Monthly Archive for June, 2010

Andrew Sullivan isn’t much interested in deference to the deceased:

Well, let me simply say that the racist, populist, larcenous bigot of a Senator – a man who robbed the American tax-payer to pave his state with baubles and bribes – is not going to be much mourned in these parts.

Democratic political hack Paul Begala goes the other way on this, seeing in the life and career of Robert Byrd nothing less than “a testament to the dynamism of the American story.”

Well as this 2005 profile shows, he was certainly a dynamic racist. We all know about his Ku Klux Klan membership in the early 1940s. (He was a recruiter and an Exalted Cyclops. Yes, an Exalted Cyclops.) We also know that he’s spent a half-century apologizing for that “indiscretion”, as well as simultaneously downplaying and rationalizing it. In his 2005 memoir he argued that his West Virginia KKK chapter, which he helped found, was less of a homocidal supremacist cult and more of a fraternal social club for “upstanding” West Virginian elites, none of whom were much interested in preaching violence or hate. Oh, and it only cost $3 for the white robe and hood.

But even though these white elites with hoods and robes were “upstanding” and definitely non-racists, elsewhere he attributes his KKK membership and his racial views at the time to the prejudice he had heard all around him as a child. Elsewhere again he said that he joined that Klan for the “excitement” and because it was so strongly anti-communist. And if that doesn’t work for you, elsewhere yet again he said he merely viewed the Klan as a handy platform from which to launch his political career. Maybe he’s hoping to be convicted on the lesser charge of rank opportunism. After all, how else can an ambitious rube from West Virginia be expected to get ahead other than by inciting and perpetuating the subjugation and villification of all non-white non-Christians? It was a savvy career move, see.

I’m not even sure which of these accounts I wish to be the true one.

Byrd has maintained that his association with the Klan ended in 1943. But his affinity for Klannish ideology (or the fraternity, or the excitement, or the brainwashing, or the political ambition) seems to have outlived his membership hood. He was ruefully against military desegregation, and inveighed against “race mongrels” in a 1945 letter. He also wrote to the KKK Imperial Wizard in 1946 urging the rebirth and promotion of the Klan throughout the nation. Byrd personally filibustered the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and voted against Thurgood Marshall’s Supreme Court nomination in 1967.

Eventually Byrd cooled off on the white supremacy stuff; again, sometimes saying that intolerance had no place in America, other times realizing, along with other southern Democrats, that he’d have to reform his views a bit if he wanted a future on the national Democratic stage.

Byrd opposed the Civil Rights Act on the familiar bigot grounds of states’ rights. I’m not sure if it’s this same fealty to federalism that made Robert Byrd the most successful and profligate appropriator of federal money in U.S. Senate history. Byrd famously shouted “Blank check!” from the Senate floor in 2002 in opposing President Bush’s Iraq War resolution. But as head of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, a blank check is exactly what he delivered to his state. In his career he steered billions and billions of federal earmarks back to West Virginia. His name is emblazoned on “more than three dozen bridges, highways, schools and public buildings.”

In his memoir he suggested that his legacy be defined by all he did to lift his state out of poverty, rather than his ignominious and vile racial views. However, his beloved state is still the second poorest in the nation so I’m not exactly sure what poverty-lifting he’s crediting to himself.

Is the man allowed to reform and reinvent himself? Was he really “changed”? I think it was Tom Friedman who said that the only real change takes exactly nine months and 21 years. In the case of the senior Senator from West Virginia, change was way, way overdue. Some things can’t be atoned for, and Byrd never faced one consequence for his past as far as I can discern. The man was indeed a larcenous bigot and he won’t be mourned here either.

I’ve compiled some links from quite disparate sources today. They all deal with the problem of epistemic awareness, and how we can be sure of what we know and what we don’t know.

