas, as opposed to random facts that you obviously think refute something.

That state of affairs is not uncommon, that a person knows a lot of facts about a particular subject matter, but has never really bothered to try to make what sense can be made of it all, and is capable of no reaction but annoyance when others try to make some sense of it all. When and if you decide to stop treating your knowledge of naval affairs, and this thread, as a rubbish heap, by all means please respond.

123: honestly? I wouldn’t know where to start.

Stephen @121 – The US does a lot to maintain regional stability in the Middle East. Some of that, as I mentioned @114, is accomplished via the Foreign Military Financing programs. Some of it is accomplished by holding large-scale joint military exercises, exchange programs, and training programs. Some of it is accomplished by fostering trade, and educational programs.

But behind all of that is the US commitment to using its full military resources to ensure international stability in the Middle East.

A complete US withdrawal of military resources and commitments from the Middle East would result, rather quickly, imho, in the following:

(1) Massive increases in military expenditure by Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, as the respective relative security of each country is immediately and hugely shifted by the change in US posture;
(2) A greatly increased likelihood of an Israeli air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, with the covert assistance of other Arab states;
(3) Massive new investments by some of the aforementioned countries in naval forces, and a greatly increased likelihood of naval incidents;
(4) Greater likelihood of the more advanced states in the Middle East obtaining nuclear capability;
(5) Based on the projections of others as to the effect of regional conflict in the ME, certain near-term oil futures spiking upwards of $150/bbl;
(6) Secondary effects upon US alliances in East Asia and elsewhere.
(7) Economic and social reform programs in some of those states would be stunted as a result of increased state emphasis on military security, a heightened sense of vulnerability, and decimated US influence. The global economic effects from all of this would not be helpful either.

Now of course there are many middle paths between the scenario you mentioned, and maintaining the current size of US forces dedicated to the ME. Not all of those middle paths would have the effects I mentioned.

” between a foreign policy of Wilsonian internationalism, driven by FDR, Truman, Marshall, Eisenhower, and the foreign policy of the Project for a New American Century”

Isn’t this a slight contradiction in light of your previous poo pooing of ideational factors in US foreign policy? Not trying to troll, just maybe I’m misunderstanding

JQ@122
Obviously, we share total bewilderment at failure of others to consider glaringly obvious problem. I can’t explain it, either.

But I’m afraid my more optimistic and otherwise pessimistic analysis tends towards:
if (a) nothing, (b) nothing, then possibly (c) nothing if US electorate reasonably sensible. Wanna bet?

But alas, at least equally possible and I fear more probable; (a) medium to long-term, weakening of Israel if deprived of US support, probably too late to switch to Russian support (b) Armageddon, given that no sane that no sane government would attack homeland of nuclear power, but sanity of all ME actors not guaranteed (c) as you said.

So here we are: we both from different perspectives can see desperate problem; in blog with very many informed and intelligent posters, nobody gives a damn.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Andrew F. @127:
Agreed except for (1) massive increase in spending by Lebanon, Jordan: two of the more decent states in the region, but skint.
And (6): understatement of Himalayan proportions.

Don’t know why previous post duplicated: please correct.

Andrew @ 127
(1) Perhaps with a more reasoned approach to the region these past 30 years there might be a thawing in the relationship between the Gulf states and Iran, and greater regional security cooperation. (As has happened in other places after US disengagement) There probably wouldn’t be a potential Iranian Nuke. Perhaps there might even be a sensible resolution to the question of Palestine and by extension the situation with Palestinian refugees. And maybe this would have led to a less ambivalent (being generous) attitude towards Israeli aggression in the region, primarily in Lebanon. Maybe a mature approach to the region might have spared it the worst of US policy (sanctions, Iraq 2003, the resulting refugee crisis) All in all your counterfactual is doing a lot of work.
(2) Well with no Iraq war in 2003, a stronger hand with Israel and a meaningful dialogue with Iran, perhaps this Nuke wouldn’t be an issue.
(3) Yeah possibly, though what presence does the US (or International community) need to maintain to prevent this?
(4) Where’s the evidence supporting the concept of regional nuclear arms races?
(5) Well this is speculative and dependant on accepting everything that’s gone before.
(6) To what extent? Can you elaborate?
(7) I think you’re going to have to expand on this. You seem to be accepting that all ‘economic and social reform programs’ in all of these countries serve the same purpose and are all going to be affected equally by this new need to increase ‘state emphasis on military security’. To really make this case I think we’d have to have a deep knowledge of the many forms of state policy in the region, and I don’t think anyone here does.

