Author: Daniel Larison

Nahal Toosi reports on the political barriers to sanctions relief:

In recent months, as Biden has mulled reducing such penalties against countries such as Venezuela and Iran, he’s run headlong into opposition in Congress. Some lawmakers, knowing the topic will play well on the campaign trail [bold mine-DL], vow to do everything they can to stop the sanctions from being lifted.

It is true that there is always domestic political resistance to sanctions relief. Many critics of Biden’s resistance to lifting sanctions have noted that this is one of the main reasons why the president hasn’t made necessary changes to the failed “maximum pressure” policies he inherited from Trump. The fear of hawkish backlash has caused the administration to move slowly or not at all in moving away from sanctions policies that they have previously admitted don’t work. All of that has been clear enough over the last eighteen months, but what if the hawkish backlash isn’t as significant as the administration believes?

This raises some important questions: do voters care at all about sanctions policies come election time, and if they don’t why is hostility to sanctions relief considered so politically advantageous? Polling often shows broad public support for imposing sanctions on other states, because sanctions are perceived as low-cost, low-risk measures that penalize other governments for their abuses or other undesirable activities. It doesn’t follow that there must be equally broad opposition to providing sanctions relief if that has a chance of advancing U.S. interests. The assumption that bashing sanctions relief “plays well” on the campaign trail is one that hawks hold, but is it true? It could be, but this issue deserves more scrutiny.

According to the Eurasia Group Foundation’s annual survey, there is a sizable group of Americans that believes sanctions are an effective policy tool, but there are even more Americans that say they don’t know if sanctions are effective and there is also a small number that believes they are not effective. Most people don’t vote on foreign policy, and even fewer would decide their vote based on something as relatively arcane as sanctions policy. It seems likely that the only voters that would respond favorably to a hawkish message on sanctions relief are voters that were already inclined to vote for the more hawkish candidates anyway.

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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.

Jordan Michael Smith has written a long essay on the changes in Republican and conservative foreign policy thinking. The entire piece is worth reading, but I want to focus on the discussion of “Jacksonian” foreign policy. Smith describes the bulk of the GOP as “Jacksonian” in its leanings:

Jacksonianism is as much a gut instinct as it is a coherent set of ideas, a hyper-patriotic expression of anger and resentment at those designated as globalists or internationalists. Political parties are heterogeneous, and not all of the new right-wing perspectives can be classified in this way. Some oppose all interventions in other countries, while still others counsel restraint but favor selective interventionism. But Jacksonianism is the dominant strain at work, especially among the grassroots.

The “Jacksonian” label has never been very useful as a way of distinguishing one group of hawks from another. In practice, “Jacksonians” are simply hawkish by default and don’t take much prodding to endorse expansive foreign policy goals. If you were a “Jacksonian” Republican in 2002-03, you almost certainly supported the invasion of Iraq and cheered on regime change just like your “Wilsonian” and “Hamiltonian” allies did. “Jacksonians” didn’t and don’t believe in nation-building, but most of them have no problem with attacking other nations on the flimsiest of pretexts. In other words, “Jacksonians” are much more likely to support an unnecessary war than they are to oppose it at the beginning when it matters.

Insofar as “Jacksonian” Republicans sometimes express reservations about certain interventions (e.g., Libya or Syria), this usually happens because the president ordering the intervention is a Democrat and their partisanship leads them to find reasons to object to something they would otherwise support or at least tolerate. I submit that the same thing accounts for at least some of the skepticism we hear today from the Republican side about U.S. support for Ukraine. When we turn to specific issues, we will find that “Jacksonians” almost never disagree with conventional hawkish views because for all intents and purposes they are conventional hawks. These are the people Van Jackson calls the nationalist militarists, and I think that label describes them very well.

I don’t hold out a lot of hope that a “Jacksonian moment” will lead to “preventing overreach and curbing the default hawkishness that still predominates in Washington,” because the record show that when push comes to shove “Jacksonians” do not usually stand up to overreach or hawkishness. In most cases, they rally behind both. To the extent that they raise objections, they are typically criticizing the means being used for certain policies rather than the ends themselves. Like liberal hawks under Bush, they will quibble with how the administration is doing things but will not question the policy as such. When someone from their party is in power, most of them won’t even quibble.

