Blogs

If I were a political adviser to those relentlessly pushing recriminations about the attack last year on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, I think my advice would be, “Give it a rest.” This pseudo-scandal has become so forced, so contrived, and so blatantly driven by motives other than safeguarding the security of U.S. interests that the unending push has already passed the point where it serves any identifiable objectives, even partisan political ones. The subject, about which a panel of inquiry has completed its work and issued its report, is already tiresome; imagine how much more tiresome it will be to voters by 2016 after three more years of it.

A poll on Benghazi released this week by Public Policy Polling suggests that the agitation on the subject is keeping a Republican base agitated but not making wider inroads on public opinion. One has to ask what good it does Republicans to dwell on something that keeps one segment of the population angry about Barack Obama (and Hillary Clinton) when that segment was already angry about Obama anyway. When asked whom the respondent trusted more on the issue of Benghazi, 49 percent said Hillary Clinton and 39 percent said Congressional Republicans. On other questions asking for an overall favorable or unfavorable rating, Clinton enjoys an eight-point margin over Congressional Republicans, the same margin as in a similar poll in March.

The Obama administration is mired in a fresh scandal of its own making. The revelation that the Justice Department has been snooping into the phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors indicates that the administration's ruthlessness when it comes to trying to protect its reputation and sources knows no bounds. Attorney General Eric Holder, always a poor choice for a cabinet post, should resign. Coupled with the revelation that the IRS has been selectively targeting Tea Party groups and the botched handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack, the administration confronts a second term that appears to be ending even before it has even really begun.

Obama has always prided himself on being squeaky clean when it comes to governing. He campaigned for transparency in government. He said he was against soft money. He said that members of his administration would have to demonstrate the highest ethical standards ever. Well, that was then. He has nominated the tax-dodging billionaire Penny Pritzker, who bankrolled his political ascendancy, to serve as his Commerce secretary. He has hoovered up any and all funds he can attract, infuriating proponents of campaign finance reform. And now his administration, in its mad and obsessive and destructive pursuit to quash any leaks, has besmirched itself by targeting journalists for investigation.

Amid much talk lately about “red lines”—to the point that the term would be a strong candidate for cliché of the year—we should reflect on the relative inattention, as Richard Falk points out in a recent commentary, to what used to be one of the most fundamental and important red lines of all. The line in question, which Falk notes the United States once played a leading role in formulating, is “the prohibition of the use of international force by states other than in cases of self-defense against a prior armed attack.”

Falk has been around long enough to rile adversaries on many issues about which he has been outspoken (and I have disagreed with some of his past positions). It was nearly forty years ago that I took a graduate course in international law from him, and he is now in his eighties. But he does speak some uncomfortable truths. Many he has spoken in connection with his current function as the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. Most recently he incurred irresponsible vitriol, including some from U.S. officials, when he noted—accurately—that U.S. policies have something to do with stimulating the kind of violent extremism exhibited by the Boston Marathon bombers. His observation about disregard for the once-prominent norm against aggression gets to another set of truths.

China this week got about as far as it ever has gotten into the Middle East peace process by hosting back-to-back visits by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This was still only, as the New York Times coverage put it, a dipping of China's toe into that process. The odds are that Beijing will not be wading much farther into that water any time soon. The new Chinese leadership certainly has plenty on its plate right at home, including uncontrolled corruption, near-catastrophic environmental degradation, and the need to adapt to a slowdown in economic growth. Moreover, continued festering of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not hurt Chinese interests as severely and directly as it hurts the interests of the United States, because of the latter's association with the Israeli occupation and other controversial Israeli actions.

At Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt has a good piece in which he examines (and praises) President Obama’s view of the global threat landscape. In Walt’s words, “The bedrock foundation of Obama's foreign policy is his recognition that the United States is very, very secure.” In this assessment, there are few scenarios that threaten American security or interests to a degree that they require an aggressive U.S. response, especially in the form of military action. As a result, “Obama has reacted slowly and in a measured way to most international events. He takes his time, remains calm, and prefers to pass the buck to others whose interests are more directly affected.”

