Jason Horowitz of the New York Observer profiled me in his paper the other day, and he did a decent job of it. He chose to emphasize my reputation as a democratization skeptic. As my readers know, I’ve been consistent over the years in questioning the wisdom of promoting democracy, at a time when the chief beneficiaries of every political opening have been Islamist zealots with fascist tendencies who detest America.

Yesterday, Horowitz went for a reaction to Steven Simon, the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former staffer on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. Simon said about me that “he and Giuliani are made for one another”—I hope that’s true—but then added this (and here I quote the report):

“Giuliani seems to believe that the only thing the other guy understands is a boot in the face, and so he has a boot in the face foreign policy,” said Simon. He said that Kramer, a self-proclaimed democratization cynic, represented a view not uncommon amongst Israeli foreign policy experts, in that he stressed views Simon characterized as “the height of neorealism on international relations.”

Essentially, Simon said the two men viewed too much democracy promotion as counterproductive to American security interests.

“You’re just going to wind up with Hezbollah or Hamas running these countries if that gets out of hand,” Simon said, characterizing Mr. Giuliani’s and Mr. Kramer’s thinking. “On balance the only strategically sensible course is to put all this democracy stuff on the back burner and focus on what’s really important. That’s certainly a departure from the Bush view.”

From the tone of it, you might think that Simon is an idealistic supporter of democratization—not at gunpoint, of course, but as a guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy. Simon, you might conclude, takes democracy promotion seriously, not as “stuff” to be shoved “on the back burner.” And without promoting democracy, what’s left? “Boot in the face.”

Well, I’ve been an avid reader of Steve Simon for a long time, so I did a double-take when I read his reaction. Is this the same Steve Simon who said this to a Congressional committee last fall?

Pursuing democratization, even assuming it was in our power to bring it about, would almost certainly result in the accession of hostile governments in the region. Whether this would defang jihadism is open to question. In any case, the costs would be high.

Well, that hardly sounds like a ringing endorsement of democracy promotion. But it gets better. In a Washington Post op-ed in June, Simon (and coauthor Ray Takeyh) dismissed “the appealing but naive belief that promoting democracy is a panacea for the Middle East’s ills.”

Washington faces a bleak choice: It can push its values or realize its interests. It cannot do both.

The problem with trying to build democracy in the Arab world is not solely that Islamic radical groups such as Hamas tend to win the elections; it’s also the absence of secular, liberal parties or politicians who support U.S. policies. It is Washington’s misfortune that it can achieve its objectives only by working with illiberal regimes such as the stagnant autocracy of Egypt or the complacent monarchies of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. On the margins, some reforms could take place; Arab despots have an interest in cultivating a veneer of legitimacy, which is best served by including some more moderate elements of the opposition in government. But the notion that America’s foremost aim should be disrupting the existing Arab order in the name of democratic transformation must be discarded.

Yes, I’m a skeptic on democracy promotion, but I’m not sure I can compete with that passage.

And then there’s this business about my representing “the height of neorealism,” whatever that means (from the context, it doesn’t sound good). In the spring, Simon wrote an article about U.S.-Saudi relations, and this is how he ended it:

With the loss of fevered neocon dreams of taking the “Saudi” out of “Arabia,” and the return to realpolitik, the U.S.–Saudi relationship is a bit closer to where it should be. It is not, nor will it ever be, a “special relationship” grounded in shared values or common experience. Serious policy differences, especially over Israel and Iraq, are likely to persist. Political liberalization will remain important, though perhaps not decisive, when it comes to the longevity of House of Saud’s authority. As neoconservative rigidity has begun to give way to neorealism, a strong relationship with the kingdom is in America’s interest. And as Lord Palmerston said: “Nations have no permanent friends or allies; they only have permanent interests.”

My Lord Palmerston! That sounds to me like a ringing endorsement not just of realpolitik, but even of “neorealism.” If anything, Simon seems to wish that the United States would radiate even more warm realpolitik toward the Saudis. (Am I surprised?)

Now I welcome it when a fervent believer in the promotion of democracy comes forward to contest me. Joshua Muravchik is a prime example: his thought is an example of the principled, consistent, and honest conviction of the best of the neoconservatives. I don’t agree with him, but I admire and respect him. The same goes for my colleague, Natan Sharansky, whom I’ve debated. But who is Steve Simon to hold himself up as a champion of idealistic principle in our Middle East policy? He’s as realist as they come—and to judge from his weak spot for the Saudis, a lot more so than I am.