This is obviously simplistic and overly optimistic, but you’re presenting an incredibly bllinkered, and patronising, position here

For various reasons, I’m less happy about the idea of preventing aggression by tossing nuclear warheads merrily about than you seem to be.

Who said I’m happy about the spread of nuclear weapons? I said that nuclear weapons render nations invasion-proof no matter how great the conventional forces arrayed against them. I consider invasion-proofing generally desirable, but if anyone with nuclear weapons behaves non-rationally (or behaves rationally to an imaginary threat, e.g. launches on faulty warning from automated systems) then more people could die in a day than in both World Wars combined. And billions more could die in the years following, depending on just how great the climate impacts are. A nuclear war could easily be the greatest catastrophe in recorded history.

Maybe you consider powerful conventional forces desirable in that they are less of an existential risk than nuclear weapons. But conventional strength can actually encourage nuclear reliance instead of reducing it, at least on the side with relative conventional weakness. NATO relied on tactical nuclear weapons to counter numerically superior Warsaw Pact forces before precision guided munitions were available. Israel developed nuclear weapons at a time when it was surrounded by hostile neighbors and unsure of maintaining its territory with conventional weapons. Pakistan grows its nuclear arsenal because it can never catch up with India on conventional terms. If Iran develops nuclear weapons it will certainly be spurred by the impossibility of defending against its enemies’ conventional forces.

Bruce @ 128

There is a tension. But there’s also a coincidence between the interests of a comfortable middle class and the ability of a professional army to encourage arrangements that extract wealth from elsewhere to the benefit of that middle class. The British Empire provided a lot of middle class jobs, both in the UK and abroad. It also provided a fair amount of free land, and a continuing stream of commercial wealth. To a lesser extent, the French Empire did the same. And the benefits to the US of western expansion/the China trade/cheap oil for 30 years and all the rest are also large.

My point was just the narrow one you mention. If I had to explain the larger incoherence, I would start by observing that policy-makers have an occupational compulsion to think that there are no insoluble problems (economists share a bit of this too, partly because they try so hard to be policy-relevant). The result is that where no solution exists, the outcome tends to a kind of endless loop of unsatisfactory muddles, continually fine-tuned with no particular outcome, interspersed with sporadic lunges at some more radical option. Bit like a large dog trying to sleep in a small kennel. In the Middle East, the US wants to both support and restrain Israel, damp down a variety of local tensions, keep other powers out, keep the local powers either on side or impotent, retain influence over oil politics and so on. Since these goals conflict in multiple ways, and since the local players are not clueless (see Iran – the big winner from the Iraq war), and since the world keeps changing, they just keep going around. A set of more democratic policy-makers with the same goals would end up in the same position.

I think Operation Banner supports my case – what proportion of the British army did it tie up? For what result?

Iran’s nuclear ambitions may have something to do with the fact that, as of 2012, there are roughly 40 major military installations in the countries surrounding it. Of the 13 countries that border Iran by land or by sea, 12 are home to US military installations (the lone exception being tiny Armenia.) And this is not counting aircraft-carriers in the Persian Gulf.

Of course they’re looking for some kind of a deterrent – their leadership would be derelict in their duties if they weren’t.

Peter T: “A set of more democratic policy-makers with the same goals would end up in the same position.”

A set of more democratic policy-makers would have different goals, and feel constrained in different ways by the costs, risk and externalities, and, so, could be expected to arrive in a different place.

Organizing a broad, democratic constituency, though, is costly compared to organizing a conspiracy, even a conspiracy of fools.

rf @136: I was responding to a hypothetical raised by Stephen @ 121.

Still puzzling over how exactly current US policy in the ME can be characterized as incoherent. One quote from the article:

The crisis in Syria provides an even more graphic illustration of the incoherence of the foreign-policy debate. It is generally agreed that the civil war now raging in Syria is, or ought to be, a matter of grave concern to the United States. The administration’s position, demanding an end to the rule of Bashar al-Assad but taking few concrete steps to bring this about, has been widely criticized. But the proposed alternative policies run the gamut from immediate military intervention on the side of the rebels to tacit, and occasionally overt, support for the status quo.

I don’t see incoherence in policy here. The civil war in Syria is important to the United States; the current policy appears to be the cautious provision of technical and advisory assistance, either directly or by helping other countries do so directly, to rebel factions that appear a good fit for US interests and values, and for a stable and progressing Syria. The US preference that Assad become a former despot must be reconciled with US preferences that Syrian chemical and other weapons do not fall into the possession of radical Islamists, that a recognized and legitimate alternative to Assad emerge from the civil war, which alternative can continue to cohere Syria as a nation-state, that a faction even worse than Assad does not obtain significant political power in a new Syrian government, that any US military involvement is proportional to US interests in the matter, avoidant of involvement in certain regional issues in which the US would prefer not to engage (e.g. the Kurdish question), and has a time-horizon and level of commitment that fit within US domestic political constraints.

