“Magical Thinking Run Amok”: Now Is A Good Time For The Administration’s Critic’s To Just Shut The Hell Up
Now that the Crimean “referendum,” such as it was, has produced its preordained outcome, and probably even the most intense Ukrainian nationalists have given up hope of ever recovering that territory, the big question now is less one of “punishing” Russia for an undoubted violation of international law, than of losing any influence on what Putin does next.
In that context, all the howling for U.S. “leadership” and “toughness” we hear is more than a little incoherent. As Michael Cohen points out at the Guardian, nobody among the many critics of the Obama administration is willing to advocate military action:
[O]ne is hard-pressed to find a single person in Washington who believes the US should send actual American soldiers to Ukraine – even if Russia truly escalates the crisis and send its troops into Eastern Ukraine.
All of which raises a quite serious and legitimate question: what the hell are we arguing about?
If the US is not prepared to put troops on the ground? If we’re not willing to use military force? If we’re content with taking the biggest tool in the US toolbox off the table, then how exactly is the United States supposed to reverse Russia’s seizure of the Crimea? Our vast military capabilities won’t mean much to Putin if he knows we aren’t willing to use them.
Here’s the dirty little secret of the foreign-policy pundit/expert orgy on what to do about Crimea: the US has at its disposal very few levers with which to change Russia’s behavior, at least in the near-term. We can cancel multilateral summits and military training (already done); we can deny visas to Russian officials (just beginning); we can even ramp up bilateral economic sanctions and try to build support among key European allies for a larger, more invasive sanctions regime (under discussion).
But as our long effort to bring Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear ambition reminds us, such steps will take time and diplomatic effort to bring results. They won’t offer the guarantee of a satisfactory result, and they could produce significant economic backlash for US companies – and, more directly, US allies.
In the end, we’re stuck arguing over policy responses that largely dance around the margins, and a situation in which Europe’s actions likely matter more than America’s.
One thing is for certain sure: all the high-volume demands we are hearing from American pundits and Republican politicians that Obama magically change the situation by “standing up” to Putin (without, of course, even contemplating military action) aren’t helping. If there were ever a good time for an administration’s critics to shut up for a brief while and await further developments–from the Russians, from the Ukrainians, from the Europeans, and from our own diplomats–this is it.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 17, 2014
“McCain’s Cold War Confusion”: Keeping Track Of The Senator’s Competing Postures
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) made his latest Sunday show appearance yesterday, having just completed a trip to Ukraine, and though much of the senator’s rhetoric was expected, there was one thing that stood out for me.
Not surprisingly, McCain is concerned about the crisis and sees Crimea’s departure from Ukraine as “a fait accompli.” But the Arizona Republican also told CNN he does not want to see a “re-ignition of the Cold War.” McCain added:
“[W]e need to give long-term military assistance plan, because, God knows what Vladimir Putin will do next, because he believes that Ukraine is a vital part of his vision of the Russian empire and we need to understand that and act accordingly.
“And again, no boots on the ground. It is not the Cold War over again.”
Wait, so McCain doesn’t believe this is the Cold War all over again?
Keeping track of the senator’s competing postures is getting a little confusing. It wasn’t too long ago, for example, when McCain declared, “The Cold War is over.”
Last week, he changed course, telling msnbc’s Andrea Mitchell, “[Obama administration officials] have been near delusional in thinking the Cold War was over. Maybe the president thinks the Cold War is over, but Vladimir Putin doesn’t. And that’s what this is all about.”
And then yesterday, McCain apparently went back to his old position, pulling off the hard-to-execute flip-flop-flip – which, in all likelihood, will have no bearing on his Beltway credibility. How can he accuse the White House of being “delusional” on March 7 for having the same belief McCain endorsed on March 16?
On a related note, the senator had a 1,000-word op-ed in the New York Times over the weekend, complaining that President Obama “has made America look weak.”
For five years, Americans have been told that “the tide of war is receding,” that we can pull back from the world at little cost to our interests and values. This has fed a perception that the United States is weak, and to people like Mr. Putin, weakness is provocative. […]
Mr. Putin also saw a lack of resolve in President Obama’s actions beyond Europe. In Afghanistan and Iraq, military decisions have appeared driven more by a desire to withdraw than to succeed. Defense budgets have been slashed based on hope, not strategy. Iran and China have bullied America’s allies at no discernible cost. Perhaps worst of all, Bashar al-Assad crossed President Obama’s “red line” by using chemical weapons in Syria, and nothing happened to him.
