Abu Hatem أبو حاتم

An email from Kalim Kassam of the Canadian antiwar conservative publication The Western Standard.  Thanks for the alert.  I am also having more and more suspicions of Palin, although I think generally speaking - from what I have seen - it appears that she leans on the traditional conservative and libertarian sides, but she has very few on record statements on foreign policy.  She may have been against American support of the Israeli occupation in the past, but there is no real record on this, and even if she was/is she will be changed into a neoconservative for this campaign by McCain.  His advisers have already said to the Washington Post that we shouldn’t worry about Palin, because when she is veep she will “learn at the hand of the master.”  Yes, the master warmonger, who didn’t even know what the difference was between Sunni and Shiite…

Kassam’s email attached:

 Abu Hatem,

It’s not just the libertarian and paleo blogosphere that’s trying to suss out exactly where Palin stands on foreign policy issues. As you know, the neoconservatives and Israel-firsters have concerns too. Of course it’s unlikely that even this former Buchananite has (or at least will express) any anti-interventionist positions given her denial of supporting PJB (despite what Pat said on MSNBC), her vetting by Bill Kristol, and of course her acceptance of a VP slot under John ‘invade the world’ McCain, but her popularity within the “pro-Israel” community in Alaska is another indicator that she will prove to be no Ron Paul Republican. Boker Tov Israel links to this Jerusalem Post article from Saturday and concludes that she is at least as pro-Israel as PM Olmert. Some choice quotations:

“Sarah’s absolutely pro-Israel,” [Alaskan Republican Jewish Coalition member Terry Gorlick] said, referring to conversations with her and comments she’s made about Israel’s security and its importance to the United States. He noted that as governor she signed a resolution honoring Israel for its 60th birthday.”

“She has ties and interests in the Holy Land,” said [Alaska AIPAC chairman, David] Gottstein, and also described her as someone who could be effective across party lines, noting that he worked well with her despite [his] being a Democrat.”

I really do like Sarah Palin, and I fear I may be going too soft on McCain as a result - but I’m not expecting anything other than standard establishment internationalism from her anytime soon. I’ll be watching her convention speech carefully to see if she shows any signs of independence from McCain, but that just doesn’t seem likely at all.

In peace and liberty,

Kalim Kassam

General Manager
www.WesternStandard.ca

Share This

Peter Hitchens’ weekly column in today’s Daily Mail has a very good point on the so-called “new cold war” which deserves to be heeded:

And still they try to foment a new Cold War, though there’s no reason on earth for it. This is not just clueless, but actively dangerous. What would we do if we actually got one? Why, we’d lose it.

Yet baby politicians try to fuel careers by pretending, rather squeakily, to be Winston Churchill. First we have the teenage Tory leader fighting on the beaches in Georgia. Then we have the pubescent Foreign Secretary David Miliband rumbling empty threats in Ukraine.

Once we had people in politics who’d heard a bullet fly and seen what happens when that bullet strikes a human body. Now we have former TV PR men and propeller-headed policy wonks, who probably haven’t even been paintballing, playing at warmongering in a shaky world.

Share This

Gordon Brown is an idiot for calling for anti-market and anti-trade solutions of becoming “independent” of Russia:

Gordon Brown warns today that the West will not be held to ransom by Russia, threatening a ‘root and branch’ review of relations with the Kremlin and urgently moving to stop Britain’s reliance on Russian oil and gas.

So is Nickolas Sarkozy, and George W. Bush and all of these world leaders in this new post-Cold War generation, that are in a short month destroying all of the post-Cold War successes for a return to realist power politics.

Brown advocates “energy independence” from Russian oil which supplies all of Europe.  One of the major arguments of both the 19th century classical liberal economists, and liberal internationalists have been that free trade will cause interdependence among nations which will make it harder for political conflict and pacify the international system.  Realists have been countering since the end of the Cold War that a 19th century “balance-of-power” system of alliances and power politics was bound to return eventually, and that markets did not pacify the international system.

