We all know what the American "strings" are: democracy, freedom, human rights, the rule of law - the whole Iraq-tarnished lexicon of the luminous "city upon a hill." When the West offers money or simply its embrace, it wants these things in return.

You know, that's nonsense. Egypt gets more foreign aid than any other 3rd world country, and the only string that's attached is that they continue to recognize Israel. The entire foreign aid apparatus during the Cold War had nothing to do with democracy, but with establishing anti-Soviet client states.

Posted by: Jay Ackroyd at November 24, 2006 06:26 PM | Permalink to this comment

"Aflaq" is a funny name.

But seriously, I have no problem with America promoting democracy, etc., on the ground that it is in our national interest to do so. But for a country to act on any basis other than what it perceives as its national interest is really wrongheaded. As an initial matter, reasonable people can disagree about the relative value of various goals. To use one particularly relevant example, democracy in Iraq is a fine goal, but I never really thought that it was worth American lives. (As a benchmark, I didn't think that the first Iraq War was worth American lives, either.) What's the over/under on the number of American and other (including Iraqi) casualties that separates whether the intervention will have been "worth it," even if at the end of the day we get a stable, functioning democratic Iraq out of it?

Moreover, and continuing with the lessons of Iraq, the consequences of American attempts to promote our values often can be very different from our goals. That's why, in my view, it's important that our "interventions" be very conservative, so that if things don't go the way we anticipate there's not a big mess to clean up later on. The current Iraq War is a great example of why I think this way.

Posted by: Tillman Fan at November 24, 2006 07:44 PM | Permalink to this comment

Jay, have you considered that it may not be exactly fair the base our analysis of current trends in US foreign policy on things that were done and established in the 1970's? Why, do you think, did we lose our alliance with Uzbekistan, perhaps our most geo-strategically important client in that part of the world? If you hadn't noticed, the Cold War has been over for some time and we're pursuing a very, very different agenda these days. Of course we're stuck with relationships like the one with Egypt, that were forged a long time ago and still serve some purpose. But when we're courting clients these days, there's absolutely nothing "nonsensical" about the idea that it comes with lots of strings attached, of exactly the variety mentioned here. To deny this is simply to deny the facts of US foreign policy as they exist today.

Posted by: Sage at November 24, 2006 07:53 PM | Permalink to this comment

We all know what the American "strings" are: democracy, freedom, human rights, the rule of law -

greg, since you were quoting someone else, I'm not sure if you believe this to be true or not.... but its obviously BS.

China is succeeding not because it doesn't care about "democracy" and "freedom", but because it doesn't insist upon any special economic ideology. Venezuela wasn't a human rights disaster when we sponsored the attempted military coup of the democratically elected Chavez government -- or when we supported the "recall" drive in an attempt to get Chavez out. We did that because he's a Socialist, and he represented a threat to American corporate ownership of Venezuelan assets.

So we made an enemy of Chavez -- and the rest of Latin America, much of which have had their own experience with US interference with their elected governments, sided with Chavez. And China is reaping the benefits of our stupid hostility toward Chavez.

And, IMHO, one of the prime reasons that Iraq has turned into a disaster is that our first "administrators" were economic right-wing ideologues who wanted to impose their economic agenda on Iraq -- which meant attempting to put Iraq's assets up for sale to the highest bidder. Its why we resisted elections for so long --- elections meant loss of control over Iraqi assets.

There is something inherently racist in how the right tries to impose "free market" economies in third world nations, while having no problem tolerating heavily "Socialist" governments in "white" Europe. The rest of the world understands this, and once again, China is reaping the benefits.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at November 24, 2006 08:31 PM | Permalink to this comment

I go for harmony

Posted by: ituloy angsulong at November 24, 2006 09:33 PM | Permalink to this comment

What's a startlet?

Posted by: BruceR at November 24, 2006 09:36 PM | Permalink to this comment

BruceR: nit fixed, thx.

Posted by: greg djerejian at November 24, 2006 10:13 PM | Permalink to this comment

Alas, Gregory, the Lebanese do not seem to be following your & the foreign policy experts script and submit quietly to the Syrian Anshuless! See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/23/world/main2207438.shtml & htto://www.bigpharaoh.com for details & commentary. It does appear that "Peace in Our Time" may be difficult to arrange.
Link to Lebanese bloggers at http://www.beirutbeltway.com/beirutbeltway

Posted by: David All at November 24, 2006 10:48 PM | Permalink to this comment

Gringo, go home.

Your liberty and freedom are always tied to torture and death.

You fool no one except the bootlickers at home.

Posted by: Latin American at November 24, 2006 10:54 PM | Permalink to this comment

China is succeeding partly because we let them manipulate our currency. Traditional economic theory says they aren't going to do what they're doing, or if they do it isn't a problem. Because the result is they give us stuff cheap when they could be getting more. They're manipulating things to their own disadvantage. They're giving away a lot of stuff to us, why shouldn't we just take it?

The result is they have lots of jobs (that don't pay as well as they would otherwise). They have lots of investment and industry. We don't have those jobs. We don't have that investment. We don't have that industry. We instead have a real estate boom and lots of insurance salesmen and stock salesmen, we have lots of people making financial instruments. Why should we work hard making stuff when the chinese do it cheap?

It might turn out that traditional economic theory is short-sighted about this topic. We'll find out.

