Month: March 2014

Apparently, segments of the GOP political apparatus are trying to put the kibosh on Sen. Rand Paul’s presidential run before it is even officially announced. Paul’s 2016 Republican contenders and their wealthy backers hate his foreign policy so much that they are willing to spend time and resources to destroy his electoral chances.

Reason‘s Matt Feeney has posted a round up of right-wing loathing for Rand Paul’s foreign policy (or, rather, what they think his foreign policy views are) and of recent reporting on GOP plans to shoot Paul’s embryonic presidential campaign dead in its tracks.

“According to several donors at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference held in Las Vegas last weekend,” Feeney writes, “the billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is prepared to fund a campaign against Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) if he picks up increased support during his widely anticipated presidential run in 2016.”

Among DC politicos, it is a near-consensus that Rand Paul’s alleged foreign policy views will handicap him in the GOP primaries. Republicans, they say, just aren’t going to go for anything less than demagogic diatribes disparaging peaceful diplomacy as weak and naive. Right-wing primary voters need the comforting reassurance that their GOP presidential candidates will issue hard-line sermons about the need to bomb Iran, to intervene in Syria, to meddle in Ukraine, and to maintain global primacy through the use of force, coercion, and an ever-expanding military budget that is beyond reproach.

That might be true, but then why does Adelson et al. feel the need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to cripple the Paul campaign? I wonder.

There are two issues at play here. The first is what Rand Paul’s foreign policy views actually are, and the extent to which perception and reality differ. The second issue is the fact that the mainstream foreign policy spectrum has become so belligerent and fringe that the basically establishment views of Rand Paul get vilified as ideologically extreme and unworkable.

Something similar happened during the fight over Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as Obama’s Secretary of Defense. You see, Hagel committed some cardinal sins for a Republican. He criticized Israel’s inhumane treatment of the Palestinians and called out the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, DC. He spoke out against the Iraq war, describing it as “a dangerous foreign policy blunder.” He suggested economic sanctions aren’t an effective foreign policy tool. Hagel even expressed an openness to cut defense budgets!

Appalling stuff, I know. For these thought crimes, Hagel was attacked as an extremist anti-Semite whose views are dangerously outside the mainstream. I actually had to write an Op-Ed at the conservative Daily Caller arguing that Hagel’s foreign policy views were not extreme or isolationist, but firmly within the traditional boundaries of the mainstream. It’s just that what passes for mainstream in the GOP these days is the kind of uninformed pugnacity that you’d think would thrive mainly on the fringes.

On whatever foreign policy issue is hot at the time, the right-wing invariably holds that America must do more, we must act and react forcefully. If we can’t act militarily, we must walk that line and convince the world that U.S. bombs and troops will be forthcoming if Washington faces anything other than absolute fealty on the international stage. Anything less than issuing threats or actually using force is condemned as weakness or appeasement.

On Ukraine, the Republican right insisted on an immediate show of force demonstrating military preparedness with NATO allies. It was also imperative to impose harsh sanctions on Russia and to combatively face down Putin.

But there were plenty of mainstream voices calling for calm and restraint. Henry Kissinger urged prudence. “Public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation,” he lamented, arguing that “the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” He advised that “the United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington.”

Continue reading “Unluckily for Rand Paul, The GOP Has No Room for Mainstream Foreign Policy”

Back in December, I argued in the Huffington Post that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is really not about “free trade,” but about serving the strategic interests of Washington.

Negotiations are still ongoing (mostly in secret, somewhat notably) and many of the details are not known (except for a leaked chapter published by WikiLeaks). While some smaller countries in the Asia Pacific are likely to get a boost economically, the economic gains for the U.S. are minimal: “only 0.13 percent, $27 billion, by 2025,” according to Samuel Rines at the National Interest. “But,” Rines notes, “realizing an immediate economic benefit is not the American goal.”

It’s more about engaging with emerging Asia and being present while the rules of trade are set. Exports and privileged access to the US market benefit emerging Asia, as the terms of trade will favor them over trading partners not at the table. The US and Japan could also act an economic counterbalance to China in the region—helping the smaller, less-developed countries compete for export growth.

