Condi in Beirut -- Another Diplomatic Triumph for Dubya?

Condi is in the house!

AP reports:

Rice met with Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, who greeted her with a kiss on both cheeks. Rice told him, "Thank you for your courage and steadfastness."

…

Her mission is the first U.S. effort on the ground to resolve a crisis that has convulsed the Middle East and threatens to engulf other countries in the region.

…

En route to the region, Rice discussed the possibility of working with Syria on a solution.

Responding to idiot comments by critics in the MSM who fault the US for not being engaged Rice said:

"The problem isn't that people haven't talked to the Syrians. It's that the Syrians haven't acted," she said.

"It's not as if we don't have diplomatic relations," she said. "We do."

Rice has tried to walk delicately between supporting the Lebanese government, while also not dictating to its ally Israel how it should handle its own security. Her posture has frustrated numerous allies.

"We all want to urgently end the fighting. We have absolutely the same goal," Rice said. But she added that if the violence ends only to restart within weeks, "then all of the carnage that Hezbollah launched by its illegal activities — abducting the soldiers and then launching rocket attacks — we will have gotten nothing from that."

Read it here.

Things are moving fast and a lot is going on behind the scenes, and it is far too early for those of us who have limited knowledge and understanding to try to make sense of the whole thing, but that doesn't stop the usual suspects in the MSM, on cable and in the blogosphere. So, here's my current understanding -- one that can always be radically revised in the face of new information.

Bush/Condi seem to be handling this situation masterfully, as they have so many others. Just a few months ago it seemed that Iran was on the verge of emerging as a regional hegemon, leading a broad Islamic coalition in defiance of an enervated and ineffective West. But, interestingly, that scenario has begun to fall apart. Israel is effectively decimating Hiz'bullah, Iran's instrument in Lebanon and dramatically reducing its effectiveness. Syria, Iran's major ally, has refused to get involved, contenting itself with warning Israel not to approach its national borders. The stage is being set for the Lebanese government to at last exercise control over Hiz'bullah. And, most importantly, the Arab powers in the region have refused to condemn Israel, thus defying Iran's attempt to construct a broad, multi-ethnic Islamic anti-Western coalition.

Things are still fluid and the outcome might be something quite different from what I expect, but I will not be surprised if a year or so from now we are seeing a Middle East in which Iran, not Israel, stands in isolation.

Several weeks ago Dan Drezner posed an important and interesting question -- "where is the anti-American balancing coalition?" He writes:

For the past fifteen years, the big question in international relations is why no balancing coalition has emerged against the United States.

The answer you get depends on who you ask. During the nineties, some liberals credited the existing framework of international institutions as forming binding constraints on the U.S., assuaging the concerns of other states. Other liberals credited America's "soft power" in getting other countries to want what we want. Still more liberals would have answered with variations on the democratic peace. Realists didn't say much about the topic during the nineties, other than to warn that a balancing coalition was sure to come, you betcha.

With the arrival of George W. Bush, the September 11th attacks, the U.S. response, and the Iraq war, just about everyone has been predicting a balancing coalition. And yet the funny thing is that it hasn't happened.

Read it here.

Even funnier are the contortions engaged in by foreign policy theorists who are trying to account for this unexpected development [or, more properly, lack of development].

Sure, some realists have claimed the existence of "soft balancing," but that's really just a fancy term for self-interested diplomacy. Plus, it's just plain odd to read realists who would otherwise pooh-pooh the existence of international organizations suddenly claim that the diplomatic activity taking place within those organization really matters. The lack of appreciable evidence is also kind of a problem.

This head-scratcher has caused people to start looking for hard balancing coalitions in out of the way places -- inside sofa cushions, under rocks, near Central Asia, you name it.

Critics of the Bush administration have time and again heralded the rise of an anti-American coalition. But the Arab "street" refused to rise. The anti-American Kyoto coalition was miserably ineffective. France's pretention to European leadership crashed and burned with the result that today it is the Chirac regime, not Bush that is isolated. Russia and China's attempt to exclude the US from Central Asia has failed miserably. Now, Iran's attempt to construct a regional Islamic coalition is collapsing.

Instead, it is the United States that has effectively put together broad coalitions on Iraq, on the environment, Asian security arrangements, on African disease initiatives, and a host of other issues. Bush, not his opponents, has been the effective coalition builder.

We are now reaching a point where the repeated failure of foreign policy "experts" to adequately confront reality is becoming a major embarrassment. It is becoming apparent that their understanding of the international system and how it operates is woefully inadequate. What is more it is becoming clear that Dubya and his people have a much better grasp of how to conduct effective diplomacy in the post-Cold War environment than do the academic theorists.