Author: Daniel Larison

Judah Grunstein warns against the entrenchment of the hawkish consensus on China:

The result is that competition and even potential conflict are now considered the default position for relations with China; those who suggest that cooperation – even on existential challenges like the climate crisis – is still valuable and at times necessary are seen as either naïve or, worse still, useful idiots.

What’s striking is that this approach has now become so entrenched that its premises are no longer scrutinized or debated. Moreover, maximalist objectives that only recently were considered farfetched and unfeasible are now granted serious consideration or else taken for granted.

Grunstein is right to sound the alarm here, and I fear that he is also correct when he says that “the momentum behind the hard-line consensus on China will only grow.” Once there is a bipartisan consensus about an adversary, the debate sharply narrows to fights over tactics. In this case, it is no longer a question of whether the US should continue pursuing a militarized rivalry with China, but rather how and where it should do so. There is remarkably little debate over the scope of Chinese ambitions or the necessity of “countering” them, and it is simply assumed that US “leadership” requires the latter.

To the extent that there are differences between the major parties, it is a difference in rhetoric and emphasis and not a fundamental disagreement over the substance of the policy itself. Unfortunately, this gives the advantage to more hawkish elements as they constantly push for more military spending, more deployments, and more coercive measures. Less aggressive adherents of the consensus feel compelled to go along with most or all of it in order to be taken “seriously,” and even critics often feel the need to frame their arguments using the language of the hardliners. Even those that believe that the US and China must cooperate on some major issues are now described as “competitive coexisters” for fear that identifying too much as advocates of engagement is politically toxic.

Hardliners set the agenda, “centrists” quibble over details at the margins, and only a small minority challenges the wisdom of the strategy itself. That was the pattern in the Cold War and the “war on terror,” and we can see that the same thing is happening again now. One of the reasons why those “considered cranks and extremists before the new consensus emerged” are so easily accepted as part of a new hardline consensus is that mainstream policymakers have chosen to embrace the extremism that they previously shunned.

Whenever the US sets out on some new global struggle, it empowers ideological zealots and causes previously sensible people to adopt that zealotry as a way of remaining “relevant.” Zealotry is a poor guide for statecraft, and before you know it the US is on the road to another reckless war in a country that has little or nothing to do with our security. Each time this happens, it is a predictable consequence of following the flawed consensus to its “logical” conclusion, but then no one seems to learn much of anything from that failure and the US proceeds to do it all over again a generation later.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Eric Edelman and Ray Takeyh want the US to “help” Iranian protesters:

They want regime change. The United States should help from afar by increasing sanctions and improving communication among the demonstrators.

If most Iranians want to change their political system, that is their right and the US should not hinder them, but the US should not be in the business of regime change. It is not our government’s role or responsibility to do this, and it is doubtful that our government’s interference would be welcome or constructive in any case. US involvement is unlikely to be helpful in a country where our government is widely and understandably loathed because of its past outrages and its current policies. At best, it would play into the hands of hardliners that seek to discredit protesters in the eyes of the population, and it could encourage false hope that the US intends to intervene directly on their behalf when that is extremely unlikely to happen.

It is debatable whether the current protests have the potential to bring down the current system. We have heard this claim several times before and it has been wrong in the past, but it is possible that something is different this time. One thing that I do know is that the US should not “assist, hasten, and perhaps even guide the revolutionary process,” as the authors urge Biden to do. The US needs to interfere far less in the affairs of other nations and should stop looking for new excuses to meddle.

Edelman and Takeyh call for the US to end negotiations on reviving the nuclear deal. This is not hard for them to do, since they have never supported the deal and have never wanted it restored. They say this “would rob the regime of its ability to generate hope among the population that sanctions might be lifted under its rule,” but it would also signal once again to the people of Iran that the US cannot be trusted to honor its commitments. Nuclear negotiations in the past have been practically the only productive and successful negotiations involving the US and Iran in four decades, so it seems particularly blinkered to shut them down as part of a cockamamie regime change policy.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Venezuelan opposition legislators voted last week to dissolve their interim government, and with that they have ended the project of trying to replace Maduro with Juan Guaidó:

But nearly four years later and with little to show for the effort, the experiment has come to an end. On Friday, the opposition lawmakers who once rallied behind Guaidó voted 72-29 to dissolve their so-called interim government, effectively ending his mandate.

This was a long overdue move. Guaidó never had control of anything outside the National Assembly in Venezuela, and eventually he didn’t really have control over that. The U.S. made a major mistake in trying to foment regime change in Venezuela, and the backing of Guaidó was a perfect example of why the policy never made any sense. The entire policy has been an exercise in wishful thinking and reckless meddling from the start. After four years of failure and worsening hardship for the Venezuelan people, there may now be a chance for a serious rethinking of this policy.

Dumping Guaidó was a necessary move, but it was one that should have been done years ago. Following almost four years of ineffective efforts to dislodge Maduro, Guaidó’s standing with the Venezuelan people was terrible. According to one recent survey, his approval rating was 5% and only 6% of Venezuelans would vote for him as a candidate for president. All the time that was spent offering him up as the alternative and “legitimate” president of Venezuela was a waste, and now the opposition will be back more or less to square one with even less political capital and goodwill than they had before. It will take years to repair the damage done by being so openly aligned with the US economic war that has been waged against Venezuela, and that can’t really begin until the economic war is brought to an end.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Fredrik Logevall reviews Frank Costigliola’s forthcoming biography of George Kennan:

Costigliola’s unmatched familiarity with the diaries is on full display, and although he does not shy away from quoting from some of their more unsavory parts, his overall assessment is sympathetic, especially vis-à-vis the “second” Kennan, the one who decried the militarization of containment and pushed for U.S.-Soviet negotiations. Kennan, he writes, was a “largely unsung hero” for his diligent efforts to ease the Cold War.

