The International Glance.

2006-09-25T20:21:00.000-07:00

Has Bush the Cowboy Begun to Build a New Global Alliance?

It is common for opponents of the Bush administration to criticize the President's arrogant unilateralism. Bush, so the narrative goes, is a reckless cowboy who has destroyed what good will America has, and who has destroyed any previous multilateral alliances which might have existed. And yet, there are certain stubborn, and often under-regarded facts which get in the way of this analysis. In fact, a case could be made that President Bush has helped form what might arguably be the most important alliance of the twenty-first century.

I first became aware of this alliance, or part of it at least, in the summer of 2005. A friend asked me for some information regarding the new Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, who was visiting Washington at the time. I was able to find the info, and in the process, discovered one of the more remarkable world leaders of the age. Singh, an economist by training and one of the more moderate members of India's Congress Party, has been widely credited for India's gradual drift away from state socialism and toward a market economy during his stint as finance minister in the last Congress government. Subsequent reading made me aware of a little-discussed fact: the Bush administration has been making a concerted effort to improve its relations with India. The recent Indo-American nuclear non-proliferation accord is one dramatic piece of evidence of this. President Bush has also maintained, and even strengthened ties with an already close ally: Japan. Partially as a result of this, there has been some talk of a change in Japan's security posture, most especially since the accession of Japan's new, decidedly more hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Bush has also reaffirmed his ties to some close allies, Israel and Australia, gained the good will of the Kurds, and made a more serious effort than many of his predecessors to deal with issues such as under-development, AIDS and human rights in Africa.

What does all this grab-bag of accomplishments have in common? To answer this, we must examine what is possibly the single most-often ridiculed foreign policy statement made by Bush among conservative circles, his attempted detente with Russia's Vladimir Putin. Bush claimed to have "looked into his soul" and seen a man with whom he could work closely. Was this simply an example of Bush's naiveté? I can see a scenario in which it was not. Let us examine some of the afore-mentioned diplomatic moves. India, first and foremost, is a somewhat surprising natural ally for the US at first blush. After all, India has historically been one of the non-aligned nations with the most anti-US attitudes. Indeed, India might be said to have shown a modest inclination toward the Soviet Union. Yet the Cold War is now long over, and India is moving away from its state socialism, and perhaps, the mentality which it characterized. India retains good relations with Russia, and the Russians are the largest supplier of military equipment to India. The second, it is worth noting, is Israel. In fact, India has been moving toward Israel as it moves toward the United States. And after deeper examination, this makes sense. India has had a problem with Islamic extremism along its borders for quite some time, and its chief rival on the subcontinent is Pakistan, a mercurial Muslim nation and ambiguous US ally. In the big picture, China is also a natural rival to India. China is also, interestingly, a natural rival to Japan in the big picture. Yet it is not the People's Republic which is pushing Japan toward greater military contribution to its alliance with the United States, but rather North Korea. Outgoing Prime Minister Coizumi took some steps in this direction, not least a deployment of "humanitarian troops" to Iraq. Now, incoming Prime Minister Abe is ready to try and make more permanent changes to Japanese security policy. Yet, while this is primarily focused on North Korea at present, China must be in its mind. Australia also doubtless has China in the back of its mind, and Islam as well. Australians have contributed to the Iraq mission, and Australia has played an important role closer to home. The south Pacific seems an odd place for a violent Islamist insurgency, and yet, in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, one is brewing. It may be that Australia will have an important role to play here. Finally, in Africa, both Islamists (through conversions and the imposition of shariah law) and the Chinese (through investment) have been trying to get a neocolonialist foot in the door. It can be argued that Bush has not been as aware of these threats as he ought to have been, but his involvement in Africa has been quite widespread and remarkable, especially given the necessarily Middle East focus which the war on terror has taken.

These alliances have set up a system of double-containment were Islamism on the one hand and China on the other. Islamism is the greatest immediate threat, while China remains a possible, or perhaps likely future one. Yet one lynch-pin is missing from this dual strategy: Russia. This, I believe, explains Bush's attempted detente. Whether by accident or design, instinct or calculation, he has helped create a global alliance capable of dealing with the major threats with which the US is likely to be faced in the near or more distant future. Russia unfortunately, has been almost openly hostile to the administration. Bush has responded by working with the new Eastern European states, helping to build a pro-American block between the inner core of the EU and Moscow. Yet this will not help win Russia over in the end, but merely contain any vestige of imperial ambition which Putin may possess. This has not been Bush's only failure. The other, and most conspicuous but under-reported one, is his lack of direction where Latin America is concerned. For a time, it appeared as though a tide of populist, leftist, anti-American revolutions was likely to plough through Latin America. That this tide has been checked owes more to the electorates of Peru and Mexico, the general moderation of Chile and the overconfident arrogance of Hugo Chavez than it does to any foreign policy clarity on Bush's part.