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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.

Most hawkish warnings about China emphasize both Beijing’s ambitions and its growing power, but some analysts have come up with a different interpretation and concluded that China is on the verge of decline and that this is what will cause the Chinese government to behave more aggressively in the near future. The two key assumptions behind this argument are that China has vast ambitions and that their leadership will therefore take huge gambles to achieve their goals before their window of opportunity runs out. Hal Brands and Michael Beckley’s new book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, lays out the argument for this view (an excerpt can be read here), and they presented an earlier version of their argument over a year ago. Others have made similar claims that time isn’t on China’s side and that the Chinese government knows this and will therefore act more rashly as a result. As Andrew Erickson and Gabriel Collins put it, this means that there is “a decade of danger from a system that increasingly realizes it only has a short time to fulfill some of its most critical, long-held goals.”

As exercises in threat inflation go, these arguments are unusual, because they take for granted that Chinese power will wane over the longer term but exaggerate the danger in the near term even more to compensate. Unlike many hawkish warnings about foreign threats, these have a definite expiration date, and if they are wrong we will know it in just a few years.

The reviews of Brands and Beckley’s argument have been mixed. Denny Roy identified a major problem with it earlier this year:

The closing window argument is only persuasive if we postulate that the Xi regime concludes it could win a war of expansion today but could not win the same war 10 years from now. The argument doesn’t work if the Chinese think they would lose the war today but would lose even worse in a decade.

I would add that if the Chinese government genuinely feared that it was facing decline it would likely be more interested in trying to consolidate its position and husband its resources instead of taking the risk of hastening that decline by gambling on major military adventures. Chinese governments have not embarked on wars of expansion for a long time, and the current government has not fought any kind of war in more than forty years, so it would be strange for them to strike out with desperate attacks in the next decade. That is no guarantee that this can’t happen, but it seems awfully unlikely.

In his review of the book, Andrew Latham found that the authors relied too much on the most convenient interpretations of the historical cases that they used to bolster their argument:

In this case, the authors appear to have fallen prey to the latter type of logical fallacy, very selectively drawing on one theory out of many that purport to explain the outbreak of war in 1914 and 1941 in order to make an argument about the dangers associated with China’s coming decline. Having for many years taught a college course on the politics of the world wars, I can point to any number of theoretical explanations for the causes of those wars that have little or nothing to do with German or Japanese fears of relative decline.

That the authors treat the most convenient accounts of these wars as simply the way things happened, and then conclude that we are now entering a similar period of heightened risk, may be suggestive but it is far from dispositive.

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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.

The Eurasia Group Foundation (EGF) released their annual survey of American public opinion on U.S. foreign policy and the US role in the world. The report, Rethinking American Strength, includes a number of notable findings that show the public is broadly supportive of international engagement but also wary of new conflicts. My colleague Kelley Vlahos and I spoke with Caroline Gray from EGF this week on the podcast about some of their findings, but because time was limited we weren’t able to discuss everything the survey covered. There were a few other results that I think deserve a bit more attention.

One of their most interesting findings was that Americans that took the survey expressed less support for defending Taiwan than in the previous year. According to last year’s survey, 42% answered yes when asked if the US should defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. That was about the same level of support that other surveys have found in the last few years, so it was interesting that this year’s survey found that this number had gone down to 34%.

The survey question had changed to include a reference to the likely costs of defending Taiwan: “If China and Taiwan go to war, considering the high cost and likely casualties, do you think the United States should commit American servicemembers to help defend Taiwan?” As the EGF report notes, the changed wording may account for the drop in support, but that may also tell us something. When Americans are asked about hypothetical military options, they are often more supportive when there is no explanation of what those options require and what risks they may entail. Polling on no-fly zones is a famous example of this. There is often broad support for a no-fly zone at first, but that depends heavily on the respondents not understanding what is necessary to establish and maintain a no-fly zone in an ongoing conflict. Some Americans may support the idea of coming to Taiwan’s defense until they are told about the potential costs that it would involve and then have second thoughts.

A separate poll conducted for the German Marshall Fund suggests that public support for actually sending troops to fight for Taiwan is much lower than we think. Their survey found no interest in sending arms or troops in the event of a Chinese invasion:

Overall, there is very little appetite for involvement beyond diplomatic measures and sanctions. The share of respondents who want their country to send arms or troops to Taiwan is highest in the United States, but it is small (8% and 7% respectively).

