The Vicious Cycle
| Wed Aug. 27, 2008 2:28 PM PDT
THE VICIOUS CYCLE....Matt Yglesias on how we deal with the rest of the world:
Part of the perverse logic of conservative foreign policy founded on a bizarre combination of hysteria and hubris is that there's this kind of quicksand phenomenon where the worse things get, the more you need to keep flailing.
Boy howdy, ain't that the truth. Over and over, we see years of bad foreign policy meander along fitfully and then, suddenly, explode into a crisis of some kind that was probably avoidable. But by then, it's too late. Once the crisis erupts, national honor is at stake and it's too late to do the right thing because nobody (including me!) likes to back down under pressure. So the only acceptable option is to stand tough and ratchet up the tension.
The Bush administration is certainly the acknowledged master of this vicious cycle: we've seen it with North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, and now Russia. We could have engaged earlier with North Korea; we could have avoided war with Iraq; we could have accepted Iranian overtures to talk in 2003; we could have kept up diplomatic relations with Syria; we could have accepted democratic reforms in Pakistan; and we could have treated Russia as a serious negotiating partner. This would hardly have avoided all the problems in the world, but it would have helped avoid some of them.
This isn't meant to justify bad behavior from other countries, no matter how hard conservatives try to paint it that way. It's just to point out that smart leaders, regardless of ideology, can't be naive; they need to understand the real world and conduct their foreign policy without closing their eyes to the likely consequences of their actions. But the American public, like a lot of other publics, never sees this. All they see is the eventual crisis, and when the crisis hits they want a leader who doesn't back down. One who's tough. "Toughness" may have been part of the very attitude that helped create the crisis in the first place, but few people make the connection. They just want a response.
John McCain, of course, shows every sign of wanting to take over exactly where the Bush administration leaves off: mishandling foreign affairs until crisis after crisis hits, and then insisting that national honor demands that we respond to each crisis as bellicosely as possible. And that sells. It sells for John McCain the same way that it sells for Vladimir Putin.
Is Barack Obama a guy who can sell the American public on a different vision of how to handle foreign affairs? I sure hope so. But I'm not holding my breath yet.
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Comments
Submitted by TangoMan (not verified) on Wed Aug. 27, 2008 2:32 PM PDT.
Is Barack Obama a guy who can sell the American public on a different vision of how to handle foreign affairs? I sure hope so. But I'm not holding my breath yet.
Following the same pattern as many others I see. Barack is an empty vessel in which believers pour their hopes and dreams.
Tangoman
Well, we have one candidate who is pretty much guaranteed disaster (as bad as first-term W or worse), while the other candidate has demonstrated smarts and doesn't depend on a hyper-nationalist base. Yeah, that looks like a fifty-fifty proposition to me.
Keeping in mind that presidents come with all the paraphernalia of national parties, Barack Obama is clearly a better bet than John McCain. The Republican Party has for the last 28 years devoted itself to the propositions that government doesn't work and we can prove it, poor people should just shut up, natural resources can't run out, and nobody can tell us what to do. I submit that a dog in a coma would make a better president than another Republican.
So I was having diner last night and there was a Russian waiter for my table. Being the Talky, friendly sort of person I am, I ask him about Russia, where he was from, (Northeast of Moscow, on the Cusp of the Urals), and joking, (a little), I asked him about Georgia.
"It's not about Georgia," he insisted, and I more or less nodded in agreement, "this was Russia's time to humiliate the United States!
"Yes," he said, "for everything the America has done to Russia to rob her of her dignity and Provinces..."
"Ahem," I cleared my throat, "Could I have a little more water please."
People aren't rational about this stuff, Kevin, not the Russians, not the Georgian's, and certainly not American's....and I fear that this will be amply displayed on election day.
Sigh.
Best Wishes, Traveller
It is perverse. When something bad happens, and the bad event is direct result of right-wing policies, their answer is that more and even more right-wing policies are the only appropriate response.
Try to imagine what life in these here United States would be like if we did not waste lives and money on expanding and maintaining the American corporate empire.