Yet despite these failures, let us also admit that there have been some monumental successes here. A strengthened alliance between the US and India is a development of immense geostrategic significance, and the new Japanese-American relationship is no small potatoes either. Bush must work to further American cooperation with African nations and peoples to counter-balance Chinese realpolitik and Islamist fervor. And importantly, he must continue to keep the pressure on the terrorists and their supporters in the Middle East. We must, however, give a few unqualified points to the unilateral cowboy: he seems to have left the country in a stronger position vis-à-vis alliances than his detractors realize.

2006-09-18T08:22:00.000-07:00

Pope Benedicts' Speech and the Aftermath:
For some reason, blogger is being a bit wonky at present, and not allowing me to title my posts. I'm having trouble with haloscan as well, but hope that this will be cleared up in the next few days. In the mean time, here is a post which combines a theological examination of Pope Benedict's recent controversial speech with some commentary on the aftermath in the Muslim world.

As some of you may know, the Pope has been called all manner of things--primarily anti-Islamic--in the past week. What's the fuss all about? Here's a link to the Pope's speech:
http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=94748
It's important to explain a little bit what the Pope is doing here. The comments which are seen as anti-Islamic--and have been portrayed in the media as
the Pope coming out and saying that Islam is evil, are nothing of the sort. Pope Benedict used a fourteenth-century dialogue between a Persian Muslim theologian and a Byzantine emperor as a spring-board for a wide-ranging academic dialogue on faith and reason. The Pope does not endorse the emperor's claim that Islam has "brought evil into the world"--though one gains the impression that he opposes forced conversions, which one hopes is a fairly mainstream position. What he does explicitly oppose is the Islamic theological concept of voluntarism--the idea that God only acts positively because he feels like it. Pope Benedict asserts that this is contradictory to Christian theology, for in the Gospel of John God and the logos (reason) are declared to be one. I partially agree with Benedict, with the caveat that I think a more narrow reading of John which implies that Christ specifically is the logos and is made known to us through the incarnation (and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us) is appropriate. Thus, God can be said to be bound inextricably up with reasonableness in that the incarnation makes known to us the reason of God in the person of Christ, and makes possible a faith based on reason thereby. I may be guilty of a certain excessive Christo-centrism, though ironically I am in complete sympathy with the Pope's critique of the liberal Christian emphasis on the man Jesus as a great moral teacher. My focus is on Jesus the Christ--fully God and fully man, which is a reality with which many of the voluntarists Pope Benedict mentions don't seem to have dealt. For a Muslim, who does, by virtue of being Muslim, accept Christ's divinity, I submit that voluntarism is not only sensible, but necessary. I think Judaism is in a slightly different position here, as I believe that God did reveal himself to the Jews in a unique way, which is tied up—from my theological perspective--with the fact that His son, the very logos, was to become one of them (that Jesus Christ was born a Jew is not just a tautology but the grounding, in my view, for their enduring status as a people special in God's sight). While I accept the Pope's argument, I would caution that we ought not to take it so far as to say that some concept of the good can be constructed apart from God's nature, and that we ought to hold God to this concept. We must define the good as that which God does, else we set up some abstract notion of the good as greater than God. Where the Pope's critique of voluntarism is spot on is in asserting that this is not an arbitrary standard. When philosophers put forward the hypothetical argument that we must per force consider idolatry (or any other sin for that matter) good if God commands it, Christians must respond that God is not some arbitrary and unknowable being, but that he has made himself, and the standards of goodness by which he operates, known to us by the person of Christ.
Now, to shift gears totally, I would like to comment about the furor surrounding the Pope's comments. I hope I have hear demonstrated at least the general point that the Pope's speech ought in no way to be read as a diatribe regarding the evils of Islam. It ought to be read for what it was, a profoundly stimulating theological lecture which happened to use a fourteenth-century dialogue in which a Byzantine emperor critiqued Islam as a jumping-off point. One might argue that the Pope could have easily used a different sourse to open the dialogue, and one might, were one paranoid enough, attempt to read a subtle anti-Islamic subtext here. I think this highly unlikely. Keep in mind that (A) the Pope has an academic background, (B) it is common for an academic lecturer to tie in whatever is applicable that he happens to have been reading recently, (C), familiarizing himself with previous ecumenical dialogues between Christianity and Islam is intrinsically a good thing for the Pope to be doing in the present undeniable global climate of Christian-Muslim tension and (D) it seems as though the Pope had honestly no idea, and reasonably so in my opinion, that the issue would take off in such a manner. What the Pope failed to account for is the rent-a-mob mentality of radical Islamists, and the sinical complicity of Muslim governments. The Danish cartoon uproar is a perfect example of this rent-a-mob principal at work. First, Islamists find a Westerner who has said something either offensive, or which may possibly be construed as
offensive to Muslims. Second, they usually inflate the original to make it actually offensive, or at least more so. Third, they organize mass protests of their followers who they then whip into a frenzy. This immediately--and essentially--attracts Western media, which then launches the next phase of their operations, and the most important one. The whole point is to get the Westerner to back down, or foster the perception that he or she has done so. This then increases the stature of the Radical Islamists who whipped up the controversy in the first place. Muslim governments sinically allow this to happen at the best of times to avoid any unpleasantness with their Islamist rent-a-mobs. They sometimes go a step further and actively encourage the mob so as to distract their discontented populations from the government's own failings. In non-Muslim majority nations, such as India, Islamists act without government
support (tacit or otherwise), but certainly with their own agendas in mind. In the end, this latest Islamist reaction to the speech of Pope Benedict ought to cast more aspersions on them than him, whatever one thinks of his theological reflections. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that this point will occur to a media which is not even familiar with and might not even grasp the arguments which Pope Benedict actually made. The Pope's speech was quite stimulating and novel. The reaction, however, was all too predictably depressing.

