Of course, nobody really knows, but it is interesting to read how the gipper reacted to Israel's surprise bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, courtesy of James Bennet:

“I swear I believe Armageddon is near,” Ronald Reagan confided to his diary on June 7, 1981. He had just learned that the Israelis had bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak.

Rather than consult with the Americans in advance, Prime Minister Menachem Begin had informed the United States only “after the fact,” Reagan noted tersely, and was insisting that “the plant was preparing to produce nuclear weapons for use on Israel.” Begin felt he couldn’t risk waiting until the French, who had sold Iraq the reactor, actually shipped uranium to power it, “because of the radiation that would be loosed over Baghdad.”

“I can understand his fear but feel he took the wrong option,” Reagan wrote. “He should have told us & the French, we could have done something to remove the threat.”

But there was no question of condemning the assault. “We are not turning on Israel—that would be an invitation for the Arabs to attack,” Reagan continued. “It’s time to raise Hell world wide for a settlement of the ‘middle-east’ problem. What has happened is the result of fear & suspicion on both sides. We need a real push for a solid peace.”

Finally, a considered take on the subject. The introductory paragraph:

For the Obama administration, the prospect of a nuclearized Iran is dismal to contemplate— it would create major new national-security challenges and crush the president’s dream of ending nuclear proliferation. But the view from Jerusalem is still more dire: a nuclearized Iran represents, among other things, a threat to Israel’s very existence. In the gap between Washington’s and Jerusalem’s views of Iran lies the question: who, if anyone, will stop Iran before it goes nuclear, and how? As Washington and Jerusalem study each other intensely, here’s an inside look at the strategic calculations on both sides—and at how, if things remain on the current course, an Israeli air strike will unfold.

Long ago at a university far away, I used to study neuropsychology. Most of my work focused on how individual voters make decisions about political candidates and how they adjust those decisions to in response to new information (that and how monkeys decide to throw poop--no joke). While the specifics have largely part faded from my memory I do remember this:

Human decision making is rational with two important caveats: First, rationality is based on access to information; without complete information, it’s impossible to be completely rational. Second, our emotions affect the way we initially process information which can later jade decision making.

While applications for behavioral neuropsych are generally limited in IR, I’ve seen this precept in action more times than I care to count.  All other things being equal, countries are rational actors. The problem is that rarely are those other things equal. More often than not, countries fail to understand each other’s motivations and thus regularly make decisions based on incompletely knowledge.

A prime example is Iran’s analysis of who is shaping America’s Iran policy. According to Jon Lee Anderson’s recent interview with Hossein Shariatmadari, a trusted adviser to Khamenei and editor-in-chief of Kayhan, a hard right publication associated with the Iran’s clerical establishment, our Iran policy is shaped by four guys:

The Green Movement, he said, was part of a grand conspiracy—conceived by, among others, Michael Ledeen (a veteran foreign-policy hawk), Richard Haass (the president of the Council on Foreign Relations), Gene Sharp (an authority on nonviolent resistance), and George Soros (the financier and philanthropist)—with the aim of overthrowing Iran’s government. The protests were not against Ahmadinejad, he explained, but “against the whole system.” Fortunately, “the people” had been mobilized and had stopped the conspiracy in its tracks.

(Check out the rest of Anderson’s New Yorker piece on the current Iranian political environment here)

As Daniel Drezner explains, Shariatmadari’s analysis is preposterous:

Seriously, Ledeen and Haass loathe each other, and Ledeen and Soros probably loathe each other even more.  None of these guys have any direct influence over Iran policy, and I'm willing to bet that Ledeen and Soros' indirect influence is exactly nil. Now, take a moment to imagine a world in which Ledeen, Haass and Soros  are secretly meeting to overthrow the Iranian regime, and I guarantee that the color of the sky in that world is not blue.

At least we can give the Iranians credit for consistency. The Iranian intelligence community has implicated Soros and Sharp in a wide variety of plots against Iran for years now. See the hilarious VEVAK propaganda video below for details.

-Evan

From John Richardson's recent Gingrich profile in Esquire:

You call Obama's Iran policy appeasement. But what's the alternative?

"Replace the government."

You're advocating war with Iran?

"Not necessarily. There's every reason to believe that if you simply targeted gasoline, and you maximized your support for dissidents in Iran, that within a year you'd replace the regime without a war."

That's it? After such an incendiary charge, your only solution is sanctions and speeches?

"The only thing you have to stop is gasoline," he repeats.

But that just seems like nuance, and only a minor difference with Obama's position.

"The difference between replacing a regime and appeasing a regime is pretty radical."

But you won't replace the regime that way. You're just tinkering with sanctions, which have never worked.

"I would cut off gasoline, and I would fund the dissidents," he repeats.

HT to Abu Muqawama

From RFE/RL:

Russian officials have confirmed for the first time the presence of wildfires in contaminated, radioactive areas, a day after Greenpeace accused the authorities of downplaying the blazes' radioactive danger.

Russian officials say 28 fires covering an area of 269 hectares have been counted in the heavily polluted Bryansk Oblast during the last few days.

The region has been among the world's most dangerous after its exposure to radiation from the 1986 Chornobyl disaster in neighboring Ukraine.

Experts have warned about the possibility that radioactive soil could be swirled into the air along with ash by the flames and the firefighting efforts.

