Foreign Affairs

Blowback Revisited

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

When the United States started sending guns and money to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, it had a clearly defined Cold War purpose: helping expel the Soviet army, which had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. And so it made sense that once the Afghan jihad forced a Soviet withdrawal a decade later, Washington would lose interest in the rebels. For the international mujahideen drawn to the Afghan conflict, however, the fight was just beginning. They opened new fronts in the name of global jihad and became the spearhead of Islamist terrorism. The seriousness of the blowback became clear to the United States with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center: all of the attack's participants either had served in Afghanistan or were linked to a Brooklyn-based fund-raising organ for the Afghan jihad that was later revealed to be al Qaeda's de facto U.S. headquarters. The blowback, evident in other countries as well, continued to increase in intensity throughout the rest of the decade, culminating on September 11, 2001.

The current war in Iraq will generate a ferocious blowback of its own, which--as a recent classified CIA assessment predicts--could be longer and more powerful than that from Afghanistan. Foreign volunteers fighting U.S. troops in Iraq today will find new targets around the world after the war ends. Yet the Bush administration, consumed with managing countless crises in Iraq, has devoted little time to preparing for such long-term consequences. Lieutenant General James Conway, the director of operations on the Joint Staff, admitted as much when he said in June that blowback "is a concern, but there's not much we can do about it at this point in time." Judging from the experience of Afghanistan, such thinking is both mistaken and dangerously complacent.

Coming Home To Roost

The foreign volunteers in Afghanistan saw the Soviet defeat as a victory for Islam against a superpower that had invaded a Muslim country. Estimates of the number of foreign fighters who fought in Afghanistan begin in the low thousands; some spent years in combat, while others came only for what amounted to a jihad vacation. The jihadists gained legitimacy and prestige from their triumph both within the militant community and among ordinary Muslims, as well as the confidence to carry their jihad to other countries where they believed Muslims required assistance. When veterans of the guerrilla campaign returned home with their experience, ideology, and weapons, they destabilized once-tranquil countries and inflamed already unstable ones.

Algeria had seen relatively little terrorism for decades, but returning mujahideen founded the Armed Islamic Group (known by its French initials, GIA). GIA murdered thousands of Algerian civilians during the 1990s as it attempted to depose the government and replace it with an Islamist regime, a goal inspired by the mujahideen's success in Afghanistan. The GIA campaign of violence became especially pronounced after the Algerian army mounted a coup in 1992 to preempt an election that Islamists were poised to win.

In Egypt, after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 prompted a government crackdown, hundreds of extremists left the country to train and fight in Afghanistan. Those militants came back from the war against the Soviets to lead a terror campaign that killed more than a thousand people between 1990 and 1997. Closely tied to these militants was the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, "the Blind Sheikh," whose preaching, according to the 9/11 Commission, had inspired Sadat's assassins. Abdel Rahman's career demonstrates the internationalization of Islamist extremism after Afghanistan. The cleric visited Pakistan to lend his support to the Afghan jihad and encouraged two of his sons to fight in the war. He also provided spiritual direction for the Egyptian terrorist organization Jamaat al-Islamiyya and supported its renewed attacks on the Egyptian government in the 1990s. He arrived in the United States in 1990--at the time, the country was regarded as a sympathetic environment for Islamist militants--where he began to encourage attacks on New York City landmarks. Convicted in 1995 in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Abdel Rahman is serving a life sentence in the United States. But his influence has continued to be felt: a 1997 attack at an archaeological site near the Egyptian city of Luxor that left 58 tourists dead and almost crippled Egypt's vital tourism industry was an effort by Jamaat al-Islamiyya to force his release.

The best-known alumnus of the Afghan jihad is Osama bin Laden, under whose leadership the "Afghan Arabs" prosecuted their war beyond the Middle East into the United States, Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. After the Soviet defeat, bin Laden established a presence in Sudan to build up his fledgling al Qaeda organization. Around the same time, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops arrived in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. military presence in "the land of the two holy places" became al Qaeda's core grievance, and the United States became bin Laden's primary target. Al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, nearly sank the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000, and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Bin Laden expanded his reach into Southeast Asia with the assistance of other terrorists who had fought in Afghanistan, such as Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali, who is the central link between al Qaeda and the Indonesian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah, and Ali Gufron, known as Mukhlas, a leading planner of the 2002 Bali bombing that killed more than 200 people.

On-the-Job Training

The Afghan experience was important for the foreign "holy warriors" for several reasons. First, they gained battlefield experience. Second, they rubbed shoulders with like-minded militants from around the Muslim world, creating a truly global network. Third, as the Soviet war wound down, they established a myriad of new jihadist organizations, from al Qaeda to the Algerian GIA to the Filipino group Abu Sayyaf.

However, despite their grandiose rhetoric, the few thousand foreigners who fought in Afghanistan had only a negligible impact on the outcome of that war. Bin Laden's Afghan Arabs began fighting the Soviet army only in 1986, six years after the Soviet invasion. It was the Afghans, drawing on the wealth of their American and Saudi sponsors, who defeated the Soviet Union. By contrast, foreign volunteers are key players in Iraq, far more potent than the Afghan Arabs ever were.

Several factors could make blowback from the Iraq war even more dangerous than the fallout from Afghanistan. Foreign fighters started to arrive in Iraq even before Saddam's regime fell. They have conducted most of the suicide bombings--including some that have delivered strategic successes such as the withdrawal of the UN and most international aid organizations--and the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, another alumnus of the Afghan war, is perhaps the most effective insurgent commander in the field. Fighters in Iraq are more battle hardened than the Afghan Arabs, who fought demoralized Soviet army conscripts. They are testing themselves against arguably the best army in history, acquiring skills in their battles against coalition forces that will be far more useful for future terrorist operations than those their counterparts learned during the 1980s. Mastering how to make improvised explosive devices or how to conduct suicide operations is more relevant to urban terrorism than the conventional guerrilla tactics used against the Red Army. U.S. military commanders say that techniques perfected in Iraq have been adopted by militants in Afghanistan.

Finally, foreign involvement in the Iraqi conflict will likely lead some Iraqi nationals to become international terrorists. The Afghans were glad to have Arab money but were culturally, religiously, and psychologically removed from the Afghan Arabs; they neither joined al Qaeda nor identified with the Arabs' radical theology. Iraqis, however, are closer culturally to the foreigners fighting in Iraq, and many will volunteer to continue other jihads even after U.S. troops depart.

In Baghdad and in Boston

President George W. Bush and others have suggested that it is better for the United States to fight the terrorists in Baghdad than in Boston. It is a comforting notion, but it is wrong on two counts. First, it posits a finite number of terrorists who can be lured to one place and killed. But the Iraq war has expanded the terrorists' ranks: the year 2003 saw the highest incidence of significant terrorist attacks in two decades, and then, in 2004, astonishingly, that number tripled. (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously complained in October 2003 that "we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror." An exponentially rising number of terrorist attacks is one metric that seems relevant.) Second, the Bush administration has not addressed the question of what the foreign fighters will do when the war in Iraq ends. It would be naive to expect them to return to civilian life in their home countries. More likely, they will become the new shock troops of the international jihadist movement.

For these reasons, U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East, as well as the United States itself, are vulnerable to blowback. Disturbingly, some European governments are already seeing some of their citizens and resident aliens answer the call to fight in Iraq. In February, the Los Angeles Times reported that U.S. troops in Iraq had detained three French militants--and that police in Paris had arrested ten associates who were planning to join them. In June, authorities in Spain arrested 16 men, mostly Moroccans, on charges of recruiting suicide bombers for Iraq. In September, prosecutors in the United States indicted a Dutch resident, Iraqi-born Wesam al-Delaema, for conspiring to bomb U.S. convoys in Fallujah. These incidents presage danger not only for European countries, but also for the United States, since European nationals benefit from the Visa Waiver Program, which affords them relatively easy access to the United States.

But it is Saudi Arabia that will bear the brunt of the blowback. Several studies attest to the significant role Saudi nationals have played in the conflict. Of the 154 Arab fighters killed in Iraq between September 2004 and March 2005, 61 percent were from Saudi Arabia. Another report concluded that of the 235 suicide bombers named on Web sites since mid-2004 as having perpetrated attacks in Iraq, more than 50 percent were Saudi nationals. Today, the Saudi government is exporting its jihadist problem instead of dealing with it, just as the Egyptians did during the Afghan war.

A Switch In Time

American success in Iraq would deny today's jihadists the symbolic victory that they seek. But with that outcome so uncertain, U.S. policymakers must focus on dealing with the jihadists in Iraq now--by limiting the numbers entering the fight and breaking the mechanism that would otherwise generate blowback after the war.

The foreign jihadists in Iraq need to be separated from the local insurgents through the political process. Success in that mission will require Iraq's Sunni Arabs to remain consistently engaged in the political process. Shiite and Kurdish leaders will have to back down from their efforts to create semiautonomous states in the north and the south. But the prospects for these developments appear dim at the moment, and reaching a durable agreement may increasingly be beyond U.S. influence.

To raise the odds of success, the United States must deliver more security to central Iraq. This means securing Iraq's borders, especially with Syria, to block the flow of foreign fighters into the country. The repeated U.S. military operations in western Iraq since May have shown that at present there are insufficient forces to disrupt insurgent supply lines running along the Euphrates River to the Syrian border. Accomplishing this objective would require either more U.S. troops or a much larger force of well-trained Iraqi troops. For the moment, neither of those options seems viable, and so additional U.S. soldiers should be rotated out of Iraq's cities and into the western deserts and border towns, transitioning the control of certain urban areas to the Iraqi military and police.

Foreign governments must also silence calls to jihad and deny radicals sanctuary once this war ends. After the Soviet defeat, jihadists too often found refuge in places as varied as Brooklyn and Khartoum, where radical clerics offered religious justifications for continuing jihad. To date, some governments have not taken the necessary steps to clamp down on the new generation of jihadists. Although the Saudis largely silenced their radical clerics following the terrorist attacks in Riyadh in May 2003, 26 clerics were still permitted late in 2004 to call for jihad against U.S. troops in Iraq. The United States must press the Saudi government to end these appeals and restrict its nationals from entering Iraq. In the long run, measures against radical preaching are in Riyadh's best interest, too, since the blowback from Iraq is likely to be as painful for Saudi Arabia as the blowback from Afghanistan was for Egypt and Algeria during the 1990s.

Finally, the U.S. intelligence community, in conjunction with foreign intelligence services, should work on creating a database that identifies and tracks foreign fighters, their known associates, and their spiritual mentors. If such a database had been created during the Afghan war, the United States would have been far better prepared for al Qaeda's subsequent terror campaign.

President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, once asked of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan: "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" Today, the Bush administration is implicitly arguing a similar point: that the establishment of a democratic Iraqi state is a project of overriding importance for the United States and the world, which in due course will eclipse memories of the insurgency. But such a viewpoint minimizes the fact that the war in Iraq is already breeding a new generation of terrorists. The lesson of the decade of terror that followed the Afghan war was that underestimating the importance of blowback has severe consequences. Repeating the mistake in regard to Iraq could lead to even deadlier outcomes.