And indeed, Romney and Obama largely agreed on the appropriately cautious, current policy as the best way to satisfy those preferences. The only item of disagreement was on the question of the provision of “heavy weapons” to rebel factions.

@144, to have a coherent policy, it is not enough to show that you have a valid reason for seeking all the mutually incompatible things that you are seeking. If you have a preference for X, and a preference for Y, but X and Y are incompatible, you can’t reconcile those goals, you have to give one or both up.

You’ve referred to a preference that Assad no longer be in office, and a preference to avoid a number of events that would be more likely if Assad is no longer in office.

Current policy of aiding rebels indirectly is compatible with the first of these preferences, but not the second–given the indirectness of our involvement, our influence is very limited, so the more likely Assad is to fall, the more likely it is that Syrian chemical and other weapons fall into the possession of radical Islamists, or a faction even worse than Assad takes power.

Perhaps there is a consistent set of beliefs that would explain which dictators would the U.S. would prefer to see hold onto power. But no one has managed to explain that set of beliefs here–and it’s certainly not a conversation American leaders are inclined to have with their constituents very often.

Stephen @ 6:49: I’m on mobile do short response, but I am certainly aware of your list and took it into account in making my statement (which includes my estimation of the trajectory of the USA and those attached to it over the next 50 years).

Cranky

Of course, I’m also aware of Keynes observation about the long run.

” Latest opinion poll shows only 7% of NI electorate – that is, less than half of Sinn
Fein voters – actually want a reunited Ireland.”

Sure that’s old news bro. In fact it’s considerable growth from the 73 referendum?

rf@150

There’s an important difference; I’m sure you know it, but not all CT readers will. In 1973, all Catholics were told by Gerry Adams and friends to abstain from voting in the referendum about Irish unity, or else. Intimidation by armed and murderous fascists can be quite effective: the unintimidated vote was overwhelmingly against unity.

Recently, GA (who was never in the IRA, so he wasn’t) can no longer credibly threaten people: the general, unintimidated opinion poll result is still massively against unity. Tough.

Stephen

I should have been clearer. It’s not “what proportion of the British army as a whole did NO tie up”, but what proportion of British army front-line infantry did it tie up? And what proportion of the disposable reserve were these? Tanks, helicopters, artillery and associated support staff and so on do not count in a low-level conflict (that’s why the people without these go for a low level conflict). Similarly, a conflict that ties up all or most of your reserve is one to avoid (see French in Vietnam – what they lost at Dien Bien Phu was a small fraction of their total force, but pretty much all their reserve).

As for what the IRA gained, well, participation in government (denied for the previous 80 odd years), the formation of all-Ireland institutions and so on. These would have been fiercely denied in the 60s. Sure, they did not get a united Ireland, but its rare that anybody gets what they want out of a war.

Bruce – I agree with almost all you say. But a set of democratic policy-makers might find it easier to abandon some goals, and so achieve the others. Bit hard to say which ones they would let go or keep, though.

‘I don’t see incoherence in policy here’

But of course US policy is going to be somewhat incoherent in Syria; it has to be as it’s responding to quickly changing events. Providing some non-lethal assistance while relying on Qatar, Saudi and Turkey to supply (some weapons) while seemingly unsure of how best to protect US interests (what opposition groups to support, whether to push for a ‘stable, democratic post Assad regime’ or fight Iran by proxy) would seem to me to not exactly be a fully formed coherent response. That’s not necessarily a criticism, but that incoherence has been set in from the start, when diplomatic efforts were concentrated on other areas of the uprisings.

Being the NYT and their very special take on the Middle East, this is obviously alarmist, but there will be some amount of truth to it

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/world/middleeast/jihadists-receiving-most-arms-sent-to-syrian-rebels.html?_r=1

The longer US ‘interests’ diverge (or are seen to) from those of Saudi, Qatar and Turkey, and US agencies build contacts on the ground within the opposition, the deeper the US is going to become involved, which will then shape what US ‘interests’ are. I’m not sure how US policy can be called anything but incoherent, because I don’t see how US policy could be anything but incoherent at the moment.