If you read Rudy Giuliani’s article in Foreign Affairs, you’ll see a vision for the Middle East that calls for working closely with progress-seeking leaders from all walks of life, in a shared effort to deliver what the region most lacks: good governance, better security, and economic opportunity. Without these precursors, democracy is impossible. But from the start, a Giuliani administration would support courageous dissidents—a commitment stressed by Charles Hill, Giuliani’s chief foreign policy advisor, in an important interview. I met many of these dissidents at a conference in Prague last June. America has a moral obligation to protect them.

But if someone out there tries to kill Americans or terrorize innocents in order to set the Middle East aflame, he deserves the boot, and not just in the face. Sure, there are people who think otherwise, on the blame-America far left and among the congenitally naive. They favor appeasement. But is Steve Simon one of them? I don’t think so, which makes his reaction even less comprehensible. I guess it’s just all about politics and ambition: they do make people say the darndest things.

The following profile of Martin Kramer by Jason Horowitz appeared in the New York Observer in the issue of August 27, 2007. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

Martin Kramer has never met Rudy Giuliani. But the recently named senior Middle East advisor to the Giuliani campaign appears to be having significant influence on how the former mayor views the world.

“I was not added for who I am,” said Mr. Kramer, in a phone interview from Tel Aviv. “Certainly not for my policy experience I don’t have any experience in government. Not for my personal charm I don’t know the mayor. I’m there for my ideas. And for me it is an opportunity to give my ideas a wider audience.“

Given Mr. Giuliani’s largely uniform support for the Bush administration’s foreign policy up to this point, those ideas aren’t what one might expect. Mr. Kramer is a self-proclaimed “democratization skeptic,” and subscribes to a distinctly different worldview than that of the idealistic neo-conservatives who promoted democratic elections in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. If his public role on Mr. Giuliani’s foreign policy team says one thing, it is the following: when it comes to the Middle East, Mr. Giuliani is no George W. Bush.

“I saw myself in a debate mode with President Bush,” he said. “I don’t see myself in a debate mode with Rudy Giuliani.”

The international relations philosophy of Mr. Kramer, 52, a dual Israeli-American citizen who is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, places him well outside the circle of interventionist would-be regional transformers who have guided America’s Middle East policy for the past seven years.

He is perhaps best known in foreign policy circles for his strong views on the perils of democracy promotion in the Middle East, a belief that a consortium of Islamic and Arab regimes and extremists share a grand vision of a world without Israel and a strong United States, and a faith in what he calls the “consensual Authoritarianism” of strong, stable central governments.

To judge by Mr. Giuliani’s recently articulated plan for U.S. policy abroad, he has already begin appropriating some of Mr. Kramer’s ideas.

“Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly and threaten their neighbors,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in a recent, much-discussed article in Foreign Affairs. “History demonstrates that democracy usually follows good governance, not the reverse.”

Mr. Giuliani then specifically cites the election of Hamas in the Palestinian-controlled territories as an example of democracy gone awry.

“The problem there is not the lack of statehood but corrupt and unaccountable governance,” Mr. Giuliani wrote. “The Palestinian people need decent governance first, as a prerequisite for statehood.”

In the article, Mr. Giuliani also seems to distance himself from Mr. Bush’s core ideological belief in democracy promotion, mentioning it only to point out that it must be tempered by “realism.”

Mr. Kramer very much approves.

“The mayor does talk about security being a prerequisite of democracy in that speech,” he said, referring to the Foreign Affairs article, adding “He did, to me, say things that invoked my ideas.”

Mr. Kramer also said that since he was unexpectedly embraced by the Giuliani campaign, his philosophy – and particularly his web site, MartinKramer.org – has begun receiving a lot more attention.

“I was pleased that someone was interested in my ideas,” Mr. Kramer said. He said the campaign had “pretty much” called him out of the blue, and added, “I have enjoyed watching the traffic on my web site increase.”

Mr. Kramer, like Mr. Giuliani, is a hawk. He supported the invasion of Iraq – but for tactical reasons – and believes, like the mayor, that America is engaged in a long-term global struggle with an Islamic brand of fascism.

But his philosophy about how to conduct that fight represents a sharp turn away from a key tenet of the Bush administration’s Middle East policy – the part that assumes that free elections in repressed Arab nations will give rise to governments that are kindly disposed toward the West and Israel.

Mr. Kramer’s web site promises “alternative readings of Islam and the Arab world,” and lists his lectures, commentary and analysis under categories called “sandstorm” and “sandbox.” The site’s homepage has a doctored image of an ululating woman in black headdress hoisting his staid headshot above her head, and there are several pictures of Mr. Kramer with his “mentor” Bernard Lewis, a Princeton-based Middle East scholar widely admired and cited by neoconservatives.