2006-09-17T20:05:00.000-07:00

Is Realism Right for the Middle East?
It has been close to five years since President Bush first began to articulate what has become known as the Bush doctrine, in which democratization efforts in the Middle East have been alleged to be a major part of the war on terror. In that time, the United States has directly undertaken two attempts at nation-building, both of which have yielded inconclusive results. The so-called Cedar Revolution has also seemed to fizzle in the face of massive pressure from Hezbollah, which has intensified after that terrorist organization’s “victory” over Israel this July. As a result of all this, much scorn has been heaped upon the "neocon project to democratize the Middle East". At present, much of this criticism has come in the form of partisan attacks containing little policy substance. However, there is one credible policy option available apart from democratization: realism.
Realism places it's primary emphasis on the stability of the Middle East, and shows very little concern for issues such as human rights and liberties. With a few exceptions, it is fair to say that this has been the prevailing wisdom in US foreign policy circles up until 9-11. However, since 9-11, it has become apparent that realism has had some unfortunate side-effects. Undeniably, in it's desire to stabilize the region, the US has delt with some unsavory characters. The earliest of these relationships was with the house of Saud, with whom every administration, Republican and Democrat, has been cozy since that of FDR. The Saudi royal family has a long-standing relationship with the Wahhabi school of jurresprudence, which falls within a broader
trend known as Salaphism. This extraordinairily conservative school of Islam--which seeks to restore the umma (Islamic community) to the time of the rightly-guided Caliphs, gives at least a wink and a nodd to those who have declared a passionate and unrelenting jihad on America in specific and the West in general. The next character of ill repute was the Shah of Iran. Just how bad the Shah was has been debated. However, I tend to agree with conservative historian Paul Johnson who claims that the Shah was a social engineer who favored Stalinist methods of control (of course, one ought to keep in mind that Johnson has a talent for viewing world leaders in a negative light: see his portrayal of Gandhi in Modern Times for example). The best that can be said of him was that he was "a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch", as Roosevelt liked to say of Somoza. Support for both these two regimes would come back to haunt the US, and cause both Republican and Democratic administrations to blunder badly. Witness, for example, Nixon's abandonment of the Iraqi Kurds because of the Shah's temporary peace deal with the Iraqi government, or Carter’s disastrously confused hash of an Iran policy, which sent badly-mixed messages during the Revolution. To be sure, there were good policy reasons for an emphasis on stability. The Soviets do seem to have considered the Middle East their playground, and they supported their own parade of punks: Nasser, Assad, Saddam Hussein (yes, Hussein was a Russian client first and foremost) just to name a few. The Saudi regime and the Shah were the twin pillars upon which the American attempt to keep the Soviets in check rested. Then in 1979, one of the twin pillars came crashing down when the Iranian people decided that the Shah, whatever he might be to the West, was no longer their son of a bitch.
I'm not convinced that tears need to be wept for the Shah, though it is possible that Johnson's analysis was too harsh. But the unquestionable tragedy of the Iranian revolution is the government which replaced him. Over twenty-five years later, an entire generation has grown up under the Islamic republic, and if we are to believe the poles and the eye-witness accounts of journalists in Iran, they don't care for it much. The Islamic Republic quickly found itself embroiled in a war with Iraq, and America flirted with it's worst realist mistake yet. Saddam Hussein was--even at the time--a Soviet client and an unreconstructed Arab Fascist who genuinely admired Stalin's style (this is a general point of consensus). However, he was dissatisfied with the deal he was getting from the Soviets, and decided to cozy up to the gulf Arabs, and certain Western powers. Among these was France, whose Prime Minister, one Jacque Chirac (a middle Eastern realipolitiker to his very bones it seems), promised Saddam a nuclear reactor, which he surely would have delivered if the Israelis hadn't blown it up for him. Just how close Saddam ever got to the US is debatable, though I tend to lean toward thinking this was a flirtation which was never