Buying Time in Tehran

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini once famously dismissed an aide worried about inflation by telling him that "this revolution was not about the price of watermelons." Today, Khomeini's successors are finding the high price of watermelons -- not to mention of meat, housing, and cars -- much harder to ignore. The untold story of post-revolutionary Iran is one of economic decline: the steady, 25-year deterioration of a nation that once boasted a per capita income equivalent to Spain's, pumped six million barrels of oil a day, and nurtured a vibrant middle class. Today, Iran's real per capita income is a third of what it was before the revolution; oil production is two-thirds of the 1979 level, and the middle class is being squeezed by chronically high inflation, widespread un- and underemployment, and debilitating wage stagnation.

In May 2005, President Mohammad Khatami, who thundered into office in 1997 on a platform of political and social liberalization, will leave his job chastened and largely defeated by his conservative foes. Not only did he fail to achieve political change, he also proved unable to heal the sick economy he inherited or to ward off a looming employment crisis. With its extremely young population -- two-thirds of which is under the age of 30 -- Iran needs to create more than 800,000 jobs a year. So far, the government has failed even to come close to that target. As a result, Iran's young people have grown deeply frustrated and hungry for political change and economic relief -- even as they remain unsure of how to achieve them.

The newly resurgent conservatives think they have the answer. Having beaten back the reformers' challenge through bureaucratic infighting, organized violence, the jailing of leading reformers, and election-rigging, the conservatives now want to embark on a program dubbed the "China model" by Iran's media. The idea -- which is neither new nor profound nor uniquely Chinese -- is to offer economic growth, jobs, and limited social freedom in exchange for continued control of the political sphere. The conservatives are betting that Iran's citizens will be satisfied with consumerism and thus give up their demands for pluralism.

Will the Islamic Republic pull it off? If Tehran's goal is to create an economic dynamo on a scale similar to China's, the short answer is no. With U.S. sanctions firmly in place, a poor regulatory environment for foreign direct investment, a relatively uncompetitive manufacturing sector, and a cronyist business climate rife with corruption, Iran is hardly primed for an economic renaissance. Moreover, the hard-line wing of the conservative faction has shown little interest in real economic reform, preferring instead a form of crony capitalism that spends state resources on political patronage of key constituents, including the security services -- a model followed widely in the Middle East, most notably in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria.

If, however, Tehran's goal is more modest -- to get through a politically bumpy period by creating limited economic openings that produce minor job growth and forestall unrest -- the conservatives may succeed. And such modesty is likely, given that a genuinely expansive economic reform program that enlarges the private sector, creates jobs, and strengthens the middle class could undermine the stability of the regime. Indeed, Iran's 1979 revolution occurred during a time of economic improvement and relative social liberalization.

Thus the conservatives are likely to tread carefully. This regime has had its obituary written before, and as one conservative official told me, Tehran is "good at crisis management." The Islamic Republic has already weathered post-revolutionary instability, a devastating eight-year war with Iraq, international isolation, a spirited reformist challenge, a grassroots democracy movement, student unrest, enormous popular discontent, and two U.S. wars in the neighborhood.

Moreover, Iran's public has grown deeply apathetic, its hopes for change snuffed out by the failure of Khatami's reform program. The regime is therefore likely to survive the current economic crisis, as it has crises of the past. As crisis management, an authoritarian bargain -- a China model "lite" -- could work for Tehran, even if fundamental economic changes of the sort Beijing has enacted are unlikely anytime soon.

The Tehran Tango

Will the Iranian public -- justifiably viewed as one of the great hopes for popular democracy in the Middle East -- accept the crude authoritarian bargain of the China model? At the moment, they seem more likely to ignore it. Frustrated by the failure of the reform movement, Iranians are starting to show signs of widespread political apathy. After nearly 3,000 reformist candidates were banned by the hardliners from running in February's elections for the Majlis (Iran's parliament), voter turnout (at 51 percent nationwide and 28 percent in Tehran) was lower than in any other election since the revolution. (There was also an inordinately high number of spoiled ballots.) Iranians might not like what the conservatives are planning, but they seem to lack the energy and will to oppose it. Political apathy has also been compounded by fear, a result of the hard-liners' consistent and ruthless use of violence and intimidation.

Even with public support or indifference, reforming Iran's economy won't be easy, despite the country's enormous potential. Iran boasts a cheap work force of both skilled and unskilled labor, a large market of 70 million people, low-cost energy resources, ample cash reserves to cushion the inevitable blows caused by liberalization, a strategic location adjacent to the markets of South and Central Asia and the Persian Gulf, wealthy potential investors in the Iranian diaspora, and a well-educated technocratic elite comfortable with Westerners.

Beneath the surface, however, the conditions are less promising. A key problem is the degree to which Iranian politics have become factionalized, paralyzing economic policymaking. During his tenure, President Khatami complained that "a crisis every nine days" made it hard to get anything accomplished. Although the conservatives have since recaptured the Majlis, they are not a monolithic bunch. Differences and personal rivalries remain and will ensure continued conflict. Pragmatic conservatives, led by former president and perennial power player Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, view the world, the economy, and the China model differently than do hard-line, ideological conservatives, who control key institutions such as the judiciary and the security services and influence Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The hard-liners see the China model principally as a means to forestall unrest. They are thus less interested in real economic reform and more prone to think in terms of patronage politics. Their approach -- more a distributive model than a China model -- will use oil wealth strategically, doling out subsidies to the population and interest-free loans and cash to their supporters while creating a few highly restricted and tightly controlled openings for foreign investment and the private sector. Hard-liners view Iran's economy as a small party with a closely guarded invitation list. And the party, they believe, should remain socially conservative.

The pragmatists, on the other hand, are less interested in controlling how people live and have a better grasp of how the global economy works, of the need for liberalization, and of the obstacles to economic growth. They, too, view the China model as a safety valve, but their economic vision promises more opportunities for the private sector and foreign investment. Unfortunately, the hard-liners already have the upper hand. In August, the Majlis overturned laws passed by the earlier, reformist parliament aimed at easing foreign investment and facilitating the entry of foreign banks into Iran. Mohammad Mir Mohammadi, a hard-line member of the Majlis, announced that the vote had prevented "foreign dominance of Iran's economy."

The hard-liners also have an advantage thanks to three years of high oil prices, which have translated into a cash windfall for Tehran. Swelling foreign reserves ($35 billion, at last count) have allowed the government to put much-needed reforms on hold without disrupting its patronage networks. One influential hard-line parliamentarian, Ahmad Tavakoli, has even begun talking about further reducing the cost of gasoline, which is already kept artificially low (at about nine cents a liter) by high government subsidies.

Since Iran earns some 85 percent of its foreign currency from oil exports and gets an extra billion dollars a year with each $1-per-barrel rise in global oil prices, the current spike in prices has inflated Iranian GDP growth figures, which have ticked above 6 percent in the last two years. High oil prices have also contributed to a property boom and a bull market on the Tehran stock exchange. But they have not yet resulted in significant job growth, which could spell real trouble for the conservatives in the near future.

Thus the pragmatists may eventually regain control. Yet the only thing that seems certain is that progress toward economic reform in Iran will remain halting, following the familiar Tehran tango: one step forward, one back, one step to the left, another to the right.

Rafsanjani Redux

The Iranian public, meanwhile, could be forgiven for feeling a strong sense of deja vu. Iran has tried the China model before, and the results only contributed to the current economic woes. In 1989, Rafsanjani, then president, made a similar attempt to buy off the discontented populace with stability, jobs, and limited social freedoms. His initiatives were welcomed by Iran's war-weary population, which, having just concluded a brutal eight-year conflict with Iraq, embraced his non-ideological and pragmatic approach.

Rafsanjani significantly liberalized the economy, foreign investment began trickling in, and a new generation of Iranian business elites -- many of them government apparatchiks with close ties to those in power -- arose. In 1995, the Iranian president even made an overture to Washington, offering Conoco an offshore oil contract (although the U.S. government ultimately rejected the deal).

Rather than truly opening the economy, however, the Rafsanjani era only ended up strengthening Iran's bonyads -- government-linked Islamic charities and businesses that today control as much as a quarter of the nation's GDP -- and further wove government into the tapestry of Iranian private business. In the highly incestuous business climate, companies associated with the bonyads or government ministries won the lion's share of government reconstruction contracts and used their access to licenses and cheap credit to become leading traders. Well-connected conservative merchants (known as bazaaris) with established trading networks also used some of their accrued wealth to enter industry, which had been the preserve of the state in early revolutionary Iran (and of Western-oriented business leaders before 1979). As a result of these developments, Iran's private sector is today hampered not only by government obstruction, but also by government competition. The country's chaotic business sector is filled with government-linked and government-owned firms engaged in crony capitalism, insider dealings, and predatory practices to crush large competitors. Reformist journalists deride "business mafias" that exploit their access to state insiders for personal gain.

Khatami-era reforms opened some new spaces for a genuine private sector, and a string of recent business successes by outsiders -- that is, those not linked to Iran's state power networks -- shows that opportunities have increased. Still, those opportunities remain far too constrained. The bonyads, accountable only to Khamenei, still own everything from banks, hotels, and shipping lines to car manufacturers and fruit juice producers. They dominate many industries, squelching some private competitors and rewarding others who play by their rules. Several government ministries even run their own businesses: the Intelligence Ministry owns telecommunications and information-technology companies and the Agriculture Ministry owns agribusinesses. Companies affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps have won contracts to build roads, pipelines, and apartment blocks, occasionally even using army conscripts as free labor to lay bricks and pour cement.

These problems are replicated on a smaller scale: civil servants commonly open small businesses, using their access to insider information to win subcontracting work or to procure necessary (but otherwise hard to come by) licenses. Many bureaucrats also regularly accept bribes. One small-business owner I know in Tehran even employs a mid-ranking government tax auditor to fake his taxes. "He knows how to fool his bosses better than I do," the businessman explains, "and I pay him better than his government salary."

Wasting and Wanting

Of course, oligarchic and kleptocratic governments and low-level corruption are common in much of Asia, even in its fastest-developing economies (including China's). But aside from Iran, none of these countries also faces exclusion from the world's largest market and largest foreign investor. And U.S. sanctions are not likely to be lifted in the near term. In fact, Washington is currently increasing its pressure on Iran due to Tehran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Still more pressure may be brought to bear as international human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International -- which pulled their punches on Iran during Khatami's era -- renew their sharp criticism of the country, calling on the European Union to impose penalties on Iran for its persistent political repression. Meanwhile, the July 2003 killing of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian journalist, and the subsequent cover-up may undermine what were growing business ties between Canada and Iran.

Even if the external climate were friendlier, Iran's prospects for economic rejuvenation would be uncertain. A good example of the failure of Tehran's state-directed economic ventures is the status of the country's natural gas industry. With the world's second-largest reserves of natural gas, Iran should, by the end of the decade, be able to claim around ten percent of this increasingly vital energy market. But as the veteran Iran energy watcher Vahe Petrossian has noted, Tehran is unlikely to meet this goal, thanks to a late start and a lack of skilled negotiators. Meanwhile, Qatar, which shares natural gas fields with Iran, is now poised to become the leading natural gas supplier in the area.

