Recently in Foreign Relations Category

That's what James Fallows has been arguing the past few days at his Atlantic blog. Fallows' analysis that the trip was not a failure appears to grow more persuasive with each passing day's new headlines.

Reporting from China, James Fallows notes from his experience that only a small minority of Chinese residents know enough about what happened 20 years ago at Tiananmen Square to give June 4 any real significance.

Former State Department official Hillary Mann Leverett, who participated in secret talks with Iran, has a post on the Washington Note explaining why she believes our Secretary of State is wrong to assert the United States is winning the battle with Iran over who will have the most influence in Iraq.

Steve Benen reminds us that this Spanish Prime Minister snub is not the first foreign policy related gaffe from John McCain. In fact, McCain has recorded quite a list.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's request to dissolve the Canadian parliament was accepted today, setting up the third national election Canada has held the past four years.

(How very California-esque of our neighbors to the north.)

Harper has been governing in a minority government, and polls suggest that he may be able to strengthen his position. It appears that Harper is going to make the Liberal Party's proposed carbon tax a major feature of the campaign.

It's a busy fall, but it is important to keep an eye on what Canada is doing. (And I say that not just because I lived less than two miles from the Canadian border in high school.)

This is a mistake that shall have lasting foreign policy implications. McClatchy's Jonathan S. Landay reports:

President Bush Wednesday promised that U.S. naval forces would deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Georgia before his administration had received approval from Turkey, which controls naval access to the Black Sea, or the Pentagon had planned a seaborne operation, U.S. officials said Thursday.

As of late Thursday, Ankara, a NATO ally, hadn't cleared any U.S. naval vessels to steam to Georgia through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the officials said. Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, countries must notify Turkey before sending warships through the straits.

Pentagon officials told McClatchy that they were increasingly dubious that any U.S. Navy vessels would join the aid operation, in large part because the U.S.-based hospital ships likely to go, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy, would take weeks to arrive.

"The president was writing checks to the Georgians without knowing what he had in the bank," said a senior administration official.

He's only been president for over seven-and-a-half years. I suppose it is unfair of me to assume that a man who calls himself the commander-in-chief so much might have this basic part of military affairs and foreign policy figured out by now.

You would think that the proper response to such a headline is "duh," but apparently this observation requires instead a debate among our presidential candidates. How bizarre a political world.

Over at Crooks and Liars, Steve Benen goes through the details, noting the difference between what Republicans like Senator John McCain say and the reality of the situation.

Benen helpfully notes the difference between Iran and the USSR, pointing to observations made by Josh Marshall and Fareed Zakaria.

Marshall: the USSR was "the world's greatest land military power, with a massive strategic nuclear capacity that carried on a multi-decade ideological struggle with the US."

Zakaria on Iran: "Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century…. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?"

One of these countries is not like the other.

I also realize that it is considered rude for me to note that before President George W. Bush's ill-advised war, Iraq was not an ally of Iran. Now they are. Yet you are supposed to feel safer. Uh-huh.

Iran is not the Soviet Union. It's not even close. It is okay to talk--talking does not equal appeasement. Even Ronald Reagan understood that when he faced the Soviet Union. (I'll be nice and not mention in detail just what Reagan did with Iran and the Contras. That would probably also be rude.)

Our so-called liberal media remains hard at work repeating White House spin that the president was not referring to Sen. Barack Obama last week when he made his unacceptable remarks about appeasers.

Except, as John over at Americablog reminds us, there were several contemporary reports where White House staff members told reporters that the president was absolutely talking about Obama and the Democratic Party. Click here for the gory details.

Josh Marshall adds an important comment to an analysis of President Bush's offensive and historically inaccurate remarks about Sen. Obama and appeasement written by one of the Talking Points Memo readers:

On balance I'd say that each time President Bush shames his office by transgressing the unwritten rules of the American polity, it's incumbent on everyone to rebuke him. As a political matter, though, it doesn't amount to that much. Every time the president does something like this, the Democratic nominee needs to point out again that President Bush bungled the country into a disastrous war that has damaged America, failed to find Osama bin Laden, funded it all but driving us further into debt to China and various Gulf sheikdoms. And McCain supports it all 100%.

Always stay on the offensive.

That is excellent advice.

