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"The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration. . .Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against the stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion. "
- Anna Comnena (1083-1153), The Alexiad
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
- Francis Bacon, 1592
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Economic Interconnectivity and Peace
Does economic interconnectivity promote peace?
In many cases, yes. But in some of those cases it's in the sense of the European Union and others not wanting to confront Iran over their nuclear ambitions, because of economic connections, or anyone confront Putin's Russia too strongly when it brazenly assassinates political opponents in our capital cities, &tc.
This isn't to say that interconnectivity is bad, just that it isn't the unvarnished good, sans downside, that many people present it as.
Economic interconnectivity does promote peace, usually in a good way. But not always or inevitably so - especially when the decent are timorous, and use it as an excuse for an absence of stalwartness in confronting challenges to the values they claim to hold dear. Thus, economic connectivity decoupled from strong policy is essentially empty and platitudinous.
at least for me, and that was something Benjamin Franklin said, as quoted in a quote from the polarized debate post I linked to, below:
Knowledge, he realized, "was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue."
I feel the same way, which is one reason I've been reluctant to blog lately. Not because I don't like expressing what I know, or think I've learned - quite the contrary. But I don't blog just to babble inanely, and when I don't think I have something to say that would be worthwhile for others to read, an aspect of which they might not find elsewhere, it takes the wind out of the effort.
The hardest part of blogging, or punditizing, or writing like this isn't the writing itself, it's acquiring the knowledge to do so in an informed manner (a lesson Maureen Dowd might profitably learn). I like learning stuff - a lot of people do. I would guess readers of political and "idea" blogs all do. But it's surprising to me how many people don't. I've meet more and more of them now that I'm "out and about". Hardly any of them are stupid, they just have different priorities, different interests. There might be a lesson there about the whole "Blue-Red Divide", not in the sense that one half of the divide is interested in learning while the other is not, but that they have different priorities, different interests, see things differently, without one side having all the stupid people and the other all the smart ones.
If you haven't read this piece on StrategyPage, I highly recommend it.
The reporting of military events in StrategyPage often differs from how the mass media describes the same events. That’s because the mass media is under enormous pressure to report startling and "competitive," news. StrategyPage isn’t. Our editors and contributors have a background in history and historical simulation (wargames), and that provides a very different perspective. Our analysis, based on historical trends and past performance, is far more accurate than the dramatic headlines the mass media use to describe the same events.
Longtime readers, if they're still around, might remember the old "Humanities Debates" posts on this site about a year ago (enter "Humanities" into search engine for related posts). Both journalism and history are in the sphere of the humanities.
One thing the StrategyPage article illustrates is that historical knowledge, done properly, is very useful in rationally evaluating the world. Bad journalism is obviously not, but it does show how a study of humanities is valuable, and can be predictive. Bad history will produce bad results, no doubt. Good journalism can produce good results - as can good punditry. Bad science also produces bad outcomes, inaccuracy and other pitfalls. Many of those on the other side of the "science vs humanities" debates may not have taken that into consideration.
That's perhaps because there is one thing the scientific community has consistently done better than the humanities-related community has. That is keep track of track records - what was right, what was wrong, and even who; which methodologies produced more accurate feedback than others, and the practitioners involved. Were they properly applying a methodology, or sloppy? If the latter, have they improved. A scientist can be forgiven for making errors, when those errors are corrected. Scientific reputations aren't based so much on perfection, but this quality. Good scientists recognize and admit their mistakes, make changes needed to correct them, and search for more accurate results. A scientist is respected for admitting error, admitting that the data doesn't support their favored theory, publishing it, and theirby pushing the ball forward (because knowing what isn't the right answer can be valuable in finding the correct one).
It isn't that humanities - a study of history or practice of journalism or punditry - can't be valuable. It's just that very often there are few if any consequences for false outcomes. Thus the same old crowd can make the same old statements about what is going to happen if we do X, and hardly anyone will be so crass as to point out that the last time they made such predictions, the opposite happened. "Keeping score" is considered rude. This means people are still using methodologies that are entirely flawed, recommending solutions that have already been shown to be failures, and making predictions that are generally wrong.
This may be changing some. One of the values of blogging is that it may prove to be a useful tool in "keeping score". Bloggers are mean enough to remind people of the last time Harold Pinter or whomever said thus-and-such, raised the ugly specter of the "Arab Street" or wild claims of millions of deaths in a humanitarian crisis, and the like.
But as StrategyPage shows, proper methodologies can be far more accurate. None of the "Humanities" are the same as pure science, but that does not mean they cannot be useful in evaluating the world. Thus people are able to compare-and-contrast, find people who have used a means of evaluating the world that has proven to be more accurate, and weed out the chaff.
You know, our scientific friends may forget, but this sort of feedback is relatively recent, in historical terms, even for their community. They tend to forget how long it took to develop, the pitfalls along the way, the resistance that paradigm-changing scientific theories faced not just from the blind non-scientific community but within the scientific community itself. A better knowledge of history (ahem) might help them see that there's not quite so much of a stark divide on this as they might want to believe - just that they're several decades ahead of the "humanities" set in applying a means of keeping score without wounding egos. Good historians and good journalists - and good pundits - are adopting the same mindset.
To quote from a prior post, “Let me start off by saying the views I express here are my own, not those of the U.S. Army.” Porphy snail-mailed the following from South Carolina just before starting Basic two weeks ago. I’m back home trying to post it – something he didn’t coach me on before departing. Wish me luck. -- M.
“ . . . I can tell already that there is going to be a downside to integrated-gender Basic Training, compared to the first time I went through Basic [1987]. Even at AIT last time around, the company was of mixed gender and classes were mixed, but platoons were either male or female. The significance is that you do everything by platoon – stay in the same barracks, go to chow at the same time and sit together (more or less), etc. In Basic Training this time around the platoons will be of mixed gender but, obviously, facilities will not be shared by all members of the platoon. Males and females aren’t going to be sleeping together, naturally. This cuts into the camaraderie and platoons are going to be divided into halves.
There’s also another consequence, as a response to politically-imposed gender integration. The Army essentially created two types of Basic Training. All people going into the combat arms go one place for Basic, non-combat arms to somewhere else. At least that’s how it seems to be – all the people I talked to at MEPS who were in a combat arm, that is in MOSs not open to women, were going to Benning. No one I’ve talked to here is in a combat arm.
At Leonard Wood in ’87, we were all mixed together for Basic, combat and non-combat alike. This gave us a chance to meet the kind of people we would be supporting in the field, and they, vice-versa, a chance to meet the folks supporting them. Also, it made for a common initial training experience. Why is that important?
