Author: Daniel Larison

Walter Russell Mead wants you to know that Things Are Happening in The World and Biden has not somehow magically stopped them from happening:

Last week Russian troops fanned out across Kazakhstan; the Myanmar junta sentenced Aung San Suu Kyi to four more years in prison; and China transferred a senior official from Xinjiang to lead the People’s Liberation Army’s garrison in Hong Kong. Two things are clear. First, America’s geopolitical adversaries aren’t impressed by the Biden administration. Second, the administration’s attempts to make a priority of human rights and democracy have so far failed to reverse or even to slow the retreat of democracy around the world.

One might wonder what it is that the US could or should have done to prevent these events, but Mead will not give you any answers. He cherry picks a series of events from different countries, imagines that they form a pattern, and then concludes, as he concludes almost every week, that it proves that “adversaries aren’t impressed by the Biden administration.” Mead does not attempt to explain what the administration might have done differently to “impress” them, nor does he consider whether the events he mentions are in America’s power to change or even influence. He simply lists things and inevitably lays blame for them at Biden’s door because he has “failed to reverse or even to slow the retreat of democracy around the world.”

Reading Mead columns is like opening a time capsule from the mid-2000s. The references may be more recent, but the mindset of the writer remains mired in the hubris of the Bush era. It used to be that almost every hawkish pundit and analyst viewed the world in this simplistic, ridiculous way, but there are still some, including Mead, that interpret every undesirable or neutral event as a “failure” of American leadership and/or a setback for the cause of democracy. According to this view, the agency and interests of other states are at best secondary considerations when trying to explain why anything happens in the world. If an adversary does something we don’t like, it is because they are insufficiently in awe of the president’s resolve. The possibility that some things are beyond America’s reach or that things happen for reasons unrelated to how American power is perceived continues to elude people with this worldview.

Consider Mead’s first three examples. Presumably these are the examples Mead finds most compelling because he leads off his argument with them. First, Russia has sent troops into Kazakhstan (at the request of the Kazakh government) in response to the recent unrest and violence that broke out across the country in the last week. What does this have to do with what Putin thinks of Biden or his foreign policy? As far as I can tell, nothing at all. Russia has moved to shore up Tokayev in what appears to be at least partly an intra-elite battle for control inside Kazakhstan. Maybe Putin is “impressed” by Biden, and maybe he isn’t, but the decision to send troops into Kazakhstan has nothing to do with Biden or the United States. Strike one.

What about the Tatmadaw’s new sentencing of Aung San Suu Kyi? This would appear to be a purely internal move related to their consolidation of power. Are we supposed to believe that the junta in Naypyidaw would have refrained from adding to her sentence if Biden had done something differently? If so, what is that something? Once again, Mead will not so much as hint at what that might be. Strike two. Finally, the Chinese government appoints an official that had served in Xinjiang to govern Hong Kong. I can see how this is bad news for people in Hong Kong, but I cannot for the life of me see how the US government under any president could have influenced Beijing’s personnel decisions inside their own country for the better. Strike three. Mead saw some things in the headlines and tried to shoehorn them into a “Biden is failing” narrative. He should have chosen his examples more wisely.

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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.

Geoff Ramsey urges Biden to change the stagnant Venezuela policy that he inherited from Trump:

As he usually does, Joe Lieberman is banging war drums:

A great Roman general said a long time ago, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” That is wise counsel worth following with Russia and Iran in 2022.

Hawks love to cite this phrase, which is originally traced back to Vegetius. He was not a “great Roman general.” He was the author of a military treatise written sometime in the late fourth or early fifth century. The exact wording from the treatise says, “He, therefore, who desires peace, should prepare for war.” This axiom often serves as a default justification for whatever harebrained hardline policy hawks want to promote at the moment.

Hawks usually interpret this phrase in the most combative and militaristic way possible. It does not have to be read this way, but this is the way that hawks choose to read it. For someone like Lieberman, it is not enough simply to prepare for war. He wants the US to seek conflict and rule out every path that might lead away from war. We see this in his recommendations for Russia and Iran policy: the US must concede nothing, it must increase its demands, it must throw more weapons into both regions, and it must ratchet up tensions with more threats of US military action as well. These are not recommendations to be prepared. They are a blueprint for stoking conflict.

Lieberman is the chairman of the poorly-named United Against Nuclear Iran, so it is no surprise that this is the Iran policy he wants. He is also an equal-opportunity militarist. He will endorse the same bankrupt coercive policies against pretty much any country that is at odds with the US Just as he did when he was a senator, Lieberman wants to pick fights with all potential adversaries at the same time. It doesn’t occur to him that taking a hard line against Russia and Iran simultaneously might overstretch US resources and put the US at a disadvantage in both regions.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

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.

Geoff Ramsey urges Biden to change the stagnant Venezuela policy that he inherited from Trump:

After 11 months in office, the administration has not significantly altered US policy. Indeed, in January 2022, Biden will almost certainly reemphasize the Trump administration’s recognition of the opposition coalition led by Guaidó as Venezuela’s legal government. Regardless of the constitutional questions at stake, it remains unclear how this will advance democracy in Venezuela, and members of Guaidó’s own circle have issued calls to revise this strategy.

In the absence of a clear plan, the broad strokes of US policy toward Venezuela remain unchanged – with slightly more rhetorical emphasis on the need for a political solution. Neither the State Department nor the White House has detailed how the United States will actually ensure successful negotiations to resolve the country’s crisis.