In this respect, this isn't a right-wing thing, it's an American people thing. They get some kind of secondary gains out of living in a country that can blow shit up and kill people.
It is perverse.
Submitted by TangoMan (not verified) on Wed Aug. 27, 2008 3:18 PM PDT.
Well, we have one candidate who is pretty much guaranteed disaster
True indeed, nevertheless the majority of commenters on this board seem to be in favor of Obama. Go figure.
while the other candidate has demonstrated smarts
This election presents us with awful choices. Obama definitely delivers prepared speeches with flourish and comes across as an intelligent guy. He's running against McCain who can't match him in this regard, but who has a life story filled with accomplishment. One has a record of getting things done, pissing off his base by reaching across the aisle, the other has questionable associations, accomplished nothing of note, but he knows how to inspire devotees.
It's certainly not clear to me why inspiring people with rhetoric trumps history of accomplishment when judging which traits are most needed to steer a successful administration of the Federal Government.
Submitted by Rick B (not verified) on Wed Aug. 27, 2008 3:52 PM PDT.
This isn't meant to justify bad behavior from other countries, no matter how hard conservatives try to paint it that way.
The thing about the conservatives is that they seem to think that there is no cost to military action, so failing to use military action to solve the problems they face is merely lack of courage or honor.
Unfortunately, they will never admit that nothing they were opposing in Iraq is worth even a tenth of what we have already paid to invade that country.
But since military force is some kind of "free good" or something, declaring victory and getting out because there is no gain worth any further expenditure of lives and treasure means losing.
Ask McCain what "winning" in Iraq means. He refuses to even respond to the question. We just stay until somehow we DO win.
Obama must convince the American public that he can defend the country. "Starting wars" isn't selling well these days, even among the right.
The key is his choice of advisers and cabinet secretaries. That's true of any new president, and George Bush failed that test miserably.
Respected career people like Richard Holbrooke at State or Wes Clark (or even Gates) at Defense would give Obama good advice. They could make a huge difference. They are, well, sane.
If they sat down and tried, foreign policy experts couldn't have screwed up US policy and diplomacy worse than the Bush Administration has.
Obama is going to have to dismantle the idiotic "War on Terror," and identify real threats, along with effective plans to deal with them. For all its raving, the Bushies have been unmitigated failures at actually conducting military action and securing the nation. Between now and November, Obama must dispatch credible surrogates to explain the disaster that could continue under McCain.
TangoMan,
You're demonstrating the standard right-wing spin regarding Obama's lack of "accomplishment". I'll admit that Obama's relative youth has given me pause, but his resume is indeed impressive for a 47-year old. Your interpretation simply borders on hackdom.
On the other hand, McCain's "life of accomplishment" must have started somewhere after he passed Obama's current age. For example, when McCain was 47 he was a first-term Representative from Arizona who'd completed his naval career a few years earlier and then dabbled in PR for his father-in-law's beer distributorship. Perfectly respectable career progression, but a "life of accomplishment"? Hardly.
In McCain's subsequent 26-year political run, one can admire his maverick persona to a greater or lesser extent (depending on how much one believes this persona was genuine or contrived), but the ironic thing is that the more one believes McCain was a genuine maverick, the more one must be dismayed by his craven cave-in to the far right in this campaign.
Whether or not Obama is elected President in 2008, I for one would expect his career trajectory to continue to climb. Projections are always risky things, but based on Obama's obvious intellect, curiosity and ability to synthesize complex issues, his position 26 years hence should make McCain's pale by comparison.
Oh, and your dismissal of Obama's oratorical skills is pretty comical - as if he only has the talent to say the words without being able to first do the hard work of understanding what they mean. Bill Clinton managed to combine both skills in one neat, though otherwise flawed, package. So it's not like the combination isn't possible.
But of course you may be more comfortable citing the Ronald Reagan model.
Cheers,
this about sums it up (via digg)
http://i37.tinypic.com/16jlu2c.jpg