The Army’s always been somewhat divided, with competition among Arms, and the combat branches seeing themselves set apart from the rest. This creation of two types of Basic training can only contribute to that. I get the sense that, while it’s not going to be easy per se, it’s not going to be as ‘tough’ as the Basic Training the combat arms folks are going through – but that even if it actually is, the recruits at Benning will never believe it was as hard for us. It’s not a shared experience so naturally they’ll think they went through a tougher regimen, even if that’s not the case. In the Army culture, that’s important.
It seems more and more like there are two Armies – not because the non-combat arms don’t face danger (In Iraq they’re often targeted by the enemy.) but because of things like this, that only enhance already-existing tendencies.
And it’s not that women in the Army is a bad idea, and of course once we get to our permanent duty stations we’ll all be working together, mixed gender. So folks might think we should be from the start. But Basic Training is different, set apart for a reason, and always leaves one of the most lasting impressions on people performing military service. Maybe there are upsides that I’m not seeing yet, but the downsides seem pernicious.”
The State Department is one of the institutions in need of reform, as I pointed out in my 21st Century Foreign Policy series. It is not because they take the enemy's side, but it is because they are on the other side of an internal divide in the Pan-Western Culture War. This causes them to engage in the war against the war. The consensus atmosphere of career State Department officials is one of collectivist internationalism (see here also) where they act more as the world's envoys to America rather than promoting American interests abroad.
Daniel Pipes has an article up at FrontPageMag exploring why this is. The piece is a review of Samuel Huntington's latest book. Pipes writes that:
Along the way, Huntington observes that Americans can choose among three broad visions for their country in relation to the outside world.
· Cosmopolitan: America “welcomes the world, its ideas, its goods, and, most importantly, its people.” In this vision, the country strives to become multiethnic, multiracial, and multicultural. The United Nations and other international organizations increasingly influence American life. Diversity is an end in itself; national identity declines in importance. In brief, the world reshapes America.
· Imperial: America reshapes the world. This impulse is fueled by a belief in “the supremacy of American power and the universality of American values.” America’s unique military, economic, and cultural might bestows on it the responsibility to confront evil and to order the world. Other peoples are assumed basically to share the same values as Americans; Americans should help them attain those values. America is less a nation than “the dominant component of a supranational empire.”
· National: “America is different” and its people recognize and accept what distinguishes them from others. That difference results in large part from the country’s religious commitment and its Anglo-Protestant culture. The nationalist outlook preserves and enhances those qualities that have defined America from its inception. As for people who are not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, they “become Americans by adopting its Anglo-Protestant culture and political values.”
Huntington sums up this triad of choices: “America becomes the world. The world becomes America. America remains America.”
Of course, that's not quite the entire range of options. Charles Krauthammer's Irving Kristol award lecture seemed more accurate in its breakdown of options. In some ways, Huntington's options resemble the classic "false choice", at least as Pipes describes them. France does not have to become America and neither does Russia, for example. Nor does Iraq or the Middle East, just as Japan and Germany did not have to become America after WWII.
But the State Department clearly inclines towards the "Cosmopolitan" choice. They have always been keenly interested in getting the world to like us, in preference to advancing America's interests in the world (which makes social gathering with friends from abroad uncomfortable experiences). The easiest way to accomplish that is to go along to get along, adopt the consensus of global elites as defined in foreign capitals where the people they admire reside. Pipes writes:
Cosmopolitans reject the unilateralism of the Iraq campaign, despise the notion of guiding the Iraqis to “a free and peaceful” country, and deeply suspect the Bush administration’s motives. They demonstrate on the streets and hurl invectives from television studios.
Or sabotage from within institutions and engage in hostile leaking to fuel the fires of the television studio ranters. The State Department is far more hostile to and resistant of the policies of a Republican President than a Democratic one - just recall Reagan. They disliked his policies towards the Soviet Union, claiming they would never work and would inflame international tensions. Well, Reagan was right - but that changed few minds in the State Department because this is ideologically driven, and remains so today.
This is one reason why the "Pan-Western Culture War" is so intimately connected to the external war. It's hard to see how one can be won without winning the other as well. It would be far better if we did not have to wage both, but the old saw about it "taking two to fight" is and always was wrong. It only takes one, and then we are stuck with the choice of either capitulation or fighting back. In both these wars, the stakes are too high for capitulation to be an option.
In one sense, the headline Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad and the Rule of Islam comes as no surprise. In another sense, the relative lack of attention even now, does. The cult of death is still there, with Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad describing his following as "people who want death". No doubt he doesn't include himself - the leaders of these sects are happy to encourage their following to want death but do not put themselves on the line.
European governments express concern over things like this, but if you judge real concern by action, it's hard to see much. We do not expect other cultures to tolerate movements dedicated to their destruction, but there is a level of passivity throughout much of the West to not only threats, but actions, based on that desire. I have written before that I am adamantly in favor of welcoming immigrants of whatever background who want to join our society and live within our civilization. But that is not the same as welcoming a viper to your bosom.
Phillip Beckman, who sent the link to me (via e-mail), wrote as follows:
How soon until Europe becomes the battleground between the West and Islamist radicals? Perhaps sooner than people would like to believe. Europe is more vulnerable than the US. The Transnational Progressive ideology has weakened Europe's institutional and philosophical commitment to the defense and perpetuation of Western Civilization. Reading this article underscores for me how important the War of Ideas within the West truly is. The postmodern leftist interpretation of Western Civilization that has come to dominate our institutions of higher learning is corrosive in that it presents WC (and America) as deserving of the wrath of Islamist terrorists and that WC is so horrible and evil that it would actually be a good thing for it to disappear. Those of us who believe that America and Western Civilization are worth defending have a lot of work to do...
All true. I'll note here that immigrants have been at the forefront of such defenses, because they know the alternative, having experienced it. But we have a different breed here. We need to be careful to winnow the wheat from the chaff, welcome those who value what they are entering and not those who wish to see it destroyed.
As I've written before, though, it would help if so many of the people born in the West hadn't been taught to distrust and devalue it themselves.
In this Buggy Professor post, related to this post from Saturday. This stuff does have an affect outside of the university, and the Buggy post illustrates both. On the one hand, good scholars can help inform us of the nature of our enemies (and friends, and everything else under the sun), but the ideologues who dominate scholarship cloud and obscure reality rather than illuminating it. It isn't just students that are affected. Policy and the lens through which the larger society views the world is skewed as a result.
