Policy Review - February & March 2013, No. 177

PO LICYReview
February & March 2013, No. 177, $6.00
LEFT 3.0 TOD LINDBERG THE POST-SOVIET TWILIGHT BRUCE PITCAIRN JACKSON INVESTING IN BAD SCIENCE HENRY I. MILLER THE TAIWAN LINCHPIN DANIEL TWINING ALSO: ESSAYS AND REVIEWS BY KORI SCHAKE, PETER BERKOWITZ, HENRIK BERING, STEVE STEIN, CHARLES WOLF JR.
A P u b l i c at i o n o f t h e H o ov e r I n s t i t u t i o n
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POLICY Review
F EBRUARY & M ARCH 2013, No. 177
Features
3 LEFT 3. 0 Obama and the emergence of a newer left Tod Lindberg
17 THE POST-SOVIET TWILIGHT The stubborn political culture of Russia and the Ukraine Bruce Pitcairn Jackson 33 INVESTING IN BAD SCIENCE The dubious projects of government agencies Henry I. Miller 43 THE TAIWAN LINCHPIN An old ally is key to the U.S. position in Asia Daniel Twining 59 THE DANGER OF A POLY-NUCLEAR MIDEAST Iran is only the beginning of the nuclear problem Shmuel Bar 71 LESSONS FROM THE INDIAN WARS The U.S. government won when it decided to Kori Schake
Books
81 TOM WOLFES MIAMI Peter Berkowitz on Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe 85 THE AUDACITY OF DE GAULLE Henrik Bering on The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved by Jonathan Fenby 93 HOW MUCH STIMULUS? Steve Stein on End This Depression Now by Paul Krugman and Red Ink by David Wessel 99 DEVELOPMENTAL CORRUPTION IN CHINA Charles Wolf Jr. on Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China by Andrew Wedeman
A P u b l i c at i o n o f t h e H o ov e r I n s t i t u t i o n
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POLI CY Review
F e b rua ry & M a rc h 2 0 1 3 , N o . 1 7 7
Editor Tod Lindberg

Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
Consulting Editor Mary Eberstadt

Managing Editor Liam Julian

Office Manager Sharon Ragland

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Left 3.0
By Tod Lindberg
he left side of the American political spectrum has undergone an extraordinary transformation over the past dozen years. Perhaps because it remains a work in progress, the extent of this transformation has gone largely unremarked and seems underappreciated even among those who have been carrying it out. Forty years after the forces of the New Left managed to deliver the Democratic presidential nomination to their preferred candidate, George McGovern, only to see him lose the general election to Richard Nixon in a 49-state landslide, the United States is home to a newer Left. Its political hopes repose not in a man able to muster less than 40 percent of the vote nationwide, but in the convincingly reelected president of the United States, Barack Obama. This newer Left is confident in itself, united both in its description of the problems the country faces and in how to go about addressing them. This Left is conscious of itself as a movement, and believes
Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of its task force on the Virtues of a Free Society, under the auspices of which he is completing a study of heroism in the ancient and modern world for Encounter Books. He became editor of Policy Review effective with its April/May 1999 edition, succeeding Robert L. Scheuttinger (197779), John OSullivan (197983), and Adam Meyerson (198498). This essay appears in the final edition of Policy Review, which is ceasing publication. His appointment as a Hoover fellow is ongoing.
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it is on the rise. It has already managed to reshape American politics, and its successes so far have hardly exhausted its promise. Policies are changing under its influence. And its opponents do not seem to have found an effective way to counter it politically. Its beyond my purpose here to explore the history of the Left in American and its relation to American electoral politics. One story is its ideological evolution, from the socialists and anarchists of the early twentieth century, through the battles of the communist and anti-communist Left of mid-century, on to the birth of the New Left in the turbulent 1960s, through the quiescence of the Left during the period of neoliberal (i.e., conservative) dominance for the generation following the election of Ronald Reagan. Or one could tell the story in terms of the progressive movement at the end of the nineteenth century, through fdrs New Deal, to lbjs Great Society, on through the primary challenge Sen. Ted Kennedy launched against Jimmy Carter, its failure, and Bill Clintons emergence as a New Democrat distinct from the old liberal partisans of an expansive role for the federal government. Both stories, however, come together with the emergence of the newer Left call it Left 3.0, tracing the ideological progression from old Left to New Left to todays newer Left. Left 3.0 is not only an ideological movement, but also effectively controls (or rather guides) a political party fully competitive at the national level. Left 3.0 is an entity whose internal divisions are minuscule in comparison to the shared convictions that hold it together. Left 3.0 is a creature of its times, well-organized and fully synced to the digital culture out of which it emerged. And Left 3.0 has come into its own at a time, not coincidentally, when its political rival, the gop electoral coalition, already under strain because of shifting demographics, is deeply divided over vexing social issues on which Left 3.0 offers clear answers.
Continuities
efore we take a serious look at what is new with Left 3.0, we should first have a look at its continuities with the Left (or Lefts) of the past. The most important of these, surely, is that its animating passion remains equality the defining principle of modern democracy, in Tocquevilles judgment. If classical liberalism emerged in part as a rebellion against hereditary privilege, modern American liberalism is foremost a rebellion against the privileges of wealth. The most important innovation of the Left, a principle held fast from the time of the French Revolution onward, has been its insistence that political rights could only be meaningful if accompanied by a degree of economic equality that systems based on political rights alone would not automatically create or protect. Thus, the Left finds the most important element on its agenda: the achievement of a greater degree of eco4 Policy Review
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nomic equality by means of politics. Its an agenda that has proven adaptable over time to various levels of intensity in the passion for equality. Some have insisted that nothing less than a global proletarian revolution will suffice. Others have advocated socialism or social democracy. The mildest iteration (that of Left 3.0) centers on redistribution of wealth through higher taxes on the rich and the provision of public benefits for all, combined with the diminution of dynastic wealth through inheritance taxes. Implementation of the animating passion for equality requires the power of government. The Left shares the suspicion of government power at the heart of classical liberalism, but only up to a point. Individuals need rights to protect them from overweening government intrusion, true, but government power in the proper hands can do good, and indeed the proper hands must wield the power of government in order to do the good of pursuing equality. Implementation The proper hands are the Lefts, it hardly needs say- of the animating ing. passion for Republicans sometimes complain that Democrats tolerate conduct by Democratic administrations that equality they would never tolerate from Republican adminisrequires the trations. This is true, but it assumes a neutral stanpower of dard of judgment should apply. The Left understands perfectly well that it must advance its agenda government. against resistance, often considerable. It follows, therefore, that progress may be halting, or indeed impossible beyond the control of the people pursuing it. What matters in that case is precisely the character of those people. They can and must and do prove their virtue in other ways. One can, of course, be rich and Left: Once again, its a matter of attitude what you are for and what you are against. In the view of the Left, rich conservatives are conservative because they want to defend the privileges of wealth; they are therefore solely self-interested. Rich men and women of the Left, on the other hand, want to ensure that all people have health insurance regardless of their means; once this and other basic egalitarian imperatives have been fulfilled through political action, the rich are free to use their money as they please (including by finding themselves the best doctors). The Lefts passion for equality begins with the pursuit of greater economic equality, but it doesnt end there. The Left has also long been in pursuit of equality in the matter of identity. Identity is a concept that substantially modifies the principle that individuals have rights. An identity is something one has in common with others. Identity puts people in groups, and societies have long assigned status on the basis of identity in many instances, in the view of the Left, improperly so. Some statuses have been improperly privileged, for example, white males in racist and sexist societies. And some statuses have been improperly denigrated, for example, gay men in homophoFebruary & March 2013 5
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bic societies. The Left has long sought to bring down the status of the privileged and elevate the status of the denigrated. This, too, is the pursuit of equality. The pursuit of greater equality of identity is very much a matter of the particular circumstances of a society. The Left, from its earliest days, has had a knack for knowing where to press. Suffrage in the United States was once limited, de facto and de jure, to white adult male property owners. The requirement of property went first; then the franchise was extended formally to blacks; then to women; then in fact to blacks, with the civil rights movement; then to eighteen year-olds. In the United States, its hard to see how that sequence could have been rearranged. Similarly, for generations, gays remained closeted and underground to avoid persecution. Then came the successful demand for an end The Left has to enforcement of and repeal of laws prohibiting often styled homosexual (and certain heterosexual) acts; then the (largely) successful demand for respect for itself as uncloseted homosexuality; then the demand for progressive, domestic partner rights equivalent to those enjoyed by married couples; then the demand for which implies gay marriage, or marriage equality, per se. not only The Left has often styled itself as progressive, improvement which implies not only improvement over time, but over time, but a a progression: Correct the perceived injustice most immediately at hand, then move on to the next one. progression. In some cases, the next injustice comes into focus only once a previous injustice has been removed. During the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969, generally regarded as the birth of the gay rights movement, it seems doubtful that participants had the goal of marriage equality in mind. The community had more immediate needs that, once satisfied, would in turn reveal its next-most immediate needs. Its noteworthy just how conservative the statements of progressives of the past often sound today. Sometimes the progressive cause has been served by progressives specifically repudiating in advance positions that progressive successor generations will openly embrace. If a conservative critic of gay rights in the 1970s claimed that codifying protection for gays would one day lead to a demand that gays be allowed to marry, no doubt many gay rights advocates at the time would have scoffed at the alarmism and foresworn any such possibility. Critics have often claimed the Left supports group rights over the rights of individuals for example, affirmative action programs offering special consideration to members of minority groups or women in employment or contracting or for college admissions. The Lefts contention, however, is not typically that blacks deserve special consideration because they are black, for example, but that an individual black candidate applying for a job may
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deserve special consideration because white applicants have benefited from improper privileges in the past. You could say that the unselected white applicant was denied on the basis of his or her race; but you would then be obliged, in the view of the Left, to take into consideration all the ways in which being white has provided and still provides advantages. Special consideration for minorities or women in employment or admissions is not, in this view, the point at which discrimination starts, but the point at which broader social discrimination begins to be remedied. The Left does think in terms of groups in the sense of cultures: hence multiculturalism. This, too, represents a kind of pursuit of equality, in the sense of recognition of the worth of cultures different from ones own. Multiculturalism is the newest major element of the old Left carrying forward into Left 3.0. The Left One of the most in its earliest years believed in universal history: one important story about movement in one direction toward one endpoint, or if not an endpoint, at least toward one developments in goal greater equality. One of the most important the thought of developments in the thought of the Left in the past century was its newfound appreciation for differthe Left in the ence. Ironically under the influence of the most past century was anti-progressive philosopher of the modern era, its newfound Friedrich Nietzsche, the Left began to flirt with and eventually largely embraced a relativistic view of the appreciation for world, according to which judgments presupposing difference. the superiority of one culture over another were no longer acceptable. The Lefts multiculturalism is connected to its older tendency to think in terms of rectifying injustices based on identity. But the presumption in the case of the latter was that the overcoming of these injustices would lead in one direction only, that of equality. With multiculturalism, it became necessary to think in terms of equalities as the final result or goal. No culture has the right to impose its standards on another. In theoretical terms, this relativist perspective has considerable difficulty explaining itself: What is the ground of the judgment that one must not judge other cultures? How could such a prescription not itself be culturalbound, if everything is culture-bound? But that would make non-judgmentalism no more than a cultural prejudice and no better than a cultural prejudice groundlessly asserting the superiority of the particular culture. Theory aside, the Lefts practical solution to the problem of multicultural relativism has been to opt for a soft multiculturalism that centers on affirming the value of the contribution of other cultures to an ongoing civilizational dialogue. Its a multiculturalism tamed to accompany the Lefts overarching vision of universal progress. The Lefts critics have often claimed derisorily that the Left believes in the perfectibility of human beings. If that was ever true, it hasnt been for a
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long time. Utopian transformation is not on the Lefts agenda, and the Marxist proposition that dialectical materialism would eventually achieve what utopian socialism could only imagine is no longer a serious element of the Lefts calculations about the future. The Left now gets by on the more classically liberal faith in improvement in the habits of individuals and in the justice of society as a whole. There is no certain endpoint, whether perfection in the form of universal satisfaction with perfect equality or something short of that. But a permanent condition of the potential for improvement seems reasonable to the Left, even if it occasionally or often entails two steps forward followed by one step (if not two steps) back. The Left also has long held a low opinion of critics of the Left, not least as impediments to the improvement of society the Left Few on the Left wants to engender. The Left regards its evolving egalitarian agenda as self-evidently reasonable. Few are willing to on the Left are willing to grant that their critics are grant that their likewise reasonable in other words, that the Left has anything to gain from taking its critics seriously. critics are That leaves the Left in search of an explanation for reasonable in why it hasnt won over its critics. The Left has three main explanations. The first is ignorance, in the other words, sense that its critics lack sufficient knowledge of that the Left has how society could be improved and why what the anything to gain Left seeks would constitute improvement. For this category, there may be hope in the form of remedial from taking its education. The second is stupidity; its critics are simcritics seriously. ply unable to understand superior wisdom when they face it. There is little hope for them, alas. The third is venality that its critics know better but seek to defend their position of personal privilege anyway. The only way to deal with these critics is to defeat them politically. Having traced the principal continuities in what it has meant and means to be Left, we arrive at the inescapable conclusion that the Left regards its desire for greater equality as the source of the moral superiority of its position and therefore of its members. Although this sense of superiority may seem out of keeping with a passion for equality, it is not. The first reason is that equality is a work in progress. Perhaps there will come a day when people are sufficiently equal and content in their equality that the demands of justice will no longer require anyone on the Left to speak up. At such a time, everyone will be on the Left (in the view of the Left), meaning there will be no further resistance to improvement. But thats far-fetched, if it is achievable at all. In the meantime, leadership is necessary. The Left provides it, and the fact that a quality of superiority attaches to leaders over their followers (not to mention their opponents) need not constitute an offense against equality. In a deeper sense, however, the Lefts view of its own superiority serves notice that a passion for greater equality has limits. Rare is the vision of
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equality that requires its adherents to debilitate themselves in order to achieve it. To pay more in taxes, certainly, but not to render oneself abject in the sense of the poorest of the global poor, nor of those so mentally ill they require institutionalized care. The Left mostly chooses to leave the limits of its egalitarianism unexamined, perhaps because so much more in the way of the promotion of equality can be done and needs to be done before society even begins to rub up against those limits.
hough largely unspoken, the Lefts implicit acceptance of limiting principles for its egalitarianism now constitutes one of its key strengths and is the first element that distinguishes Left 3.0 from its progenitors. The acceptance of limiting principles allows the Left to avoid the temptation of radicalism. It keeps the Left in the system. The Lefts ambition is to obtain majority political support no more, no less. The Revolution has been canceled. The system is the solution. The Democratic Party is the sole legitimate representative of the aspirations of Left 3.0. There are, no doubt, a few aging radicals who still dream of sweeping the whole capitalist system away and starting over. But never in the history of the Left have such views been so marginal. Once the vanguard of the Left, the radicals are now its pets. Violence on the Left seems largely confined to scuffles during demonstrations, and indeed, the Left is now heavily vested in the proposition that the real danger of political violence comes from the extreme right. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, casts a longer shadow now than any remnant of the Weather Underground. The last thing Left 3.0 would wish to be thought is dangerous. Meanwhile, the publications to which one might once have turned for radical social criticism and edgy political judgments now seem largely indistinguishable from Democratic Party propaganda sheets. The counterculture of the 1960s is now the culture as such, and no one thinks anyone has sold out. Pop stars vie with one another for gigs at Democratic Party soirees. Kelly Clarkson killed it at President Obamas second inaugural. Hollywood celebrities are no longer blacklisted members of the Communist Party but guests of Vanity Fair at the White House Correspondents Association dinner afterparty. The Democratic Partys oneness with Left 3.0 is a new phenomenon. Political scientists tell the story of the great sorting of the political parties. There used to be such creatures as liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats; considered as a whole, the parties were less ideological. That in turn meant accommodating diverse interests, which led to dissatisfaction on both Left and Right. On the Democratic side, Bill Clinton staked his political fortunes on his claim to be a New Democrat, by which he meant: not a
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left-wing Democrat. Although everyone on the Left loves him now, its not because he continues to draw a distinction between himself and his partys left wing. On the contrary, in 2003, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination promising to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party an explicit repudiation of Clintons Third Way centrism and triangulation between the gop-controlled Congress and old-school liberal Democrats. Running for president in 200708, Hillary Clinton was certainly not representing herself as New Democrat redux. When she lost to Barack Obama anyway, whatever remained of the New Democrat sensibility dissolved harmlessly into the mainstream of the party. Obamas appointment of her as his secretary of state was (among other things) an The disappear- insurance policy against a New Democrat resurgence around the figure of outsider Hillary Clinton. ance of a The disappearance of a powerful, avowedly cenpowerful, trist element was essential in making the party congenial to Left 3.0. Conservatives have long claimed avowedly that the United States is a center-right country, and centrist element for many years, many Democrats believed them. was essential in Efforts to reach the center of the electorate often alienated the Left, giving rise to such phenomena as making the Ralph Naders 2000 third-party candidacy for president which arguably cost Al Gore the election in Democratic Florida. When the party in 2004 nominated John Party congenial Kerry, a candidate sufficiently congenial to the Left to Left 3.0 . to avoid consequential defections from the Democratic cause, he came up short in the center. The notion of an invincibly center-right electorate was anathema to the emerging Left 3.0. A key moment in its reconciliation with the Democratic Party was the latters abandonment of policies designed with a center-right electorate in mind. For the foreseeable future, the party would lay claim to the center not on the basis of adopting positions to appease moderates and independents, but on the basis of winning more than 50 percent of the vote on election day for candidates congenial to Left 3.0 and garnering majority public support for positions congenial to Left 3.0. The role of Barack Obama in this transformation can hardly be overstated. His 2008 campaign was intentionally vague, promising post-partisan transformation and renewal in a time of economic crisis highly conducive to the hopes of a challenger to the incumbent party in the White House. But in the primaries, he was also the candidate untainted by the whiff of anything New Democrat. He was a vocal opponent of the Iraq war, and his voting record in the Senate, though short, did nothing of consequence to displease the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. And if there was not much content to his 2008 message, neither did he give the Left any particular reason to worry about his intentions.
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Obama staked his legacy on patching the largest remaining hole in the New Deal social welfare safety net. Guaranteed lifelong access to affordable health care has been at the top of the Lefts policy agenda since fdr. Bill Clinton tried, failed, gave up for good. Obama would not give up. Despite an economy that continued to sputter contrary to his own expectations and those of his advisors, despite public opinion polls that early turned against the reform effort, despite ominous electoral signals, and despite having to abandon the Lefts cherished public option, he persisted. And he prevailed. It was a political risk on the order of the one Ronald Reagan took in cooperating with Fed Chairman Paul Volckers successful effort to wring inflation out of the economy in 198182 at the cost of a brutal recession. Obama lost Democrats their House majority in doing so. Not that they thought it would happen, but in the view Obama staked of many on the Left, health care reform on the scale his legacy on Obama was able to achieve, though imperfect, would be worth losing a House majority. The patching remainder of Obamas first term would be a domesthe largest tic policy desert if not worse, entailing various capitremaining ulations to the gop, at least in the eyes of many on the Left at the time. But he had his signature hole in the achievement, subject to validation by the Supreme New Deal Court and the ability to sustain enough Democratic political power in Washington to prevent its repeal. social welfare Obama seemed quickly to understand that the safety net. only way to vindicate his decision was his reelection. And possibly out of a necessity but certainly out of personal preference and choice, he decided that a Clintonian pivot to the center was completely out of the question. What he needed to obtain a majority was a coalition that consolidated the Left and built from there. The decision he made was, in effect, to propose himself as the greatest liberal president since fdr. He would not run as a liberal Democrat, but as a voice of reason and common sense whose every utterance would happen to be pleasing to the Left of 3.0. The capstone of this may have been his decision that the time had come to endorse marriage equality for gays. Obama was the vehicle for the mainstreaming of the Left. And it turned out that Left 3.0 needed him as well. It will come as a surprise to some conservatives, but until now, the Left has lacked a sense of itself as a political winner. The legacy of George McGovern was large. Before Obama, the Left never really got its first choice among aspirants for the Democratic presidential nomination (to say nothing of those on the Left who would have been unable to bring themselves to support even the most liberal Democrat). Walter Mondale in 1984 was an orthodox, liberal old Democrat but hardly an inspiration for the Left. The Left made its peace with Kerry, who did nothing to offend, but the real reason the party picked him was his supposed electability against George W. Bush. But with
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Obamas against-the-odds nomination in 2008, the Left got a taste of victory. When Obama won in November, it was intoxicating. With Obamas reelection, victory has become a bit of an addiction.
Policy ambition
ith newfound success for its political ambitions, the Left has correspondingly attenuated its policy ambitions. This is the second major feature of Left 3.0. The Left has not changed the direction it wants to go, but it has changed its timeframe for expectations of success. When a Democratic president and Democratic congressional leaders are doing as much as they can to advance a Democratic agenda sufficiently progressive to satisfy the Left, these politicians will have the support of Left 3.0 even if they do not succeed. Democratic leaders by and large understand and accept this bargain. With a gop-controlled House, there are limits to what a Democratic president can do. Left 3.0 is not unsympathetic. But it demands a fight. And there is an emerging corollary of considerable interest. Health care reform is once again the decisive precedent. The next time a Democratic president has a Democratic Congress to work with, Left 3.0 will expect major achievement to show for it. Performance on the level of what Bill Clinton achieved with a Democratic Congress (or for that matter, of what George W. Bush achieved with six years of gop control of Congress) will not be acceptable. When government is divided, you must fight as best you can; when government is yours, you must win. Its impossible to say what the Democratic Party/Left 3.0 agenda will be when Democratic political control returns to Washington (which could happen as soon as 2015). But anyone with a decent political imagination can list some possibilities: In the view of Left 3.0, a value-added tax would certainly be worth losing another Democratic House majority, for example. So would a move to a single-payer health care system. (Republicans might then find themselves in the position of defending the state exchanges Obamacare created.) Mandatory paid parental leave, perhaps? Ambitious but achievable policy reform when the political circumstances are ripe and its Left 3.0 that will adjudicate ripeness is now the sine qua non for the Lefts full and unhesitating support for the Democratic Party. If its unforthcoming, the deal will be off, and the era of Left 3.0 will come to a close. It is possible that there is an unsustainable premise at the heart of Left 3.0/Democratic Party solidarity. Hitherto, it has seemed as if the American economy has been able to deliver high rates of economic growth relative to most other advanced economies, thus supporting high levels of job creation. One wonders if an economy growing at a decent clip wont also be necessary to sustain the ambitions of Left 3.0 and whether success in acting on those ambitions might have an adverse effect on the economic growth that is
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its precondition. If this is so, the Democratic Party could actually do itself a favor by losing from time to time, ushering in brief periods of market-based reform. The alternative would seem to be stealth reform by Democrats in power themselves, a phenomenon not uncommon in the advanced welfare states of Europe. The willingness of Left 3.0 to tolerate such stealth marketbased reform has not yet been fully put to the test although one must note that the unhappiest moment for Left 3.0 to date came when Obama quickly cut a deal following the Democratic losses in the 2010 election to extend the Bush-era tax rates for two more years. (Obama, for his part, was far-sighted enough to understand that he would get his way on an increase in top tax rates following his reelection on which, once again, everything depended.)
Organization and media culture
eft 3.0 also differs from its previous versions in terms of organization. Apart from the Communist Party, and there even so, organization has not really been the Lefts strong suit. Private sector union membership has been declining for decades and stood at 7.2 million in 2011. Public sector union members are more numerous, at 7.6 million. But organization and mobilization on a mass scale have been beyond the Lefts reach. But perhaps the 2012 election changes that. The Obama campaign in Chicago was a masterpiece of political technology in terms of identifying voters and ensuring they got to the polls. The challenge here was considerable. The Obama campaign knew that its candidates support had declined from his 2008 levels. It knew that he was going to lose among independents. There was margin for error in the size of the Obama victory in 2008, but Obama would need to become the rare incumbent reelected with less popular support than he won with four years before. The Obama campaigns success appears to have been comprehensive: The campaign knew with precision what kind of turnout it needed to generate; knew in real time how well it was faring in reaching voters; and had an effective strategy for delivering their votes, whether through early or absentee voting or election-day operations. The Obama campaign spent unprecedented sums polling, even drawing ridicule from some observers, not all of them Republicans. Yet the result seems to have been knowledge of the electorates intentions and habits on an unprecedented scale. To better appreciate the level of success, let us briefly examine failure on a comparable scale. By all accounts, Mitt Romney awoke on election day in the firm conviction that he was going to be elected president. Nor was this said to be some inner delusion he was suffering. He was apparently wellbriefed by his Boston campaign staffers, who apparently did indeed believe they were working to expand the map of his electoral college victory in
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the campaigns final days. Florida and Virginia had long been in his column; Ohio was all set; Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and perhaps even Pennsylvania were in play. Romney lost all those states. His campaign was completely wrong about where it stood with voters in states he had to carry, and was accordingly unaware of the levels of turnout it needed to generate. Chicago understood what was going on and was therefore able to master events. Boston never had a clue. But perhaps we should question whether the one-off success of a political campaign is sufficient evidence of a new capacity for mass organization on the part of the Left. Perhaps. But it wasnt just one successful campaign; it was two three if one differentiates the 2008 priChicago mary and general election campaigns. And by all accounts, the political technology of the reelection understood campaign built on that of the 2008 campaigns. The what was going continuity of the data base and of the data mining operations was noteworthy. Why would anyone dison and was mantle such a resource? On the contrary, the real therefore able question now is what else it can do. How does one modify it for use in congressional elections, for to master example? Mid-term elections are even more depenevents. Boston dent on turnout than general elections. Will it now never had be possible for the Democratic Party to reach every Obama voter in swing congressional districts with a clue. targeted messages explaining the importance of Democratic control of Congress? The Romney campaign left no such legacy. Its unclear that Republicans understand how far behind in political technology they may be falling. On other fronts pertaining to organization, Left 3.0 has caught up. More than a decade ago, senior Democratic strategists and funders deliberately set out to replicate some of the structures and practices the Right has long employed to advance a conservative political agenda and conservative electoral prospects. New non-profit think tanks sprouted on the Left, some specializing in particular policy areas, some striving for general influence. In addition to the traditional 501(c)3 educational institutions funded by taxdeductible contributions, the 501(c)4 category of non-profit allows for explicitly political activity, including lobbying and electioneering, so long as it is connected with the promotion of social welfare in some fashion. Contributions are not tax deductible, but neither do organizations have to disclose their donor lists. Left 3.0 funder networks now gather periodically to strategize where best to deploy resources. Money for the cause appears to be abundant. Activists meet to share information and coordinate plans. Opinion journalists offer up articles and blog posts and tweets. None of this is unique to the Left, of course. But to the extent that the emerging Left 3.0 considered itself lagging
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Left 3.0
efforts on the Right what the Left likes to call the right-wing noise machine Left 3.0 has now fully caught up. Interestingly, conservative institutions the Left has now replicated generally tell the story of their own founding as an effort to counter a dominant leftleaning culture. The first generation of neoconservatives of the 1970s liked to call it the New Class the post-industrial category of white-collar professional workers whose labor consists almost entirely of the manipulation of symbols, from Hollywood to Harvard Yard, from Madison Avenue to the newsroom floor, from the Ford Foundation to the network anchor desk. This culture was distinctly left-leaning; it came to include many alumni of the New Left now gone mainstream. Conservatives concluded that they would never get a fair hearing through the filter of the New Class, and so they set out to create their own institutions for the development and promulgation of their ideas. With Left 3.0, the counter to the dominant culture has now been countered. Meanwhile, though the mainstream media no longer have oligopolistic control over the flow of information, they retain considerable influence, and are if anything more openly left-leaning than they were thirty years ago. The new media environment has been very favorable to Left 3.0. Vibrant websites abound, some of them extraordinarily influential: The netroots have been a formidable force. The sorting of the political parties into left and right has an analogue in the sorting of the consumption of political opinion. It has never been easier to avoid encountering opinions with which one might disagree. The effect of this on the Left side of the political spectrum has helped promote the solidarity of Left 3.0 and the Democratic Party: The victors in the internal political debate were those advocating for the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Left 3.0 is sophisticated technologically and entirely at home in the digital age and its wikiculture of affinity-based social networks. The Right enjoys no less vibrant a media culture, but as the respective experiences of Chicago and Boston demonstrate, lags in the ability to exploit the new environment for political gain.
hus left 3.0: a newer Left in solidarity with the political aspirations of the Democratic Party; realistic about fulfilling its policy ambitions but insistent on obtaining the most that a given correlation of political forces can deliver; organizationally sophisticated and fully funded; and part and parcel of the digital age. As the broader process of the sorting of the electorate has made the Democratic Party more liberal, so too has it made the Republican Party more conservative. Unity, however, has eluded the gop. The conservative movements alliance with and alienation from the gop is a longstanding toand-fro that shows no sign of abating any time soon.
The divided gop
Tod Lindberg
At this writing, the nexus of talk radio and the Tea Party is making life miserable for establishment Republicans, who for the most part consider themselves to be staunch conservatives in their own right. The party is deeply divided over social issues. Abortion, for example, may be a politically useful issue to Republicans, or at least a neutral issue, when the subject is parental notification or late-term abortions. But if the party persists in nominating candidates who would ban abortion in cases of rape or incest, the political costs will be high. It doesnt matter that realistically speaking, such candidates have no chance of their views on abortion prevailing nationwide. Its the thought that counts. The theological justification for the position makes no sense to anyone not already operating within the same theological framework. Democrats in conjunction with Left 3.0 will be unsparing in holding the entire Republican Party to account for such views. The changing demographics of the electorate are also inauspicious for the gop. The country is less white than it used to be. The Democratic Party has discovered that it can win nationally without the support of white men, a fact which in turn lessens the need to try to fashion appeals to them. This is pleasing to Left 3.0, which views such appeals as unnecessarily centrist. Republicans, meanwhile, have not yet found a reliable way to make up for the votes lost to demographic change. Generational differences further complicate the demographic picture. Younger people, its well known, mostly dont have a problem with gay marriage. When Obama switched sides on the issue, it was telling that he cited the influence of the views of his own children. He seemed to be telling people quite consciously that its ok to change your mind, to move with the times. His personalization of the issue was perhaps marred by the likelihood that he has secretly been in favor of gay marriage since the subject first came up, but thought political viability demanded opposition. But perhaps then his story serves as a signal from Left 3.0, of which Obama is member-inchief, that its time for other Democratic politicians to drop their feigned opposition as well. Support for marriage equality, on the other hand, is highly unlikely to be an issue on which people change their minds as they get older. A united conservative movement is unlikely any time soon to find itself at one with the Republican Party in the manner in which Left 3.0 is at one with the Democratic Party. First, one would need a united conservative movement, which is difficult to envision in its own right, leaving aside its potential for melding with the gop. In a broader sense, though, the Left differs from the Right in knowing where it wants to go: in the direction of more equality. Conservatives mostly know where they want to stay: in conditions in which liberty can thrive and the market can work its wonders in creating prosperity. Since the push in the direction of equality will sometimes impinge on liberty and on the market in ways that people will notice and object to, conservative reform will once again have its day. But today belongs to Left 3.0.
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The Post-Soviet Twilight

