The Globalist

What Obama Can Learn from European Health Care

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:37:00 -0500

Imagine a place where doctors still do house calls. When I was visiting my friend Meredith, living in the small rural town of Lautrec about an hour's drive outside Toulouse, France, one day she was stung badly by a wasp, causing a sizable and painful swelling on her hand.

She called her doctor, and to my great surprise within 15 minutes he had shown up at her door -- the famous French doctor's house call. I couldn't get over it. "House calls in the United States went out when Eisenhower was president," I told her, shaking my head.

The Brave New World of Global Finance

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:30:00 -0500

When future historians look back at the major shift in power that came in the fall of 2008, they will focus not just on the election of Barack Obama. Less than two weeks after Obama's historic election, finance ministers and central bank governors from the G-20 nations convened in Washington at the height of a global panic to discuss the future of global finance.

Assessing Putin

Ron Tang — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500

What will Putin’s legacy amount to? For starters, let us dispense with a giant "red herring" that too many Western commentators have pursued for far too long.

What I am referring to is the question of whether Putin is a “democratic reformer” -- or a “Soviet authoritarian.”

An authoritarian reformer

The answer, of course, is that Putin is an authoritarian reformer. He is profoundly committed to reforms intended to make Russia into a successful modern state. But at the same time, he is profoundly skeptical of his society’s capacity to undertake such reforms without strong control from above -- at least without running a grave risk of flying to pieces in the process.

Whether he is right or wrong on this is open to question. But it is an old Russian position dating back to Peter the Great and even beyond. And it is a stance that was confirmed in Putin's mind and in the minds of a large majority of ordinary Russians by the dreadful experiences of the 1990s.

Putin is also not a personal dictator, but a member of an authoritarian ruling collective of former and serving security officers. As he prepares to step down from his present role in 2008 (while retaining dominant influence), one key question relating to this group is not whether they have become democrats -- but to what extent they remain officers.

Russia after Putin

In other words, are they capable of restraining their personal greed and ambition -- and rallying as a collective behind Putin in his new role, and behind Putin's chosen successor? Or will they have become like the magnates whom they have succeeded, and allow their immoderate desires to tear the state apart?

A second question, of course, is whether they themselves are intelligent, dynamic and honest enough to build a great modern economy.

Putin's "Germanic" character

There is nothing at all foolish or irrational in Putin’s attempts to promote a version of South Korea’s past economic program in Russia -- except that it may turn out that such a system needs Koreans to run it.

What role Putin himself will play after 2008 is the subject of fevered and fruitless debate. Fearing just such anarchical competition among a predatory ruling elite, most Russians -- and most foreign investors -- devoutly hope that it is an influential one.

Noting his intensely controlled nature, Russians sometimes remark that Putin has a somewhat “Germanic” character, uncharacteristic of Russians in general. In a historical sense, there may be something to this.

Russian-Germans

The rational, organized, hard-working, but somewhat cold-blooded and inhuman Russian-German is a familiar figure in Russian 19th century literature. But he is also a personification and externalization of something which over many hundreds of years had become intrinsic to Russia’s own society and culture: the constant attempts of the state and state elites to impose order and development on an intrinsically anarchic country.

A combination of this anarchy -- and of desperate attempts to overcome it in order to catch up with the West -- repeatedly led the Russian state towards not just authoritarianism. It also triggered absurd and often very savage attempts at controlling every aspect of behavior. That is true from the Tsarist bureaucratic code to Gosplan.

Putin's toughness

There are certain milder elements of this in Putin’s own attitudes. In addition to limiting even the long-term growth of real democracy, they may also yet help stifle just the economic dynamism that he genuinely wants to promote -- above all through state-directed, partially state-controlled monopolization.

For all the strengthening of the state under Putin, Russia has not wholly shed either the anarchy of the 1990s, or the tradition of “Russian revolts -- senseless and merciless,” as Pushkin described them. And they are a reminder of the fact that ruling Russia does require a certain toughness.

During my stay in Russia, bloody anti-Caucasian rioting broke out in the depressed northern town of Kondopoga, a place that epitomizes all the dreary, desperate areas left behind by Russia's contemporary march to prosperity. If that march falters, it is easy to see how such places could be breeding grounds for a far more savage version of Russian chauvinism than anything we have seen under Putin.

Chic Moscow

But toughness aside, there is also another side to it all. Walking in central Moscow under a sunny sky, I saw streets lined with handsomely restored 19th century mansions and churches. And I saw luxuriously appointed shops selling every item one could buy in London or New York.

These streets are filled with well-dressed, well-off people -- and even, mirabile dictu for anyone who lived in the former Soviet Union, with smiling, helpful shop assistants.

The oil question

What encouraged me the most was a sign of the continued strength of the Russian intellect. I was able to ruminate from one well-stocked bookshop to another.

These included a specialist architecture bookshop featuring among other things a journal devoted to architecture and interior design in the Urals -- clearly something which 15 years ago one would have said was a virtual oxymoron.

But soon enough, nagging doubts came back. How much of all this depends on the price of oil -- and what happens if that price falls?