Yet realists have fallen into a lot of trouble over the past few years.  From 1991, until now 2008, it just seemed completely out of the question for there to be any kind of conflict among the great powers.  Now, with the West snubbing Russia - again - over this Georgia mess, and thinking it will get away with it, the interdependent international order which began in 1991 is in great danger.

Post-1991 the ratio of exports to the GDP of the major powers - the United States, Germany, Japan, France, the U.K., Russia - has increased tremendously.  Without economic self-sufficency it has been extremely improbable that any state would want conflict with another state due to its economic self-interest.  This pacifying affect is now disappearing with the U.K. attempting to get off Russian oil, and the E.U. and U.S. snubbing Russia with the missile defense sheild.  Russia has no choice but to snub back.

The current order is crumbling, the international system is further changing.  Turkey is now torn between both Russia and the U.S. as both are major trading and diplomatic partners to Turkey.  The U.S. has forced Russia to open up the strait to the black sea or risk worsening relations, while Russia has threatened to cancel certain trade deals with Turkey if it does not reject the U.S.’s offer.  Talk about a rock and a hard place.  The international system should not be like this.

Brown’s idiocy on Russia not holding us ransom is crazy talk.  Russia wants nothing from the E.U.  Firstly, the Russians are extremely weak and there is no chance Russia is going to be invading Europe, especially NATO countries, anytime soon which would be sucide.  The E.U. should quit dictating to Russia what to do.   This is an internal matter between Georgia and Russia.  Talk about the benefits of non-interventionism.

Share This

Courtesy antiwar right-wing radio host Scott Horton’s great blog Stress:

America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t to-day be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.” - Winston Churchill 1936

Share This

A list of a few articles over the past two weeks which actually had a rational response to this crisis:

1. Saakasvili’s Folly
2. Georgia is the graveyard of America’s unipolar world
3. This War could have been avoided
4. Georgia: Lets not start World War II
5. NATO must not be expanded further
6. Georgia caused this war
7. Crisis in the Caucasus
8. Talking to Russia

Share This

I don’t know how many times I have heard the phrase “Cold War II” in the past few days, as if the Russia-Georgia conflict is re-starting the Cold War between Russia and the West.

The debate is re-emerging on whether or not our age is one of a perpetual democratic capitalist great power peace based in international norms or simply a short break from great power conflicts of the world wars and the Cold War.  The debate began in 1991 with the end of the Cold War and Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History which argued that democratic capitalism was now seen - for the most part - as the best and most just system of governance, and that we are entering a globalized capitalist world order which will be more peaceful and less marked by great power conflict.  John Mearsheimer’s 2003 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics argues that capitalism will only cause more and more powers to get rich and thus powerful and this will mean more security competitions, cold wars, and even world wars in the next century.  This is the debate between Idealism and Realism.

Whatever your stance on the debate, Russia’s invasion of Georgia certainly does not signify another Cold War against the bear.  Even if Washington and Moscow were to soon come into some sort of international tensions, this is far from a return to those days.

Um… hello, the Soviet Union is gone.  Communism is dead.  While Putin’s Russia is not extraordinarily democratic, it certainly is very capitalist.  Russia’s economy is 1/13th of the U.S., Russia’s annual defense budget is less than 1/14th of the U.S.’s and  1/21th of NATO’s.  Moroever, even if you combined Russia and China’s GDP they would only account for 1/3rd of the U.S.’s GDP - not including the EU, NATO, and other Western allies.

With the absence of an actual peer competitor, or an ideological conflict, there is no cold war.  Russia may be asserting its geopolitical sphere in the caucuses, and there may be more great power conflict in the next decade, yet the U.S. and its Western allies in NATO have so surpassed China, Russia, and any other combination of countries in the world in military and economic might that American hegemony is still the international system of the day.

