The Buzz

Jacob Heilbrunn rightly praises Danielle Pletka for exposing the hollowness of the Republican internal debate on foreign policy. It’s past time for a discussion of what, exactly, America aims for in the world beyond its borders, and how the government should work abroad to advance the interests of the citizens it exists to serve. (That debate shouldn’t be confined to the GOP, either—a national conversation is in order.) Yet there’s an unsettling undercurrent to Pletka’s article: the effort to rebrand neoconservatism as internationalism.

Pletka is hardly the only example of this. A major Foreign Policy essay by John McCain, whose views are almost the Platonic ideal of neoconservatism, repeatedly uses the label. The American Enterprise Institute has launched the American Internationalism Project, co-chaired by former senator Joe Lieberman, another neocon. The project’s media presence has been full of neoconservative bromides.

This is somewhat understandable. As National Review’s Reihan Salam has pointed out, “the distinction between Republican internationalism and Republican hawkishness often appears to have collapsed.” The neoconservatives have become the primary voice of GOP foreign policy. The conservative-realist intellectual tradition—which in the past claimed prominent names like Eisenhower, Nixon, Kissinger and Scowcroft—has largely vanished, even though it is certainly internationalist. And at times the alleged isolationists earn the epithet. Rand Paul, for instance, filed a budget amendment with the stated purpose of “reduc[ing] spending by withdrawing the United States from membership in the United Nations.” It’s hard to say that’s internationalism. But the same time, Paul has called himself a realist and, (rumor has it) was influenced deeply by a recent book on ur-realist George Kennan.

The new label erases all the ideological space between the part of Rand Paul that wants out of Turtle Bay and the part of John McCain that inexhaustibly desires new wars. This undermines the very conversation that Pletka wants to promote. It also buries the real key to a Republican restoration—the rejection of the neocons’ reflexive interventionism as the party’s foreign-policy fulcrum. This reflex, now being branded “internationalism,” brought America’s international power to its lowest ebb since the days of Carter. Yet the neoconservatives seem to wear their new nametag without irony.

Even the most secure countries occasionally suffer deliberate attempts on the lives of their leaders. Yet only an absurdly insecure country would see its leader attacked with deadly force by accident. This is what happened in Egypt on Sunday, when a gang of young men in a pickup truck—apparently on their way to a fight—drove into the midst of Prime Minister Hisham Qandil’s motorcade. Qandil’s bodyguards fired warning shots to keep the truck away, prompting one of the men to return fire. Luckily for Qandil, the two volleys of birdshot didn’t hit him (though a bystander may not have been so fortunate). Yet the incident was a distillation of Egypt’s deepening troubles, troubles that eventually may overwhelm it.

Egypt has become an increasingly violent place. Tahrir Square, catapulted into the spotlight as the focal point of the 2011 revolution, has become an open sore, unsafe to visit at night, home to “criminals, former prison inmates freed during 2011 prison breaks, and drug dealers,” and occasional fits of random destruction. Women who venture into the area are sometimes sexually assaulted by mobs; when the police deign to help the victims, they have been known to urge them not to file a report.

Police indifference, in fact, is a key component of Egypt’s problem. Footage from a deadly April attack on a funeral service at a Coptic cathedral appears to show officers doing nothing to interfere with a man firing a pistol at the church; they did manage, however, to arrest four of the mourners. Though the police don’t bother to deliver safety, abuses—sometimes deadly—are widely reported. Reforms are unlikely. President Morsi reportedly fears that police strikes—already a major concern—will spread further if he takes serious action; the police, in turn, fear Morsi aims to bring them under Muslim Brotherhood control.

East of Egypt’s Nile core, the situation is still worse. The Suez Canal area continues to suffer aftershocks from a deadly 2012 soccer riot, and has been an epicenter of police resistance. In the Sinai, antigovernment violence continues to resemble a low-level insurgency and has seriously hindered Egypt’s exports of natural gas, while Salafist terrorists from the Gaza Strip used the area to fire rockets into Israel.