Walt ends with this wish:

I wish he could give one of his trademark speeches explaining this logic to the American people. He probably can’t, alas, because this sort of realism cuts against the rhetoric of “global leadership” that has been part of the Establishment echo-chamber for decades, not to mention the self-conceit of American exceptionalists. So Obama will continue to sound like his predecessors when he talks about America's global role; he just won't do most of the foolish things that most of them would have.

Walt is certainly correct that we are never likely to hear a presidential speech extolling the virtues of “buck-passing” or “leading from behind.” Nor are we likely to hear any president tell us that by any objective standards, the United States remains very secure.

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.

Where should the Republican party head on foreign policy? Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute has a new essay called "Who Are We Again?" on the Foreign Policy web site, suggesting that the GOP is in the throes of a debate between neocons and realists. It's a stimulating and provocative piece.

Pletka says that she never thought the battle between the neocons and realists would be joined so quickly. The proximate cause, as she points out, is Syria, where President Obama is trying to muddle his way through, with his critics arguing that the muddling is precisely what is making a bad situation worse, a point that both the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal editorial pages—but not the New York Times—agree upon. Has President Obama's refusal to engage in Syria, in fact, made it more likely that he will end up engaging militarily? She also acknowledges that in some areas defense spending could be safely cut. And she notes that realist tenets can themselves become shibboleths about building at home rather than abroad, and so forth. Any credo can, of course, degenerate into a doctrine.

But her basic point is this:

The island kingdom of Bahrain has stuck out as a kind of sore thumb in the Persian Gulf ever since the Arab Spring got under way. It is the only one of the six monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council that has seen major political unrest during these past two or three years. It also is a place where U.S. objectives don't really fit together. Two principal attributes of Bahrain underlie these observations.

One is that it has a Shia majority, constituting about 70 percent of the Bahraini population, but is ruled by a Sunni regime. In that respect it is like Iraq before Saddam Hussein's ouster and unlike the other GCC states, which all have Sunni majorities. Economic patterns correlate with religious ones; Bahraini Shia are generally less well off than their Sunni countrymen.

The other attribute is that Bahrain has a major military relationship with the United States, including being the home of the Fifth Fleet. This fact evidently has dominated the thinking behind U.S. policy on Bahrain. It has been a major disincentive against rocking boats regarding political and economic rights of the Bahraini people. When Saudi Arabia sent forces across the causeway to help the Bahraini regime quell Shia unrest, the United States did not make an issue of it.

For job seekers, sometimes there's no substitute for pounding the pavement—or even putting yourself on display in a storefront window, hoping to catch the attention of a potential employer passing by. In Denmark, the Wall Street Journal reports, some white-collar professionals have resorted to this awkward, sidewalk self-exhibition, a practice often associated with prostitutes in Amsterdam's red-light district.

The Situationist International, postwar Marxist activists who decried the "society of the spectacle," would have a field day pointing out this commodification of the individual worker. Perhaps they had a point, anticipating that there are instances in which capitalism really does start to resemble a theater of the absurd.

But in the market of our time, where flexible labor is valued over job security, workers are already in the habit of constanty advertising their services in very public albeit virtual forums such as LinkedIn. The window stunt may simply acknowledge that for the unemployed, posting to online forums and sending out dozens of resumes via email per day has limited utility—particularly when many of these messages are lucky to be read by a computer algorithm, let alone a human hiring manager. And to be fair, it's not as if the shop window is akin to some medieval slave market: the job seekers sit in relative comfort, tapping away on their laptops.

Michael Hirsh, one of Washington's ablest commentators on foreign affairs, has a provocative piece in the Atlantic arguing that Mitt Romney got a bum rap during the election campaign when he declared that Russia is America's No. 1 geopolitical foe, a clear and present danger to our national security. Romney's observation created an uproar. Russian President Vladimir Putin observed, "“I’m grateful to him (Romney) for formulating his stance so clearly because he has once again proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems." At the same time, Romney was roundly mocked, including by yours truly, for indulging in cold war nostalgia rather than confronting contemporary realities. President Obama seized upon the remark to suggest that it demonstrated Romney was an utter doofus when it came to foreign affairs.