An excellent lecture by John Kekes on the professoriate and the state of modern higher education. This was particularly good:
This coercive stifling of opinion permeates daily life, not just our campuses. It is very hard to think of an area of life that is free of the exhortation of intrusive moralizing.
Good, because those engaging in the intrusive moralizing do not think of themselves in that light, and need to be confronted with it.
Here, shades of last fall's "Humanities" dialogues on this site:
The professional obligation of professors is to teach their subjects and expand their fund of truths to the best of their knowledge. That is their job and their justification for receiving the benefits they enjoy. But many of them - especially in the social sciences and the humanities - have come to subordinate teaching and research to a political ideal. Their supposed justification is that the ideal is now more important than teaching and research, and this entitles them to violate their professional obligation if it conflicts with their political ideal. The ideal in question happens to be that of the liberal left. It calls for an egalitarian society without hierarchies and authorities that perpetuate significant differences in wealth, status, power, and life prospects. My concern, however, is not with the nature of the ideal, but with the serious consequences of subordinating teaching and research to any political ideal. Higher education is now deeply compromised because the chief preoccupation of many professors is with making universities and colleges, and through them society as a whole, conform more and more closely to their political ideal. This damages higher education regardless of the nature of the political ideal to which the pursuit of the truth is subordinated.
The professors who become self-appointed political activists know that their society funds higher education in the expectation that they will teach the truth and expand its scope. In order to assure that the money supporting their activities will continue to flow, they present a false picture of what they are doing. But they manipulate the truth in good conscience because they feel justified by the ideal they in fact pursue and have no compunction about falsification when it serves their political purpose. I shall argue in what follows that this is an accurate description of the prevailing state of affairs and a major cause of the deplorable state of North American higher education.
Which is to say, there is value in what those who study the humanities can contribute, when they adhere to their purpose. The problem is not the subjects themselves or the results of good political science or historical or literary research, the problem is the corruption of the practice to serve a different purpose altogether, an ideological rather than scholarly cause. Then there is this bit:
It would be one thing to declare forthrightly that universities and colleges no longer regard the upholding of truth through teaching and research as their basic obligation. It may, then, be said that henceforth institutions of higher education are to be in the vanguard of the transformation of society to reflect a political ideal. But not only is this not said, it is denied with hypocritical indignation. For defenders of preferential treatment realize that if they told the truth about the political ideal they are aiming at, they would have to justify it to politicians who allocate resources for teaching and research, not for political activism; to parents who pay for students' expenses on the assumption that they will get an education rather than be conscripted as foot soldiers into the army of political activists; to those professors who continue to uphold the truth and refuse to subordinate it to political considerations; and to citizens who do not wish to pay taxes to finance self-appointed activists bent on changing their society. Their justification would have to reveal what qualification entitles professors of literature, sociology, or anthropology, for instance, to take advantage of their students' willingness to learn and harangue them with a political view about how society should be transformed. It is because no convincing justification could be given that instead of telling the truth, these professors spread falsehoods.
Which is why arguments over entrance policies, the ones presented for public and judicial consumption, are such a sham, as is the claim of diversity and exposing their students to a rich variety to challenge them, because:
they want diversity only if it conforms to their political ideal. . .
. . .It goes without saying that any institution should be open to challenge, research and teaching should be receptive to promising new possibilities, and it is wrong to exclude people from university and college positions on the basis of characteristics irrelevant to teaching and research. What preferential treatment aims at, however, is not these desirable goals, but the inclusion of people on the basis of characteristics irrelevant to teaching and research, the undermining of truth for political purposes, and damaging the one institution in North American life whose traditional and indispensable contribution to the well-being of society used to be upholding the truth. This destructive policy moreover is presented and supported by falsehoods intended to obscure the fact that it aims to transform universities and colleges into political tools by replacing better with worse qualified teachers and researchers.
At the foundation of it all is the mindset that O'Brien confronted Winston Smith with, the belief that:
the truth cannot be subverted because it does not exist. What exists are beliefs people hold, express, and act on, but, since all beliefs are cultural artifacts, ultimately one is as good as any other. If there are no objective grounds on which beliefs could be criticized or justified, then all beliefs have an equal claim to recognition and respect. Any attempt to show that some cultures, individuals, values, practices, or institutions are better than others is a coercive and arbitrary authoritarianism that fails to respect the integrity of other systems and ways of life. This is why "Western civ" must go, why there should be no canon, why teaching the classics is a form of oppression, why science is a plot by men to impose patriarchy on women, and why professors have as much to learn from students as students from professors. This is politics with a vengeance because it attacks the very possibility of legitimately regarding any authority or belief as better than anything else.
Of course, all this involves a great degree of doublethink: on the one hand, real truth does not exist and no belief is better than anything else so the hierarchy of the canon should be destroyed and Western Civ displaced because, on the other hand, their ideological vision - that of the Cultural Left - deserves to replace it all in order to transform society to match their progressive vision. As Kekes puts it:
Most relativists, however, are not consistent. Their actions are at odds with what they claim to believe because no sane person could seriously hold the pernicious and absurd beliefs to which relativists are committed.
So the relativistic argument is just a sham, a rationalization for their substituting that which is ideologically pleasing to them and disparaging that which is not.
Then there is this, which gets at the root of the politicization of universities and the tactics that are used to intimidate anyone who objects to it:
Academic freedom is routinely used to protect the advocacy of communism, terrorism, homosexuality, the overthrow of the government, the denigration of Western civilization, the celebration of America's enemies, the castration of rapists, and so forth. But academic freedom is not extended to the advocacy of Protestant fundamentalism, male dominance, innate racial differences, anti-semitism, condemnation of homosexuality, or the superiority of Western civilization. The limits of academic freedom are thus set to favor causes political activists regard as being within the limits of toleration and to prohibit the advocacy of causes they find objectionable. This, of course, is nothing but censorship designed to forbid the public questioning of beliefs political activists find congenial. It is also an insult to the truth because the censorship is exercised by those who rely on academic freedom to protect their own advocacy of political causes they favor.
Outside of the haze of Democrat and Liberal doom-and-gloom, things are getting better, as two City Journal pieces show. Kay S. Hymowitz looks at a variety of indicators, cultural and social, and finds them trending up:
Wave away the colored smoke of the Jackson family circus, Paris Hilton, and the antics of San Francisco, and you can see how Americans have been self-correcting from a decades-long experiment with “alternative values.” Slowly, almost imperceptibly during the 1990s, the culture began a lumbering, Titanic turn away from the iceberg, a movement reinforced by the 1990s economic boom and the shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. During the last ten years, most of the miserable trends in crime, divorce, illegitimacy, drug use, and the like that we saw in the decades after 1965 either turned around or stalled. Today Americans are consciously, deliberately embracing ideas about sex, marriage, children, and the American dream that are coalescing into a viable—though admittedly much altered—sort of bourgeois normality. What is emerging is a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry.