“I was a student of Bernard Lewis’ and in 1978, Edward Said wrote a book about Orientalism which turned the field first and foremost against my teacher,” said Mr. Kramer, referring to the book by the late Columbia University professor and Palestinian intellectual who argued that westerners had an inherent cultural bias against the Arab world. “I don’t think I could have found a position in the United States at a leading university of Middle East studies with the intellectual pedigree that I had, but I could in Tel Aviv.”

Mr. Kramer, a Washington native, ended up teaching at Tel Aviv University for 25 years, eventually returning home to visit his children as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Georgetown and Cornell. In 2005, he retired from Tel Aviv University and moved to the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, where he is a senior fellow and colleague of prominent Israeli hawk (and democracy advocate) Natan Sharansky.

Mr. Kramer spends half the year there and divides the rest of his time between the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Olin Institute at Harvard University.

From his vantage point in Israel, Mr. Kramer has come to a position of extreme skepticism about the president’s forceful public advocacy of the spread of democracy in the Middle East.

“In Israel, there has never been great enthusiasm for the democratizing agenda,” Mr. Kramer said.

In an address to a Washington Institute for Near East Policy program in Beverly Hills on November 29, 2006, Mr. Kramer expressed disdain for the administration’s “big ideas” for changing the Middle East.

“The way to cure the Middle East was to shake it up by promoting democracy first by forced ‘regime change’ in Iraq and then by encouraging liberals across the Middle East,” Mr. Kramer said in the lecture. “The president launched what he described as his ‘forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.’ It became known as the ‘Bush Doctrine.’”

He continued: “Now that big idea has crashed, too. It has crashed, first, as a result of the maelstrom in Iraq, and second, as a result of the election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and the fact that free elections everywhere end in victory for Islamist zealots.

“Promoting democracy to Arabs,” he added, “is coming to be regarded in this country as the ultimate fool’s errand.”

Instead of the personal freedoms cherished in the United States, he says people in the Middle East are working off a different model in which they are more protective of collective freedoms, such as the right to speak their language, if not the freedom of speech.

“Were the United States to champion those kinds of freedoms, it would have greater resonance than perhaps the single championing of elections,” said Mr. Kramer.

He believes the countries with the most stability in the region, such as Egypt and Jordan, practice a form of government in which a de facto bargain has been reached between a central power and the people in which there are no elections, but the rulers guarantee security and stability, recognize some collective rights, and limit their intrusions into the lives of law-abiding people.

In another panel on June 5, 2007 at the Prague conference on “Democracy and Security: Core Values and Sound Policies,” Mr. Kramer delivered a speech that he fashioned as a direct challenge to Mr. Bush, who was set to deliver his own remarks in the same room hours later, and challenged the Bush doctrine’s core tenant that democracy promotion ultimately serves the interests of America’s national security.

“Democracy competes not against them, but against this consensual authoritarianism,” Mr. Kramer said in Prague. “And the reason democracy is losing that competition is that consensual authoritarianism produces security for its peoples, and exports security to its neighbors and the world.”

Mr. Bush, in his remarks later that day at the same conference, took an opposite view.

“Still, some argue that a safer goal would be stability, especially in the Middle East,” said Mr. Bush. “The problem is that pursuing stability at the expense of liberty does not lead to peace it leads to September the 11th, 2001. The policy of tolerating tyranny is a moral and strategic failure. It is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.”

Mr. Giuliani has long supported the administration’s rationale for going into Iraq, saying that the Sept. 11 attacks made it clear that the United States had to move off the “defense” and go on the “offense.” But he has since sought to put at least a small measure of distance between himself and the White House by criticizing the tactical mistakes made in the war’s prosecution.

Mr. Kramer, who supported the war, goes further in criticizing the Bush administration, saying that every one of the president’s stated reasons for attacking – the weapons of mass destruction, the introduction of free elections and, especially, the alleged ties to Sept. 11 – was flawed.

“I believed like others and I still believe that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11,” said Mr. Kramer.

Asked if Mr. Kramer’s role as a Giuliani campaign advisor reflected a break with the president on the idea of liberating the Middle East from non-democratic governments, Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for the Giuliani campaign, said in an e-mail, “The Foreign Affairs piece speaks for itself where the Mayor speaks to achieving the ultimate, long-term goal of democracy.”

The area where Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Kramer are most in sync, and the area in which they seem closest to the neo-conservatism of the Bush administration, is their shared belief, as Mr. Giuliani likes to say, that there is a “terrorists’ war on us” and that America faces an “Islamic fascist” enemy.