There are few US policies more in need of changing than this one. The US pursuit of regime change in Venezuela has been a flop from the start, and intensifying sanctions have only worsened conditions in the country. Next month will be the third anniversary of the USrecognition of Guaidó as the interim president, and he is as far removed from taking office as he has ever been. For some reason, the Biden administration has been continuing with the charade of pretending that an opposition politician with no official role and no control over anything is the “legitimate” president of the country. Even his own would-be foreign minister has lost confidence in Guaidó and quit, and this defection reflects the fractured nature of the opposition. It is one of the many oddities of American regime change policies that our government retains more confidence in a failed opposition leader than many of the people in the opposition.

“Maximum pressure” sanctions on Venezuela have been particularly harsh, and they have been imposed on a country that was already suffering from severe economic and humanitarian crises. Maduro has tightened his grip on power, and he and his allies appear to be firmly entrenched. Far from pushing Maduro out, “maximum pressure” has caused him to hold on to power for dear life. The military has not turned on Maduro so far, and it seems unlikely that the top military leadership will abandon him anytime soon. The Trump administration jumped on the regime change bandwagon because they thought they were pushing on an open door and would be able to achieve a quick win that they could use to pander to voters in Florida. Instead, Venezuela is in even worse straits than it was then, there is no realistic prospect of a change in political leadership in the foreseeable future, and US meddling has strengthened the forces it was supposed to be weakening. You could hardly ask for a clearer example of a complete failure of US policy than this.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

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.

Fred Kagan is on the warpath as usual:

Americans and Europeans must understand that Ukraine’s independence is of vital import – for ourselves as well as Ukraine – and must act accordingly. That is also the best way to deter Putin.

Kagan’s column is as wrong as can be, but it is useful as a window into the mindset of Russia hawks. First, he begins by exaggerating the stakes by making it seem as if Ukraine’s existence as an independent state is at risk, and then he exaggerates the importance of that independence to the West (“vital import”). If Russia takes any new military action in Ukraine, it is extremely unlikely to extend to the invasion of the entire country, and it isn’t going to occupy or absorb all of it. Russia hawks have to oversell the threat and they have to inflate the interests that the US and its allies have at stake, because otherwise their preferred policy of confrontation would make no sense. His main recommendation is having the US and NATO make a commitment to fight for Ukraine, which is as fanciful as it is wrongheaded. It is fanciful because there is rightly no appetite in the US or most of Europe to fight a major war for a non-ally, and it is wrongheaded because it would be a ruinous war that serves no US or allied interests.

Kagan argues that an independent Belarus and Ukraine are valuable because they created a “buffer” between Russia and central Europe, but it doesn’t seem to occur to him that having them as a buffer between Russia and NATO is exactly what Moscow wants. In other words, the Russian government is opposed to NATO involvement in Ukraine and further NATO expansion because they want to have that buffer. They believe Ukraine is being turned into a Western satellite, and they don’t like that. It doesn’t make sense for them to eliminate that buffer and create more places where their territory borders on NATO. It’s also worth noting that a “Russian takeover of Ukraine” would provoke a significant insurgency, which Western governments would presumably support, and that would become a huge drain on Russian resources for years and possibly decades to come.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

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.

Matt Yglesias embraces the hypocrisy of Biden’s democracy summit and calls for even more of it:

The fight for democracy is too important to conduct on ideological grounds alone; to win, the US will need an appropriate amount of realpolitik. America can say it cares about democracy – and actually take steps to protect and promote it – but the real focus should be competing with China, with all the compromises that will entail.

Both the “fight for democracy” and the “competition” with China are very poorly defined, and it isn’t clear how the US would “win” either one. What does “winning” look like? Does it mean having a democratically elected Chinese government by the end of the century? Does it mean simply bottling up Chinese influence as much as possible through an anti-Chinese “coalition of the willing”? To what end? I don’t think anyone knows the answers to any of these questions.

It is simply taken for granted that there must be a “competition” with China and that it will therefore involve the kinds of awful tradeoffs that the US made during the Cold War. That “competition” needs some sort of ideological significance attached to it so that it isn’t simply crude Machtpolitik, so we claim to be standing up for democracy. There is supposed to be tension between democracy promotion and “strategic competition,” but if we assume that the former is mostly window-dressing for the “real” contest there is no contradiction to be resolved. After all, the difference in our political systems is not the real reason why the US and China are now moving on a collision course, and that difference did not prevent our governments from cooperating earlier when they judged it to be useful.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

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.

Edward Luce has a very strange recollection of the last 15 years:

The US public turned against overseas militarism when the Iraq war began to go wrong under George W Bush. It has stayed that way ever since. Fifteen years on, it is easy to presume American “non-interventionism” has become the settled view of its people. But US history – and common sense – suggests that the climate can switch rapidly from cold to hot when confronted with new facts. Think of what happened after 9/11. Now imagine hordes of Ukrainians fleeing as Russian tanks churn up their towns this winter.

I wish it were true that there had been a sharp turn against “overseas militarism” back then, but this doesn’t describe public opinion or U.S. policies during the last 15 years. The public definitely did turn against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but within just a few years of withdrawing the bulk of U.S. forces from Iraq there was broad public support for bombing ISIS in Iraq and then in Syria. This supports Luce’s point that public opinion is fickle and changeable on these issues, but it also makes the rest of his column seem rather odd.

Luce imagines that China and Russia are intent on taking advantage of what he calls American “sullenness,” but this seems like an absurdly American-centric way of understanding their views. The Russian government is not convinced that the U.S. has turned non-interventionist. The current crisis is the result of their assumption that the U.S. and NATO are too involved in Ukraine, and the Russian government is now insisting that this change. There is misreading going on here, but it is a Western misreading of the causes of the crisis.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

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.