Promoted from the diaries

Most of my writing is on foreign policy. There are few other topic areas other than the law on which I’m comfortable writing. However, as streiff notes, I, like most other Catholics, got to hear a heartfelt letter from my Bishop — a living examplar of St. John Chrysostom’s famous (possibly apocryphal) maxim — explaining that clear out of nowhere, somehow, the Obama Administration decided to make Catholic institutions pay for abortifacents, birth control, and sterilization procedures, all of which are actually explicitly mortal sins in my faith, which is to say, one can be in danger of Hell merely for helping to provide them.

As Sts. Nicholas and Chrysostom would not, in their unenlightened days, have likely had warm feelings for His Excellency, it is perhaps incumbent upon me to note that my Bishop neglected a few details in the sermon he had our deacon read aloud. His Excellency was absolutely silent on the possible election of a man who actively defended the post-uterine execution of neonatal infants, which I ascribe to moral laziness and cowardice, though it may have been instead interest in funding a short lived billboard campaign in Atlanta extolling Catholics who believe him and the Pope evil to come on back for a quick round of communion. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is a self-professing Catholic who is one of the most ardent defenders of the abortion license in our country. Obamacare was passed through the good offices of numerous nominally-Catholic Senators and Representatives, despite warnings from Catholic groups (such as the Knights of Columbus, who fought tooth and nail) and without so much as a peep of the same from our esteemed Bishops, that maybe, just maybe, the Obama Administration might be vaguely interested in making free abortion on demand and contraceptives available to all, conscience exceptions be damned.

No pun.

Instead, in that pastoral letter, there was a general note that this was bad, and we should all be aware of it. In the background, I believe I heard someone dropping bread into a bowl of milk. I may have also heard someone washing his hands before a condemned man, but I’m not sure about that.

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Foreign policy is hard.

You wouldn’t have thought it was so from listening to candidate Obama in 2007 and 2008. Just a quick dialogue with batty dictators here, a wholesale troop withdrawal there, a quick invasion of Pakistan for garnish, and a drizzle of adoring crowds in the home of dangerous demagoguery, and voila! Receding seas, world peace, America’s foreign policy solved.

So, here we are, in 2011. One invasion of Pakistan, one badly-handled troop withdrawal from Iraq, several pointless speeches, and one dictatorial gladhand later, and the world is still falling apart.

For the first several months of this Administration, many of us tried to figure out what exactly the President and his foreign policy team were trying to accomplish. After months of inconclusive, frequently cross-purposes infighting and schizophrenic policy, it became fairly clear that the Administration had no foreign policy except to take credit when something good happened. (In fairness, the President has proven extremely adept at ordering the killing of fugitives from international law, both 18 year-old, malnourished pirates, and world-spanning terrorists. He seems pretty good at ordering the extrajudicial — but correct — killing of American terrorists, as well.)

The problem with an incoherent U.S. foreign policy — especially when that incoherence appears to be the result of constant in-fighting inside the Administration — is that you don’t actually get very much accomplished. Will the Arab Spring for which the President takes credit devolve further into Islamism? Who can say! Perhaps another speech will stop that. Are we allowing China too much sway because they hold Treasuries? These things happen. Maybe we can get the Vice President to make another gaffe-ridden trip to the region — he’s great copy for the papers for days.

The further, paradoxical problem of allowing bad situations to grow worse while waiting for Cnut’s demonstration to reverse itself is that one tends to leave one’s allies and partners hanging. The best-known examples — snub after snub of the Brits, mooning the Indians, abandoning the Poles to the Russians (again), flipping off Israel — have received more than a bit of press, and rightfully so. However, much as character is what you do when no one is looking, foreign policy outside of the camera light matters too.

Examples abound — examples in Latin America abound, for Pete’s sake — but if you want to see an obscure, but important area where the Administration is flubbing it, you have to look to Central Asia. The truth that very few Administration officials understand is that Central Asia is where much of the world’s action is happening right now, just as it was a century ago when British historian Halford Mackinder propagated his famous theory that He who controls the Heartland of Eurasia controls the world. Central Asia is surrounded by the peace-loving democrats of Tehran, Beijing, Islamabad, and Moscow, and all have varying levels of influence in a geo-political zone where there are gigantic natural gas reserves that compete with Russia’s, and where solid American allies are scarce on the ground.