Successfully adopting the China model would also require large infusions of foreign investment, and on this score too, Iran's prospects look bleak. In addition to the uncertain climate created by the Majlis' scrapping of the 2002 Foreign Investment Protection and Promotion Act, two high-profile foreign investments have recently become ensnared in the familiar mix of ideological, political, bureaucratic, and personal rivalry that often paralyzes Iranian politics. On May 8, a Turkish-led consortium, which had won a contract to operate the newly opened Imam Khomeini International Airport, found its contract abrogated on the first day when the Revolutionary Guards shut the airport down. The guards said that having foreigners operate the airport was "an affront to Iran's dignity" and charged that the Turkish consortium had ties with Israel, a charge the Turks deny. Another explanation was that the Revolutionary Guards wanted one of their own companies to get the contract and hoped to embarrass Ahmad Khorram, the reformist transportation minister detested by most hard-liners (and currently under impeachment threat in the Majlis). Whatever the reason, future investors will be wary.

Indeed, it is not surprising that foreign direct investment in Iran continues to lag behind that in other players in the region, such as Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms. Already, the tiny emirate of Dubai, with a population of just over one million, attracts far more foreign investment than Iran. In fact, many businesses that sell to the Iranian market prefer to locate in the more business-friendly Dubai or send goods to more efficient Dubai ports, where Iranian traders and Dubai merchants do brisk business in re-export to Iran. One Dubai merchant explained, "We benefit from Iran's government incompetence."

Not only are they incompetent, but many hard-line Iranian officials also still view foreign investors as "exploiters." Iran's constitution itself reflects this suspicion, virtually banning all foreign investment. The hard-liners fear that foreign money would mean giving strangers control over their country. Iranian political discourse reflects this suspicion as well, distinguishing between "insiders" (khodi) and "outsiders" (gheyr-e-khodi). Insiders are generally thought to include all revolutionary players (including the religious reformers around Khatami) and to exclude secular democrats and nationalists. Now the hard-liners want to restrict the political and business playing field still further, keeping out everyone except like-minded individuals with social or family links to those in power. Already, such thinking has produced a version of crony capitalism that can be called khodi capitalism: a system dominated by Iran's Islamic apparatchiks and business elites, who maintain incestuous business relationships that mix the public and private sectors and reward only those with the right connections.

Despite the conservatives' best efforts to sabotage investment, Iran will continue to attract foreign interest in its oil and gas sector. Still, beyond its natural resources, the prospects are bleak. China can at least offer foreign businesses the tantalizing prospect of a market with more than a billion consumers and an army of cheap laborers. Iran, with only 70 million people and an unproven labor force, promises much smaller rewards.

A "China model lite" could marginally improve Iran's economic prospects if oil prices remain high and at least limited reforms are undertaken. Thus far, however, Iran's hard-liners seem to understand the repressive side of the China model better than its reformist side. Iran's economy is likely to remain afloat, buoyed by oil money. But the country will fail to live up to its enormous economic potential and will do just enough to get by, frustrating Iranians, enriching insiders, and alternately tempting and repelling foreign investors. Given the long-term facts of Iran's demography, dramatic changes are inevitable at some point in the not-too-distant future, despite the present public apathy. In the meantime, however, the mullahs seem likely to do just enough to avoid the abyss. Major economic reform is not likely, but neither is a serious collapse.

Demography is not Destiny

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

After World War II, the GI bill dramatically lowered the cost of home ownership for millions of young Americans. Its educational benefits also allowed millions of men still in their twenties to start earning nearly as much as their fathers. The bill's purpose was not to create a baby boom in the United States. But that is what it did -- a good example of how government policies, even when not explicitly pro-natal, can make the economics of parenthood less punishing and thereby enable more people to afford the children they want.

Today, in both Europe and the United States, women coming to the end of their reproductive years report that they did not have as many children as they would have liked. Such statements suggest an implicit demand for children that is not being met. The reasons for this trend are complex, but many are clearly within the scope of government to ameliorate.

One way to do this would be to give parents relief from punishing and unprecedented payroll taxes. Other ways would be to make access to health care less contingent on full-time work, to encourage greater age diversity in university admissions, and to provide more resources for childcare. Within Europe today, the highest fertility rates are found in the nations that do the most to ease the strains between work and family life.

Are fears of population decline overblown? The matter cannot be settled by pointing to history, because no previous society has experienced population aging on the scale and at the speed of that now occurring throughout the world. Demographic change once moved at a tectonic pace. But countries such as China are now aging as much in one generation as countries such as France did over the course of centuries. And even in healthy, peaceful populations, fertility rates are falling well below replacement levels and staying there -- a trend that, again, has no historical precedent.

How certain is the global aging trend? One can be quite sure how many elders there will be over the course of the next 70 to 80 years because those people have already been born. And without some new totalitarian or fundamentalist force commanding procreation, the global decline in fertility rates is unlikely to reverse itself.

As I stated in my article, lower fertility does seem to bring some economic benefits when it begins. And as I discuss in greater detail in my book, The Empty Cradle, there are many ways in which societies can encourage more productivity and more productive aging. But a society that consistently consumes more human capital than it produces obviously must prepare for new and difficult challenges.

The Global Baby Bust

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 03:00:00 -0400

The Wrong Reading

You awaken to news of a morning traffic jam. Leaving home early for a doctor's appointment, you nonetheless arrive too late to find parking. After waiting two hours for a 15-minute consultation, you wait again to have your prescription filled. All the while, you worry about the work you've missed because so many other people would line up to take your job. Returning home to the evening news, you watch throngs of youths throwing stones somewhere in the Middle East, and a feature on disappearing farmland in the Midwest. A telemarketer calls for the third time, telling you, "We need your help to save the rain forest." As you set the alarm clock for the morning, one neighbor's car alarm goes off and another's air conditioner starts to whine.

So goes a day in the life of an average American. It is thus hardly surprising that many Americans think overpopulation is one of the world's most pressing problems. To be sure, the typical Westerner enjoys an unprecedented amount of private space. Compared to their parents, most now live in larger homes occupied by fewer children. They drive ever-larger automobiles, in which they can eat, smoke, or listen to the radio in splendid isolation. Food is so abundant that obesity has become a leading cause of death.

Still, both day-to-day experience and the media frequently suggest that the quality of life enjoyed in the United States and Europe is under threat by population growth. Sprawling suburban development is making traffic worse, driving taxes up, and reducing opportunities to enjoy nature. Televised images of developing-world famine, war, and environmental degradation prompt some to wonder, "Why do these people have so many kids?" Immigrants and other people's children wind up competing for jobs, access to health care, parking spaces, favorite fishing holes, hiking paths, and spots at the beach. No wonder that, when asked how long it will take for world population to double, nearly half of all Americans say 20 years or less.

Yet a closer look at demographic trends shows that the rate of world population growth has fallen by more than 40 percent since the late 1960s. And forecasts by the UN and other organizations show that, even in the absence of major wars or pandemics, the number of human beings on the planet could well start to decline within the lifetime of today's children. Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis predict that human population will peak (at 9 billion) by 2070 and then start to contract. Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size, and the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically. Moreover, the populations that will age fastest are in the Middle East and other underdeveloped regions. During the remainder of this century, even sub-Saharan Africa will likely grow older than Europe is today.

Free Falling

The root cause of these trends is falling birthrates. Today, the average woman in the world bears half as many children as did her counterpart in 1972. No industrialized country still produces enough children to sustain its population over time, or to prevent rapid population aging. Germany could easily lose the equivalent of the current population of what was once East Germany over the next half-century. Russia's population is already contracting by three-quarters of a million a year. Japan's population, meanwhile, is expected to peak as early as 2005, and then to fall by as much as one-third over the next 50 years -- a decline equivalent, the demographer Hideo Ibe has noted, to that experienced in medieval Europe during the plague.

Although many factors are at work, the changing economics of family life is the prime factor in discouraging childbearing. In nations rich and poor, under all forms of government, as more and more of the world's population moves to urban areas in which children offer little or no economic reward to their parents, and as women acquire economic opportunities and reproductive control, the social and financial costs of childbearing continue to rise.

In the United States, the direct cost of raising a middle-class child born this year through age 18, according to the Department of Agriculture, exceeds $200,000 -- not including college. And the cost in forgone wages can easily exceed $1 million, even for families with modest earning power. Meanwhile, although Social Security and private pension plans depend critically on the human capital created by parents, they offer the same benefits, and often more, to those who avoid the burdens of raising a family.

Now the developing world, as it becomes more urban and industrialized, is experiencing the same demographic transition, but at a faster pace. Today, when Americans think of Mexico, for example, they think of televised images of desperate, unemployed youths swimming the Rio Grande or slipping through border fences. Yet because Mexican fertility rates have dropped so dramatically, the country is now aging five times faster than is the United States. It took 50 years for the American median age to rise just five years, from 30 to 35. By contrast, between 2000 and 2050, Mexico's median age, according to UN projections, will increase by 20 years, leaving half the population over 42. Meanwhile, the median American age in 2050 is expected to be 39.7.

Those televised images of desperate, unemployed youth broadcast from the Middle East create a similarly misleading impression. Fertility rates are falling faster in the Middle East than anywhere else on earth, and as a result, the region's population is aging at an unprecedented rate. For example, by mid-century, Algeria will see its median age increase from 21.7 to 40, according to UN projections. Postrevolutionary Iran has seen its fertility rate plummet by nearly two-thirds and will accordingly have more seniors than children by 2030.

Countries such as France and Japan at least got a chance to grow rich before they grew old. Today, most developing countries are growing old before they get rich. China's low fertility means that its labor force will start shrinking by 2020, and 30 percent of China's population could be over 60 by mid-century. More worrisome, China's social security system, which covers only a fraction of the population, already has debts exceeding 145 percent of its GDP. Making demographics there even worse, the spreading use of ultrasound and other techniques for determining the sex of fetuses is, as in India and many other parts of the world, leading to much higher abortion rates for females than for males. In China, the ratio of male to female births is now 117 to 100 -- which implies that roughly one out of six males in today's new generation will not succeed in reproducing.

All told, some 59 countries, comprising roughly 44 percent of the world's total population, are currently not producing enough children to avoid population decline, and the phenomenon continues to spread. By 2045, according to the latest UN projections, the world's fertility rate as a whole will have fallen below replacement levels.

Repaying The Demographic Dividend

What impact will these trends have on the global economy and balance of power? Consider first the positive possibilities. Slower world population growth offers many benefits, some of which have already been realized. Many economists believe, for example, that falling birthrates made possible the great economic boom that occurred in Japan and then in many other Asian nations beginning in the 1960s. As the relative number of children declined, so did the burden of their dependency, thereby freeing up more resources for investment and adult consumption. In East Asia, the working-age population grew nearly four times faster than its dependent population between 1965 and 1990, freeing up a huge reserve of female labor and other social resources that would otherwise have been committed to raising children. Similarly, China's rapid industrialization today is being aided by a dramatic decline in the relative number of dependent children.

