Blogs

Commentary yet to be written on President Obama's visit to Israel no doubt will be infused with readings of the congeniality meter—assessments of whether meetings between the president and the Israeli prime minister show any evidence of warming of U.S.-Israeli relations. Consensus expectations seem to be pretty low on this score, but that will not stop the meter-reading. There's nothing wrong with that on the face of it. What is wrong, however, is the prevalent assumption that warmth in this case is necessarily good, and lack of warmth necessarily bad. Warmth is good if it advances or protects U.S. interests, not if it doesn't.

In many alliances and friendships between nations this may seem almost like a distinction without a difference. There may be a reservoir of empathy, goodwill and, most important, a broad set of common or parallel interests that pays dividends to each side in ways that do not need to be connected explicitly with any one action or any one summit meeting at which leaders make nice to each other. Keeping the reservoir filled can confidently be expected to be good for the interests of one's own nation over the long term. This generally characterizes, for example, the relationship that the United States has with Britain or Canada. But the relationship between the United States and Israel is extraordinary and very different from any other—so much so in its nature and implications that it deserves to be called strange. The profuse provision of support and expressions that the larger country directs to the smaller one is not rooted in commonality of interests but instead in the larger country's internal politics.

Washington is marking the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in an unusual way: with talk of a new war, this time in Syria. Following unconfirmed rumors of a chemical attack, Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham issued a joint statement calling for “the provision of arms to vetted Syrian opposition groups, targeted strikes against Assad’s aircraft and SCUD missile batteries on the ground, and the establishment of safe zones inside Syria to protect civilians and opposition groups.”

Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat, then told Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin that he believes “there should be the next ratcheting up of military effort and that would include going after some of Syria's air defenses.” He suggested, in agreement with earlier testimony by NATO head Admiral James Stavridis, that antiaircraft missiles could be placed on the Turkish border to create a no-fly zone in northern Syria without actually entering Syrian territory: “It is a way without putting boots on the ground and in a way that would be fairly cautious, that would put additional pressure on Assad.”

If you were a stolid burgher living in prosperous Bavaria who had conscientiously salted away his savings over the past several decades, would you really want to hand them over to Greece, Portugal, and even Cyprus? That's the conundrum facing the technocrats who are striving mightily in Brussels, Frankfurt, and Berlin to hold together the rickety contraption known as Europe. Now that Cyprus--which is more like a city-state than a country, with its one million inhabitants--needs a big bailout, the unresolved tensions of the European unification are becoming increasingly acute.

It seems like every few months Europe confronts a fresh crisis and then muddles through. But this time the Cypriots are putting up more resistance than usual to the financial engineers in Brussels and Berlin. What's more, there's a Russian connection that is also causing more than a bit of consternation among the Eurocrats. Cyprus is, at bottom, an old-fashioned kind of place--a country where you can park billions earned licitly or illicitly and figure, with a pretty high degree of confidence, that no pesky inspectors from the international community will be able to snoop around and discover the amount stashed away. Now that Switzerland is getting more transparent, Cyprus looks to be one of the last redoubts of a great banking tradition.

Those of us who worry and write more about about foreign affairs than about domestic ones have largely been spared confrontation with the formidable U.S. gun lobby. There is only the sadness any citizen can feel at this country's political inability to regulate effectively the trade in implements used in the sorts of violent incidents that have led gun control to move back, at least for now, to a prominent place on the national agenda. The resumption this week, however, of multilateral negotiations on a treaty on the international trade in conventional arms demonstrates that foreign policy is not immune to the gun lobby's heavyweight presence. The lobby, as represented most familiarly by the National Rifle Association, is by no means the only source of disquiet about such a treaty in the United States—which is, by a small margin over Russia, the world's leading arms exporter. But the lobby is mounting a significant effort to spike the treaty even before negotiations are complete.

The idea of implementing additional international legal control on the arms trade has been around for some time. Diplomatic activity leading directly to the current negotiations began about a decade ago. Back in the 1970s, ultimately unsuccessful bilateral negotiations to curb the trade in conventional arms took place between the two largest arms sellers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The type of multilateral treaty that is currently under discussion at the United Nations would hardly be a cure-all for the kinds of internal violence that are the main concern. It would, however, be a modest and reasonable measure to provide a legal framework aimed at reducing the means for perpetrating the most egregious instances of such violence, and otherwise creating greater transparency in the international arms trade.

