realists

You know how so many in the blogosphere bitch and moan about the ability of neoconservatives to get their policy proposals published even after screwing up on Iraq? 

I'm kind of curious how these people feel about Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett's op-ed in the New York Times today about Iran.  I mean, this is a scant few months after they served as apologists for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the controversial June election.  I guess the Leveretts know Gwen Pollard well. 

Others can debate whether the Leveretts deserve the prime real estate on the NYT op-ed page.  I'd like to focus on the fact that the op-ed itself makes no f***ing sense whatsoever. 

Let's take a look at it, shall we?

[T]he meeting on Thursday in Geneva of the United Nations Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany with Iran (the “five plus one” talks) will not be an occasion for strategic discussion but for delivering an ultimatum: Iran will have to agree to pre-emptive limitations on its nuclear program or face what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls “crippling” sanctions.

However, based on conversations we’ve had in recent days with senior Iranian officials — including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — we believe it is highly unlikely Iran will accept this ultimatum.

Oh, wow... senior Iranian officials told the Leveretts that they would not concede?  Well, I'd definitely take that at face value.  I'm sure these were the same people who told the Leveretts that Ahmadinejad was the legitimate victor back in June.  Clearly, these are reliable sources with zero incentive to dissemble to regime-friendly pundits in the United States.  And it's not like they have anything to hide.  Oh, wait....

 American officials tend to play down Iranian concerns about American intentions, citing public messages from President Obama to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, as proof of the administration’s diplomatic seriousness. But Tehran saw these messages as attempts to circumvent Iran’s president — another iteration, in a pattern dating from Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, of American administrations trying to create channels to Iranian “moderates” rather than dealing with the Islamic Republic as a system.

Wow again.  See, I would view these exchanges with Khamenei as attempts to talk to the person with actual control over Iran's nuclear program, as opposed to the guy who rants on and on about how the Holocaust was just a big myth. 

Indeed, the Obama administration is "dealing with the Islamic Republic as a system" -- and they are trying to talk to the people with genuine foreign policy power.  The Leveretts, on the other hand, seem to be convinced that the only way to talk with Iran is through Ahmadinejad. 

Unfortunately, the Obama administration was enticed by the prospect of regime-toppling instability in the aftermath of Iran’s presidential election this summer. But compared to past upheavals in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history — the forced exile of a president, the assassination of another, the eight-year war with Iraq and the precipitous replacement of Ayatollah Khomeini’s first designated successor, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, with Ayatollah Khamenei — the controversy over this year’s election was hardly a cataclysmic event.

Seriously, how did this paragraph get past the op-ed editors?  First of all, beyond a rhetorical flourish or two and asking Twitter to hold off on their scheduled maintenance, what exactly did the Obama administration do to foment regime-toppling instability?  Second, if the largest street demonstrations since the 1979 revolution don't qualify as a big event, what would convince the Leveretts of the import of the June election?  More YouTube videos?  Hand puppets? 

Instead of pushing the falsehood that sanctions will give America leverage in Iranian decision-making — a strategy that will end either in frustration or war — the administration should seek a strategic realignment with Iran as thoroughgoing as that effected by Nixon with China. This would require Washington to take steps, up front, to assure Tehran that rapprochement would serve Iran’s strategic needs.

On that basis, America and Iran would forge a comprehensive framework for security as well as economic cooperation — something that Washington has never allowed the five-plus-one group to propose. Within that framework, the international community would work with Iran to develop its civil nuclear program, including fuel cycle activities on Iranian soil, in a transparent manner rather than demanding that Tehran prove a negative — that it’s not developing weapons. A cooperative approach would not demonize Iran for political relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah, but would elicit Tehran’s commitment to work toward peaceful resolutions of regional conflicts.

This seems as propitious a moment as any to cave to popular demand that I articulate some thoughts on the sanctions question with regard to Iran.  I would expect some somewhat more utility in the sanctions process than the Leveretts.  If the U.S. can foster cooperation among the P5 + 1, and the Iranians see the extent of this cooperation, then I think they'd be willing to deal.  That's not an easy proposition to pull off, and would require both diplomatic skill and will.  That does not mean it should't be tried, however.  Even the effort to build momentum in the Security Council might prompt serious bargaining from the Iranians. 

I would also like to know how the Iranian opposition feels about sanctions.  If they reject them as a policy tool, well, that's a good argument against their imposition.  On the other hand, if this is a replay of South Africa, then that's something else to consider. 

One final point -- the analogy with Nixon's opening to China makes zero sense in the current context.  Nixon was trying to outflank the Soviet Union during the Cold War by cozying up to their most powerful bordering state.  What the Leveretts seem to be proposing is a multilateral move to bring Iran in from the cold -- which benefits Russia and China far more than it benefits the United States.  In other words, I'm not sure how a Nixon strategy works in the P5 + 1 framework. 

I suppose that the Obama administration could attempt secret shuttle diplomacy with Iran to outflank Moscow and Beijing.  Such a gambit would infuriate our European allies and push Israel into panicking, however -- and I'm not sure that's worth whatever strategic gains would be had by a rapprochement with the regime in Tehran. 