First, Jonah Lehrer has an interesting post on Watson, the IBM supercomputer programmed to beat humans at Jeopardy. Watson is, predictably, very very good at Jeopardy, but Lehrer found a fascinating weakness that gets Watson into trouble at times. From the original New York Times Magazine piece about Watson:

To avoid losing money…Ferrucci’s team has programmed Watson generally not to buzz until it arrives at an answer with a high confidence level. In this regard, Watson is actually at a disadvantage, because the best “Jeopardy!” players regularly hit the buzzer as soon as it’s possible to do so, even if it’s before they’ve figured out the clue. “Jeopardy!” rules give them five seconds to answer after winning the buzz. So long as they have a good feeling in their gut, they’ll pounce on the buzzer, trusting that in those few extra seconds the answer will pop into their heads.

Jonah comments:

This anecdote highlights one of the most impressive talents of the human mind. We don’t just know things – we know we know them, which leads to feelings of knowing. I’ve written about this before, but one of my favorite examples of such feelings is when a word is on the tip of the tongue….

What’s interesting about this mental hiccup is that, even though the mind can’t remember the information, it’s convinced that it knows it. We have a vague feeling that, if we continue to search for the missing word, we’ll be able to find it….But here’s the mystery: If we’ve forgotten a person’s name, then why are we so convinced that we remember it? What does it mean to know something without being able to access it?

Jonah points to empirical studies that show that our “feelings of knowing” are highly accurate. We are remarkably clear about what we know, even if we can’t recall the information at the time.

However, as this fascinating piece by Errol Morris on the NYT website explains, we are much less sure-footed about what we don’t know. Or to be more precise, what we don’t know we don’t know. Morris talks to social psychologist David Dunning, who was inspired while reading about an arrested bank robber who thought he was immune from the bank security cameras because, well, he had rubbed lemon juice all over his face prior to the heist. Alas, the lemon juice scheme failed and he was apprehended within hours. Dunning had an epiphany about the incident:

If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

Dunning and his colleague published a seminal paper on this simple insight which came to be known the Dunning-Kruger Effect. In essence, “our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.” From their paper:

When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.

Dunning goes on to say in an interview:

There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that.  Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

These “unknown unknowns” and the intersection of knowledge and hubris are of course the central theme in Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan.

Finally, if we’re talking about epistemology and memory we can’t really avoid Marcel Proust (pictured above). David Frum happens to have an elegant post up about the fluidity of political coalitions, and he finds a trenchant quote from Proust’s Swann’s Way. Proust is, as ever, meditating on the mutability of life and memory. These are the last few lines of the book:

The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

“Fugitive, alas, as the years” is just wonderful. That “alas” really gives things an elegiac tone. Proust may find joy and comfort in combating time with memory, but he knows that each resuscitation, each remembrance, is a mourning anew.

The title refers to Winston Churchill’s famous line about Russian foreign policy in 1939:

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

So too maybe with Turkey in 2010; though perhaps substituting “AKP electoral interest” at the end.

Via Michael Rubin, a good piece in the Turkish daily Hurriyet details Prime Minister Erdogan’s alarming use of overt anti-American and antisemitic rhetoric in the wake of the Marmara flotilla crisis. The writer attributes his recent flurry of demogogic populism in part to the challenge Erdogan’s ruling AK Party is likely to face in parliamentary elections next year. In a recent public speech, Erdogan played to the adoring religious and ultra-nationalist crowd:

Erdogan went on threateningly to say, “I am calling on the Israeli supported international media and their subcontractors at home: Turkey is not like other countries.” […] Previously he had made references to the “Jewish controlled international media” but must have been warned by his advisors that this was too overtly “anti-Semitic,” and thus politically incorrect. This no doubt forced him to make a slight modification in his nevertheless anti-Semitic reference to the international media.

There has been a lot of talk lately about whether and where Turkey is “drifting” following its lead role in the flotilla incident, its bellicose rhetoric toward the U.S. and Israel, and its increasing chumminess with Iran and Syria. Is it “reorienting” Eastward? Is its foreign policy backbone of “zero problems with neighbors” compatible in the long term with U.S. regional interests? What is Erdogan’s EU posture?

Is there an AKP grand strategy at work here? The writer has a simple theory that rings true: Erdogan is a politician and politicians are base opportunists who want to be liked and reelected:

As matters stand it appears that Mr. Erdogan is simply riding the crest of a populist conservative and Islamist wave – with nationalist overtones – which enables him to fog some seminal questions about where he is taking the country.

