James Kirchick: Off the Fence

There was a curious story in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times entitled, “Few blacks serve in top U.S. diplomatic posts.” Reporters Paul Richter and Tom Hamburger write that “The State Department has fallen short in its efforts to promote African Americans to key frontline diplomatic posts, department officials and diplomats said, despite efforts to increase diversity under two black secretaries of State and a black president.” The article goes onto report that while African-Americans, like United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, do serve in some high-profile positions, “officials said few minorities were climbing to senior frontline posts that wrestle day to day with some of the nation's most urgent international challenges in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.”

I’m not one who supports racial preferences in hiring (or university admissions for that matter), but if there is a case to be made for such a practice, the U.S. diplomatic service is one employer where it would be defensible. America is a nation of immigrants, the melting pot, and we ought to show our (many) faces to the world. Yet while the ideal of a racially diverse foreign service is something that the United States ought to try and achieve, I am also not so naive as to think that foreign governments would be so shallow as to predicate their policy toward us due to the race, sex, or any other unalterable trait of the ambassadors, deputy chief of missions, and charge d’affaires whom we send abroad. After all, that the president of the United States is himself black has brought us nothing by means of tangible deliverables from either our friends or our adversaries, which is not to say that his election was not in and of itself a world historic moment.

But what makes this article curious are the actual statistics used to back up the thesis. According to the State Department, 16.3 percent of its employees are black, while blacks comprise 12.8 percent of the population. So, to be technical about it, blacks are actually over-represented. But a lack of black diplomats is not really the complaint of the article’s sources; what bothers them is that blacks are not serving in “Europe, the Middle East and Asia.” There’s no evidence, however, that anyone in the department is discriminating against blacks wishing to serve in these positions. Indeed, the “problem,” if one can even really call it that, apparently derives from self-selection. “The shortfall,” the Times reports, “stems from a combination of factors, officials and diplomats said, including the fact that many young black diplomats have been drawn to African embassies because of personal interest, and because those embassies have been eager to recruit them.”

So it’s difficult to see just what, if anything, those disturbed by the lack of senior-level black diplomats in certain parts of the world would suggest that the department do to alter this situation, seeing that the black diplomats whose advancement they hope to further voluntarily choose to serve on the continent of their ancestors’ birth. Presumably, these emissaries perform better there then they would in regions that don’t hold their interest to the same extent, a supposition that applies to people in any field of work.

Over the weekend, Iraq held parliamentary elections. Twelve million people—some 62 percent of the electorate—made it out to the polls, numbers that would make any American politician envious. This number is even more remarkable given the threat of violence that always hangs over Iraq and that was especially pronounced during the vote: Insurgents promised vengeance against any Iraqi who dared to partake in the democratic process, and a series of bombings killed 38 people. Nonetheless, the election was widely regarded as free and fair.

While governments around the world, the United Nations, and election observer groups all praised the courage of the Iraqi people and the progress they have made in the seven years since the downfall of Saddam Hussein, the vote was a source of laughter for John Stewart, the pied piper of Generation-X liberals. Recently named the Left’s most influential journalist by The Daily Beast, Stewart was chosen as “America’s most trusted newscaster” in a poll conducted by Time last year, so he’s more than just a comedian, but a major cultural force. Stewart led off a recent newscast with a segment about the election mockingly titled, “Arabian Rights,” juxtaposing news clips of poll-related violence with TV talking heads praising the vote as a “success.” What follows is a series of ham gags, including images of Iraqis inserting their votes into ballot boxes to the sounds of a paper-shredder. Forwarding the meme that the Iraq War was “unilateralist,” there are the requisite jokes about the measly contributions made by the Coalition of the Willing (in the eyes of some, an international action is “illegitimate” and “illegal” unless it earns the favor of France, Germany, Russia, and China). This charge was insulting when Michael Moore used it six years ago in his Fahrenheit 9/11—mocking President Bush’s listing of Poland as a partner in Iraq, which earned Moore the brickbats of Polish critics who compared his film to totalitarian propaganda—and it is no less so today. And it is all the more hypocritical coming from a liberal left that sees conservative foreign policy as being all swagger and bravado and not much else.

