Saturday, September 13, 2008 - Posts
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Update: As it turns out, Sarah Palin didn't actually visit Iraq - but she did see it, from Kuwait, just like she sees Russia from Alaska. (Hey, I saw Margot Fonteyn once - in Paris! Didn't make me a ballerina.) As the Boston Globe reported today, that whole been-to-Iraq thing was even more of a stretch than counting Ireland among the countries she's visited because her plane stopped there to refuel.
Know what, though? Even recognizing that McCain is an awfully high-mileage 72, I don't know how many McCain-Palin supporters will be put off by her lack of experience out in the world. And while I'm sure you're right, Rosa, to doubt whether Palin could pass a Foreign Service Exam, it will be interesting to see whether, even after everything we've been through, voters really care.
They were perfectly aware that Gore knew more than Bush. (In fact, I'm not kidding when I say that compared to Bush in '99, Palin was a regular Madeleine Albright with Charlie Gibson.) Yet voters held that against the know-it-all in the race, rather than the know-nothing. In '04, Kerry lost more points for speaking French than Bush did for knowing so little about the country we were about to invade that it was news to him that Sunnis and Shiites were from two different sects. ("I thought the Iraqis were Muslims,'' he said when this was pointed out to him, shortly before we went in. Which has nothing to do with intelligence; it's what comes of not caring enough to bother to learn.) After eight years of living with the result of such callousness, will we hold Palin to a higher standard? Perhaps so. But with familiarity about the world beyond our borders still considered suspect, put me down as not so sure.
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Rachael, you're of course right to say that "economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and reliance upon allies" are all perfectly sound methods for addressing foreign-policy crises in the abstract—and you're also right to note, in Palin's defense, that both McCain and Obama favor admission of Georgia into NATO and have spoken out against the Russian invasion of Georgia. That part of her response to ABC's Gibson on how to respond to Russian aggresison in Georgia was fine. But what appalled me about Palin's remarks was her casual "perhaps so"—not in answer to a question formulated as, "Would we have to assist Georgia" if Georgia joined NATO or even, "Would we have to defend Georgia," as you generously reformulated it, but to a question about whether we would "have to go to war" with Russia.
Legally, the NATO treaty doesn't require us to "go to war"—it just doesn't. If a fellow NATO member is attacked—in a manner satisfying the treaty terms—the treaty obligates parties to "assist the Party ... so attacked by taking forthwith ... such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area." In international law terms, "such action as it deems necessary" means, basically, diddly squat. Thus to say that including Georgia in NATO means that we might "perhaps" "have to go to war" with Russia if Russia "went into Georgia" is just plain incorrect as a statement about our treaty obligation.
Lots of journalists don't know this, but, OK, they're journalists, not diplomats, international lawyers, or people claiming to be ready to serve as commander in chief as of this very minute. But Palin is trying to tell us that she is ready to be commander in chief—right away!—if something should happen to McCain. She needs to know this stuff.
Fine, you might say, maybe in a technical sense there is no binding obligation to "go to war"—but wasn't Palin just acknowledging that in a loose sense, when you have a mutual-defense treaty, political loyalty alone might "perhaps" make us feel obligated to go to war with Russia if Russia "went into" Georgia, a NATO ally?
If Palin actually believes that—and frankly I doubt she does if she pauses for 10 seconds to think—then she has no business pushing for NATO expansion. Because no one in the mainstream of either the Democratic or Republican Party thinks that we should "perhaps" get into an actual "war" with nuclear Russia over Georgia's borders. And for that reason, no one ever, ever says that "perhaps" we'll have to go to war with Russia—because there is just no "perhaps" about this. We're not going to do this.
It would be—to bring back a phrase from not so long ago—mutually assured destruction. And we actually do not want to return to that era, which was far more dangerous than the current era. No one wants that. That's why there is some evidence that the Bush Administration quietly warned Saakashvili not to provoke the Russians over South Ossetia. Yeah, we like democratic Georgia—but not enough to risk nuclear war.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not to push for NATO expansion, whether or not to exclude Russia from the G8 and the WTO, whether or not to go as far as economic sanctions—but reasonable people don't disagree that the United States should not and would not casually pursue a policy that might "perhaps" lead us directly into a war with the world's other major nuclear power. (This is not the same thing as saying that the Russian action in Georgia is OK or not worth being very upset and concerned about—it's just a statement that neither political party actually thinks it makes any sense to contemplate "war.")
What troubles me is the utter shallowness of Palin's answers—in this case, a dangerous shallowness. She had obviously learned a few talking points. (NATO is a mutual-defense treaty. ... We want to include Georgia in NATO. ... They're a democracy, they "deserve" it. ... The Russian invasion was very bad. ... There must be consequences ... We can't let Russian just get away with this stuff. ...) But she had absolutely no knowledge or judgment underneath that. But saying "perhaps" we'll go to war is the kind of throwaway statement that, when made by a vice presidential candidate, has real-world consequences for future United States-Russia relations. It dramatically ups the ante.
We may never know, but I think it's a pretty good bet that when the GOP foreign policy experts charged with prepping Palin saw that interview, they said, "Sarah, you must never, ever say that kind of thing again—because if we win, we actually have to function in the world, and this ain't gonna help."
How would a pro have handled that question? Even the famously hot-tempered McCain easily could have handled it: "Charlie, for 60 years NATO has helped prevent and resolve conflicts in Europe, and that's what's going to continue to do when Georgia and Ukraine are members. We're not restarting the Cold War, much less a hot war. We want Russia to play the constructive role we know it can play—but we're also going to continue to work with our allies inside and outside NATO to make it clear to Russia that the territorial intergrity of sovereign states must be respected. We're going to stand by our friends, and send a crystal clear message to Russia that if it wants to prosper politically and economically, it needs to abandon this kind of inexcusable aggressiion. Specifically, we're looking at a range of mechanisms for sending that strong message, including making it clear that Russia's membership in the G8 and the WTO are contingent on approriate actions. ..."
Fred Kaplan got it right: Palin spoke with the "assertive confidence familiar to those who engaged in high-school debate competitions. But it was painfully obvious—from the rote nature of her responses, the repetitions of hammered-home phrases, and the non sequiturs that leapt up when she found herself led around an unfamiliar bend—that there is not a millimeter of depth undergirding those recitations, that she had never given a moment's thought to these matters before two weeks ago."
I'm thinking Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar, and even Condi Rice are crying themselves to sleep.
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