Over the next decade, the Middle East could benefit from a similar "demographic dividend." Birthrates fell in every single Middle Eastern country during the 1990s, often dramatically. The resulting "middle aging" of the region will lower the overall dependency ratio over the next 10 to 20 years, freeing up more resources for infrastructure and industrial development. The appeal of radicalism could also diminish as young adults make up less of the population and Middle Eastern societies become increasingly dominated by middle-aged people concerned with such practical issues as health care and retirement savings. Just as population aging in the West during the 1980s was accompanied by the disappearance of youthful indigenous terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades and the Weather Underground, falling birthrates in the Middle East could well produce societies far less prone to political violence.

Declining fertility rates at first bring a "demographic dividend." That dividend has to be repaid, however, if the trend continues. Although at first the fact that there are fewer children to feed, clothe, and educate leaves more for adults to enjoy, soon enough, if fertility falls beneath replacement levels, the number of productive workers drops as well, and the number of dependent elderly increase. And these older citizens consume far more resources than children do. Even after considering the cost of education, a typical child in the United States consumes 28 percent less than the typical working-age adult, whereas elders consume 27 percent more, mostly in health-related expenses.

Largely because of this imbalance, population aging, once it begins creating more seniors than workers, puts severe strains on government budgets. In Germany, for example, public spending on pensions, even after accounting for a reduction in future benefits written into current law, is expected to swell from an already staggering 10.3 percent of GDP to 15.4 percent by 2040 -- even as the number of workers available to support each retiree shrinks from 2.6 to 1.4. Meanwhile, the cost of government health-care benefits for the elderly is expected to rise from today's 3.8 percent of GDP to 8.4 percent by 2040.

Population aging also depresses the growth of government revenues. Population growth is a major source of economic growth: more people create more demand for the products capitalists sell, and more supply of the labor capitalists buy. Economists may be able to construct models of how economies could grow amid a shrinking population, but in the real world, it has never happened. A nation's GDP is literally the sum of its labor force times average output per worker. Thus a decline in the number of workers implies a decline in an economy's growth potential. When the size of the work force falls, economic growth can occur only if productivity increases enough to compensate. And these increases would have to be substantial to offset the impact of aging. Italy, for example, expects its working-age population to plunge 41 percent by 2050 -- meaning that output per worker would have to increase by at least that amount just to keep Italy's economic growth rate from falling below zero. With a shrinking labor supply, Europe's future economic growth will therefore depend entirely on getting more out of each remaining worker (many of them unskilled, recently arrived immigrants), even as it has to tax them at higher and higher rates to pay for old-age pensions and health care.

Theoretically, raising the retirement age could help to ease the burden of unfunded old-age benefits. But declining fitness among the general population is making this tactic less feasible. In the United States, for example, the dramatic increases in obesity and sedentary lifestyles are already causing disability rates to rise among the population 59 and younger. Researchers estimate that this trend will cause a 10–20 percent increase in the demand for nursing homes over what would otherwise occur from mere population aging, and a 10–15 percent increase in Medicare expenditures on top of the program's already exploding costs. Meanwhile, despite the much ballyhooed "longevity revolution," life expectancy among the elderly in the United States is hardly improving. Indeed, due to changing lifestyle factors, life expectancy among American women aged 65 was actually lower in 2002 than it was in 1990, according to the Social Security Administration.

The same declines in population fitness can now be seen in many other nations and are likely to overwhelm any public health benefits achieved through medical technology. According to the International Association for the Study of Obesity, an "alarming rise in obesity presents a pan-European epidemic." A full 35 percent of Italian children are now overweight. In the case of European men, the percentage who are overweight or obese ranges from over 40 percent in France to 70 percent in Germany. And as Western lifestyles spread throughout the developing world so do Western ways of dying. According to the World Health Organization, half of all deaths in places such as Mexico, China, and the Middle East are now caused by noncommunicable diseases related to Western lifestyle, such as cancers and heart attacks induced by smoking and obesity.

Global Aging And Global Power

Current population trends are likely to have another major impact: they will make military actions increasingly difficult for most nations. One reason for this change will be psychological. In countries where parents generally have only one or two children, every soldier becomes a "Private Ryan" -- a soldier whose loss would mean overwhelming devastation to his or her family. In the later years of the Soviet Union, for example, collapsing birthrates in the Russian core meant that by 1990, the number of Russians aged 15–24 had shrunk by 5.2 million from 25 years before. Given their few sons, it is hardly surprising that Russian mothers for the first time in the nation's history organized an antiwar movement, and that Soviet society decided that its casualties in Afghanistan were unacceptable.

Another reason for the shift will be financial. Today, Americans consider the United States as the world's sole remaining superpower, which it is. As the cost of pensions and health care consume more and more of the nation's wealth, however, and as the labor force stops growing, it will become more and more difficult for Washington to sustain current levels of military spending or the number of men and women in uniform. Even within the U.S. military budget, the competition between guns and canes is already intense. The Pentagon today spends 84 cents on pensions for every dollar it spends on basic pay. Indeed, except during wartime, pensions are already one of the Pentagon's largest budget categories. In 2000, the cost of military pensions amounted to 12 times what the military spent on ammunition, nearly 5 times what the Navy spent on new ships, and more than 5 times what the Air Force spent on new planes and missiles.

Of course, the U.S. military is also more technically sophisticated than ever before, meaning that national power today is much less dependent on the ability to raise large armies. But the technologies the United States currently uses to project its power -- laser-guided bombs, stealth aircraft, navigation assisted by the space-based Global Positioning System, nuclear aircraft carriers -- are all products of the sort of expensive research and development that the United States will have difficulty affording if the cost of old-age entitlements continues to rise.

The same point applies to the U.S. ability to sustain, or increase, its levels of foreign aid. Although the United States faces less population aging than any other industrialized nation, the extremely high cost of its health care system, combined with its underfunded pension system, means that it still faces staggering liabilities. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the imbalance between what the U.S. federal government will collect in future taxes under current law and what it has promised to pay in future benefits now exceeds 500 percent of GDP. To close that gap, the IMF warns, "would require an immediate and permanent 60 percent hike in the federal income tax yield, or a 50 percent cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits." Neither is likely. Accordingly, in another 20 years, the United States will be no more able to afford the role of world policeman than Europe or Japan can today. Nor will China be able to assume the job, since it will soon start to suffer from the kind of hyper-aging that Japan is already experiencing.

Aging And The Pace Of Progress

Even if there are fewer workers available to support each retiree in the future, won't technology be able to make up the difference? Perhaps. But there is also plenty of evidence to suggest that population aging itself works to depress the rate of technological and organizational innovation. Cross-country comparisons imply, for example, that after the proportion of elders increases in a society beyond a certain point, the level of entrepreneurship and inventiveness begins to drop. In 2002, Babson College and the London School of Business released their latest index of entrepreneurial activity. It shows that there is a distinct correlation between countries with a high ratio of workers to retirees and those with a high degree of entrepreneurship. Conversely, in countries in which a large share of the population is retired, the amount of new business formation is low. So, for example, two of the most entrepreneurial countries today are India and China, where there are currently roughly five people of working age for every person of retirement age. Meanwhile, Japan and France are among the least entrepreneurial countries on earth and have among the lowest ratios of workers to retirees.

This correlation could be explained by many different factors. Both common sense and a vast literature in finance and psychology support the claim that as one approaches retirement age, one usually becomes more reluctant to take career or financial risks. It is not surprising, therefore, that aging countries such as Italy, France, and Japan are marked by exceptionally low rates of job turnover and by exceptionally conservative use of capital. Because prudence requires that older investors take fewer risks with their investments, it also stands to reason that as populations age, investor preference shifts toward safe bonds and bank deposits and away from speculative stocks and venture funds. As populations age further, ever-higher shares of citizens begin cashing out their investments and spending down their savings.

Also to be considered are the huge public deficits projected to be run by major industrialized countries over the next several decades. Because of the mounting costs of pensions and health care, government spending on research and development, as well as on education, will likely drop. Moreover, massive government borrowing could easily crowd out financial capital that would otherwise be available to the private sector for investment in new technology. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has recently calculated that the cost of public benefits to the elderly will consume a dramatically rising share of GDP in industrialized countries. In the United States, such benefits currently consume 9.4 percent of GDP. But if current trends continue, this figure will top 20 percent by 2040. And in countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, somewhere between a quarter and a third of all national output will be consumed by old-age pensions and health care programs before today's 30-year-olds reach retirement age.

Theoretically, a highly efficient, global financial market could lend financial resources from rich, old countries that are short on labor to young, poor countries that are short on capital, and make the whole world better off. But for this to happen, old countries would have to contain their deficits and invest their savings in places that are themselves either on the threshold of hyper-aging (China, India, Mexico) or highly destabilized by religious fanaticism, disease, and war (most of the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia), or both. And who exactly would buy the products produced by these investments? Japan, South Korea, and other recently industrialized countries relied on massive exports to the United States and Europe to develop. But if the population of Europe and Japan drops, while the population of the United States ages considerably, where will the demand come from to support development in places such as the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa?

Population aging is also likely to create huge legacy costs for employers. This is particularly true in the United States, where health and pension benefits are largely provided by the private sector. General Motors (GM) now has 2.5 retirees on its pension rolls for every active worker and an unfunded pension debt of $19.2 billion. Honoring its legacy costs to retirees now adds $1,800 to the cost of every vehicle GM makes, according to a 2003 estimate by Morgan Stanley. Just between 2001 and 2002, the U.S. government's projected short-term liability for bailing out failing private pension plans increased from $11 billion to $35 billion, with huge defaults expected from the steel and airline industries. An aging work force may also be less able or inclined to take advantage of new technology. This trend seems to be part of the cause for Japan's declining rates of productivity growth in the 1990s. Before that decade, the aging of Japan's highly educated work force was a weak but positive force in increasing the nation's productivity, according to studies. Older workers learned by doing, developing specialized knowledge and craft skills and the famous company spirit that made Japan an unrivaled manufacturing power. But by the 1990s, the continued aging of Japan's work force became a cause of the country's declining competitiveness.

Population aging works against innovation in another way as well. As population growth dwindles, so does the need to increase the supply of just about everything, save health care. That means there is less incentive to find ways of making a gallon of gas go farther, or of increasing the capacity of existing infrastructure. Population growth is the mother of necessity. Without it, why bother to innovate? An aging society may have an urgent need to gain more output from each remaining worker, but without growing markets, individual firms have little incentive to learn how to do more with less -- and with a dwindling supply of human capital, they have fewer ideas to draw on.

Importing Human Capital

If high-tech isn't the answer, what about immigration? It turns out that importing new, younger workers is at best only a partial solution. To be sure, the United States and other developed nations derive many benefits from their imported human capital. Immigration, however, does less than one might think to ease the challenges of population aging. One reason is that most immigrants arrive not as babies but with a third or so of their lives already behind them -- and then go on to become elderly themselves. In the short term, therefore, immigrants can help to increase the ratio of workers to retirees, but in the long term, they add much less youth to the population than would newborn children.

Indeed, according to a study by the UN Population Division, if the United States hopes to maintain the current ratio of workers to retirees over time, it will have to absorb an average of 10.8 million immigrants annually through 2050. At that point, however, the U.S. population would total 1.1 billion, 73 percent of whom would be immigrants who had arrived in this country since 1995 or their descendants.