Given the nauseating segment he produced, Stewart would have been better off just ignoring recent events in Iraq. But ridiculing the democratic project there and diminishing its signal achievements has become a crucial aspect of the anti-war Left’s discourse, as they are wedded to the belief that Iraq was the most disastrous foreign policy undertaking in American history. In the worldview of Stewart and his viewers, who clap like seals at his every utterance, Iraq is inextricably associated with President George W. Bush, who couldn’t do anything right. In his 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush said that, “the establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.” So even though we are beginning to see the potential for such a watershed, since Bush predicted it, it must be wrong.

And so today we witness the sad spectacle in which the American Left’s most influential cultural voice openly mocks a democratic election in a country brutalized by decades of Stalinist terror, has nothing to say to the vast majority of Iraqis who risked their lives to participate in that election and views the violence perpetrated by Islamic Fascists against them as a laughing matter. Last summer, Christopher Hitchens wrote a thoughtful essay on “the smug satire of liberal humorists,” his chief complaint being that they are mere water-carriers for the Democratic Party and the Left in general, reluctant to mock members of their own team. Whereas this biased posture was barely defensible when Republicans ruled the roost, it has become utterly tiresome now that liberals are in charge. It is a testament to the enduring quality of domestic political venom that this partisanship would extend as far away as Mesopotamia, where the brave people of Iraq have become pawns in a cable comedian’s shtick.

Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru’s National Review cover story on the president’s alleged rejection of American exceptionalism in spheres foreign and domestic is producing much consternation in the blogosphere. Most peculiar among the responses is that of my co-blogger David Rieff, whose initial reply last week associated Lowry and Ponnuru with the paranoids of The John Birch Society, who infamously alleged that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent. By arguing that the president is attempting to move America away from the qualities which make it exceptional—namely “liberty, equality (of opportunity and respect), individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics” along with “our religiousness and our willingness to defend ourselves by force”—and adopt those of a European social democracy, the pair, Rieff says, are reprising long-standing conservative attempts to portray liberals as traitors. What Lowry and Ponnuru are essentially doing, Rieff writes, is alleging that, “President Obama and his supporters are enemies of the United States,” not to mention slyly nodding their heads toward those who argue that the president wasn’t born here.

It doesn’t end there. Like many other writers who express disagreement with the president, these two will no doubt soon have blood on their hands. “Lowry and Ponnuru would presumably indignantly deny that their accusations against President Obama and his supporters had anything of the same quality of the ad that ran in The Dallas Morning News the day President Kennedy was assassinated, accusing him of having made a secret deal with the Communists,” Rieff contends. Finally, in case his point wasn’t clear enough, he deems that the “language” used by Ponnuru and Lowry, “is not the language of political argument” but rather “the language that was in the north Texas air the day John Kennedy flew into Dallas. And while it may not end on a grassy knoll, it is almost certainly going to end badly. Very badly.”

There are many things one could say about this passage, but the most obvious is: Does David Rieff know that it was a communist who assassinated John F. Kennedy?

Meanwhile, the smartest reply to the National Review piece comes from my friend and colleague Damon Linker in The New Republic. He argues that the essay lazily conflates the policy preferences of conservative Republicans with the various creeds that the authors say comprise American exceptionalism. What makes America exceptional is not just laissez-faire economics, but also the struggles of the civil rights movement, largely led by people on the left. Liberal patriotism, more cognizant of America’s previous mistakes and current faults, “sometimes puts more faith in the American future than in its past or present.” That does not make it any less patriotic, just more nuanced. American exceptionalism should not be the exclusive preserve of those on the right, as it’s a tapestry of the various constituencies and movements which have made America freer, fairer, and more productive.

Where I differ from Linker is his view of how a belief in American exceptionalism should inform beliefs about America’s foreign policy. “Is anything less exceptional in human history than a country’s willingness to defend itself by force?” Linker asks, believing the claim that Americans are more supportive of a robust approach to overseas humanitarian crises and foreign aggression to be a straw man. To be sure, and not so long ago, European countries were willing to do a lot more than use force in self-defense. They would rape and pillage to expand their empires. But today, the exact inverse is true, as a gander at the defense budgets of most of our NATO allies attest, never mind their rules of engagement in Afghanistan. Europe, with few exceptions, is a post-martial society. A Gallup poll taken a week after 9/11 found that 80 to 90 percent of people in Europe and Latin America opposed military action against countries harboring terrorists, preferring extradition and prosecution instead (the Taliban, of course, refused to extradite any members of al Qaeda).