This is where foreign policy gets very, very hard. Having and maintaining allies in this region — a necessity because those Eastern democrats just seem determined to exploit the region for their own gain — means making the best of less-than-ideal situations. It means understanding that one needs allies, and the best allies in the area are countries at least partly independent of Moscow’s (and China’s and Iran’s) influence, nation-states that are struggling fitfully toward democracy. It means choosing the most pleasant options and sticking with them.

Even at this, the Administration is incompetent.

Take Azerbaijan. Caught between a revanchist Russia and an Iran determined to make its neighbors into a religious and natural satellite, Azerbaijan is a proven source of enormous natural gas reserves (in direct competition with the Russians who hold Europe hostage regularly with their natural gas supplies). Whatever its flaws, Azerbaijan is actually good news for NATO and even better news as a strategic energy partner for the European Union — and for the same reason, as it helps thwart Russian twilight expansion.

The Azeris are actually committed U.S. allies, even though just 20 years after getting liberated from Moscow’s yoke they are still working up to a fully functioning democracy.  But they do have dozens of functioning opposition parties, and two-thirds of the freely published daily and weekly newspapers are outspoken in attacking the government and praising the opposition.

While Azerbaijan may not be a modern democracy, it’s worth noting that they are light-years ahead of their neighboring former Soviet states (where torture is considered a routine form of political expression) and trending in the right direction. With a hulking Iran on one border and the Russians just inside of arm’s reach, the Azeris have nevertheless acted as our staunch allies for years, and occupy a critical source of natural resources for a Europe desperate to avoid Vladimir Putin’s regularly scheduled gas blackmail. Not unrelatedly, they are now on the United Nations Security Council.

Our response to their efforts to crack down on Islamic radicals is to regularly humiliate them rather than to take advantage of this critically-positioned, moderate Muslim state (that hosts fully functioning Jewish synagogues in its capital of Baku — a distinct contrast with its neighbors). When their decades-long standoff with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabkh — a region of Azerbaijan from which the Azeris have been ethnically cleansed with the help of Armenia, who should know a thing or two about genocide — flares up, and Azeris get killed, we remain silent, presumably because of misplaced guilt over the Armenian genocide by the Turks. (Hint to Secretary Clinton: The Azeris are not the Turks. Further hint: The Armenians are a Russian satellite, with Russian military helpfully stationed in-country, and with close ties to Iran.)

This failure extends to soft power, as well. Whether the Norwegian government — long a fan of using NGO prestige to advance left-wing causes — has had a direct hand in undermining the Azeris or not, their closely-aligned Human Rights House has singled out the Azeri government for rough treatment, with approving noises from Oslo every step of the way. Thus, despite the vibrant opposition press and numerous (if uncoordinated and ineffective) opposition parties on the ground, the Norwegians insist on painting Azerbaijan as Uzbekistan in all but name.  So Norway has been leading the pack of human rights militants in praising a pro-opposition newspaper editor named Eynulla Fatullayev. That Norway, a NATO member, should be even perceived to be interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign country that can actually help the United States, Europe, and the West, should raise alarms in Foggy Bottom.

In getting involved in the domestic politics of Azerbaijan by associating with a pro-opposition journalist amongst others, the Norwegians are — nominally in the name of freedom — actually aligning themselves with a man who was freed by presidential pardon last May, and who received government-paid compensation for his imprisonment as the terrible, lawless, rogue Azeris actually implemented a European Court of Human Rights recommendation to free him. Further hint to Secretary Clinton: Tyrannies don’t abide by the ECHR’s decisions.

While it is not incumbent on the United States to answer every slight on its allies, it is incumbent to remember that the more Azerbaijan feels alienated from the community of nations, the more we risk that it will drift from the West and our version of democracy.