Just housing such a massive influx would require the equivalent of building another New York City every 10 months. And even if the homes could be built, it is unclear how long the United States and other developed nations can sustain even current rates of immigration. One reason, of course, is heightened security concerns. Another is the prospect of a cultural backlash against immigrants, the chances of which increase as native birthrates decline. In the 1920s, when widespread apprehension about declining native fertility found voice in books such as Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, the U.S. political system responded by shutting off immigration. Germany, Sweden, and France did the same in the 1970s as the reality of population decline among their native born started to set in.

Another constraint on immigration to the United States involves supply. Birthrates, having already fallen well below replacement levels in Europe and Asia, are now plummeting throughout Latin America as well, which suggests that the United States' last major source of imported labor will dry up. This could occur long before Latin nations actually stop growing -- as the example of Puerto Rico shows. When most Americans think of Puerto Rico, they think of a sunny, overcrowded island that sends millions of immigrants to the West Side of New York City or to Florida. Yet with a fertility rate well below replacement level and a median age of 31.8 years, Puerto Rico no longer provides a net flow of immigrants to the mainland, despite an open border and a lower standard of living. Evidently, Puerto Rico now produces enough jobs to keep up with its slowing rate of population growth, and the allure of the mainland has thus largely vanished.

For its part, sub-Saharan Africa still produces many potential immigrants to the United States, as do the Middle East and parts of South Asia. But to attract immigrants from these regions, the United States will have to compete with Europe, which is closer geographically and currently has a more acute need for imported labor. Europe also offers higher wages for unskilled work, more generous social benefits, and large, already established populations of immigrants from these areas.

Even if the United States could compete with Europe for immigrants, it is by no means clear how many potential immigrants these regions will produce in the future. Birthrates are falling in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in the rest of the world, and war and disease have made mortality rates there extraordinarily high. UN projections for the continent as a whole show fertility declining to 2.4 children per woman by mid-century, which may well be below replacement levels if mortality does not dramatically improve. Although the course of the AIDS epidemic through sub-Saharan Africa remains uncertain, the CIA projects that aids and related diseases could kill as many as a quarter of the region's inhabitants by 2010.

A Fundamental Problem

Some biologists now speculate that modern humans have created an environment in which the "fittest," or most successful, individuals are those who have few, if any, children. As more and more people find themselves living under urban conditions in which children no longer provide economic benefit to their parents, but rather are costly impediments to material success, people who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves. And many others who are not so successful will imitate them.

So where will the children of the future come from? The answer may be from people who are at odds with the modern environment -- either those who don't understand the new rules of the game, which make large families an economic and social liability, or those who, out of religious or chauvinistic conviction, reject the game altogether.

Today there is a strong correlation between religious conviction and high fertility. In the United States, for example, fully 47 percent of people who attend church weekly say that the ideal family size is three or more children, as compared to only 27 percent of those who seldom attend church. In Utah, where 69 percent of all residents are registered members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, fertility rates are the highest in the nation. Utah annually produces 90 children for every 1,000 women of childbearing age. By comparison, Vermont -- the only state to send a socialist to Congress and the first to embrace gay civil unions -- produces only 49.

Does this mean that the future belongs to those who believe they are (or who are in fact) commanded by a higher power to procreate? Based on current trends, the answer appears to be yes. Once, demographers believed that some law of human nature would prevent fertility rates from remaining below replacement level within any healthy population for more than brief periods. After all, don't we all carry the genes of our Neolithic ancestors, who one way or another managed to produce enough babies to sustain the race? Today, however, it has become clear that no law of nature ensures that human beings, living in free, developed societies, will create enough children to reproduce themselves. Japanese fertility rates have been below replacement levels since the mid-1950s, and the last time Europeans produced enough children to reproduce themselves was the mid-1970s. Yet modern institutions have yet to adapt to this new reality.

Current demographic trends work against modernity in another way as well. Not only is the spread of urbanization and industrialization itself a major cause of falling fertility, it is also a major cause of so-called diseases of affluence, such as overeating, lack of exercise, and substance abuse, which leave a higher and higher percentage of the population stricken by chronic medical conditions. Those who reject modernity would thus seem to have an evolutionary advantage, whether they are clean-living Mormons or Muslims, or members of emerging sects and national movements that emphasize high birthrates and anti-materialism.

Secular Solutions

How can secular societies avoid population loss and decline? The problem is not that most people in these societies have lost interest in children. Among childless Americans aged 41 years and older in 2003, for example, 76 percent say they wish they had had children, up from 70 percent in 1990. In 2000, 40-year-old women in the United States and in every European nation told surveys that they had produced fewer children than they intended. Indeed, if European women now in their 40s had been able to produce their ideal number of children, the continent would face no prospect of population loss.

The problem, then, is not one of desire. The problem is that even as modern societies demand more and more investment in human capital, this demand threatens its own supply. The clear tendency of economic development is toward a more knowledge-based, networked economy in which decision-making and responsibility are increasingly necessary at lower levels. In such economies, however, children often remain economically dependent on their parents well into their own childbearing years because it takes that long to acquire the panoply of technical skills, credentials, social understanding, and personal maturity that more and more jobs now require. For the same reason, many couples discover that by the time they feel they can afford children, they can no longer produce them, or must settle for just one or two.

Meanwhile, even as aging societies become more and more dependent on the human capital parents provide, parents themselves get to keep less and less of the wealth they create by investing in their children. Employers make use of the skills parents endow their children with but offer parents no compensation. Governments also depend on parents to provide the next generation of taxpayers, but, with rare exception, give parents no greater benefits in old age than non-parents.

To change this pattern, secular societies need to rethink how they go about educating young adults and integrating them into the work force, so that tensions between work and family are reduced. Education should be a lifetime pursuit, rather than crammed into one's prime reproductive years. There should also be many more opportunities for part-time and flex-time employment, and such work should offer full health and pension benefits, as well as meaningful career paths.

Governments must also relieve parents from having to pay into social security systems. By raising and educating their children, parents have already contributed hugely (in the form of human capital) to these systems. The cost of their contribution, in both direct expenses and forgone wages, is often measured in the millions. Requiring parents also then to contribute to payroll taxes is not only unfair, but imprudent for societies that are already consuming more human capital than they produce.

To cope with the diseases of affluence that make older workers less productive, rich societies must make greater efforts to promote public health. For example, why not offer reduced health care premiums to those who quit smoking, lose weight, or can demonstrate regular attendance in exercise programs? Why not do more to discourage sprawling, automobile-dependent patterns of development, which have adverse health effects including pollution, high rates of auto injuries and death, sedentary lifestyles, and social isolation? Modern, high-tech medicine, even for those who can afford it, does little to promote productive aging because by the time most people come to need it, their bodies have already been damaged by stress, indulgent habits, environmental dangers, and injuries. For all they spend on health care, Americans enjoy no greater life expectancy than the citizens of Costa Rica, where per capita health expenditure is less than $300.

In his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich warned, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Fortunately, Ehrlich's prediction proved wrong. But having averted the danger of overpopulation, the world now faces the opposite problem: an aging and declining population. We are, in one sense, lucky to have this problem and not its opposite. But that doesn't make the problem any less serious, or the solutions any less necessary.

Picking up the Pieces

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 01 Mar 2002 00:00:00 -0500

For most Americans, the events of September 11 came like a bolt from the blue on that beautiful, terrible morning. But as Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda observe in their well-written introduction to The Age of Terror, "the unforgivable is not necessarily incomprehensible or inexplicable." In fact, all three of these books make clear that although the attacks on New York and Washington were unexpected for many, the warning signs had long been evident -- at least to some of those who focus on terrorism.

There was, for example, the report by the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (known, for its co-chairs, as the Hart-Rudman report). As several of the essayists in these books point out, in the spring of last year this commission predicted that there would likely be a catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil within the next two decades.

By last summer, it had also become clear to those monitoring Osama bin Laden that al Qaeda was plotting an attack; the only question was when and where. The arrests of al Qaeda associates in Yemen and India in June had revealed plans to blow up the American embassies in those countries, and a propaganda videotape, which circulated widely in the Middle East during the summer, showed bin Laden calling for more such assaults.

Given this forewarning, how did the attacks on America happen? So asks the book assembled by the editors of this magazine. The answers are provided by a list of big thinkers, ranging from Fouad Ajami to Fareed Zakaria. Part of the answer can be found in an essay by Princeton's Michael Scott Doran, "Somebody Else's Civil War." Doran, attempting to explain a subsidiary question -- namely, why do they hate us? -- shows that the United States has been sucked into a struggle within the Muslim world. This battle pits those, such as bin Laden, who seek to re-create the era when the Prophet Muhammad ruled the Islamic lands, against those who actually govern Muslim countries today. Bin Laden used Afghanistan as a base to launch a jihad across the Muslim world, hoping thereby to bring "apostate" regimes such as Saudi Arabia within the fold of true Islam and restore the caliphate from Spain to Indonesia. By this view, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were collateral damage in a struggle for the hearts and minds of the umma -- the worldwide community of Muslim believers. According to Doran, bin Laden hoped that the attacks against the United States would spark uprisings by Muslims against their own American-backed regimes. As Sandy Berger pithily observes in his own essay, "bin Laden's ultimate twin towers are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia."

The Real Rogues

All three of these books have their merits, not least of which are their timeliness and the admirable dispatch with which they were produced. How Did This Happen? is the most wide-ranging of the three; the essays included examine everything from the economic impact of the attacks to the troubled recent history of Afghanistan. For those seeking to understand how the attacks might play out in the wider historical story of the U.S. role as a great power, The Age of Terror offers several literate and illuminating contributions. And To Prevail presents a series of policy recommendations that, although they may make the book less engaging reading, should be of considerable interest to policymakers.

It is a virtue of these three books that all of them, mercifully, avoid dragging Iraq or Iran into the events of September 11. There seems to be a desire in some quarters today to discover a deus ex machina in the plot, a way to explain the terrible attacks without accepting that they were simply the work of al Qaeda (which Talbott and Chanda aptly label "the ultimate NGO"). But scant evidence exists that any state actors -- except the Taliban -- actively supported bin Laden. Certainly, if any Middle Eastern government does bear blame for supporting the kind of Islamist extremism that led to September 11, it is neither Iraq nor Iran; Saudi Arabia is the real culprit. In its effort to shore up its own legitimacy, Riyadh has financed militant Islamist movements around the world. This policy of backing virulently anti-Western groups -- a strategy some have dubbed "riyalpolitik" -- has now borne disastrous results, from Afghanistan to America.

Imagine for a minute that, instead of being Saudis (as they in fact were), 15 of the 19 hijackers had been Iranian. Imagine, too, that the Taliban got its diplomatic and economic support not from the House of Saud but from the regime in Tehran, and that bin Laden enjoyed the backing of Iranian clerics, charities, and businesses rather than their Saudi counterparts. Does anyone doubt that if any of the above were true, the United States would have already taken aggressive actions against Iran?

In fact, as Talbott and Chanda observe, Iranians responded to the attacks of September by holding two large candlelight vigils. By contrast, the Saudi defense minister told The New York Times in December that American news media coverage of the kingdom's links to Islamic extremism amounted to a "slanderous campaign."