While I certainly agree that Cheney and his PNAC pals were a highly destructive force, on full reflection, I am not entirely comfortable attributing “evil”, manifest in the doings of governments and nation-states, to a person. Cheney’s character is certainly nothing to admire: a draft-evading war-monger, who thinks it’s fun to get drunk and shoot captive quail with a shotgun, and who used his high office to direct billions to his old employer for shoddy work, etc. There are many indications, that Cheney is not someone about whom I would find much to respect or admire.

Even in a thoroughly authoritarian state, in an advanced state of social disintegration, I am suspicious of explanations that attribute everything that goes wrong to the madness of a single individual, directly or indirectly. Rousseau’s philosophy was not “the cause” of the Reign of Terror, Nicolae CeauÈ™escu was not the only guilty Romanian, and Pol Pot was not sui generis. The social disintegration, itself, which gives so much scope to a psychopath to operate unopposed or to amplify his madness into state policy, must be noticed, even, or especially, in the extreme and extensive cases. (Yes, you right-wing fools, Richard Nixon had something to do with igniting the horrors that followed in Cambodia.)

The United States is on an ugly path, in its domestic affairs and in its foreign policy, and Cheney helped to put it there. It is popular on the American Left, to attribute power to movement conservatism and its long-term success in building up institutional strength and accumulated, systematic policy change in its favor. But, those trends could, with as much or more justice, be attributed to the failures to oppose or moderate the Cheneys of the Right.

Cranky Observer has mentioned Cheney’s evident turn toward paranoia, after 1992, but I would narrate that differently. What happened after 1992, is that Cheney was no longer constrained by subordination in a hierarchy headed by moderate Republicans, like Ford or Bush I, who had some sense of consequences and a moral compass. All the things about the worldview of people like Cheney, which I complained about, when I wrote

If wage suppression to the point of slavery, endemic corruption of officials, depletion of the commons, or pollution of the natural environment build private wealth (and what other kind of wealth can there be?), it’s all to the good.

all of that can be perfectly fine, perfectly innocuous in outcome, if opposing interests and views constrain the actual outcomes in state policy. Its fine to advocate for lower wages, if someone else can make the case for higher wages, and the outcome is a sensible compromise that respects the full complexity of the case. Any production process is going to produce pollution; that follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A demand from the Left that business produce no pollution at all is as unrealistic, and as apt to produce undesirable results, as an expressed desire from the Right to create environmental destruction as a means of creating wealth. These worldviews are extremes of human ambivalence, and as long as the political conflicts they represent are processed in politics into a policy that finds a rational middle ground, we muddle through reasonably well. It is the elimination of conflict from politics, which produces the “evil” result — the turn to toward an expedient authoritarianism, which respects neither complexity nor the interests of those rendered politically powerless.

Cheney’s worldview — his “realism” and “practicality”, even his ruthlessness at times — were fine, and even healthy, in politics in which they had to be compromised, to accomodate other considerations. If there had been someone to insist on a competent plan and administration of the Reconstruction in Iraq, or to argue the case for an early and certain exit, or to match the paranoia about weapons of mass destruction with a reasonable scheme and schedule for rounding up Iraqi weapons caches and destroying them, etc., the “evil” and “incoherence” of policy, both, might have been resolved.

In the event, Cheney rolled over very weak opposition, in the Bush Administration and in the Senate and in American politics, generally. The Republicans rolled over Democrats to steal the 2000 election. They rolled over Democrats to get approval for the Iraq invasion on the most dubious grounds. They rolled over the left on torture. I could go on and on, and draw parallels on the financial de-regulation, the financial crisis, bank bailouts and Obama’s refusal to prosecute banksters.

At some point, I think, we have to notice the missing element, which distinguishes liberalism from neo-liberalism, the ceding of principle and the dismantling of institutions on the centre-left, which corresponds to the rise of movement conservatism on the right, and has resulted in a politics without essential conflict, and, therefore, policy without vital compromise or inclusive vision.

JQ @156
never heard of Michael Totten, thks for the link. appears to be a working journalist rather than right-wing propagandist but that’s only an immediate reaction after a couple of mins inspection…

The Exxon Valdez. (Sorry, Cranky, but I couldn’t resist.) If something is designed on the basis of potentially disastrous false assumptions, as U.S. foreign policy seems to be, it doesn’t take much inattention to expose them for what they are. Stubbornness only adds to the scope of the disaster, and Cheney is nothing if not stubborn. When a lot of lives are stake, pigheadedness can do just as much damage as evil. Calling it evil is just a handy way to measure the extent of the damage.

As someone pointed out about President Obama’s possible collusion in war crimes, if you bomb one wedding party, it’s a regrettable error. If you bomb two, it’s negligence. If you bomb them repeatedly, it’s policy, and you’re responsible.