Azerbaijan is hardly alone in the Administration’s failure to understand basically any aspect of modern foreign policy. But it is metonymic of a series of failures. With the Republican foreign policy debate fast-approaching, and with a decided lack of foreign policy chops in the current field, it is incumbent on someone to demonstrate that they understand the Administration’s miserable failure in foreign policy, and the path to correcting it.

As Americans, we take the rule of law as a given. We usually think of this in terms of national epigrams like “a nation of laws, and not of men,” and the idea that anyone high or low is entitled to the same procedural safeguards before he is deprived of life, liberty, or property.

These things are true, and they are valuable rights our forebears had the good sense to carve out and hold out against our governments. But they are the flip side of a coin our ancestors took for granted – that a nation of laws can only survive if men are obedient to the law, even when they deem it unjust. An unjust law must be obeyed until it is lawfully erased through peaceful protest and through the civic mechanisms that exist to change or delete it. The law, as the best representation of what men believe to be just, must be given the presumption of justice as long as it is in effect.

As Americans, we have largely forgotten this in any explicit sense, even if we clearly hew to the idea in practice: We pay our taxes, we show up for jury duty, we pull to the side when an emergency vehicle comes racing up in traffic. Because we have internalized this idea, we take it for granted, and forget that without this implicit and explicit respect for the law, the procedural mechanisms will and must decay.

This is not true the world over, and indeed, need not always remain true here. In the former Soviet Union, twenty years of hard work have not corrected for generations of a view of the law as something to be used when possible, and otherwise avoided. The Ukraine is currently providing us a preview of what our future will look like if we continue to forget the linkage between civic duty and sovereign limitation.

Yulia Tymoshenko, the twice-former prime minister of the Ukraine, is on trial for what essentially amount to charges of abuse of power while prime minister. (She is also being investigated for corruption while making her billions in the private sector.) Ms. Tymoshenko, who garnered an enormous amount of goodwill in the West and at home as one of the leaders of the so-called Orange Revolution, ran for the presidency after a largely failed premiership under her former Orange Revolution partner, Viktor Yushchenko, and lost by a few percentage points to the Ukraine’s current president, Viktor Yanukovych. Tymoshenko’s trial is basically custom-made for a Hollywood film – the embattled, beautiful, former prime minister, now opposition leader, on trial by her frowning political opponent – and Tymoshenko has played it to the hilt. As with most things Hollywood, this is simple to the point of being affirmatively wrong.

She is currently undermining the rule of law by breaking her part of the compact, the promise that she will treat the same institutions over which she governed as legitimate. She is doing so because her personal ambition appears to be more important than her duty to her country’s civic institutions.

Tymoshenko garnered an enormous amount of goodwill as a result of her part in the Orange Revolution, to the point where basically the rest of her life history has gone down the memory hole. She made her fortune in the 1990s as a natural gas oligarch, getting the nickname “gas princess” (think in terms of Elizabeth Báthory rather than Rapunzel) by allegedly squeezing a monopoly on the Russian natural gas flowing into the Ukraine. Her business partner of the time, former prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko, was convicted of money laundering, wire fraud and extortion in the U.S. in 2006. Her time in the Ukrainian parliament after she made her fortune was marked by protests, well-publicized rages, fights with the rest of the government, two-way accusations of corruption, a pending Russian indictment, and essentially what one would expect of a natural gas oligarch diva who decided to do politics.

The Orange Revolution, and her role as a beautiful and charismatic spokesman for it, vaulted her to near the top of Ukrainian politics, where she would serve as Yushchenko’s prime minister until, just eight months later, he grew tired of the protests, well-publicized rages, fights with the rest of the government, and two-way accusations of corruption, and dismissed her. In what he would later describe as the worst mistake of his life, Yushchenko appointed her prime minister again two years later. Her second tour as prime minister would include highlights like stated neutrality over the Russian invasion of Georgia (an invasion opposed by the rest of the government), cozying up to Vladimir Putin, protests, well-publicized rages, fights with the rest of the government, opposition to free market and civil service reforms (a trend that continues to this day), two-way accusations of corruption, and essentially what one would expect of a natural gas oligarch diva who decided to do politics.

Unsurprisingly, Yushchenko actively campaigned against her in the 2010 elections. Also unsurprisingly, Putin made clear that she was his chosen candidate.