“I call it a vision, a big idea,” said Mr. Kramer. “The idea in the Middle East or Arab Islamic world is to be free of the restraints that are presently imposed on it by American power. If you look at what these organizations what they say to themselves, it doesn’t matter if it is Al Qaeda or Iran, obviously they are different strands but different strands of the same grand idea, which is that Islam does not enjoy the dominant power that it enjoyed throughout most of history and it should rightfully enjoy again.”

Asked whether Mr. Giuliani, whom he hopes to meet next month at Harvard, truly understands that threat, Mr. Kramer seemed certain.

“It is one of the things he gets,” he said. “He also understands that this is a long-term struggle.”

Last week, Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign announced the Mayor’s team of foreign policy advisors. Charles Hill, a renowned former diplomat who now teaches at Yale, has been named Giuliani’s chief foreign policy advisor and head of his foreign policy advisory board. Other senior advisors whom I know personally include my old friend Norman Podhoretz, my Harvard colleague Stephen Rosen, and Hoover’s Peter Berkowitz. Other senior advisors: Sen. Bob Kasten, S. Enders Wimbush, and Kim Holmes.

I’ve also been named to the team, as senior Middle East advisor. I agreed to come on board for a simple reason: I believe that Mayor Giuliani gets it. He understands perfectly what is at stake in the Middle East, he sees precisely the forces arrayed for and against us, he knows this will be a long contest, and he has the resolve to see the United States prevail. I don’t see that same depth of understanding in any of the other candidates.

So choosing the Mayor was an easy call. But taking on this sort of role did give me a moment’s pause, because of something written by my dear and departed friend, the late Elie Kedourie. A scholar of the Middle East and political philosophy, he  achieved an astonishing grasp of the nitty-gritty of statecraft, through the painstaking study of British diplomatic records. This  led him to conclude that making foreign policy was an entirely “practical pursuit,” which nowhere overlapped the scholarly vocation. In 1961, he wrote an article chiding academics for throwing around advice about foreign policy.

If the academic is to recommend action here and now–and in foreign policy action must be here and now–should he not have exact and prompt knowledge of situations and their changes? Is it then proposed that foreign ministries should every morning circulate to historians and “social scientists” the reports of their agents and the dispatches of their diplomats? Failing this knowledge, the academic advising or exhorting action will most likely appear the learned fool, babbling of he knows not what.

Elie anticipated the riposte:

It may be objected that this is not what is meant at all; we do not, it may be said, want the academic to concern himself with immediate issues or the minutiae of policies; we want his guidance on long-term trends and prospects; and here, surely, his knowledge of the past, his erudition, his reflectiveness will open to him vistas unknown to the active politician, or unregarded by him. And should not this larger view, this wider horizon be his special contribution to his country’s policies and to its welfare?

Yet this, too, Elie rejected. “This appeal to patriotism, this subtle flattery, needs must be resisted,” he wrote. Why? “The long view, the balanced view, the judicious view, can positively unfit a man for action, and for giving advice on action.” To make policy, wrote Kedourie, is to leap into the unknown.

Shall academics presume to instruct a man how he shall leap? Presumption is the pride of fools, and it ought to be the scholar’s pride not to presume. It is pursuit of knowledge and increase in learning which gives scholars renown and a good name. How then should they, clothed as they are in the mantle of scholarship, yet imitate this lobby or that pressure group, and recommend this action or that, all the time knowing full well that in politics one is always acting in a fog, that no action is wholly to the good, and that every action in benefiting one particular interest will most likely be to another’s detriment.

I gave much thought to Elie’s view of this over the years, so much so that I took it as the theme of a lecture I delivered a few years back, to mark the tenth anniversary of his passing. I could see the point of his uncompromising position–but also why, as I showed in my lecture, he eventually compromised it himself. For that story, you’ll have to read the lecture in full. But here’s a clue as to where Kedourie finally came to rest, from an article he published in 1978:

It is usually (and rightly) said that the academic’s virtues–his critical turn of mind, and his willingness to follow the argument wherever it leads–become defects in the man of action, who must accustom himself to make quick decisions on the basis of hunches and imperfect information. But in a region like the Middle East, where yesterday’s friend can become today’s opponent, where alliances and allegiances shimmer and dissolve like the fata morgana, the academic’s skepticism, his readiness to scrutinize far-fetched theories and unlikely suppositions, are perhaps qualities that even busy men of action should cultivate.

Ah. For the Middle East, Elie Kedourie was prepared to make an exception. I’m glad he did.

Addendum: View this speech on the Middle East by Mayor Giuliani, delivered on June 26 at a synagogue in Rockville, Maryland (where, as it happens, I grew up).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_QkflbiQ5k