There's something to that. When the shockingly revolutionary issue of our time is Gays wanting a right to form families, rather than people trying to "Smash Monogamy", things have changed. In many ways, "revolutionary" goals have become conservative ones.
I harp on the things that are still going the wrong way here, and frequently get mail from regular readers saying things aren't that bad. In my opinion, we have a swiss-cheese situation. Some things are getting better, others - some important institutional structures - aren't. Indeed some of those are getting more hostile to the larger society, or at least further alienated from it, precisely because it's not going "their way". The analogy is two trains heading in opposite directions. A lot of the article highlights the generational aspect of things. Longtime readers will remember posts referencing the work of Strauss & Howe, who predicted much of this. But we still have more work to do. But a lot of positive things are going on out there:
With their genius for problem solving and compromise, pragmatic Americans have seen the damage that their decades-long fling with the sexual revolution and the transvaluation of traditional values wrought. And now, without giving up the real gains, they are earnestly knitting up their unraveled culture. It is a moment of tremendous promise.
We have a duty to be more creative than longing for the past. I believe the best accomplishments of the gay, feminist, and black civil-rights movements in the second half of the 20th century can live alongside the moral clarity that has made America the Shining City on a Hill. These are not mutually exclusive concepts. We do not have to choose one or the other.
Our responsibility to ourselves and to future generations is to take the best of what we've become and bring it together.
The second City Journal piece highlighting good trends is by Harry Stein, who finds some even in daytime TV. It's still at best a mix bag, but "less bad" constitutes improvement. Check out both pieces.
BILL MOYERS, WHO WILL be 70 in June, grew up in east Texas and by the age of 30 was press secretary to the President of the United States. He worked for LBJ when the Great Society was forming. He became a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Ever since he has kept on moving to the left. Now he controls millions of dollars in foundation money (bequeathed by rich businessmen), has access to taxpayer-subsidized airwaves, and his wife on the payroll. Yet he is a profoundly alienated man. Like Lenin, he doesn't want to pat heads when we are living in this hell.
Responding to yesterday's post on the degeneration of the Democratic Party, Kevin Cherek wrote, via e-mail:
I'd like to see some discussion of how the democratic party ended up in this mess. The republican party has its fringe elements, but for some reason they don't feel the need to "spout off". Neither to the party leaders feel that they need to pander to them.
They spout off, and some party leaders pander to them coyly. But I'd agree that you're right. They don't make it the centerpiece of their campaign. On the Democratic side, the fringe has become their mainstream, dictating tone and content.
What happened to the democratic party to cause the center to give way? They went from a party espousing traditional liberal values to one that is divisive and bitter and crazy. Instead of fighting for the common man, they tell the common man what he should want and then fight for that. How the heck did they drift so far off target? Its like a torpedo that has turned around and is homing in on the sub that launched it. What happened to the feedback mechanisms that are supposed to prevent this from happening?
For two teams to play ball, they both have to be in the same park. I really feel as if the dems and repubs are playing in two totally different ball parks, and there are no bridges between the two. I'm trained in the sciences and appreciate a logical, rational approach to politics. I find I can easily follow the arguments put forward by republicans. I also find that I am left completely clueless when presented with the dem's arguments. Perhaps its because they tend to be based on premises such as those listed in Vanderleun's article (e.g. Powell is an uncle tom). I find this schism in everyday life also. Some folks think like I do, and some like the dems. I can't find anyone in between and I can't find anyone who can bridge this gap. In every case I end up shrugging my shoulders and walking away, thinking that the other person doesn't appear capable of rational thought. I'm sure the other person is thinking I'm clueless and just "don't get it" (e.g. why Bush is evil).
What the heck is going on?
They have all kinds of reasons. A typical Democrat response would be that their anger is legitimate, because after all, Bush stole the election with the help of Republicans in Florida and on the Supreme Court and Bush lies! and Bush knew! about 9/11 but didn't stop it, Republicans attacked Clinton, Republicans did mean things to win in '94, Bush Sr. engaged in dirty tricks to defeat Dukakis, Reagan deceived everyone with glibbness to defeat Mondale, and dittoes against Carter plus conspired (with Bush as his emissary) on the hostages so he could win, and we all know about Nixon, right?
The Democrats are like Cowboy fans in the past (they've gotten better). Or Oakland Raider fans today. Those teams never lose a game, you know. They just get screwed by the Refs. They get hosed by the Republican dirty tricks machine. Never mind the Dems own machine, such as the one fingering Bush for killing James Byrd, or the Mediscare ads, or the radio adds saying a vote for a Republican is a vote for church burning, nor all the invective Democrat candidates hurl at their opponents. That's all ok, perfectly legitimate, "telling the truth and they just think it's hell" kind of stuff in their minds.
That's their reasons for their anger, and they would probably say it's a reaction to Republican/Right-Wing reactionaries taking over our politics. That's their mindset on it. In some ways that's an indication of how far off center they've moved, where policies that actually a majority of the country generally supports or at least close to a majority (as close as some of their policies on the flip side) can frequently be declared "out of the mainstream" by Liberal opinion, the courts, Democratic Senators, &tc.
But I think you're right that the problem is bigger than just "the devil makes us do it" theory that they would respond with implies. It's the fact that they have come to see disagreement with them, different visions and policies, as diabolical in the first place. Their attitude towards the political give-and-take in a Democratic society has been gradually and progressively (heh) infused with the mindset of the progressive Left.
In the FOR Sincere Liberalism post I linked to, I mentioned an article called "Slouching Towards Berkeley" that is in the book Destructive Generation by Peter Colier and David Horowitz. It's an example in microcosm of what happened to the old Liberals and the old Democratic Party. It happened first in Berkeley, among other Liberal communities and institutions, and eventually to Democratic and Liberal politics as a whole.
The big question that is endlessly debated is why the Liberal establishment was incapable of resisting the "Progressive" Left when the latter decided to stop attacking institutions from the outside and instead move in to control them from the inside. Becoming "Clean for Gene" in '68 despite the fact that the Democratic Party wasn't something they identified with (later revisionism on their part to the contrary notwithstanding), re-writing the Party by-laws which then allowed them to be key in nominating McGovern in '72. Things advanced from there to what we see now. But back to the question of why couldn't sincere Liberals resist those, like Tom Hayden (a favorite example of mine), Ron Dellums, and other radical progressives and indeed often made them - Republicans didn't make them, they made them - front-and-center and in leadership positions? Radical protesters who insinuated that American soldiers were war criminals in Senate testimony would never have become the Party nominee in the Party of Truman or JFK. Why is that considered uncontroversial now, except among us out-of-the-mainstream right-wing-fringe types?