This is a deeply odd take on a variety of levels. Of particular interest. Obama has said many times that “the tide of war is receding,” in reference to two of the longest hot-war conflicts in American history: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ending these conflicts has made the United States appear “weak”?
It’s hard not to get the sense that McCain believes Vladimir Putin’s aggressive moves in Ukraine are the result of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.
As for the rest of the op-ed, McCain proceeded to urge the Obama administration to take a series of steps, which can generally be broken down into vague platitudes (the United States “should work with our allies” and “reassure shaken friends”) and steps the president is already taking (“boycotting the Group of 8 summit meeting in Sochi”).
It’s an underwhelming perspective.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 17, 2014
“Don’t Call Yourself Reagan Republicans”: Whatever You Think GOP, “Reagan” Is Not An Action Word
In all likelihood, it’s probably too late to think the political world will remember any of the details of Ronald Reagan’s actual presidency. Indeed, the mythologizing will almost certainly get worse – I half-expect “Reagan” to become a verb, to mean “to stop all foes through force of will and stern looks.”
But the Republican preoccupation with doing whatever they think Reagan might have done in any given situation occasionally gets a little silly.
A proposed U.S. aid package for Ukraine’s fledgling pro-Western government stalled Thursday amid festering Republican Party feuds over foreign policy.
Tensions erupted on the Senate floor late in the day after the chamber did not advance the measure, with Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) berating the dozen or so of his Republican colleagues who, for various reasons, objected to the legislation.
“You can call yourself Republicans. That’s fine, because that’s your voter registration. Don’t call yourself Reagan Republicans,” McCain said on the Senate floor. “Ronald Reagan would never – would never let this kind of aggression go unresponded to by the American people.”
Look, the 1980s were a while ago and the political world has a notoriously short memory, but Reagan wasn’t a comic-book character. He was a president whose record is readily available to anyone who bothers to look.
And the notion that Reagan “never let this kind of aggression go unresponded to” is wholly at odds with how the Republican icon actually governed.
Kevin Drum flagged some helpful tweets from Dan Drezner, himself a center-right scholar on international affairs, who offered a quick history lesson for those who don’t remember the Reagan era quite as well as they should.
* When Soviet-backed Polish leaders cracked down on Solidarity activists, Reagan didn’t do much of anything.
* When the Soviets shot down KAL 007, killing 269 people – including a member of the U.S. Congress – Reagan went to the United Nations, but not much else.
* When terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847, the Reagan administration had no qualms about negotiating with them.
* When terrorists killed 241 Americans in Beirut in 1983, Reagan didn’t do much of anything except run away.
I’d just add that this terrific chart from Adam Serwer shows the number of attacks on U.S. diplomatic outposts abroad soared during Reagan’s presidency.
How is this possible? Didn’t these people realize that the U.S. president at the time could Reagan them with his Reaganness?
Russia’s moves in and around Ukraine represent a crisis, but let’s not assume Reagan had some magical leadership powers that could stop these provocative acts or prevent these kinds of developments from happening in the first place.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 15, 2014
“Dark, Heartless And In No Position To Criticize”: It’s Time For Dick Cheney To Get Off The Stage
In the midst of the Crimean crisis, Dick Cheney saw fit to undermine the commander in chief. “I also think he hasn’t got any credibility with our allies,” Cheney said Sunday on a CBS News broadcast, speaking of President Obama.
That’s unseemly, to say the least, in a foreign policy crisis. A once-high official simply does not say such things about a sitting president, by protocol; George W. Bush is scrupulously silent these days. It’s just Cheney’s latest outrage; keeping track is like counting cattle.
Who asked him, anyway? Charlie Rose, hosting Bob Schieffer’s Sunday show, “Face The Nation.” Rose apparently had not heard of a famous declaration by a Republican senator, one swell Arthur Vandenberg, that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Cozy with his Southern charm, Rose did not challenge Cheney’s bald, ugly assertion about President Obama, laced with an edge malice. Old pro Schieffer, my favorite CBS Newsman, wouldn’t let an unpatriotic line go by so easy.
Why wasn’t Cheney back home on the range in Wyoming, where the deer and the antelope play — all the better to hunt? Let him leave us in peace and spend more time with his family.
The country knew of Cheney’s glaring influence inside the Bush White House and its wars of choice. Less known is that the former president and Cabinet colleagues had grown weary of Cheney’s sharp style and he’d eventually lose his place in the power scheme. The man who ducked every chance to serve in uniform during the Vietnam War seemed to see himself leading “on the field of battle” in a dark shadowy conflict. He took the tragedy of September 11 into other spheres as well and masterminded scaring us into surrendering our civil liberties.