Nevertheless, great power conflict is not fatalistically foreordained.  An international system based in cooperation and commerce is indeed possible, and free markets have truly pacified the world.  While hubristic imperialism and paranoid preventative war are currently American foreign policy, there has been a notable absence of actual great power war since 1945.  No matter what happens, America does not want war with Moscow - even though it would eventually win - because the cost is just too high.  And Moscow does not want war with the U.S. because the costs are too high.  Nuclear weapons and the increase of aggregate defensive power among great powers has made great power war too big of a loss for rational actors - that is governments - to want to go through with them no matter the cost.  And markets are just so globalized and thus states interdependent, that realpolitk although still certainly a major part of international affairs is much less apparent.

Francis Fukuyama himself reflected on recent events and himself still holds his End of History thesis.  In a Washington Post article yesterday Fukuyama said:

Various writers have suggested that we are now witnessing a return to the Cold War, the return of History or, at a minimum, a return to a 19th-century world of clashing great powers.

Not so fast. We are certainly moving into what Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria labels a “post-American” world. But while bullies can still throw their weight around, democracy and capitalism still have no real competitors.

What is interesting is how the founding father of modern foreign policy neoconservatism is now endorsing Barack Obama, against the war in Iraq, and opposed to an overtly Utopian militant neoconservatism, and how neoconservative Bob Kagan - John McCain’s foreign policy adviser - is now writing about the “Return of History” and debunking Fukuyama’s old thesis!  Check out this week’s Weekly Standard for a mawkish article entitled “History’s Back”

While Fukuyama is certainly much, much better nowadays - the man is still a Straussian Nietzchian atheist interventionist - and I wouldn’t really give his words much creedance.  Nevertheless, I find myself agreeing with him that its not Cold War II!

Share This

First, let me clarify something.  When I said the neocons where making more sense than the noninterventionists on the Georgia issue I was using hyperbole.  What I meant was that noninterventionist blogs and commentators have been almost unanimous in unilaterally blaming Georgian aggression on the crisis without blaming the absolutely horrid Russian devestation of Georgia.

Of course, Georgia made a tactical mistake in invading South Ossetia, but Russian provocations of Georgia were going on for the past four months.  Russia is not simply fighting back in South Ossetia, it also took back Abkhazia, is occupying Georgian cities of Gori and the port of Poti, and is 20 miles from Tiblisi as we speak.  BBC World, Al-Jazeera English, and CNN International along with the NYTimes all reported from Tshkinvali for the past two days and have proven without doubt (what Muslim muhaditheen or scholars of historiography and narration would call khabar mutawatir or a highly massively transmitted peice of information) that Tshkinvali was not massively razed in the fashion that Russia alleged.  In fact, most of the city remains intact although much destruction did occur and fighting appears to have been isolated to a few neighborhoods.

The noninterventionist solution in this case is not to take Russia’s side.  Russia is asserting its sphere of influence in its near abroad and may intervene again in the future.  In the eyes of justice, both Georgia and Russia should be blamed, but especially Russia for its highly disproportionate responsive aggression.  The same people today taking Russia’s side and blaming Georgia, where taking sides against Israel during the 2006 July War against Lebanon.  Hezbollah began the war, but Israel aggressed disproportionally.  I am not a Christian, but let not our Christian brothers forget St. Augustine’s condition of proportionality in his formulation of jus ad bellum.

Aggression has always been the central problem in international relations.  Notice I use the term “aggression,” and not “war,” for war may refer to defensive combat which various moral and religious traditions have strict legal codes to justify.  There have been numerous solutions to the problem of aggression which are still in existence to this day:

1. The “realist” Thucydides/Hobbes/Machiavelli approach - aggression is inevitable and fated because men are evil and love power, justice is impossible.
2. The “liberal” Kant’s approach - aggression can be minimized by the spread of democratic capitalism.
3. The”internationalist” Grotian approach - aggression contradicts the natural law, must be fought against in defense, and should not be engaged in - justice and virtue are possible.