Liberals of old have a long tradition of pride in the country and defense of it. Why are most of them now half-apologetic if not critical of our heritage? That is, why have they at least half-accepted the premises of the "progressives", and feel that their critiques are serious, even if they don't quite agree completely? Well, it's a question worthy of exploration and I'm not sure I totally know the answer. But whenever this comes up I'm reminded of a paragraph from Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey as quoted on p.13 of The Politics of Bad Faith:
Certain things were clear between Laskell and Maxim [Trilling's representative liberal and radical]. It was established that Laskell accepted Maxim's extreme commitment to the future. It was understood between them that Laskell did not accept all of Maxim's ideas. At the same time, Laskell did not oppose Maxim's ideas. One could not oppose them without being illiberal, even reactionary. One would have to have something better to offer and Laskell had nothing better. He could not even imagine what the better ideas would be.
That's a partial explaination, but it begs the question of why the Laskells of the world didn't have enough confidence in their own ideas to see them as better. Part of the reason there might be the trauma of Vietnam - a psychological obsession of Liberals to this day, where every conflict America gets involved in is if not a Vietnam then potentially so, and Vietnam = bad. Afghanistan was Vietnam. Somalia was Vietnam and they made sure to make it so. The first Gulf War was compared to Vietnam until it ended, &tc.
But the other reason is more deeply rooted in the origins of what we call modern Liberalism (as opposed to Classical Liberalism), in what Jacques Barzun called Liberalism's "Great Switch", which I referenced here and is described somewhat here:
Of course, it is not only in the realm of culture that confusion reigns. The realms of social relations and politics are equally beset. One result is what Mr. Barzun refers to as the "Great Switch," "the reversal of Liberalism into its opposite." If Liberalism originally "triumphed on the principle that the best government is that which governs least," today "for all the western nations political wisdom has recast the ideal of liberty into liberality." The universalization and extension of the welfare state has nurtured a culture of entitlement. What began in an access of largess ends in an explosion of regulation and hectoring scrutiny.
Then we have to ask why that happened. Why did Classical Liberalism transform into its opposite, into what I mean hear by Liberalism (as opposed to Leftism)?
The origins of the "Great Switch" are to be found in the 19th century, when Liberalism's philosophical basis was re-cast from Natural Law theories onto Utilitarian grounds - the same bases from which Socialism sprung, rendering them relatives-by-adoption as it were. Then followed their interpretations of what sort of policies would be of the greatest good for the greatest number and gradually they were persuaded it would be various government-directed programs aimed at benefiting people and uplifting their lot rather than liberty and limited government. They were moved to adopt similar premises and axioms of the more radical, though not their program. They "did not accept all radical ideas, but did not oppose them. One could not oppose them without being illiberal, even reactionary." So now it is us out-of-the-mainstream right-wing fringe types that defend liberty and limited government (tell it to our politicians! I know, I know), classical Liberalism, and are seen as diabolical for it - illiberal, reactionary.
FDR, Truman, down to JFK, all remained strong though not Classical Liberals. LBJ and his establishment were, until their confidence was finally undermined by the experiences of Vietnam abroad and social disorder (riots, protests, antipathy, &tc) at home. The radicals that Truman confronted walked back into Democratic politics and became its intellectual base, and intellectual and philosophical bases are far more important than some people, including a fair number of my readers (c.f. old "Humanities" debates) think. See here and here and here and in general a surfeit of posts from last summer.
In an uncertain world, as they say in the car adverts, there are some things that can always be relied on. Not getting the improvements in reading and maths that parents want? Blame it on the tests that reveal the weakness. Discipline problems in the classroom? It must be the fault of Thatcherite materialism. For the teaching profession - or at least its vociferous activist wing - it is for ever 1985. And why not? Those were the glory days, when the NUT conference was a howlathon of Trotskyist headbangers who drove one Tory education secretary after another to despair and professional ruin.
Teachers took government by the scruff of the neck (something that they refused to do to unruly pupils) and shook it. They bellowed their defiance of authority at their annual conferences and they acted it out in the classroom with their systematically subversive teaching.
Of course the Left, which often decries "demonization", engages in most of it. It's just that they don't want their mascots - "spiritual leaders" of terrorist organizations, mass killers, totalitarian despots, "revolutionary" killers, and the like deplored. But the Thatchers of the world, or the Reagans or Bushs, those are, in Howard Dean's memorable phrase "the real enemy here".
Thomas Sowell is once again taking a global rather than parochial view of something. Here's a review of his latest book. I haven't read it yet, but I'm a big fan of his work. Check out the review, check out the book. I'm sure I will, but probably after Basic & AIT.
Responding to recent themes, M. Simon writes, via e-mail:
The long marchers are not doing so well with today's students. The long marchers control the institutions but the students are not too receptive.
It's true that a majority aren't, but enough are for the thing to be self-perpetuating. They'll create enough successors and hire only them to perpetuate their ideology's control of those institutions unless some means can be found or created to promote ideologically neutral hiring practices again.
As it stands, they don't need to persuade everyone or even a majority to embrace their ideology. They just need to persuade enough who will follow in their footsteps and then be groomed to climb the ladder (to mix metaphors) behind them, and convince a majority to not rock the boat. That is, convince a majority to leave it alone, which is done via passive-aggressive methods of intimidation.
As I've argued in the past in numerous posts, institutions matter and thus so does control of them. PCization of various government departments, based on the prevailing attitudes of those who worked in them, was and still remains a factor in how terror networks were and are fought. It's somewhat overlooked by the 9/11 commission, because this aspect of things apparently remains politically toxic except among us members of the Vast Right-Wing Media. But it's not being addressed in no small part because other, non-government institutions likewise are under control of the Marchers: "mainstream" media is hostile now, just wait till they're able to characterize things as a "McCarthyite purge of professionals being conducted by Right-Wing Ideologues".
Many, many people in the blogosphere and beyond wonder aloud every few months why Bush hasn't cleaned house in some of these obviously deficient institutions. Well, there is an answer, and the answer relates to why I devoted an an entire essay in my America's 21st Century Foreign Policy series to the generational mission of institutional reform and rejuvenation. It wasn't simply because I wanted to combine pet issues, it was because whether we will succeed or fail largely depends on how we handle the problems we face, and how we handle them is largely determined by the prevailing vision in our institutions.