Hope and irony

And just as in the 1990s, I looked back with bitter sadness and irony to the hopes of the Gorbachev era. And I wondered: Will I one day remember this bright day in Moscow in the same profoundly disappointed manner?

Amidst the chaos and the misery of the 1990s, I and many Russians looked back with bitter sadness and irony to the hopes of the Gorbachev era. And I wondered: Will I one day remember this bright day in Putin's Moscow with the same feelings of bitter irony and disappointed hope?

Read part ? of this article Dining With Putin.

Dining With Putin

Ron Tang — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Our meal with President Vladimir Putin took place at the presidential villa at Novo-Ogaryevo in 2006.

The drive to the presidential village was a short tour of the world of the new Russian elite -- which is now not so very new anymore, given the years that have passed since the Soviet collapse.

The new Russian elite

The road led through the former village of Zhukovka, now containing enormous villas -- some almost as large as that of the president.

We rode by a “Luxury Plaza” featuring shops and signs for Armani, Gucci, Dolce and Gabbana, Bentley and Maserati. The “Dream House” firm of estate agents advertises “kottedzhi” (cottages) and “taunkhausi” (townhouses). One huge sign was for the publication “Strong Man -- the Magazine That Dictates” (I am not making this up).

Unless they are rich enough to afford a helicopter and several landing sites, or modest enough to take the (superbly efficient) metro, there is one thing, though, that even the Muscovite elites cannot escape, and that is the increasingly impossible traffic. Alternatively, they can be very powerful, or like us, briefly connected to supreme power.

Stopping traffic

When our bus became hopelessly stuck at one point, our police escort extricated us by the simple expedient of stopping all the traffic coming in the opposite direction -- and driving us down the wrong side of the road for a while.

The presidential villa is an attractive enough, but somewhat generic and soulless Soviet reconstruction of a 19th century Russian neo-classical country-house, with a pillared portico outside and white and gold decoration within.

A steely disposition

The meal, though, was worthy of a prince, not in its quantity, but in its really superb quality. We shared an Italian meal, cooked by a chef from a famous restaurant in Moscow.

Putin’s remarks were of a studied moderation. He rejected the term “energy superpower” for Russia, saying that it was an inappropriate reference to the Cold War and had no relevance to the world of mutually beneficial energy deals. A certain steely quality emerged when he insisted that the West could not demand access to sales of Russian property, while barring Russia from buying shares in Russian corporations.

Still more steel came to light when he warned that any moves by the West to grant independence to Kosovo would result in direct consequences in terms of Russia's own policy towards Georgia’s separatist provinces. But in both cases the tone was mild, the steel decently veiled.

Increasing revenues

Where Putin, and still more his successors, will really need to show “steel” is in an area rarely mentioned in the West, but which he emphasized in his remarks -- a continuation of his present determination to maintain rigorous fiscal discipline.

In the face of the flood of revenues pouring in from high oil and gas prices, and growing demands from the population that more of this be spent on public services and raising living standards, that will prove to be a real challenge.

Remembering the 90s

Putin and his team seem to be near-obsessed with memories of the 1990s, when hyper-inflation and declining revenues came close to wrecking the state. These events did, for a while, radically undermine its economic and diplomatic independence vis-a-vis the West.

Hence the determination to channel the great bulk of the state’s new resources into the stabilization fund and enormous foreign exchange reserves, with investment in restoring infrastructure and services coming a long way behind.

This is a line which attracted the unwilling, but profound admiration of some of the Americans in our group, given the fiscal exuberance of their own present administration. However, for future Russian governments to stick to this strategy in the face of public unrest if energy prices remain high may one day yet again require not just metaphorical but actual steel on the part of Russia’s rulers.

Putin starts and ends dinner

In one respect, official dinners with Putin resemble what I seem to recall reading was a feature of the court of Franz Joseph of Austria. The sovereign is, of course, served first. He also eats quickly -- and drinks almost nothing. And when he is finished, the staff whisk everybody’s plates away, finished or not.

I was sorely tempted to make a grab for the last tentacle of the octopus carpaccio as it passed me on the way out of the door. But while other hosts might have applauded this as a compliment to their hospitality, I do not think it would have gone down well with Putin.

Putin's image

The President’s personal abstemiousness and intense self-discipline are part of the Putin image, an essential aspect of what makes him the anti-Yeltsin -- which makes him admired by a large majority of Russians. He gives no impression of playing an assumed role.

Or rather, it was no doubt a role that this undersized street-fighting kid from the Leningrad slums assumed long ago when he put on the uniform of an officer of the KGB, and which is now part of his very nature. Unlike some Western politicians acting on their PR adviser’s instructions, he gives no impression of being uncomfortable in his own skin.

Read part ?? of this article Assessing Putin.

My Visit To Khanti-Mansiisk, Part II

Ron Tang — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:00:00 -0400

The museum of the Khanti and Mansii tradition is intelligently and attractively designed, with vaguely New-Ageish references to Khanti and Mansii religion, but also genuinely interesting and informative about their beliefs.

Among these, following the Russian conquest of the 17th century, was a conflation of Jesus Christ with their traditional principal object of worship, the bear.