Posted by: J Thomas at November 24, 2006 11:09 PM | Permalink to this comment

But, Greg, "your caricature-like ideological straight-jacket" got you to endorse the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And still in your mode of intellectual denial about the real facts on the ground, you recently came out for a bipartisan Congressional push and last ditch effort to salvage something positive from the foreign policy debacle in Iraq by endorsing a temporary infusion of more American soldiers into the boiling cauldron in Baghdad. Of course, you finally got your long-awaited wish of Rummy's head. But how has that changed the internal dynamics of the civil war in Iraq?
I'm sure you mean well and are sincere in your concerns. But do you remember that old adage about the road to hell being paved with good intentions? I journeyed down that proverbial road during my naive and idealistic youth when I served in the Vietnam War as a medical corpsman. So I am a bit taken back by your reference to a book by two policy wonks entitled Ethical Realism. Is that a feeble attempt at a Yeatsian oxymoron?
Foreign policy should be based on realpolitik, not ethical realism. It was the realpolitik of elder statesmen like George Keenan, who gave us the victor's laurels in the Cold War. And of course, Keenan was an early intellectual skeptic and later critic of the Johnson administration's military escalation of the war in Vietnam.
Brent Scowcroft now seems prophetic in his op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal during the hysterical propaganda campaign for the Iraq War that we would open Pandora's Box in the Middle East.
And Roger Cohen has little grasp on how the real world works. He recently penned a mea culpa on his enthusiastic endorsement of the Iraq War, "The Lingo of Vietnam." He stated: "In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence would be therapeutic." And he is a fellow Vietnam veteran! I saw nothing therapeutic in the evacuation hospital where I served. Now he finally admits that during his tour of duty he realized the war was unwinnable and unworthy of his life. And he had the chutzpah to point out the moral hyprocrisy of older men in the Bush adminstration sending younger men and women into the hell of the civil war in Iraq. So if he is your role model for reasoned commentary upon a new direction in foreign policy, I think that you are just setting yourself up for another ideological letdown as you did when you jumped on the neo-con bandwagon of transforming Iraq into a model of a functioning democracy in the Middle East.
Where are the realists today in the foreign policy community? I want real men, who know how to put things together, rather than boys with lethal toys, who only seem to know how to break things. I want a foreign policy based upon cold and calculated reasoning that is focused upon a balance of power among nations competing in a globalized economy for natural resources and trade. No more of ethical this or that in my humble opinion. That is the central weakness of the neo cons; it was an ideological frozen world view, which conveniently discounted how the real world works. We are now seeing how the real world works in Iraq. It isn't a pretty sight.
The neo cons were ideologically trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Now they are shamelessly pointing their fingers at each other as they did in their revealing interviews in Vanity Fair.
Cohen implicitly criticizes the Chinese leaders for having no moral scruples about securing the essential natural resources of oil and gas needed to fuel their great leap forward for their citizens into the realm of the middle class and their nation's status as a super-power. But that is in their national interests and based upon a realistic assessment. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from the Chinese about establishing more client-state relationships based upon economic concerns, which will provide our nation true growth among its citizens rather than just the denizens of the upper class.

Posted by: george hoffman at November 24, 2006 11:51 PM | Permalink to this comment

george: leaving aside the merits of your arguments, you're mixing up your cohens i'm afraid. this is not richard, but roger, for my $$ a much better informed columnist.

Posted by: greg djerejian at November 25, 2006 12:07 AM | Permalink to this comment

Sage--

I think you're mistaking rhetoric for policy. Yes, it's true that the Bush administration talks a lot about promoting democracy. But, as always been the case in American foreign policy, regardless of the party in charge, the focus has been on friendly regimes rather than democratically elected regimes. Republican administrations tend to act with military or covert operations against democratically elected regimes that are unfriendly, but in all administrations the long term commitment to representative government and transparency loses out to the short term tactical goal of a friendly government.

What sticks out about this adminstration is how ham-handed it has been in playing this particular game. If they were gonna stage a coup over a democratically elected Chavez, they should have either been successful or kept it quiet. Their pressing for an election in Palestine, and then the rejection of its result was a stunning display of foreign policy incompetence. Their attempts to rig the Iraqi government, leading at last to an actual election, where they played a key role in selecting the head of state showed contempt for democratic processes.

You pooh-pooh standing commitments to repressive regimes as not relevant, because they are standing commitments. You say everything has changed, but then I look at Uganda and find that the "string" in Uganda is tied to the elimination of a very effective anti-AIDS program of broad condom distribution and education, in order that abstinence be promoted instead. I do not know the details with respect to Uzbekistan and would appreciate a link to a source with such details. But from what I can tell the currently fashionable good governance initiiative in the international development community has been driven much more by the UN than by the US. Mozambique is one good example where these policies have been reasonably effective, discounting the odd murdered journalist.

Posted by: Jay Ackroyd at November 25, 2006 02:25 PM | Permalink to this comment

. . . they played a key role in selecting the head of state . . .

In parliamentary systems the prime minister is called the 'head of government'. The 'head of state' is a ceremonial role filled by the monarch if there is one, and otherwise usually by an elected president. In the American system and those modeled on it, both roles are combined in the president.

Posted by: David Tomlin at November 25, 2006 05:52 PM | Permalink to this comment