Yet as bad as the security situation has become, disturbing economic trends suggest things could go further downhill. Egypt’s foreign-currency reserves are dwindling and inflation rates are uncomfortably high. Foreign investment is hard to come by, idling Egyptian factories. There are fuel shortages. Children are already going hungry, and there are fears that Egypt’s massive demand for wheat might not be met—the government bet on increased production, but the economic problems are harming agriculture, too. And in spite of all this, Egypt continues to dawdle on taking a big IMF loan that could at least kick the crisis down the road.

In the long run, it’s no prettier. Climate change will be particularly unkind to Egypt, and farmers in some areas are already facing saltwater intrusion from the Mediterranean. Growing demand for water in countries higher up the Nile could combine with decreased rainfall and increased evaporation to reduce the flow of Egypt’s essential river. Birth rates—a key indicator in an overcrowded, underemployed and import-dependent country—have spiked to highs not seen in more than twenty years. Egypt may become a place where an ever-growing public struggles for a piece of a smaller and more expensive pie.

This may be pessimistic. Egyptian officials think they can significantly boost agricultural yields with improved techniques and reduced waste. Reforming the bloated subsidy system so that it helps the poor more than the rich would yield significant savings while reducing the distortions in Egypt’s economy. Getting the police back on the streets might restore some stability and create a better investment climate. So would more predictable politics rooted in a strong constitution. Yet many of these would be tough to realize—and tougher still given the Egyptian state’s current problems. In the worst-case scenario, Egypt continues its slide. The economy shrinks, the population booms, insecurity and intolerance become constants. And with sub-Saharan Africa booming, Egypt could become the new land of international pity.

Google's stated mission is "to organize the world's information." But that's not always as simple as providing the best Chinese takeout menu: in its attempt to classify vast amounts of data, the internet search giant also must make choices that cause controversy—and the occasional international incident.

Its popular maps product, for example, informally adjudicates in numerous international border disputes. The ubiquity of Google Maps means that even unintentional glitches can have real world consequences. In one instance, reports the New York Times, "Google Maps’ imprecision reignited a long-standing border dispute that, with a few miscalculations, could have led to a real war."

Last week Google weighed in very publicly on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Reuters reports that following last November's UN vote to recognize Palestinian statehood, "Google's Palestinian homepage and other products previously labeled 'Palestinian Territories' were changed on May 1 to read 'Palestine.'"

As one might imagine, Palestinians are elated: Google has "put Palestine on the Internet map, making it a geographical reality," said an advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas. According to Reuters, he added "that the Palestinians had invited Google's cartographers to come and gather more data for their online maps." Israel, unsurprisingly, is furious, claiming that the Google's endorsement of Palestinian statehood is an attempt to circumvent the negotiations process. 

Google claims it is simply following the lead of international organizations. A spokesman told the BBC that the company "consult[s] a number of sources and authorities when naming countries. … In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], ISO [International Organisation for Standardisation] and other international organisations."

Putting aside the question of whether Google considers U.S. interests as one of its "sources and authorities," the episode is yet another example of a world that does not turn on the bottom-up, transparent culture of the Wiki. Even the leaders of Silicon Valley—some of the biggest cheerleaders for an Arab Spring fueled by the power of individual Tweets—use an opaque process to reach decisions with significant geopolitical consequences.

Closer to home, tech industry leaders seem to have recognized that public policy is not made by Tweets alone, particularly when it comes to domestic issues. "Facebook’s lobbying budget swelled from $351,000 in 2010 to $2.45 million in the first three months of this year, while Google spent a record $18 million last year," reports the Times. Companies like Google—which once said its motto was "Don't Be Evil"—are finding it increasingly difficult to stay above the fray.