Hopes for Khanti-Mansiisk

For anyone with a sense of Russian history, Khanti-Mansiisk has a certain heartbreaking quality. This was the dream of the Soviet reformers under Gorbachev -- a Russia whose immense natural resources -- freed from the crushing burden of bloated military spending, insane ideological constraints and geopolitical megalomania -- would be spent for the benefit of the Russian people.

And not just for their material benefit, or even on public services, but also by improving them through exposure to a mixture of moral exhortation and Russian and Western classical culture. This aspect of the Soviet tradition had its authoritarian and absurd side, but also a rather touching one. After all, there are worse things than being forced to read Tolstoy and respect the ballet, albeit possibly from a respectful distance.

The Governor of Khanti-Mansiisk reminded me of Gorbachev in a couple of ways. He is a very Siberian-looking figure, a former oilman with a craggy face and an air of natural authority, though in a considerably better suit than he would have worn in Soviet days.

The Governor

The first recollection of Gorbachev was in his genuinely good intentions for his people, demonstrated by what we had seen in his region.

The second Soviet leadership feature began as we started on our official banquet -- and what a banquet it was!

Feast of the Gods

This one didn’t just resemble one of those feasts of local notables from Gogol -- it was the very thing itself: white sturgeon, smoked sturgeon, salmon, black caviar, red caviar, head-cheese, stewed veal, stewed mushrooms with sour cream, tongue, smoked pork, ham salad, potato salad, beetroot salad, fish soup, beetroot soup, fish pie, mushroom-pie, beef-pie, cheese pie, onion pie, ordinary pancakes and potato pancakes. And that was just the appetizers.

This being Siberia, there was also a local delicacy in the form of a kind of fish sorbet, a dish that I very much doubt ever spreads far beyond its native land, even on a sea of vodka.

Where was I though? Ah yes, time to introduce the governor’s other Gorbachevian, or rather Gorbacho-Brezhnevo-Khrushchevesque, feature.

The Governor Speaks

Well, he began his speech to us about the Basic Indicators of the Social and Economic Development of the Khanti-Mansiisk Autonomous Okrug-Yugra with the frozen fish. And he talked steadily through the rest of the appetizers.

He came to an apparent end with the mushroom julienne, and we all applauded. But then he began again with the soup. He talked through the reindeer, and the beef stroganov, and the whole sturgeon, which was facing me.

Never-Ending Speech

Sturgeon, you know, often have melancholic expressions. That is not surprising given the circumstances in which one usually meets them, but this one’s face seemed to me to grow sadder and sadder as the speech went on and the bottles went away empty.

Where was I again? Well, the Governor talked and talked and talked and talked. What made it even worse was that, unlike in pre-Gorbachev Soviet times, neither my Western nor my Russian colleagues had to be afraid of him any more. So they all started talking and laughing loudly as well, and he droned on and on like a kind of bagpipe accompaniment in the background.

Those of us at my end of our table -- being closest to him and therefore compelled to some kind of decent manners -- silently drank more and more to numb the increasingly agonizing embarrassment of the whole affair. That was a pity, given his administration’s achievements and that he had given us a feast for the gods -- but then, imagine having to live on Olympus and listen to Zeus every night.

My Visit To Khanti-Mansiisk, Part I

Ron Tang — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:00:00 -0400

Last autumn, I found myself by invitation of some very respectable investors in a high-class Moscow night-club shaped like an amphitheatre. The rake-thin, huge-eyed “models” perched in the tiers above me, and under the flashing strobe-lights, adopted in my inebriated imagination the forms of exquisitely beautiful, slightly predatory roosting birds.

My previous, sober after-dinner speech on Russia’s economic prospects to these international investors had been succeeded by a line of can-can dancers clad only in feathers and led by a bear waving a Russian flag.

Reminders of the Past

The moment reminded me of a British journalist colleague, who a few years ago wrote that Russia needed a new version of John Reed to describe the transformation of the 1990s. As far as I can tell, Fellini would have been much closer to the mark.

The preternatural thinness of the women in the night club also reminded me of another dancer 1,700 miles away and a week earlier during my trip. By contrast, this dancer was the most perfectly spherical human being I have ever met -- in fact an accumulation of circles, like a human armillary sphere.

Maria Kuzminichna, an amiable matriarch from the formerly nomadic Khanti people of Western Siberia, had been produced by the local authorities to perform folk dances for a collection of rather bewildered international experts (including myself) on the forested banks of the river Ob.

A Different Sort of Party

Although perfectly sober, the scene had its surreal quality. A wooden stage on the riverbank had been erected for our visit, on which performed Maria Kuzminichna and her granddaughter in traditional Khanti dress.

The event also featured a Russian M.C. and pop singer dressed out of 1970s Pittsburgh, some disappointed fur salespeople (they had obviously been seriously misinformed concerning the incomes of Western experts on Russia) -- and an array of local staff serving roasted reindeer and some sort of prehistoric-looking monster fish.

Alone in the Wilderness

The temperature was that of a warm West Siberian old wives’ summer -- like a blanket with a knife in it. And yet, we were greeted by the usual dazzlingly beautiful women wrapped up to their necks in mink coats as an advertisement for Khanti-Mansiisk’s second-most famous product.

