The Navy denies it but it seems that rumors are circulating that the United States will step into the breach of stalled India-Russia negotiations about getting India an aircraft carrier by having us give them the USS Kitty Hawk, which is slated to be decommissioned. Robert Farley explains why this is a good idea.

There’s a substantial “international public good” aspect to much of what the US military does, and I think that’s particularly true of the Navy. That’s good for us, as far as it goes, but it makes sense for us to find ways to do that stuff in ways that allows for cooperation and burden-sharing. Helping friendly countries improve their naval capabilities in ways that both brings our countries closer together and save us money would seem like a big step in the right direction.

Andrew writes that “McCain insists on not revisiting the decision to invade and occupy Iraq.” Instead, “He wants a debate solely on the surge. I can understand why; but I doubt it will work.”

I’m by no means sure it will fail. A certain notion of can-do pragmatism is deep in American political culture, and that kind of forget the problems of the past let’s roll up our sleeves and talk about what’s working now attitude has a certain appeal. But it shouldn’t work. And the reason it shouldn’t work is that a given military strategy doesn’t just “succeed” or “fail” in a vacuum, it needs to be understood in some kind of strategic context. If you understand the war as a giant mistake which created a large problem that’s now in need of a solution, that creates one set of ideas about what counts as a solution. If you understand the war as an opening salvo in a campaign to use the U.S. military to remake the Persian Gulf, then working becomes a very different matter.

That said, the politics of the war will depend, crucially, on the actual situation. Surge proponents presumably think things will get better and better, whereas skeptics are inclined to see these stormclouds on the horizon and wonder if it’s about to start pouring again. Thus you have two different political strategies built in large part out of different substantive ideas about how events are likely to play out. There’s just no way to do the political analysis without adding a substantive analysis.

David Ignatius says that “politicians who talk about the terrorism threat — and it’s already clear that this will be a polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign — should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman.” The good news, from my point of view, is that based on Ignatius’ writeup, Sageman’s new book doesn’t sound all that different from his previous book, Understanding Terror Networks. Bottom line:

[W]e are not facing what President Bush called “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation,” but something that is more limited and manageable — if we make good decisions.

The trouble is that ever since 9/11, we’ve adopted a set of incredibly harmful and counterproductive policies (the war in Iraq has, of course, been considerably more costly in terms of lives lost, people crippled, and stuff destroyed than was 9/11). Rather than taking a focused, disciplined approach to a dangerous-but-manageable situation, the Bush administration has engaged in a series of flailing overreactions that have, improbably, actually made it possible for a relatively small group of people to dramatically alter the course of the world without expending any vast resources. The whole thing’s been a disaster. James Fallows points out that you can find much material along these lines in his great 2006 cover story on the need to back off from the idea of a “war on terror.”

In my forthcoming book, Heads in the Sand I observe that there’s a substantial political problem here as well. Given how firmly entrenched the wrongheaded framework is, it’s generally not worth any particular politician’s while on any particular day to stick his or her neck out and try to prick the conceptual bubble Bush has erected around these questions. It’s risky. It makes more sense to try to just come up with ideas that make sense within the Massive Ideological Struggle framework. But as long as that framework goes unchallenged, it’s incredibly difficult to make the case for liberal alternatives to the policies we’ve been implementing.

That’s where outside pressure and things like primary campaigns can make a difference — they create situations in which the balance of incentives can flip and people have reason to start trying to dismantle the sort of grandiose vision that Bush and now John McCain have been propounding. However it gets done in the end, however, the main point is that it’s absolutely vital to do it over the long run. Trying to cram good policies into a framework that was designed to support bad policies is a thankless and ultimately futile task.

House Republicans pissed that standing up for telecom immunity hasn’t been the fundraising bonanza they were hoping for. But, of course, it’s all about keeping the country safe with them.

Michael Cohen seems to me to be quite right to be skeptical that cultural exchanges of the sort typified by the New York Philharmonic’s recent visit to Pyongyang could play a constructive role in “opening things up” in North Korea. The DPRK is just too despotic and locked-down for whatever you might want to communicate to the North Korean people to get through. But that said, I also don’t understand the worry that a visit of this sort will “provide international credibility to a terrible regime (probably the worst in the world).” I mean, how so?

Someone says to you “North Korea, that’s gotta the worst regime in the world.” Then you reply, “no, no, the New York Philharmonic played there, it can’t be so bad.” And then what — he’s supposed to say back “man, you’re right, I suddenly find Kim Jong-Il very credible!” I mean, it is what it is; the DPRK is an incredibly horrible regime and I never hear anyone say otherwise. I oftentimes detect a disturbing level of subjectivism in foreign policy circles, as if people are seriously at risk of forgetting that the US is a mighty superpower and North Korea is ruled by awful despots and thus a top priority to be to find symbolic ways of endlessly reiterating those facts.