By Bruce Pitcairn Jackson
n november 16, 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel met reluctantly in Moscow for the annual German-Russian summit. It was widely reported that the summit, which had already been abbreviated to a few hours, did not go well. In reality, the summit succeeded in contradicting itself. Merkel infuriated Putin by suggesting that the imprisonment of the members of punk rock band Pussy Riot might be a human rights violation. This caused Putin to cite Pussy Riot as a case of illegal anti-Semitism which, he suggested, would be something Germany should understand. Despite the apparent political antagonism, the Summit concluded with German industrial giant Siemens signing a 2.5 billion euro deal with the Russian state railway for 675 railroad engines. What is so remarkable about the outcome Merkel playing to idealism, Putin pandering to nationalism, and both agreeing on trade is that the November summit was the product of a hard-fought strategic review in Berlin pitting human rights romantics against economic pragmatists. Neither
Bruce Pitcairn Jackson is the president of the Project on Transitional Democracies. He co-founded the U.S. Committee on nato and served as its president from 19952003 .
Bruce Pitcairn Jackson

side won nor altered the uncomfortable status quo in any recognizable way. Several weeks earlier, long-awaited parliamentary elections in Ukraine also produced a nonresult. Both Washington and Brussels had been waiting for at least a year for the conduct of the elections to reveal whether or not the Ukrainian authorities heard and understood the criticism of Kyivs atrocious political manners, including the selective prosecution of opposition figures. In the event, the elections were mostly free and fair but also imperfect and inconclusive. Yulia Timoshenko, the object of Western affection, remained in jail; and President Yanukovych, the object of our annoyance, remained in power. In retrospect, it is clear that sometime during the summer of 2008, between the failed nato Summit in the spring and the outbreak of the Russo-Georgian War that It is clear that August, consensus among Western leaders about sometime during what do with the post-Soviet world disappeared. Since then, Western policy towards the post-Soviet the summer of world and the Eastern Partners of the European 2008 , consensus Union has been characterized by the universal disamong Western satisfaction of the West with its own policy. The dispiriting and inconclusive stasis of this years leaders about German-Russian summit and the October elections in Ukraine are grudgingly accepted as both the post-Soviet metaphor for our times and confirmation that we world simply are going nowhere. How we came to this slough of disappeared. geopolitical despond and the twists and turns of how policy failed is an interesting story. The first chapter might well be entitled Irrational Exuberance, referring to the initial period of enthusiasm for the nascent post-Soviet democracies beginning with the Rose Revolution in 2004. In that year, American politicians rushed to praise the impetuous President Misha Saakashvili and Georgian democracy with the urgency and decorum of shoppers in Walmart the day after Thanksgiving. When the Orange Revolution came along a year later, not to be outdone, Prime Minister Tony Blair offered eu membership to Ukraine days after the inauguration of President Yushchenko. By 2007, however, the bloom was already off the rose, at least in Georgia. Despite President Bushs uplifting rhetoric on the inevitability of democratic transformation, his speech in Tbilisis Freedom Square had a fin de sicle quality. The president did not look up from his text when someone threw an old Soviet grenade at the stage during his speech, which due to its age and shoddy manufacture did not explode, but bounced around unnoticed in the crowd until a security guard tossed it into the derelict Soviet-era subway. The poorly-fused grenade clattering into the darkness of a forgotten Soviet subway in the Caucasus is as good a metaphor for the new period of disappointment as there is readily to hand. President Bushs propensity to overstate his case, particularly on the transformative powers of the American
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model of democracy, ended up highlighting the fragmentation that was occurring in the policies of the West towards the post-Soviet world. By the nato summit in Bucharest in April 2008, the European allies led by Germany blocked the aspirations of both Georgia and Ukraine to begin preparations for nato membership. Any possible illusion that our policy to support revolutionary democratic change in the leading post-Soviet democracies was working (or could work if continued) ended when Georgia and Russia went to war in August 2008. When the shooting starts with Russia, there is little chance that a stable and prosperous democracy will be the result. By 2009, the eu had conjured up the Eastern Partnership, which was intended to compensate for natos and the eus new lack of interest in post-Soviet states with a vague Arguably the and insubstantial program of association with only Eastern European institutions. The new American president policy still succeeded in dampening the enthusiasm of Central and Eastern European states for militant democracy standing in 2013 support inside the former Soviet Union by announcis the Eastern ing a reset with Russia, which up to this point had been the object of a thinly disguised neo-containPartnership or ment strategy. These partial policies had two things what remains in common: They dissatisfied their putative beneficiaries, and they brought little comfort or influence of it. in the post-Soviet world to their authors in Washington or Brussels. Neither reset with Russia nor association with the rest of the former Soviet Union had the slightest effect on the internal character or national development of the post-Soviet semi-democracies. Arguably, the only Eastern policy still standing in 2013 is the Eastern Partnership or what remains of it. There is no doubt that between 2008 and today few believed that Western policy was bearing fruit in post-Soviet democracies or that these democracies were developing in the manner of the Visegrad, Baltics, or even the leading democracies in the Balkans, such as Slovenia and Croatia. As a kind of disquiet and uncertainty took hold in the policy community, yet another nagging question arose. Perhaps, the inefficacy of our Eastern policy was not a problem in policy development or execution after all. Perhaps, we had missed something more fundamental about the nature of post-Soviet states and their aptitude for political development and European integration. This would explain why we cannot predict or influence the behavior of President Putin or President Yanukovych and are regularly surprised by such ordinary events as a parliamentary election in Georgia. Our interpretation of the political culture and dynamics of what used to be Soviet space was simply wrong. The problem of the interpretation of Russia and the semi-democracies and autocracies which surround it lies at the heart of the Eastern Question

of the West. And, a misunderstanding of political culture and its importance explains our myopia. Samuel Huntington among many other historians observed that a vast chasm separates liberal, legalistic, Protestant, parliamentarian Western Europe from the authoritarian, oligarchic, Orthodox, presidential systems of Slavic Europe and Eurasia.1 It is hardly a clash of civilizations, but more of a thermocline of two political cultures of greatly different internal temperatures resting against each other. Happily, it seems that vastly different political cultures even in proximity can be very stable over long periods of time. But this equilibrium works best if each culture is isolated to some extent from the other and tends to break down when exogenous shocks threaten the weaker system. For example, what happens to the major post-Soviet states if a global recession creates an existential crisis for their economic system? In economic or political crises, the political culture of these states takes on great significance.
After the collapse of empire
n interpreting the behavior of formerly communist or post-conflict nations, we often reason from our 20th-century victories over fascism in 1945 and Soviet totalitarianism in 198991 that states once free to choose will naturally turn to European models of democracy as they did in Western Europe in the postwar period and in Central and Eastern Europe in the postCold War era. But thats not always the way it has happened in Europes past. Norman Davies in his Vanished Kingdoms tells the fascinating story of what happened after Alaric sacked Rome in 410 ad.2 As it turns out, Alaric set up the Visigothic Kingdom in Aquitaine, France, which was built almost exclusively on the political culture, system of organization, and laws of the very Roman Empire Alaric had just helped destroy. In short, after the barbarians sack Rome, they try to rebuild an inferior model. In the event, the Visigoths lasted for about ninety years, but it was not for another 500 years that the fading political culture of Rome was superseded by a distinctly French culture. Davies calls this extended aftermath of the Roman Fall the post-Roman twilight. Perhaps, we should be thinking about the implications of the post-Soviet twilight, wherein the depredations of Lukashenko and the maladroit lumbering of Yanukovych are merely the initial barbarian phase. If we were to adopt Daviess model, we have not even begun the extended phase during which the political culture of Soviet Moscow will fade into a wasteland over the centuries.
1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993).
2. Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (Viking, 2012), 3031.
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Of course, this is an exaggeration. But it serves to illustrate that democracies do not always pop up unaided like tulips in the spring. There have been post-imperial transitions in European history much longer and much gloomier than the recent transition from Warsaw Pact to nato.
The state of post-Soviet states

f we look at the condition of post-Soviet states, they may have improved from the depths of the early 1990s, but in many cases they have not recovered to the levels of the Soviet period, and none are converging with European levels of gdp per capita at the rate of Poland or the Baltic states. Belarus is in the worst shape politically and economically since Stalin. It is completely a Securitate state with a brutal, clownish dictator. The North Caucasus may be even worse and has slipped beyond the control of Moscow and into an ungovernable hodgepodge of warlords, radical Islamic fundamentalism, criminal trafficking and systemic poverty. Azerbaijan, despite its extraordinary wealth from oil and gas, has turned its back on European reform and evinces no interest in free trade or association with European institutions. Increasingly, the Azerbaijan of Ilham Aliyev is little more than a hereditary autocracy propped up by petrodollars. Significantly, the Aliyev dynasty derives its power and legitimacy directly from the career of Heydar Aliyev in the Soviet kgb and Politburo. Armenia remains isolated, flirting with political violence and the suppression of alternative political parties. Its unit of political measure seems to be clans with guns. Georgia, despite eight years of reform and the recent peaceful change of government in free and fair elections, remains very much in doubt. The good czarism of Misha Saakashvili and his party, which succeeded in reforming, modernizing, and Westernizing Georgias economy and political system, seems to have given way to the disorderly populism of the eccentric Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, who thus far has shown no understanding of due process or political tolerance. Of the minor post-Soviet states only Moldova which happily does not share a border with Russia seems promising (relative to the others) and intent on inching along towards Europe. But the Communist Party still remains its largest political party 20 years after the death of the communist system, and the Moldovan political establishment was unable to seat a president in office for almost two years after the recent elections. Clearly, these countries are not the wholesome children of colorful democratic revolutions. And the Orange and Rose Revolutions themselves seem far less than glorious today. It would be difficult to argue, as George Bush did in the Freedom Square speech, that democracy in these countries is inevitable

and that the driving force for political change is the universal belief in individual freedom. Indeed, one is forced to the opposite conclusion. Variations on the authoritarian state (or vertical of power) seem to be the political model for postSoviet states. Each state seems to have adapted elements of Soviet culture to its pre-existing national culture, in effect draping Russias old nationalities problem with the culture and inefficiency of the ussr in the 1970s. The same frozen conflicts remain: In the case of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, they get even colder, and in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, they threaten to get much hotter. Political liberty and dissent are constrained by secret police, tax police, libel laws, or bans on ngos throughout the postSoviet world. But this is what the post-Soviet twilight could be expected to look like: remnants of an autocratic political culture jutting like shards of glass upwards through the torn fabric of the Russian and Soviet empires. When we examine the two major powers in the post-Soviet world, Russia and Ukraine, the situation is less chaotic but potentially more dangerous. Among the minor states, the post-imperial twilight has brought a persistent disorder and insecurity, a relative isolation from European and global politics, severe limits on economic growth (excepting Azerbaijan) and political systems that limit individual civil liberties and human possibilities. In the major states, however, there is a superficial stability. There are significant populations and resources, and both Russia and Ukraine are connected to international markets and politics. In Central Asia, the murder of an opposition leader is a nonevent. In Kyiv, however, a slight increase in the price of natural gas is a European crisis. The failure of Russia or Ukraine could produce secondary effects which could harm the Euro-Atlantic, and this is what seems to be happening.
The economic crisis in Russia

van krastev wrote recently that in 1991 the Soviet order was paralyzed by the deadly combination of political stability and economic inefficiency.3 Much the same thing could be said of Russia today. The political paralysis combining the Putin-Medvedev duopoly with systemic corporate mismanagement have recapitulated the economic conditions of 20 years ago and threaten the breakdown of the post-Soviet system. The negative effects of the second fall of a Soviet-derived economic system could dwarf the political collapse of 1991, which marked the end of the Cold War. As Krastev reminds us, the West has made considerable interpretive mistakes in assessing Putins Russia. We assumed that the outcome of Putins
3. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, Putinism Under Siege: An Autopsy of Managed Democracy, Journal of Democracy 23:2 (July 2012).
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autocratic tendencies would be a strong autocracy, when in fact Russia is today only a fragile state. We assumed that a powerful Russia would assert its strength, when it has only threatened to assert power and more often than not resorted to gestures of power, such as the imprisonment of Pussy Riot and symbolic photo-ops with leather-clad motorcycle gangs. The much-publicized Moscow middle class at protest is far from an exploited minority or a political class victimized by the ruling party. As Krastev observes, the Kremlin casually manages the Russian people but ruthlessly exploits Russias natural resources. This is why President Putin regards Gazprom, Rosneft, Rusal, veb, vtb, and other corporations involved in the development, export and financing of Russias energy and mineral resources as strategic industries.4 Post-Soviet Russia and its rise to global influence Post-Soviet were built on the exploitation of resources by stateRussia and its directed companies. In a manner of speaking, Putin dropped the ideology of the Soviet imperial system rise to global but kept its political culture in pursuit of a primitive influence were form of mercantile capitalism which became the built on the post-Soviet economic system. When Krastev observes that modern Russia is Putins nation, he exploitation of means (a) Russia is inseparable from the Putins perresources by sonal reinterpretation of Soviet political culture (in much the same way that Misha Saakashvili was state companies. until very recently seen to personify modern Georgia) and (b) Putin is the architect of both managed democracy and (more significantly) the system of state-oligarchic capitalism unique to Russia. Like all twilight systems, the same flaws that caused the imperial system to collapse and which remain embedded in its political successor will cause the post-imperial system to collapse as well. As Stephen Kotkin wrote, Russia has inherited everything that has caused the Soviet collapse as well as the collapse itself.5 And this is what is going on in Russia at the moment. Putin, Medvedev, and Russias financial elite are confronting an economic crisis for which its strategic industries and federal budget are unprepared. The inheritance of post-Soviet Russia included a well-educated and calculating elite of kgb-trained siloviki, a centralized, resourced-based economy, and a business elite capable of only theft and the simulation of management. With these fragments of Soviet political culture, the Kremlin built a hugely wealthy oligarchic economy which threw off enough profits to finance the post-Soviet state. At the moment, 60 percent of state revenues come from
4. For a discussion of Russias industry, see Thane Gustafson, Oils Well That Ends Well for Russia, Foreign Affairs (NovemberDecember 2012); and Anders Aslund, How Putin Is Turning Russia Into One Big Enron, Moscow Times (November 21, 2012). 5. Cited in Krastev and Holmes, Putinism Under Siege: An Autopsy of Managed Democracy.
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taxes and income from Gazprom, Rosneft, and other fossil-fuel corporations.6 This economic system can function only for as long as the profits of aging, mismanaged strategic industries generate enough profits to fund the lifestyles of their oligarchic owners and the social needs of 143 million Russians. And in the last decade, the decline of commodity prices, increased competition, and the rising costs of Russias regions have overtaken profits. Russia has 39 million pensioners and eighteen million other recipients of state aid. Federal transfers to regions require almost ten percent of gdp, an increase of $58 billion over 2007. By contrast, Gazproms total profit in 2011 was $44 billion and was down dramatically in 2012, to roughly $32 billion. Overall gas production in Russia has fallen since 2001, and these figures do not reflect the impact of oil prices at $85 per barrel or of U.S. shale gas, which will likely create a world spot price of approximately $6 per unit, or $2 under Russias cost of production.7 In short, the slowing of a post-imperial state is already beginning at the economic level. It remains to be seen whether or not Putin can change the twilight political culture and restructure the wealth-creating industries quickly enough to avert systemic collapse.
The political crisis in Ukraine
n ukraine, there are many of the same facets of Soviet political culture, but they have been assembled in a Ukrainian way to produce dysfunction at the political level rather an economic breakdown at least so far. Despite the lack of imf bailout funds, staggering gas prices, the absence of eu structural funds and or even an agreement with the eu on free trade, Ukraines economy still functions. Grain, steel, coal, and pipes still get to market, and there is always the option of siphoning natural gas from the gas transit system. The same cannot be said for the political class, whose dysfunction is breathtaking. Since the beginning of President Kuchmas first administration, the composition of the governing elite has been remarkably stable, including during the Yushenko/Timoshenko period after the Orange Revolution. Both President Yushenko and Prime Minister Timoshenko came up through the previous Kuchma/Lazarenko administration and governed in much the same way as the rest of the elite: with a combination of populist rhetoric, questionable financial deals, redistribution of property by the state, selective prosecution, and consummate skill in playing audiences in East and West off against each other.
7. Mikhail Dmitriev and Daniel Treisman, The Other Russia: Discontent Grows in the Hinterlands, Foreign Affairs (SeptemberOctober 2012).
6. Will Englund and Kathy Lally, Cumbersome Gazprom Losing Its Clout, Washington Post (September 23, 2012).
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Throughout the 20 years of post-Soviet Ukraine, a form of the Regions Party has won the vast majority of elections and won again on October 28, 2012, convincingly and legally (although the latter is not as important in Kyiv as one would like it to be.) The permanence of a Regions majority reflects the consistency of a political culture with a distinct hierarchy of interests: First, the constituencies of the oligarchic business groups insist that the government provide political stability for them to pursue business and to ensure that the largess of government is divided evenly between the regions. Second, they want the state to continue to provide subsidies, pensions, and basic services to ordinary Ukrainians to prevent social disorder, which is bad for business. Third, the oligarchs want protection for themselves from the power and greed of the state, for which they are prepared to pay by ceding claims to the Russian gas trade from which Since the start the governing elite can enrich itself. of President Under President Kuchma, this system worked most of the time, albeit imperfectly, but it began to Kuchmas first break down during Yushenkos and Timoshenkos administration, endlessly acrimonious political divorce. The combination of Yushenkos near mystical refusal to man- the composition age Ukrainian democracy and Timoshenkos inabiliof the governing ty to win at the ballot box without massive spending elite has been on social welfare and electoral giveaways set the stage for the explosion over a controversial gas deal quite stable. with Russia. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that the contract then-Prime Minister Timoshenko agreed to in January 2009 with then-Prime Minister Putin was a tipping point for post-Soviet Ukraine. Under the pressure of the approaching presidential elections, yet another Timoshenko-Yanukovych rematch, Timoshenko agreed to pay $480 per thousand cubic meters of natural gas for ten years on a take the gas or pay for it anyway basis. This price is by far the highest in Europe and compares unfavorably to the range of prices between $350 and $320 for Germany and Poland. In effect, Russia picked up a $60 billion windfall over a decade on European market prices, and Ukrainian business picked up an annual bill for $6 billion in additional energy costs.8 In the event, despite short-term discount financial concessions from Russia, substantial funds from the imf redirected into populist spending prior to the election, and promises from Vladimir Putin to campaign for Timoshenko personally, the Orange reformers lost the 2010 presidential elections by three percent. Obviously, the gas deal and Timoshenkos political defeat were the necessary ingredients for the ensuing political crisis,
8. Ukrainian domestic gas prices are heavily subsidized by the government, to the fury of the imf. Since prices cannot be increased on households without bringing down the government, any increase in gas prices must lead to even greater government deficits or be passed along to business as an additional cost.
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which led to her prosecution and conviction and to the alienation of the European Union from the new Yanukovych government. But, perhaps unintentionally, the dramatic rise in gas prices began the breakdown of the postimperial political system, which President Yanukovych presumably realized on his first day as president. First, with gas prices around $480 for the next ten years, the oligarchic business groups can no longer make money, stability or not.9 Second, with a sliding economy and the alienation of both Europe and the imf, the government in Kyiv cannot meet the social needs of average Ukrainians (although the government papered over this shortfall through the parliamentary elections.) Finally, with gas prices falling and Russia nearly finished bypassing the leaky and corrupt Ukrainian pipelines, the state cannot enrich itself and, therefore, begins to steal from foreign investors and then from Ukrainian businesses, including prominent members of the Regions Party. Here again the foundation of the postCold War Ukrainian state is starting to give way. The political culture which this generation of Ukrainian leaders inherited from the Soviet Empire proved an unreliable basis for a political system bordering on the prosperous and politically powerful European Union. Increasingly, the Ukrainian government cannot meet the demands of its core constituencies nor can it satisfy the conditions which Europeans require for access to their markets and institutions.
The irony of innocents abroad

f brussels is anything like Washington, the news that the two largest and most consequential states of the post-Soviet world are teetering at the precipice of collapse and disunion will probably not engender a period of soul-searching among policymakers. No one will ask, How could we have handled Russia and Ukraine so badly? What were we thinking? To the contrary, the democracy promoters and human rights advocates will be delighted that Yanukovychs Ukraine may fall apart, which means to them only that Yulia will be freed. Similarly, hardliners in my much maligned Republican Party will be delighted that Gazprom is going out of business and that the gates of Moscow will soon be thrown open to the victorious corporate armies of the West. They got what was coming to them, one might say.
9. Since Gazprom has negotiated all its contracts to date on a bilateral basis, it is difficult to compare prices between contracts. Ukrainian officials argue that if German-Polish composite prices ($350) are used and their additional transportation costs subtracted, then Ukraine should be paying $250. If Europes additional transportation costs of roughly $100 are added to Ukraines current gas prices ($480), then Ukraine is paying the European equivalent of $580. By contrast, Belarus is buying gas from Gazprom at $120. Very roughly speaking, Ukraine is paying Gazprom $100 to $200 over European spot prices. These pricing anomalies are the subject of the current anti-trust investigation of Gazprom by the European Commission.
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In terms of American and European opinion, our misplaced enthusiasm for the various hues of revolutionary change in 20045 has been replaced by a constituency for complacency about what happens to Ukraine and Russia. Obviously, this complacency is occasioned by our profound disappointment with political developments throughout the post-Soviet world, but it is reinforced by serious geo-economic factors. Particularly in Washington, there is the view that our newly discovered energy independence makes the postSoviet world less important, that our recessionary economy limits our interests in Europe, and that the rise of Asia commands our attention. And, lets be frank, Russia and Ukraine will do what they do regardless of what the eu and the United States do or say. It is this final thought that links the period of irrational exuberance to the current period of withdrawal and complacency. In the course of less than a decade, Western policymakers first believed that post-Soviet democracy would necessarily triumph and then just as firmly became convinced that post-Soviet decline and disintegration are inevitable. In the first instance, certainty was advanced as a reason for political action and, in the second instance, as the justification for diplomatic inaction. In both policies, we are misinterpreting the East. Ironically, the dire straits of the post-Soviet world are at a minimum bad news for Europe and United States, and conceivably a Great Recession in Russia and Ukraine could be disastrous for the West. Our influence over political developments in Ukraine will not increase; it will disappear altogether. A breakdown in Putins economy will not produce a more docile and studious Russia, it will produce a more unpredictable and dangerous neighbor. Here are but a few of the problems these developments pose for foreign policy and some of the ironies which attend to their resolution.
From reset to bailout?