The Washington Note's Steve Clemons posts an initial analysis by the Nelson Report's Chris Nelson about Pakistan in the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's assassination. As Clemons writes:

Chris Nelson is correct that while the world is debating the state of democracy in Pakistan -- the military and intel elites are worried about what they should be concerned about -- the nukes.

Per usual, Nelson's analysis is worth reading.

The former Pakistani prime minister was assassinated following an election rally, just 12 days before scheduled parliamentary elections.

It is hard to overstate just how bad this news could prove to be. While we do not focus on the country much, it is an important nation on the world stage, as Professor Juan Cole explains:

Pakistan is important to US security. It is a nuclear power. Its military fostered, then partially turned on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which have bases in the lawless tribal areas of the northern part of the country. And Pakistan is key to the future of its neighbor, Afghanistan. Pakistan is also a key transit route for any energy pipelines built between Iran or Central Asia and India, and so central to the energy security of the United States.

One cannot easily overstate what is at stake in Pakistan over the next few hours, days, and weeks.

I'd really like Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub to justify this slur against the Democratic candidates:

Of course, the Democrats are not much better. They deny that the Islamists are a threat but see even bigger monsters in the economic closet and are even more eager than the Republicans to protect us from competition and change.

Just what the hell is he talking about? Which candidates exactly are against dealing with the people who actually attacked us on September 11, 2001? Iraq, of course, had nothing to do with that attack.

Was this what President George W. Bush saw when he looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin's heart? CNN reports:

On Saturday, Russian authorities arrested Kasparov, one of President Vladimir Putin's harshest critics, and sentenced him to five days in prison after he helped lead a protest.

Kasparov was charged with organizing an unsanctioned procession of at least 1,500 people against Putin, chanting anti-government slogans and resisting arrest, court documents said. His assistant said he was beaten during the demonstration.

Another of President George W. Bush's good friends suffers a huge electoral defeat at the polls, as Australian Prime Minister John Howard not only loses this parliamentary majority, he appears also to have lost his seat in parliament.

What was behind the loss? Local issues, certainly, but also a rejection of key points of the Bush Administration's foreign policy, as the BBC News reports:

Mr Howard had found himself on the wrong side of public opinion on the Kyoto protocol and the war in Iraq, our correspondent said. Many people also seemed to be simply tired of Mr Howard after 11 years of his rule.

Update: Glenn Greenwald adds more on why we really should be happy to see John Howard go and a useful reminder that we shouldn't chalk up every foreign election on a "love or hate" Bush scoreboard.

Matthew Yglesias rightly points out that the only way to move the foreign policy debate away from fear mongering and unilateralism is for liberals to start, um, advocating liberal ideas.

Ultimately, the most helpful think would be for a progressive president to successfully implement progressive ideas under circumstances (unlike those of the Clinton administration) when the public is paying attention. That means dropping the assumption that liberal ideas won't fly politically and need to be kept hidden under layers of macho posturing and, instead, actually try to build progressive messaging around progressive ideas.

It's remarkable the extent to which you almost never see leading Democrats articulate commonplace notions like "starting a war with Iran would be a strategic disaster for the United States," "expending finite resources investigating people who there's no probable cause to suspect is probably a waste of time," "we should focus on fighting al-Qaeda rather than other Muslims who haven't attacked us," "invading Iraq was a huge mistake," "Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt founded the UN because a strong UN is good for America," "getting other countries to follow non-proliferation agreements is going to require us to follow them too," or "reviving the Israeli-Arab peace process would make ti easier for us to find Muslim allies." Now I'm not going to promise anyone that those exact phrases are ones it would be smart to use. But the ideas are important ones, and the real political professionals need to think about finding the best ways to express them.

These are important ideas. They need to be shared with the public.

Meanwhile, a commenter on Yglesias' post makes an additional important point:

If and when the Republican nominee starts up with "we're tougher on National Security" bulljive, I just hope the Dem nominee has the ovaries to respond with some variant of, "I'd be a lot more confident in Republicans on National Security if 9-11 hadn't happened on their watch. With plenty of advanced warning. There, I said it."

And more people need to do so.

It also now has been 2,240 days since President George W. Bush promised to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." Why isn't this a bigger issue? Where are the speeches making this obvious point?

It is time for Democratic politicians to fight back. Do not accept the fear mongering without comment or by implicitly agreeing with it. Go back after them.

George W. Bush has a record. It is not a good one. It is time to use it.