When Ukrainians were understandably weary of her antics and turned down her bid for the presidency in 2010, she took the election to court; when the courts refused to immediately name her president, she loudly declared the same courts she had overseen as prime minister hopelessly corrupt and a sham. Now on trial, she has taken to having her protesters (who have been allowed to protest on the courthouse steps) flood into the courtroom to protest. When the judge grew weary of having chanting protesters in his courtroom during open court — a feature of judges across the planet — and had them removed, Tymoshenko took the opportunity to step up her public taunting of the judge, leading to her removal.

One might almost detect a pattern here.

The problem is not merely one minority politician in a former Soviet republic taking advantage of her best camera angles to push her political agenda and break her country’s judiciary. The problem is how this has been portrayed by the press and governments at home and abroad – and the message that they have inadvertently broadcast as a result.

The Financial Times, for example, has actually developed a fondness for oligarchs for the first time in living memory. The Obama Administration, not seeing a largely neutralized Muslim despot to bomb, has valiantly leaped into its traditional stance of puzzled ambivalence. The European Union is adopting the same stance. A consistent theme among the media outlets has played Tymoshenko as Joan of Arc before the Inquisition, treating public histrionics and contempt of court that would have her in shackles in the United States as a valiant speaking of truth to power. In so doing, they are not merely telling a good story. They are aiding the lady’s attempt to undermine the rule of law. They are joining Tymoshenko in saying that the rule of law runs only one way, and that citizens do not have a duty to avoid starting riots in courtrooms, or using courts as personal political stages. By example, they are disintegrating the civic behavior that makes the guarantee of procedural fairness possible.

We still treat these sorts of histrionics as aberrant. That will not last as we — through our civic institutions, and inevitably our own behavior — define deviancy down, to the point where the state’s mechanisms of law are not even honored by its citizens. Though not the way she undoubtedly intends, Yulia Tymoshenko is an object lesson to us all.

There is something about political office that either drives many men to infidelity — and the belief that the old rules don’t apply to them — or attracts the sorts of men prone to infidelity and a belief in their own exemption from the rules. Just the last few years have been remarkable for the wave of public men confessing (or being found to have) a complete inability to keep their pants on around women other than their wives.

In our fallen age, we tend to treat adultery as a personal failing. It is not. A marriage is a public institution and a public face. It is literally one of the building blocks of a civilization, because it is the smallest indivisible element of that civilization, the most compact voluntary union between two humans with internal and external mores, concerns, and promises. All of the arguments over gay marriage can be boiled down to the question of whether the inclusion of homosexual unions will have no perceptible effect on, or will further damage, an institution we have come to treat as a mere contract all too often.

And yet, for all of that faltering view of the importance of a marriage, at heart, we still understand its real and symbolic purposes. Bill Clinton’s many failings were basically known to the electorate at some level by the time he won re-election, but fatigue with his immaturity and inability to grasp the private and public harm his philandering did surely helped George W. Bush win the Presidency. John Ensign correctly perceived he needed to leave public office after his adultery destroyed his credibility with his constituents. Anthony Weiner, after weeks of absolutely ridiculous denials, did the right thing and stepped down, though one suspects that this was more a function of concern over his young marriage than the belief that his constituency would abandon him.

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As the 2012 primary jockeying starts up — we should count our blessings that so many waited for June 2011 instead of the now-traditional June 2009 — most of the energy on the right is aimed at finding the best contender who won’t continue the spending binge on which our country has embarked. Given the numerous crises facing us, this makes a great deal of sense.

I therefore put the odds of a Draft Huckabee movement at 7-to-1.

With that said, the remaining elements of the Republican platform cannot be and should not be ignored: Social conservatism and foreign policy, the rights to hire and fire and work and quit, the free market — all of these things are important. I’m not clever enough to speak to most of these things, but foreign policy is an area the Obama Administration has left in shambles, and it needs immediate attention.