Right now it's quite different than what prevailed in the past, when even - or especially - Liberals could be relied upon to be as strong and unapologetic in the defense of our country and its interests as anyone else, rather than hamstringing things.
Actually things were more political in the 60s and 70s. You just had fewer sources so it seemed more monolithic. Thank the Maker for the internet.
It's probably true that things were more overtly political in the '60s and '70s, when the Marchers were occupying buildings to force their way into controlling what the policies would be, than they are now when they sit behind the desk and make the policy without having to conduct sit ins and shut institutions down. Why shut down what they control?
Plus, half their effort - at least - is devoted to convincing those who are not persuaded to adopt their vision that there is no point in engaging in politics, no point in confronting them. The motto "Question Authority" has a subliminal caveat: "except ours". Their response then is to use intimidation and, when that fails, passive-aggressiveness to wear out any disagreement. How many "speech codes" were supposedly defeated in the early '90s, only to be quietly brought back under a new guise later, when attention wavered and everyone thought "well, it's over, we won on that issue at least". But it didn't go away, and new terminology is invented all the time to shut down disagreement. The phrase "micro-aggression" that Andrew Sullivan mentioned a couple months ago was new to me. How often do people think that is invoked to rule unacceptable Leftist characterizations of the Right rather than just rule out-of-bounds arguments that makes a Leftist uncomfortable, and thus constituting a "micro-aggression" against them?
Most people throw up their hands and don't fight it, so sure things aren't as overtly political as in the '60s and '70s. But that "micro-aggression" is just a new tool in the arsenal of Marcuse's concept of Liberating Tolerance: toleration for movements of the Left, intolerance of movements of the Right, and respect for diversity being only skin deep rather than a respect for intellectual diversity. But it also limits the civic debate and is aimed at narrowing the discussion, ruling things out of consideration and thought. Remember the context in which Andrew Sullivan was confronted with the charge of committing “micro-aggression” – when he was talking about how to free us all, including most Moslems, from the radicals and extremists. The student who complained that he had “aggressed” her accepted that he wasn’t lumping all Moslems together, but that he shouldn’t have talked about it anyhow, because she was uncomfortable none the less. This is aimed at insuring that we never find any solution except “why do they hate us, they must be right – we cannot even suggest that they may be wrong.” Does it work completely? No, but these things do have an affect. Just because their ability to dictate the terms of debate is not complete does not mean it doesn’t exist.
It affects us every day, and inarguably people have died because the Long Marchers control these institutions and thus have a large degree of influence on the kind of policies we were able to adopt pre-9/11, and their efforts now are aimed at regaining the measure of control they've lost since. But also inarguably, they have not even now lost all their control, and their attitudes and latent threat affects the "realm of the possible" even now.
Thus, for example, the Transportation Department adopts pointless, futile anti-terror measures rather than effective ones. That's just one example among many possible examples, but I've written extensively on some of the others in the past and will refrain from repeating them again now.
Interesting observation in this David Brooks piece on the transition from school to the rest of the world:
The people who succeed most spectacularly, on the other hand, often had low grades. They are not prudential. They venture out and thrive where there is no supervision, where there are no preset requirements.
critics of the pro-democracy policy -- in Europe, in Washington and inside the Bush administration itself -- will again proclaim that a neocon attempt to "impose" democracy on the Middle East "from the outside" has foundered. That this resistance to elected government comes from a group of kings, emirs and presidents-for-life doesn't seem to trouble the critics. The assumption seems to be that the autocrats' objections are those of their own people.
Yet, they are not. The most underreported and encouraging story in the Middle East in the past year has been the emergence in public of homegrown civic movements demanding political change. Two years ago they were nonexistent or in jail. Now they are out in the open even in the most politically backward places in the region
What's he talking about? And what happened between two years ago and now that might have affected things?
These people weren't created by George W. Bush. They are the homegrown answer to a decadent political order, and they ride a powerful historical current. But they will tell you frankly: The new U.S. democratization policy, far from being an unwanted imposition, has given them a voice, an audience and at least a partial shield against repression -- three things they didn't have one year ago.
Just an example, as it was in Eastern Europe, of how what we say and the stances we take do matter. Note that the same people who raised the same objections then are doing the same now. Some people learn nothing from history. Check out the whole piece.
Not that other's haven't before. But what's noteworthy about this one is that it's written by a Leftist, but one of the (too few) ones who has some respect for factual accuracy.
Yes, more ranting about the ChiComs. Continuing from where I left off yesterday.
I mentioned the hope held by many that China will make a peaceful or relatively peaceful transition to democracy. After all, there is the example of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but also of Spain, Chile, Taiwan, and South Korea. The last four nations all made the transition about as smoothly as can be expected, and while the former SovWorld countries are more of a mixed bag there are certainly positive examples, where the unrest and bloodshed was minimal and democratic institutions and the rule of law seem to be taking root in at least some of them. Even Putin's Russia isn't entirely bad, though I wouldn't call it a democracy.
Spain, Chile, Taiwan, and South Korea were all classical Autocratic Dictatorships however. That is, the regimes were based on the rule of one man - sure, he had lackeys and hangers-on, but power rested in the hands of a single ruler. Since the death of Deng, this has not been the case in China. China has evolved into a Self-Perpetuating Oligarchy. Sure, one member of the oligarchy may have more influence than others, but power is no longer exclusively his. Indeed, this is the aspect of things that make some people look at China and see the possibility for a breakup into warlordism: power is no longer concentrated exclusively in one person's hands, but has devolved into multiple hands. They chose a first-among-equals but rule in concert.
This makes the potential for internal friction among the ruling claque more likely, but also makes the system more resistant to change of the sort people are hoping for. It's not a situation akin to that of Chile, Spain, Taiwan, or South Korea where if the dictator just gets old or tired or dies and decides to be succeeded by democratic processes rather than another strongman, he can make that decision and it will stick. In China, the regime is self-perpetuating and no one can make that choice.
Well, what about the SovWorld, then? Arguably, the "coup plotters" who infamously bundled Gorbachev off to the Crimea and claimed to be the real government believed that the Soviet Union had made a transition to Self-Perpetuating Oligarchy. But that was never the case in the Soviet Union, and when the dictator was removed the agencies loyal to him did not prove loyal to the would-be oligarchs. They instead stood down while Russia succeeded and the Soviet Union fell apart. This was even more the case in the Warsaw Pact countries, which were ruled by dictatorships propped up by a foreign power (the Soviet Union) rather than oligarchies. So comparisons between China and that of the SovWorld do not apply.
