Foreign Policy as hyperventilation
| By TimFernholz - Jan 28th, 2007 at 11:24 am EST |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
What do we freak out about next?
Sunday mornings are great for the college student. You get to sleep in, and read the greatest general interest weekly around, the New York Times Magazine. Plus, if you're really lucky, you can have lox and bagels, which is just decadent.
Anyways, this week's magazine has two foreign policy articles that show the real dynamics of the American foreign policy debate: Not right or left, but rather, freaking out or tamping down. Which is to say, are you freaking out about Latin America? Or tamping down Iran freak-outs?
For starters, you have David Rieff freaking out--hyperbole, there--about Hugo Chavez and his cadre of leftist fellow-Presidents in Latin America. Rieff, a respected liberal journalist who did yeoman's work in Kosovo but who also thinks that the best American policy in Darfur is to do nothing, makes the case that Chavez and his ilk are represent the next ideological challenge to American-style liberal democracy. He's right that Latin American leftism is an ideological challenge to the U.S., but it is only an economic one. Rieff gets freak-out points for trying to link Chavez and co. to Iran and Hezbollah, who join together for symbolic anti-American propaganda and OPEC activities but certainly don't represent a united, or even current, threat. The end point of Rieff's article seems to be that since 1967, socialists haven't liked American capitalism. Glad we cleared that up.
Meanwhile, Laura Secor has a great article about domestic politics in Iran.
On the left right now, there's an interesting debate about the Iran threat. Some people don't take it seriously enough, others take it too seriously. For what its worth, I tend towards a longer-term view; we have at least five years before things get critical, and as my old art teacher used to say, let's explore that space, even as we recognize that a nuclear Iran is completely untenable--and certainly more untenable than a nuclear North Korea. I think Secor's article backs me up: things aren't stable in Iranian politics right now, and with proper coercive diplomacy, we can hope for a Libyan moment. (By the by, I think the single most important article published about Iran is this op-ed by Flynt Leverett, detailing how many times this Administration missed chances to improve our relations with that country.)
So should we be doing about Iran? Freaking out? Or tamping down?
--Tim
Sunday mornings are great for the college student. You get to sleep in, and read the greatest general interest weekly around, the New York Times Magazine. Plus, if you're really lucky, you can have lox and bagels, which is just decadent.
Anyways, this week's magazine has two foreign policy articles that show the real dynamics of the American foreign policy debate: Not right or left, but rather, freaking out or tamping down. Which is to say, are you freaking out about Latin America? Or tamping down Iran freak-outs?
For starters, you have David Rieff freaking out--hyperbole, there--about Hugo Chavez and his cadre of leftist fellow-Presidents in Latin America. Rieff, a respected liberal journalist who did yeoman's work in Kosovo but who also thinks that the best American policy in Darfur is to do nothing, makes the case that Chavez and his ilk are represent the next ideological challenge to American-style liberal democracy. He's right that Latin American leftism is an ideological challenge to the U.S., but it is only an economic one. Rieff gets freak-out points for trying to link Chavez and co. to Iran and Hezbollah, who join together for symbolic anti-American propaganda and OPEC activities but certainly don't represent a united, or even current, threat. The end point of Rieff's article seems to be that since 1967, socialists haven't liked American capitalism. Glad we cleared that up.
Meanwhile, Laura Secor has a great article about domestic politics in Iran.
On the left right now, there's an interesting debate about the Iran threat. Some people don't take it seriously enough, others take it too seriously. For what its worth, I tend towards a longer-term view; we have at least five years before things get critical, and as my old art teacher used to say, let's explore that space, even as we recognize that a nuclear Iran is completely untenable--and certainly more untenable than a nuclear North Korea. I think Secor's article backs me up: things aren't stable in Iranian politics right now, and with proper coercive diplomacy, we can hope for a Libyan moment. (By the by, I think the single most important article published about Iran is this op-ed by Flynt Leverett, detailing how many times this Administration missed chances to improve our relations with that country.)
So should we be doing about Iran? Freaking out? Or tamping down?
--Tim
!
Comments are closed for this post.
"Coercive diplomacy" - I like that phrase. And yet the devil is in the details: what should we be using as leverage with Iran that we're not? That's not a rhetorical question.
I'm not asking for a complete blueprint, but sometimes discussions on liberal/progressive blogs about the merits of diplomacy strike me like the business plan of everybody's favorite cartoon gnomes.
Step 1: Diplomacy!
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
By sharpening the game plan a bit down to coercive diplomacy, that at least takes the first step. But how, exactly, can we coerce them and expect to get results?
One thing I'm also trying to figure out is how the Clinton administration's experience fits into all this. By most accounts, they bent over backward to reach out to Iran. "Axis of evil"? Under Albright the term was "regimes of concern". We offered them far more under Clinton than any Bush envoy ever could, and at the end of negotiations they balked. The firsthand accounts I've seen published by Albright no.2's from the time suggest that Iran's domestic power dynamics were what prevented them from reaching a deal, not a lack of American diplomacy.
If we take that as true, what exactly are we expecting from the Bush administration on the diplomatic front? Any carrots offered up will be less than what they refused from Clinton. As for sticks, there's no domestic support in America for an invasion of Iran, and even limited missile strikes would probably be very unpopular. We've already threatened them several times in various ways, and they've always laughed it off -- what's going to change now? If there's a way that Bush gets some Only Nixon Could Go To China mojo, I'm not really seeing it.
As for what I think we should be doing about Iran today?
Twiddling our thumbs.
We don't have any good options right now, as you've pointed out we do have a few years to wait. Assuming we spend the next few years getting our house in order, it's hard to imagine that right now is the zenith of our ability to influence Iran, and that it's all downhill from here. If a crisis situation develops and military action is necessary -- we can leave that to Israel to sort out, presumably giving them covert logistics support for whatever military option they choose. If a strike against Iran does happen, I trust the Mossad and the IDF more than anyone to get it done right.
I think a lot of progressives essentially support the "twiddling our thumbs" option along with me, but they're cowed into thinking that they need a plan for Iran right now by the people you've fairly accurately described as the "hyperventilators". And so, too often, "diplomacy" becomse the all-purpose fallback.