Ludwig von Mises and other libertarians took approach no. (2).  This is generally the underlying assumption of the vast majority of Americans to this day - whether Ron Paul libertarians, neoconservatives, liberal democrats, etc.  It is generally assumed that the spread of free markets, free trade, and democracy will create a liberal order and norms and a community of nations which will avoid aggression.  Even libertarians such as Ron Paul who reject the United Nations and supranational organizations accept the basic precept of international law - that aggression is wrong and unjust - and believe that our nation should strive to avoid this.  Neoconservatives, and liberal democrats, may define aggression in a much more narrow way - making “peacekeeping” or “humanitarian” missions a loophole - yet they still accept the base assumptions of this fact, the idea of a liberal order was the base assumption of classical liberalism.

On the other side are the realists.   The realists, as marxist historian E.H. Carr writes in his wonderful The Twenty Years Crisis, are the opposite of the classical liberals.  Their view is that justice will always be impossible, that man is depraved, and that struggles for power and wealth define international relations fatally.  The state exists just to exist and continue its existence, and aggression is something normal which cannot be stopped or curbed.  Thus the realist is the “pragmatist,” who does not care for morality in foreign relations and rejects idealistic uses of power if they may harm his nation’s interests.  Carr himself rejects such “consistent realism” stating that it provides absolutely no practical room for action.  Realists attempt to secure as much power as possible, to keep the status quo, to be pragmatic, and to avoid unnecessary conforntation.

Realism’s fundamental assumption - that man is fully depraved - strikes at the heart of antiquity’s philosophy of man.  Both Christian and Muslim civilization did not see man as fully depraved, nor perfect, but a mix of both good and bad.  Justice is indeed possible, there are good and bad people, and aggression is not something inevitable but an evil chosen by its doer.  Thus those who agreed with realism’s presumptions on power and its importance but were Christian developed a new school - the Christian realists - led by Reinhold Niebuhr, who argued that peace was paramount and aggression was immoral and unjust yet one should still be wary of the affects of power.

Thus comes the current question on the current crisis.  When to intervene?  For the strict noninterventionist, one should not intervene until one is attacked aggressively.  For the strict liberal internationalists - those who transgress against another soverign state violate international law which was signed by all states in the interntational system, thus international institutions such as the United Nations or the European Union or even alliances of Western “liberal democracies” such as NATO should push Russia back militarily or at least put pressure.  For the strict realist, this is Russia exerting its power and increasing in its sphere of influence, one should leave them alone unless they cross a major red line which affects the United States.  Realist antiwar conservatives such as Christopher Layne recommend a strategy of “offshore balancing” or not engaging in combat unless Russia aggressively attacks any region to such an extent that it may strongly upset the balance of power in its favor and thus be hard to fight later on.

Because there is no “world government,” - nor will there ever be one - the problem of stopping aggression on small states that cannot defend themselves has been the central problem of international relations.  The only key to security in the international system is allying oneself with more powerful states or alliances or increasing in military power.  Georgia has learned this lesson - this is why it wants NATO membership and American gaurantees of support so bad.

Yet the realities of international politics catch up to the moral idealism of international law.  American intervention is simply not pragmatic.  Because America does not want all out confrontation with Russia it would never come to Georgia’s side.  Saaksavili does not like this and has been blaming the west.  Yet what can he do?

This is not our fight.  American intervention on the side of the Georgians would simply exasterbate tensions in the world and lead to a confrontation with Moscow which is unnecessary and detrimental to our security.  George Washington warned us of “entangling alliances.”  This is not 1938, Hitler is not aggressively taking over Europe.  We have no choice but to allow Russian aggression.  The European Union - which is on Russia’s doorstep - will take the means necessary to contain and stop Russia as it is in their direct national interest.  For the cause of peace, and national interest, pass the buck Bush.