or many years, most Americans thought that the weakening of Russia both politically and economically would be a pretty good thing. As this outcome becomes more than a theoretical possibility, it does not look nearly so attractive. A Great Recession inside Russia would return Russia to 199091. Russian energy supply would become more unreliable. Germany would have to write off its sizable foreign direct investment in the East, which would be a massive loss to Germany banks. eu-Russia trade would drop precipitously. (Note that U.S. shale gas wont arrive in Europe as lng until 2020. While the Unites States has shale gas reserves in abundance, addressing environmental concerns about increased domestic production, securing congressional approval to export, and reversing Americas lng terminals to liquefy gas rather than re-gasify will take years.) Europe will enter a more profound recession. The liberal middle class in Moscow and the technocratic oligarchs will emigrate immediately to their villas in Montenegro and Mayfair respectively. China may see its advantage

in the Far East. Certainly, the Chinese will claim the energy resources in Turkmenistan and Central Asia. Putin will have no choice but to nationalize the strategic industries to protect whats left, leaving investors in the ftse and nyse with massive losses. I could go on, but it only gets worse. The point is that if Lehman Brothers, which was a third-rate investment bank in New York, could throw the world economy into financial crisis, imagine the social and economic impact of a Gazprom or Rusal becoming insolvent. At a minimum, the loss of Russian energy, trade, and economic growth will put a gigantic hole in the Euro-Atlantic system and will retard recovery on both sides of the Atlantic. There are three obvious implications for policy and all three are doubleedged and not without irony: 1. At a time when the treatment of dissidents, usaid , and ngo s argues
that we should cancel the reset policy and stop talking with Putin altogether, we will have to step up engagement with Russia to protect our economic interests.
2 . At a time when the eu is finally ready to sue Gazprom for decades of

bullying market behavior, we are going to have to help Putin reform, restructure and dare I say it save Gazprom in some more efficient form. In short, the eu cannot sue Gazprom for as much as $13.1 billion at this point in history without slitting its own throat.10
3 . And, finally, just when market forces have finally begun to bring fairly
priced energy to European markets, we are going to have to think carefully about how to phase in an integrated market without dislocating major industries and millions of workers in the East.
In short, a functioning and prosperous twilight Russia wherein we suffer the annoyances of post-Soviet political culture and persistent corruption is far preferable to a moonless economic midnight stretching from the Carpathians to the border of China.
he irony of Ukraine is that no country has ever been the bemused recipient of more Western advice and sermonizing and proven less capable of an appropriate response. The single-minded pursuit of shared political values has neither engendered these values nor has it resulted in freeing former Prime Minister Timoshenko from prison. Although it may seem churlish to point out, while Yulia Timoshenko may be no worse than her prosecutors, she is certainly not much better. The question
10. Alexander Kilyakov, Gazprom May Lose Its Position, Russia: Beyond the Headlines (December 27, 2012).
From shared values to raw influence?
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for policy, however, is whether the release of Timoshenko, her return to politics, or even regime change in Kyiv is the most important objectives for Europe and the United States in Ukraine. No doubt selective political prosecution is offensive in Ukraine (although less so in Turkey and among many other of its practitioners). And no doubt, the arrest of a former prime minister is particularly egregious, although it is not deemed so in the case of Romania and Croatia, which have former prime ministers in jail. And certainly not in the United States, which has done the post-Soviet world one better by imprisoning former Ukrainian Prime Minister Lazarenko for the last ten years. The central point here lies in the problems associated with selecting a test case to summarize all the differences the West has with the lamentable political and human rights stanNo doubt, the dards of Ukraine. For one, an emotional case such as arrest of a Timoshenkos leads more often to the alienation of the West and the isolation of the country in question former prime than to a breakthrough on political values. Second, minister is it is rare to find a test case as black and white as the actions of the Burmese government against Aung particularly San Suu Kyi. As the recent Skadden Arps report on egregious, the Ukrainian judicial system makes clear, both the though not so governments prosecution and the conduct of Yulia Timoshenko as prime minister raise significant legal in Croatia problems. More to the point, the test case we have or Romania. chosen in Ukraine (or had forced upon us) has not served to accomplish our objectives or protect our interests. While Timoshenko should certainly be released, the West has other interests in Ukraine at least as important as the fate of a particular Ukrainian politician. After all, what is the point of making a woman whom we do not really know the threshold condition for larger interests which we have not yet defined and may not have? Interestingly, the European Commission may have been the first to break out of the straitjacket created by making the release of Yulia Timoshenko the precondition for any kind of engagement. On December 10, 2012, the Commission announced a subtly revised policy of engagement with Ukraine which confirmed that the eu would sign an Association Agreement and a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement at the Eastern Partnership Summit in November 2013 in Vilnius, Lithuania. Moreover, in certain circumstances pertaining to political values, the eu would allow the provisional application of parts of the free trade agreement before its signing and ratification. In the first week after the statement, President Barroso spoke at length with President Yanukovych twice by telephone, thereby nullifying Chancellor Angela Merkels policy towards Ukraine: We do not speak to people who do not share our values.

It seems that Merkel was mistaken. The Europe Union is prepared to be perfectly appalled by the judicial mistakes of the Yanukovych government and still willing to compete aggressively on trade and energy with Russia for the political affection of Ukraine. Expressed in another way, the European Union seems to have chosen a circumscribed engagement policy over a political confrontation ending in sanctions.
European recovery, Atlantic free trade, Asia influence

n whichever way we resolve the conundrum of our policy towards Russia and Ukraine, these policy choices will take place within the larger context of politics in the Euro-Atlantic. From the United States perspective, the highest Atlantic priority is a European recovery and an eu that survives the European financial crisis. As I have argued, it is hard to see how either outcome is helped by an economic crisis in Russia or political disorder in Ukraine. Indeed, either event would seem to deepen Europes problems and unsettle Americas shaky recovery and lagging job creation. Following the logic of interdependence, if European leaders are serious about opening free trade discussions with the United States, it is hard to see how an economic implosion in Europes East to complement the fiscal disaster in Europes South is the best way to get a trade bill through the Senate or to regain the confidence of capital markets. An Atlantic Free Trade Agreement on the scale of nafta will be difficult enough without having to explain that Europe has lost control of its Neighborhood Policy. Finally, there lies President Obamas wishful pivot to Asia. It is one thing for a united Euro-Atlantic community of the eu and U.S. bound in a formidable nato alliance and integrated in a free trade system comprising almost 50 percent of global wealth or a combined gdp of $33 trillion annually. It is hard to see how China could dictate norms to such a large market and powerful alliance. It is quite another thing to sail the Pacific with Europes West divided from Europes East by political culture just as conclusively as Europe was once divided by Stalin, with Europe cut off from its nearest and most abundant energy supplies in Russia, and with the United States unable to access either the Trans-Caucasus or Central Asian transit to the sub-continent. In this event, the loss or even the temporary alienation of Russia and Ukraine will allow any passing Mandarin or Commissar from Beijing to dictate trade, security, and energy terms to both Washington and Brussels. To be credible in world politics, a great power must demonstrate that it can consolidate and politically control its strategic rear. And Europes East is the strategic rear of the West for the purposes of an Asian pivot.
30 Policy Review
ithout doubt, we have grossly misinterpreted the politics of Europes East after the fall of the Soviet Union. We were wrong to think that a wholly new political system had appeared overnight across the Eurasian landmass so different from its Soviet predecessor that even the term post-Soviet was misleading. We were wrong to assume that the maturation of these nascent democracies would proceed in much the same way that Western Europe developed after World War II or Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which seemed to us in hindsight as inevitable until very recently. And, we were completely wrong in 2004 in Georgia and 2005 in Ukraine to see the Color Revolutions as the reflections of our own political imagination. The post-Soviet world is the legacy of the Czarist and Soviet empires that preceded it and remains a rough fabric sewn piecemeal from the tatters of older imperial culture. For 20 years, this world has not developed as our models predicted, and our policies and well-intended advice have had the opposite of their intended results. As a consequence, our geopolitical influence and the reach of our institutions have declined inexorably over the past two decades. Now, we have a stark policy choice. Do we allow the two leading states in the post-Soviet world to enter into crises likely to bring the post-Soviet period to an end, and then just hope for the best? Or, do we now accept that political cultures change over centuries (not merely with the fall of an empire) and that the democratic change we hope will come to the postSoviet world will arrive over decades of trade, association, and cultural exchange? If the latter, we will have to accept that Putin will never share our view of human rights and political values. If the latter, we will not to be able to sacrifice relations with 43 million Ukrainians over a single court case despite our sympathies. It seems to me that the failure of the West after the fall of the Soviet Union was first indifference and then the inflation of our expectations (which quickly became demands) far beyond what was politically conceivable for the post-Soviet states. What should be our objective is an extended period of limited engagement with the most promising and important of the post-Soviet states. This engagement will take place in areas of agreement: trade, security, conflict resolution. In this manner we can gradually shape new states possibly even European states in the post-imperial twilight. If we decline this chance through pique or malice, Norman Davies warns us that it could be five hundred years before a new culture appears to replace the hapless, thuggish, but nonetheless imitative barbarians. No doubt there are difficult choices to be made in striking the right balance between the imperative of long-term engagement and the protection of
The legacy of empires

our values in the course of engagement. Nevertheless, this predicament was anticipated and summarized long ago by the poet C.P. Cavafy:
Now whats going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.11
In this sense, Europe is substantially ahead of the United States in recognizing that whatever happens in the post-Soviet twilight will begin with people who do not share our values: the barbarians, for lack of a better word. Nothing that will happen to the barbarians or to their fragile world is foreordained or inevitable. Nevertheless, their political culture will be shaped and redirected over long periods of time by the influences of trade, travel, language, and education. Indeed, the sum of these soft, liberal forces has been known to change political culture. This is a kind of solution.
11. C.P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians, C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, trans. by Edmund Keely and Philip Shepard (Princeton University Press, 1972).
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Policy Review
Investing in Bad Science

By Henry I. Miller
he federal government expends vast amounts of money on research of innumerable kinds. Many of these expenditures are unwise and unwarranted, falling into the category of pork or overlapping with work that would otherwise be performed by private-sector entities. Public funding for scientific research should largely be limited to basic scientific discoveries or proof-of-principle experiments which would reasonably be defined as public goods rather than efforts to extend science into marketable technologies or products. From an economic perspective, one can justify government funding for public goods because they are far enough removed from fencing through intellectual property rights that no individual or company has sufficient economic incentive to pay for the research. If an entity cannot capture at least part of the financial gains from the research investment, the research, in
Henry I. Miller is the Robert Wesson fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution. A physician and molecular biologist, he was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the fda .
Henry I. Miller
effect, supplies information on which anyone can capitalize. No one ought to be able to monopolize basic scientific principles or natural phenomena, and our intellectual property regime does, in fact, attempt to prevent that. (The recent Supreme Court decision in Mayo v. Prometheus reiterates that point.) However, there is a far less persuasive rationale for government funding of research that can be fenced sufficiently to provide a return on investment, and there are other critical determinants in the sense of limitations of what research should legitimately be federally funded. It should a) follow recognized experimental methodologies, b) be in the national interest, and c) focus on nontrivial questions or problems. As discussed below, these spare and seemingly obvious criteria are often controverted. And although such exceptions to sound principles represent a small percentage of overall federal research funding, in a time of belt-tightening at the nations premier research organizations the dollar amounts could make a real difference to legitimate, high-quality research. Moreover, the fact that certain organizations are systematic and serial offenders cries out for reform.
Golden fleece vs. golden goose

rom 1975 to 1987, Democratic Senator William Proxmire presented monthly Golden Fleece Awards to identify what he viewed as wasteful government spending. Since then, many politicians and other critics of federal spending have blasted various government-funded research projects. Some of these criticisms clearly have been wrong-headed. An example is this dismissal of a supposedly unworthy research project by former Alaska Governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin: Sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not. The problem is that Palin didnt know what she didnt know. A century of studies on the genetics ofDrosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, an organism that shares about half of its genes with humans, has yielded information critical to understanding the process of aging and how genes work. In order to call attention to this sort of misapprehension, several congressmen from both sides of the aisle have gotten together with various research advocacy organizations to create the Golden Goose Awards to highlight the often unexpected or serendipitous nature of basic scientific research by honoring federally funded researchers whose work may once have been viewed as unusual, odd or obscure, but has produced important discoveries benefitting society in significant ways. Jim Cooper, the congressman behind the idea, clarified the awards intention: Weve all seen reports that ridicule odd-sounding research projects as examples of government waste. The Golden Goose Award does the oppo34 Policy Review

site. It recognizes that a valuable federally funded research project may sound funny, but its purpose is no laughing matter. Cooper and Alan Leshner, who heads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, penned a precious little op-ed in the Washington Post to describe the rationale for the award and to announce this years winners. Their view is, We need to get serious about science. In fact, maybe its time for researchers to fight back, to return a comeback for every punch line. However, all research isnt created equal, and some punch lines dont deserve a comeback. Although the Cooper-Leshner initiative might help in some instances to educate the public and politicians about the nature of science, it should not obscure the fact that many research projects that sound funnyare ill-conceived and represent waste or abuse of government funds. The Golden Goose Award makes use of a formal fallacy, a pattern of reasoning that is illogical and wrong, called asserting the consequent. It takes the form of: If A, then B. B, therefore, A. An example would be: If Warren Buffett owned the British Crown Jewels, he would be rich. Buffett is rich; therefore, he owns the Crown Jewels. The rationale for the award seems to be, Some criticism of federally-funded research projects has been uninformed and ill-advised. People continue to criticize federally funded projects; therefore, their views are uninformed and ill-advised. Leshner, of all people, should understand fallacious reasoning; he was a psychology professor for a decade. But maybe he spent too long at the National Science Foundation involved with the funding of the social and behavioral sciences, which, as discussed below, has become an exemplar for worthless research.
The National Science Foundation

ts astonishing that some of Proxmires Golden Fleece Award projects passed any kind of peer-review for merit. The first two went to the nsf. The first was for an $84,000 grant that was intended to discover why people fall in love. The second, for $500,000 (part of which was from two other federal agencies), was to determine which stimuli cause rats, monkeys, and humans to bite and clench their jaws. nsf is a major driver of American science: With an annual budget of over $7 billion, it funds about one-fifth of all federally-supported basic research conducted by U.S. colleges and universities and 60 percent of all nonbiomedical life science research. But nsf has made a habit of fleecing American taxpayers. In April 2011, Senator Tom Coburn, a physician, released a report, nsf Under the Microscope, that provides a useful analysis of the agencys funding. Coburns report identified a number of projects that will make most Americans, scientists and nonscientists alike, shake their heads. They include studies of: how to ride a bike; when dogs became mans best friend; whether political views are genetically predetermined; whether parents
Henry I. Miller
choose trendy baby names; the best time to buy a ticket to a sold out sporting event; and why the same teams always seem to dominate the ncaa basketball playoffs. Coburns study noted that only politicians appear to benefit from other nsf studies, such as research on what motivates individuals to make political donations, how politicians can benefit from Internet town halls . . . and how politicians use the Internet. Two recent studies funded by nsf not mentioned by Coburn include how power affects empathy and outlook on life and political ideology. My own experience confirms the thrust of Coburns report. Some of the projects I encountered were of the overtly ridiculous variety. I once suffered through a presentation about an nsf-funded study of the ethics of nanotechnology research. The invesMy experience tigator conducted interviews with nanotechnology confirms the researchers in their offices, and part of her research methodology involved recording what kind of thrust of screen savers were on their computers. The study Coburns report. concluded: Narrative is an indispensable device for Some projects I formulation of theory about scientists [sic] perspectives regarding the moral and social implications of encountered nanotechnology, and alternative pedagogies are were overtly necessary to fully explore and develop a working ethical framework for analysis of nanotechnology. ridiculous. Sounds as though its of nano-value to society, and clearly in Golden Fleece territory. Some of the projects funded by nsf are less flagrant but real examples of waste or abuse. For example, the agency has funded a series of citizens technology forums, at which previously uninformed, ordinary Americans were brought together to solve a thorny question of technology policy. According to the nsfs abstract of the project, carried out by researchers at North Carolina State University under a grant, participants were to receive information about that issue from a range of content-area experts, experts on social implications of science and technology, and representatives of special interest groups; this was supposed to enable them to reach consensus and ultimately generate recommendations. The project, first funded in 2002 to support two panels, and expanded thereafter, called for eight more panels (comprised of people representative of the local population). Their deliberations were to be overseen by a research team composed of faculty in rhetoric of science, group decisionmaking, and political science, who were charged to test both an innovative measure of democratic deliberation and also political science theory, by investigating relationships between gender, ethnicity, lower socioeconomic status and increases in efficacy and trust in regulators. The first of these nsf-funded citizens groups tackled regulatory policy toward agricultural biotechnology and recommended that the government
36 Policy Review

tighten regulations for cultivating genetically engineered crops, including a new requirement that the foods from these crops be labeled to identify them for consumers. Both of these recommendations are unwarranted, inappropriate, and conflict with the views of experts including those within and outside the government. (The labeling recommendation would also run afoul of the First Amendment constitutional guarantees of commercial free speech, which the citizen-policymakers failed to realize.) In 2008, the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University and its collaborators at North Carolina State University held an nsf-funded citizens technology forum on the topic of nanotechnology and human enhancement. It followed the pattern of the one on biotechnology, with the organizers selecting Nonexperts from a broad pool of applicants a diverse and are too often roughly representative group of 74 citizens to participate at six geographically distinct sites across the subject to their country. own prejudices Participants were informed by a 61-page backand to the ground document vetted by experts to read prior to deliberating. (The experts once again specific choice of reflected the viewpoints of the organizers, no doubt.) background They produced a hodgepodge of conclusions and recommendations, including concern over the materials. effectiveness of regulations and reduced certainty about the benefits of human enhancement technologies but wanted the government to guarantee access to them if they prove too expensive for the average American. (Surprise! The participants didnt understand the risks and benefits of the new technology but wanted the government to provide them with entitlements so they could avail themselves of the products of nanotechnology!) The output of the citizens technology forums illustrates that such undertakings have limitations in both theory and practice; nonexperts are too often subject to their own prejudices and to the specific choice of background materials and the advocates to whom they are exposed. Both of these groups yielded just what one would expect: opinions that were based on a slanted and incomplete understanding of the subject. Getting policy recommendations on obscure and complex technical questions from groups of citizen nonexperts is like going from your cardiologists office to a caf, explaining to the waitress the therapeutic options for your chest pain, and asking her whether you should have the angioplasty or just take medication. Not only is this project ill-conceived on its face but the agencys left hand seems not to know what the right hand is doing. A study of public comprehension of science by the foundation several years ago found that fewer than one in four people know what a molecule is, and only about half understand
Henry I. Miller
that the earth circles the sun once a year. Even political leaders in policymaking positions are often profoundly ignorant. U.S. Congressman John Salazar related this disturbing anecdote: You know when I was debating what became the 2008 Farm Bill, I had a member of the Ag[riculture] Committee actually ask me if chocolate milk really comes from brown cows. I asked if he was joking and he assured me he wasnt. In a September 2012 speech, Representative Paul Broun called Darwinian evolution lies from the pit of hell and argued that the Earth is 9,000 years old. Scientists have a somewhat different estimate: Based on evidence from meteorites and molecular decay rates, they believe the Earth is on the order of 4.5 billion years old. And Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee during a visit to Caltechs Jet Propulsion Lab asked a nasa scientist whether the Beyond whether Mars Pathfinder probe had photographed the flag that astronaut Neil Armstrong had left behind in they deserve the 1969. Armstrong had, of course, left the flag on the moon, not Mars. Nor is a manned mission to Mars largess they planned. receive, do As long ago as 1994, cosmologist Carl Sagan such projects expressed concern about the trend toward an American society in which, clutching our crystals go beyond the and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critinon-science cal faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between whats true and what feels good, we slide, into the realm almost without noticing, into superstition and darkof nonsense? ness. And in The March of Unreason, British polymath Dick Taverne (a.k.a. Lord Taverne of Pimlico) posited that in the practice of medicine, popular approaches to farming and food, policies to reduce hunger and disease and many other practical issues, there is an undercurrent of irrationality that threatens science-dependent progress and even [threatens] the civilized basis of our democracy. Theres a good reason that people generally are not science and technology savvy a phenomenon that has been dubbed rational ignorance, which comes into play when the cost of sufficiently informing oneself about an issue to make an informed decision on it outweighs any potential benefit one could reasonably expect from that decision. Citizens occupied with the concerns of daily living families, jobs, health may not consider it to be cost-effective to study the potential risks and benefits of genetic engineering or nanotechnology. Beyond whether or not such projects deserve the largess of the National Science Foundation is the deeper question of whether they go beyond nonscience into the realm of nonsense. Representative Coopers co-authorship of the Washington Post article is puzzling. A lawyer without any training in science or even relevant congressional committee assignments, somehow he feels qualified to pontificate on
38 Policy Review

scientific issues. Ignorance in not just a problem for the general public. For example, Representative Hank Johnson, during a committee meeting, expressed concern about too many troops being sent to the island of Guam because, My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize. The point is that there is both obvious and subtle waste and abuse in federal funding agencies that give away huge amounts of taxpayer dollars for science and technology, and except for the rare bird like Coburn, congress has little appetite for addressing the problem. As aaas President Alan Leshner wrote in a November 2011 Science editorial about these times of tightened federal budgets, When resources are constrained, it is essential that they be used effectively and efficiently to avoid losing scientific momentum and to ensure that society will benefit maximally from s&ts potential . . . The impact of impending cuts can be at least partially mitigated by some fundamental rethinking of the ways in which s&t are both funded and conducted. Leshner was right, and the soft and sloppy science projects at nsf, a large percentage of which are funded by its Social, Behavioral and Economics Directorate, would be an obvious place to begin that rethinking. Its programs need to be both trimmed and reorganized, and peer-review needs to be more effective. According to a former senior nsf official, When the social sciences grants were part of the Biology Directorate they were embedded in a culture of scientific rigor and in competition with strong science [in other disciplines]. When they split off on their own the inmates took over the asylum and their world became quite insular.
hen it comes to obvious waste and abuse of federal funds, nsf is, of course, not the only culprit. The breakdown of effective peer-review has given rise to problems at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (nccam) at the National Institutes of Health (nih). The centers mission is to define, through rigorous scientific investigation, the usefulness and safety of complementary and alternative medicine interventions and their roles in improving health and health care. The problem is that many of its projects are trivial and almost all of the interventions tested have proven to be worthless. For example, a recent study funded by the center found that cranberry juice cocktail was no better than placebo at preventing recurring urinary tract infections. Other studies funded by the Center include, Metabolic and Immunologic Effects of Meditation, Long-Term Chamomile Therapy of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Restorative Yoga for Therapy of the Metabolic Syndrome. Sounds an awful lot like the tv ads for snake oil of all sorts. Perhaps worst of all is the $60-plus million multicenter study, the Trial to
The nccam
Henry I. Miller
Assess Chelation Therapy (tact), conducted under the aegis of nccam and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, to investigate the effects of disodium edta (a chemical that chelates, or binds, atoms so that they can be removed from a system) on coronary artery disease (cad). The likelihood that this study will yield positive results approaches zero. Perhaps because the trial was requested by two powerful members of Congress, nih pursued it in spite of the fact that chelation therapy had been discredited by four controlled trials performed during the 1990s. Even the nih concedes that there is a lack of adequate prior research to verify edta chelation therapys safety and effectiveness for cad. The bulk of the evidence supporting the use of edta chelation therapy is in the form of case reports and case series. nih officials should know the old saying among medical scientists that the plural of anecdote is not data. The sort of research funded by nccam, to the tune of $130 million annually, is an affront to the nih and nih-funded investigators who are at the cutting edge of their disciplines and who are facing increasing difficulty getting federal funding even for studies that are highly ranked on the basis of scientific merit. In 2011, the percentage of research grant proposals that were funded by nih fell to eighteen percent, a record low. The squandering of research funds particularly shortchanges inexperienced scientists who do not have an extensive record of achievement. Bruce Alberts, the editor of the journal Science and the former president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote in a November 2011 editorial, There is an ominous sense of a major crisis brewing. Budget realities have begun to constrain scientific progress across the board, with an especially heavy impact on the careers of young scientists.
National Institute of Food and Agriculture