Though Erdogan has been doing his best to alienate seemingly everybody except for pan-Islamists, rabid antisemites, and Turkish nationalists, the one group he has remarkably failed to alienate—quite the contrary—are the Kurds. This despite the Turkish military’s recent raid into northern Iraq in which it killed over a hundred Kurdish rebels hiding in the mountainous border region. The Kurdish terrorist group PKK has been particularly active since the breakdown of a ceasefire agreement with the Turkish government earlier this month. The PKK is outlawed in Turkey and in Iraqi Kurdistan; the leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan have always walked a fine line between condemning the PKK’s activities, and distancing themselves from Turkey’s penchant for invading and bombing PKK strongholds across the Kurdistan border.

However, both sides have refused to let the PKK issue derail what has become an incredibly fruitful and durable economic alliance. The President of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, just finished up a historic official visit to Turkey, which was basically a love-in with Turkey’s top political leaders and businessmen. Barzani gushed:

We see Turkey as a gateway for us to Europe and the wider world, just as we believe that the Kurdistan Region can also become a gateway for Turkey to the rest of Iraq and further south to the Gulf countries….I see a bright future in our relations and cooperation with Turkey, and there are big opportunities before us.

Turkish companies represent 60% of the foreign companies currently operating in Kurdistan, and the two sides engage in $5 billion a year in trade. Barzani and his Turkish counterparts agreed on further steps to cement their broad economic and cultural ties. Two major Turkish banks will soon open branches in Kurdistan, and Turkish Airlines is adding a route to Erbil, the Kurdistan capital.

Turkish corporations absolutely love Kurdistan because it’s stable, peaceful, secular, democratic, capitalist, consumerist, and has very favorable foreign investment laws. While the Kurds are notoriously rabidly pro-American and enjoy strong ties with Israel, somehow I don’t think there was any talk of flotillas or blockades during Barzani’s visit. As Hyman Roth would say, it had nothing to do with business.

This rapprochement with the Kurds is certainly a welcome consequence of Turkey’s vaunted “zero problems with neighbors” policy. And its indicative of why we shouldn’t get too bent out of shape over the current diplomatic fissure between Turkey and the West.

It may be good for Erdogan’s electoral prospects. But it’s bad for business.

We have heard plenty in the last few weeks about the immiseration of the Gaza Strip, attributed alternatively to Hamas’ fanaticism or Israel’s intransigence, depending on your perspective/ideological bias. The recent international focus on Gaza is understandable, but what of the West Bank? You know, that other Palestinian territory which is fifteen times larger than Gaza and is home to about 50% more people.

Two recent essays explore the quiet yet extraordinary growth and successful development and administration underway in this area which not long ago was ruled into the ground by the plunderer and charlatan Yasser Arafat. In Slate, Michael Weiss reports that the West Bank is now a "thriving, integrated society," and Ramallah, the capital, "now resembles an embryonic Tel Aviv, featuring state-of-the-art office buildings, expensive boutiques and shopping malls, and ads for imported luxury goods. The casbahs of Nablus, once the cynosure for the second intifada, are busier than ever…."

Who is to credit for this remarkable transformation? Salam Fayyad, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority. A economics PhD from the University of Texas and a former economist for the World Bank and the IMF, Fayyad is a pure technocrat and has developed and began implementing a strategy he calls "de facto statehood":

In London last August, he outlined his program of "de facto statehood" in a 38-page blueprint for infrastructure and institution-building. Rooted in free-market principles and an ethos of law and order designed to attract foreign investors, Fayyad’s plan seems the joint brainchild of Rudy Giuliani and David Petraeus….