While Maria Kuzminichna chanted and drummed and the M.C. and pop singer screeched and warbled, in the background the river flowed on quietly under an enormous sky. That river was as broad as a great lake, but moving steadily northward towards the Arctic. On either side of our tiny island of jollity, the forest stretched away forever.

In a more than 100 mile ride north in our fast hydrofoil from the regional capital of Khanti-Mansiisk (in Tsarist days, Samarovsk), we had seen not one town or village. Just endless trees, tinged with the brown and gold of autumn, and flood-plains so limitless that they defeated all sense of perspective.

Beneath the Surface

When I took a walk along the beach to get away from the pop singer, a tell-tale sign of human endeavor along the river became immediately apparent. With every step, my shoes broke through the crust of sand -- and came up coated with an oily sludge.

Oil is Khanti-Mansiisk’s most important product, dwarfing by some distance fur and folk-art, and the reason why we had gone to Khanti-Mansiisk this year.

An Important Location

Come to think of it, the whole of the immense apparatus of the Russian state -- with its nuclear arsenal, still-powerful army, public services, giant bureaucracy,
vast and overstretched transport network and geopolitical influence -- could be described as a huge inverted pyramid whose tip rests on Khanti-Mansiisk.

How could that be? Well in 2005, Khanti-Mansiisk produced 267 million tons of oil, or 57% of Russia’s total production: If it were an independent state, it would have 7.5% of the world’s oil production, second only to Saudi Arabia. With about 1% of Russia’s population, the region contributed 22.7% of the total tax revenues of the Russian Federation.

Khanti-Mansiisk is therefore one of the spots on the earth through which flows the indispensable life-giving heroin, called oil, that permeates the present world economy.

Foreign Appearance

It flows similarly through the Persian Gulf, the Niger Delta -- or, in smaller ways, the North Sea and the bayous of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. This raised an interesting question in my mind: When it comes to the things that make life worth living for the people who live there, where to place Khanti-Mansiisk on that spectrum?

The town of Khanti-Mansiisk itself looks like a small, very prosperous town in Finland. That is the case for a very good reason -- to a considerable extent, Finns built it. When the regional authorities in recent years gained a greater share of their region’s immense revenues, they decided to turn their small capital into a magnificent regional showcase.

Finnish Influences

They chose mainly Finnish firms to do this, partly because of the excellence of Finnish design, partly because of a desire to create a regional style with references to the Finno-Ugric origins of the Khanti and Mansy. Those peoples have given the region its name and autonomous status.

Pure Kanti and Mansy now make up less than 5% of its population, though to judge by many local “Russian” faces, their contribution to the local gene pool is very much larger.

The result is rakishly-angled buildings, often brightly coloured against the gloom of the Siberian winter, and often furnished inside with simple but strikingly elegant woodwork.

A Mixture of Cultures

This being Russia, however, a certain surreal element is not lacking. The center for the performing arts is modernist on the outside -- but neo-baroque on the inside.

It also includes a row of immense, writhing, tropical-looking trees, festooned with creepers -- all of which turns out on closer examination to be made of plastic. Facing these curious growths are plaster roundels of old Soviet cultural icons like Pushkin and recovered ones like Diaghilev.

A New Facade

Dominated by a magnificent new Orthodox church, and a rebuilt one from Tsarist times destroyed under Communism, the small town of 70,000 people boasts an array of magnificently furnished new schools, hospitals and sports centers, much new gleaming public housing, a very attractive theatre-cum-opera house and a fine civic park.

It also has an arts center with training facilities for local artists, including dancers (beautiful) and musicians (brilliant).

The new gallery of painting boasts an array of icons and works by great Russian 19th and 20th century masters, contributed by a mixture of the state and oil magnates anxious to display their civic-mindedness (including the now-imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the green and yellow colors of whose former Yukos company still adorn local petrol stations and some buildings).

The British Empire's Lessons for Its U.S. Brother

Ron Tang — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

In contemplating a future world in which U.S. power is used more effectively, but in more limited ways -- indeed, more effectively because of these limits -- Americans can draw upon the example of British strategy in the century before 1914, when its global power was at its zenith.

This experience has been used by writers such as Niall Ferguson and Max Boot as an example for the exercise of American global power today and in the future.

Such recommendations too often ignore the fact that British power, even at its height, was in certain key respects limited. And it is often forgotten that, at the start of the 20th century, Britain conducted a deliberate strategic withdrawal from several regions in order to concentrate on what London regarded -- rightly -- as its most dangerous enemies.

British Rule

Britain’s directly ruled empire was also not the heart of its economic supremacy. More important was Britain’s indirect influence over large parts of the globe, and above all its domination of the world economy through its lead in industry, technology, trade and finance.

Britain’s 19th-century strategy was an economical one -- intelligently tailored to the British Empire’s real strengths and weaknesses. London did not seek to acquire global dominance of the kind now being dreamed of by U.S. neoconservatives and liberal hawks.

Super Powers

It always recognized that Britain had to coexist in the world with a number of other great powers, each with its own sphere of legitimate interest, which it would be reckless folly to meddle with.

