The WaPo editorial page is on fire with foreign-policy goodness today. (I’m giving Ghettoputer’s sister credit.)

First, Professor Baktybek Abdrisaev, former ambassador of Kyrgyzstan, writes that U.S. policy towards Kyrgyzstan became reduced to simply maintaining our airbase at Manas. He have preferred we’d have continued to press the government towards democracy and openness. As does the Volgi, but Prof. Abdrisaev, in his sorrow for his country’s political regression, underestimates the diplomatic dilemma with which the Foreign Service is presented in such an instance.

Say we’ve got a strategic airbase in Country X, and the government there is getting more repressive. The State Department tells the GoX on the q.t. (or, if they’re really fired up because some protestors got shot, say, delivers a démarche) saying, “Hey, dudes, get your act together. We disapprove.” Logically, the next step is a carrot or a stick, and since you don’t want to reward this kind of stuff*, it’s Hammertime. So what’s your stick? “We can move our airbase.” Except, say, Country X is strategic precisely because you don’t have a lot of options for airbases. And you know as soon as these words pass your lips, the defense attaché is sending frothing all-caps e-mails back to the Pentagon, which will result in the Secretary getting involved, and eventually you’ll get a “knock it off” telegram. Plus, you don’t like lying. Who needs the hassle?

So, you got nothing. Plus, you’re an American. You don’t really do diplomacy in the classical sense of pursuing your country’s interests by guile and misdirection. You are good at practical stuff, like managing the relations between State and their Foreign Ministry, and Defense and their MoD. So it‘s easier and a lot more rewarding to focus on the details of keeping the base open.

So you just tell ’em, “Hey, we’re not happy about that anti-democratic stuff.” They nod, and assure you that your concerns will be taken terribly seriously, and then they keep their heads down in case the increasingly authoritarian government comes after them. And relations slide and become increasingly based on process, like keeping an airbase open.

This is not to crap on State—there are great people doing great jobs there, and I have no reason to believe that this is what happened in Kyrgyzstan. But this is a pattern that happens frequently in American diplomacy. See America comma Latin; Iran comma Shah of; &c.

The second piece, which echoes in a different way, Prof. Abdrisaev’s concern for the lack of American assertion in the world is the usually excellent Charles Krauthammer running down the foreign-policy ploys our enemies (and weak allies) have tested the Obama Administration with. Krauthammer worries that we’re supine before these challenges. It’s always hard to judge at first glance what, exactly, is going on in diplomatic and miltiary circles, as so much of it is done sub rosa, but Krauthammer has legitimate reasons to worry, given the “Negotiations Now, Negotiations Forever” tone that Obama took in the campaign, as well as their aespparent disdain for any assertion of American interests by President Bush (why the eff would we want to suddenly suck up to Putin that Chekist Хуй® when he’s the one making aggressive moves by wanting to put offensive missiles in Kaliningrad?) Krauthammer concludes:

I would like to think the supine posture is attributable to a rookie leader otherwise preoccupied (i.e., domestically), leading a foreign policy team as yet unorganized if not disoriented. But when the State Department says that Hugo Chávez’s president-for-life referendum, which was preceded by a sham government-controlled campaign featuring the tear-gassing of the opposition, was “for the most part . . . a process that was fully consistent with democratic process,” you have to wonder if Month One is not a harbinger of things to come.

Let‘s hope the hell not.

Last, the Post sounds the right note of modesty relative to our ability to deal with the nightmare hermit psychopaths of SLORC.

Mr. Obama should conduct a policy review, by all means. But he must stick to the priorities implied in his inaugural address: If the United States is to extend a hand to Burma†, that country’s tyrants must first relax their grip on power.

Let’s hope Secretary Clinton and anyone else involved in the review resist the temptation to claim a diplomatic “coup” by merely holding negotiations (which can only result in a North Korean-style giveaway…go re-read the footnote).

In all of these situations, too, it’s useful to remember the Volgi’s Fallacy of Foreign-Policy Egocentrism. It ain’t always about you.

• Country X is not going authoritarian because you’re not arguing hard enough against it—your arguments, carrots and sticks, can affect the dynamic, even reverse it, if you’re lucky and good.
• Countries outside the democratic world don’t perceive primarily perceive you as benevolent or mean, first comes “strong” or “weak.”
• And, sometimes you can’t fix the problem. Period. You’ve just got to manage it.

*N.B. Does not apply to North Korea. There, give ’em all sortsa crap and take their s— year after year. Why? You have no idea what to do. They’re batshit crazy, South Korea likes the batshit crazies more than us, and short of invading (a Chinese client state), you got nothing. So, hey, continue the charade of “engaging” them and give into all their crazy one-sided demands in return for token concessions that they retract, then sell back to you.

†We speak English and do not truckle to dictators. It’s Burma and Rangoon, dammit.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.