Hussein Ibish at Foreign Policy adds to Weiss’s praises, and stresses that Fayyad’s singular focus on the "mundane, workaday tools" of internal development—eschewing both the language of armed resistance and the increasing dead-end of high-level diplomacy—should not be seen as a resignation or acquiescence to the Israeli occupation, but rather as a sophisticated way of confronting it:

[Fayyad's] program marks an attempt to build the administrative, infrastructural, and economic framework for a Palestinian state — not only in spite of the occupation, but as a means of confronting it. The plan calls for every [Palestinian Authority] ministry to meet a series of administrative and institutional goals, from economic and infrastructural developments to good governance and transparency measures. A budget document released in January added even more details to the program. The idea is that, if you build the state, it will come.

The program is working. The West Bank economy grew by 8.5% in 2009, with similar high growth expected this year. Both articles argue pursuasively that Fayyad is perhaps the best thing to ever happen to the Palestinian national movement, and certainly represents the most exciting development in Arab democratic governance in a very long while. The Israelis are noticing. Weiss quotes no one less than Israeli President Shimon Peres describing Fayyad as the "Palestinians’ first Ben Gurionist." Ibish describes some of Fayyad’s accomplishments:

Last year, the PA completed more than 1,000 community development programs. It has created the nucleus of a Palestinian central bank and developed a transparent and accountable system of public financing. Hundreds of major development and public-private initiatives are under way, including at least two major telecommunications companies and the first planned Palestinian city.

Perhaps most important from an Israeli perspective are the new security services which are one of the bedrocks of Fayyad’s program; thousands of officers trained by multinational forces are already deployed in cities throughout the West Bank. The forces’ effectiveness has been commended by Israel, which in response has dismantled several West Bank checkpoints.

One ought not be overly sanguine about Fayyad’s ability to shepherd a Palestinian state. International focus on Hamas-ruled Gaza is apt in one critical sense: Hamas is inimical in every way to Fayyad’s program, and Hamas has an administrative and de facto military veto power over any precipitous move toward diplomatic accomodation with Israel, let alone statehood. Weiss notes that Fayyad has been noticably "fuzzy" on the details of how he intends to reunify the Palestinian national movement. And Ibish is more blunt: "The PLO and Hamas currently agree on absolutely nothing, from how to deal with Israel to the cultural and religious foundations of Palestinian society." Ibish notes that Hamas’s influence will decline only with the success of Fayyad’s state-building program, and it is therefore incumbent upon the international community to help ensure that success. This includes a committment by Israel to embrace and reward Fayyad’s remarkable progress, by continuing to cede administrative and security responsibility to the Palestinian Authority and lessen the visibility and substantive intrusion of the occupation on the lives of West Bankers. As Ibish concludes, if Fayyad’s program keeps bearing fruit, he and the West Bank will get all the headlines they deserve soon enough.

On the occasion of the first anniversary of the fradulent presidential elections in Iran, I present two competing analyses of where the Green Movement stands today, and what the U.S. should do going foward.

First, Hooman Majd, whom I’ve seen speak a few times here in town. He’s an Iranian-American writer, and former advisor and translator for two Iranian presidents (Khatami and Ahmadinejad) during their trips to the United States and the UN. Majd thinks the West has misunderstood the aims of the Green Movement, imputing its own desires for regime change on a movement that only seeks broad civil reforms within the current regime structure. He also notes that Western involvement plays right into the Iranian regime’s hands and allows it to more easily discredit the opposition:

A raft of Iranian opposition groups and individuals, mostly abroad, have jumped aboard the Green train—in some cases even claiming the mantle of leadership—and their basic agenda (overthrow of the Islamic regime) invariably contradicts the Green Movement agenda (electoral transparency and civil rights). Statements of support from the much-despised Mujahedin-e Khalq, based in Paris, and the green wristband worn by the shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, were godsends to the government, which has from the start labeled the Green Movement a “velvet” or “color” revolution backed by foreigners. Green leaders have taken pains not to advocate the end of their government, since this is clearly the regime’s most potent charge against them. Though a few of their ranks may harbor seditious dreams, the movement writ large is about civil rights, not pro-Western revolution. […]

In order to continue to delegitimize the Greens as complicit in foreign plots, Ahmadinejad’s government could easily use help from abroad. They got it in spades.

Commentators abroad who desperately wanted to help the Green Movement not only hindered but actively hurt it.