While China has said it would like to be part of the discussions, it has yet to sit at the table. China would stand to lose about 1.2 percent in exports, but only about 0.3 percent GDP—translating to only $57 billion in export losses and $47 billion lower GDP. These losses are easily surmountable, and China does not lose enough to be convinced to participate in discussions surrounding state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and governmental participation in the economy.

If one wants free trade, one should encourage open and free commerce across borders without protective tariffs, subsidies, or strictures that crowd out competition for favored corporations. The TPP may lower some tariffs over time, but U.S. lobbyists are pushing for provisions that would keep tariffs, subsidies, and protectionism for big businesses in the U.S. while subjecting everybody else to the grind of competition (for details, see my HuffPost article).

China is being effectively excluded from involvement in the supposed “free trade” deal thanks to provisions that single out specific structures of the Chinese economy for reform. One example cited by Rines is the provisions on targeting state-owned companies, of which China has many.

“Some proposed definitions would go so far as to define an SOE as any business in which a government has a stake, limits the amount of competition, or acts on the company’s behalf,” Rines explains. This is too broad and would target lots of U.S. companies, so Washington is pushing for more specific language to single out Chinese companies, thus discouraging China’s involvement in the deal.

“When it comes to TPP clearly the focus is not the economics for the U.S.,” Rines asserts. “Hailed as part of the Asian pivot, the TPP is more political than anything for the U.S.”

So really the TPP isn’t about free trade. It’s about global power and corporate favors for U.S.-based companies. It’s about boosting Washington’s geopolitical leverage in the Asia-Pacific. It’s about staving off China’s inevitable rise for the sake of preserving America’s global hegemony.

I love a good argument too, but I think the Crimea situation is less about race, nationalism and the East-West divide than it is economics.

Crimea is dirt poor, even by Ukranian standards, and was intensely dependent on government aid. The regime change brought about a lot of philosophical shifts in government, but the big change from the Crimean perspective was economic in that:

a) Ukraine’s struggling economy is heading further into the ditch, with EU trade ties likely not to make a major difference for years and the loss of Russia trade ties likely to be a quick impact.

b) The IMF bailout came amid intense conditions of austerity, which means Crimea’s subsidies were likely to be on the chopping block .

Whatever else one may say about Russia’s economy, it’s got a lot of money from oil and gas exports, and they were in a position to not only replace the aid Ukraine had been giving Crimea, but to increase it considerably. I’d say you can’t buy that kind of loyalty, but you clearly can.

Interviews on the streets with Crimeans told similar stories, of local retirees expecting their pensions to go from $100 a month under Ukraine to $500 a month under Russia. Similar pay hikes were expected for soldiers who transferred to the Russian military, and they played a big role in the sheer size of the defections.

From Russia’s perspective, it’s also a pretty straightforward economic move. They kept the Yanukovych government close with billions in subsidies and loans for all of Ukraine, and with the regime change removing that option and the Sevastopol base the only real asset Russia needs to keep, it is much easier to just buy Crimea’s accession into the Russian Federation (which will cost Russia billions annually anyhow) than it was to try to get another Yanukovych elected.

Historical claims to the peninsula certainly provided a pretext for the secession/annexation, and are interesting from an academic perspective, but if Ukraine wasn’t broke I don’t think we’d be having this discussion at all.

Via Charles Davis, the Washington Post reports on comments made by President Obama today:

Speaking in Brussels, Obama dismissed suggestions by Russia and its supporters that the Iraq war undercuts the United States’ credibility in criticizing Russia’s incursion into Crimea in Ukraine.

“It is true that the Iraq War was a subject of vigorous debate – not just around the world, but in the United States as well,” Obama said. “I happened to oppose our military intervention there.”

Obama added: “But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory, nor did we grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people and a fully sovereign Iraqi state could make decisions about its own future.”

This is perhaps the most asinine thing the president has said in the entirety of his presidency. The invasion of Iraq was an illegal, preventive war based on lies. It got hundreds of thousands of people killed and cost trillions of dollars. The U.S.-backed dictator of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, is ruling the nation with an iron fist, as the country slips back into civil war. Nothing but chaos, ruin, and rivers of blood resulted from the criminal invasion. For Obama to even dare to compare Crimea to Iraq is a sick joke.