A footnote - this crisis also gives a very important lesson.  Although one may be antiwar and noninterventionist, it is simply not safe for any country to have weak defenses.  Nuclear weapons and a strong and robust military are essential at deterring states from attacking each other.  As you can see, Russia easily and fearlessly attacked Georgia while the West is sufficiently deterred - whether in statements from Bush, Condi, or Bob Gates - from actual military confrontation with Russia even though Russia is an extremely weak country and a regional power at best.  The West wanted to attack North Korea, but after the Korean nuclear program was reluctant at upsetting the status quo.  Its the same deal with Iran - Kenneth Gatzman, a neoconservative scholar for the Congressional Research Service, stated recently that if Iran got the bomb there would probably be no war against Iran nor any strong rhetoric, while if it was unarmed a war was likely.  Legitimate defense is something necessary for every country.  The problem is that such weapons become used by our own country for its own aggression against others.  Where is Reinhold Niebuhr - who warned of this - when you need him?

Share This

There have been numerous foreign policy intellectuals who have written about the Georgian crisis in the past few days.  I do not agree with all of them, but here is a good sampling of approaches given by those who have made their study history and international relations:

Francis Fukayama, neocon, suggests Russia’s invasion is analogous to America’s invasion of Iraq, and likes Obama’s shunning of a reliance on hard power:

The Bush administration this week rebuked Russia for its disproportionate military intervention in Georgia; many rightly suspect Moscow’s real goal is regime change of the pro-Western, democratic government in Tbilisi. But who set the most recent precedent for a big power intervening to change a regime it didn’t like, without the sanction of the U.N. Security Council or any other legitimating international body?

Of course, there is no moral equivalence between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgia. But the U.S. is scarcely in a position today to rally opposition to Russia on the basis of international law and norms constraining the strong from using force against the weak…

 

Mr. Obama does not share McCain’s instinctive reliance on hard power as the primary instrument for dealing with messy questions of terrorism and proliferation in the broader Middle East. This is one reason I support him for president.

 Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, writes that a multipolar world is emerging:

This brings us to the larger geopolitical meaning of the Georgian scrap - namely, the measure of US power in today’s fast-changing world. It could be better. It has been brought lower during the past eight years by inconsiderate and sometimes arrogant diplomacy, by an obsession with “the war on terror” and reckless fiscal policies. The post-1991 decade of the US’s position as unchallenged number one - in Charles Krauthammer’s memorable phrase, “the unipolar moment” - is over. To later historians, the pace of this shift will seem astounding. In the early 1990s, the elder George Bush, James Baker and other foreign policy veterans were wondering how to prevent Russia collapsing. Now the concern is about excessive Russian power.

Andrew Bacevich, antiwar conservative, writes of Russia’s payback:

The chief lesson of the Georgian crisis is this: The post-cold war holiday from history during which Europe took its security for granted has now ended. NATO’s eastward march at Russia’s expense has reached its limits. Enlarging the alliance further by incorporating Georgia or even Ukraine as member states will entail costs likely to be prohibitive.

Zbigniew Brzezinski on putting pressure on Russia, which I don’t agree with:

 The West has to respond carefully but with a moral and strategic focus. Its objective has to be a democratic Russia that is a constructive participant in a global system based on respect for sovereignty, law and democracy. But that objective can be achieved only if the world makes clear to Moscow that a stridently nationalistic Russia will not succeed in any effort to create a new empire in our postimperial age.

Share This

You know Antiwar radio is pretty damn good. Honestly, if the average joe listened to like 3 or 4 of the very intelligent guests they have on there he would be absolutely changed. Its your shortest link to understanding the Bush administration’s view of U.S. foreign policy. Here are the best interviews I have seen so far:

1. Pat Buchanan
2. Rep. Ron Paul
3. Bill Kauffman
4. Phil Donahue
5. Glenn Greenwald
6. Howard Zinn
7. Juan Cole
8. Chris Hedges
9. Chalmers Johnson
10. Robert A. Pape
11. Edward Peck
12. Scott Ritter

And don’t forget my good friend Joshua Snyder, at The Western Confucian blog.