Next, Senator John McCain, who takes to the pages of the New Republic to argue that, far from keeping its distance so as to not undermine the indigenous legitimacy of the Greens, the U.S. should in fact be much more explicit about its goal of regime change in Iran, and do all it can to further that aim. McCain calls for the U.S. to lead the charge and “challenge the legitimacy of this Iranian regime, and to support Iran’s people in changing the character of their government—peacefully, politically, on their own terms, in their own ways.”

We—the government and the people of the United States—need to stand up for the Iranian people. We need to make their goals our goals, their interests our interests, their work our work. We need a grand national undertaking to broadcast information freely into Iran, and to help Iranians access the tools to evade their government’s censorship of the Internet. We need to let the political prisoners in Iran’s gruesome prisons know that they are not alone, that their names and their cases are known to us, and that we will hold their torturers and tormentors accountable for their crimes. We need to publicize the names of Iran’s human rights abusers, and we need to make them famous. Then we need to impose crippling sanctions on them for their human rights abuses—to go after their assets, their ability to travel, and their access to the international financial system, which is exactly the goal of legislation that I and others have proposed.

McCain harbors exactly none of Hooman Majd’s concerns about perceived or real Western meddling only serving to help the Iranian regime discredit the opposition as pawns of foreign powers. In addition to the robust U.S. involvement called for above, McCain argues that President Obama himself has a critical role in shaping the destiny of the opposition in Iran:

If President Obama were to unleash America’s full moral power to support the Iranian people—if he were to make their quest for democracy into the civil rights struggle of our time—it could bolster their will to endure in their struggle, and the result could be genuinely historic.

In the Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami agrees with McCain’s view, and is much more harsh in expressing what he calls the president’s “strategic and moral failure” by not being more vocal, or forceful, or something, in his support for the Green Movement last year:

There is no guarantee that categorical American support would have altered the outcome of the struggle between autocracy and liberty in Iran. But it shall now be part of the narrative of liberty that when Persia rose in the summer of 2009 the steward of American power ducked for cover, and that a president who prided himself on his eloquence couldn’t even find the words to tell the forces of liberty that he understood the wellsprings of their revolt.

So who is right? Did the U.S. meddle too much and discredit the opposition, or did the U.S. not meddle enough? Do the Greens want to change the entire character of their government, or do they just want better behavior and performance within the current regime structure?

My view is that there is simply not much the U.S. can do to help, and plenty it can do to hurt. It may be morally satisfying to call for amorphous solutions like “standing up for the Iranian people” and “unleash[ing] America’s full moral power” and “tell[ing] the forces of liberty that [Obama] understood the wellsprings of their revolt”, but these honestly seem like the type of things you say when you don’t have anything real to say. And if there’s nothing real to say, it may just be because the U.S. is relatively impotent in its ability to change either the behavior or the character of the Iranian regime.

McCain does momentarily entertain the idea that the Greens may not want more Western involvement (“[T]he United States should never provide its support where it is unrequested and unwanted.”), but he quickly decides that support is both requested and wanted, and that there is no daylight between the U.S.’s and the Greens’ position on regime change. Ajami generously allows that “categorical American support” of the type he advocates would not have been guaranteed to alter the outcome for the better. But shockingly he doesn’t seem to consider that categorical American support during the height of the opposition’s power may have altered the outcome for the worse!

I do agree with McCain’s implicit point that there is no option for the United States to be neutral in this or any conflict between democratic and reactionary forces. And of course last summer, contra Fouad Ajami, Obama was anything but neutral. Without going into the history of democratic revolution, suffice it to say that sometimes overt U.S. support has been helpful and sometimes it has been ruinous. It’s hard to know the difference in advance.

While symbolism does matter, the silly talk about unleashing moral power and understanding people’s wellsprings reminds one of the current outcry for the president to “do something” about the Gulf oil spill. As noted yesterday, sometimes we have to acknowledge that there are just objective limits to U.S. governmental power. And people who deny this often seem to do so much louder when their preferred political party is out of power.

