America's "inward turn" is moderate and proportionate

It's hard to deny, as Roger Cohen charges, that Obama and his surrogates have whipsawed the world with mixed signals in the wake of the Syrian government's chemical weapons attack on August 21. But Cohen overstates the case and its consequences when claiming that Obama's "dithering"

marked a moment when America signaled an inward turn that leaves the world anchorless.

The president has reflected the mood in America. Almost two-thirds of people surveyed think the United States should not take a leading role in trying to solve foreign conflicts, according to a recent New York Times/CBS news poll. Principle backed by credible force made the United States the anchor of global security since 1945 and set hundreds of millions of people free. Obama has deferred to a growing isolationism. His wavering has looked like acquiescence to a global power shift.

The Times/CBS poll result cited raised my eyebrows too. Specifically, 62% said that the U.S. should not "take the leading role among all other countries in the world in trying to solves international conflicts," while just 34% said that the U.S. should do so. Perhaps even more striking, when asked,  "should the United States try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it can, OR should the United States stay out of other countries' affairs?" 15% said "try to change," while 72% said "stay out."

So U.S. "isolationism" is "growing." But growing from what?  The Times/CBS pollsters have been asking the first question since September 2002, when the Bush administration was selling its prospective war in Iraq and was pretty fresh off an apparent quick victory in Afghanistan. You could say that the U.S. was at the peak of post-9/11 triumphalism.  At that point, 45% said that the U.S. should "take the leading role," while 49% said it should not.  A drop from 45% to 34% is significant, no doubt. But it strikes me as quite moderate in light of the decade of disastrous war that followed.

Oh, for a worthy enemy to crush

I try to reassure myself that Romney is at least a competent and rational, data-driven guy, I really do. I remain convinced that he is the only Republican candidate who wouldn't necessarily destroy this country if elected. I was even mildly reassured -- grasping at straws though I was -- by the technocratic stance vis-a-vis taxation he struck in a Wall Street Journal interview published this week:  "I'm not running for office trying to find a way to lower the tax burden paid for by the very high, very highest income individuals. What I'm solving for is growth."  I could even, in this relatively (if faux) wonkish context, stomach the thrust of his economic attack on Obama as advocating "a European social Democratic model."  False though the alleged choice between such a model and a "merit-based opportunity society -- an American-style society--where people earn their rewards" may be, it is at least true that Obama is closer to a European social Democrat than Romney.  And that's about as much truth as you're going to get out of a GOP candidate this election season.

But in compensation for his relative economic moderation, Romney felt compelled to double down on a cartoon narrative about Obama and America in respect to the world at large:

Why the Obama Administration won't cut defense spending

Today's Times has front-page article reporting the first whispers in U.S. government that defense cuts may have to be part of any long-term deficit-reduction plan. The end note brings the assumptions precluding those cuts into into sharp relief.

First, the terms of debate. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has long spoken, written and acted on the need to reform Pentagon priorities and procurement practices and eliminate nonessential weapons programs, has called for real growth of 1% per year in the Pentagon budget. Gates does not envision any force reduction, and personnel costs account for two thirds of the Pentagon budget. Some budget planners are beginning to talk about reductions in "end strength" (total personnel) once Obama begins reducing troops in Afghanistan.

Why not? The U.S. significantly reduced military spending during the Clinton years. Outgoing budget director Peter Orzag responds:

“During the end of the cold war, one could imagine a significant downsizing of the American military,” Mr. Orszag said. “That is a fundamentally different proposition than the situation we find ourselves in today.”

Why is our situation "fundamentally different" today?  Gates himself has stressed that we will not face any significant major-power competition in the foreseeable future. He wants the money for the kinds of war we are in -- without apparent end. Here's what he told the Heritage Foundation about major-power competition in May 2008:

Russian Empire without Tanks?

Two weeks ago Paul Berman warned in TNR that Russia's invasion of Georgia would strengthen autocracy and weaken democracy on multiple fronts, including the internal politics of Russia's "near abroad":

The vast and irreversible effects of the invasion of Georgia will be felt everywhere in the ex-Soviet bloc, and not just there. Each of the ex-bloc countries has what could be called its own pro-Russia party, which is hostile to the democratic revolutions. The pro-Russia parties stand on several solid and distinct foundations: ethnic Russian minorities in the countries bordering on Russia; a variety of business interests linked to Russia, based either on Russian gas and raw materials, or on networks descended from the Soviet-era military and police agencies; nationalist groupings in the old Slavophilic style; and some (not all) of the heirs to the old Communist political tradition.

From atop those several foundations, the pro-Russia parties derive strength from a variety of physical threats: a threat of cyber-attack (already waged against Estonia on behalf of the Russian ethnic minority there, and, shortly before the invasion, against Georgia); a threat of a cut-off in gas supplies, which Russia has already wielded against Ukraine; and, more vaguely, a threat of murky political tension. Today, the pro-Russia parties in each of Russia's immediate neighbors and in some of the more distant neighbors can add to those the ultimate threat. The one involving tanks. The pro-Russia parties in every country have therefore emerged from last week's events massively reinforced, and they will remain so for years to come even if every one of those Russian tanks were to exit Georgia tomorrow.