During the 1890s, Britain’s economic predominance disappeared in the face of the dramatic growth of the American and German -- and to a lesser extent, Russian and Japanese -- economies.

In part for inexorable geographic and economic reasons, and in part for domestic political ones, the British government failed to check this relative economic decline -- just as it may not be possible for any U.S. administration to do much about the relative economic rise of China.

Sharp Strategy

What they could -- and did -- do in the British case was to take a cool, level-headed look at the strategic implications of these developments, and adopt radically new strategies to deal with them.

British policymakers identified the threats to Britain’s truly vital interests and prioritized accordingly -- recognizing that to try to remain predominant everywhere would mean risking defeat everywhere.

Tough Decision

They ceded predominance in Latin America to the Americans, and Britain signed an alliance with Japan that essentially recognized that country as the predominant power in the Far East.

A few years later, in 1907, as the menace of Wilhelmine Germany grew, Britain signed a treaty with its old rival Russia that guaranteed British rights in southern Persia -- but surrendered predominant influence over the country to St. Petersburg.

None of this was easy for a British official class that had been used to dominating all these regions for generations, and expected to be ferociously criticized for these withdrawals by sections of British opinion.

Smart Move

This strategy of limited strategic retreat took not just intelligence but great moral courage.

Without this willingness to conduct painful compromises and tactical retreats in the 20 years before 1914, Britain would undoubtedly have been defeated in the First World War.

Unlimited Ego

The very idea of reducing America’s presence in any area of the world is anathema to most members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. As President Eisenhower warned, their own narrow interests as a ruling elite are completely against this. They have also convinced themselves that it isn’t necessary.

Amazingly, even after the savage lesson of Iraq, one can still frequently hear in Washington, from representatives of both parties, the line that “U.S. power in the world is practically unlimited.”

Of course, in certain narrow military fields, such as naval and air supremacy, and the ability to deploy precision-guided munitions against identifiable objects, this is true -- just as it was true that for most of the 19th century, the Royal Navy could destroy at will most of the other navies in the world.

Futile Figures

The figures are well known. The United States spends as much on its military as the rest of the world put together. It has the only large aircraft carriers in the world, and the only forces widely equipped with precision-guided missiles and bombs.

True -- but also frequently irrelevant. The British could knock over any army outside Europe and North America -- but they could not generate the forces to occupy and rule a vast civilization like China.

Losing Battle

Likewise, the United States today can knock over any army and regime with relative ease -- but it cannot occupy and change societies such as Iran, Pakistan or even little Iraq.

In the entire century from 1815 to 1914, the British only launched one significant military operation on the European continent. That was the Crimean War -- and even that was on the farthest periphery of the continent, and was only possible because the French and the Turks provided the bulk of the ground forces.

The reasons for Britain’s particular weaknesses during the 19th century were basically the same as those for America of today.

Calculated Courage

Above all, both the British and the American populations have been deeply hostile to the conscription necessary to create armies large enough to fight prolonged wars with major powers and establish armies of occupation. And they were opposed to the taxes necessary to pay for huge armies and endless wars.

Britain therefore conquered and ruled its empire through a mixture of professional troops and local native auxiliaries and mercenaries. In consequence, it deliberately restricted its ambitions to weak Asian and African polities that could be conquered with relative ease.

Unclear Future

The difference to the United States is that today the demilitarization of society has gone so far that it is difficult to raise even volunteer troops for long and bloody overseas wars. Volunteer armies are also much more expensive than conscript ones.

In the case of both Britain and the United States, the resulting fiscal strain has been made worse by the fact that -- as global, not regional, powers -- they have also had to maintain immensely expensive navies (and in the U.S. case, an air force) and the high-tech industries to build them.

Like the United States now, Britain then was by far the richest power on earth -- but that did not mean that its resources were infinite.

This article is adapted from "Ethical Realism: A Vision For America's Role In the World" by Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman.

The Conflict In Iraq And U.S. Elites

Ron Tang — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500

What has failed in Iraq has been not just the strategy of the administration of George W. Bush -- but a whole way of looking at the world.

This consists of the beliefs that the United States is both so powerful and so obviously good that it has the ability to spread democracy throughout the world; that if necessary, this can be achieved through war; that this mission can also be made to advance particular U.S. national interests -- and that this combination will naturally be supported by good people all over the world, irrespective of their own political traditions, national allegiances and national interests.

These beliefs are very widely and instinctively shared throughout the U.S. establishment -- and both political parties. As a result, their failure in Iraq has so far led not to a new approach to international relations, but to a period of intellectual and political bewilderment.

Incompetent Administration

This is now being succeeded by worrying indications of an emerging new bipartisan consensus, based essentially on the previous assumptions and myths.

Even after the debacle of Iraq, there is therefore at present no real opposition in the United States when it comes to foreign and security policy. The Democrats are bitterly, and rightly, critical of the monstrous incompetence displayed by the Bush Administration.

Defending Democracy

But they do not themselves have an alternative strategy or philosophy to offer. And too often, they content themselves with offering similar messianic platitudes about American greatness and the transformative power of democracy.

Vietnam taught us once that the United States is not invincible. All of the United States' technological superiority, and all the courage and skill of its soldiers, may be useless against certain kinds of enemies using certain kinds of strategy.