Obama also rejected comparisons to Kosovo:

Obama then made a similar point about Kosovo, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has cited as another example of the West not walking the walk.

“…NATO only intervened after the people of Kosovo were systematically brutalized and killed for years,” Obama said. “And Kosovo only left Serbia after a referendum was organized – not outside the boundaries of international law – but in careful cooperation with the United Nations, and with Kosovo’s neighbors. None of that happened in Crimea.”

The people of Kosovo were indeed oppressed. But NATO’s bombing of Serbia had the immediate consequence of sharply increasing Serb atrocities of Albanians in Kosovo, not the other way around. The vast majority of the violence occurred after the bombing began, so Obama is inverting the chronology. But even with his fictional chronology, it doesn’t change the fact that the NATO action was a violation of international law, and thus, quite relevant.

Despite Justin’s attempts to place me in the the same camp as the neocons, Anthony Gregory of the Independent Institute has written a balanced and principled piece on this controversy. Here’s an excerpt:

So what should we think? We should probably take a middle ground between B and C. Putin isn’t just an aggressor; he’s one of the worst on the planet. He killed tens of thousands of Chechens. He oversees one of the most vast prison populations on earth. He is essentially a late-communist holdover of the party variety in everything but name, and his violations of civil liberties, free speech, and the dignity of homosexuals and others are not minor matters for any libertarian who cares about the rights of all people on earth. His invasion of Ukraine was unjustified. His annexation of Crimea cannot be defended and although some critics have exaggerated the evils of this territorial power grabs by comparing them to Stalin’s or Hitler’s expansionism, it is true that Putin’s defenders’ arguments based on ethnic nationalism could indeed be used to justify the most infamous European land grabs that occurred that same decade.

As for the United States, its foreign policy is a lot worse than Putin’s biggest detractors wish to acknowledge. While Putin has killed more people than Obama, he does not appear to have killed more people as Bush—and yes, it is a moral failure and deviation from libertarianism to downplay the Iraq war as anything less than one of the very worst international atrocities of our new century, and one that dramatically taints the moral character of U.S. diplomacy. What the last few U.S. administrations have done will haunt much of the world for decades. And the aggression has hardly ceased. Obama’s drone killings are one of the most infamous human rights violations on the planet, the drug war imposed on Mexico has taken tens of thousands of lives, and America’s own civil liberties record is far worse than some on Team America wish to confront. There are tens of millions of people much worse off throughout the world because of recent U.S. diplomacy and wars, and only a cold utilitarian would even attempt to justify this record.

I understand why some libertarians are inclined to emphasize one point or the other. Those Americans focusing on U.S. criminality are right that we have more influence, albeit marginally so, on the government that lords over us, that if we don’t stand up to the U.S. war machine and its covert ops, no one will, and that criticism of foreign aggression often fuels war propaganda at home. But others are frustrated that just because the U.S. government condemns Russian aggression, they’re supposed to keep quiet. “My country is the world,” as Tom Paine said, and libertarians around the world should condemn aggression anywhere it happens. Pretending the U.S. government is the world’s only major problem is naïve at best. The first group is often right that liberal states are more belligerent in foreign affairs, and the second group is often right that it’s easy for people here to forget about victims of foreign oppression. Such dynamics played themselves out in the Cold War, too, and both sides had a point. It would have been demoralizing to be berated for attacking either U.S. or Soviet aggression in those times.

It is hard to maintain the right level of nuance and principle. I think John Glaser and the Jesse Walker blog entry he links to are good models of principled libertarian commentary.

Read it in full here.

John Glaser’s blog post on Crimea is typically American – i.e. it is bathed in unconscious albeit ferocious nationalism.

He starts out by accusing me of excusing “the crimes and misdeeds of foreign regimes that Washington sees as antagonistic.”