Looks like this process is already playing out in Ukraine. From today's FT:

Ukraine’s pro-western coalition descended into chaos on Wednesday even as western leaders sought to demonstrate their support for Kiev following Russia’s intervention in Georgia.

Ministers backing President Victor Yushchenko walked out of a cabinet meeting on Wednesday after their Our Ukraine party threatened to quit a coalition with the bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko, the prime minister.

Addressing the nation, President Yushchenko accused Ms Tymoshenko’s bloc of plotting an ”anti-constitutional coup” by voting in tandem with communists and the Moscow-leaning Regions party in favour of legislation to cut the president’s authority. “Without a doubt, the collapse of the coalition was a well-planned action,” he said. He threatened to dissolve parliament unless politicians agreed a new coalition. Andriy Portnov, a lawmaker backing Ms Tymoshenko, said the coalition could be saved if Mr Yushchenko’s camp apologised for ”systematically trying to sabotage” the government. The partners still have up to 40 days to try to reconcile their differences....

Moscow has denied suggestions it could challenge Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but has openly protested against the speedy westward integration drive adopted by Mr Yushchenko, including plans to join Nato.

McCain used to like to talk about "rogue state rollback." Today, it looks like Western Alliance rollback is gaining momentum. Putin has already started working rhetorically to pin that process on McCain, suggesting that the Bush Administration triggered Georgia's invasion of Ossetia to help his candidacy. Russia, with good reason, considers McCain its most inveterate enemy in the U.S.. If he's elected, count on Cold War II.

McCain's errors on Iran: fruitful and multiplying

John McCain continues to oversimplify the threats to U.S. security emerging from the Middle East. In his speech on nuclear security delivered iin Arlington, VA, May 27, he said:

President Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and represents a threat to every country in the region - one we cannot ignore or minimize.

No one should to minimize the insanity of Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier who cut his teeth psyching up Iranian pre-teens for suicide runs across minefields in the Iran-Iraq War. But when dealing with a madman, you have to listen carefully. And Ahmadinejad, while certainly expressing a death wish for the Israeli state, did not in fact threaten to "wipe Israel off the face of the earth."

The literal meaning and full context of Ahmadinejad's words, uttered at a "World without Zionism" conference and misquoted by McCain, have been credibly detailed by the artist Arash Norouzi, co founder of the Mossadegh Project (devoted to restoring and honoring the memory of the democratically elected Iranian leader deposed by a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1953). In an article posted on the Mossadegh Project website, Norouzi makes the following points:

1. Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini when he uttered the infamous words.

2. The literal translation is as follows: "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time. This statement is very wise". This is an expressed wish for regime change, not a threat to annihilate a people.

3. Ahmadinejad's 'thesis' was that Khomeini predicted the destruction of four regimes, and three of them have in fact "vanished": the Shah's, the Soviet Union, and Saddam's (two of them without any contribution from Iran). The implication is that the fourth will follow. The means are left unspecified.

That "wiped off the face of the map" was a mistranslation -- albeit one originated by Iranian authorities -- is a verifiable fact spelled out by multiple sources.

McCain's adoption of the mistranslation is of a family with his other errors about Iran. One, in this same speech, pointed out by Hilzoy (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan), is that we've "tried talking" to the Iranian government "repeatedly over the past two decades" (Hilzoy: Does McCain not understand that the stated policy of the U.S. government since April 7, 1980 has been to NOT TALK TO THE IRANIANS. And that we have not negotiated with Iran over their nuclear weapons program). Another is McCain's now-famous assertion that Iran is aiding al Qaeda in Iraq. These gross errors fit neatly together: Iran aids our own worst enemy (in the Land of McCain, there's no difference between Al Qaeda proper and Al Qaeda in Iraq, and al Qaeda's mortal hostility toward Shiites is of no consequence); Iran is a mortal threat to Israel (possibly, but the evidence here is hyped); Iran has proved fruitless to negotiate with.

Where does that leave us? "Bomb, bomb Iran"? Oh, that was just McCain's little joke. God forbid the Iranians should be crazy enough to misinterpret it.

Raising the specter of a world in which many states obtain nuclear weapons, McCain's looks back with nostalgia to a time "when the threat of mutually assured destruction could deter responsible states from thinking the unthinkable."The implicit contrast here is between that old-time paragon of "responsibility," the Soviet Union, and the mad mullahs of Iran. Never mind that the era of MAD between the U.S. and USSR began in the time of Stalin, a one-time ally whose regime was a thousand times more murderous than that of Iran's admittedly brutal mullah's; that we reached the brink of nuclear war with the Soviets two or three times at least; that far from regarding them as a "responsible" adversary, we acted for four decades on the assumption that they were bent on world domination. With them it was "responsible" to negotiate; with the Iranians, negotiation is rank appeasement. At the same time, McCain is of that school that yearns desperately to elevate diverse threats from the Islamic world to the status of a Cold War-level adversary.