For self-interested reasons I enjoyed David Brooks’ column today on the unheralded value and pleasures of a liberal arts education. Brooks adds a few important entries to the usual list of virtues; ones that I hadn’t thought about before and that I think are really underappreciated.

First: "People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies." Very true. We are associational creatures and we use analogy to contextualize and synthesize complicated ideas and make sense of vast quantities of information.  Being able to call upon and express oneself through a shared language of cultural and literary canonical continuity is really an enriching and useful thing.

Brooks’ more interesting point is that a humanities education sets out a means of exposure to that critical third plank of human motivation and experience, which he quite unfortunately decides to call The Big Shaggy:

Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy. […]

[O]ver the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

This ineffable collection of passions and drives, leading to such "upheavals of thought", is something quite distinct from the usual representations of the duality of human motivation, whether rendered as spirit/sense, intellect/appetite, reason/passion, Hesse’s nirvana/samsara, etc. Plato calls this third plank of the human psyche "thymos." It’s very closely related to the idea (advanced in various forms by Dostoyevsky, Hegel, and Fukuyama) of the centrality of the struggle for individual recognition in human affairs. Some of Brooks’ examples of simple material or sexual desire do not belong to thymos. I take it to connote emotional drives related to status. 

As Brooks notes, a humanities education gives us, or should give us, our first glimpse of these "rare and strange people" who have been able to navigate and elucidate the warring constitutent parts of human motivation, and who have left us records of their insights through their art. The intellectual pleasure to be found in this pursuit speaks for itself. But appealing to and drawing upon these insights can also be a tremendous consolation, and an unwavering hedge against dispair, ennui, and loneliness. Also against religion: the sustenance provided by literature and art and music imparts far more meaning and wonder than any supernatural or theological appeal.

Well up until that last line I managed to write an entire post completely devoid of contentiousness or argumentation or rebuttal. Almost…

Daniel Larison has a series of interesting, provocative posts on the U.S. and Israel’s deteriorating relationship with Turkey, made all the more acute by the Gaza flotilla disaster which left four Turkish nationals dead. Larison makes the larger point that we should not be surprised when the stragetic interests of developing democratic nations are not always aligned with those of the U.S. I agree with Larison’s main point here:

Hegemonists seem to think that if other countries are becoming more democratic they ought to become more “like us” in their “values,” and therefore their governments should be more willing to align themselves with the U.S. As we are seeing all over the world, the more democratic other nations become the more their governments begin to pursue interests that diverge from American interests….

But rather than diverging interests, Larison thinks it is the “disastrously bad leadership in Israel” that is largely to blame for the precipitous decline in Turkish-Israeli relations. He traces the impetus for this decline to Israeli’s “excessive and destructive military actions” in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2009. I do agree that both were excessive and destructive, and as Noah Millman pointed out in an excellent essay yesterday, they were untethered from any clear strategic or military goal:

Israel’s policy-making no longer seems to me to be particularly related to concrete policy objectives at all. Neither the Lebanon war nor the Gaza war had actual military goals. Both were essentially wars for domestic consumption. Hezbollah and Hamas were firing rockets at Israel, and Israelis were understandably furious. “Something” had to be done about that, to let the Israeli public know that their leadership felt their fury. So the government did “something.”

Larison argues that Turkey had particular reason to be angered by Israel’s actions, especially the Gaza war. He notes that immediately prior to Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2009, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan was mediating high-level peace talks between Israel and Syria:

[Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert turned around almost immediately after meeting with Erdogan and launched the operation against Gaza. Erdogan understandably felt that he had been left in the dark about Israel’s intentions and saw Olmert’s decision as sabotage of his mediation effort. In other words, the Turkish government was attempting to help Israel with a long-standing diplomatic problem, and Israel rewarded them by making Erdogan look like a fool. Add to that the damage and the deaths caused by the operation and the genuine outrage the Turkish public felt about these things, and one can understand how Erdogan has become so combative.

Is that really so easily understandable?