actually consumated. Russia, after an unhappy courtship with the Islamic Republic, quickly decided that the devil they knew (Hussein) was better than the devil they didn't. Consequently, Saddam continued using Russian weaponry throughout the Iran-Iraq war. The most profound statement of US policy during the war was probably offered by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger: “it’s a shame they can’t both lose.” In a further irony, a case can be made that both powers did just that. However, the US probably did provide Hussein with dual-use technology and minimal satellite intelligence (a bridge too far I think, but then, the ending of the Cold War was on the front of everyone's mind and the Middle East unequivocally was not). Perhaps the most fascinating and ironic aspect of the Iran-Iraq conflict from a “who supported Saddam” angle is the fact that Saddam was heavily supported by the very same gulf states with whom he would be at war in 1990. So desperate were they to check Iran that they supported—and encouraged their western allies to support—a nation which would be an even more direct menace to all of them almost as soon as the war was over.
This last anecdote is, I think, the most damning endigtment of a policy of realism; you are likely to support today a nation you will be fighting tomorrow. It is against this back-drop that the neocons offer their democratic vision. They seek nothing less than a universal standard to which all nations in the region ought to be held. Allied nations should be encouraged to live up to this standard with carrots, enemies brought to heel with the stick if necessary. As the President is fond of saying, the premise of neoconservative democratization is that the security of America at home is dependent on the spread of liberty abroad. The supreme irony is that the most vociferous criticism of neoconservatism comes not from the stodgy conservative right, but from the revolutionary left. Is not democratic revolution--come hell or high water--a staple of liberal (let alone leftist) foreign policy? Was the critique of the US thrown out by the left throughout the Cold War not inherently a critique of the perception of American realpolitik?
I cannot accept the premise that the leftist critics of neoconservatism would prefer US foreign policy based on realism, as this would represent a staggering ideological inconsistency. Neither have they offered a policy framework of their own around which American foreign policy should be based. This leads to one inescapable conclusion: it is the use of American power, period, to which these critics object. What are the implications of such a rejection? If America is not to exert world power status, who would these critics accept as a world power? Or are they utopian enough to believe that a power vacuum will go unfilled, or that an anarchic international order will be a more peaceful one? I don't know the answers to any of these questions--but I do know that, with all it's warts, we're stuck with democratization in the Middle East as a guiding principal of American foreign policy. Quite simply, it would appear that no better viable option exists. Indeed, the old cliche still holds: democracy is the worst option man has ever created--accept for all the others.

2006-09-14T09:24:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the International Glance. In this inaugural post, I hope to provide a little background on my purpose for this blog.
I have tried blogging a few times, with varying levels of success. However, this is my first attempt at blogging which is directly related to my chosen field: international politics/international relations. My goal is to post regular essays on international issues, particularly those not covered in the press. International relations ought to be a non-partisan discipline; in truth, however, it is anything but. Thus I need to make some caveats. I am a conservative (some would call me a neoconservative, but this is inaccurate as I've never been a Communist, socialist or even left-wing liberal). My goal is to be objective, in so far as this is possible, but I feel it's a good idea to let the reader know where I'm coming from. I hope you'll check back often, and that I'll be updating often. After all, there's always quite a bit going on in the world. If ever you want to make intelligent commentary--even commentary which disagrees with the post--be my guest. Spam and mindless repitition of talking points will be deleted at my discretion, but not without due warning. Nobody here wants to buy your products or listen to your crazy 9-11 conspiracy theories. Keep it civil, keep it smart, and we'll have no problems whatsoever. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I'm going to enjoy writing, and thanks.