So then what will happen in China? It's difficult to say, but it is unlikely to resemble what happened in nations that made the transition from sole-rule (dictatorship) to democracy, because that is not how China is governed today. Fragmentation is possible to the extent to which oligarchs build up local power-bases and come into conflict with each other. Unrest as a growing middle class pushes for more political liberty and input into how they are governed is certainly also a possibility, but any transition is likely to involve more strife than it did in Eastern Europe, much less the "Asian Tigers". Economic stagnation as China fails to make a transition to the information age on account of the oligarchs' desire to control access to information is also likely - unlike in India, and that is one reason to be more positive about India's future than China's. That will likewise lead more to problems than to solutions, and China's oligarchy will likely do what similar regimes always do in such situations, and displace blame for conditions to foreign devils (just as the Saudi oligarchy has) and export the resulting violence.
Speaking of that, Alastair Mackay wrote via e-mail in response to yesterday's post as follows:
re. China's ascendancy, there was an interesting future-history novel that came and went a few years back that imagines a resurgent China picking a fight with a Clintonesque administration, starting by occupying the Spratley Islands. In the novel, the vague yet fuzzy "demonstrations of force" by the US military do not fare well against the countermoves of the technologically inferior PLAN, guided by a ruthless, savvy, and Westernized Politburo. The twist in the story is that the CCP finances their war through Soros-style futures and derivatives trading, via cutouts of course. A fun albeit depressing read.
Richard Neumeier sends a link to this piece by Jonathan Rauch, on the formation of a caucus of democracies within the UN. The real question is: can the UN be reformed? I'm dubious, but as the teaser at the beginning of the article states, this might be a step towards its replacement. Perhaps by a Commonwealth of Democracies (also here and index). The goals down the line may be ambitious, but even the limited near-term goals have problems:
Eventually, officials say, the United States would like to see the caucus shape
policy not just in the Human Rights Commission but throughout the U.N. system. As of now, that seems ambitious. Getting the democracies to coordinate their committee nominations is about as big as anyone is thinking.
Well, France is a democracy, but they'll still vote to nominate scumbags for committees if it will screw over America. South Africa is a democracy, but they don't want to do anything that will upset Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, such as, say, condemn or ostracize him.
But consider the long-term potential. By the time the Community of Democracies becomes strong enough to act coherently inside the U.N., it will also be strong enough to act coherently outside the U.N...."
Probably, to be effective, it will end up being a subset of democracies at first rather than all of them. Then if this group manages to change the incentive structures, the others will come along. But this is likely how we'll end up with something along the lines of the "Commonwealth of Democracies" I propose: attempts to create a caucus of all democracies within the UN structure which founder on the fact that some democratic countries are less helpful than others. There will be a number which will work together, though, and they'll find that to work together effectively and coherently, it will be outside the UN. Because the UN's problems are inherent:
According to polling by the Gallup Organization, 60 percent of Americans rate the U.N. as doing a "poor job in trying to solve the problems it has had to face." The reasons for disenchantment go deeper than last year's tiff over the Iraq war. The most fundamental is that the United Nations is built on an obsolete premise: that countries governed by their people and countries governed by thugs, thieves, or tyrants should meet on equal terms, one vote each.
That's the problem with the UN as it stands, and also the obstacle to reforming it. That's one of the things that I think should change as we go forward. Regional blocs are also a problem with the UN structure:
To add injury to insult, democracies at the U.N. are disproportionately weak. The U.N. is dominated by a cluster of regional and ideological caucuses. African countries, for example, are pressured to vote together, with undemocratic governments often calling the shots and democracies going along to get along. Tyrants thus routinely exempt themselves from human-rights resolutions, while log-rolling ensures that condemnations of Israel sail through.
and that, too, would be changed in an organization based on behavior rather than regional unity and treating every nation, no matter how thuggish and dictatorial, as being just as good as any other - except that they aren't held to the same standards. Under the UN system, no one seems to mind that Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro, or Hugo Chavez, or Robert Mugabe, etc, violate international law, or tries to hold them responsible in the same way they do when some democracies try to enforce such norms. International law and sovereignty are instead invoked to protect these despotic regimes, as a means to prevent action against them. The current system is corrupt in that it has it backwards, effectively privileging dictatorships at the expense of democratic governments - and allowing corrupt regimes like the French to line their pockets to the tune of billions of dollars in the UN's oil-for-blood program, if they're willing to sell their votes to such dictatorships. It will have to go.
I have become a reader of Wretchard's Belmont Club over the last several months. His post Monday (3/22/04) on further focusing of the WOT contained a reference to the Congress of Vienna. This was interesting to me in the way that economic changes (a rising middle class - see the last paragraph) led to the break up of the empires as the sense of nationalist identities emerged.
One of the reasons that this bit of history caught my attention is a story I read today about comments by the Shi'ite leader, Ayattolah Sistiani, about the proposed Iraqi constitution being a recipe for partition. Of course, I gather that is just what the Kurdish people would like to see. Do you think it is at all possible that, as part of the promotion of liberal democratic values, the US will selectively support a "new wave" of nationalism, based not on the colonial divisions that served as templates for the foundation of "independent" colonies after WWII, but upon cultural (linguistic, etc) templates? The tribal/cultural/linguistic strife in the former Yugoslavia, much of Africa, and probably elsewhere certainly seems to beg for such a "solution" if rational economic and political bases could be cobbled together in some way (granted, a big IF). Of course, India stands, at least from my meager point of view, as an exception, maybe due to the pervasiveness of English, Hindi, and Hinduism. I wonder how long the Chinese "empire" can withstand the emergence of economic middle classes? Just wondering,. And, as I belatedly realized, you may have already written about this.
I don't think that's what we're trying to do, and I probably wouldn't support it if we were.
The Kurds are like the Armenians, a people buffeted by history and arguably deserving of a state. The Armenians now have theirs, the Kurds still have only their aspirations. But I doubt we'll be helping them carve out an independent state, if only because Turkey is still an important ally and it would be very messy. If the Kurds got their state, their future, surrounded by Arab, Persian, and Turkish nations hostile to the idea, would be precarious. The better option for them is a Kurdish region within a multiethnic, hopefully federal, Iraq, that respects its citizenry of whatever ethnic or religious stripe they may be.
Moving to India, it would probably not hold together as well as you think in a new global wave of nationalist separatism. The biggest reason India still uses English as one of their official languages is not because of a deep, abiding respect for Britain (though it arguably should be). It is because India is a nation where hundreds of languages are spoken.