With the exception of Jon Huntsman — whose primary foreign policy accolades appear to come from the Chinese (that is not, actually, a compliment) — the current and likely field is very, very short on foreign policy experience. It is therefore imperative to identify the candidate who can actually come to grips with the challenges the world presents, or at least do a passable show of successful on-the-job training. Native intelligence is not the important factor here, as this Administration has done a remarkable job of botching its foreign policy portfolio everywhere Richard Holbrooke had no authority despite having at its head someone we have been assured is smarter than Marilyn Vos Savant. President Reagan, whom everyone thought a dunce, spent his life preparing for the role, and gave us the model.

Whatever the it-factor is, we’re going to need it.

The Middle East is going to be a headache for every President for decades, much as every President since Truman has experienced an ongoing migraine from dealing with it. This will be true whether it’s Israel finally being tired of threats of nuclear annihilation and deciding to use a total-quality-management approach to its foreign policy, or the nutcases in Iran deciding to scratch the itch of anti-Semitism once and for all (leading again to that TQM approach from Israel), or another Iran-Iraq war, or, golly, any number of things. President Obama’s much-ballyhooed speech was not, as was popularly perceived, an attempt to cast a new consensus, but rather an admission that he is simply not up to grappling with the region in any meaningful way. The Middle East is, to borrow a phrase from a wise man who wisely borrowed the phrase from another wise man, a known unknown.

More important — and more quantifiable — will be the next President’s ability to manage American foreign policy interests in Asia. There are few unknowns, but the knowns are troubling enough.

The last years of China’s ascent are upon us, as the Han fascists are flexing their military muscles while they still have enough young men to power their nascent military machine. China’s economy is going to continue to grow rapidly for as long as possible, because Beijing’s regime decided sometime around, oh, say, 1989, that rapid economic development at any cost was the price for continued survival. The result of eating so much seed corn, and not bothering to have babies for thirty-odd years, will only begin to take its toll after 2017; the issue is therefore how to deal with an increasingly bellicose China that desperately wants attention, recognition, hegemony, and respect, especially in the area that it perceives as its historic stomping ground — Southeast Asia.

It is here that the Obama Administration has done the most damage. More or less the entire area understands that it is American naval and ground commitments that have kept the peace on the ground and in the waterways for decades; and where nations have voluntarily committed themselves to commendable, voluntary international law to resolve their disputes (as Cambodia and Thailand have recently done), it is in the light of an American peace that has made intra-regional and international trade lucrative enough to make war simply not worth doing.

But China as hegemon cannot and will not be so benevolent as an American hegemony. China has claims that extend into and envelop islands and whole nations, and China’s history makes clear that even when it comes bearing peace, it still expects a kowtow. Over the last several years, China’s importance as a trade power has been matched more and more by its importance as a military one, as its navy has expanded its reach into blue water.

The Obama Administration, seeing critical trade routes and trading partners beginning to fall under China’s sway, has done exactly what we should have expected. The vacuum of American authority is dangerous not because it makes China’s rise more pronounced, but because it makes conflict more likely. America does not want war, for moral and practical reasons. China wants a sufficient lack of hostility that it can export its goods to the world and be the center of the region. The difference is critical.

In the absence of overt expressions of American hegemony, regional blocs are attempting to maintain something resembling the status quo. ASEAN, originally so many self-important chatterers and tyrants attempting to throw around their weight during the height of the Cold War, has slowly morphed into a more respectable gathering of democracies and not-as-bad powers intent on regional trade and development.

In this context, efforts like Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak’s to introduce a new dynamic to the region must be viewed as a net positive. Faced with a rising China and a withdrawing China, Najib’s call for ASEAN’s influence to grow, China’s to be seen as (and to act as) a benevolent power, and the United States to remain engaged in the region is a terribly clever piece of Realpolitik: It explicitly appeals to American and Chinese pride in their pasts while calling on them to act harmoniously into the future. That it promotes ASEAN as a force for stability and progress in the region is an added bonus, and a gentle reminder to both the U.S. and the P.R.C. that someone must keep piracy at bay and trade routes open. The entire speech is not, as some have cast it, an attempt to call for non-alignment as to China and the U.S., but rather a shrewd recognition that the world is becoming multipolar, and for everyone’s good, the same principles that animated the American peace must animate the multipolar world.