et another federal research boondoggle is usdas $4 million yearly program on risk-assessment for genetically engineered organisms, run by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Helped along the way by innumerable analyses by the National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, academics and others, usda has had a quarter century to figure out that genetically engineered organisms do not represent a meaningful category amenable to risk analysis (or deserving discriminatory, regulatory oversight, which is another story). Here are some of the conclusions of a landmark 1989 analysis by the U.S. National Research Council:
The same physical and biological laws govern the response of organ40 Policy Review

isms modified by modern molecular and cellular methods and those produced by classical methods. Recombinant dna methodology makes it possible to introduce pieces of dna, consisting of either single or multiple genes, that can be defined in function and even in nucleotide sequence. With classical techniques of gene transfer, a variable number of genes can be transferred, the number depending on the mechanism of transfer; but predicting the precise number or the traits that have been transferred is difficult, and we cannot always predict the phenotypic expression that will result. With organisms modified by molecular methods, we are in a better, if not perfect, position to predict the phenotypic expression. [N]o conceptual distinction exists between genetic modification of plants and microorganisms by classical methods or by molecular techniques that modify dna and transfer genes. Crops modified by molecular and cellular methods should pose risks no different from those modified by classical genetic methods for similar traits. As the molecular methods are more specific, users of these methods will be more certain about the traits they introduce into the plants.
One might think that even members of Congress and usda bureaucrats could comprehend the unmistakable message first delivered a quarter-century ago and reiterated in innumerable forums since: There is no scientific rationale for a dedicated risk-assessment research set-aside for this pseudocategory. Its like doing risk-assessment on all the objects that have doors.
he master of waste, fraud, and abuse among the research-funding agencies, though, is the Environmental Protection Agency, the logo of which should be a Golden Fleece flanked by dollar signs. epa, with a research budget in excess of $800 million, has long been more concerned with public relations than public health. A scheme was exposed several years that would have diverted epa research funds to pay outside public relations consultants up to $5 million over five years to improve the website of the Office of Research and Development, conduct focus groups on how to polish the offices image, and produce ghostwritten articles praising the agency for publication in scholarly journals and magazines. This payola scheme is similar to the agencys longstanding practice of buying influence by doling out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to certain favored nonprofit organizations money that, according to the inspector general and Government Accountability Office, is dispersed with
Environmental Protection Agency
Henry I. Miller
no public notice, competition, or accountability. The investigators documented systematic malfeasance by regulators, including: (1) making grants to grantees who were unable to fulfill the terms of the grants; (2) favoring an exclusive clique of grantees without opening the grants to competition; (3) funding environmental grants for activities that lack any apparent environmental benefit; and (4) failing to ensure that grantees performed the objectives identified in the grants. I saw evidence of this while I was an official at the fda. For some reason I was favored with periodic reports of the research funded by the epa. The overwhelming majority of it was shoddy, irrelevant, and unpublishable.
The Next Big Thing that wasnt

ecause money is fungible, federal agencies are, in effect, funding nonsensical research on baby naming and meditation therapy at the expense of sciences Next Big Thing. As Coburn said in the introduction to his study of nsf: A dollar lost to mismanagement, fraud, inefficiency, or a dumb project is a dollar that could have advanced scientific discovery. This report alone documents at least $65 million in wasteful spending on low-priority projects, $19 million lost to fraud, $1.2 billion in duplication, and $1.9 billion in other forms of mismanagement. Altogether this report identifies over $3 billion lost to waste, fraud, duplication, and mismanagement. Organizations within nsf, nih, usda and epa have shown themselves to be systematically incapable of consistently discriminating good science from bad. What is clearly needed is congressional action to strip unworthy federal organizations of the ability to disperse research funds. This wont happen, however, unless there is pressure on Congress to do it, which presumably would need to come from the editors of major research journals, organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which, recall, is headed by Alan Leshner), and responsible scientists whose research has been preempted by the funding of unworthy projects. (Research funding is, after all, a zero-sum game.) But the courage from any of these quarters to air publicly the government funding agencies dirty little secrets has been lacking, and there has been only pusillanimity and politically correct silence. Except, of course, for the new Golden Goose award which, from where I sit, looks more like a turkey.
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Policy Review
The Taiwan Linchpin

By Daniel Twining
as americas alliance with Taiwan, one of its oldest in Asia, become a strategic liability, a relic of a bygone era that no longer advances American interests? The obvious answer would seem to be no. First, there is the legacy of the relationship. American and free Chinese forces fought together in World War II. Taiwan was Americas unsinkable aircraft carrier during the Cold War. More recently, democratic Taiwan has become a model of political liberalization in a Chinese society. It boasts a high-tech economy that is intimately intertwined with those of America and its Asian partners; the United States is the largest foreign investor there. Taiwan is a key strongpoint in the United States offshore network of allies in maritime Asia. And not insignificantly, Taiwan is a reliable friend to America at a time when President Obamas pivot to Asia is a reminder of
Daniel Twining is senior fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where he leads a fifteen-member team working on the rise of Asia and its implications for the West. He previously served as a member of the secretary of states Policy Planning Staff and as the foreign policy advisor to U.S. Senator John McCain.
Daniel Twining
the Chinese challenge to U.S. primacy and the imperative of maintaining in Asia a balance of power that favors freedom. It is surprising, then, that an active debate is now underway in Washington over whether Taiwan is a spoiler, rather than a partner, in U.S. strategy towards the worlds emerging center of wealth and power. The core of this argument assumes that relations between the United States and mainland China will define the 21st century and that they should not be held hostage to the legacy of the civil war between Chinese nationalists and communists in the 1940s. Why should Washington risk its relationship with the rising superpower of 1.3 billion people over its ties to a small island nation of only 23 million given the high military and economic stakes for the United States of a conflicted relationship with Beijing? These arguments assume that Taiwan, as a senior U.S. military official once indelicately phrased it, is the turd in the punchbowl of U.S.-China relations.1 But arguments to let Taiwan go get strategy backwards. First, cutting off an old U.S. ally at a time of rising tensions with an assertive China might do less to appease Beijing than to encourage its hopes to bully the United States into a further retreat from its commitments in East Asia. Second, it would transform the calculus of vital American allies like Japan and South Korea, who might plausibly wonder whether the U.S. commitment to their security was equally flexible. Third, it would upend the calculations of new U.S. partners like India and Vietnam, whose leaders have made a bet on U.S. staying power and the associated benefits of strengthening relations with America as a hedge against China. Fourth, such preemptive surrender would reinforce what remains more a psychological than a material reality of China emerging as a global superpower of Americas standing which it is not and may never be. Finally, it would resurrect the ghosts of Munich and Yalta, where great powers decided the fate of lesser nations without reference to those nations interests or the human consequences of offering them up to satisfy the appetites of predatory great powers.
Canary in the coal mine

roponents of letting Taiwan go seem to assume that everything else would remain unchanged in U.S. Asia strategy. Americas alliance system would remain robust, its military would continue to expand its access to regional ports and basing facilities, and nonChinese Asia would continue to underwrite American leadership. In fact, abandoning Taiwan say, by ending military sales (it is the top recipient of American arms worldwide) would create a cascade of strategic consequences that would upend the U.S.-led regional order. The first thing to erode would be the U.S.-Japan alliance, without which
1. William Lowther, Blair Defends Turd Comment, Taiwan Record, Taipei Times (February 1, 2009). .
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Policy Review
The Taiwan Linchpin

American leadership in East Asia in its present form would be impossible. Japan, Washingtons most important ally in Asia, may have few viable strategic options to maintain an independent foreign policy without a free Taiwan. As Chinas military power casts a growing shadow over its neighbors, Japans capacity to retain strategic choice may hinge on Taiwans ability to maintain autonomy from the mainland in ways that preclude a hostile China from projecting military power from Taiwan into the sea lanes that are the Japanese economys lifeline. Too often, analysis of Taiwans strategic evolution focuses on its implications for China, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other. In fact, the foundations of Japanese grand strategy since 1951 starting with its intimate alliance with the United States may well be unsustainable should Taiwan fall under the control of a hostile, assertive China that defines Japan as an adversary. As Japans primary security partner, the United States therefore has a compelling interest in protecting Taiwans autonomy, not only for reasons related to Taiwan and U.S.-China relations but because it is foundational to Japans strategic future as Americas bedrock ally in East Asia.
Taiwan and the U.S.-Japan alliance

mericas role as what former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called a resident power in Asia is made possible by the U.S. alliance with Japan. Nearly 50,000 American troops are forward-deployed there, and it is headquarters of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, whose ships and submarines patrol the Pacific and Indian Ocean sea lanes that carry most world trade in goods and energy resources. The problem of 20thcentury Asia, of how to constrain Japanese power, was solved by a postWorld War II alliance that contained Japanese militarism, reassuring its neighbors and enabling Asias economic miracle by allowing regional states to focus on modernizing their economies rather than competing militarily. Chinas own extraordinary growth since it launched economic reforms in 1978 was made possible by the security umbrella America provided to Japan. This neutered armed conflict in East Asia and allowed American forces to operate freely in the region in ways that reassured rather than threatened key Asian powers. Japans strategic posture and identity as a peaceful trading state are intimately tied to Taiwans orientation. Japan and Taiwan are natural allies a term not usually associated with Japans relations with neighbors due to friction over history issues related to wartime Japans rapacity. Japan and Taiwan share a strategic geography as offshore trading powers dependent on free access to the maritime commons. Japan is Taiwans second-largest trading partner, and their economies are closely bound together by two-way flows of technology and capital as well as goods and services. They share a common military ally in the United States, the lodestar of their security in a
Daniel Twining
rapidly changing region. They both define a national interest in an Asian balance of power that is not dominated by mainland China but preserves pluralism among Asia-Pacific states, allowing each to choose its alignments freely. Cultural and political values pull Taiwan and Japan together rather than pushing them apart, laying a more enduring foundation for their shared strategic interests. Both are democracies in which political power has alternated between parties and governments are held accountable through strong institutions, free media, and the rule of law. Culturally, Japans occupation of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945 did not leave the imperial scars so evident elsewhere in Asia; to the contrary, Japanese administration helped modernize Taiwan and is remembered as a time of progress. Today, people-to-people ties between the two nations remain strong: Polling consistently shows that majorities in both societies hold the other in high regard. Taiwanese popular esteem for Japan is exceptional when compared with most of its neighbors. Many scholars and analysts predict a near-term future in which Taiwan is increasingly drawn into mainland Chinas embrace willingly or otherwise. Yet as long as Japan and the prc remain security competitors, Taiwans reintegration with the mainland would put it on the wrong side of the divide, allied with the country that most threatens it against its most natural East Asian partner. In the absence of political liberalization in China, Taiwans interests and political values clash with the prcs as strongly as they coincide with Japans suggesting that we might expect to see a closer convergence in Japanese-Taiwanese relations over the coming decade, rather than the divergence that would occur from Taiwans reunification with a still-authoritarian regime in Beijing. For this reason, the future of Taiwans relations with Japan approach in importance the future of relations across the Taiwan Strait.
here are four maritime domains that critically impact the economic and resource security of both Japan and Taiwan. First and most obvious are the waters around Taiwan, including the Taiwan Strait and Luzon Straits. As a trading state, Taiwan requires full and free access to these waters, the highways for its exports and imports of goods and energy resources. This is equally true of resource-poor Japan: The bulk of Japanese energy imports originate in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia and are shipped through the waters around Taiwan en route to the Japanese home islands. A hostile power that controlled Taiwan and projected naval and air power over surrounding waters could choke off Japanese energy imports. It was the threat of such a stranglehold in 1941 at the hands of the United States that persuaded an earlier generation of Japanese leaders to launch a preemptive strike against Pearl Harbor.
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The strategic geography
The Taiwan Linchpin

The Western Pacific is the second maritime domain of vital concern to both Taiwan and Japan. These waters connect both nations to their principal military ally, the United States, and its major hubs of power projection in Guam and Hawaii. The supply lines for U.S. forces stationed in Japan and Korea run through this area. Western Pacific sea lanes also carry Japanese and Taiwanese exports to North America. Were China to control Taiwan, its ability to project naval and air power into the Western Pacific would be unlocked; it is currently constrained by the offshore island chain of U.S. allies from Japan in the north to Taiwan and the Philippines in the center and Australia in the south. The weakest link in this offshore barrier to Chinese power projection is Taiwan, given the intensity of the prcs targeted military buildup against it and the political priority the The weakest link Chinese leadership attaches to reunification. Chinese in the offshore occupation of Taiwan would lead to a rebalancing of naval, air, and missile power in the Western barrier to Pacific that would put at risk the security of the air Chinese power and sea lanes and the U.S. militarys ability to operate freely in them that bind together the projection is economies of East Asia and North America. Taiwan, given The South and East China Seas are the third marthe prc s itime domain of special interest to Taiwan and Japan. Taiwan is a claimant in the South China Sea targeted buildup dispute for reasons of history: Its claim matches that against it. of the mainland, as Beijing and Taipei both vie to uphold what they argue is Chinas historical suzerainty over the scs. Unlike the prc, however, Taiwan has not pursued gunboat diplomacy against Vietnam and the Philippines in violation of basic maritime conventions associated with freedom of the seas. In the East China Sea, the escalating conflict between Tokyo and Beijing over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands is taking place in waters very close to Taiwan, underlining how Chinese control would intensify its ability to overturn by force Japanese administration of the disputed islets. Both Taiwan and Japan are dependent on freedom of passage through the South and East China Seas for energy imports and trade flows. Nearly 60 percent of Japans and Taiwans energy supplies are shipped through the South China Sea,2 demonstrating how a hostile powers chokehold on its sea lanes could rapidly cripple their economies or, at a minimum, require adjustments to their foreign policies in return for secure passage. One-third of all global trade passes through the South China Sea.3 For trade-dependent economies like Taiwan and Japan not to mention South Korea and China
2. Robert Kaplan, The South China Sea is the Future of Conflict, Foreign Policy (September-October 2011). 3. Conversation with cincpacflt Commander Admiral Patrick Walsh, Honolulu (July 2011).
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free passage through the sea lanes linking the Straits of Malacca to the Taiwan Strait and Western Pacific is essential. So is freedom of the East China Sea lanes, which carry the extensive triangular trade between Japan, Taiwan, and the Asian mainland. The fourth maritime domain of special interest to Taiwan and, in particular, to Japan is the Indian Ocean. It carries a majority of both nations energy imports from the Persian Gulf and is therefore intrinsically important despite its geographic distance from East Asia. It is also the home sea of India, which is emerging to play a critical balancing role in East Asia. This is attested by the development of Indian security partnerships with Japan, Vietnam, and other regional powers. Indias access to these countries for purposes of trade, joint exercises, and military exchanges is dependent on freedom of passage through Southeast and East Asian waterways. India cannot play the balancing role in East Asia that Japan, Taiwan, the United States and other partners would like it to play a role which these countries can leverage to provide themselves greater strategic autonomy vis--vis China if its access to the region is constrained by contested maritime commons.
Chinas military buildup opposite Taiwan

separate component of the strategic geography of JapanTaiwan relations is the impact on Japan of Chinas military buildup targeting Taiwan. The approximately 1,200 short-range ballistic missiles the Chinese military has deployed along its coastline opposite Taiwan are equally capable of hitting Japanese territory.4 The extensive fleet of attack submarines operating out of bases on Hainan Island and other Chinese ports designed to complicate any American military intervention in a cross-strait conflict are equally useful to surveil and harass Japanese shipping. The asymmetric capabilities China has procured and developed to deter or defeat American military intervention on Taiwans behalf including anti-satellite weaponry, ballistic missiles capable of targeting advanced naval vessels, extensive cyberwarfare capabilities, and stealth attack aircraft can equally target Japanese strengths in satellite surveillance, theater missile defense, naval power, and cyber capabilities. Indeed, we have seen over the past few years a striking increase in Chinese military penetration of Japans territorial waters and airspace. Chinese maritime forces are actively challenging Japans administrative control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Chinese submarines routinely harass Japans naval fleet and operate extensively within Japans Exclusive Economic Zone. Cyberattacks on Japanese government and business computing systems emanating from China have spiked (particularly during periods of Sino-Japanese
4. Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the Peoples Republic of China, 2012 (Department of Defense, 2012).
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The Taiwan Linchpin

tension). One trend driving Japans growing security integration with American military forces over the past fifteen years has been Chinas ballistic missile buildup opposite Taiwan, which senior Japanese officials regularly remind visitors can be easily retargeted toward Japan.5 Japans defense white papers highlight Chinas military buildup against Taiwan as a source of insecurity and threat to the Japanese homeland.6 More broadly, the double-digit budget increases the Peoples Liberation Army has enjoyed for the past two decades have funded an aggressive Chinese military modernization that ostensibly targets Taiwan, but increasingly emphasizes power-projection and asymmetric capabilities that would seem to have greater utility in combat against more capable armed forces like those from the United States and Japan. In short, it is difficult to disentangle the utility of Chinas massive buildup of military power against Taiwan from the equal threat it potentially poses to Japan and the United States, given their inevitable roles in any cross-strait conflict and the core interests both have in the security of Taiwan and its region. Both Japan and Taiwan have also learned that close trading ties with China are no guarantee of an improved political or military relationship. Chinas emergence as Japans top trading partner has developed at the same time diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Beijing have deteriorated sharply and military skirmishes between their air and naval forces have intensified. Enactment of a comprehensive trade and investment agreement between China and Taiwan has not slowed Chinas deployment of military capabilities expressly designed to further tilt the cross-strait balance in its favor, and to call Americas ability to defend Taiwan into question.
The key to the alliance

related component of the strategic geography of JapanTaiwan relations is the role relations play in facilitating regional access for the United States, which remains the primary security provider in East Asia and the Pacific. American ability to project power in East and Southeast Asia, as currently constituted, is dependent on allied control of Japan and Taiwan. The largest American forward-deployed troop concentration, on Okinawa, is as close to Taiwan as to the Japanese home islands. The United States responsibility for the defense of Japan invests the southeastern approaches to the Japanese home islands with considerable strategic importance; similarly, U.S. ability to project power to defend Taiwan is dependent on the American militarys ability to operate from
5. Conversations with Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defense officials, Tokyo (October 2009).
6 . See the evolution of Japanese Defense White Papers on this issue from 2 0 0 5 1 2 at http://www.mod.go.jp/e/publ/w_paper/index.html (this link accessed January 11, 2013).
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Okinawa. In short, U.S. bases in Japan reinforce the continued credibility of Americas military commitment to Taiwans defense, while a friendly Taiwan helps secure the southeastern approaches to the Japanese home islands the most likely route of any airborne or naval assault on Americas closest Asian ally. U.S. plans for the defense of Taiwan require access to bases, logistics, reararea support, intelligence, communication, and supply hubs in Japan. It is therefore unlikely that a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan would relieve Japan of the imperative to actively support, defend, and perhaps even fight with American forces. It was this realization, following the exposure of a lack of clarity in Japan over its role in supporting the United States during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1 9 9 5 9 6 , that led Washington and Tokyo to more clearly define the Chinese control defense of Taiwan as a core area of alliance cooperaof Taiwan would, tion.7 Hostile control of Taiwan which enabled projecamong other tion of naval and air power from its territory would things, sever the dramatically erode the United States ability to defend Japan. American bases on Okinawa would sea lanes than become less defensible and more vulnerable to connect Japan embargo or attack. The ability of the United States Navy to secure the sea lanes around Japan would be and its ally, the called into question. This would raise doubts not United States. only about the defense of Japan, but the security of the maritime routes connecting Japan to the economies of Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, and Central Asia. Okinawa serves not only as the frontline defense of Japan, but as the hub of American power projection into Southeast Asia. Hostile control of Taiwan would geographically sever the primary base of U.S. expeditionary forces in Asia from strategic regions like the South China Sea and the IndoMalaysian archipelago. Asian states that have sought closer security ties with the United States, including Indonesia and Vietnam, might reconsider their strategic choices should Taiwan move from being a facilitator to an obstacle to U.S. power projection in maritime Southeast Asia. The freedom of maneuver that U.S. air and naval forces enjoy in East and Southeast Asia the basis for American primacy and the prosperity it has underwritten in this vast region would be meaningfully constrained should the air and maritime commons around Taiwan come under contestation. In short, the operation of the U.S. alliance system in Asia, and the reassurance American forward-deployed forces have offered Asian partners for decades, could be overturned if Taiwan flipped from friendly to unfriendly hands. Given the centrality of East Asia to global growth, the consequences for the world economy would be crippling.
7. Michael J. Green, Japans Reluctant Realism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). .
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The Taiwan Linchpin
his strategic geography has compelling implications for Japan. Assuming that China remains controlled by an authoritarian, aggressive regime, Chinese control of Taiwan would enable it to sever the sea lanes that connect Japan to its closest ally on the opposite end of the Pacific Ocean. It would threaten Japans commercial and security access to the South China Sea and the straits connecting through to the Indian Ocean, the highway for Japans energy supply from the wider Middle East. It would also seriously complicate an emergent Indian-Japanese axis of security, investment, and trade that has developed on the basis of free passage through the international waters linking the two Asian powers. Japans other key non-American security partner, Australia, could also find its deep military and economic ties to Tokyo buffeted by a transformed balance of power in East Asia. Japanese leaders of varying political persuasions have also discovered a consistency in Chinese assertiveness toward both Japan and Taiwan that has consistently diminished Japanese security. Chinas missile buildup opposite Taiwan has continued despite the transition in Taipei from rule by the proindependence Democratic Progressive Party to that of Ma Ying-jeous Kuomintang, which has pursued policies of reconciliation and economic integration with the mainland. Japanese outreach to Beijing in 200910 under Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama whose policy of equidistance between the United States and China threatened Japans role within the alliance to assist in Taiwans defense was rebuffed by Beijing. Chinese naval harassment in and around Japanese waters actually increased during this period, capped by the ramming of a Japanese destroyer by a Chinese fishing captain, launching a tense period in which Beijing demanded the return of its sailor in increasingly militant terms. The Chinese regime also continued to mobilize anti-Japanese nationalism over a period encompassing both pro-Chinese and China-skeptic leaders in Tokyo, suggesting a structural logic to this manipulation of public opinion tied to Beijings efforts to shore up the legitimacy of the Communist Party. Hence Japan and Taiwan are linked in another way: Just as Chinese leaders derive legitimacy from their claims on Taiwan, so they also derive legitimacy by fueling (controlled) anti-Japanese nationalism amongst the Chinese public. And just as Japan has beefed up its role and capabilities within the U.S.Japan alliance over the past fifteen years, so it would seem it must elevate Taiwan in its strategic planning and security guidelines, given the extraordinary implications for Japanese interests of any transition in Taiwan from ally to adversary. This could include trilateral U.S.-Japan-Taiwan planning around various contingencies related to mainland efforts to force or blackFebruary & March 2013 51
Implications for Japan
Daniel Twining
mail Taiwan into reunification on Beijings terms. It could also include enhanced intelligence-sharing in the realms of naval, air, and cyber defense in particular. Elements of missile defense, integrated air defense, and earlywarning cooperation between the United States and Japan could be quietly extended to include Taiwan, and officer exchanges among the three countries could be expanded. It would be natural for Japan and the United States to assist Taiwan in upgrading its anti-submarine warfare capabilities, and to cooperate on integrated undersea surveillance.8 Japan could also build planning around various Taiwan contingencies into its security dialogues with Australia, South Korea, and India, given the large stake these powers have in peace and security in East Asia. In the fraught debate over the relocation of American forces in Japan, Japanese leaders might elevate considerations related to Taiwan contingencies as they assess the pace and scale of plans to realign the U.S. military footprint on Okinawa. Such judgments should relate not only to operational support for U.S. forces in any Taiwan conflict contingency, but to the broader strategic implications for Japanese maritime and energy security of pla power projection from Taiwan. Tokyo has a compelling interest in shoring up an eroding balance of power across the Taiwan Strait and can no longer outsource this role to the United States given the magnitude of Chinese military modernization and the geographic realities that put Japan on the front line of any conflict between Taiwan and the mainland.
Implications for Taiwan

eaders in taipei historically have focused on ties with Washington and Beijing as the primary determinants of Taiwans security and diplomacy. They should consider elevating Tokyo within their councils alongside the current superpower and its rising challenger. Japan will never play the same kind of pivotal role as these states in the international system. But the deep linkages between Japanese and Taiwanese interests, values, and strategic futures, intensified by their geographic proximity, make relations with Japan an important reinforcement to Taiwans ties with the United States while at the same time giving Taipei greater leverage vis--vis Beijing. Moreover, structural pressures will continue to push Tokyo to move beyond its historically passive role within the U.S. alliance to one in which Japan becomes a more normal great power willing to use all tools to secure its vital interests, including military force. Japans evolution in this direction over the past decade is striking, encompassing military support to allied forces fighting in Afghanistan; deployment of non-combat forces to Iraq
8 . The author is grateful to Randy Schriver of the Project 2049 Institute for these points.
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The Taiwan Linchpin

