Foreign Policy‘s Mike Boyer asks Bill Overholt from RAND whether it’s really true that China has a lot of leverage over the situation in Burma. He says, basically, “no”:

China has interests and involvements in Burma, but limited leverage. Burma is not some kind of client state of China. It is a xenophobic, divided, tribalized country with a nationalistic government; it bears more resemblance to one of the less coherent sub-Saharan African states than to most other East Asian countries. It’s not an easy place to influence. Through most of the 1980s there was a Burmese Communist Party, which consisted primarily of the Wa tribe plus Chinese leadership. When the Wa decided to turn anti-communist in the late 1980s and chased the Chinese leadership into China, China’s influence in the country was drastically reduced but there was little China could do without military intervention. So Beijing basically sat by passively when it happened.

So there, I guess.

American right-wingers should probably give some thought to the fact that even Americaphilic conservative politicians from Anglophone countries don’t seem to share their perspective on world affairs. Here, for example, is Canadian Prime Minister Stephan Harper:

Unlike the U.S., Harper said, “Canada has no history anywhere in the world of conquest or domination. It’s probably hard to perceive of Canada being in that type of a position.”

In contrast, Canada is seen in the world as a “positive and non-threatening force,” he said. “What my government is trying to do is to use those values to promote positive change in concert with our allies.”

At the end of the day, this stuff isn’t brain surgery. Use America’s leading position in the world to contribute in a positive way to problems that people worry about around the world and you’ll be liked. Use it to pursue a policy of conquest and domination — not so much.

Via Spencer Ackerman, the new world corruption rankings. Haiti has surged from most-corrupt down to a respectable fourth-most-corrupt. Iraq is in third-from-last place, ahead of Burma and Somalia (this must be the good news the MSM is trying to hide from you).

As usual, the Nordics are squeaky clean with Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway all in the top ten. The US is basically more corrupt than a northern European country, but less corrupt than a southern European one.

I should say that notwithstanding my considerable skepticism that improved education in the developing world is the key to fighting terrorism, it still really is a very good thing to do. I caught a bit of Gene Sperling talking about the Global Campaign for Education before ducking out on the grounds that I attended a Sperling/GCE panel at YearlyKos so I didn’t need to hear it again. But you the reader may need to read about it again.

So in short here are some good reasons to think this could be very useful. The legislation in the United States is aimed at getting us to contribute $3 billion to meeting the UN Millennium Goals in education, and there’s a lot of bang for the buck to be found here since in a lot of cases you’re starting from close to zero.

I still don’t really know anything about Burma, but what I’d come up with in the way of an opinion is that the key actor here is China, and that aside from ineffectual posturing the most useful thing to be done is to try to influence China which, in turn, is actually in a position to restrain the Burmese military. According to Josh Kurlantzick, either many people who know what they’re talking about agree with me, or else the leading western officials are no better informed than I am:

Many Western powers believe that China, the most important foreign actor in Burma, can be convinced to withdraw its blanket backing for the junta. In a British cable earlier this year obtained by THE NEW REPUBLIC, British diplomats argue “China is closer than any other country to Burma’s military regime … China’s interests had changed in Burma. They [are] investing heavily and want to see a return on their investment … There may be an opportunity to persuade China that it is in their interest to see a stable and developing Burma.” Indeed, some of this week’s Burma protests have signaled popular anger at China as well, with demonstrators pointedly going by the Chinese embassy; several Burmese previously told me of kidnappings of Chinese businesspeople in the north of the country. Recently, according to AFP, senior Chinese official Tang Jiaxuan offered a gentle rebuke to the Burmese junta, telling its foreign minister that “China sincerely hopes that Myanmar can bring stability back to its domestic situation.”

Kurlantzick, though, is skeptical this will work and says that “placing so much trust in China conceals the fact that there are still steps other nations can take on Burma.” His analysis, though, mostly comes down to the fact that there’s are still steps other nations can take that might increase China’s level of concern with the situation.

Matthew Bunn has a solid op-ed in The Washington Post on the real nuclear terrorist threat.

Rick Perlstein takes a look at Nikiti Khruschev’s 1959 trip to the United States:

Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people—then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers’ family quarters. Visited the Agriculture Department’s 12,000 acre research station (“If you didn’t give a turkey a passport you couldn’t tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey”), spoke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin’s crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K’s words, “capitalist lackeys”), and Los Angeles (there he supped at the 20th Century Fox commissary, visited the set of the Frank Sinatra picture Can Can but to his great disappointment did not get to visit Disneyland), and sat down one more with the president, at Camp David. Mrs. K did the ladies-who-lunch circuit, with Pat Nixon as guide. Eleanor Roosevelt toured them through Hyde Park. It’s not like it was all hearts and flowers. He bellowed that America, as Time magazine reported, “must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm.” Reporters asked him what he’d been doing during Stalin’s blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.

Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?

The answer, obviously, is no. Rather, as Rick says, Khruschev visited a country that had some level of maturity in its dealings with other powers around the world.

I’ve been a bit behind the curve on this, but it’s worth listening to Jim Webb’s warnings that the Lieberman-Kyle Amendment on Iran could well be a sub rosa authorization of the use of force masquerading as a meaningless sense of the senate resolution. It’s also worth noting that this crew has been at this game for a long time. Let me quote myself from the February 2002 [CORRECTION: should be 2006] American Prospect:

The atmosphere on the morning of Monday, January 23, was more of a bad dream than a press conference. I was in a small room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol; sitting directly behind me amid the rows of cheap folding chairs was a young man from the National Union for Democracy in Iran, an obscure California-based exile group I’d never heard of seeking, yes, regime change in Tehran.

The walls were overcrowded with reproductions of John Audubon’s brightly colored bird prints. At the front of the room was an American flag, a podium, a projection screen, and R. James Woolsey, former director of Central Intelligence who went more-than-a-little around the bend sometime after leaving the Clinton administration. He was one of the very first prominent commentators to finger Saddam Hussein as the likely culprit for the 9-11 attacks, doing so just after the strikes when no empirical evidence could possibly support the contention, and maintaining his view steadfastly even as evidence continued to be non-existent.

Needless to say, such loyalty to his own imagination has done nothing to diminish his standing in the neoconservative world or his access to mass audiences on cable television. On that January day at the Capitol, he was speaking on behalf of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a think tank he founded in the summer of 2004 with various neocon B-listers under the nominal auspices of Senators Jon Kyl and Joe Lieberman. The occasion was the release of a six-page policy paper on Iran, which to no one’s surprise reached the conclusion that “the United States’ policy objective must be regime change in Iran.”

At some point, the madness has to stop, right? Right?