After all, military power is not something you hang on a wall for visitors to admire. Real military power is power that can be used. America’s famous 12 aircraft carrier battle groups are not much use on the streets of Fallujah.

Lessons not Learned

Vietnam also should have taught us that American preaching of democracy, even with the best of intentions, will not be accepted by other peoples -- if it is accompanied by strategies that they see as opposed to their national pride and national aspirations.

Yet, a generation later, these lessons seem to have been forgotten. The stakes today are much higher than they were in Vietnam.

Getting Serious on Security

Despite the illusions of that time, Indochina was never really very important to the United States, to its leadership in the world, or to the world economy.

Nobody could say that of the Middle East today. Nor was there ever a chance of the Vietnamese Communists, or Saddam Hussein for that matter, attacking Americans at home.

Americans, the British and the Spanish all have bitter reason to know that this is not true of Al Qaeda and its allies. The threat from Islamist terrorism has to be taken very seriously indeed -- more seriously than any other security issue now facing the United States.

Missing the Meaning

Unfortunately the political left, believing the terrorist threat has been exaggerated, directs more of its attention and criticism at America’s own government than at the nation’s mortal enemies.

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq has squandered time and energy, increased Muslim hatred of the United States -- and created a breeding ground for terrorists. A war with Iran would repeat this dreadful mistake on an even larger scale.

Attacking Terrorism

Shunning these distractions, we need to focus on Al Qaeda and their allies in the world of Sunni Islamist extremism. These are the people who actually carried out 9/11 and killed thousands of Americans.

They are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and if they gain them and can deploy them, they will carry out atrocities far worse than 9/11 -- and not just against us, but against all their enemies.

Russians, Shia Muslims in Iraq and Pakistan, and victims of the Taliban in Afghanistan all have good reason to know this. The Islamist terrorists are also our most dangerous enemies because they can persuade us to destroy ourselves.

Aftermath

We have already seen in the years after 9/11 how that terrorist attack has led the U.S. administration and military into actions and arguments that previous generations of Americans would have found inconceivable.

These actions have tarnished the image of American democracy in the world. One shudders to think of the consequences for U.S. democracy of another truly massive terrorist attack.

This article is adapted from "Ethical Realism: A Vision For America's Role In the World " by Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman.

The United States in the Global Concert of Powers

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 15:48:00 -0400

Lind's new book, The American Way of Strategy, explores this issue in greater detail. Please click here for additional information.

* * *

Theodore Roosevelt was in favor of it. So was his cousin Franklin -- and his rival Woodrow Wilson. “It” was an alliance or “concert” of peace-loving, law-abiding great powers that would cooperate to maintain international security.

Ending the cycle of world wars by establishing a great-power concert was the goal of Americans in World War I and World War II and underlay the foundation of the League of Nations and later the United Nations.

After the Cold War, however, the bipartisan, American foreign policy establishment -- including Democrats as well as Republicans -- changed its collective mind.

New Hegemony

America’s leaders tried to turn the temporary Cold War-era dominance of the United States over its protectorates in Western Europe and East Asia into permanent American world hegemony.

Under Presidents Clinton and Bush, the United States sought to obtain new spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Insolvency

At the same time, the United States encircled and isolated China and Russia, while seeking to maintain the military dependence of Japan and Germany on the United States as long as possible.

Even as it expanded its commitments vastly beyond its Cold War protectorates, the United States shrank its military below Cold War levels. This was a formula for insolvency.

The United States wrote checks for which the American public was unwilling to pay. With the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the checks began to bounce.

Preventive Tactics

The goal of American strategy since the Cold War has been to prevent Japan, Germany, China and Russia from emerging as independent “peer competitors” or military great powers in a multi-polar world no longer centered on the United States.

The United States has offered them a bargain: If you allow us to monopolize most world military power, we will protect your vital national interests, in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans and elsewhere.

The American People Won’t Foot the Bill

The problem with this bargain is that it has never been explained to the American people. It means, for example, that Americans must fight and die to secure the oil supplies of Japan and China (even though the United States receives less than a fifth of its oil and gas from the Persian Gulf).

The American people tolerated the Kosovo War, a war to turn the Balkans into a U.S./NATO protectorate rather than a Russian or German sphere of influence -- because there were no American combat deaths.

But public opinion turned against the Iraq War after 2,000 American soldiers had died. Now, a majority of Americans think that the Iraq war was a mistake.

The Price of Small Wars

The hegemony strategy requires the United States to wage frequent small wars like the Kosovo War and the Iraq War, on behalf of the major industrial nations in Europe and East Asia, with little or no participation by other countries.

The American people, though, are unwilling to pay the cost for these “wars of choice” in tax dollars and dead soldiers. It’s time for a different strategy.

League of Peace

That strategy can be found in the thinking of American statesmen in the first half of the 20th century.

In his 1905 annual address to Congress, Theodore Roosevelt had endorsed the idea of a concert of power: “Our aim should be from time to time to take such steps as may be possible toward creating something like an organization of the civilized nations, because as the world becomes more highly organized the need for navies and armies will diminish.”