The number of Iranian students studying in the US is on the rise:

Since 1979, when tens of thousands of Iranians studied in the United States, the number of Iranian students in the United States has taken an almost uninterrupted nosedive, bottoming out at fewer than 1,700 students in 1999. Since then, the number of students has begun a slow but steady rise, with more Iranians in the country now than at any other point since 1994, says the Institute of International Education in New York.

I met many Iranian students in Baku applying for visas at the US Embassy there. Amazing kids in every way.

There are some compelling arguments to be made that we should reconsider the role democracy promotion plays in American foreign policy. Pat Buchanan’s recent critique of what he calls America’s  “democracy obsession” in The American Conservative isn’t one of them.

Buchanan bases in his argument against democracy promotion on a rather warped history of America’s relations with tyrants:

“Historically, we have often made common cause with autocrats and dictators when our vital national interests commanded it.  […] During Vietnam, autocratic South Korea and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines sent troops. The Brits and French traded with the enemy. Gen. Pinochet, who seized power in a coup in 1973, was a better friend than Chile’s Salvador Allende, who was elected. While the Nixon White House did not cause Allende’s ouster, neither did they weep over it.

Democratic France denied Ronald Reagan overflight rights for his F-111s to hit Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya in retaliation for a terrorist attack, but Portugal’s dictatorship gave permission for Nixon to use the Azores as a fueling station in resupplying Israel during the Yom Kippur war.

Ought not nations judge friends less by the ideals they profess than by how they behave when you need them most.”

Buchanan’s apparent ardor for dictators aside, the reality is that tyrants rarely make good strategic partners; they are far more likely to be mercurial and demanding and in the long run are generally unstable. The idea that we can manipulate a chosen crop of autocrats is more hubristic than the notion that we can force democratic change on a country.

Even more galling, Buchanan claims that in recent decades it has been our despot chums who have been our real friends while our democratic allies have often turned against us when we needed them most. This just isn’t true.

Take Afghanistan—certainly a more relevant example than our de facto alliance with Napoleon during the war of 1812 or any of the other cases Buchanan cites. Of of the 28 nations contributing soldiers to the ISAF only three (Azerbaijan, Jordan and UAE) are "not free" and of the 18 countries contributing 500 or more soldiers to the ISAF, 15 are ranked by Freedom House as “free” and the remaining three are “partially free.”

One thing I do agree with Buchanan on: American democracy promotion has failed under the weight of its own hype. It is clear that America cannot force or directly cause a country to shift toward democracy. Even our record of providing assistance to countries that are actually interested in reform isn’t particularly impressive.  The answer, however, isn’t to abandon democracy promotion and instead embrace every dictator who  offer us some passing strategic benefit. Instead, the United States needs to take more incremental, targeted and strategic approach to promoting democracy around the world.

Right now, I’m working on a paper outlining what the US can and should do to promote democracy in Azerbaijan, a prototypical state in democratic decline. Until that drops (hopefully before Azeri Parliamentary election this fall), I recommend you check out Thomas Carother’s comprehensive “Revitalizing Democracy Assistance: The Challenges of USAID.” A teaser:

Most of the current structures and methods for funding and implementing this assistance were developed in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when democracy was spreading rapidly in the world, the international acceptance of crossborder political aid was growing, and the United States enjoyed clear geostrategic hegemony. Those conditions no longer hold. Democracy promoters face a world today where democracy is largely stagnant (having retreated as much as advanced over the past decade), suspicion of and hostility toward international democracy aid has burgeoned, and the weight of the United States on the international political stage, although still enormous, is not what it was before. The U.S. democracy assistance community has only started to adjust to these profound changes.

Evan

Or at least he thinks that it's an island off the coast of West Africa. Maybe he has it confused with the Canary Islands? In a bizarre day in which some people say a grenade was thrown at the Iranian President during a speech (news outlets closer to the leader say it was a firecracker), Mr. Ahmadinejad delivered this gem in the city of Hamedan, live on state television:

Look at this country of England — a small island in West Africa. These people made weapons and ships; they attacked people; they subjugated India, whose area is 10 times the size of England, whose populations is tens of times larger!

This is outside of our normal purview, but summer blogging is slow, so who cares? This line from the WSJ jumped out at me:

Four of the 10 highest-earning executives [of the past 10 years] ran companies whose shareholders lost money over the decade: IAC/InterActive, Countrywide, Capital One and Cendant Corp.

This includes 2 of the top 5-- guys pulling in $1.1 billion and $549 million respectively.

Sure, these are arbitrary samples taken from arbitrary time periods, and some of the other top paid execs did preside over companies that made huge profits for shareholders. But taking arbitrary samples wouldn't matter, and the numbers wouldn't be so far off (1.1 billion????) if exec pay was really tied to performance (or to "maximizing shareholder value").

The NYTimes has an inspiring story about a man who quit Russia's police force on YouTube by giving a speech denouncing institutionalized corruption and bribe-taking. He was, of course, arrested, farcically charged under a statute designed to protect "state secrets", but was released after the case became an embarrassment. Now he tours Russia giving speeches against corruption, and encouraging ordinary people to bypass the Kremlin-controlled media and share their stories via YouTube. Watch him speak here (with subtitles).