As for China, I haven't written on this aspect of things but it is one of the factors in the background of my recent posting on China. There are several ways things could go in China. The optimists say that the rising middle class and developing economic prosperity will lead to a push for democratization. They perhaps forget that in most cases these transitions have not been without troubles. The smoothest was, perhaps, in England but even there it included the "Cavaliers vs. Roundheads" and Cromwell. In continental Europe it was expressed in over two centuries of bloody upheaval starting with the French Revolution in 1789 and ending (?) with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Of course, it's always possible that China will have its own version of a "velvet revolution" or the transitions to democracy that South Korea and Taiwan experienced. But in a country of over a billion people, if things get messy, they'll get really messy.
Another way things could go is the one Richard alludes to: it results in fragmentation. Likely this will make the breakup of Yugoslavia seem like a pre-season exhibition game compared to the intensity of a Super Bowl. The breakup of China has the potential of being very ugly. The other possibility is the one the Chinese government is pursuing. That is things continue on their current trajectory of Nationalism and Socialism with the mixed economy of private and semi-private businesses under state direction (pioneered by Mussolini) until China is strong enough to challenge first the regional and then the global order, to throw it's weight around to secure what they see as their interests, including Taiwan and restoration of China's traditional hegemony over the region. This is also the option France is supporting and pushing the EU to support, with their recent arms sales and joint military ventures like the one that "happened" to coincide with Taiwan's election last week.
None of these possibilities are without risk to us. Obviously the first, with it's hopeful outcome of a "velvet revolution" of democratization and world peace. There is of course one other possibility, referred to in some of the articles I've linked to in posts on China: their economy overheats, the bubble bursts, and global recession follows along with upheavals in China that will likely result in one if not more of the downside consequences mentioned above, just a little sooner. I like to think that good and improving relationships with India, and a democratizing Arab world, will be an "insurance policy" against the potential downside in China. How that might work is an important matter. How important? So important we'll take it up in a future post at some point.
On Sunday I linked to a FT piece by Phillip Bobbit. It has many good aspects, which I'll get to. But Bobbit makes a glaring misconception when it comes to the "Forward Strategy of Freedom". Bobbit calls this "liberal imperialism" and seems to believe that it involves simply sending in American troops everywhere that democratic institutions do not exist. Bobbit writes:
by focusing on the internal life of disparate societies it neglects to establish whether their transformation is compatible with the strategic interests of the US or of their own peoples, as they see it. As such, it is a recipe for civil war in many countries, and for the systematic grinding down of the American military that, while it fights wars commendably, is at a loss in dealing with civilians directly.
However, here Bobbit and other critics of Bush's strategy are more simple-minded than the Administration that is often accused of being just that. Administration officials have made it very clear that their policy is not as uniform as Bobbit portrays. Much of their efforts are aimed at persuading countries to enact democratizing reforms. They have certainly shown a willingness to work with undemocratic regimes, such as Musharaf's Pakistan, if it's in America's strategic interest to do so.
However, they are going to push for democratization where it matters, and the Bush Administration has candidly accepted what many critics of American foreign policy over the years have said, especially Liberal critics: that working with undemocratic regimes is a short-term stopgap and to really resolve many of the problems that we confront internationally, including terrorism, promoting democratic accountability and the rule of law will ultimately be better for us than simply accepting and working with the status quo. Would America and the world be more secure from terrorism if Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Iran were democracies instead of dictatorships - two of a fundamentalist Islamic sort that promote the export of violence, and three of which directly support terrorism either openly or covertly? If Bobbit's point that a nation has a right to intervene to promote changes when another nation's policies threaten its security is correct, then certainly it applies here.
But there are many ways of promoting democratic reforms, not all of which - even most of which - will involve military action. The Bush Administration recognizes that in the policies it has designed to promote this goal, it is odd that Bobbit has not heard of them or studied the issue enough to be aware of them. I am sure that if he had he would have written this section differently. Bobbit flatters the FT's readers in recognizing that the EU attempts such non-military methods of suasion when it comes to potential members:
It is notable that the EU has been able to induce regimes with very oppressive human rights records to voluntarily change their laws and practices as a condition of admission to the single market - a classic market state manoeuvre.
But for some reason fails to mention America's efforts, on a broader scale that indeed the EU is not very helpful regarding, to induce such voluntary changes in many regions. This is also a key aspect of the reformations I suggested the U.S. enact with respect to international institutions (More here and here). These are aimed at changing the incentives - rather than treating any government as essentially the same, so that Qaddafi's Libya or Assad's Syria can be seen as having as much legitimacy on the UN's Human Rights Commission as a democratic state that respects the rule of law and liberty, members would be treated differently and thus induced to change. Surly Libya's Qaddafi seems to have a much better understanding of Bush's policy position than Bobbit does, as he recognized that relinquishing the WMD activities that the U.S. sees as a threat to global security would mean the marines would not go to the shores of Tripoli again. The simple fact is the Greater Middle East Initiative was not the blunt instrument Bobbit implies it was. If it were as mindlessly interventionist as Bobbit's piece suggests, the Bush Administration would not have backed off in the face of regional resistance as much as they did - more than they should have.
However, as I said, there are many good things about Bobbit's article. For one thing he recognized a point I emphasized in the beginning of my America's 21st Century Foreign Policy series. Bobbit puts it this way, writing:
In the past half-century, the US has undertaken to provide three types of collective goods that the world wants. It has underwritten the security of potential rivals - Japan-Korea, Germany and her neighbours - when they faced the Soviet challenge; it provided the legal framework for the society of nation states to universalise international law and human rights; it managed the superpower confrontation to keep the cold war cold. . .
A world without American leadership would be a world that is far more violent and far less free, and poorer than it would otherwise be. As long as the US provides precious collective goods - building coalitions and acting globally through regional co-operation, implementing anti-missile, anti-proliferation and pro-environmental regimes, organising humanitarian intervention and sharing information about terrorism - there will remain an important demand for US leadership. That demand will be volitional not coerced. That is the point. It will call upon an emerging market state, in a society of such states, not an empire.
Bobbit's European - and many American - readers benefit from being reminded of that fact. They also benefit from his rebuttals of the idea that America is an Empire. He only fails on that point when he says Bush's policies are moving it in that direction, and that failure is based on his misunderstanding and misreading of Bush's policy and the "Forward Strategy of Freedom".
But Bobbit is also accurate on what the U.S. finds so troublesome about certain international institutions and agreements, such as the land mines treaty or the ICC. He correctly points out that the advocates of thes