Earlier this year, there was a minor kerfuffle when the New Republic, which had commissioned a lengthy piece by journalist Steven Brill on health-care costs for its first cover story after its relaunch, bumped Brill in favor of running an interview with President Obama. As a result, Brill took his roughly twenty-five-thousand-word opus to Time instead. Today, the New York Times reports that Brill is taking somewhat of a victory lap, as his piece proved a big hit both in terms of sales and online presence:

The 25,000-word article that Steven Brill wrote for the magazine’s March 4 issue appears to be on course to become its best-selling cover in nearly two years. Ali Zelenko, a Time spokeswoman, said the issue sold more than double the typical number of copies. . . . The article was shared 100 times more often on social media than the average Time article in 2013, and the #BitterPill hashtag was mentioned nearly 6,000 times on Twitter.

At Politico, Dylan Byers argues that this means TNR made a mistake. As he says, “Brill's piece was far more substantive, far more impactful and far more daring,” and running it in their first issue “would have made a bold statement.” In contrast, he writes, the Obama interview “made no lasting impact on any national debate, save for a few days discussion of Obama's skeet-shooting habits.”

The New York Times reports that the entry of Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and similar figures into the Republican foreign-policy debate has provoked worry in the party:

Now, a new generation of Republicans like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is turning inward, questioning the approach that reached its fullest expression after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and signaling a willingness to pare back the military budgets that made it all possible.

That holds the potential to threaten two wings of a Republican national security establishment that have been warring for decades: the internationalists who held sway under the elder President George Bush and the neoconservatives who led the country to long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under President George W. Bush.

Members of both camps said this week that they fear returning to a minimalist foreign policy . . .

Senator John McCain has apparently become a foreign policy ornithologist. He recently dismissed his fellow Senator Rand Paul and others who share his views on a less expansive American foreign policy as "wacko birds," a term, one might think, that would most appropriately apply to the woman from the frozen wasteland of Alaska that he selected to become his vice-presidential candidate. Paul's feathers appear to be unruffled. At the CPAC convention, Paul, fresh off his drones filibuster triumph, which earned him kudos on both the left and right, gave as good as he got, suggesting that McCain and his chum Senator Lindsey Graham are mossbacks, relics of a past era.

These verbal fusillades have prompted the media to conclude that a civil war is taking place in the GOP on foreign affairs (though the current attacks look more like preliminary shots than all-out combat). A case in point is an article about the GOP by Michael D. Shearer in today's New York Times. Shearer correctly suggests that the GOP is starting to revisit the question of whether America should intervene abroad or mind its own knitting. He quotes Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass (the author of a new book called Foreign Policy Begins At Home), who appears to approve of some aspects of Paul's approach to foreign affairs and worry about others. He also zeroes in on the views of neocons such as Dan Senor who profess to be worried about the prospect of a Pauline conversion in the GOP. Shearer's conclusion:

Documentaries, commentaries and forums marking the ten-year anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War have been so numerous that they already have become tiresome, even though the actual anniversary of the invasion is not until next Tuesday. The repetition would nonetheless be worthwhile if it helped to inculcate and to reinforce lessons that might reduce the chance that a debacle comparable to the Iraq War will itself be repeated. Maybe some such positive reinforcement will occur, but a problem is that the anniversary retrospectives also give renewed exposure to those who promoted the war and have a large stake in still promoting the idea that they were not responsible for foisting on the nation an expedition that was so hugely damaging to American interests.

Some may say print is dead, but one thing is sure: they haven't been to Burma. In just two short weeks the Burmese press will be free to print daily news for the first time in over fifty years, and local journalists (or largely, the young people who want to become them) are electrified with excitement. While their internet connections are shoddy, the would-be journos have been practicing for months, running off private daily editions of the Myanmar Herald and Rangoon Times in anticipation of the April 1 start date. Shanghai-based Jake Spring's piece for the Atlantic is a great window into this special and changing time in the Southeast Asian country. That said, not all will be smooth sailing. According to Spring:

The selection of a Roman Catholic pope is a fascinating, even if mostly occluded, political process. It ought to inspire some thinking about what is good and bad about our own process for choosing a top leader. Of course, a church is not a national government (notwithstanding the legally sovereign status of the Holy See), and some aspects of the selection process that may be appropriate for the former would not be for the latter. The cardinals, for example, are supposed to be inspired by the Holy Spirit in choosing a new pope. Given how much religion, contrary to the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, tends to get injected into American politics these days, this may not appear to be a point of major difference—but that is not one of the attractive features of American politics.

In some respects the cardinals' selection of a pope resembles how some cabinet or parliamentary systems, including in Europe, choose top leaders while differing from how U.S. presidents are picked. By choosing someone from their own ranks, the new leader is certain to be someone with already established experience, accomplishment and stature in the organization. There are no retail politics in the Vatican. One can argue for the virtues of American-style retail politics, but a major virtue of the alternative is to eliminate splashy but inept amateurs from consideration. The secrecy of the papal selection process probably would not fit most secular political systems, although until not very many years ago the Conservative Party in Britain chose its leaders, and thus a good number of prime ministers, through a process that was just as opaque to the public.