The Middle East scholar Gregory Gause highlights the ambiguous position of the Saudis in his essay appropriately titled "The Kingdom in the Middle" (which appears in How Did This Happen?). As he explains, "[Saudi Arabia] is both a source, however indirect, of terror against the United States and a key American ally in the battle against that terror." Gause warns, however, that it may be dangerous for the United States to pressure the Saudis to reform. As he explains, "were elections to be held today in Saudi Arabia, they would be won by candidates whose worldview is closer to that of Osama bin Laden than to that of Thomas Jefferson." In such a short essay, of course, Gause can only scratch the surface of this rich issue. Those who want to know more should turn to Douglas Jehl's excellent recent reporting from Saudi Arabia in The New York Times and the Georgetown scholar Mamoun Fandy's authoritative study Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent.

The Mind of a Killer

Michael Mandelbaum, now at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, uses his essay in How Did This Happen? to pour some much-needed cold water on the argument, beloved of the left, that the attacks were in some way the result of the socio-economic inequities between the West and the Muslim world. Such a notion fails all sorts of common-sense tests. For example: if the attacks were really about the poverty of Islamic countries, the hijackers should have been destitute Afghans or Africans -- not scions of the Egyptian and Saudi middle class. Instead, al Qaeda's top leaders were a surgeon from a prominent Egyptian family and a trust-fund baby from one of the richest families in the Saudi kingdom.

If the attackers were not motivated by economic discontent, then, what drove them? Religion, of course -- although not everyone is ready to fully admit the role of Islam in September's attacks. In her essay in How Did This Happen?, for example, the religion scholar Karen Armstrong doth protest too much when she says that the Koran tells Muslims they "may never initiate hostilities ... and aggressive warfare is always forbidden." Her claim is simply false. Some verses in the Koran, it is true, seem only to allow purely defensive wars: "Permission to take up arms is hereby given to those attacked, because they have been wronged." But the Koran also exhorts the believers to aggression: "When the Sacred Months are past, then kill the idolaters wherever you find them." Turn the other cheek this is not. Bin Laden, in fact, quoted this very verse when he declared his war against the West in 1998.

This religious motivation helps explain why al Qaeda unleashed such massive destruction in September, a quantum leap forward from conventional terrorism. Rand's Brian Jenkins elucidates this important point: "in the past, terrorists could have killed more but chose not to. Why? Because wanton violence could be counterproductive," tarnishing a group's image and provoking massive crackdowns. Al Qaeda, however, represented a new generation of religious terrorists that operate without such constraints: "Those convinced that they have the mandate of God to kill their foes have fewer moral qualms about mass murder and care less about constituents."

The historian Walter Laqueur, also writing in How Did This Happen?, amplifies that observation by noting that the new religious terrorists have come to the fore at the same time that weapons of mass destruction have become much more available. "One must conclude," he argues, "that the world is now entering a new phase it its history, more dangerous than any before." Strong words, perhaps. But in the light of September 11, it now seems like wishful thinking to believe we will escape future acts of catastrophic terrorism.

What is to Be Done?

The essays in How Did This Happen? posit a number of useful suggestions. Richard K. Betts, writing about the role of the U.S. intelligence community, observes that on "many subjects the coverage is now only one analyst deep." To ameliorate this problem, Betts advocates the creation of an "intelligence analyst reserve corps: people ... who can be mobilized if a crisis involving their area erupts." He also urges Washington to rely more heavily on academics for analysis of long-term trends in the Muslim world. Joseph Nye, meanwhile, argues robustly for giving Tom Ridge's Office of Homeland Security greater budgetary authority, so that Ridge does not end up as a mere figurehead, like the country's drug czar. And The New Republic's Gregg Easterbrook decries the failure of the "All-Too-Friendly Skies." The aviation industry, he finds, had previously trained pilots to cooperate with hijackers, a policy that had disastrous results in September. "The new training assumption must be that hijackers are butchers and not 'rational' criminals, and that it is better to let a few passengers die than to let all of them die."

For its part, To Prevail -- a selection of essays produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies -- focuses less on how September's attacks happened and more on possible solutions to the scourge of terrorism. Antony Blinken, who served on the National Security Council from 1994 to 2001, outlines an interesting approach in "Elevating Public Diplomacy." If terrorism is theater, then counterterrorism should be as well -- or at least it should have a much larger propaganda component than it has been given thus far. For example, bin Laden's argument that the United States is the enemy of Islam should be vigorously disputed. There is certainly plenty of counterevidence. Look, for example, at recent U.S. military interventions in Somalia, Kuwait, Bosnia, and Kosovo -- interventions that saved hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives. This evidence should be widely publicized in the Muslim world to help combat the image of America as the Great Satan. As Blinken explains, "during the Cold War, public diplomacy was an effective weapon in the West's arsenal." In the current campaign it should be as well.

Blinken's specific prescriptions include developing a rapid-response capability to counter erroneous commentary about American policies (paging James Carville!); encouraging U.S. ambassadors to engage in the public debate in their host countries; routinely deploying American officials to appear on Arabic media outlets like al Jazeera; bolstering the Voice of America in the Middle East, where it is currently heard by only 2 percent of Arabs; and enlisting the help of prominent Muslim Americans to communicate pro-American messages in their countries of origin. All of these ideas are indisputably commonsensible, and they offer another advantage as well: they come cheap.

In a chapter on homeland security, the authors of To Prevail insist that the United States must look beyond hijackings to other threats, involving "missiles, trucks, cars, or ships ... chemical or biological agents or nuclear materials in major U.S. cities; and both cyber and physical attacks on critical infrastructure." Such advice is welcome, for terrorists always seek "soft" targets, which are less well defended than the more obvious "hard" ones. The authors therefore also suggest that Ridge's office "should institute an extensive program of war-gaming exercises" to probe the nation's vulnerabilities and conduct a homeland security review "on the scale of a quadrennial defense review."

Globalization Gone Awry

The Age of Terror is more discursive in tone than the other two volumes reviewed, and its authors emphasize how recent, triumphalist proponents of globalization missed its dark side. As the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis writes,

it was held to be a good thing that capital, commodities, ideas, and people could move freely across boundaries. There was little talk, though, of an alternative possibility: that danger might move just as freely. ... It was as if we had convinced ourselves that the new world of global communications had somehow transformed an old aspect of human nature, which is the tendency to harbor grievances and sometimes to act upon them.

His fellow historian Paul Kennedy picks up that theme. "No one," he writes, "wants to reside in a totally closed society like North Korea, but complete integration and openness also bring their perils and achieving a fine balance between accessibility and security will be excruciatingly difficult."

Meanwhile, the veteran diplomat Charles Hill takes aim with considerable verve at a number of targets, in his essay dissecting the "Myth and Reality of Arab Terrorism." Hill decries the fact that during the 1990s the United States "relied heavily on law enforcement mechanisms to try to investigate and punish terrorists. The results, predictably, were interminable legalistic entanglements that focused on the lowest suspects and left the masterminds alone." Hill blames the American news media, too, for turning inward, closing overseas bureaus, and reducing foreign affairs coverage so that "paradoxically, the greater the U.S. involvement in a globalizing world became, the less knowledgeable or concerned Americans became about events beyond their own borders."

Hill also fires a devastating broadside at the regimes of the Middle East. This critique is worth quoting at length, since it is the political failures of these states that allowed for the genesis of the religious terrorists.

[There is a] single approach to the political ordering of [Arab] society. In Oman, a sultan; in Yemen, a military "president"; in Saudi Arabia, a king and family with special Islamic custodial responsibilities; in Jordan, a king of a simulated constitutional monarchy; in Egypt, a president and a parliament only nominally connected to the original Western meaning of these institutions. Beneath all these styles a single form is discernible. Power is held by a strongman, surrounded by a praetorian guard. ... Those close to political power gain; the weak are disregarded.

Hill is on a roll here, and it gets even better.

Every regime of the Arab-Islamic world has proved a failure. Not one has proved able to provide its people with realistic hope for a free and prosperous future. The regimes have found no way to respond to their people's frustration other than a combination of internal oppression and propaganda to generate rage against external enemies. Religiously inflamed terrorists take root in such soil. Their threats to the regimes extort facilities and subsidies that increase their strength and influence. The result is a downward spiral of failure, fear and hatred.

And then comes Hill's masterstroke: his conclusion that the deleterious impact of political disenfranchisement in the Arab world has been amplified by "the deeply rooted conviction that virtually every significant occurrence is caused by some external conspiracy. Every societal shortcoming is attributed to a foreign plot." The best example of this culture of conspiracy, of course, is the widely circulated -- and widely believed -- story that the attacks on the World Trade Center were the work of the Jews, as is demonstrated by the supposed fact that 4,000 Jews did not show up for work on the day of the attacks. Accordingly, the lead hijacker's father -- an apparently sane Egyptian lawyer -- remains convinced that the attacks were the work of the Mossad, Israel's security service. And even the appearance of the bin Laden home video -- in which Osama is seen chuckling over the hijackings -- has done nothing to dissuade the undissuadable. After all, as a commentator on al Jazeera television opined, the tape may have been a fake.

Hill goes on to explain that "conspiracy theories blight every society they touch. The people who hold them become impervious to evidence and reason." Indeed, it was precisely this culture of conspiracy that enabled bin Laden to convince a transnational coalition of Arabs that, despite evidence to the contrary, the problems of their home countries were the fault of the United States -- rather than of the incompetence and corruption of their various domestic elites.

Age of Empire?

The Age of Terror also features an essay by the prolific British historian Niall Ferguson, in which he takes issue with the notion that the September attacks were the opening salvo of the much-ballyhooed clash of civilizations. "One of the dangers of [this thesis]," he argues, "is that it exaggerates the homogeneity of Islam as a world religion." Ferguson is right. Furthermore, as bin Laden's various statements make clear, the Saudi exile did indeed hope to provoke such a clash between "believers" and "infidels." But this project has turned out to be a spectacular failure. The streets of Karachi and Cairo never filled up with hundreds of thousands of Osama's admirers. Moreover, the United States has not engaged in a wide-ranging war against Muslims. Instead, the U.S. campaign has essentially amounted to a police action in Afghanistan -- one conducted largely by the Afghans themselves, and with the goal of extirpating a group of Arab criminals.

Ferguson turns to the nineteenth-century British Empire to find a more apposite historical model for today's crisis. He describes the spectacular rise and fall of Muhammad Ahmed al-Mahdi, a messianic Sudanese Islamic fundamentalist whose soldiers stormed Khartoum in 1885, killing British General Charles Gordon along with the city's other defenders. This attack, as Ferguson observes, was the "'September 11' of the era." And the British Empire hardly collapsed as a result. Instead, the outraged British responded decisively to al-Mahdi's provocation, and at the battle of Omdurman in 1898, ten thousand of the rebels were wiped out by British Maxim machine guns. Meanwhile, only a handful of British soldiers were killed. Sound familiar?

Building on this parallel, Ferguson argues that the United States should now take a forceful leadership role in the world -- a role similar to that played by the British Empire -- in order to counter the growing forces of disorder. He establishes a series of premises that show why such leadership is now mandatory: the United States is vulnerable to attack; weapons that can be used against Americans are becoming both cheaper and more readily available; and the United Nations is "incapable of coping with the challenge of global disorder." Furthermore, only the United States can afford the costs of empire. Ferguson concludes with a question: "Do the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place have the guts to do it?" The answer remains unclear, but one can only hope that isolationist views like those of Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) on America's role in the world have begun to fade into history.

