Cold Blooded Idealist

Robert Kagan has gone off crazier than usual. This time he's indicting realists as being against another Iranian revolution. Read:

It would be surprising if Obama departed from this realist strategy now, and he hasn't. His extremely guarded response to the outburst of popular anger at the regime has been widely misinterpreted as reflecting concern that too overt an American embrace of the opposition will hurt it, or that he wants to avoid American "moralizing." (Obama himself claimed yesterday that he didn't want the United States to appear to be "meddling.")

But Obama's calculations are quite different. Whatever his personal sympathies may be, if he is intent on sticking to his original strategy, then he can have no interest in helping the opposition. His strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government's efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition's efforts to prolong the crisis.

Apparently realist are opposed to democracy, revolution, freedom, liberty, and all that good stuff. We just dislike it so much that we hope that there are no governmental upheavals ever again. Well, that's bullshit. A realist when conducting foreign policy has no preference in terms of government. The internal does not effect the way we deal with the external. Iran could be a beacon of democracy and light and I suspect neocons would still oppose its nuclear development. The external actions are what matter to the United States, not me personally. I would love it if the Iranian regime fell. I despise oligarchies and dictatorships. But, at the end of the day, if I'm a head of state, I'm going to have to deal with whatever regime is in power in Iran, be it the Supreme Leader or Ahmadinejad or whoever.

Back to Kagan:

It's not that Obama preferred a victory by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He probably would have been happy to do business with Mir Hossein Mousavi, even if there was little reason to believe Mousavi would have pursued a different approach to the nuclear issue. But once Mousavi lost, however fairly or unfairly, Obama objectively had no use for him or his followers. If Obama appears to lend support to the Iranian opposition in any way, he will appear hostile to the regime, which is precisely what he hoped to avoid.

Hence the declaration that he doesn't want to appear to be "meddling." But, oh wait, Kagan already dismissed that statement as bullshit.

Obama's policy now requires getting past the election controversies quickly so that he can soon begin negotiations with the reelected Ahmadinejad government. This will be difficult as long as opposition protests continue and the government appears to be either unsettled or too brutal to do business with. What Obama needs is a rapid return to peace and quiet in Iran, not continued ferment. His goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it. And that, by and large, is what he has been doing.

If you find all this disturbing, you should. The worst thing is that this approach will probably not prevent the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon. But this is what "realism" is all about.

I guess Kagan submitted this piece before he heard about the President asking Twitter to remain online to aid the protesters. You may ask, "what's the big deal about Twitter being online?" Well, since the Iranian government has shut down almost every means of communication in the country, Twitter has risen up as the primary method of organizing. The Iranian regime has also confined reporters to their hotel rooms or kicked them out of the country, whhich made Twitter one of the important means of getting news out of the country. The President by making sure Twitter remained provided assistance to the Iranian regimes opposition. How does Kagan account for this? He doesn't. He can't. Because it doesn't fit into his stereotype of realists.

Kagan's indictment gets it wrong primarily because he assumes the outcome of the anti-government protests, if successful, will be democracy and no nukes. Well, Kagan has no idea what the outcome of all this will be. Nobody does. Ahmadinejad could very well be the president of Iran when all is said and done. Or, maybe a recount happens and Mousavi becomes president. Or, maybe Rafsanjani gets enough support in the Assembly of Experts to remove the Supreme Leader. Or, maybe the Iranian public brings down its government and establishes a whole new one. Maybe that new government is a democracy, maybe its not, maybe its friendly to the US, maybe it's not. Any one of these things and a dozen others could happen. We simply cannot know. So, to say the President isn't doing anything because his realism demands he support the Iranian regime is not true. The President isn't doing anything for two reasons. The first is that he actually understands that the US has meddled in Iran before and it always turned out bad. The second is that the President's realism requires information. The President is going to have to deal with whatever regime is in power in Iran and he does not know who is in power. The realist approach to this situation is to take a step back, let the situation sort itself out, and deal with the consequences, not to rush headlong into support of anyone without the necessary information.

I do think it's interesting that the worst outcome for Kagan is not that the Iranians don't get true democracy, but they get a nuke. Which one of us is cold blooded?