This is not to say that Amadinejad's world-view and deeds are not appalling, or that Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology and rooted hostility to Israel should not be regarded as grave threats. Mistranslating Ahmadinejad's words to exaggerate their threat is a matter of, pardon the expression, nuance. (But nuance is making a comeback, even within the Bush Adminstration: today, according to the Financial Times, a spokesman for national security advisor Stephen Hadley justified use of the term "War on Terror" on the grounds that "We recognize that the use of the word 'Islamic' before the word terrorist can be heard by Muslims...as lacking nuance." ) International relations are not a U.S. political campaign--there's nothing to be gained by willfully distorting an adversary's words, however hateful.

Taken at face value, McCain's "Bomb, bomb Iran" clowning is every bit as inflammatory as Ahmadinejad's invocation of Khomeini. Indeed the threat is far more credible. Iran currently lacks the means to erase Israel from the page of time. On the other hand, McCain's self-appointed fellow traveler across the commander-in-chief threshold, Hillary Clinton, has gleefully reminded the world that the U.S. is fully able to "obliterate" Iran. The current U.S. president, with the full support of McCain (and the tepid support of Clinton), invaded Iran's near neighbor on premises that proved to be false. And McCain's own logic seems to suggest that talking to Iran is pointless.

Karl Rove pimps out the swiftboat

Perhaps Karl Rove is running for Vice President. He's using his freehold on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page to test attack lines on Barack Obama that are, well, Rovian. Here's how he characterized comments by Obama attempting to place the threats posed by Iran and other 'rogue states' in context:

On Sunday at a stop in Oregon, Sen. Obama was dismissive of the threats posed by Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Syria. That's the same Iran whose Quds Force is arming and training insurgents and illegal militias in Iraq to kill American soldiers; that is supporting Hezbollah and Hamas in violent attacks on Lebanon and Israel; and that is racing to develop a nuclear weapon while threatening the "annihilation" of Israel.

By Monday in Montana, Mr. Obama recognized his error. He abruptly changed course, admitting that Iran represents a threat to the region and U.S. interests.

Conveniently, Rove neglects to quote Obama before slipping into a schoolmasterly lecture about the carefully prepared negotiations of Nixon and Reagan. Obama was not in fact 'dismissive' of the threats posed by rogue states; his aim was to defuse the hysteria of the Bush Administration's years-long effort to inflate these threats to the magnitude of those posed by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Here's a CNN digest of what Obama actually said:

"Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union," Obama said. "They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us, and yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet.

"We should use that position of strength that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen. We might not compromise on any issue, but at least we should find out are there areas of potential common interest, and we can reduce some of the tensions that have caused us so many problems around the world," Obama said.

Obama said he was aware of the "grave" threat Iran poses to the United States, but that it was "common sense" that Iran is less of a threat today to the U.S. than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

Nor did Obama "recognize an error" and walk these statements back the following day; he simply elaborated:

The Soviet Union had the ability to destroy the world several times over, had satellites spanning the globe, had huge masses of conventional military power, all directed at destroying us," he said. "So, I've made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave. But what I've said is that we should not just talk to our friends. We should be willing to engage our enemies as well. That's what diplomacy is all about...

Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports terrorism across the region and militias in Iraq. It threatens Israel's existence. It denies the Holocaust," he said. "The reason Iran is so much more powerful than it was a few years ago is because of the Bush-McCain policy of fighting in Iraq and refusing to pursue direct diplomacy with Iran. They're the ones who have not dealt with Iran wisely.

In his attempt to bring the rogue state threat to scale, Obama seems to be channeling in an argument spun out by Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria last October:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

You don't have to think that the threats posed by Islamic extremism and nuclear proliferation are "overblown," as John E. Mueller has argued in a book of that title, to appreciate Obama's attempt to counter Cold War nostalgia that craves a superpower-weight enemy against which the U.S. can define itself.

As Obama fights to break the spell of Rovian fear-mongering, I do wish he hadn't weakened himself in the famous YouTube debate exchange last summer, when he responded "I would" to the question, "Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?" Hillary was quite right to call him out on this. I thought at the time and continue to think that Obama didn't fully absorb the question and didn't mean to say that he'd meet all five personally within a year--just that, on principle, it makes sense to be willing to meet when there's something to be negotiated. But in post-debate dueling he went the other route and tried to suggest that Hillary wouldn't be willing enough to negotiate with rogues. This is one major instance of Obama's sometime tendency to dig deeper when he's in a hole.

Still, that error is as nothing compared to McCain's serial expressions of strategic incoherence. McCain's vision of a decades-long but casualty-free occupation along the lines of our presence in Korea and Japan betrays the kind of Cold War imprinting Obama is trying to defuse (our presence in those countries was part of global competition with the Soviets and their allies). His assertion that Iran backs al Qaeda in Iraq reveals a penchant for lumping all "Islamic extremists" together into one monolithic adversary, as strident Cold Warriors did with the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam. His "bomb bomb Iran" 'joke' is infinitely more "dismissive" of the nature of the threats we actually face than Obama's contextualizing.