Rounding out the responses is this sneering comment from an unnamed (and undistinguished) contributor for The Economist blog, who types: “The fact that there is an American ideology that sees America as unique in the world and at the pinnacle of historical evolution is no more remarkable than the similar self-congratulatory provincial ideologies flaunted by nationalist Israelis, Iranians, French, Dutch, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, North Koreans and Vietnamese.” Because the esteem that we (and untold millions of people around the world) feel for America’s achievements is no more meaningful than the forced displays of loyalty on the streets of Pyongyang or Hanoi. There is an exceptional quality to this sort of argument, in that it is exceptionally dumb.

One of the more remarkable international stories of the past year has been the fate of Honduras. Somehow this tiny, plucky, and extremely poor Central American country managed to outwit and outmaneuver the regional authoritarian, the United States, and the much-ballyhooed power of “international opinion.”

Last June, the Honduran military rousted President Manuel Zelaya from his slumber and exiled him to neighboring Costa Rica. In the preceding months, Zelaya had attempted to hold a referendum to abolish term limits, in clear violation of the country’s constitution (Zelaya had to obtain the ballots from his enabler, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, for his plebiscitary plot). Zelaya’s illegal behavior forced the hand of the country’s Supreme Court, which, with the backing of the attorney general, the human rights ombudsman, the Catholic Church, and most members of Zelaya’s own party, ordered the military to remove him.

Whether or not Zelaya’s arrest by the military (and not, say, the police) and his exile (rather than detention), represented a “coup” (and informed people disagree on this question), what followed hardly resembled the military dictatorships of the Cold War era. “Coup” denotes iron-fisted rule by officers, replete with sunglass-sporting, cigar-chomping generals giving the orders and signing the execution notices. Immediately after shipping Zelaya away so as to prevent domestic instability (a prescient move, given the rioting that followed his covert re-entrance into the country and subsequent sheltering at the Brazilian Embassy, where he called upon followers to overthrow the government and alleged that—you guessed it—the Jews were trying to poison him), the military handed authority over to the president of the Honduran Congress, Roberto Micheletti, himself a member of Zelaya’s Liberal Party.

Meanwhile, the United States did everything short of invading Honduras to see the “coup government” fall. It revoked the visas of top Honduran officials. It suspended military aid. The government-run Millennium Challenge Corporation halted $11 million in economic support. For those of us who have witnessed the left’s descent into isolationism over the past decade, it was quite a thing to behold liberals argue, without any sense of irony, for robust American intervention to right what they considered to be a great wrong. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself spent a half hour on the phone with Micheletti, and, at one point, the United States heralded an agreement that it thought would restore Zelaya to power, only to see it collapse within days of its being signed by both parties.

On November 29th, Honduras held a free and fair election, in which conservative Porfirio Lobo won a resounding victory. The U.S., contradicting its past pronouncements that it would only recognize a Honduran government with Zelaya at its head, abruptly changed course and announced that it would respect the election if it was democratic (it is joined by Taiwan and a handful of Latin American countries in recognizing Lobo). But as much as the U.S. may now try to claim credit for ending Honduras’s political crisis, every major aspect of the new political dispensation—from the creation of a truth commission to investigate Zelaya’s ouster to the amnesty proposal that allowed Zelaya to leave the country peacefully—was decided upon by the Honduran parties themselves, often in defiant opposition of what its neighbors and the U.S. told it to do. For an indication of how the U.S. has followed, rather than influenced, events in Honduras, just take a look at the statement made by our top diplomat for the Americas after the election:

 “The issue is not who is going to be the next president,” Arturo Valenzuela, the new assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, told reporters in Washington. “The Honduran people decided that. The issue is whether the legitimate president of Honduras, who was overthrown in a coup d’état, will be returned to office.” 

This was rather generously characterized by The New York Times as a “qualified response.” Zelaya is now residing in the Dominican Republic, with no plans of returning to Honduras, and yet Washington is acting as if it has played some sort of crucial role in alleviating what Lobo has referred to as “the worst political crisis in our history.”

All of this is to say that the Honduran people’s ability to see their democracy survive through obstacles set up by the strange alliance of Hugo Chavez, the Organization of American States, and the U.S. is a remarkable thing. Last year, I argued that the initial agreement by Zelaya and his opponents to seek mediation from Washington—and not, say, Venezuela—showed that “If the United States cannot avoid taking a leadership position in helping a small and embattled Central American democracy find its way out of an internal political dispute, then the forecast for American global hegemony is far sunnier than what the chroniclers of our decline portend.” In light of recent events, I may need to temper my optimism about the future of America’s influence abroad. For the events in Honduras show that a small group of seemingly powerless people—committed to the ideals of democracy, liberty, and pluralism—can indeed take on the world.