It may be understandable that European publics have no interest in sending their forces to fight for Taiwan, but it is remarkable that American support is apparently this low. If the GMF findings are at all representative of what Americans think about this question that poses a major political problem for anyone proposing that the US go to war for Taiwan. What both the EGF and GMF surveys point to is that the public is quite reluctant to support military options in Taiwan, especially when they involve direct costs to the United States.

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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.

Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh are wrong as usual, but in this piece they are also wildly irresponsible:

The Biden administration has now run into this buzzsaw of sexual politics and faith. If the president were wise, he would throw his lot in with Iranian women. Mr. Biden wasn’t going to stop the Iranian bomb in Vienna. Aligning American policy behind the rebels at least gives the administration a chance at regime change [bold mine-DL]. It also gives the White House a chance to restore American dignity.

It is not surprising that pro-regime change zealots see every event as an occasion to agitate for regime change, but they are as deeply mistaken as ever when they insist that pursuing this goal is the appropriate role for the US government. Leave aside the nuclear negotiations for a moment and ask whether it makes any sense for the US to insert itself into these protests. The Iranian government is already casting protesters as agents working on behalf of foreign governments, and Gerecht and Takeyh would like to lend credibility to those accusations.

In many cases like this, the wiser course of action is to refrain from becoming involved so that our government does not exacerbate the protesters’ difficulties and so that it does not create false expectations of more direct intervention down the road. The US should recognize the sharp limits on its influence in a country that our government understands very poorly and where it has not had a diplomatic presence in more than forty years. The US should not seek to exploit popular protests for destructive ends. There is nothing dignified about intruding into another country’s affairs in an attempt to topple its government.

Referring to protesters seeking redress of grievances as “the rebels” is a gift to the Iranian government, which would like nothing more than to dismiss them as “seditionists” and crack down even harder. Perhaps Gerecht and Takeyh understand that they are undermining the protesters by calling them rebels, and perhaps they don’t, but that is what they are doing. Talking about these protests as a means to achieve regime change plays into the hands of the state’s propaganda.

If the US started making policy with an eye towards using Iranian protesters as if they were pawns in a regime change policy, that would be deeply wrong and also likely to blow up in our faces. While the US can and should criticize the Iranian government’s use of violence against protesters, there is very little that our government could do that would be constructive and welcome inside Iran. Trying to hijack an Iranian cause to advance a fanatical interventionist goal is exactly what the US should never do.

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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.

Bret Stephens likes collective punishment:

It’s good that the Biden administration, which has done so well in standing up to Putin, has now thrown its weight behind Iran’s protests, including by trying to keep Iranians connected to the internet via Elon Musk’s Starlink boxes. It can do even better by withdrawing from the nuclear talks, on the principle that a regime that will not give relief to women deserves no relief from sanctions.

Iran hawks do not and have never cared about the plight of the Iranian people. That has been obvious for a long time. That is why it is more than a little tiresome to watch as they seize on the latest protests over the outrageous abuses of the Iranian government to justify their ghoulish support for broad sanctions that do nothing but hurt the Iranian people. The Iranian government should be held accountable for the deaths of innocent protesters and for the outrageous death of Mahsa Amini, but that has nothing to do with the negotiations over the nuclear deal and it should not be an excuse to keep cruel and inhumane broad sanctions in place.

Denying Iranians sanctions relief in the name of opposing their government’s authoritarian abuses is the sort of stupid and destructive thing that Iran hawks specialize in. The Iranian people have enough to endure from their own government without having to suffer under our government’s pointless sanctions as well. Punishing an entire population for its government’s actions seems particularly dimwitted when so many of those people are protesting against their government’s abuses. If you respect what the protesters are standing for, you should oppose our government’s own abusive sanctions policy that also causes them harm.

The chief victims of broad sanctions are innocent Iranians. Iranian women bear the greatest burden of the conditions created by economic warfare. They are the ones that stand to benefit most from sanctions relief, and by opposing Iran hawks declare themselves to be hostile to the welfare of ordinary Iranians. Refusing to give them relief in order to spite their government is as twisted as it gets.

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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.