So much, then, for the contours of the battle the United States now finds itself in. One question remains: When can victory be declared? Mandelbaum's essay in How Did This Happen? provides a useful standard. He compares terrorism to a disease that can never be entirely eradicated but can nonetheless be managed. "Victory," he writes, will have been achieved in the war against terrorism when the issue disappears from the forefront of public attention and when the innovations of foreign policy, law enforcement, and public safety established in the wake of September 11 are absorbed into the everyday fabric of American and international life.

Until then, the United States will remain engaged in a strange kind of "war": one that is neither cold nor hot. And, we should fear, a war in which civilian casualties will vastly exceed military losses.

Civil War by Other Means

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 30 Sep 1999 00:00:00 -0400

AMERICA'S DOVISH NORTH AND HAWKISH SOUTH

The war in Kosovo opened more fissures in the American public and the U.S. foreign policy elite than any U.S. military intervention since the Vietnam War. Many have remarked that viewpoints about the war transcended the ideological categories of left and right, producing unusual alliances of conservatives and liberals among both supporters and opponents of the NATO campaign against Serbia. What has been overlooked, however, is the influence of American regional culture -- not only on attitudes toward the war in Kosovo but on the domestic politics of foreign policy throughout American history.

That so little attention has been paid to regional influences on U.S. foreign policy is surprising. After all, the polarization of American domestic politics along regional lines is one of the most obvious and striking phenomena of our time. The disproportionately southern congressional leadership reflects the new southern base of the Republican Party. Both liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans find their strongest support in the states of New England and the northern tier. The superimposition of regional cultural loyalties atop partisan ideologies accounts for much of the increase in partisan rancor in the United States. To name only one example, the impeachment of President Clinton revealed a stark division between this southern president's political enemies, who are overwhelmingly southern, and his predominantly northern defenders.

While the sectional division in domestic politics has become familiar, the impact of the divisions between America's regions on its diplomacy is a neglected subject. When the influence of sectionalism on U.S. foreign policy is discussed at all, it is usually in the context of trade disputes, which pit the northeastern-midwestern manufacturing belt against the high-tech industries and commodity exporters of the South and West. But regional influences on U.S. foreign policy go far beyond conflicts of economic interest. Regional differences in the United States based in culture and values -- particularly the enduring differences between anti-interventionists in the North and pro-interventionists in the South -- have shaped debates over American foreign policy in every generation and will continue to do so.

REGIONALISM AND AMERICA'S EARLY WARS

Regions in the United States are notoriously difficult to define. The best guide, perhaps, is provided by speech regions. Most linguists identify four regional dialects of American English: northern, midland, highland southern, and coastal southern. The Greater New England or northern speech region, according to the historian David Hackett Fischer, includes "New England, upstate New York, northern Ohio and Indiana, much of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern plains, and the Pacific Northwest, together with islands of urban speech at Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco." Since the late 1700s, this area has been the heartland of opposition to foreign wars and the U.S. military establishment. Pro-war, pro-military attitudes have been strongest in the areas identified with coastal southern speech (the Tidewater South) and, to a lesser degree, in the Highland South, from West Virginia through Tennessee to Texas.

The pattern of Greater New England's opposition to wars and the opposite tendency of the South, especially the Tidewater South, to be strongly interventionist first manifested itself in the earliest years of the Union. During the War of 1812, the hawks tended to be southerners like Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Congress' vote on the war followed sectional lines, not partisan lines. In the House of Representatives, the northern-and-mid-Atlantic-dominated Federalist Party voted unanimously against the war; the southerners who controlled the Democratic-Republican Party solidly backed it.

This pattern reemerged in subsequent conflicts. Southerners generally favored the western expansion of the United States; northerners disproportionately opposed it. In the 1830s the most extreme American pacifists broke away from the American Peace Society to form a new organization that forswore the use of force even in self-defense. Its name tells the story: the New England Non-Resistance League.

Another example of the extreme antimilitarism of New Englanders is provided by Charles Sumner, the powerful Massachusetts senator who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee between 1861 and 1871. Sumner's first major public speech was an 1845 Fourth of July oration in Boston in which he horrified the veterans in the audience by blaming war on arms manufacturers, calling West Point "a seminary of idleness and vice," and describing soldiers as "wild beasts" who rejoice "in blood." His speech culminated in the declaration, "In our age there can be no peace that is not honorable; there can be no war that is not dishonorable." True to his pacifist principles, Sumner refused to fight back when he was caned on the floor of the House in 1856 by South Carolina Representative Preston S. Brooks, in retaliation for Sumner's verbal assault on Brooks' cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler.

For New Englanders like Sumner, the Mexican War was a national disgrace. Boston, the capital of the antiwar movement during the War of 1812, was also the center of opposition to the Mexican War. The Boston-based American Peace Society charged the U.S. government with aggression against a "poor, feeble, distracted country." Both the Democrats and their opponents, the Whigs, were divided along regional lines. In February 1847, just before the U.S. victory at Buena Vista, Thomas Corwin, a Whig senator from Ohio, encouraged the Mexican enemy to welcome American soldiers "to hospitable graves." The Boston Brahmin Henry David Thoreau refused to pay taxes, claiming that to do so would make him an accomplice in an unjust war. Jailed, he wrote his classic essay Civil Disobedience, which inspired later generations of (mostly northern) antiwar activists in the United States.

In general, the South was as enthusiastic about the Mexican War as the North was hostile. Many leading southern military officers, including Robert E. Lee, became members of the "Aztec Club," an organization of veterans of the Mexican War. To some degree, this was because the U.S. military has almost always been dominated by southerners. As Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard political scientist, has noted, "The South gave military professionalism its only significant support in the pre -- Civil War years. A 'Southern military tradition' existed in a way in which there was never a New England, Middle Western, or Rocky Mountain military tradition." Huntington points out that in the U.S. Army of 1837, 3 of the 4 active generals, 6 of the 13 colonels of the line, and 10 of the 22 highest-ranking officers were not only from the South but from one state: Virginia.

The pattern of southern support for foreign wars was broken during the Spanish-American War when -- for the only time in U.S. history, with the possible exception of the Kosovo war -- intervention abroad was the project of northeastern elites. As the historian Richard Franklin Bensel notes, "imperialism rationalized the interests of the northern industrial core, their agrarian allies, and the Republican party" -- at the time a northeastern-midwestern coalition. Meanwhile, many former Confederates opposed the war out of bitterness toward the federal government. But antiwar sentiment did not end there. Even though the Spanish-American War was a northern enterprise, it was opposed vehemently from within the North. David Hackett Fischer writes, "Anti-imperialism was a regional movement, centered in New England." Once again Boston became the center of the antiwar movement.

AMERICAN SECTIONALISM AND THE WORLD WARS

After the outbreak of World War I, congressional voting on "preparedness" legislation between 1915 and 1917 revealed the by-now-familiar pattern. The anti-interventionists were concentrated in Greater New England, with a few allies among populists in the Highland South. The myth of conservative isolationism to the contrary, most of the World War I-era isolationists held left-of-center views: Progressive Republican followers of Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette and southern and western populists of the William Jennings Bryan school. In the Senate, the most consistent opponents of pre-paredness and intervention in World War I were all from the western section of Greater New England: George W. Norris (R-Nebr.), Asle J. Gronna (R-N.D.), Harry Lane (D-Ore.), and La Follette himself. In the House, as in the Senate, all but one of the representatives who never voted to put the nation on a war footing or intervene were from the same region. Remarkably, four of the seven most consistent opponents of U.S. involvement in World War I came from the same state in Greater New England: Wisconsin.

The South, on the other hand, was overwhelmingly in favor of U.S. participation in this European war, as it had been in favor of U.S. involvement in the Napoleonic Wars in 1798 and again in 1812. Two-thirds of the southern members of the Senate and four-fifths of the southern members of the House voted in favor of every one of Woodrow Wilson's wartime policies. The exceptions tended to be found in the Highland South. Among the Highland southern allies of the Yankee isolationists in the years preceding World War I was a populist Democratic senator, Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma -- the grandfather of novelist Gore Vidal and an ancestor of the late Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Sr., and his son, Vice President Al Gore. His "Gore Resolution" prohibited travel by U.S. citizens on armed merchant vessels.

Between World War I and World War II, the leaders of isolationism in Congress were William E. Borah (R-Idaho), Hiram Johnson (R-Calif.), George Norris (R-Nebr.), and Robert La Follette, Sr. (R-Wis.). Although often described as "midwestern conservative isolationists," they were all actually Greater New England progressives, usually to the left of center in domestic policy. Another of their number, North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye, became an important progressive anti-interventionist. In 1934 -- 35, Nye chaired a Senate committee investigating allegations that the munitions industry and international finance had drawn the United States into the Great War. According to the historian Thomas N. Guinsberg, Nye, along with Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.) and a Missouri Democrat, Bennett Champ Clark, then staged "a most effective preemptive attack that took the leadership of foreign policy away from the White House." They passed neutrality laws similar to those of the years preceding World War I -- and also similar to legislation passed by the northern-dominated Democrats in Congress during their later attacks on presidential foreign policy prerogatives in the 1970s and 1980s.

As war with Hitler appeared imminent, the American political elite was divided along regional lines, rather than partisan or ideological ones. Southern Democrats like Senators Harry Byrd and Carter Glass of Virginia supported F.D.R.'s military policy even though they bitterly opposed the New Deal. As war with the Axis approached, Representative Luther Patrick of Alabama joked that "they had to start selective service to keep our boys from filling up the army" as volunteers. The isolationist America First Committee succeeded least in the South.

At the same time, many northerners, both Democrats and Progressive Republicans like La Follette, endorsed the New Deal while opposing F.D.R.'s military measures in exactly the same way many northern Democrats and liberal Republicans later supported the civil rights and welfare programs of Harry S Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson while opposing their anti-Soviet foreign policies. The New Dealer Rexford Tugwell pointed out that the West (that is, Greater New England) supported F.D.R.'s progressivism at home but not his interventionist foreign policy, while the South supported interventionism abroad but not a progressive domestic policy. In August 1941, just months before Pearl Harbor, interventionist southern Democrats provided the votes to save the extension of the draft law from defeat. In the fall came the vote on amending the Neutrality Act. Seven southern states cast all their votes to revise "neutrality" to let the United States aid Britain in its struggle with Hitler. Four Greater New England states -- Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Idaho -- cast all their votes against the measure. By providing Roosevelt with a narrow margin of victory on preparedness measures, southern interventionist representatives played a key role in defeating Nazi Germany.

