O rare Dan Drezner!1 Oy vey, Dan Drezner! Just last week I was falling all over myself with praise for Dan’s all too acute post The war in Ukraine is going badly for everyone, which Dan then followed up with another depressingly acute corker, What is the plan behind sanctioning Russia?, pointing out that the sort of “tough” sanctions trotted out by the U.S. on just about every conceivable occasion these days ensure pain and suffering for the common people of the offending country while doing nothing to deter the bad behavior that is their justification. As Dan asks, “Tell me what makes the Russia sanctions end.”
Well, no one gets it right all the time, but Dan’s most recent piece, Can realism explain the war in Ukraine? When an elegant theory collides with a messy reality, is, nonetheless, mind-numbingly2 bad.
See, as I’ve observed before, Dan is just a wee bit of a closet realist, contributing, for example, this brilliant piece for Reason magazine, There Is No China Crisis, explaining why the rise of China should be considered a non-event rather than the existential threat of the new millennium, which he recently followed up with this snide suggestion that China’s neighbors might have good reason to prefer doing business with wicked China rather than the vainglorious U.S.
In both these pieces, and in many others, Dan deliberately, and effectively, takes on the numerous hypocrisies and incompetencies of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, aka “the Blob”. The thing is, Dan’s position is, no one is allowed to complain about the Blob but him. In fact, no one is even allowed to use the word “the Blob”, Dan’s own highly peculiar brand of Brookings-style wokeness. My guess is—and it’s only a guess—that Dan’s pals on the poached salmon and roasted vegetables circuit sometimes tease Dan about one of “those guys”—the guys who think that Dan and his pals are pack of criminal incompetents who are responsible for a staggering waste of wealth and human lives over the past decades of the Pax Americana, which might better be called the “Pox Americana”, considering the body count we’ve run up at humanity’s expense—and that hurts Dan’s feelings.
Dan proves particularly touchy on the subject of America’s stunningly bloody incompetence these days, when big-mouthed realists like John Mearsheimer point out that the compulsively “forward” policy pursued by the U.S. in eastern Europe led inevitably to the current disaster, which threatens to assume world-altering proportions, Dan’s problem being that Big John is 100% right. If we had listened to George Kennan and NOT expanded NATO, if during both the Bush and Obama administrations we had not treated Russia like a nonentity, and, in particular, if we had not deliberately encouraged the violent overthrow of a pro-Russian government in Ukraine, we would not be facing this disaster. Dan just can’t accept the fact that Dan and his pals are the bad guys. But they are.
The ”funny”, or “shocking”, or whatever, thing is, Dan and John reverse themselves 100% on the subject of China, Dan being the real realist, in the posts I’ve cited above, while Mr. Realist is all but frothin’ at the mouth on the subject of the Middle Kingdom in this unfortunately paywalled interview on Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish,” screechin’ like he was Kaiser Wilhelm II lecturin’ the West on the Yellow Peril. According to John, we never should have “allowed” China to develop in the first place, though how one exiles a quarter of the earth’s population from the rest of humanity is a question he leaves unanswered. “Allowing” China to grow economically was not a “blunder”, as John keeps shouting from the rooftops, proclaiming his prescience on the matter as he does so, but rather something that we could not prevent from happening. As Dan points out in his two articles, China is not one tenth the menace of the old Soviet Union, though John absurdly presents them as ten times worse.
Particularly risible is John’s insistence that we have to maintain our technological edge over China, as though we Amuricans are somehow more gifted genetically than the Chinese—though, from what I hear, the Chinese are pretty smart too. The often massive technological edge the U.S. enjoyed over other countries during the 20th century was due almost exclusively to two factors: we were much larger, and much richer, than our European competitors. China has four times as many people as the U.S. and their economic growth, though obviously leveling off, is continuing. Certainly sometime within the next 50 years, China will surpass the U.S. in technological innovation by a large margin. There is nothing the U.S. can do to prevent this. If John has a “plan”, well, I’d love to hear it.
So Dan is wrong on Russia and pathetically unwilling to admit the grievous mistakes the U.S. made in eastern Europe over the past 30 years, while John is eager to make even more grievous ones in Asia. Such, as the saying goes, is the perversity of human nature.
Afterwords
I have bickered with Dan in the past on numerous occasions—Dan Drezner does my job for me. And does it better! Sometimes! and I wonder if Daniel Drezner even knows what “pessimism” means and Daniel Drezner, you shall not escape my wrath!, for example—and I always win. Because I do all the talking.
I sympathize with the longings of Russians like Gary Kasparov and Russian-Americans like Max Boot and Cathy Young, and all those like Anne Applebaum who long to see eastern Europe and Russia itself enjoy the sort of material prosperity and intellectual freedom that we spoiled darlings in the west take for granted. But look at our track record, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, In Libya, in Syria. How much proof do you need that U.S. intervention in the name of “right” DOESN’T WORK!
UPDATE
Dan has an interesting post up, How has Ukraine changed my mind?, one that does not, however, reflect any re-examination of his previous refusal to consider the argument that America's lack of respect for Russian interests and concerns were the ultimate cause of the tragic situation we now face.
1. Please excuse the literary in-joke. Elizabethan playwright and sometime murderer (really) Ben Jonson left instructions that his tombstone be inscribed with the message “Orare Ben Jonson”, Latin for “Pray for Ben Jonson”, which a non-classically educated stone carver revised to read “O Rare Ben Jonson”.
2. I almost went with “motherfuckingly”, but I seem to be overworking that one these days. Seems like Vladimir’s stupidity is rubbing off on everyone.
“Ben Jonson mouths again “