My vacation last week was not as ill-timed as that of Samantha Power, the expert on stopping genocide who went back to visit Ireland just at the point when it became necessary for the U.S. to stop a genocide.
That's the big breaking foreign policy news: the Assad regime's chemical weapons attack against civilians in Syria. I won't write much about that attack or the administration's reaction, because whatever I say is likely to be quickly overtaken by events, particularly if President Obama decides to intervene. Maybe he will, maybe he won't, maybe it's already too late. Maybe we'll wait for the French to do it.
This is what really puts Power on the spot: she made a name for herself arguing for America's responsibility to use force to prevent genocide -- and she is now in the position of having to put her money where her mouth used to be.
But President Obama's history of dithering on Syria -- there was evidence of chemical weapons attacks months ago -- has prompted some comparisons to Jimmy Carter's foreign policy. There were a lot of folks who argued back in 2008 that if Obama were elected, we would get Jimmy Carter's second term. Well, if we get it, we'll get it in Barack Obama's second term.
But it strikes me that the really essential comparison to Carter is somewhat different, and it explains why the very thing that may prompt Obama to action in Syria has wrecked his policy in the other big conflict in the Middle East.
One of the key problems of the Carter administration's policy was it elevation of a short-term concern for "human rights" over our long-term interest in opposing Communism (and radical Islam). That's what prompted the U.S., for example, to abandon authoritarian regimes in Nicaragua and Iran, at the expense of enabling the expansion or establishment of much more dangerous dictatorships.
This was one of the key changes made by the Reagan administration and particularly championed by Reagan's UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. The "Kirkpatrick Doctrine" advocated support for all opponents of Communism, including authoritarian regimes in what we used to call the "Third World."
From a long-term perspective, after the end of the Cold War, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine has been vindicated. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a liberating event that did so much for the cause of freedom and representative government that it makes our short-term support for "friendly dictators" look like it was worth it. That's especially true when we observe how many of those "friendly" dictatorships -- Chile, El Salvador, Argentina, Taiwan, South Korea, South Africa -- have since made a peaceful transition to become free societies. Meanwhile, it is the old leftover Marxists, in places like Cuba, North Korea and Zimbabwe, who are still stubbornly clinging to power.
This is the lesson President Obama is ignoring in Egypt. His Carterish concern for "human rights" may prompt him to intervene in Syria (as Carter did, covertly, in Afghanistan), but it is making a hash of his policy in Egypt.
In Egypt, the military leadership has not merely overthrown Mohammed Morsi's increasingly dictatorial government; it has basically imposed a ban on the Muslim Brotherhood.
That is has done so through the bloody suppression of pro-Morsi street protests creates a dilemma for the United States. As the old darkly humorous quip would have it, "it's worse than a crime, it's a blunder." That was originally said about the summary execution, on Napoleon's orders, of an aristocratic counter-revolutionary. It was a crime, certainly, but it was also a political error, since it made Napoleon's rule look arbitrary and tyrannical. Killing people always creates a deficit of moral authority that tends to cancel out the benefit a regime gets from eliminating its rivals.
Yet we have to make the same decision in Egypt that we had to make during the Cold War: are we willing to support one dictatorship, hopefully temporarily, in order to prevent a worse, more dangerous dictatorship from taking root? In this case, the greater danger isn't Communism but Islamism. We have to decide whether the Islamist rule the Muslim Brotherhood was attempting to impose in Egypt would have been worse, both for us and for the Egyptians, than the current military regime.
The regime is making its pitch, with Egypt's foreign minister comparing the Brotherhood to the Nazis:
"Speaking in Egypt's embassy in a Mayfair townhouse, Mr. Kholy compared the one-year rule of Mr. Morsi to the Islamist takeover of the Iranian state after the 1979 revolution and said that, like Nazism, the Muslim Brotherhood ideology sought to dominate Egyptian society. "'Morsi was elected president and held office for one year but in that time he tried to make everything Muslim Brotherhood controlled. Egyptian culture over 5,000 years is a mix of religions and civilizations in which the Islamic religion is one ingredient of the Egyptian character,' he said. 'The Muslim Brotherhood are like a Nazi group that demand that everything changes and people everything to their way.'"
This recalls Kirkpatrick's old distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes. This is also why many of Egypt's liberals support the coup, as they feared that the Islamists were targeting them for elimination. It's also why Egypt's liberals are convinced that President Obama is a secret Muslim Brotherhood supporter.
To get an idea of why the liberals are breaking for the new military rulers, after throwing off the old military rulers, consider the Islamists' response to the military's crackdown: a campaign of violence and terror against Coptic Christian churches in Egypt. This has been dubbed the Coptic Kristallnacht (after the violent purge in which Hitler consolidated his power) or an anti-Christian pogrom.
You can see why some folks are concluding, as Leslie Gelb does, that freedom has more chance under military rule than it does if the Muslim Brotherhood gets back into power and sets out to get some payback.
"Let's get real and tamp down the moral posturing about democracy in Egypt. Freely elected President Morsi and his now-deposed Muslim Brotherhood government weren't practicing democracy. They were co-opting the laws and slowly destroying all possible opposition. Besides, they were aligning with America's jihadist enemies in Syria, Gaza, and elsewhere. Egypt's military leaders, no democratic sweethearts either, are aligned with moderates, need Washington more than the Islamists, and back U.S. interests on the Suez Canal and Israel. Americans rightly can't stand the military street slaughters. For sure, bloody casualties will mount. But the United States has some modest chance to influence the military in right directions. It has little or no chance of saving Egypt for democracy if the Islamists return to power."
That's basically the point behind the Kirkpatrick Doctrine.
The calculation in Syria, I should note, is a little different. A new Kirkpatrick Doctrine does not imply support for the Assad regime, even though the rebels include jihadist factions, because the regime itself is an ally of Hezbollah and a satellite of Iran. While nominally secular, in the wider political perspective, the Assad regime is the tool of theocratic dictatorship. And the whole point of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine is to keep us focused on that wider geopolitical perspective.
So that's our foreign policy choice: a Carteresque policy of hand-wringing, myopic focus on "human rights," versus a new Kirkpatrick Doctrine against Islamism.