Month: May 2014

Over at Foreign Policy, Christopher J. Fettweis argues the hysteria in Washington over Ukraine is based on “pathological beliefs” about foreign policy. “The United States has no interest at stake in eastern Ukraine or Crimea,” Fettweis writes. “It is hard to imagine how any outcome here would affect the American people…”

Most importantly, Fettweis debunks the pervasive myth that the U.S. must do something to show its strength against Russia over Ukraine:

How we act now, it is commonly believed, can signal to Moscow (or to Beijing, or to Tehran) how we are likely to respond to provocations to come. Our inaction will encourage their belligerence.

There is a mountain of research from political science to suggest that this is an illusion, that credibility earned today does not lead to successes tomorrow and therefore is never worth fighting for. Others simply do not learn the lessons we wish to teach through our actions. Our rivals tend to believe that the United States will act in accordance with its national interest, rather than because of its reputation for resolve earned in previous crises. In fact, when countries back down in the face of provocation, often their rivals believe that they will be more aggressive in the future…

Worrying about the messages sent during this crisis, in other words, distracts us from what ought to be its central fact: Ukraine does not really matter.

I’ve written about the credibility myth numerous times. In Reason back in March, I argued against the ridiculous notion that Putin decided to take action in Ukraine because of Obama’s failure to enforce his “red line” and bomb Syria several months earlier. The credibility canard is a issue that is largely settled in the scholarship, but continues to inflict analysis among politicians, strategists, and policy wonks.

Kudos to Fettweis for saying what nobody else in the mainstream dares to: Ukraine does not really matter.

Reprinted from LobeLog with permission of the author.

I’m supposed to be editing right now, but I’ve discovered something wonderful enough to put aside my responsibilities for a moment and write about it here.

The short film posted above is part of videographer Patrik Wallner’s skate documentary, the Visualtraveling series, which features countries that people wouldn’t normally associate with skateboarding. In “The Persian Version,” an international group of professional skateboarders offer a truly unique way to see Iran, where I was born.

The two Americans, Kenny Reed and Walker Ryan, were granted tourist visas to Iran, but they were prohibited from skating, except for once, when they visited a skatepark. So, while their colleagues glided through one of the oldest and restrictive countries in the world, the Americans had to travel with a 67-year-old tour-guide.

“Just being told what you can and cannot do, 24-hours a day. I mean, we had a babysitter the whole time,” said Ryan, who is shown smiling throughout the film, featured this week on GlobalPost.

French skater Michael Mackrodt saw the Iranians as engaging in tit-for tat behavior, “They want to show the Americans that you give Iranians a hard time when they come to America, so we do the same…”

While Iranians who are lucky enough to get visas to the US are able to travel there freely, Tehran has a list of historical grievances against Washington, which its sees as responsible for the strangulating international sanctions regime Iranians have been enduring for years.

Continue reading “American Skateboarders in Iran”

The much-touted debate on NSA spying sponsored by Canada’s Aurea Foundation between Michael Hayden and Alan Dershowitz on one side and Glenn Greenwald and Alexis Ohanian had few surprises — except for the surprise appearance of Edward Snowden in a video made for the occasion. In it, Snowden explains the power and scope of the National Security Agency: Hayden and Dershowitz spent the rest of the hour and a half or so denying that the pervasive surveillance described by Snowden and Greenwald even exists.

It was a case of worlds in collision – the truth presented by Greenwald/Ohanian and the outright lies of Hayden and Dershowitz. The latter never laid a glove on Greenwald, in spite of their tortured attempts to do so, while Glenn got Hayden good when he attributed Hayden’s contention that we might have stopped the 9/11 attacks if the NSA had its programs in place at the time: Hayden, Glenn averred, was merely covering up his own ineptitude on 9/11, when he was in charge at Ft. Meade. If a cartoonish “Ka-POW!” appeared over Hayden’s head at that point I wouldn’t have been surprised. Another Haydenism: “’Collect is all’ doesn’t mean collect it all!” That provoked a few startled laughs.

The debate cannot even be called a debate because the two sides simply were not talking about the same subject. Hayden-Dershowitz refused to discuss the actually existing NSA spying programs. Dershowitz, instead, insisted on taking what he called a “middle position,” which would involve “some rights violations” in the name of the “greater good.” Hayden, for his part, completely denied that the NSA’s surveillance system was violating anyone’s rights.