without a United Nations mandate; new security cooperation agreements with Australia and India, its first outside the U.S. alliance; military capacitybuilding projects in Southeast Asia; and development of advanced capabilities for (latent, if not actual) power projection though joint development and deployment of missile defenses with the United States, among other activities. Japans growing security relations not only with India and Australia but with South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia suggest that Japanese leaders from both political parties are investing in a more diversified set of security partnerships in Asia beyond the U.S.-Japan alliance. Taiwan should be a key beneficiary of Japans new look on regional security, even if intensified military cooperation and planning must be undertaken more discreetly. Leaders in Taipei Moreover, the political debate in Taiwan pitting dpp leaders favoring closer relations with Japan have historically against kmt leaders who privilege outreach to focused on Beijing somewhat misses the point.9 Irrespective of who rules in Taipei, closer relations with Japan are a leaders in China source of leverage that can reinforce Taiwans develand the U.S. as opment of a more peaceful and cooperative relationdeterminants of ship with Beijing. Kuomintang leaders have suggested that closer strategic ties with Japan could under- Taiwans security cut Taiwanese outreach to the mainland, and thereand diplomacy. fore that collaboration with Tokyo should be rolled back so as not to displease leaders in Beijing. Given that China appears more inclined to cooperate internationally in the face of strength rather than weakness, the opposite would seem to be the case. Historically, Chinas diplomatic isolation of Taiwan including constant Chinese pressure on the United States to minimize its ties to the island has been premised on Beijings calculation that Taiwan would ultimately accept Chinas terms for reunification because it would not have external allies to give it other options. One way for Taipei to give itself leverage to engage on more favorable terms with Beijing in ways that sustain peace and deterrence across the Taiwan Strait is by deepening military ties with Japan as that country itself works to maintain its distance from Beijing, sustaining its strategic freedom of maneuver by diversifying security partnerships across Asia. American leaders of varying political persuasions have understood clearly that strong and stable relations with Beijing are facilitated by a robust U.S. alliance system in Asia and growing ties with rising powers like India. Taiwan comes nowhere near to approaching the weight of the United States in the international system. But smaller countries that more closely approximate Taiwans capabilities and geographic constraints have similarly found
. 9. The author is grateful to Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute for this insight. .
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that diversified strategic relationships have increased their autonomy vis-vis Beijing. Vietnam, for instance, shares a land border with China as well as a history of both deferral and resistance to Chinese suzerainty. Yet Vietnam is working diligently to build closer ties with the United States and India in particular, in the belief that more intimate military and diplomatic relations with key regional players will allow it to engage Beijing without fear of Finlandization. Taiwanese leaders might draw the conclusion that closer diplomatic and military relations with Japan could serve a similar purpose without upending relations with the mainland.
Implications for the United States

uring the cold War, the United States favored a hub-andspokes alliance model in Asia. For nearly half a century, Washington did not seek to multilateralize this arrangement by knitting allies together into a region-wide security club unlike in Europe, where military ties with key powers were embedded within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato). Over the course of the past fifteen years, Washingtons perspective has changed, and U.S. policy in Asia increasingly favors the construction of groupings combining like-mindedness with meaningful capabilities to shape a new regional security architecture that remains grounded in the U.S. alliance system, but adds a new layer of multilateral cooperation on top of it. Trilateral groupings linking the United States, Japan, and Korea; the U.S., Japan, and Australia; and the U.S., Japan, and India are a new feature of post-Cold War U.S. security policy. Operationally, Washington has also found quadrilateral groupings to be useful delivering relief to Indonesia with the Indian, Japanese, and Australian navies following the December 2004 tsunami, for instance, or conducting joint exercises with Japan, India, and Australia in the Quadrilateral Partnership arrangement in 2007. Washington has also encouraged regional partners to institutionalize security cooperation with each other even when it excludes the United States on the principle that stronger ties between allies complement their relations with America. The United States played a handmaiden role in the 2008 Japan-Australia security arrangement and encouraged Tokyo to follow Washingtons lead, in the wake of the U.S.-India strategic breakthrough of 200508, by signing a far-reaching Indo-Japanese security cooperation agreement. U.S. officials have also welcomed Indias outreach to East Asian states like South Korea and Japans strategic assistance programs in Central and Southeast Asia. In short, unlike during the Cold War, when it actively discouraged allies from developing independent relationships with each other, Washington now understands that developing new networks of security providers in Asia could make a critical contribution to the provision of
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The Taiwan Linchpin

regional public goods as American primacy becomes contested. Taiwan is an exceptional case given the unique nature of its identity and historical conflict with mainland China, as well as U.S. equities in supporting Taiwans autonomy while sustaining a fruitful relationship with Beijing. Nonetheless, the same point applies from an American perspective: to the extent that Taiwan has a wider set of friends and allies that assuage Taiwanese insecurities and offset its isolation, it is easier for Washington to pursue constructive relations with Taipei. From an American perspective, the cross-Strait balance looks sturdier when Taiwan is strengthening relations with Japan and other important powers than when Taiwan is isolated, withdrawn, and unduly dependent on the United States. The U.S. goal of building new networks beyond the hub-and-spokes alliance model including connecting allies with each other to create a more robust regional security architecture would be enhanced by more intimate military and diplomatic relations between Taipei and Tokyo. Pulling Japan out of its U.S. alliance cocoon into greater regional leadership remains a long-term American objective that Taiwan can help facilitate. By encouraging Tokyo to assume broader regional security responsibilities, Taiwan can help shape Japans identity in the 21st century in the same way that Japan shaped Taiwans in the 20th.
Implications for China

hina is more likely to succeed in its self-declared goal of peaceful rise if its ascent occurs in a region of strong, vibrant states that can prosper and sustain open commons that benefit them all. China is less likely to rise peacefully in a region of weak states that create a vacuum of power around the mainland and tempt it into external adventurism. Such a scenario would empower the camp of militant nationalists in Beijing at the expense of leaders who would pursue more cooperative relations with neighbors. Japan succumbed to the latter temptation in the 1930s largely because China was so weak. A crucial element in sustaining a configuration of power that encourages China to focus on internal enrichment rather than external aggrandizement is a continued and enduring U.S. role as a resident power in Asia. From a development and security perspective, China has had an extraordinary 30 years a period when the United States actually increased its military footprint and security partnerships across Asia. There is little evidence to suggest that American primacy in maritime Asia is detrimental to Chinas own development aspirations. Indeed, the United States and its allies have underwritten Chinas economic miracle by shaping such a benign external environment in which China could peacefully prosper. It is therefore unconvincing to argue that Americas current security strategy in Asia is designed to contain China by encircling it with hostile adverFebruary & March 2013 55
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saries. The United States is Chinas largest trading partner, and China is Americas largest trading partner. No country in Asia wants to have to choose between relations with China and relations with the United States they want both, with U.S. ties serving as a useful hedge against what would otherwise rapidly become a dangerous dependence on China. In these circumstances, it is hard to understand how containment would be either feasible or desirable or why it would be in the interests of the United States. The entire containment thesis misses the point: from 2009 to 2011, as Nancy Bernkopf Tucker and Bonnie Glaser wrote in the Fall 2011 Washington Quarterly, the United States sold nearly $13 billion in weapons to Taiwan, even as relations between Beijing and Taipei improved dramatically. It is more plausible to argue that U.S. support for Taiwan gave it the confidence to engage China than to maintain that U.S. defense sales create a wedge between Taipei and Beijing. In the same vein, closer strategic cooperation between Japan and Taiwan would not be designed to contain China but, rather, to reinforce and diversify the sources of regional stability. Both Japan and Taiwan have obvious interests in shoring up the balance of power across the Taiwan Strait and signaling to the prc that any attempt to retake Taiwan by force would be extremely costly. Moreover, Chinas assertive and even hostile behavior toward Japan over the past two years from the embargo on rare earth elements (the first time modern China has openly practiced economic warfare) to the constant encroachment in Japans territorial waters to overt Chinese warnings against Japanese security cooperation with free nations like the Philippines has lowered the costs to Japan, and raised the incentives, for Tokyo to pursue a more creative security diplomacy. It should signal to China that the worlds third-largest economy and closest ally of the United States will not be bullied by its authoritarian neighbor, but will pursue its peaceful interests and choose its external alignments as it sees fit.
hina promises to be a truly global power in 2030. But a Chinese superpower will not resemble the American one and will suffer from a range of possible Achilles heels, from rigid one-party rule to a strategic geography of constraint, that will limit its ability to surpass the United States as the leader of the international system much less to shape a world order around itself as America did in the 20th century. Unlike the United States, which ascended to global leadership in a geopolitical environment characterized by the demise of other great powers Japan, Germany, France, Britain, and Russia China will ascend over coming decades in a world characterized by the resilience of American power and the parallel rise of India, Brazil, Indonesia, and other key states. This means that China will be a great power in a world of other great powers. It
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China 2030
The Taiwan Linchpin

will live in a world that has adapted to constrain and channel its power rather than submitting to it. China will certainly wield significant capabilities and influence international norms. But it will not single-handedly write the rules of the international system in the way that previous hegemons have done, because it will most likely not be hegemonic. China may also be democratic in 2030, which if it comes to pass would fundamentally alter the peer-competitor logic that shapes grand-strategic analysis today. China will still need to wield global military power to protect sea and space lines of communication, secure natural resources, protect overseas Chinese populations, meet alliance commitments, and shape developments in regions essential to its economic and security interests. But the security-dilemma dynamics otherwise associated with these projections of power and influence would be A democratic muted by a Chinese political system that was transtransition in parent, accountable, viewed at home and abroad as legitimate, and governed by democratic norms that China could eased Chinese diplomacy with otherwise skeptical states. Just as the United States does not worry increase pressure about nuclear missiles in the hands of Britain, of popular France, and India today, so Washington would have nationalism on less to fear from the military power of a consolidatChinese foreign ed Chinese democracy. And China would have less incentive to invest in aggressive military power-propolicy. jection capabilities were its armed forces subject to democratic civilian control. It is certainly true that a democratic transition in China could increase the pressure of popular nationalism on Chinese foreign policy leading to heightened pressure on a more accountable regime to reunify Taiwan, for instance. But it is equally true that a democratic regime in China would be a more appealing interlocutor for Taiwan to consider peaceful reunification. China might actually be better positioned to achieve its core foreign and security policy goals integrating Taiwan into the prc, convincing skeptical Asian neighbors of its peaceful ambitions, and reassuring the United States that its rise is compatible with American interests were democratic institutions of restraint and reassurance in place in Beijing, recasting the calculations of both Chinas restive citizens and its external competitors. Democracy would also greatly enhance Chinas legitimacy in reshaping international institutions to give itself a more central role in providing global public goods. Many countries would acquiesce to Chinese leadership within the international system should a liberal political regime govern in Beijing, in ways they most likely will not should China continue on its authoritarian trajectory. Indeed, the qualities of Chinese autocracy will increasingly handicap the countrys geopolitical ascent, suggesting that Chinas continuing rise through 2030 may actually require a democratic opening to manage a range of intractable domestic and external challenges. Such an opening would, in
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turn, pave the way for Chinas ascent to the top tier of global politics. In this important sense, Taiwan need not be an impediment to U.S.-China relations or to Chinas continued rise; it may more accurately represent Chinas democratic future.
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Policy Review
The Danger of a Poly-Nuclear Mideast

By Shmuel Bar
he likelihood that the current efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a military nuclear capability may fail has raised debate in academic and strategic communities regarding the implications of a poly-nuclear Middle East, which may include after Iran states such as Saudi Arabia (under the current or a future more-jihadi-oriented regime), Turkey, Egypt (under the Muslim Brotherhood regime), Syria (or a successor state/states thereof), Iraq (or successor states) and Libya. Some respected strategic theorists regard the Cold War experience as highly relevant to such a scenario and point at the fears that permeated the western military establishments of a nuclear China and the fact that a nuclear Indian subcontinent did not result in nuclear war, despite mutual hostility and freShmuel Bar is director of studies at the Institute of Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel. He served for 30 years in the Israeli government.
Shmuel Bar
quent outbreaks of crisis. Kenneth Waltz even suggests that the very possession of nuclear weapons tempers military adventurism and inculcates a degree of strategic responsibility commensurate with the grave consequences that would result from nuclear conflict.1 However, two decades after the Cold War, it is clear that it was not only deterrence based on mutually assured destruction (mad) that prevented outbreak of nuclear war between the two superpowers, but also the stringent procedures of command and control over the nuclear arsenals that reduced the risks of their use in escalation scenarios or unauthorized use. Furthermore, it is clearer today than during the Cold War that the culture of command and control differed considerably in the different nuclear countries and was influenced by military structure, political culture, and levels of confidence of the political leadership in the military.2 Therefore, even if we assume that the leaderships of the region will normally wish to avoid nuclear confrontation, it behooves us to explore the command, control, communication (c3) and Intelligence (c3i) capabilities that may be applied in these countries. There are no indications that any Middle Eastern Muslim country with the possible exception of Iran has begun to develop a doctrine for use and command and control of such weapons. In the veteran nuclear powers, such doctrines and command and control systems developed over the years through constant processes of design, planning and exercises, and involvement of the academic community. In the types of regimes that exist in the Middle East, on the other hand, it is reasonable to assume that such methodical planning will not take place and doctrine will evolve through discussions between the leadership and a small circle of trusted advisors. The chosen paradigms of command and control will, however, be influenced by the cultural, political, and organizational features of these regimes, such as: Personalized or religiously motivated leaderships. Islamic views regarding the nature and role of nuclear weapons and Existing c3 of existing strategic weapons (chemical, biological, ssm ) and existing c3 in conventional situations levels of centralization, culture of delegation of authority, levels of trust in the regular military as opposed to special regime guards forces. the moral permissibility of using nuclear weapons.
Willingness to incur civilian casualties by deployment of weapons in

highly populated areas.
2. See Bruce Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Brookings Institution Press, 1993); Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Keith B. Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
1. Kenneth Waltz, Why Iran Should Get the Bomb, Foreign Affairs (July & August 2012).
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Nuclear aspirations in the Middle East have been motivated by a variety of considerations: deterrence, a need for a weapon of compellence, honor, regional and international stature, and others. The motivation to acquire nuclear weapons and the circumstances through which the state achieves nuclear weapons will influence the development of c3 and the considerations that will guide the operational concept. Some (such as Iran) may see nuclear weapons as a means to undermine the balance of power in the region. Others may see them as necessary in order to counterbalance the former. In any case, the strategic environment of a poly-nuclear Middle East will be exceedingly dynamic and even volatile. It will differ from the stability of the latter part of the Cold War3 and will probably be more like the instability of its early years, but with many nuclear players. In such a volatile environment, the paradigms of command and control may mean the difference between controlled tensions and nuclear confrontation.
Attitudes toward nuclear weapons
he basic building block for command and control of nuclear weapons will be the countrys perception of their purpose; are they perceived as a sui generis weapon so destructive and terrible that they must be controlled far past any other weapon? Or are they just more powerful manifestations of existing weapons?4 Will these countries assimilate the view of use of nuclear weapons as a taboo to be avoided at all cost? From the public discourse in the Middle East, there are few traces of the collective traumas of World War II and the fear of worldwide nuclear conflagration during the Cold War that brought most of the international community and particularly the Western world to subscribe to such a taboo. The perceived legitimacy for acquisition and use of nuclear weapons in Islamic discourse is not drawn from international law (these are frequently even seen as discriminatory infidel conventions imposed on the Muslims in order to weaken or exploit them), but from Islamic jurisprudence. In this context, nuclear weapons are perceived as latter-day manifestations of categories of weapons that existed in the early days of Islam; if the Prophet permitted use of the latter, use of the former must be permissible as well. The most common analogy in Sunni Islamic discourse on wmd is
4. For example, Truman was quoted as having said that he saw the atomic bomb as no more than a bigger artillery shell.
3. The early years of the Cold War were far less stable, though we tend to forget that. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara noted regarding the Cuban missile crisis: It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today. See The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, transcript available at http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html (this link accessed June 14).
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between nuclear weapons and the ancient use of catapults.5 The potential nuclear states in the region will not universally adopt the same attitude towards the role of nuclear weapons in their strategic posture. Schematically, we can portray two possible roles that nuclear weapons may be seen to play: As weapons of deterrence and last resort. This attitude resembles that
of the West during most of the Cold War. The underlying assumption would be that the weapons will probably not be used, and that the country may not have to deal with a second strike scenario or a need to respond after the political leadership has been incapacitated or decapitated. They will serve as a last resort weapon only when attacked by nuclear weapons. This attitude may bring its proponents to place more emphasis on safeguards to prevent the weapons from being used by mistake. A regime which views nuclear weapons as purely a deterrent may have a greater tendency towards a centralized structure: deployment in few high security areas; direct lines of control to the political leadership cutting out intermediary echelons; simplification of the storage and operation of the arsenal and total separation of weapons and delivery systems, reliance on authentication systems and fail-safe mechanisms.
As weapons of compellence as a means to achieve regional hegemony,

or to realize religiously or ideologically deterministic victory. To adopt such an attitude, it would not be necessary for the regime leadership to be devoid of a sense of the enormity of use of nuclear weapons, or to be irrational; rather it would suffice for it to suffer from the hubris of the belief that it can handle nuclear brinksmanship situations. This scenario opens up a vast expanse of potential nuclear exchanges, war by catastrophic miscalculation. Countries that subscribe to this view may put the emphasis on facilitation of their operation in certain contingencies, including frequent or permanent high alert (defcon ) levels.
The above notwithstanding, the nuclear postures of such new nuclear powers will have a reciprocal influence over each other. Thus, while a country such as Saudi Arabia may view nuclear weapons as essentially a weapon
5. The Sheikh of al-Azhar Muhammad Tantawi drew an analogy from the ruling of the Caliph Abu Bakr to fight the enemy with a sword if he fights with a sword and . . . with a spear if he fights with a spear. Therefore, if the enemy uses a nuclear bomb, it is the duty of the Muslims to use on, too. Al-Qaeda justified the September 11, 2001, attacks as an attack with heavy weaponry with no possibility of distinguishing between enemy civilians and combatants that was similar to the use of catapults (manjaniqat) by Muslim armies against fortified enemy cities in early Islamic warfare. The concept of manjaniq can be found in numerous Islamic traditions; for example, in Malik bin Anas, when at the siege of Taif in 630 ad Muhammad used catapults against the city and it was said to him, Messenger of God, there are women and youth inside, and the messenger of God said, peace be upon him, they belong to their fathers. Since then, the catapult case has been applied to numerous battle situations in Muslim history, now including use of nuclear weapons.
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of deterrence, and attempt to maintain a low profile accordingly, it may be forced to develop a higher profile that calls for more sophisticated levels of command and control in the face of provocations and nuclear one-upmanship of other powers in the region (e.g., Iran). Cultural, religious, and external and internal political factors will certainly have an influence on the crafting of these countries nuclear postures. Such factors may include: The Sunni or Shiite orientation of the regime. The clerical establishment in countries likes Saudi Arabia and Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt and potentially in other countries may have a pivotal role in determining how the utility of nuclear weapons will be perceived.
The relationship with the U.S. and the West. Pro-Western regimes will
be more prone to respond to Western pressures to maintain strong controls over their weapons, and to accept Western guidance in this regard.
Risk proclivity. Countries with a history of conventional brinkmanship are more likely to view nuclear weapons as additional tools in such a policy toolbox.
Regional aspirations that are seen as being achievable through political use of nuclear weapons.
Confidence that the regimes have it in their capability to operate the

weapons on short notice, or to posture a plausible second-strike capability if attacked.
An important issue in this regard will be the option for nuclear ambiguity, along the lines of the Israeli model. Although an ambiguous stance by Iran cannot be ruled out, due to its international obligations and considerations, it now seems that the chances of Iran acquiring a military nuclear capability and maintaining ambiguity are slim both for reasons relating to the Iranian regime itself, and since Irans adversaries in the region will expose Irans capabilities. Therefore, it seems that the option for nuclear ambiguity for the rest of the countries in the region will not be on the table for long.
Custody of weapons, security of assets
key issue will be the custody of nuclear assets. This includes: decisions regarding means of delivery, deployment of the weapons and delivery systems, separation of assets (weapons and delivery systems) to safeguard against unauthorized use; and the designation of the organization within the state that has physical possession of the assets.
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The choice of delivery means will influence a wide range of considerations for command and control: deployment, custody, and authority for delivery/launch. For most of these countries, the preferred means of delivery will most likely be surface-to-surface missiles, of which they already have significant capabilities. However, ssms are vulnerable to pre-emptive attacks, both in storage and in launching sites, and deployment considerations will have to take this into account. The logic for deployment in distant sparsely populated areas would (as in the Cold War) be to minimize the threat to the civilian population and to impose on the enemy counterforce strikes to deal with a large and widely dispersed number of targets. Such a deployment would render the enemys intelligence collection, building of target banks, and The Iranian battle damage assessment more difficult. On the other hand, in many of the states in question, such regime has areas (frequently populated by minorities) are, in dispersed its many cases, perceived as a priori disloyal to the regime. This raises the dilemma (for example, the strategic assets current dilemma of the current Syrian regime in and installations, Northern Syria in regards to its chemical weapons including nuclear stockpiles) of the security of the installations in those areas. The Iranian regime, however, has disproduction persed its strategic assets and installations, including facilities and nuclear production facilities and ssm assets, over a wide geographical expanse, and shows relatively litssm assets. tle concern regarding this consideration. This may not hold true for other, less confident, regimes in the region. Fear of infiltration and betrayal may encourage separation of weapons from delivery systems. However, keeping the two separate would extract a price in terms of operational flexibility, and would constrain flexibility of alert levels, undermining the credibility of deterrent threats and reducing escalation dominance. In some regimes, security considerations may be subordinated to the necessity for flexible response, and hair-trigger readiness. Keeping warheads unassembled or a step away from operational status would render the theft of fully operational weapons difficult, but would not solve the problem and the danger of the theft of near-operational weapons, materials and expertise and would contradict a credible deterrence or compellence posture. In most of the regimes in the region, custody of the weapons and the delivery systems will have to be put in the hands of organizations or family members whose loyalty to the leaders is beyond doubt. This may lead to weapons and delivery systems being under unified command. This will simplify command and control, but at the same time increase the risk of unauthorized or hasty use. Having acquired nuclear weapons in contravention to their npt obligations, Middle Eastern regimes will probably be extremely sensitive regarding
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the possibility of further unauthorized transfer from ideological or material motives of nuclear materials, expertise, hardware, components, or weapons from themselves to adversaries. This is a critical issue already today in the Pakistani context. The r&d organizations in the Middle East unlike their Cold War predecessors may be more likely to emulate A.Q. Khan in Pakistan, not only maintaining a role in the decision-making processes after completing development of the weapons, but also becoming back doors to the weapons they devised, particularly in scenarios of breakdown of the states. Unlike the scientific institutions of the Soviet Union, which had little or no prior interaction with potential customers for their know-how, and whose efforts to capitalize on their access could be relatively easily monitored and disrupted by the successor state (Russia) and the West, these elements have wide access to potential clients. One of the ramifications of a common interest of a number of Sunni Arab states (Saudi Arabia, uae, Egypt) facing the need for a fast track to a nuclear r&d joint custody and command and control of the nuclear weapons, possibly along the lines of the nato example as between allies. Theoretically, this could create a unique relationship of joint command, and unique problems of command and control.
Authority over use

n the veteran nuclear states civilian control of the nuclear arsenal was decided at the inception of the nuclear age and was, for the most part, not an issue for large-scale struggles within the respective regimes. The tendency throughout the Cold War was to lower the political profile of nuclear tests, exercises, and planning out of concern that publicity would result in possible escalation. Western (American, British, and French) systems of delegation of authority were based on the ex officio assumption of loyalty of the officers who received the orders, while the ethnic, regional, or family affiliation of the individual officers was deemed irrelevant. While the Soviet system did, apparently, take into account ethnic background of senior officers, this was not, so it seems, a constant concern of the political leadership. It was relegated to the security services to perform appropriate weeding and vetting. The Middle East in this regard will be fundamentally different. The nuclear capability, once achieved, will be an important lever for influence within the regimes. The very identification of the nuclear capability with the political leader is, in the Middle East, a source of legitimacy and public support. Therefore, we can expect that even technical issues relating to building, deploying, or training the nuclear force will receive a high profile and publicized reference in these regimes, to enhance the legitimacy of the leadership in the eyes of its constituents. All the regimes and military establishments in question are loath to deleFebruary & March 2013 65
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gate authority in matters relating to strategic weapons and strategic interests. The hyper-centralized structures of some of these regimes and the deep involvement in military affairs of the political leadership would probably extend to the latters direct involvement in vetting each link in the chain of command over nuclear weapons. We should expect a more personalized chain of command consisting of fewer but highly trusted individuals, with less compartmentalization between them. Collective identification tribal, ethnic, and even social networks, such as affiliation with certain religious institutions will probably influence who would have access to nuclear weapons, and to whom, and when, authority would be delegated. Similarly, the field units entrusted with nuclear assets are likely to be fiercely loyal, disciplined, and ideologically unshakable (e.g., Communication the irgc in the case of Iran). The safeguards for communication with nuclear safeguards with units are far less advanced in the military structures in the Middle East than in any of the existing nuclear units nuclear states. Communicating a command authoare far less rizing the launch of nuclear weapons at an adversary would probably mandate redundancy, including advanced than both modern as well as primitive means, given that in any of the communications in a crisis or war might be vulneraexisting nuclear ble to disruption. The solution for a breakdown of communications due to nuclear warfare, elecstates. tronic warfare (ew) attacks or even intensive conventional strikes can range from low-level physical communication (ptp telephone), through covert trusted civilian chains of communication (Iranian or Saudi clergy channels for those states), dependable runners, and others. Such measures would also reduce flexibility and escalation dominance. The key issue with respect to delegation of authority, though, is not the default authorization (Saddam Husseins example of delegating authorization of wmd and ssm use in 1991 and 2003 to field commanders) through the chain of command when the leader is alive and in the loop, but how to authorize use in case the authorized leadership is incapacitated and primary c3 assets are disrupted. The tendency of Middle Eastern regimes to personalize the state may lead to broad authorization to launch nuclear weapons in case the leader is presumed dead even if no nuclear attack has taken place. A Soviet style dead-mans hand system, would, theoretically, be attractive to many of the regimes in the region, and particularly to autocratic authoritarian regimes. However, the logic behind this system in the Cold War was a reflection of the assumptions that if the leadership were destroyed, it would mean that a large part of the country had been decimated and that only the other superpower could have executed such a blow. These assumptions will not be true in the Middle East. As opposed to the
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mutually assured destruction of the Cold War, nuclear war in the Middle East may be perceived as survivable, especially in the larger and more populous states, like Iran or Egypt. Therefore, the regime may fear that surviving elements to which authority was delegated (even family members or high level members of the ruling party) may opt not to automatically escalate to a full-fledged nuclear war in the case of the incapacitation of the top leadership. The solution might be a standing order for automatic launch if communication with the leadership is lost and it may be presumed to have been destroyed.
Verification and authentication

