Originally published on Facebook, 1/31/11
God, I hate Henry Kissinger. The man was a genius no doubt- and don't expect one of the occasional leftist frothy rants you see out there from time to time as crusty, aging hippies who can't let go of Vietnam try and pin a variety of war crimes on him and call for his execution in various painful ways. He was a genius- an evil genius, perhaps, one opposed to any semblance of ideology I might happen to have- which is hard to pin down on a good day, but today... it's even harder. But I have to salute evil geniuses where I find them, because genuine minds are hard to find in government service- and even if you disagree with everything Kissinger's ever done, it's hard to deny that the guy's intelligent- an evil diplomatic genius, to be sure. (For the record, the other evil genius I'm thinking of: Antonin Scalia. Totally brilliant mind- and the perfect Bond villain.)
So why the haterade for Mr. Kissinger? Well, today's rant concerns the overall hypocrisy that seems to be the hallmark of traditional Conservative foreign policy in the post-Cold War world. Don't get me wrong: there's plenty to bitch at the Left about too- but today's topic concerns our brothers and sisters to the right of the political spectrum. Even as hundreds of thousands of people swarm the streets of Cairo today- and Hosni Mubarak is left making weak little attempts at reform that he should have begun a quarter of a century ago, one can't help wondering if we're witnessing realism in it's final death throes.
What do I mean by realism? Any good student of IR out there will know immediately- but basically, if the academic world contains people like Mearsheimer who constantly pimp out their theories of realism- then Kissinger was the guy who put it into the practice. In short, it's international power politics at its best: the world we live in is anarchic, states act in their own interests- placing their security and their power over all other considerations and only the strong survive. It's like Ayn Rand's wet dream and it's incredibly irritating if you sit down and study some International Relations because for every single situation that emerges in the global system, committed realists can just shrug and say in their smugly superior manner: 'they're just acting to protect their interests.' As if that explains everything away!
But, alas, we must raise our glasses to Kissinger, Mearsheimer and company and toast them with a shot of Haterade, because we've come to a potentially very interesting crossroads in Egypt. One of the (far too many) dictators we propped up during the Cold War in the name of that pesky security over ideology and other moral considerations that realists love to blather on about is on the ropes. And we're placed in an interesting position: realists would dictate that Mubarak is stable, friendly to our interests and has been for the past thirty years. Certainty with the devil we know is a lot better than the uncertainty of the messy transition that is sure to ensue if he goes. And that's a perfectly reasonable position to take- except we may have passed the point of no return already and our continued soft, wet-noodly, hand-wringing response to all of this has a real potential to damage our long term interests, power and security in the region.
Ah-ha! Herein lies the dilemma: if it's about preserving American power throughout the Middle East, then we should have jumped off the Mubarak train several years past. We've known this was coming- the failure of these tinpot autocrats to deliver on anything remotely resembling prosperity or jobs to their people has been slowly boiling for years! And we've kept funding the dictators, even though the political calculus for doing so had long since fallen by the wayside- and continuing to fund them as realism demands has in fact raised the prospect of damaging both our security, standing and power throughout the region.
What do I mean by this? Well, a stroll through the right-wing blogosphere finds commentator after commentator pronouncing President Obama as 'the guy who lost Egypt' and people desperately worried about the role of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in all of this. And yes, those are valid concerns- but if President Obama had stood up at the State of the Union address and said to Egypt- 'democratize and listen to your people or not one more dollar of our money is coming your way' then suddenly, the United States becomes the country that pushed the autocrat out of the window. Moderates might have had a smidgen more respect for us and we could have been working to find people- other than El-Baradei, whom apparently not a lot of people think that much of- to give us a regime we can live with.
There was a moment last week to do the right thing- and something that had the benefit of being fiscally responsible and essentially realist all in one fell swoop. Instead, the people of Egypt have been getting the shit kicked out of them by a police force working for an autocrat that gets $1.3 billion in US taxpayer money pretty much every single year. Do you think they're going to have warm, fuzzy feelings about the United States as a result? I sincerely doubt it. What we're witnessing in Egypt isn't just a revolution- if it succeeds, it will (and I know this is oh-so-fashionable for students of IR to proclaim whenever they can) the death of realism as we know it- because blindly funding and supporting the devils we know will have the potential to create even worse devils- that we don't know. And that does fly in the face of everything that Realists love to sermonize about the international system, because it will be contrary to our best interests.
There are reasons to worry about Egypt- the strength and the power of the Muslim Brotherhood being chief amongst them, but it's also worth noting that Egypt in 2011 is not Iran in 1979. The regime, wisely, has not cracked down on religion, only Islamism and these protestors are being driven by young people who are linked into Facebook and Twitter- two decadent tools of the infidels that the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden and the Ayatollah and All His Merry Men aren't all that fond of- what this is, if it can be defined, is an outpouring of anger over the abject failure of the regime to deliver on anything at all. Like in Tunisia, when the autocrats can't deliver, people get madder and madder until finally they stop giving a damn and starting burning the place down. Tunisia spread to Egypt- I'm sure Yemen is next and Syria is trying desperately to get out ahead of this curve and Iran is one bad bottle of tequila away from a total implosion as it has been for much of the past decade, even with its nuclear program.
The question for Conservatives then, is this: did you really mean all that moral, upstanding horseshit you tried to shovel under Bush the Younger about 'the freedom agenda' and 'democracy' and 'the blessings of liberty?' Because if you did, then Paul Ryan should be cutting Egypt's funding until Mubarak gets on a plane and takes off. If you didn't, and the Dictatorial Chickens we put in various henhouses during the Cold War deserve our support because of the old realist calculations about power politics and devils we know, then not only are you hypocrites of the worst kind, but I think you'll be watching you Cold War Chickens come home to roost even as realism flails away at trying to explain the fundamental contradiction of supporting autocracy above democracy- yet again.
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