“Trust me,” said Hayden – and the audience laughed.

Campaign for Liberty, the political action group founded by Ron Paul, led the fight to audit the Federal Reserve. Now the IRS is demanding information about its donors. But no one receives a tax deduction for donations to Campaign for Liberty and the IRS is not entitled to their names. Still the IRS has come out with guns blazing and is imposing heavy fines. Is this another case of the government targeting political opponents for retribution? This week Charles and Ron talk about Campaign for Liberty’s battle with the IRS.

Listen here.

Charles Goyette is New York Times Bestselling Author of The Dollar Meltdown and Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America’s Free Economy. Check out Goyette and Paul’s national radio commentary: Ron Paul’s America and the Ron Paul and Charles Goyette Weekly Podcast. Goyette also edits The Freedom and Prosperity Letter.

Over at The Dish, Andrew Sullivan notes the difference in opinion between the elites and the general public on foreign policy. Elites in New York and Washington, DC are upset that Obama hasn’t been forceful enough, whereas the public, as I noted yesterday, in greater numbers than ever want a less interventionist foreign policy of restraint.

Sullivan, however, thinks Obama has hit the right balance, while ultimately siding with the public on this one.

My view is that Obama has done about as good a job as possible in managing the core task of his presidency: letting self-defeating global hegemony go. That required a balancing act – of intervention where absolutely necessary and caution elsewhere. He prevented the world economy tipping into a second Great Depression, has maintained overwhelming military superiority and shored up Asian alliances even as he concedes, as we should, that China will be the dominant power in the region in the 21st Century.

The argument that Obama’s reluctance to bomb Syria illegally or put troops in western Ukraine denotes “letting self-defeating global hegemony go,” is unpersuasive. For Sullivan to be right, he would have to explain how the Libya intervention was “absolutely necessary” or how disregarding international law and national sovereignty by implementing a limitless and secret drone bombing campaign indicates caution.

The bigger point, though, is this notion that Obama as “concede[d]…that China will be the dominant power in the [Asia Pacific] region in the 21st Century.” That is difficult to square with Obama’s actual policies in the Asia Pacific.

Global hegemony, in the parlance of the Pentagon and international relations theorists, refers to a foreign policy that maintains absolute dominance in our own western hemisphere, while preventing the rise of any “peer competitors” that would be able to achieve similar status in their own spheres. If anything is clear about Obama’s “Asia pivot,” it’s that Washington is trying to thwart China’s plans to enforce its own kind of Monroe Doctrine in the Asia Pacific and prevent China from achieving regional hegemony like us.

Consider what it looks like from China’s perspective. The United States military maintains the greatest naval presence in the entire Asia Pacific, with the Third and Seventh Fleet patrolling the South China Sea and surrounding waters with five massive aircraft carrier strike groups. The U.S. military occupies Japan, less than 500 miles off the Chinese coast, with 50,000 troops. Almost 30,000 occupy South Korea, which is separated from China only by the slender North Korea. Washington keeps thousands of troops and major air and naval bases in Guam. The Pentagon has close military-to-military relationships with all of China’s neighboring rivals, including the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand, among others.

Obama just returned from a trip to South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Malaysia to reassure all those allies that America will go to war against China in case such a conflict breaks out. He was also trying to secure a major “free trade” deal that, conspicuously, does not include China, the region’s biggest economic powerhouse. A Shanghai-based professor, unsurprisingly, argued Obama’s trip “only made China angrier and inflamed regional tensions.”

In short, Obama is trying to block China’s rise to be “the dominant power in the region in the 21st Century,” by containing Beijing both militarily and economically. I don’t see how this indicates resignation or “letting…global hegemony go.” If you look at the world’s other strategically vital regions – Europe, the Middle East, etc. – I think you’ll find similar results. America is not retreating. At least not yet.

Sullivan is right about one thing, though: the quest for global hegemony is self-defeating.

It is regrettable that the Washington Post’s editorials on foreign policy are rarely as profound as its editorial cartoons.

Someone could easily compile a list of Washington Post editorials and guest articles by bellicose nitwits urging U.S. preemptive strikes for each venue that Tom Toles lists in this ‘toon.