revention of deliberate unauthorized use will be a paramount concern for all the regimes in the region. Over the years, the means that have evolved for prevention of deliberate unauthorized use (and to prevent accidental use) have moved from the human to the electronic spectrum. Systems based on split codes held by separate senior officers may be problematic for reasons of regime structure noted above, and regimes may rightly fear that an entire nuclear unit may mutiny and take control over the weapons. Cold War technical means took decades to fully develop, including the evolution of Permissible Access Links (pals) to reduce the risk of deliberate or erroneous unauthorized use of nuclear weapons. Early Cold War technical intelligence capabilities were limited, and an early poly-nuclear Middle East may resemble this environment in some ways. c3 systems in the veteran nuclear powers have gradually moved towards the technological, leaving behind slow, cumbersome, and potentially compromising human methods. Authentication redundancies of the authority to launch nuclear weapons developed over the years in the existing nuclear powers (the American football, or the Russian Cheget). However, integration of such technologies into the c3 structures of regimes in the Middle East is doubtful, at least in the early stages. Each fledgling nuclear country will initially have small arsenals and a much larger set of enemy targets. This will encumber pre-designation of weapons for targets and exclude the use of pals, which preclude the accidental use of a weapon against targets that are not pre-defined. Furthermore, the inherent (and in the light of the cyberattacks on Iran not unjustified) suspicion that the enemy may be capable of planting Trojan horses in technological systems in order to manipulate them may inhibit use of highly technological means. This would have an adverse effect on the regimes ability to maintain flexible time-sensitive response mechanisms and hence would influence other elements of the nuclear doctrine. The fact that the same types of delivery systems may be used for both conventional and nonconventional warheads will further complicate c3, as
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different standard operating procedures (sop) will probably be applied to those delivery systems which are dedicated for nuclear weapons. The defender will not know for sure whether the ssm launched against him is carrying a conventional or wmd warhead until it explodes, and the attacker may assume that the defender understands that he is only employing conventional warheads, or may deliberately allow the ambiguity involved to intimidate the defender and enhance the credibility of his deterrence. Furthermore, the possibility that nuclear weapons may be delivered in unorthodox ways (from civilian ships, neighboring countries territory) in order to obfuscate responsibility will also reduce the use of technological means of command and control. Human verification may be implemented at operational levels (for example, the need to combine codes held by more than one senior officer in order to override safeguards and arm weapons). However, it is very unlikely that any of the regimes in the region would be able to adopt human verification of the orders of the head of state. In the authoritarian regime model, the leader would probably not want restrictions on his authority to launch weapons even authentication by a trusted deputy. In regimes such as the Iranian or future Jihadi-Salafi regimes in which the leader is perceived as the Amir al-Muminin (Commander of the Believers) or (as in Iran) the ValiFaqih, the leader is thought to have inspiration from Allah, and restriction of his discretion by a lesser individual would be tantamount to imposing restrictions on the will of Allah. Even the argument that the verification is not meant for regular situations but for contingencies during which the leader may be incapacitated, for any reason, may be difficult to support in these regimes.
he confidence of a nuclear-enabled regime in its intelligence capabilities will play a pivotal role in determining the spectrum of alert levels, and the routine in regards to those levels. Such an operational nuclear deployment will require strategic early warning and intelligence capabilities covering all relevant threats: day and night airborne visual intelligence (visint) and signals intelligence (sigint) assets, ground sigint and radar deployment in effective ranges, an advanced satellite deployment, and more. The indigenous early warning capabilities of all these countries to ssm threats in general conventional, cbw, and then nuclear, are either weak or nonexistent, and the potential for error is very high. Consequently, these new nuclear countries may opt to rely on intelligence allies: the U.S., Russia, and China. However, such reliance may bring about situations not dissimilar to the role the Soviet Union played in 1967, but with far more dire consequences, in which an external player feeds alarming information that provokes nuclear alert. Without the ability to assess such
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Intelligence

information, countries receiving it will have no choice but to go on nuclear alert. Much of the discussion relating to the potential dangers of a poly-nuclear Middle East focuses on the feasibility of deterrence to prevent premeditated intentional use of nuclear weapons. However, not enough attention is paid to the potential for nuclear confrontation during a multilateral spiral of escalation and absence of escalation dominance. In this context, the flexibility and robustness of the command and control structures of fledgling nuclear powers in the region will be critical. The factors that will influence the c3 paradigms of nuclear weapons in the region include a wide range of political, military, bureaucratic, religious and technological issues. In the early stages, such paradigms will probably be closer to the early structures of the veteran nuclear powers, with adaptations for regional cultural, political, and religious idiosyncrasies, and will not necessarily integrate the lessons learned by those veteran powers over time and in thoroughly different strategic and cultural contexts. Furthermore, it stands to reason that the new nuclear powers will not welcome imported solutions based on off the shelf Western technology, and will prefer local solutions, which will be, initially at least, less sophisticated. Among the considerations in crafting nuclear command and control paradigms, considerable weight will be given to the perception of the role of nuclear weapons and the acceptance of a cultural taboo on their use that developed in the international community. The integration of such a taboo would be a key factor in the motivation of the leaderships of the new nuclear states to prevent their use. Even ideologically, or religiously, highly charged leaderships may be aware of the dangers inherent in nuclear war and behave rationally. However, such awareness and rational decision-making processes are a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Nuclear confrontation may not be the result of some irrational but premeditated decision by leaders to initiate a nuclear strike, but of faulty intelligence, command, and control in escalatory situations. In such situations, it appears that the command and control structures that may develop in new nuclear states in the Middle East are likely to exacerbate the dangers inherent in escalation and brinkmanship, and to result ultimately in perennial nuclear instability or even nuclear war.
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Lessons from the Indian Wars

By Kori Schake
eginning with the 1778 Treaty with the Delawares, the United States engaged in some 375 treaties with Native Americans. While many were concluded hopefully, even earnestly, none ended well for Indian tribes. From George Washington forward, American presidents were confronted with the problem of Americans coveting and taking Indian land. Moreover, from the time of the French and Indian War in 1754, what would become the American army was fighting Indians. Subjugating those Indians was a challenge of enormous magnitude: Only 5,000 soldiers patrolled a million square miles that was home to 200,000 to 300,000 Indians. And the Indians were generally more proficient at warfare. Soldiers fighting successive tribes of Indians as white settlers moved south and west to occupy the continent were mostly militia, with little prior experience of warfare. By contrast, most Indian tribes fought as their profession. As S. C. Gwynne emphasizes in Empire of the Summer Moon, American Indians were warlike by nature, and they were warlike for centuries before Columbus stumbled upon them.
Kori Schake is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of international security studies at the United States Military Academy.
Kori Schake
Yet the United States had innumerable advantages it could bring to bear against the Indians: wealth, numbers, technology, industrial organization. Why did it take so long over a hundred years to do so? The answer is a complicated story, interweaving policy and military failures, failures of understanding and execution, and throughout it all an obdurate unwillingness of Americans on the frontier to uphold their governments policy. The Indian Wars were finally won with the combination of simplified objectives, ruthless prosecution by both military and economic means, and international cooperation to preclude sanctuaries from which tribes could operate. But the lessons, and especially the military lessons, were there from the start. These lessons are immediately relevant to the war we are fighting in Afghanistan. Nor are the lessons of the Indian Wars solely applicable to countering insurgencies. When asked by George Marshall in 1942 how the Army should train for pivoting from the war in Europe to the Pacific, the commander of the Marines on Guadalcanal answered go back to the tactics of the French and Indian days . . . study their tactics and fit in our modern weapons, and you have a solution. Many would now prefer to consider this kind of war a narrow subset of the spectrum of conflict; the Defense Departments 2012 strategic guidance concludes the United States will no longer engage in large-scale counterinsurgencies. Yet the impediments to winning the Indian Wars will be impediments to winning any kind of war. They have to do with an unwillingness by political leaders to acknowledge the scope and contradictory nature of their strategic objectives; an enormous gap between the campaigns objectives and the resources political leaders are willing to put toward the effort; dramatic overestimation of the capacity of our government to effectively carry out a sophisticated policy with political, economic, and military elements; corruption delegitimizing the idealistic components of the policy designed to win support of reconcileables; military gains far outpacing civilian agencies ability to capitalize on them; existence of safe havens because of our inability to bring border states into cooperation; insularity in Washington against the consequences of the policys failures, which are principally borne by others; a military hesitant to credit their adversaries with superior tactics and even strategy; a cost-exchange ratio significantly favoring the enemy and therefore making our strategy episodically followed and their strategy more sustainable over time; ideological unwillingness to adjust the strategy to one more in line with conditions and resources. In fact, these are the same impediments preventing us winning the Afghan war.
In the beginning
ashington and his Virginians were beaten back from Ft. Duquesne in 1755 by Ottawa and Potawatomie (600 of the 800 French-led troops were Indian). In the aftermath, Washington
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reflected on this kind of fighting, and the importance of individual judgment when armies are dispersed. British General John Forbes, Washingtons commander, went even further, concluding wee must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from Enemy Indians, or anything else who have seen the Country and Warr carried on in it. Once a tribe was forced to cede its land, however, the militia typically disbanded and returned to their farming and ranching. Even the last four decades of the 19th century, the period we tend to think of as the closing of the American West, nearly all battles were fought by small detachments of infantry and cavalry. The army did not carry lessons from one Indian War over into the next by, so instead of one war, the Indian campaigns are more properly thought of as a sequence of wars in which previous iterations were little studied. Yet the Indian Wars were constant. From 1768 through 1889, according to R. Ernest and Trevor N. Dupuys The Encyclopedia of Military History, the army fought 943 actions in twelve separate campaigns and numerous local incidents. And as Fairfax Downey notes in his Indian Fighting Army, from 1866 to 1892 there was not a year, and hardly a three months, in which there was not some expedition against the Indians in the vast regions west of the Mississippi, and between the Canadian and Mexican borders. That the army chose not to study and learn from its experience is a terrible institutional indictment; that it succeeded anyway is a marvelous tribute to the inventiveness of the soldiers who fought these wars. That the wars were ultimately won only when effective military operations were integrated into a broader political and economic campaign is a lesson we seem always in need of relearning, as our current military success and strategic failure in Afghanistan makes clear. Theodore Roosevelt gave a typically clear-eyed summary of the Indian wars in his book The Winning of the West:
The frontier was pushed westward, not because the leading statesmen of America, or the bulk of the American people, foresaw the continental greatness of this country or strove for such greatness; but because the bordermen of the West, and the adventurous land-speculators of the East, were personally interested in acquiring new territory, and because, against their will, the governmental representatives of the nation were finally forced to make the interests of the Westerners their own.
That is an essential, and essentially American, truth: The federal government was too far removed from local concerns to craft workable solutions. Throughout the Indian Wars there was an enormous gap between the policy of the American government and the views of those Americans living in Indian territory. Settlements generally preceded forts, and government policy foundered on settler refusal to comply with government policy. From the capital, the government crafted a grand strategy it was incapable of implementing.
Kori Schake
Bill Cody, awarded the medal of honor for his scouting with the army, said every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government. Many in the professional army agreed with that view; more often than not, they blamed settlers for causing massacres through their own recklessness. The army was throughout the Indian wars generally unsupportive of the policies of state and territorial governments and hesitant to enforce them or cooperate with militia engaged in them. As late as 1871, General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the army, rejected settler demands for army protection on the Texas frontier, saying, they expose women and children singly on the road and in cabins far off from others, as though they were safe in Illinois . . . such actions are more significant than words. From George Washington forward, with only the exception of Andrew Jackson, American presidents attempted to reconcile southward and westward expansion with preservation of Indian settlements, even if dislocating Indians from their tribal lands. Washington was unequivocal: Indians being the prior occupants possess the right of the soil . . . to dispossess them . . . would be a gross violation; confiscation would stain the character of the nation. Yet he could not prevent settlers doing so, and was pulled into defending them in the Northwest Indian War.
A nation divided
ndrew jacksons more aggressive dispossession of land from Indians, not surprisingly, coincides with the rise of populism in American politics. It also traces the fault line between those Americans living in safety and those settling the frontier; the removal policy was deeply unpopular in New England, supported where people were exposed to Indians. And the political power of the frontier was rising with the admission of new states and continued expansion. The separation of federal and state powers further aggravated the schism between presidential policies and local attitudes, as very often federal treaties promised land that states refused to hand over to Indian control. The policy cleaved along another uniquely American fault line during the Jackson administration, with the president declining to enforce the Supreme Courts decision that Georgia must comply with federal treaties governing relations with the Cherokee. After Jackson, though, the previous policy equilibrium was restored, in part because the attention of the nation was riven by conflict over slavery and the gathering storm of civil war. Secession of the southern states removed federal troops from the West and increased competition for skilled soldiers and militia. Before the Civil War, the professional army was spread across the nation; with the advent of war, all troops were recalled eastand states required to raise volunteers to protect emigrant trails and
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delivery of mail. Americas best soldiers were fighting each other, not Indians. The last state militia were relieved by federal troops professionals only in 1866. The diluting of talented soldiery was especially felt in the southwest, where plains tribes pushed the frontier back more than a hundred miles. After the war, the federal government refused to allow former Confederate states to raise militia, even in response to brutal raiding by Apache and Comanche. In 1871 the line of settlement had not yet returned as far west as before secession.
The Armys deficiencies

ilitia may have been less capable soldiers, but even the professional army was not serious about the undertaking of fighting Indians. As late as 1871, General C.C. Augur had to issue an order that henceforth officers would be expected to make a vigorous effort, even to the extent of privation, to overtake and punish marauders. Indeed, life on the frontier for officers and their families was often glamorous amidst the danger and deprivation. Most officers, Custer included, picnicked and hunted significantly more than they trained. In the Battle of Rosebud in 1876, General Crooks troops fired 250 rounds per Indian casualty, an appallingly low level of marksmanship. One observer of Custers Seventh Cavalry, quoted in Nathaniel Philbricks Last Stand, before Little Big Horn reported that sending raw recruits and untrained horses to fight mounted Indians is simply sending soldiers to be slaughtered without the power of defending themselves. Lack of wherewithal further impeded progress. The War Department was continually hobbled for funds, and chose policies for efficiency rather than effectiveness. It long held the belief that if the Indians could be induced to keep the peace, forts and war would be unnecessary. While weapons technology advanced significantly during that time period, the fiercest of the Indians had access to the best weapons in many instances they were better armed than the American soldiers they were fighting. Soldiers were provided with single shot muskets, mostly front-loading, making nearly impossible any reloading while on horseback (a distinct disadvantage in Indian country). As an economy measure, soldiers were also not issued ammunition to practice firing.
An industrial age solution

he federal government was finally pushed into solving the Indian problem in the second Grant administration. That solution was an overt renunciation of peace policies, development of a
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more proficient Indian-fighting army, relentless prosecution of a military campaign against the tribes, and decimation of Indian livelihood. President Grant had initially supported what we would now describe as an ethical and culturally sensitive approach to the Indian problem. He sought to minimize conflict, supporting any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship, ordering military commanders to prevent settler incursions onto Indian land, accepting responsibility for Indian welfare on reservations, establishing educational and medical programs even symbolizing the policy by appointment of the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs. What in contemporary parlance we call whole of government operations were also in vogue for managing the Indian problem. Military commanders were subordinated to Indian Agents, government civilians purportedly caring for Indian interests. The more nuanced strategy did not, however, reduce spectacular incidents of violence that changed public attitudes even in the cosseted east. The Modoc War on the California-Oregon border resulted in the killing (during peace negotiations, no less) of the only general officer during a hundred years of Indian warring. Custers Seventh Cavalry was massacred at Little Big Horn. Grant considered Little Big Horn Custers own fault; but the public would not be assuaged. The peace policy was discredited as much by failure of the Indian agencies as by violence. The magnitude of corruption experienced throughout the Indian agencies has seldom been equaled; its revelation was devastating to liberal reformers hopes for a humane resettlement of Indians. Faced with collapse of more sophisticated strategies than enforcing compliance, and the public outcry after Custers massacre, Grant changed course, subordinating the Indian agencies under military control and ordering the military to subdue all Indians who offered resistance. This instruction finally got the army serious about the Indian Wars. They brought men battle-hardened from our first industrial-age warfare; the change from the dashing romanticism of the frontier to its conquest is epitomized by the transition from Custer, with his long golden hair and buckskins writing memoirs of life on the plains, to Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, a severe, unpopular commander who defeated the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Sioux, Ute, and Apache with a fearsome mix of intellect and determination.
The intellectual revolution

ackenzie graduated from West Point in 1862, was wounded six times during his Civil War service, and seven times breveted (given field promotions). In the space of three years, he was promoted from second lieutenant to major general; Ulysses Grant characterized
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him in his memoirs as the most promising officer in the army. Other commanders were better supplied, had more forces and less daunting enemies; none matched Mackenzies victories. The key to his success was understanding: He thought differently about the problem than his contemporaries. Mackenzie set about to demonstrate seriousness to his own soldiers, eliminating sport hunting, drilling them relentlessly, and enforcing strict discipline. Like George Washington, he was at first unsuccessful fighting Indians Comanche Quanah Parker stole his horses on his first campaign, and being unhorsed in Indian country was often a fatal error. Mackenzie made numerous other early mistakes: His scouting was deficient, winter provisions inadequate, he nearly got his men killed encamping between buffalo and water, and was outsmarted by both Kiowa and Comanche. But he learned from his mistakes, developing the The Army won tactical proficiency that would turn the tide. With as conditions hardened troops and logistical experience from the Civil War he began to operate at great distances changed and as from supply lines. He learned to utilize Indian adversaries scouts (which required understanding the enmities became more between tribes) and divided spoils among them to reward information; to march with a detachment of accomplished cavalry between scouts and infantry as a shock and dangerous. absorber; carry cartridges on their person; to wheel and volley in the face of an attack; and not to divert forces to chase retreating Indians. He campaigned during the winter, when Indians tended to encamp and were therefore easier to find and less mobile. Most importantly, he determined how Indians followed water trails in the desert. He also studied their social structure, learning (as Andrew Jackson earlier had) that an asymmetric grab for Indian families would derail attacks and Indian chiefs would make any concession to ransom their women and children. Mackenzie also realized, as no other soldier had before him, that mobility was the key to proficiency for the plains Indians: He didnt have to kill all the Indians, he just had to take their horses. And he did. Mackenzie raided for horses not, as the Indians did, for honor, but to prevent his adversaries utilizing their principal advantage. That higher-level insight, so obvious in retrospect, led to the broader observation that without buffalo to hunt, the Indian way of life would collapse. While he unrelentingly insisted that military success was required to force Indian compliance, Mackenzie advocated strategies that incorporated military operations with political and economic components. This was most visible in his advocacy of negotiations with the government of Mexico to prevent Indians having sanctuary across the border (and in his violation of the sovereignty of Mexico by attacking Indians inside Mexico until the government agreed to U.S. terms).
Kori Schake
In the late stages of the Indian wars, those occurring in the plains and along the southwest border of what is now the United States, the Army suffered losses and depredations, but it eventually won the war. Or, more accurately, won the wars. It won as conditions changed and as adversaries became more accomplished and dangerous. Battlefields shifted to the vast southwest and from infantry skirmishes to mounted warfare. But the pattern is remarkably consistent from George Washington in 1755 to Ranald Mackenzie in 1875: The American government does not reconcile its policy to its means until forced by the public, and when they do, the Army fights and loses, gains respect for their Indian adversaries and begins to mimic their tactics, brings in the supplies and organizational skills learned in campaigns against armies fighting as we do, which leads to the successful pushing of Indians off their tribal lands. If there can be said to be an American way of war, it is this. Militarily, the Indian Wars follow an evolution in which the Indians first mastered the horse, Americans then countered with the rifle, and then both seized on the others strong suit. Both were equally motivated, both societies amazingly enduring of hardship and casualties. They fought, perhaps, for different things, certainly with different approaches; the Indians for personal valor, the Indian-fighting U.S. Army with the brutal arithmetic of industrial age warfare. The difference, ultimately, was that Indians did not continue innovating, whereas the Army did. In the end, though, it was less the Army than the society that destroyed the Indians. As Mackenzies boss, General Philip Sheridan, testified to the Texas legislature in 1873 when the hunters were killing buffalo by the million, decimating herds of the plains,
These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular Army has done in the last 40 years. They are destroying the Indians commissary. And it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.
Population tables tell the story most succinctly: White settlement in Wise County, Texas, dropped from 3,160 in 1860 to 1,450 in 1870; but in 1880, five years after the end of the Indian Wars, it had surged to 16,601.
he myth has grown out of the 20th century of the United States as a vaunted military power, determined to vanquish its foes. The Jacksonian tradition is credited with imbuing our culture with a commitment to fight until the unconditional surrender of our enemies and a reflexive willingness greater than in most other countries to support military
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Indian-fighting country

