Growing Up

To try to clarify a point from my post on Vladimir Putin, I don't really think there's anything wrong with the American political elite being nostalgic for the international climate of the 1990s and the way it was more friendly to the unfettered exercise of American power.

Nevertheless, people -- including political elites -- ought to understand that that was an anomolous situation and that moment has passed. It happens to be the case that China and Iran are dictatorships while Venezuela and Russia are illiberal plebiscitary regimes but this has relatively little to do with America's policy disagreements with them. No conceivable set of domestic political arrangements is going to change the fact that the Russian government wants to ensure that governments in the "near abroad" will be friendly to Russian interests (think of US policy toward Central America and the Carribbean), that China wants to be a great power on a par with the USA, that Iran thinks it should be a leading regional power, or that Latin Americans resent American political and economic domination of the Western Hemisphere. Grown-up policy recognizes that countries are going to have interests and desires that can't be wished away by hoping for democracy and that the essence of foreign policy is finding ways to reconcile those interests with our own priorities rather than whining about the fact that very few countries are interested in becoming Japan-style client states unless they really have no choice in the matter.

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Posted by artappraiser | March 12, 2007 11:57 AM

I think "dictatorship" gives people the wrong impression of Iran (and plays into an unhelpful framing). In contrast to vanilla dictatorships, it doesn't have an open cult of personality around the Leader, there are clear succession processes that it seems likely to expect will be followed, and the country isn't run mainly as a racket to enrich the leader and his friends. "Authoritarian" I'll give you, but "dictatorship" is inaccurate.

Posted by william | March 12, 2007 12:03 PM

Iran is half elderly clerical group dictatorship and half illiberal plebiscitary democracy. Let's call it a sclerogopocracy.

Posted by anon | March 12, 2007 1:22 PM

Isn't it interesting how Democrats dismiss the neoconservative preoccupation with old-style state threats in one breath and embrace that allegedly dated ir paradigm in the next breath?

Depressingly, Democrats have responded to the first major insurgency (which happens to be rabidly nihilistic) of the American Imperial Age by nostalgia for a time (the 1990s) when the American Empire appeared to have no major adversaries, and the apparent belief they can convince the electorate there will be some kind of "return to normal". Meanwhile, the Republicans in charge of things have embarked on a foreign policy that is most likely to lead to the partition of the Arab world and Central Asia along sectarian lines, the transformation of the American military into an imperial legion full of soldiers from the developing world, and the further consolidation of the American Empire.

Posted by Linus | March 12, 2007 1:38 PM

Yeah, drawing the line between Iran and Venezuela seems like an arbitrary call. Or is the point that in Iran and China power rests in a self-reconstituting non-democratic extra-governmental ideological institution (the clergy in Iran, the Party in China)? Whereas in Russia, while power does sit outside the nominal legal forms that claim to embody it, the institutions it actually resides in are rather formless and impenetrable -- the KGB, the big state-owned companies, etc.? Thinking about it, "dictatorship" isn't a good description of China either: who is the "dictator"? Power in China is arguably less centralized than power in Iran -- there is no supreme leader.

Posted by mattsteinglass | March 12, 2007 10:27 PM