Does the Onion want the United States to fight another war in Syria? The satirical newspaper’s coverage of the two-year-old civil war in that country has taken a dramatic turn. While the publication made semi-regular references to Syria throughout the war’s earlier stages, its barbs have gotten more common and very pointed lately. Its recent posts have been deeply and darkly critical of current U.S. policy in Syria, and sometimes appear to border on outright calls for American intervention.

Consider three examples from the past six weeks. First, there is this mock op-ed on March 25, written from the perspective of the Syrian leader:

Hello. My name is Bashar al-Assad. I am the president of Syria, and in the last two years, you—the citizens of the world and their governments—have allowed me to kill 70,000 people. You read that correctly: I am an individual who has murdered 70,000 human beings since March 2011, and you have watched it happen and done nothing.

Then there is this news brief from April 4:

WASHINGTON—While tucking in his daughters as they settled into bed Tuesday evening, President Barack Obama reportedly kissed the two children gently on the forehead and reminded them that the lives of Syrian people are “worthless” and “completely insignificant.” “I love you two so much and Syrians are subhuman and don’t matter at all,” said the president.

And finally, there is this piece published yesterday, titled “‘Help Has To Be On The Way Now,’ Thinks Syrian Man Currently Being Gassed”:

HOMS, SYRIA—As Syrian military aircraft rained chlorine gas on his community Tuesday, local man Amir Najjar, 36, reportedly assured himself that military and humanitarian aid from foreign governments must certainly be racing toward the country at this very moment to protect him and other helpless civilians.

It’s telling to look at the assumptions that support this line of humor. Namely, these pieces all work from the premise that the world—and the United States in particular—bears the moral responsibility for what happens in Syria. As a result, the practical considerations about how an intervention to stop the killing might work are necessarily washed away. Reluctance to act on the part of President Obama implicitly means that he doesn’t care about the Syrian people, as the second item stresses. It’s the “responsibility to protect” doctrine in comedic form.

Part of the reason that the paper’s Syria coverage has been so striking to read is that in the past, it has often been a voice against what it sees as excessive or ill-advised American military action, particularly in Iraq. One example is this classic 2003 point-counterpoint published as the Iraq War began, which both anticipated many of the disasters that would happen as the war unfolded and perfectly captured the hubris of many of the war’s supporters. More recently, it has gone after President Obama’s regular use of drones to conduct targeted killings overseas. As one of its television “hosts” asked in a video last year, with the Onion’s trademark deadpan mock-seriousness, “After ten years of combat in Afghanistan, is it time to take a second look at our policy of killing Afghan children with missiles shot from terrifying, remote-controlled flying robots?”

Of course, Syria, Iraq and the drone war are all separate issues, and there are valid policy reasons to support one intervention but not the others. But it’s probably wrong to see the Onion’s “positions” (to the extent that one can call them that) as evidence of a consistent house agenda. The more likely explanation is that humorists are naturally going to respond to real or perceived mistakes, especially those made by the U.S. government. Thus far, Obama has chosen to err on the side of caution in Syria. As the body count has risen, this choice makes a fat target for the kind of biting satire cited above. Yet one can easily imagine an alternative scenario in which, if Obama had decided to intervene last year and things had gone badly, the Onion would now be skewering him from the opposite perspective, mocking his and America’s tendency to intervene frequently in other countries.

So, in short, the Onion is not exactly becoming a comedic arm of Bill Kristol–style neoconservatism or the liberal interventionism of Anne-Marie Slaughter. Nevertheless, its shift on Syria is notable, if only because the publication often serves as a bellwether of elite attitudes. Its Syria pieces have been very funny and well executed, but the reason they pack an emotional punch is because they rely on the presumption of a shared belief—on the part of both the audience and the authors—that of course the United States should be doing more in Syria. As the administration reportedly weighs new steps aimed at ousting Bashar al-Assad, the question of how this decision is portrayed in mass-media outlets—even satirical ones—is very much worth watching.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/David Shankbone. CC BY-SA 3.0.