solutions to vexing international problems. It echoes through debates on Iraq and Afghanistan, when advocates of greater commitment attempt to place the judgment of commanders above that of the leaders elected to determine how much national effort to commit. That approach subverts the proper ordering of civil-military relations: Presidents are responsible for winning or losing wars. It is presidents who set political objectives and are accountable to the public for matching the importance of the war with the resources to attain them. It is presidents who hire and fire military leaders carrying out their campaigns. It is presidents who must sue for peace or determine to fight the enemy to extinction. And no president has given limitless resources to any war the United States has ever fought. Not the Revolutionary War: Washington, as chief executive of the war effort, constantly harangued the Congress for authorities and resources they would not give him. Not the Civil War; Lincoln had to navigate draft riots and public exhaustion. Not World War II; Roosevelt was constrained by isolationist sentiment and concern about the recovery needs of the American economy. The United States wins wars when it decides to stop losing wars when it brings its strategy and resources into alignment and political leaders commit to outcomes within the constraints. In the case of the Indian Wars, that meant simplifying our objectives relinquishing any pretense at justice in our dealings with Indians and fighting a war of imperial consolidation that would win control of the territory in question. It meant acknowledging the failure of our civilian agencies and directing the military to perform the functions necessary for the success of the war effort. It required putting forward military leaders able to understand the enemy and innovate to diminish his advantages. It required compromises and unwelcome commitments and the risk of a wider war with foreign powers to prevent safe havens. It required using our technological and economic advantages to decimate other societies. In wondering why we dont win our current wars, we ought perhaps to reflect that we as a society have not wanted that outcome enough to commit ourselves to the gritty and awful business of destruction. We are an incredibly fortunate society in that we have the luxury of choosing whether to win our wars. We ought perhaps to reflect on whether we could have won the wars we chose to win by the means we now consider sufficient and proper to fight them.
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Books Tom Wolfes Miami
Tom Wolfe. Back to Blood. Little, Brown. 704 Pages. $ 30.00. n 2012, both presidential candidates agreed that America is a divided nation. In private remarks to wealthy donors in May that were secretly taped and released to devastating political effect in September, Mitt Romney declared that 47% of Americans are heavily dependent on government entitlements, pay no income taxes, see themselves as victims, and will never vote for a Republican who calls for personal responsibility. In contrast, no hostile actions designed to cripple his candidacy were necessary to reveal President Obamas view that poisonous divisions disfigure the nation. The president openly, emphatically, and every chance he got proclaimed that America suffers from an ugly and
By Peter Berkowitz
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book is Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, SelfGovernment, and Political Moderation.
unjust rift between the wealthy and the rest. And unlike the former governor of Massachusetts, whose opinions about what divides us were spoken in private, the president and his team did what was in their power to stoke resentment by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in swing states alone on negative ads that sought to convince women, minorities, the young, lowincome earners, and much of the middle class that the rapacious rich and the heartless Republicans who coddle them are the peoples enemies. Tom Wolfe, master chronicler of American society and culture for half a century and going strong, also sees America riven by deep divisions. Or so he sees Miami, the seething setting for his entertaining and ambitious new novel about the heroics, travails, and chivalry of young Cuban-American cop Nestor Camacho, and the ill-fated romances of Nestors beautiful and basically good-hearted ex-girlfriend Magdalena Ortega. Wolfe surrounds the young former lovers with a cast of colorful co-stars, including a smart but sleazy psychiatrist specializing in treating rich and well-connected sufferers from addiction to pornography; a billionaire porn-addicted patsy of a patient; a ruthless Cuban mayor; a formidable African-American chief of police; an enormously rich Russian playboy, philanthropist, and thug; a stuffy, risk-averse newspaper editor; a shy but dogged young reporter; a Haitian-born professor of French literature who seeks to conceal his Haitian origins and flaunt his French roots, manners, and mores; and the professors beautiful and pure daughter Ghislaine. And with his trademark vividness Wolfe brings to life Miami
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neighborhoods, from grindingly poor to extravagantly posh; a ludicrously preening art scene; tony restaurants and tawdry strip clubs; and endless sun and endless striving. The citizens and city whose simmering tensions Wolfe evokes tell a local tale while providing a troubling portent for the countrys future. Yet the source of the divisions that define Wolfes Miami in the first decades of the 21st century is not views about the role of the federal government or political party affiliation. Indeed, the stuff over which Democrats and Republicans have been battling with increasing resentment and self-righteousness for the last decade is practically invisible in Wolfes novel. Instead, the divisions flow from blood. Wolfe has in mind blood in more than one sense. Yes, as the critics have been quick to observe, in Wolfes Miami family, ethnic tradition, and the larger community into which one is born instill a deep-seated distrust of outsiders. But, though the critics have mostly failed to discern it, looming larger in Back to Blood are the oldest human passions coursing through our veins however much we may purport to have put all that behind us and still inflaming and embittering, enticing and enthralling our hearts. Indeed, Back to Blood is the story of the mixing of blood in the sense of cultural inheritance and in the sense of the primally human. It is a particularly explosive mixing because in Wolfes Miami, and not only in Wolfes Miami, the inherently volatile elements are generally uncooled and unrefined by religious faith, patriotic devotion, and shared standards of justice and duty.
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ovels are the least perfectible of literary forms, and Back to Blood is no exception to the genre. Some of the complaints to which it has been subject recall those lodged against Wolfes previous novels. The plot relies on farfetched coincidences. The characters frequently are less deftly-realized individuals than types heroic or villainous, clownish or stalwart, bursting with youth, negotiating middle age, humbled by old-age. And the authors literary technique, which consists in part in depicting characters thoughts in the authors own high-energy, rapidfire, crackling prose, risks giving every character the same remarkable inner voice. To these standard criticisms there are effective replies. Rare is the novel, including the greatest, in which apparently accidental happenings are not crucial to pushing the plot forward. The human types and the general tendencies into which Wolfe breathes life are of intrinsic interest and crucial to understanding America yet are typically distant from and neglected by contemporary elites. And by means of the refinement and amplification of the language of his characters inner life, Wolfe makes audible and visible the powerful all-too-human anxieties and aspirations that roil their spirits but are often repressed, disguised, or underestimated not least by those whose task it is to clarify the currents and contradictions of our contemporary cultural wonderland. Moreover, whatever the ultimate shortcomings of Back to Blood, they are more than made up for by the sheer exuberance of Wolfes language and the inspiring delight, with
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which every page sparkles, that an octogenarian takes in the perennial human comedy. The elite reviews have for the most part been mixed. For example, according to Washington Post fiction editor Ron Charles, despite having produced a screwball comedy that has its moments, Wolfes depiction of Cubans, blacks, Russians, men, and women are boring; his descriptions of sex are loud and repellent; and his various sub-plots dont cohere. In the New York Times, daily book critic Michiko Kakutani found Back to Blood a soapy, gripping and sometimes glib novel in which Wolfes two CubanAmerican heroes, Nestor and Magdalena, serve as a prism by which to view the pretensions, social climbing and Machiavellian manipulations that burbles [sic] all around them. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, novelist and critic Thomas Mallon faults the novel for inadequately developed plotlines and slow pacing. But Mallon is more impressed with the books achievements. Recognizing Wolfes propensity to concentrate on behavioral codes and status and to favor big themes over private emotions, Mallon portrays Wolfe as a kind of Babe Ruth of the novel, graced with outsized talent and built to swing for the fences who, when he connects, hits home runs for the ages but, and as part of the price, often misses the ball by a mile and frequently strikes out. Mallon generously concludes that the familiar Wolfean trappings and tropes that abound in Back to Blood dont feel the least bit irritating; the effects are too good to retire, and their deployment serves to stitch Wolfes oeuvre into the single, big Balzacian chronicle
hes always had a mind to produce. By contrast there is nothing generous or even the slightest mixed about the brutal verdict issued in The New Yorker by James Wood, the premier literary critic of his generation. Wood is appalled and repelled by Wolfes latest novel, and indeed, as Wood himself is only too eager to point out, by all of
According to Washington Post fiction editor Ron Charles, despite having produced a screwball comedy that has its moments, Wolfes depictions of Cubans, blacks, Russians, men, and women are boring.
Wolfes novels. According to Wood, in its wildly inflated prose and cartoonish plot, Back to Blood exhibits the excess it purports to describe. The book is powered by Wolfes conservative paranoia. Although Wolfe famously prepares to write his novels by leaving the cloistered study to immerse himself in the glittering spectacle and seamy underside of teeming American cities New York City in Bonfire of the Vanities, and Atlanta in A Man in Full Wolfe is incapable of intelligently analyzing these complex realities, and merely exploits them for sensation. Wolfe imbues his characters with resentment so that he will have pathologies and social convulsions about which to write. It is impossible to learn anything about what his characters are actually like, because Wolfes
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voicings of their interiority are spoiled music, and hold no interest. In contrast to great writers such as Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy who create textured realities by means of imagining important details, Wolfe distorts reality by reporting boring facts. And whereas ordinary life is complex, contradictory, prismatic, Wood finds that Wolfes characters are never contradictory, because they have only one big emotion, and it is lust for sex, money, power, status. It is noteworthy when a critic of James Woods gifts demonstrates blindness to a novels leading themes and literary aims. In fact, Wolfes characters in Back to Blood are of interest because lust for sex, money, power, and status is inherently interesting, and because such lusts often conflict, producing both comedy and tragedy. Moreover, Wolfes hero Nestor Camacho is of special interest because of the clash in his soul between the varieties of lust and the determination to achieve higher human ends and live in accordance with a code of morals that has roots in both classical antiquity and biblical faith. You would never know from Woods account, however, what really drives the young Cuban-American cop at the heart of Back to Blood. Nestor has built his five-foot, seven-inch body to muscular perfection. He climbs the cable of a seventy-foot-high foremast of a big pleasure ship on Biscayne Bay to rescue a man about to plunge to his death, only to see his own kin and community turn his heroism into betrayal of his people. He saves his partner in a crack house raid by wrestling a 250-pound giant to the ground and subduing him but his
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valiant act is promptly transformed by the press into a scandalous exhibition of vicious racial violence. And despite suffering banishment from family, neighborhood, girlfriend, and job he maintains his sense of decency, professionalism, and gallantry. In short, it could hardly be more wrong to say of the hero of Back to Blood, as Wood says is true of all Wolfes characters, that he has only one big emotion, and it is lust for sex, money, power, status. Although his lusts are real and powerful, what distinguishes Nestor is that he is a man on a mission, driven by pride, who puts honor grounded in faith first. While collecting himself for the raid on the crack house that, like the many other reversals of fortune that upend expectations in Back to Blood, would lead to his suspension from active duty,
Nestor couldnt help remembering something an astronaut had said in a documentary on tv: Before every mission I told myself, Im gonna die doing this. Im gonna die this time. But Im dying for something bigger than myself. Im about to die for my country, for my people, and for a righteous God. I always believedand still believe that there is a righteous God and that we, we in America, are part of his righteous plan for the world. And so I, who am about to die, am determined to die honorably, fearing only one thing: not living up to, not dying for, the purpose for which God put me on earth. Nestor loved those lines and believed in their wisdom and remembered them in every moment
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of police work that involved danger. . . . Did you do that before the ever-judging eyes of a righteous God . . . or was it the eyes of an Americano sergeant. Now, be honest.
The Audacity of de Gaulle

Jo n at h a n F e n b y . The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved. Skyhorse Publishing. 707 Pages. $32.50. n c e , w h e n a s k e d for his opinion of Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill mused: If I regard de Gaulle as a great man? He is selfish, he is arrogant, he believes he is the center of the world. He . . . You are quite right. He is a great man. Churchill knew whereof he spoke: During World War II, it was he who bore the brunt of the Frenchmans intransigence. Though very different characters, the two statesmen had certain points in common: Both had an extraordinary way with words and both saw themselves as men of destiny. Having fled to Britain after the collapse of the French army, de Gaulle cast himself as the embodiment of the French nation, a modern-day male Joan of Arc, who would lead the fight against the Germans and their Vichy hirelings and restore France to its rightful place and greatness. In the process, he managed to upset a great number of people. As French historian Francois Kersody has written, he seemed to be permanently involved
That as serious a reader of literature as James Wood is deaf to the vindication of virtue, manly and moral, at the heart of Nestors adventures suggests that Wolfe is right that he must exaggerate effects to get a hearing for his untimely themes and bold literary aims. So rare these days is reflection on the virtues, particularly manly virtue, that even though Wolfe gives his main character a Homeric name and entitles the last chapter of his book The Knight of Hialeah, our most sensitive critics perhaps because of their prejudice in favor of sensitive souls or the sensitive side of our souls overlook that Back to Blood is an old-fashioned morality tale set in hyper-modern times. The common conviction today that partisan political divisions are fundamental is one expression of our alienation from questions of duty, honor, and virtue. So is the critics view that Back to Blood revolves around racial and ethnic divisions. The deeper divisions, as Wolfes novel compellingly presents them, are between those who believe that happiness consists in one form of pleasure or another including the aesthetic pleasure of sensitively glimpsing ones own sensitivities and the sensitivities of others and those who, like Tom Wolfe and his heroes, believe that happiness consists in the exercise of courage, selfcontrol, and the other qualities of mind and character that constitute human excellence.
By Henrik Bering
Henrik Bering is a writer and critic.
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in a two front war: a public war against Vichy and the Germans, and a private war against the British Admiralty, the Air Ministry, the War Office, the Intelligence Service, the Foreign Office, the Prime Minister, the U.S. State Department, and the president of the United States. One of his advisers noted the General must constantly be reminded that out main enemy is Germany. If he would follow his own inclination, it would be England. Before departing London to set up headquarters in Algiers in May 1943, de Gaulle said goodbye to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who asked, Do you know you have given us more difficulty than all our European allies? To which de Gaulle answered, I have no doubt of it. France is a great power. The Americans, of course, regarded him as suffering from delusions of grandeur. During the Casablanca summit, Roosevelts secret service detail discretely kept the Frenchman covered with their Tommy guns. You can never be too careful. Despite or because of his obstinacy, de Gaulle managed to place France among the victors of World War II. Later, with his comeback in 1958, he gave his countrymen a new constitution, he got France out of the Algerian mess, and he saved his nation from civil war. Was he a great statesman or a conjuror on a huge scale, a true founding father of present day France, with lessons for the world, or a Wizard of Oz manipulating a great machine of illusions? This is the central question posed in Jonathan Fenbys fascinating The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved.
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The book provides a vivid and eminently fair assessment of its subject, bringing out the essential ambiguities: de Gaulle was both a doer and a dreamer, an extreme realist remorselessly applying cold logic, and a romantic Don Quixote figure, tilting at windmills. e gaulle was a man of the North, from the city of Lille, a colder and sterner industrial region, Fenby notes, than the sundrenched French south one normally reads about. His father was a monarchist and a professor of history and literature. De Gaulles upbringing emphasized duty and frugality, and gave him a solid knowledge of the classics, of philosophy, and of French letters. We catch colorful glimpses from his youth: Prompted by his reading about the French defeat in the 1 8 7 0 7 1 Franco-German War, he early decided on a military career. Before attending military college as a cadet, he spent an obligatory year in an army regiment; he was not promoted to sergeant: As his captain argued, how he could do so to somebody who would only feel at ease as a general. At the military academy of St Cyr, his evaluations deemed him calm and forceful in command. His physical appearance certainly contributed: Measuring 63, with hooded eyes and a nose in the Cyrano de Bergerac class, he towered over everybody. In World War I, he was wounded three times, including a bayonet through his thigh in the battle of Verdun. Given up for dead, he had in fact been taken prisoner. His fellow prisoners recalled him as formal and reserved, not a man one addressed with
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the familiar tu. Fenby quotes his prison notebooks, which set out his ideas of leadership, of which mystique plays an important part: One must speak little. In action one must say nothing. The chief is the one who does not speak. From de Gaulles attendance at the Ecole de Guerre in 1922, one of his fellow officers provides amusing testimony: At the beginning of term meeting in the lecture theatre I saw a tall, very tall captain in horizon blue make his way down the tiers to take his place again. He walked very straight, stiff and solemn, strutting as if he were moving his own statue. De Gaulles career benefitted from his being a protg of Marshal Petain, the victor at Verdun, but the two parted company over military strategy. While the military establishment were putting all their bets on the defensive Maginot Line, de Gaulle insisted on a war of movement. His 1 9 3 4 book, Vers lArmee de Metier, calls for a professional and fully mechanized army of some 100,000 men in addition to its conscript army. The book died in France, but in Germany it was studied with great interest by Rommel and Guderian. When the Germans invaded, their panzer armies practiced exactly the kind of concentrated war of movement de Gaulle had advocated. His division was one of the few to put up a successful fight. Hastily appointed deputy defense minister, he had three meetings with Churchill to discuss last-minute efforts to stave off defeat. The prime minister now needed the Royal Air Force for the defense of Britain, but was quick to recognize de Gaulles mental toughness. With Petain about to sign an armistice, the only course left to de
Gaulle was to escape to Britain. Here, installed in a triangular office on the embankment, de Gaulle set up his Free French operation. His June 18th broadcast over the bbc provided a message of hope to the French population and an appeal to French servicemen abroad to join him in the battle against the Nazis. Asked to do a sound check, he uttered one word: France. e gaulle never doubted the wars eventual outcome, especially once the Americans were in, but, as Fenby notes, his task was the tricky one of ensuring that France got a seat among the victors. To do that, Frenchmen had to participate on all fronts, thereby forcing Britain and the U.S. to recognize France as a fellow ally. But his suspicious and unyielding nature made him a prickly partner. After the allied landings in North Africa, he was particularly worried that Britain would take over Frances colonial role in the Levant. Fenby provides some valid explanations for de Gaulles intransigence: One was his need to demonstrate to his countrymen that he was his own man, not some Anglo-Saxon puppet. He was also holding an extremely weak hand. Once when Churchill blamed him for his stubbornness, in a moment of naked candor, de Gaulle replied I am too poor to bow. He could not afford to compromise, as he did not have anything to compromise with. His was a high wire act, which in the words of his French biographer Jean Lacouture substituted symbol for reality. Still, as Fenbys evidence makes plain, de Gaulles stubbornness went way beyond what was required, bordering on the irrational. His was the
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kind of mind that carefully stored every slight, indignity, defeat, and humiliation the French had ever suffered at the hands of perfidious Albion, the most recent occurring in 1898 when a British force under Herbert Kitchener compelled a French expedition to withdraw at Fashoda on the White Nile, the most traumatic event of his childhood. Fenby details their clashes, with Churchill vacillating between admiration for the mans fighting spirit and the urge to clap him in chains. De Gaulles constant attempts to split the British from the Americans triggered this outburst from Churchill at the Casablanca summit. For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt. Much less indulgent than Churchill, Roosevelt saw him as a dictator type There is no man in which I have less confidence and was keen to replace him with General Henri Giraud, but Giraud proved politically inept and lacked popular support. So they were stuck with de Gaulle. After the invasion, Roosevelt had wanted to the place France under military administration, but typically, de Gaulle presented the Allies with a fait accompli by immediately setting up his own administration in Baujeau. And when the Paris insurrection forced Eisenhower to liberate the city rather than bypass it, de Gaulle ordered General Leclerc to rush his tanks to Paris, making it look like the French had liberated themselves. With some major unacknowledged help from Churchill at the Yalta and
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Potsdam conferences, to which de Gaulle was not invited, France came out of the war with permanent seat in the un security council, its own occupation zone in Germany, and a seat in the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers in Europe, a pretty impressive result. f t e r l i b e r at i o n , Fenby notes, there was always the risk that the communists, having practicing classic united front tactics during the war, would hijack the Resistance movement and leave de Gaulle as a French Kerensky, the Russian transition figure who governed briefly after the Revolution. In the days of the provisional government, de Gaulle ruled by decree. As head of the new elected government, with three roughly equal blocks, he had to work with the communists, who with 26 percent were the largest party, and accept five communists in his cabinet, though not in the most sensitive spots. Thus the immediate postwar months featured de Gaulle the extreme pragmatist, whose first priority was to prevent civil war. According to the resurrection myth, all the French had been part of the resistance: Thus among the charges at Marshal Petains trial, there was nothing about the deportation of the French Jews to the extermination camps, nor the sending of French workers to do forced labor in Germany. (De Gaulle commuted Petains death sentence.) Civil servants were treated leniently and so were businessmen, many of whom got off free. But the composition of the parliament did not suit him: a nest of intrigues, he called it. After fierce clashes with parliament over his demand for a new constitution, he
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resigned in 1946 and withdrew to his austere home in Colombey-les-Deux Eglises, about which he once told a visitor one does not come here to laugh. Here, Cincinnatus-like, he was waiting for the country to call him back. The first volume of his elegant memoirs appeared in 1954, advancing his claims as the once and future savior of the nation. In particular, he was carefully monitoring the situation in French Algeria. Meanwhile, he pondered what changes he wanted to make. Constitutional change remained at the top of the list. Like its predecessor, the Fourth Republic proved ungovernable, with the prime ministers seat changing occupant 2 1 times in the period 1 9 4 6 5 8 . Noting his countrymens preference for easy solutions, he saw his mission as making the French do the things they did not want to do. But however badly he wanted to be back in power, notes Fenby, he wanted to do so through legal means. The worsening situation in Algeria afforded the opportunity. Here terrorist attacks were a daily occurrence, the Front De Liberation Nationale insurgency having been encouraged by the 1954 French pullout from Indochina. Fearing a sellout from the politicians, General Salan, the commander in chief in Algeria, had warned President Coty that the army would not accept any concessions to the rebels. Addressing demonstrators in Algiers, Salan declared, We are united now and will march together up the Champs Elysees and bedecked with flowers. The situation grew tenser when paratroopers stationed in Corsica took charge of the island in support of their comrades in Algiers.
Fenby details de Gaulles handling of the touchy situation and gives it high marks: de Gaulle made plain his refusal to take power in a tumult of Generals and at the same time refrained from criticizing the army, instead offering himself as a referee, which a frightened legislature accepted: As premier designate, he had achieved a legal return to power and headed off a very real threat of a military operation and civil war. It was an extraordinary victory. Having assumed emergency powers for six months, he announced a referendum on constitutional reform. His proposal called for a strong presidency, in which the president would handle foreign and defense policy and retain special powers in case of threats to the republic from within. The president would appoint the prime minister, who would be responsible for the day-today business of government. These measures he deemed necessary to make up for the effects of our perpetual effervescence. While his harshest critic, the socialist Franois Mitterrand, denounced it as a permanent coup detat, his countrymen backed him overwhelmingly. ut what exactly was his policy on Algeria? For a while, notes Fenby, he hoped for a military victory and a compromise solution involving the emergence of a third force. But the realist in him had long realized the demographic odds were against France holding on: nine million natives versus one million Pieds-Noirs, French settlers. Believe me, I am the first to regret it, but the proportion of Europeans is too small.
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In the end, he bit the bullet by entering the Evian agreement of 1962, which paved the way for the Algerians to vote on their future; 99 percent voted for independence. At home in France, in a referendum, 90 percent of the French, thoroughly fed up with the issue, voted in favor of the agreement. One million Pied-Noirs returned to France. The leaving fourteen bullet holes in the car. Afterwards de Gaulle was unshaken, My dear friend, these people shoot like pigs. The planner was sentenced to death and shot. Altogether, there were two dozen assassination attempts on de Gaulle. as t i n g h i m s e l f as a man above politics I am a man who belongs to nobody and who belongs to everybody de Gaulles leadership style in Fenbys words combined the oracular mystery of a long gone monarchical age with techniques of modern communications. His press conferences were high masses and his tv speeches were like a republican monarch addressing his subjects. The air of aloofness surrounding the ruler was an essential governing tool. But he also needed physical contact with his subjects: He believed he had some mystical communication with the French people, writes Fenby. Accordingly, he would plunge into the crowds in a bain de foule, a crowd bath even if the police had arrested men with knives, pistols, and hypodermic syringes on his path. His sense of superiority never fails to amuse. After his resignation in 1946, he turned down the offer of elevation to the rank of marshal on the grounds that his two stars had served him perfectly well during the war, and besides, One does not decorate France. Similarly, he had declined an invitation to become a member of the AcademieFrancaise: The King of France does not belong to the Academy, nor does Napoleon. When attending j f k s funeral as president, he was not entirely satisfied
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Casting himself as a man above politics, de Gaulles leadership style, in Fenbys words, combined the oracular mystery of a long gone monarchical age with techniques of modern communications.
Algerian crisis did not end favorably, writes Fenby, but in the only conditions that were possible. The slaughter began as soon as Algeria got independence. According to Fenby, between 10,000 and 80,000 natives who had backed the French were killed, some boiled alive or emasculated. It is difficult to see de Gaulles handling of the crisis as anything more than the maneuvers of an extremely skilled politician operating on his own with a mixture of guile and ruthlessness to find an escape from the challenge that had brought down the republic, writes Fenby. The secret army organization, the oas, continued its war on the French government. On August 22, 1962, they came close when they spayed de Gaulles Citron with machine gun fire,
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with the seating arrangements, having been placed in the eighth row: Resolutely, he marched to the front and told the head of protocol Right. We can start, and sat down there and then. In their dealings with him, exasperated American politicians repeatedly resorted to mountain imagery. Secretary of State Dean Rusk compares an audience with de Gaulle to Crawling up a mountainside, opening a little portal, and waiting for the oracle to speak . . . there was never any give and take. De Gaulle gave us pronouncements from on high, but never had any real discussion; he was there, he would listen. Je vous ecoute, and would then bid us goodbye. De Gaulles hauteur coexisted with a penchant for secrecy and ambiguity, writes Fenby. He was at one and the same time the most straightforward of politicians in his ultimate aims, and among the most tricky in the way he proceeded towards them, an Olympian who adopted wily crab-like tactics. He rarely told an outright lie, but was masterly in obfuscation and economizing with the truth. be remarkably incoherent and emotional, as Fenby demonstrates. He was an anti-communist, but seemed more intent on shutting America out of Europe. During the Korean war he stated that The Russian are hard people, but added that the Americans were brutes, too. His initial desire to keep Germany weak had proved a nonstarter in the intensifying Cold War. Instead he tried to talk the Germans into some kind of Franco-German defense arrangement, but neither Konrad Adenauer nor his successor Ludwig Erhard bought the idea. As Fenby notes, the official photograph from the Franco-German friendship treaty in January 1963 carries huge symbolic value. But the Germans did not sign up for de Gaulles vision of Europe, he adds. In the preamble to the treaty, it explicitly says that this will not affect relations with the U.S. Recalling Churchills words about Britain always siding with America, he punished the Brits by vetoing their entry into the Common Market, as he saw Britain as a Trojan horse for American influence, and did not consider the British to be Europeans. This kind of contrariness became even more pronounced after the 1965 elections, where he was forced into a run-off. Increasingly he was a prisoner of his own mindset, writes Fenby, displaying an exaggerated self importance and overestimation of Frances role. Thus having made threats for years, as part of his own attempts at dtente with the Russians, in 1966 he pulled France out of natos integrated military command, forcing all Allied personnel to leave, prompting President Johnson to ask if that applied to the
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h e c e n t r a l t e n e t of Gaullism is self-reliance: The French needed to see themselves as part of a great nation, and should not rely on others for their national security and prosperity. Thus de Gaulle oversaw the development of the French Force de Frappe, and sought to steer a kind of independent middle way between the blocs that was designed to maximize French influence. But for a man priding himself on cold logic and clear thought, he could
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American war dead, too. But France did remain part of natos political structure. Vietnam became the centerpiece in his anti-American crusade, which would presumably curry favor with third world revolutionary movements. At the same time, France was always ready to shore up its favorite dictators in Africa. His lack of concern for ideological issues meant he did not appreciate the depth of the divide between East and West, writes Fenby. Leonid Brezhnev told Polish leaders while he [de Gaulle] was an enemy, his policies had the advantage of weakening U.S. positions in Western Europe. His increasing remoteness was also demonstrated in the run-up to the 1967 Six-Day War, as Arab armies were massing on Israels borders. He warned the Israelis that he would not support them if they attacked first, but magnanimously stated that he would not allow Israel to be destroyed. What did you think the Israelis did with my advice? They completely ignored it! he blurted out, and he took flak when he later described the Israelis as an elite people sure of themselves and domineering. Interestingly, as Fenby notes, the Israelis were displaying precisely the kind of self-reliance he wanted for France. The whole episode can best be seen as an example of his pique in being bypassed and reminded of the limits of his international sway, writes Fenby. The books final section is dominated by events on the home front, the six weeks of turmoil in the spring of 1968, which started with student occupations and spread to the massive strikes by industrial workers in an insurrection complete with barricades. The authori92
ty of the government was crumbling, and the cia foresaw civil war. De Gaulles response was one of the great disappearing acts of all time. Without telling anybody of his whereabouts, he flew off to the headquarters of French troops in West Germany to confer with the general in charge, Jacques Massu. Having obtained the armys backing, de Gaulle headed back to Paris. Resorting to extreme theater to rally France behind him, in a radio address he again faced the nation with a choice between himself and chaos. The result was the great counterdemonstration of May 30, followed by June elections in which the Left incurred a massive defeat. But this was his last triumph. After losing on a referendum on senate reform the following spring, on which he had staked his presidency, he retired on April 28, 1969, to Colombey-lesDeux Eglises, quietly to work on his books. l l s u c c e s s f u l leaders are to varying degrees magicians and actors, writes Fenby. Starting from scratch, of the World War II leaders, de Gaulle conjured most from the least. Thus de Gaulles career defies those who see history merely as the result of impersonal forces, beyond the influence of great men: Though it opened him to mockery from those who saw him as ridiculously self-important, the key to his greatness lay in a single factor: His genuine belief that he incarnated France and could raise it to the status he believed it deserved. The original impulse of self-reliance behind Gaullism can be seen as posiPolicy Review
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tive, notes Fenby, as an attempt to take his countrymen out of their depression, and be part of a great national project. But due to the originators particular mindset, his brand of patriotism, as it comes out in the book, was too narrow and selfish, earning de Gaulle his reputation as the abominable no-man. According to Fenby, he saw his nation as a sort of middle kingdom [for which] the rest of the world had meaning only if it affected France. De Gaulle saddled France with the reputation of a nation that was always going its own way, that could not entirely be counted on. It is hard to see how this improved Frances security. As for the left-wing charges of a dictatorial bent, though he certainly had authoritarian traits, says Fenby, he was no dictator, as he believed that dictatorships always ended in disaster. As de Gaulle had noted in the 1965 presidential elections, where he was up against the socialist Franois Mitterrand a crafty ruffian in his words and forced into a run-off: Have you ever seen a dictator on a run-off ballot? Accordingly, he relinquished power twice, in 1946 and in 1969. Most importantly, he brought stability. His Fifth Republic has survived: As Fenby notes, there were only three pms from 1958 to 1969, when he retired, versus the 2 1 under the Fourth Republic. The Fifth Republics harshest critic, the socialist Mitterrand, came back a decade after de Gaulle defeated him to beat President Giscard DEstaing and seemed to settle in perfectly happily. It even survived a period of cohabitation, where Mitterrand had to rule with a Gaullist prime minister
providing de Gaulle with a heritage few politicians can claim.
How Much Stimulus?