Intriguingly, as Costigliola shows but could have developed more fully, these efforts were already underway in the late 1940s, while the superpower conflict was still in its infancy. This transformation in Kennan’s thinking is especially resonant today, in an era that many analysts are calling the early stages of yet another cold war, with U.S.-Russian relations in a deep freeze and China playing the role of an assertive Soviet Union. If the analogy is correct, then it bears asking: How did Kennan’s thinking change? And does his evolution hold lessons for his successors as they forge policy for a new era of conflict?

One of the problems with containment doctrine from the start was that it could be interpreted in so many different ways, some of which flatly contradicted each other. It could be interpreted narrowly, as Kennan would have preferred, and limited primarily to Europe, or it could be interpreted as broadly as possible to apply to every corner of the globe and to serve as a warrant for massive military buildups and arms races. As Ali Wyne has written in America’s Great Power Opportunity, “A framework that is at once widely accepted and highly elastic is vulnerable to misappropriation.” Containment was both widely accepted and highly elastic, and so it was misappropriated in record time. Kennan is often called the author of containment, but as subsequent events showed he lacked the authority to define and enforce his version of what containment should be.

Logevall’s discussion of the dispute between Walter Lippmann and Kennan caught my attention because I had just been listening to John Delury and Van Jackson talk about this very thing in a recent podcast about Delury’s new book, Agents of Subversion. Delury and Jackson were talking about Kennan in the context of the early Cold War and how Kennan believed Lippmann misunderstood his views on containment (discussion starts around the 25:00 mark). Jackson said:

[Kennan] understood what he was advocating as a form of restraint….This is the limit, this is the outer bound of what our foreign policy should be trying to push. In that sense, it was an alternative to global domination, it was an alternative to preventive nuclear war, which was on the table with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the ‘50s. Even though that’s the case, containment did not get implemented the way that he imagined it at all. The way Kennan saw containment was not how Lippmann interpreted Kennan.

The reality was that Kennan largely agreed with Lippmann’s objections to a more expansive and ambitious form of containment, but Lippmann didn’t recognize this. Logevall concurs:

More than that, he found himself agreeing with much of Lipp­mann’s interpretation, including with respect to Moscow’s defensive orientation and the need for U.S. strategists to distinguish between core and peripheral areas.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Jonathan Katz tears apart George Packer’s essay on a “new theory of American power”:

More importantly, who is “overdoing” what “retrenchment,” and where? The U.S. still operates at least 750 military bases in 81 countries and territories – on every continent except Antarctica – and those are just the ones we know about. At any given time, most of the US Navy’s eleven active carrier strike groups are deployed without challenge across the Atlantic, Pacific, and often the Indian and Arctic Oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea. They patrol, largely at will, along with dozens of nuclear attack and other submarines, bombers, and drones, available for scattering at any given moment to almost any point of the globe.

If the US retrenched half as much as defenders of the status quo have claimed it has over the last twenty years, our foreign policy might start to become somewhat sane. Instead, the US repeatedly expands its commitments and involvement and then settles in for what becomes the new normal. That then becomes the new baseline for comparison, and anything less than that newly-expanded role is rejected as “turning inwards.”

Packer says in his essay that “[w]e overdo our foreign crusades, and then we overdo our retrenchments,” but as I noted in my own response a few weeks ago there has been virtually no retrenchment to speak of. If it means anything, retrenchment would require the US to have fewer security commitments today than it did in the last few decades and it would require the US to spend significantly less on its military than it has during that same period. The costs of US foreign policy should be noticeably lower if there had been any retrenchment, but they are not.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Hillary Clinton offers some bad advice:

The US should not be negotiating with Iran “on anything right now,” including a nuclear agreement, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday.

“I would not be negotiating with Iran on anything right now, including the nuclear agreement,” Clinton told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday, adding that the horse is “out of the barn.”

Clinton is hardly alone in calling for an abandonment of diplomacy in response to Iran’s crackdown on protesters, so it may be worth spelling out why this sort of short-sighted posturing is harmful to U.S. interests and to the people of Iran. If the US is ever going to have success in negotiating with adversarial authoritarian governments to advance toward its policy goals, it cannot tie its hands by conditioning the negotiations themselves on other actions that those governments take in unrelated areas. The nuclear issue is one where the downsides of refusing to negotiate are potentially so great that it makes no sense to reject engagement unless one wants to create conditions for rising tension and conflict.

The aversion to negotiating stems in part from the idea that negotiating with an oppressive government is a reward for them and therefore one shouldn’t “reward” a government that is abusing its own people. That idea gets things as wrong as can be. Our government doesn’t negotiate with another government as a favor to their side, but as a means of securing our interests. If it is done well, diplomacy should produce mutually beneficial agreements, but then that means that refusing to negotiate amounts to denying yourself the potential benefits of an agreement out of spite. Opponents of diplomacy can pretend that this has something to do with standing on principle, but it is really just vanity. It is the position that people choose to take when they already wanted to oppose diplomacy but need a plausible excuse for it.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.