AMERICA'S REGIONAL COLD WAR SPLIT

The pattern of northern isolationism and southern interventionism continued into the Cold War. Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft voted against both the Marshall Plan and NATO. The legacy of Greater New England isolationism also explains the curious fact that William Langer, a progressive Republican senator from North Dakota, opposed the Senate's censure of Wisconsin's Joseph McCarthy -- and the fact that McCarthy was admired by Robert La Follette's son Philip. McCarthy's hatred and suspicion of U.S. national security agencies resonated with many left-of-center progressive isolationists in Wisconsin and surrounding states. Indeed, it is no accident that the same region produced both McCarthy, determined to expose alleged communist subversion of American national security agencies in the 1950s, and Idaho Senator Frank Church, determined to expose the immorality of the CIA in the 1970s. Both McCarthy and Church must be understood in the context of two centuries of Greater New England opposition to standing armies and the national-security state. Nor is it an accident that it was McCarthy of Wisconsin's attack on the Virginia-bred General George C. Marshall and the largely southern U.S. Army that finally led to the demagogue's downfall at the hands of the southern-dominated U.S. Congress. Significantly, the most influential school of anti -- Cold War thought in the academy and press was the "Wisconsin School."

The regional continuities in American foreign policy during the Cold War are clear despite the political realignment of 1964 -- 94, in which the two parties exchanged their constituencies. As the right-wing Goldwater movement, based in the South and the West, became more powerful in the GOP, growing numbers of progressive and liberal Republicans from New England and Yankee states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and Oregon joined the Democratic Party. At the same time, blacks deserted the party of Lincoln and joined their traditional northern Protestant and Jewish white allies in the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, white southerners and, more slowly, northern white Catholics moved into the Republican Party. By the early 1970s, the Greater New England Protestant-black-Jewish alliance had captured the national Democratic Party. Following the congressional election of 1974, conservative and moderate southern Democratic committee chairmen were purged by mostly northern left-liberal reformers. (In 1956, two-thirds of the Democrats chairing House committees had been southerners.)

The reason for the collapse of Cold War liberalism in the Democratic Party was not Vietnam but the transformation of the party's base. Even if there had been no Vietnam War, the Democratic Party probably would have become more isolationist in the 1960s and 1970s as its demographic base moved northward. Many of the antiwar activists and politicians came from backgrounds or regions formerly associated with Republican progressivism and anti-interventionism. Lyndon Johnson, a product of the old southern-northern Catholic New Deal coalition, found himself presiding over a party increasingly identified with antimilitary northern Protestants and Jews. Lady Bird Johnson marveled in 1967 at the way that the Republicans supported the Cold War while the Democrats were abandoning it: "Lyndon and I watched Senator John Tower for the Republicans and Senator Joe Clark for the Democrats on television -- the Today show -- talking about Vietnam. What a twist of fate it is to see the administration -- indeed, us -- being explained, backed, yes, even defended by John Tower, while that red-hot Democrat Joe Clark slashes at the administration's policy with rancor and emotion." What escaped the First Lady's attention was the fact that the difference was less partisan than regional: Tower was from Texas, Clark from Pennsylvania. (Senator George Aiken, famous for saying that the United States should declare victory and get out of Vietnam, was from Vermont.)

The divisions within the Republican Party over Vietnam also followed geographic fault lines familiar from earlier American wars. Northern Republicans tended to be more dovish than southern Democrats. At a 1965 Republican governors' conference, the only two governors who refused to sign a pro-war resolution were from the Greater New England anti-interventionist belt: George Romney of Michigan and Mark Hatfield of Oregon. In spring 1967, three Republican senators from Greater New England -- Jacob Javits of New York, Charles Percy of Illinois, and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine -- met to promote a more dovish line for the GOP. The drift of Greater New England Republicans into the Democratic fold was symbolized by the conversion of Senator Floyd Haskell of Colorado, an antiwar Republican.

The contrast between northern anti-interventionism and southern interventionism can be illustrated by a comparison of Idaho Senator Frank Church and Representative Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, who chaired the House Armed Services Committee from 1965 to 1970. Church, a harsh critic of U.S. Cold War policy and national security agencies like the CIA, was photographed in 1966 holding up a picture of his hero and predecessor in the Senate from Idaho: William Borah, the Republican interwar isolationist. Rivers, reflecting the tradition of nineteenth-century South Carolina "fire-eaters," summed up his attitude toward Vietnam thus: "Words are fruitless, diplomatic notes are useless. There can be only one answer for America: retaliation, retaliation, retaliation, retaliation! They say, Quit the bombing. I say, Bomb!"

Northern congressional Democrats in the 1970s, turning against the interventionist heritage of the disproportionately southern and Catholic Cold War liberals, revived techniques used by the isolationist northern Republicans of the 1930s, like banning U.S. military aid to factions in countries like Angola and Nicaragua and attempting to strip the presidency of foreign policy powers. The leader of the movement in favor of a War Powers Act was a Democratic representative from historically anti-interventionist Wisconsin, Clement J. Zablocki.

The domestic divisions over U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s, Peter Trubowitz writes, "were also sectional, not ideological. . . . While Cold War internationalism continued to strike a responsive chord in the South, it had lost much of its appeal in the Northeast." (Indeed, the Cold War never had much appeal in the Northeast, except in regions with large numbers of anticommunist Catholics). According to Trubowitz, "Most of the so-called doves were liberal Democrats and Republicans" from the Northeast, whereas the "hawks were a group made up of conservative Democrats from the South and Republicans from the West."

The Greater New England anti-interventionist bloc coalesced once more in the 1980s behind the nuclear-freeze movement, which won the endorsement of 446 New England town meetings. The sponsors of the first congressional resolution backing the nuclear freeze came from Massachusetts (Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative Edward J. Markey) and Oregon (Senator Mark Hatfield). Three out of four voters in Massachusetts supported the nuclear freeze; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ashland, Oregon, among other cities in the isolationist belt, declared themselves "nuclear-free zones."

Meanwhile, white southern Democrats rallied behind President Reagan's militant Cold War policy. In 1980, southern whites who favored higher defense spending were 52 percent Democratic and 34 percent Republican; by 1984, they were 49 percent Republican and 38 percent Democratic. Almost 80 percent of southern whites who voted for Reagan believed that defense spending should be increased beyond Reagan's buildup -- itself the largest peacetime buildup in U.S. history.

By the 1990s, the Tidewater South was the most solidly Republican region, and Greater New England was the bastion of the Democrats. Enough southerners left the Democratic Party after 1960 to give the Republicans a majority in both houses of Congress by 1994 and a near lock on the White House from 1968 to 1992. The regional polarization of the two parties was reflected in the congressional vote authorizing President Bush to wage war on Iraq. Most Democrats voted against the measure, and most of the dissenting Democrats whose alliance with the Republican minority let the declaration of war pass were southerners.

At first glance, the pattern of partisan attitudes toward Kosovo appears not to fit the familiar pattern. Many southern conservatives opposed the NATO campaign against Serbia, while many northern liberals supported it. On close examination, however, the North-South split is still faintly discernible through the superimposed palimpsest of party loyalties.

On April 28, the House of Representatives voted on several proposed endorsements of the war. The votes were mostly partisan; the Republican majority that had impeached President Clinton voted against his Balkan policy, while most Democrats rallied behind their party's leader. Such partisan loyalty was made easier, no doubt, by the fact that the NATO campaign did not seem to the public like a major war (indeed, no American soldiers were killed in combat). Even so, the deviations from the partisan norm were instructive. Representatives from Greater New England states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, and Ohio were over-represented among the Democrats who broke with their party to vote against Clinton's bombing campaign. The only Texan Democrat who did so was Lloyd Doggett, who represents liberal Austin, a major college town. Just as significant was the regional identity of the Republicans who voted to formally authorize the Balkan war. Approximately half of these were from southern or south-western states. Virginia alone provided a fifth of the Republicans who broke with their party to back the bombing. Even more significant, another resolution in which Congress, on behalf of the U.S. government, would have formally declared war on Yugoslavia was supported by only two members of the House, one from Texas (Joe Barton, a Republican) and one from Mississippi (Gene Taylor, a Democrat). However distorted by the Clinton-era politics of scandal, the old regional pattern still holds.

WAR AND AMERICAN REGIONAL CULTURE

The historical record, then, could not be clearer. There is a centuries-old anti-interventionist, antimilitary culture in the United States, centered in New England and the regions of the Great Lakes, the Midwest, the Upper Plains, and the Pacific Northwest settled by New Englanders. In the twentieth century, as European Catholic immigrants diluted the influence of Yankee Protestant stock in New England itself, the epicenter of this political culture shifted westward to the Middle West and Far West. For generations, the isolationists of Greater New England have battled the pro-military interventionists of the Tidewater South. The populists of the Highland South have often been divided over foreign policy, as they were divided in their loyalties during the Civil War and the American Revolution. The pedigree of Yankee isolationism runs from the New England Federalists through the northern Whigs and northern Democrats who opposed the Mexican War to the New England anti-imperialists of the later nineteenth century, the liberal Republican anti-interventionists of the first half of the twentieth century, and the anti -- Cold War northern liberal Democrats of the second half. Today's pro-military, interventionist Republicans, for their part, are the political heirs of the pro-military, interventionist Roosevelt and Wilson Democrats, as well as of the expansionist Democrats of the early nineteenth century and their predecessors, the Jeffersonian Republicans who favored the War of 1812.

What accounts for this remarkably persistent pattern of North-South disagreement about the necessity and legitimacy of U.S. military intervention abroad? Traditional accounts of U.S. interventionism and isolationism have explained them in terms of the ties between immigrant groups and Old World countries. This explanation does help account for the opposition of German Americans and anti-British Irish Americans to U.S. intervention in both world wars. But political scientists like Samuel Lubell who attribute interwar American isolationism chiefly to the influence of German and Irish American voters are mistaken. Isolationist sentiment from 1914 to 1941 was strong in many northern states with negligible German and Irish populations.

Quasi-Marxist economic determinist explanations are no more convincing. In Defining the National Interest, Trubowitz attributes the persisting sectional divisions between the hawkish South and the dovish North to different regional economies. Given the South's enthusiasm for other American wars, it is not necessary to explain southern hostility to Hitler and his allies, as Trubowitz does, in terms of a southern strategy of defending overseas markets for cotton exports. The "agrarian" explanation of Greater New England isolationism is no more convincing. The historian Paul Michael Rogin speculates that the opposition of North Dakota Senators Quentin Burdick and George McGovern to the Vietnam War "owes something to the radical agrarian heritage." But agrarianism cannot explain both the anti-interventionism of the North and the interventionism of the South.

The real reason for the persistence of sectionalism in U.S. foreign policy can be found in the "ethnoregional" theory of American politics, which has been developed by David Hackett Fischer, Daniel J. Elazar, D. W. Meinig, Kevin Phillips, and others. This theory holds that, in the United States, powerful ethnic and regional subcultures are more important and enduring than political parties or ideologies. The meaning of "Democrat" and "Republican" differs from generation to generation; regional subcultures like those of New England and the Tidewater South change far more slowly.

The greatest insight of ethnoregional theorists is that immigrants in the United States do not assimilate into a uniform American national culture but assimilate into one of a small number of preexisting regional cultures. The historian Wilbur Zelinsky defined a "Doctrine of Effective First Settlement," which holds that "whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to affect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been." According to Zelinsky, "in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later."

Historians disagree about how many such enduring regional cultures there are in the United States. But most scholars agree on at least three: a "Yankee" culture that spread westward overland from New England, a "Quaker" culture originating in Pennsylvania, and a "Cavalier" culture originating in the coastal South. Most, but not all, include a fourth regional culture, that of the Scots-Irish Highland