In his 1910 Nobel Prize Lecture, Theodore Roosevelt said, “It would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others.”

Community of Power

Woodrow Wilson agreed: “There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power -- not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.”

In his address to Congress of January 22, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson announced the concert of power strategy that would replace America’s earlier grand strategy of non-entanglement: “In every discussion of peace that must end this war, it is taken for granted that the peace must be followed by some definite concert of power which will make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm us again.”

Securing Peace

Although Wilson’s League of Nations failed, during World War II Franklin Roosevelt sought the same goal of a concert-governed international system in the form of the United Nations.

Mr. Roosevelt scoffed at the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928 that purported to outlaw war, on the grounds that “war cannot be outlawed by resolution alone.”

In May 1942, Roosevelt outlined his plan for a new world organization with a general assembly and a security council of the major powers: “The real decisions should be made by the United States, Great Britain, Russia and China, who would be the powers for many years to come and that would have to police the world.”

Beyond Paralysis

The provision of security by the great powers would permit the majority of the world’s states to disarm and devote their resources to improving the standard of living of their people.

The Cold War paralyzed the UN Security Council. Following the Cold War, however, a great-power concert became possible. All of the permanent Security Council members, including China and Russia, at least tacitly supported the Gulf War and the U.S. invasion of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan after September 11, 2001.

Peacekeeping

These were traditional responses to international aggression. It is true that China and Russia refused to endorse the US/NATO war on Serbia in 1999 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But these two wars broke with international norms, even by prior U.S. standards. The Kosovo War was an intervention in a civil war, while the Iraq War was an unprovoked preventive war.

It was the United States, not China and Russia, that was rejecting the rules of the post-1945 system that America itself had created.

From Hegemony to Great-Power Concert

If the United States adopted a concert of power strategy, it would not have to rely primarily on the rigid UN security council. Instead, the United States could take part in regional great-power concerts.

The members need not be democratic internally, as long as they are not genocidal tyrannies and are committed to the norms of a peaceful international system.

The Pan-European Concert

The admission of Russia into NATO would turn that alliance into a pan-European great-power concert.

The six-power talks about North Korea could become the basis of a great-power concert uniting the United States and Japan with China and Russia.

In the Middle East, a great-power concert is not possible, because of local rivalries. In North America, one is not possible because the United States is the only great power in the continent.

As a participant in regional concerts, the United States can play a constructive peacetime role between crises.

Regional Concerts

And, in the event that a hostile power seeks regional hegemony, the other members of the concert could rally around the United States to form an anti-hegemonic alliance, something they might hesitate to do without the certainty of U.S. participation.

By promoting regional concerts, the United States can maintain its influence in strategically important regions outside of North America -- without risking a backlash by trying to impose unilateral American hegemony on all three.

Security on a Budget

The concert of power strategy, unlike the hegemony strategy, does not require the United States to assume the sole responsibility of policing the neighborhoods of all of the other great powers in the world while they watch from the sidelines.

The United States can take part in efforts to police Europe and Asia and the Middle East, when necessary. But U.S. security does not require the United States to wage wars like the Kosovo War and the Iraq War -- which are almost entirely American efforts, camouflaged by the nominal participation of a few allies.

And the United States can save money by pooling its defense resources with the other great powers in the hegemonic concert.

Paranoia

The hegemony strategy is based on the fear that, if the leading European and Asian countries are strong enough to defend themselves against minor threats in their own neighborhoods, they will be so powerful that they threaten the United States.

But the notion that the United States can never be safe -- unless every other great power is weak, passive and dependent on the United States in its own region -- is absurd.

An International Effort

As long as other great powers are allied with the United States in regional concerts, it is in America’s interest to encourage their strength, not to encourage their weakness.

Of the possible grand strategies the United States might adopt, the concert of power strategy is most likely to preserve American security at a minimal cost to the American way of life.

Working together with the other great powers of the world would cost less in terms of American taxes, American lives and American liberty than a misguided retreat into isolation or the doomed attempt to establish solitary United States world domination.

Dean, Yankee of Vermont

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500

The values of America's Yankee Puritans were forged in the religious and political conflicts of 16th- and 17th-century Britain. Puritan opposition to Catholicism and Anglicanism translates, among their descendants, into strong support for the separation of church and state.

Puritan values = New England values

The Puritan belief that the community of "saints" as well as the individual is a moral actor lives on in a strong sense of civic spirit and support for social reform. New Englanders were over-represented in the campaigns to abolish slavery, to end segregation -- and to provide equal rights for women.

The Puritans' hatred of the wasteful royal court and parasitic aristocrats survives as the "Yankee work ethic" and fiscal conservatism in New England and the Midwest. The emphasis of Puritans on individual reading of the Bible has made the New England states the national leaders in public education and higher education.

And the rejection by the Puritans of the British aristocracy's warlike culture of honor -- a culture shared by the upper class of the South -- has made New Englanders leaders of opposition to foreign wars from the War of 1812 to the 2003 Iraq War.

Moral Virtues, political vices

But the moral virtues of the Greater New England Yankees more often than not have proven to be political vices.

The culture of New England, while admirable in many respects, has often been found alien and threatening by Americans of other backgrounds.