This can be nothing more than a band-aid, though. American neglect of the region will and must have long-term consequences for regional peace and stability, and for global free trade, a rising tide that has truly lifted all boats. Joint military exercises with rising regional powers will not transform those regional powers into potential hegemons. At some point, America must be America again. We do not play global cop because we want to rule the world, we play global cop because we know that a world under the Pax Americana is a better world for everyone, including us.

For all our sakes, let us hope a candidate who not only mouths, but understands this, steps forward soon.

In the West, we tend to ignore the Muslim countries of Southeast Asia too often in favor of the more rambunctious Middle East; whether this is because we are concentrating our limited energies on the larger problem spot, or ignoring places where things are going well, is probably a function of one’s particular outlook on life. Regardless of the source of this disregard, it is an error as great as choosing to ignore the safe streets in city planning in favor of the bullet-ridden ones. The good things don’t last without some tending of their own.

That leads to Malaysia, a moderate Muslim country with strong trade ties to the United States, that we too often ignore along with its other, moderate neighbors in favor of a pointless bombing campaign in Libya and other adventures in futility. Malaysia has done well for itself, holding fast to a moderate strain of Islam while continuing to grow energetically. It is not heaven on earth, but it is better than most Muslim nations, with religious minorities freely practicing their faith, and calls for extremism loudly and roundly denounced by most Malaysians. It is in and from this fertile ground that Malaysia’s current prime minister, Najib Razak, boldly decried the practice of suicide bombing, eschewing the usual Islam-means-peace pablum for a concrete denunciation of murder and suicide, explicitly calling them contrary to Islam and a mark of barbarism.

This is especially significant because English is the lingua franca of Malaysia, and so Najib’s Oxford speech was reported and understood at home. He cannot — and to his credit, does not — play the all-too-common game of tell-the-non-Muslims-what-they-want-to-hear, revert-to-death-to-the-Jews-death-to-America at home.

His political opposite cannot say the same.

I’m on the record having a low opinion of Anwar Ibrahim, but that’s only because he’s a virulent anti-Semite with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood who formed an opposition coalition in his country by recruiting a political party best known for calling for volunteers to fight with the Taliban against the United States. So, you know, little things. But what’s worse is how he has played the nasty demagogue at home, then played the good democrat in the West; and what’s worse than that is how the Western policy establishment has historically tolerated this.

This is one of those critically easy policy rules: If someone is blathering about the Jews being the source of the world’s problems, or, more particularly, his own, he is a very bad man, a nutter, or both. You don’t need to be a failed painter with a nasty little mustache, a figurehead president with alleged (and hastily denied!) Jewish ancestry, or a former military juntaist whom we have unaccountably not snuffed as he has gone on to destroy one of the most vibrant and productive economies in Latin America for this to be so. You can be an opposition leader trying to wrest control of your country’s parliamentary system from someone you casually describe as being controlled by the Jews.

Indeed, given his ready trafficking in old anti-Semitic (and anti-Christian) tropes, it is a wonder the extent to which Anwar has retained so much of the goodwill he managed to rack up in the late Nineties. People whom many of us (I include myself) have respected for years tend to shock us by excusing away Anwar’s disturbing tells. Probably the best, single example of this I’ve seen has been Jackson Diehl excusing the anti-Semitism as an unfortunately necessary means of political survival (while giving Anwar an on-the-record opportunity to explain away his minutes-long rant as the result of a slip of the tongue), and giving Paul Wolfowitz, who really should know better, a chance to provide Anwar some same-themed cover. That neither man would tolerate this sort of doublespeak out of, say, a Saudi prince is a telling indictment of their willingness to suspend their disbelief at inconvenient times.

Diehl and Wolfowitz are hardly alone. For years — since at least 2008, when Anwar first explained his failure to win a national election as the result of the American Jewish Lobby doing … something — Western policymakers and opinion makers have given the man a free pass, ignoring each round of particularly vicious anti-Semitism as it occurs. Anwar has helpfully made himself available without pause or cessation, ready to say one thing to any Western voice that would listen, and another at home; he has been his own best press agent.