The crimes of foreign governments are the responsibility of the people who live in those countries: my critique of their actions has no power to effect any change as far as they are concerned, and it would be pointless for me to tilt at those particular windmills. I live in the United States, which is currently the main danger to peace and freedom in the world. Glaser admits this later when he writes that Ron Paul is “correct, in my opinion, to place criticism of U.S. foreign policy as a priority over that of other governments.” Therefore my criticism is directed at Washington, and yes I do admit – nay, proclaim! – my “grave bias” against the undisputed champion of death and destruction worldwide. The “invasion” of Crimea produced zero casualties: compare that to what happened when we “liberated” Iraq.

The rest of Glaser’s piece consists of hand-wringing over the presence of Russian troops in Crimea – a presence agreed to by Ukraine. If “nobody knows exactly how many” came in after or before the vote, as Glaser puts it, then how do we know there are any “extra” troops present? Glaser doesn’t know, as he admits, yet he uses the word “extra” so as to sound like all the other Washington pundits who sanctimoniously condemn the “invasion.”

But this is just splitting hairs. The underlying reality is that if some past President of the United States had handed over,  say, Maine to Canada on a whim – as Nikita Khrushchev handed Crimea over to Ukraine in 1953 – would anyone in the US dispute the results of a referendum reintegrating it back into the Union?

Glaser whines that some voters weren’t sent mysterious “vouchers” enabling them to vote in the Crimean referendum, but this hardly invalidates the vote. Crimeans have voted repeatedly – when they’ve been allowed to do so – in favor of reunion with Russia, which has held Crimea since the days of Catherine the Great. The last referendum, called by the Crimean parliament in 1992, was stopped by Kiev’s threat of force. The recent referendum was Crimea’s revenge – and good for them!

Glaser continues:

“Crimeans do have a right to self-determination. And they very well may have voted to rejoin Russia even without Moscow’s meddling and military incursions. But it is just a fantasy to believe this is anything other than an interventionist power grab by Russia. Obviously, this doesn’t mean one ought to support U.S. intervention of any kind. But I think it does mean libertarians, when asked directly, should not defend Putin’s regime.”

This paragraph conflates several different issues. Defending the referendum as legitimate has nothing to do with defending “Putin’s regime.” This accusation is a typical smear tactic designed to discredit arguments that cannot be answered by any other means. Putin is a typical statist, but that doesn’t mean his every action on the world stage is to be condemned. For example, he opposed Obama’s plan to bomb Syria: is giving him credit for that “defending Putin’s regime”? By Glaser’s standards – yes. By rational standards – of course not.

Contra Glaser, everything that comes out of Washington is indeed “without merit,” i.e. it is mendacity unadulterated by any meritorious substance, the sole purpose of which is to justify American and European expansionism.

What’s important about Glaser’s contribution to the discussion – so far, at least –is what it leaves out: a years long systematic subversion of Ukrainian politics, with millions of US taxpayer dollars pouring into the coffers of groups and individuals who are little more than Washington’s sock-puppets. He doesn’t mention this at all – yet more evidence of the unconscious American nationalism distorting his view of the Ukrainian events.

The American people have had it with military intervention, and Washington is adapting to this with characteristic quickness: they’re switching to deploying “soft power,” which can be just as deadly as the hard kind.

There was nothing “perfectly respectful” about the vicious attack on Ron Paul by the “President” of Students for the State Department Liberty: like Glaser, he conflated support for Putin’s “regime” with support for the right of the Crimean people to join Russia if they so wish. This is the latest version of the typical neocon accusation that accompanies all their attacks on those of us who oppose their vision of an world dominated by Washington. That Glaser is echoing this pernicious nonsense is sad indeed.

This silly idea that we are obligated to equally condemn the depredations of all governments everywhere is rubbish: it posits a moral equivalence between some Third World hellhole that never respected human rights and never pretended to with a country — the most powerful in the world — that does much worse in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.”

UPDATE: I see here that Glaser is citing Anthony Gregory, who blogs for the Independent Institute, in his defense. But Gregory’s argument is fatally flawed: he cites Tom Paine’s maniacal peroration to the effect that “My country is the world!” A crazy — and completely untrue — statement. This is what the warlords of Washington believe — and act on. But Gregory’s country is most certainly not the world — not if the world has anything to say about it.