From East Anglia to Seattle

There was plenty of opportunity for clashes of values and policies largely rooted in the fact that Puritan settlers were on a nationwide mission.

After they had colonized New England, their descendants settled Great Lakes states like Wisconsin and Minnesota, where they found political and cultural allies among German and Scandinavian immigrants.

In Illinois, Missouri and Kansas, Yankees moving south collided with northward-migrating Southerners with quite different values. In the 19th century, New Englanders colonized the Pacific Northwest from northern California to Seattle.

It is easy to see that the map of Democratic electoral votes in recent primary elections tracks the Puritan migration closely.

Yankees vs. Southerners

The political line of confrontation involved white Southerners and New England Yankees. These two groups have hated each other warmly since the early years of the Republic.

New Englanders view Southerners as violent, superstitious and reactionary barbarians. Southerners, in return, have always viewed New Englanders as annoying and preachy prudes attracted to utopian fantasies of social reform.

Puritan alienation

Over the decades -- within the Northeast and Midwest -- Greater New England Yankees alienated Catholic immigrants for many generations with their anti-Catholicism and their social liberalism.

Even German-Americans -- whose support for education and social reform made them natural allies of the Puritans -- were offended by Yankee support for Prohibition in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The German beer-garden, like the Irish saloon and the Catholic church, were viewed with suspicion by many earnest Yankee Protestants.

These cultural factors explain why the New Englanders have so often been out of power for generations at a time. There have never been enough Greater New Englanders to form a majority party. But their attitudes often alienate the other groups they need as allies.

A history of political failure

The New England-based Federalist Party lost control early in the presidency when Thomas Jefferson was elected in 1800. The party disintegrated entirely after 1815.

Its successor as the New England party, the National Republicans, elected only one president -- John Quincy Adams. That success came about only because the winner of the popular vote, Andrew Jackson, was passed over by the House of Representatives in an election without an electoral-vote majority winner.

The Whigs

The next incarnation of the Yankee party, the Whigs, managed to elect only two presidents -- both of them Southern-born generals, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor -- before it expired in the 1850s.

One successor to the Whigs, the American Party, which was established in 1849, committed electoral suicide by defining immigrants as enemies of Protestant America. That offended not only Irish-Americans, who were mostly Democrats, but otherwise friendly German-Americans.

Most of the Whigs reunited in the immigrant-friendly, anti-Southern Republican Party, which in 1860 elected Abraham Lincoln. Here was a Southern-born Midwesterner who led a New England-based party.

Democratic deserters

The Lincoln Republicans narrowly escaped being reduced to a minority party of the Greater New England region following the readmission of the Southern states in the mid-1870s.

Only by rapidly turning western territories with mostly-Yankee settlers like Idaho and Colorado into states did the Republicans manage to create a majority in the Senate and the electoral college that lasted until 1932.

Roosevelt Democrats

During the New Deal era of 1932-68, a sizeable number of Republican and ex-Republican New England progressives joined with Southern conservatives and populists and Northern Catholics in Franklin Roosevelt's unwieldy coalition.

Many other Yankees, however, were offended by the big spending and foreign wars of the Roosevelt Democrats, and remained in the Republican Party, which had shrunk to a small remnant in New England, the Midwest and the Pacific coast by the 1960s.

Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon invited conservative Southerners alienated by the Democratic left into the Republican Party. As a result, by the 1990s the Party of Lincoln had been hijacked by the political heirs of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Escape from New England

Today's Democrats are in danger of being marginalized like the Federalists, Whigs and New Deal era Republicans. That will be their fate if the party's white Greater New England voters cannot make alliances with other groups which otherwise share few -- if any -- of their basic values.

Blacks and Latinos, like white Southern populists, tend to support government spending programs that benefit ordinary Americans -- and they also tend to have conservative religious and social views.

The challenge of the Democrats

A party that combines New England's fiscal conservatism with New England's social liberalism is not likely to appeal to any of these groups. Latinos, like white Southern populists, may be lured away from the Democrats by the Southern Right's use of jingoistic patriotism and traditional values.

The deep strain of anti-militarism among the descendants of the New England Puritans is a political liability as well.

Again and again, Southern conservatives have successfully portrayed anti-war New Englanders as pacifists, defeatists -- even traitors.

Breaking open the Puritan core

During the War of 1812, anti-war New Englanders met in the Hartford Convention to discuss the possible secession of their region from the United States in protest.

The Federalist Party was so tainted by their apparent treason that it died. The opposition of most Whigs to the popular Mexican War of 1846-48 was one reason why the party collapsed by the 1850s.

Conservatives dominate national security

The growing influence of anti-Cold War New Englanders in the Democratic Party from the Vietnam War onward led the American people to entrust the job of commander-in-chief to a series of Republican conservatives.

The exception were two relatively conservative Southern Democrats, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

As a percentage of the population, the Yankees of Greater New England, the upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest are dwindling rapidly. If the Democrats are to achieve a stable majority in American politics, they will have to add populist and pro-military voters, of various races, to their Puritan core.

The Puritans will have to learn to tolerate impurity. That is, in one sentence, what Howard Dean's biggest obstacle is on the road to the White House.