Share This

Whatever you think about Pat Buchanan, his newest book is absolutely amazing point of genius. Challenging the conventional wisdom, Buchanan’s hardheaded realist non-interventionist foreign policy recommendations inherent in his book would be wisely heeded by an administration who in the quest of “making the world safe for democracy” has destabilized the world leading to the criminal deaths of millions of people.

Here is Pat Buchanan on the Colbert Report last night:

Buchanan’s point that Churchill shouldn’t have given a war guarantee to Poland because it did not posses the capabilities to protect Poland, and that war would destroy the British empire, are absolutely correct. Colbert jokes that Buchanan would allow Poland to fall to Hitler, but Buchanan counters that if we gave a war guarantee to Tibet nowadays this would lead to war with China which is not in our national interests.Our neoconservative friends would say this is not correct. America should be, as Charles Krauthammer says “democratically realist,” it should not only care for its national interest but also, when practical, aim at spreading good throughout the world. Unfortunately, Krauthammer does not understand that American intervention often falls to the law of unintended consequences. Oftentimes our good intentions end up with extremely evil consequences. Questions of war and peace deserve more moral reasoning than that surely.Buchanan recommends that Britain would have carried out a policy of containment, telling Hitler that the red line was France and threatening war otherwise. Unlike the positivists formulating theories of international relations, Buchanan agrees with Henry Kissinger who wrote in his Does America Need a Foreign Policy? that “there was nothing foreordained about World War II.” Indeed, Hitler highly respected the British and would have much rather went to war with Stalin.War is the biggest of big government programs, and times of crisis are often the impetus of increases in government power, decreases in liberty, and pathological utopian social engineering schemes to be given weight.Buchanan compares World War II to the Iraq war. We did not need to start that war, Buchanan says, because Iraq did not threaten the United States. Indeed!

Hitler is often cited as the ultimate example of the necessary war. Indeed, it would have been necessary to contain Hitler by the time that he had upset the regional balance of power. Modern academics of international relations theory call this a strategy of “offshore balancing,” or that once a potential and aggressive hegemon upsets the balance of power to such a degree that their uneven increase in power threatens one’s state, it would be more cost-beneficial to fight that hegemon now while he is weaker and one is stronger, than weight until defensively attacked and lose power advantage.

Positivist international relations theory does not examine the morality of such a situation, only the utilitarian security benefits of a state in preemptive or preventative war. The realm of morality to some realists is nonexistent, and if existent is impossible. This is obviously absolutely rejected. Yet the realists do make important points when it comes to analyzing international politics.

Many times alliances are not created for ideological ends at all, but simple as marriages of convenience for state security. Because a state cannot guarantee its existence except by increasing its military power or by being protected by another powerful state that can check the potential aggressive intentions of another, often nations find themselves in strange marriages. Hitler loved Churchill and his ideology saw Churchill’s people as superior, and the U.S. hated Satlin who they saw as a communist tyrant, but the Allies ended up including Stalin while the Axis opposed Churchill.

Friendships can occur amongst nations through commerce, friendship, and diplomatic ties. And there is no doubt that ideology influences foreign policy (for those that disagree, look at who’s in the White House!), but the realities of international realpolitk must always be affirmed. If Britain would have used its diplomacy more effectively and been more realistic it could have remained the world’s unipolar hegemon, and we would have avoided a Holocaust, a Cold War, and the deaths of millions.

It is the same with Iraq. In a dreamworld quest for democratization of the Middle East, or control of a state in the heart of the Arab world, or preventing hegemony over oil, or a preventative war against a potential Iraqi threat to the West and Israel - whatever the justification for war - we have destabilized the Middle East, created a new Arab cold war over Iran, scared other states in the international system, and perhaps begun something even worse than what Churchill did for Poland.

The moral of the story is that war is a weighty matter, aggression is immoral, and that even for those who reject the morality of war (realists), the decision to enter into a preventative war or a war for idealistic ends should always be seen through cost-benefit analysis.

Share This