The answer to the question headlining the Saturday afternoon panel at the Munich Security Conference, "The Future of Arms Control and the NPT: Is Zero Possible?" is rather simple: No.

The elimination of nuclear weapons is as wonderful an idea as it is fantastical. That hasn't prevented it from preoccupying the minds of world leaders, and not just liberal ones, ever since the dropping of the atomic bomb. Ronald Reagan, whose mantra was "peace through strength," was a nuclear abolitionist. More recently, former Republican Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have joined former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn and Clinton administration Defense Secretary William Perry in calling for "a world free of nuclear weapons."

None of these men support the radical prescription of American unilateral nuclear disarmament, but that doesn't make the idea of "Global Zero," (to take the name of the organization committed to a "world without nuclear weapons") any more likely. Nuclear weapons provide an enormous strategic benefit to the nations that acquire them, which is why governments spend vast sums in their obtainment. It is why, to take the situation that has captivated the world for the past several years, the Iranian regime has risked so much ­ in terms of its isolation on the world stage and the threat of economic hardship that will come with tighter sanctions ­ to join the nuclear club. No number of briefing papers, commissions, and security conference panels have yet to describe a realistic way by which the world will divest itself of these weapons—and Saturday's discussion in Munich was no different. Even if the goal were to be achieved and all nuclear arms were abolished, that still would not erase nuclear know-how, the intangible knowledge contained in the brains of thousands of scientists around the world. Given that know-how, and the funds to support it, what treaty's verification mechanism would realistically prevent one of the world's less trustworthy and transparent states—and several come to mind—from using the global elimination of nuclear weapons as an opportunity to start a Nuclear Club of One?

Listening to the panelists—Senator John Kerry, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano, former German Foreign Minister and Social Democratic Party leader Frank Walter-Steinmeier, former Indian National Security Advisor Mayankote K. Narayanan—one heard dire warnings about the threat of nuclear proliferation and how it is the solemn responsibility of Russia and the United States (as the nations that inaugurated the nuclear age) to eliminate nuclear weapons. But the connection between these two goals is chimerical. Would-be nuclear powers like Iran do not need the pretext of American or French or Russian or Chinese nuclear capability to acquire their own weapons; they want them regardless for the power and influence they bring. Arguing that nuclear abolition makes attempts to stop proliferation more credible—as President Obama has done repeatedly in speeches from Prague to the United Nations—simply plays into the morally specious arguments of international bad actors.

To appreciate how this mindset forms, consider "The Bomb," a two-hour documentary hosted and co-written by Claus Kleber, one of Germany's most prominent newsmen and the moderator of the panel. A recent critique published by The Weekly Standard describes how the film purports to show how "it is the United States that committed the original sin by developing the first nuclear weapons, and the current risk of proliferation is merely the consequence of America's transgression." On the Web site for the Munich Security Conference, convener Wolfgang Ischinger (a former ambassador to the United States) published a letter to the editors of the magazine attacking the piece. Introducing Kleber the other day, Ischinger said that he should wear criticism from the magazine as "a badge of honor."

The responsibility for throwing cold water on all this silliness was left to Josef Joffe, the redoubtable editor of Die Ziet and one of Germany's most perceptive political analysts, who compared his position as a Global Zero skeptic to that of an agnostic at a Baptist convention. He pointed out that "history simply does not support" the notion that great power disarmament encourages non-proliferation, noting that, since the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia have dramatically reduced stockpiles all the while other nations have built up theirs. Joffe rolled a proverbial stink-bomb down the church aisle by challenging the supposition that nuclear weapons are strategically archaic, noting that Israel helps ensure its security with its nuclear status. And he added that North Korea, a "third-world country, [is] treated as a first-world power" because of its status as a nuclear state. Further, he challenged the fundamental logic underlying any plan to achieve complete nuclear disarmament, because, as stockpiles are cut, each weapon becomes more valuable due to the basic principle of scarcity.

How to explain why such distinguished and knowledgeable figures would support something so utterly fanciful? There's a common trait in elder statesmen that compels them to find benign, fuzzy ideas around which they can all cohere. In this sense, Global Zero is just another aspect of building one's legacy. Or perhaps Global Zero is just a noble lie; an idea that sounds pleasant to third-world ears, but in which everyone tacitly understands to be non-operative.