Much is made of Turkey’s increasing economic and diplomatic clout and its desire to play a more activist role in regional and global affairs. But a maturing and strong regional power does not “become combative” over diplomatic pique. And this sounds cynical, but Arab-Israeli peace is, to say the least, a contact sport, and no sane country decides to make its diplomatic bones by injecting itself in the Mideast peace process. If Erdogan thinks he has cause for special grievance simply because Mideast peace has made a fool of him, then he is not nearly as ready for the world spotlight as he thinks. If Erdogan hasn’t noticed, making fools of well-meaning mediators and interlocutors is all the peace process does!

Turkey can espouse a “zero problems with neighbors” policy all it likes, but that doesn’t mean its neighbors don’t have problems. Turkey ought not be surprised when playing diplomatic footsie with that renowned statesman and peace-lover Bashar Assad doesn’t lead to easy diplomatic victories or garner Turkey immediate international prestige and respect. Getting burned by naively wading into the Mideast peace tinderbox does not grant you the right to become “combative.”

Larison also concedes that Erdogan is all too eager to play the demagogue on Israel-Palestine:

Turkey and Israel did have a constructive, mutually beneficial relationship. Thanks largely to disastrously bad leadership in Israel that has provided Erdogan with a perfect foil for demagoguery, it is now in ruins.

But why is Erdogan so keenly on the lookout for pretexts for demagoguery? Why isn’t that the root problem here? If Erdogan wasn’t so eager to exploit a “perfect foil for demagoguery”, then perhaps the relationship would not be in ruins. A country that espouses a policy of “zero problems with neighbors” does not seek out opportunities to deliberately demagogue an issue on which it hopes to play a leading role as mediator! This is puerile behavior and it should come in for much more criticism from Larison than it does.

Larison also quickly glosses over the fact that the Turkish ruling party “has some sympathy for Hamas.” Steven Cook goes much farther, referring to Ankara’s “warm embrace” of Hamas, and calling the Turks “thinly-veiled advocates.” I know this sort of Islamist solidarity is not exactly shocking, but why should Israel have zero problems with a putative ally that expresses sympathy for a terrorist organization? How is Israel to regard an aspiring “honest broker” who is engaged in a warm embrace with the group dedicated to Israel’s destruction?

Both Turkey and Israel at times have had to suppress their immediate self-interest in the service of maintaining their strategic alliance. When those interests diverge too far and the alliance frays, it’s not fair to assign agency and blame to only one side, which Larison does above. If in the past Turkey has failed to act in its own self-interest out of a desire to mollify or curry favor with a strategic ally, perhaps Israel has done a little of the same with regard to Turkey. All governments have an instinct to wallow in diplomatic pique and to demagogue an emotional issue for the benefit of domestic consumption. Such instincts should not be condoned; not for Israel and America, and certainly not for Turkey.

On U.S.-Turkish relations, Larison offers a solution to the problem of diverging national interests: The U.S. should simply define down its conception of its national interests:

A more modest, limited, rational definition of American interests would considerably reduce the number of clashes with other governments, and an administration following such a definition would actually welcome the regional leadership and gestures towards burden-sharing that some of our allies have started to offer.

This has been our superpower paradox. As Ezra Klein put it regarding China:

On the one hand, we get a bit uncomfortable when other countries amass too much power too quickly. On the other hand, we want other powerful countries to use their power to take some of the burden off of us.

And we only want others to share the burden if they do so as our proxy, even if it forces them to subordinate their interests to ours. But at the same time, responsible burden-sharing means not crying foul every time you think you have cause to. It means being self-assured enough to not give in to demagoguery at home at every turn. And frankly, it’s absurd and unbecoming of a regional stakeholder to aspire to “zero problems” with your neighbors, when two of those neighbors, Iran and Syria, arm and support terror groups in Lebanon and Palestine, and rule their countries by brutal force and suppress political dissent and minority rights. Does Turkey have zero problems with Hezbollah? Does Turkey have zero problems with Bashar Assad’s police state? How about Iran’s fraudulent elections and subsequent bloody crackdown? Does Turkey have zero problems with rabid anti-semitism and homophobia?

If it does, it ought to say so. By all means Turkey, share in the burden. All of it.