So, to review, I give the Leverett op-ed an "I" -- for being inchoate, inconsistent, and idiotic. 

Two interesting articles of note over the weekend.  The first is Clive Thompson's essay on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (otherwise known as BDM) and his Fabulous Foreign Policy Game Theory Contraption forecasting model-for-hire.  Bruce is the leading proselytizer of using game theory as a predictive tool in political science -- and he has quite the forecasting business to back him up. 

Bruce seems to merit one of these every two years or so, and Thompson hits most of the same sources and critics of BDM's approach.  He does add this nugget of information, however: 

Those who have watched Bueno de Mesquita in action call him an extremely astute observer of people. He needs to be: when conducting his fact-gathering interviews, he must detect when the experts know what they’re talking about and when they don’t. The computer’s advantage over humans is its ability to spy unseen coalitions, but this works only when the relative positions of each player are described accurately in the first place. “Garbage in, garbage out,” Bueno de Mesquita notes. Bueno de Mesquita begins each interview by sitting quietly — “in a slightly closed-up manner,” as [U.K. telecommunications company Cable and Wireless Richard] Lapthorne told me — but as soon as an interviewee expresses doubt or contradicts himself, Bueno de Mesquita instantly asks for clarification.

“His ability to pick up on body language, to pick up on vocal intonation, to remember what people said and challenge them in nonthreatening ways — he’s a master at it,” says Rose McDermott, a political-science professor at Brown who has watched Bueno de Mesquita conduct interviews. She says she thinks his emotional intelligence, along with his ability to listen, is his true gift, not his mathematical smarts. “The thing is, he doesn’t think that’s his gift,” McDermott says. “He thinks it’s the model. I think the model is, I’m sure, brilliant. But lots of other people are good at math. His gift is in interviewing. I’ve said that flat out to him, and he’s said, ‘Well, anyone can do interviews.’ But they can’t.”

Patrick Appel links to this essay because of BDM's Iran predictions (according to him, the student protestors will be more powerful than Khamenei by the fall).  He notes, "Let's hope his model is right, but I'm skeptical that these questions can be predicted by equations alone."  Except as the above quote suggests, it's not just equations alone -- it's knowing what values to plug into those equations.  This requires a different set of skills -- and rare is the person who excels at both. 

Speaking of brain skills, I found Emily Yoffe's Slate essay on brain chemistry to be kind of interesting.  The argument in a nutshell:

Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting "enter" to get our next fix....

[O]ur brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. "The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire," [University of Michigan professor of psychology Kent] Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one....

Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. [Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak] Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

I fully recognize the biochemical reward system discussed in the essay, and I've certainly heard this argument applied to bloggers who allegedly lose the ability to engage in long-form writing.  But based on my own experience, I don't buy it. 

True, blogging, updating, etc. brings excitement.  But I get the same thrill from perfecting a longer stretch of prose.  When I'm polishing up a case study or trying to refine a theoretical argument, I usually feel the desires for new information that I get when I'm blogging.  Indeed, the biggest mental rush I get from writing is tackling a completely new subject and then, 10,000 words later, retackling the first draft with renewed vigor and the promise of molding it into something better.  Once I think I have something of merit, oooh, does the dopamine kick in.

But that's just me.  Tell me, dear readers -- are your electronic gadgets hampering you ability to do long-form work?     

In the spring I wrote in The National Interest online about the GOP split between realists and neocons.  Now, Ilan Goldenberg argues that the split is complete -- because the realists have endorsed Barack Obama or endorsed his policies:

Consider this list:

• Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama.
• Richard Lugar, Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has endorsed Obama's approach to diplomacy over that of McCain.
• Brent Scowcroft refuses to endorse either way.  Pretty telling for a former Republican national security advisor, especially since he was opposed to the war in Iraq.
• James Baker continues to support direct talks with Iran and has for the past two years. (Actually just read the entire five secretaries of state even transcript from CNN.  It's one big endorsement of Obama's foreign policy)
• Kissinger and Schultz are op-eds in the Washington Post and Financial Times calling for a more moderate approach towards Russia.
• Kissinger has also called for direct talks with Iran (At the Secretary of State level).
• Chuck Hagel has traveled to Iraq with Obama and while not publicly endorsing looks to be pretty clearly in favor of Obama.
• Secretary of Defense Bob Gates is giving speeches that sound a lot more like an Obama foreign policy than a McCain foreign policy.

The dirty little secret is that all of these pragmatic conservatives have more in common with Obama's world view and that of the progressive community as a whole than they do with McCain and Neoconservatism.  Right now most of them are sticking with McCain because of old friendships and loyalties, a desire to stay out of politics, or because they are social and economic conservatives.  But don't be surprised if Powell's endorsement will encourage more of these pragmatic foreign policy conservatives to come over to the Democrats over the next few years.   But don't be surprised if Powell's endorsement will encourage more of these pragmatic foreign policy conservatives to come over to the Democrats over the next few years.  

Well.... the thing about that list is that everyone on it is pretty old.  And I'm not sure how many yonger realists there are on the GOP side.  Hence the title to this post.