A strange thing seems to have happened of late, though. Anwar is on trial for forced sodomy (mistakenly described by Diehl and others who should know better as consensual sodomy), and the judge presiding over the case has allowed it to go forward. In a matter of days, Anwar will have to present his defense, and will doubtless explain again to Western ears that he is a beleaguered democrat facing a political charge (something the Washington Post seems inclined to believe credulously), and tell audiences at home that this is because of the Jews, the Israeli special ops, and/or the Americans.

But as yet, there is no groundswell of spontaneous opinion writing in his defense. There is no remarkable wave of excuses and dire warnings about democracy in Malaysia. There is, instead, silence.

I would submit this is the result of two, critical factors.

First, Anwar’s political touch is turning out to make a lot more lead than gold. Most recently, he has taken to excusing away his inability to move the needle in local elections, in the process doing critical damage to his coalition’s efforts in advance of the upcoming national elections by insulting a vital, potential ally. He compounded this by accusing the people of Sarawak — where he carefully hid his ties with radical Islam during the local elections, to no avail — of racism for failing to support his ticket, a charge that is not merely not helpful, but has the added bonus of being based on a complete misunderstanding of the facts on the ground.

The Western press likes winners and canny underdogs. It’s not quite so hot on fools who cannot keep their feet from their mouths.

The second, critical element here is the Obama Administration’s approach to Malaysia. I have been a not-infrequent critic of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy — confused, overt deference to the genocidal People’s Republic of China, and a willingness to snub the world’s most populous democracy are not actually achievements of which Americans should be proud — but this is one area in which the Administration seems to have caught on more quickly than its outside supporters and critics. Not only is the Secretary of State praising Najib’s call for religious moderation, but the Administration as a whole is treating Anwar as a matter of secondary importance.

And as we learned during the 2008 Presidential campaign, the media are nothing if not sensitive to the directions open and implicit of this President.

The next few months will be interesting to watch. Anwar’s trial will conclude with a verdict of some kind, and Malaysia will move toward its next national election. In the face of dual pressure, it would seem reasonable to assume that Anwar will step up his availability and his lobbying of the Administration to build support either for his appeal (if convicted) or his election efforts (regardless of the trial’s outcome).

Whether his one-man public relations campaign yields the same willingness to ignore rank anti-Semitism and tolerance of Islamist lunacy will rest on the Administration’s willingness to stand by its prior positions (an open question) and whether Anwar continues to inject his foot into his mouth when blood libels are not leaving it.

The Prime Minister of a majority-Muslim country, a strong U.S. ally, and one of the foremost voices for moderate Islam on Earth — real, serious Islam, the kind to which President Bush referred when he spoke of a “religion of peace” — gave a speech at Oxford today. It was a serious speech, a speech that grappled with real problems, and a speech that did not deny the violence done in Islam’s name, even while demanding that religious violence end.

It was, of course, basically a non-news event here.

This is a shame, and a burgeoningly tragic one at that. Najib Razak, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, has been on a more or less singular crusade to convince the Muslim world — and the West — that there is a path for moderate Islam in the world, that Islam does not equal terror, and that the taking of a life is contrary to Islam and civilization. His speech at Oxford was of a piece with that.

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It is a staple of American politics, when American politicians can be bothered to notice Malaysia, to sing the praises of Anwar Ibrahim, the more-or-less permanent opposition leader of that state. It is to the Obama Administration’s rare credit that it has started to distance itself from Anwar, recognizing that Malaysia’s government has made serious strides in the last several years, and that Ibrahim’s unsavory past and ties do not make him a good partner in the region.

The Administration is so very bad at so much foreign policy, that we should actually take the opportunity to praise them when they do something right.

Anwar faces a crisis of his own making, distracting from his latest, quixotic attempt to move from opposition leader into government. In what was initially portrayed as a replay of his famous turn-of-the-millennium sodomy trial, he once again faces a sex scandal and trial. This time, however, there is video. And more importantly, there is the matter of the dynasty he is trying to create.

Here in the U.S., we are well-used to the scene of the politician’s fall from grace via video and photograph, with infidelities real and imagined making their grainy way onto the evening news.

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