Yet Cheney’s star began to wane about six years into the Bush presidency, according to Peter Baker, the author of “Days of Fire.” This was about the time Bush himself fell out of public favor.
By then, the nation was weary of war, especially the empty grounds for the Iraq War. At home, Bush’s cavalier reaction to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina drowning of New Orleans awakened the nation out of a slumber. So, of course, not all the failings of his presidency had Cheney’s fingerprints on them.
But back home on the Texas ranch, Bush himself wrote in his memoir that Cheney had “become a lightning rod for criticism from the media and the left. He was seen as dark and heartless — the Darth Vader of the administration.”
Cheney has not lightened up since.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, March 11, 2014
“Return Of The War Party”: The Hoary Old Voices Of Blood Lust Are Heard Again
Whatever else it has done, the Ukraine crisis has served as a major tonic for American conservative foreign policy hawks, who have recently been losing ground not only with the general public but inside the Republican Party, where hatred of Barack Obama has sometimes trumped the desire for an interventionist foreign policy.
Now hoary old voices of blood lust are heard again, even at the young-libertarian-skewing CPAC, per this account from Dave Weigel:
Twenty-five years since Oliver North was convicted for his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. Twenty-three years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And yet here he is, the ever-more grizzled “host of ‘War Stories’ with Oliver North,” standing between American flags and issuing warnings about the Russian bear.
“The people of Ukraine are this very minute paying the terrible price for America’s leadership deficit disorder and the Obama organization’s utopian rush to unilateral disarmament,” says North. “That’s where we’re headed. We don’t need a head of state who guts our defenses and draws phony red lines with a pink crayon.” North pauses for the guffaws. “Yeah, I did say that.”
Conservatives had been hating the Russians long before they had been Standing With Rand. All day Thursday, the thousands who packed into CPAC’s main ballroom heard their movement’s icons cry out against isolationism. They’d known foreign adventurism and intervention as Obama policies, blights on both parties, not part of the Republican Party they were rebuilding. They were being tested, and by people who claimed to know much more about how the party should defend America.
“Can you just imagine Ronald Reagan dealing with Vladimir Putin?” asks onetime UN Ambassador John Bolton, one of the only representatives of the George W. Bush administration to show at CPAC. “Reagan called a strong defense budget the ‘vital margin of safety.’ We are losing that vital margin all around the world. … Putin has a growing defense budget and ours is shrinking.”
If you’re Standing With Rand, that’s never worried you. The senator had supported the forced cuts of sequestration, encouraging his colleagues to “jettison some of the crap” in the defense budget and live with lower spending levels. If you’re, say, a 21-year-old CPAC attendee, you were born after the Soviet Union dissolved. You were 8 years old on Sept. 11, and maybe 10 for the start of the war in Iraq. You’ve never been a hawk.
But the average rank-and-file member of the Republican “base” isn’t a 21-year-old college student wearing a “Stand With Rand” t-shirt, is it? More typical is a 65-year-old white man whose first political memory was the Goldwater campaign, in which the desire to “lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin” was as strong a mobilizing sentiment as hostility to such unconstitutional domestic measures as Medicare or the Civil Rights Act. On the long path from then to now, some of conservative activists’ most thrilling moments, in fact, involved smiting college students opposed to overseas military adventures, from the “effect corps of impudent snobs” denounced by Spiro Agnew during the Vietnam War to the sniveling appeasers willing to let Saddam Hussein run amok. So of course it is second nature for older conservatives to take the rhetorical uniform of the Cold War, dry-cleaned recently for the occasional march for war with Iran, out of the closet for its original purpose. And the return of the war party was notable at CPAC:
[A]t CPAC, you’re seeing the hawks sprint back into the spotlight. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio uses his Thursday speech to rally conservatives in a global fight against “totalitarianism.” Afterward, he tells the New York Times that “there are forces within our party, there have always been in American politics, that basically say, ‘Who cares what happens everywhere else? Just mind our own business.’”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz ventures from the main conference to an alternative all-day meeting of hawks—itself, a sign of how much ground has been lost to the libertarians—and explains how he differs with Paul. Sure, the Kentucky senator was right about Syria, but the hawks were right about Iran.
It will be fascinating to watch this, the one real ideological “split” within a right-wing dominated Republican Party, work its way out during the 2016 presidential cycle.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 10, 2014
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