Paul Krugman, End This Depression Now. Norton. 259 Pages. $24.95. Dav i d We s s e l . Red Ink. C row n Business. 204 Pages. $22.00. he u.s. economy has been depressed for over four years and Paul Krugman Nobel laureate, economics professor, and New York Times columnist is irked that his remedies go unheeded, especially since theyre also the remedies that John Maynard Keynes laid out over 70 years ago. Keynes would not have been impressed with the halfway measures that have been employed to create fiscal stimulus, and neither is Krugman. Federal spending on the order of what was done in World War II is in order, even though this is peacetime. Wont this lead to runaway inflation, and eventually to national insolvency? Wont it bring the nation into a predicament similar to that of Spain or Greece? Nonsense, says Krugman, and in several chapters of his recent book, End This Depression Now, he answers
By Steve Stein
Steve Stein is a writer and financial advisor in Marin County, California.
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economists and politicians who say otherwise. In an early chapter, tellingly headed Bankers Gone Wild, Krugman elaborates his view on how we got into the current mess. He traces the path of banking deregulation throughout the last quarter of the 20th century, starting with minor dilutions of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act and ending with that laws complete repeal in 1998. Glass-Steagall, which separated the functions of commercial banking and investment banking, was designed to prevent banks from speculating with taxpayer-insured deposits. However, bankers eventually persuaded Congress that the rules made it impossible for them to compete with other financial institutions not bound by similar constraints. Krugman agrees that the mismanagement by commercial bankers wasnt solely responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, noting that the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, started a run on the shadow banking system. But his approach would have been to regulate the shadow banks more, not to regulate the commercial banks less. Many economists place as much responsibility for the crash of 2008 on the government and the Federal Reserve as on private bankers. After all, Congress pressured the two government sponsored lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax lending standards so that lower income borrowers could afford to own homes, while the Federal Reserve facilitated this imprudence by holding interest rates far too low from 2002 to 2004. Krugman is having none of that. Interest rates were also low throughout much of the world, and the housing
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bubble was an international phenomenon extending well beyond the influence of U.S. policy. As for blaming the relaxed lending standards on Fannie and Freddie, this Krugman calls the big lie. Most of the bad loans were sub-prime and, by definition, outside the Fannie and Freddie parameters. He has no use for the argument that Fannie Maes practices weakened mortgage lending criteria throughout the industry. Whatever the cause of the meltdown and recession, Krugmans cure is a much heavier dose of Keynesian stimulus. He believes the administrations stimulus plan (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) was woefully inadequate, and that President Obama should have ignored his opponents cries of alarm about an out-ofcontrol deficit, since they were motivated by a combination of political mischief and ignorance. Acknowledging that Keynesians dont have an intellectual monopoly on economic theory, Krugman takes some time to the review the competing monetarist view, associated mainly with Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago. Both Friedman and Keynes found that increases in the money supply can lead to inflation, but Keynes maintained this to be so only when in an economy at or near full employment. Krugman finds the data overwhelmingly on the Keynesian side and sees the controversy a matter of pragmatism versus quasi-religious certainty. Despite a steady drumbeat of warnings, the interest rate on the tenyear treasury bond has remained near an all-time low for several years, and core inflation has been contained at about two percent a year.
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But hasnt Keynesian theory run up against significant contradictory evidence of its own, as when high inflation accompanied high unemployment throughout the 1970s? Krugman dismisses this as the result of random supply shocks which arent likely to be repeated. How he knows this, he doesnt say. In any event, Krugman certainly doesnt fear inflation today. Indeed, he would try to boost the current inflation rate considerably higher to about four percent, and makes three arguments for that policy: It would compensate for the central banks inability to drive nominal interest rates below zero (inflation would make the real rate go down further), and the debt overhang would be eased considerably, since debtors would be repaid in cheaper dollars. Finally, when wage reductions are needed in order to increase employment, inflation will make them more palatable. While workers will staunchly resist direct pay cuts, theyll more readily accept them when disguised as the same nominal wage, but paid in cheaper currency. Krugman says this third reason is more applicable to the labor markets and politics of Europe than to those of America, and before detailing his plan to end the American depression, he detours to the Eurozone, where similar economic problems are exacerbated by the fact of a common currency. Europes economic integration began with the Coal and Steel Community in 1951, and expanded into the European Economic Community in 1957, which continued to add members through the 1980s. Ten years later, as closer economic and political ties had become so obviously
advantageous, the case for a common currency seemed compelling. But when countries with widely divergent economies share a common currency, the weaker ones can be worse off during an economic downturn than if they had their own separate money. They can no longer make exchange rate adjustments. Nations with high debt and unemployment, who might otherwise have inflated their way out of those problems, must now depend on the cooperation of others. So, if there is a collective remedy for the euro countries, it looks very similar to the one proposed for the U.S.: more money created by the central bank, and forget about austerity. Which brings Krugman back to the United States, where substantially raising a deficit that is already over $1 trillion doesnt faze him, especially when the gdp is over $15 trillion. His Exhibit A is the spending that the U.S. government underwent at the beginning of World War II and the massive debt that the country took on as a result. The nation had been in a depression for over ten years, with unemployment in 1939 still at seventeen percent. The government had undertaken vast public works programs to get the economy on track, but they never seemed to be enough. The war changed all that. In 1940 the annual deficit was 3.6 percent of gdp; in 1943 it peaked at 30.8 percent. Wars are terrible, and no sane person Krugman emphatically included would seek such a remedy for economic troubles. But he does see the salutary side effects of wartime spending as a compelling guide to what similar spending can achieve in a peacetime economy.
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Krugman envisions roughly an additional $1 trillion of spending, divided among new federal infrastructure projects, more federal money to cities and states, home mortgage relief, and enhanced transfer payments for unemployment compensation and job retraining. Wouldnt such a set of policies be politically impossible? Krugman thinks not; if a major push gets this stimulus underway, its success will be self-reinforcing. Is it possible that the 1930s depression was prolonged not by the inadequacy of the governments response, but by its inconsistency and incoherence? Krugman doesnt address that point, nor does he really address the political concern that additional government spending means additional government control. People readily accept this in wartime, partly because they expect quick victory and a return to normalcy, but any phase-out of emergency spending in peacetime is much less certain. No recession ever ended at the same time for everyone; there are always groups who want government to stay in the game and governmental agencies that are programmed to oblige. For example, federal money for cities and states may support higher current payrolls, but would also sustain the high public pension costs that made federal bailouts necessary in the first place. Even in the case of the actual wartime spending, there was disagreement about when and how to wind down the governments role. Paul Samuelson, later to become Americas leading Keynesian academic, was on the staff of the National Resources Planning Board during the war and had advocated slowing the rate of troop
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demobilization once the war ended. Samuelson feared that the reentry of so many men into the civilian workforce would reignite unemployment and recession. Delaying demobilization was too much even for the Board, but maintaining other wartime programs had much wider support. The Truman administration wanted to continue wage and price controls through 1947. However, voters had another view of the matter; the Republicans swept both houses of Congress in 1946. Even if a huge new round of spending does have merit, it is hard to see how the financial markets or the public would accept so much additional public debt unless coupled with a highly plausible plan toward eventually paying it down. Christina Romer, while chairing President Obamas Council of Economic Advisors, made that very point. Romers outlook tends to align with Krugmans, but on this they differ; she held a key post in the administration that he criticizes for not promoting a larger stimulus package. omers views are reported in Red Ink, David Wessels short book about the mechanics and politics of the federal budget process. Wessel, economics editor of the Wall Street Journal, believes that budget realities are an essential element of political literacy, and pins down the figures on expenditures and revenue. Since 2009, mandated expenditures mainly Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest have accounted for every penny of revenue. This year that amounts to about $2.4 trillion. Everything else, including all defense and discretionary spending, requires about another $1.3
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trillion, all of which will have to be borrowed. Health care costs are by far the biggest expense, accounting for almost a quarter of the total federal budget. As these costs continually rise, it is difficult to reasonably project a scenario for revenue growth sufficient to whittle down the yearly deficit or cumulative debt. Even the Defense Departments budget is subsumed by medical costs. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, Health care costs are eating the Defense Department alive. Tricare, the d o d s generous health insurance program, is made available for every veteran of 20 years service. The yearly premium runs about $500 per year for insurance that would cost $5,000 per year on the civilian market. Why does Tricare survive unscathed? Wessel asks, then answers, Mostly because of the enormous political power of veterans groups. Not that there arent bigger line items in the defense budget. After all, the U.S. spends more on defense than the next seventeen countries combined. As Wessel puts it, The Navy estimates each aircraft carrier costs in excess of $11 billion, more than Medicare spends annually on knee, hip, and shoulder joint replacements for nearly seven hundred thousand elderly. Meanwhile, the defense budget gets ample political support from both parties, not least because the Pentagon is among the largest employers in the world. Combine that fact with appeals to patriotism and security, and defense expenditures are hard to argue with. On the revenue side, the tax mix has changed markedly over the past 50 years. Personal income tax as a share of total revenue has remained about
the same, but the payroll tax share has vastly increased, and the corporate income tax share has correspondingly diminished. The payroll tax increase was an almost inevitable consequence of the decline in the number of workers now paying in per each retiree collecting from 16.5 in 1950, to 2.9 today, and a projected 2.1 in 2030. The corporate tax share has been somewhat reduced by various additional exemptions and credits, but the main cause is Subchapter s of the irs code, which allows most nonpublic corporations to be treated as individual proprietorships and pay no corporate tax at all. No discussion of taxes, Wessel writes, can avoid the money that the government doesnt collect because of some provision of the tax code, a deduction or a credit or an exclusion or an exemption. If someone gets a sum of money from the government, that is the result of a spending program that is bound to be unpopular with some portion of the electorate. But if that person receives a voucher that is used to reduce taxes, this will be called a tax cut, and will attract little opposition. Certainly the Earned Income Tax Credit has worked this way. Whatever else has occurred in taxation over the last 50 years, the irs Code has surely become more complex. The most popular of the tax expenditures, as these carve-outs and credits are called, is the home-mortgage interest deduction, but there are also provisions relating to the adoption of children, credits for investing in biomass generation of electricity, and other energy subsidies. Together, all these amounted to $1.1 trillion of revenue foregone in 2011.
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Since Red Ink underscores the difficulty of discovering plausible long-term debt reduction, it reveals the impracticality of Romers suggestion to increase spending now and match it with credible repayment later. Still less does Wessel support Krugmans approach, which concentrates entirely on increased current spending. However, he does acknowledge Krugmans position as one of the three that make up the current Washington debate. The second one is Congressman Paul Ryans plan, which puts all the emphasis on spending reduction. Finally, there is Pete Petersons plan, which insists on roughly equal spending cuts and tax increases. Peterson, a retired ceo of an investment firm, now uses some of his over $1 billion net worth for a foundation dedicated to slaying the deficit dragon. None of the three groups is particularly good at communicating with the others. Its as though the Krugman group says, Its Unemployment, Stupid, the Ryan group says, Its Spending, Stupid, and the Peterson groups says, Its the Deficit, Stupid. The fight between the warring camps is sometimes mediated by the Congressional Budget Office and its director, Bob Elmendorf. Wessel writes that At congressional hearings, Elmendorf is like the referee in a food fight. He reminds the lawmakers of the stubborn facts of demography: we cannot go back to the tax and spending policies of the past because the number of people sixty-five and older will increase by one-third between 2012 and 2022. Sometimes Elmendorf just returns to basic politics: The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services the people expect the government to provide . . . and the
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tax revenues that people are willing to spend. There is little in Red Ink to cheer the anti-tax absolutists currently dominating the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. But what if Republicans instead were to argue that serious spending cuts must come first, with tax increases to follow if and only if reduced expenditures prove insufficient? Theyd find much in Wessels analysis to buttress that position. Meanwhile, what of Krugman? Surely hes well aware of the data explored in Red Ink, including the profound American demographic differences between now and the decades following 1945. Yet he maintains that we can add more than $1 trillion in new spending with fair confidence that the future will take care of itself. Does he really believe that rapid economic growth, along with inflation which he once labeled as implicit default can bring the resulting national debt down to a safe percentage of gdp? Or does Krugman perhaps think the default might actually be somewhere more explicit? He has elsewhere written sympathetically of Argentinas default in 2001, and has encouraged the Greek governments consideration of more haircuts for its bondholders. Here he writes that lenders want governments to make honoring their debts the highest priority, and decries the continuing urge to make the economic crisis a morality play, a tale in which a depression is the necessary consequence of prior sins and must not be alleviated. Krugmans statement about economics not being a morality play is suspect, in two ways. First, he contradicts himself a few pages later by invoking a moral imperative to carry out the
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measures he advocates; maybe he see economics as a morality play after all, so long as the moral code meets his own criteria. Second, Krugman minimizes the nexus between money, credit, and moral obligation. When various agency bonds are guaranteed, theyre backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. If that isnt a matter of morality, its certainly a first cousin. Is the soundness of money and credit societys highest value? Of course not, but it is a value that cant be tossed aside as a matter of convenience. Perhaps thats why David Wessels statement of budgetary facts shows that Paul Krugmans recipe for a way to end this depression now doesnt taste quite right. reached by political scientists, sociologists, or other members of the putatively softer social sciences. Examples of this hubristic role abound. For instance, the conventional wisdom among social scientists in bygone days was that pay-as-you-go Social Security would encourage household savings economists correctly predicted the opposite effect. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was enacted with the conventional expectation that this entitlement would promote stability in poor families instead, it had the opposite effect, in accord with what economic theory would predict. Also, several decades ago when the Soviet Union sought to expand its imperial reach by spreading largesse around the world, foreign policy wonks worried about the fearful consequences of this effort economists provided empirical evidence that, instead, the effort was costing the Soviets more than it was worth. Andrew Wedeman, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska, has accomplished a reversal of this pattern. His Double Paradox is a carefully reasoned and empirically grounded analysis of corruption in China, which runs counter to prior, frequently-cited work by economists. The initial motivation, he tells us, for his long immersion in the subject of corruption sprang from economists work in the mid-1990s which indicated that corruption exacted a measurable cost in forgone economic growth in other words, corruption hindered growth. Instead, Wedemans own substantial experience in China was, to the contrary, that corruption and growth thrived together: Corruption worsened as growth prospered. The economists were evidently missing something. The books title
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Developmental Corruption in China

By Charles Wolf Jr.
Andrew Wedeman. Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China. C o r n e l l U n i v e rs i t y Press. 272 Pages. $75.
c o n o m i s t s o c c a s i o n a l ly feel called upon to correct, or at least modify, conclusions
Charles Wolf Jr. holds the distinguished corporate chair in international economics at the rand Corporation, and is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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(including its subtitle: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption) reflects Wedemans efforts to resolve this puzzle. Wedeman defines corruption simply as the improper use of public authority for private gain or advantage, and the books title represents his attempt to reconcile the double paradox of rapid growth and intensifying corruption. To keep matters in balance, its worth pointing out that his attempted reconciliation doesnt exactly refute the prior economic work that motivated his study. That prior work a rigorous, cross-sectional, and time-series analysis by economist Paolo Mauro found a statistically significant negative relationship between corruption (measured in several different ways) and aggregate investment as a fraction of gdp. Measured across time and across countries, higher levels of corruption were correlated with significantly lower rates of investment. However, the direct relationship between corruption and economic growth (as distinct from the relation between corruption and investment) was, according to this prior work, not statistically significant.1 While the investment rate surely affects growth (so, if higher corruption lowers investment, growth might be expected to suffer as well), growth and investment are not equivalent. Indeed, later studies suggest that other things for example, technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, and human capital (as distinct from physical investment) are at least as important as the investment rate in affecting economic growth. If, for example, in post-Maoist, reformist China corruption actually facilitated innovation and entrepre100
neurship (elements of human capital that were impermissible and indeed prosecutable during Maos Cultural Revolution of the 1960s), the expected result might well be higher growth notwithstanding a lower investment rate. Hence, Wedemans reconciliation between corruption and growth is not fully dispositive of the prior work that motivated his own, although he assuredly registers on the other side of that divide. The first third of Double Paradox deals with the generic distinction between developmental corruption and degenerative corruption. Developmental corruption, according to Wedeman and exemplified by his case studies of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, evolved as a coalition between a politically dominant entity, on the one hand (in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party; in Koreas erstwhile days, the military; in Taiwan, the Kuomintang), and pro-growth business interests, on the other. Sustaining these coalitions in these three countries was an implicit and sometimes explicit understanding that the politically dominant group would implement pro-growth policies sought by business, and these emergent business interests would compensate the politicians with ample funding to support and continue their dominance of government. Development and corruption prospered together. The result of this developmental corruption was a protracted period of both political stability and sustained economic growth in the three countries, including the lengthy tenure of the politically favored ally in each country until recent years. The political machines in these countries became in effect development machines; hence,
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they were the vehicles of developmental corruption. By way of contrast, degenerative corruption (alternatively termed predatory corruption, or simply kleptocracy), extracts a toll, typically a large and increasing one, irrespective of whether the economy is growing, stagnant, or impoverished, and without regard for enacting policies to promote economic growth or to avoid policies that would hinder it. For this type of corruption, think of plunder, piracy, extortion, or Chicago gangsterism. Double Paradox includes vignettes of degenerative corruption exemplified by Zaire, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, and, perhaps the most egregious of all, Equatorial Guinea. he book then shifts to concentrate on corruption in China, with exhaustive details of the similarities and differences between China and the other cases covered in the previous chapters. This part of the book is an exposition, as the familiar phrase might put it, of corruption with Chinese characteristics. China didnt have to develop a political machine to propel growth from the top down (as in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) because it already had a formidable one in the Communist Party. In the post-Mao era, propelling growth was at the top of the partys agenda from the inception of Deng Xiaopings reforms in the late 1970s and continuing into the present. At the start of this reformist era, corruption was only sporadic and decentralized; it was not entrenched, according to Wedeman. Reforming the planned economy in the direction of a more market-based sysFebruary & March 2013 101
tem provided the incentives and drivers for accelerating growth, as well as opening up abundant opportunities for new and lucrative forms of corruption. At the core of the ensuing corruption, according to Wedemans account, was the dual-track price system: that is, the transition away from prices prescribed by the planned economy and toward prices increasingly determined by competitive markets. This reformist process affected prices of commodities, investments, land, construction, and notably the prices at which government assets were sold by officialdom (including, of course, members of the Communist Partys hierarchy) to market-based buyers. These buyers included both private, commercial businesses and state-owned enterprises, which themselves experienced varying degrees of privatization through equity sales to private, nongovernment buyers. In all of these transactions, arbitraging between the lower controlled prices and the higher market prices afforded lucrative opportunities for rent-seeking behavior by the participants. One might add that this process foreshadowed a similar one in the 1990s in Russia, when assets of the defunct Soviet Union were auctioned to preferred buyers at preferred prices, giving rise to Russias notorious oligarchs. In China, the ensuing corruption was contemporaneous with dramatic economic growth that, like the corruption, was also generated by reform toward a more market-based economy. Therein is the essence of Wedemans resolution of the double paradox: The same reformist process that engendered rapid growth via the market mechanism was also the root source of rising corruption (hence, the books subtitle).
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Marketized reform was the engine propelling both growth and corruption. Wedemans successful demonstration of the compatibility between rapid growth and rising corruption is not, however, the same as saying that the interactions between the two are equivalent in both directions. Rapid growth through transition to a more marketized economy enlarges the fare on which corruption can feed. Furthermore, even if the effect of this were to reduce the effective rate of investment (recall the prior reference to Paolo Mauros work on corruption and investment), or to lower the productivity of investment, a relatively high rate of economic growth might persist, and indeed continued to do so. Such has been Chinas record thus far. Whether it will endure remains to be seen. Wedeman next focuses on the measurement of corruption, and of Chinas anti-corruption efforts. His attempts at quantifying corruption are original and informative, if only partly successful. In the process he introduces such concepts as the revealed rate of corruption (rrc), consisting of the number and gravity of corrupt deeds that are detected and prosecuted; the actual rate of corruption (arc) which, in principle, is the full extent of corruption (the iceberg of which rrc is the top); and the gap between the two, which he presumes to be dependent on the intensity of enforcement. While the arc and the gap between it and the rrc are unobservable, Wedeman avers that variations in them can be inferred from the time periods when the authorities launched anti-corruption campaigns. These periods are well-known because theyve periodically been highly publicized. Cleverly, if not entirely convinc102
ingly, he then uses the ratio between r rc and a rc during the relatively high-intensity enforcement periods to help in estimating the emerging rate of corruption (erc) and the cumulative level of corruption (clc). Most readers are as likely to be put off as to be engaged by the somewhat contrived character of these constructs. Nevertheless, the use he makes of them is of interest. Partly through their use, partly without it, Wedeman presents data from 1980 through 2008 on a range of corruption indicators including the numbers of cases of economic crimes detected and prosecuted; the levels and numbers of officials involved in corruption cases; and the financial scale of these cases. The takeaway from his analysis of these indicators is that although the surge [in corruption] began after the advent of reform, it was not until the early 1990s that high-level corruption began to intensify. In effect, this is the empirical validation of Double Paradox: According to Wedemans time-series data, rising corruption and rapid growth moved in tandem with one another. Wedemans discussion of anticorruption efforts adopts Gary Beckers rational choice model in which the prevalence of corruption depends on the difference between a perpetrators expected value of committing a corrupt act, on one hand, and the expected value of remaining honest, on the other. In turn, the expected value of committing the corrupt act is the acts payoff, less the probability of getting caught times the severity of punishment. Thus, more rigorous enforcement that increases the probability of apprehension, or/and increases the severity of punishment, will reduce corruption. With respect to
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the latter, Wedeman concludes from what he asserts are comparable samples of criminals apprehended for corrupt acts in China and in the U.S. that the sentences meted out in China were exponentially harsher than those handed down in the United States. Despite this perhaps arguable finding, his journey through a labyrinth of Chinese data on corruption cases, criminals, and penalties over several decades leads to a balanced if inconclusive judgment that there is little evidence that the extent of corruption has dramatically increased . . . but there is also little sign that corruption has decreased in recent years. The recent blatant evidence of egregious corruption surrounding the Bo Xilai scandals in Chongqing and elsewhere in China casts some doubt on this conclusion. inally, returning to what I referred to earlier as corruption with Chinese characteristics suggests a fundamental question: Is the relationship between the two parts growth and corruption symbiotic or parasitic? How this question is answered is both timely and important: timely because of the current and impending slowdown of 2 to 3 percent or more in Chinas growth rate; important because different answers have very different policy implications. If the relationship is symbiotic, then growth in the past, powered by marketization, enlarged the pie on which corruption could feed, and this will continue in the future; and corruption, while facilitating growth in the past through the arbitraged movement from controlled prices to market prices, will also continue to facilitate growth in the future.
If the relationship is parasitic, then corruption extracts a toll from growth which, although not worrisome when growth was high, may become increasingly burdensome and contentious as growth declines in the future. Mao formulated a parable to dismiss the question rather than answer it. Said he: There is no need to squeeze all the toothpaste out of the tube [i.e., cadre corruption], you cant get it all anyway, so why bother? In recent conversations with friends at fairly high ranks (Levels 4 and 5 in the multitier levels of the ccps aspirationally classless hierarchy), Ive encountered a perspective thats quite different from Maos dismissive one. Moreover, this current perspective adds a political dimension to the corruption and growth dichotomy, a dimension viewed by its protagonists as overriding the other two. The tenor of this perspective can be summarized in the form of a syllogism:
Rising and conspicuous corruption is a serious threat to the legitimacy and continuity of the Chinese Communist Party. As long as the state plays a major role in the economy, incentives for party members to engage in corrupt practices will be lucrative and irresistible. Therefore: The state should retreat and withdraw from the economy, regardless of whether withdrawal would help or hinder future growth.
The inference from this syllogism is a paradox no less striking than the two paradoxes of Wedemans book. In
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effect, some staunch and aggressive ccp members are vigorous and articulate advocates of a more thoroughly marketized economy, and a diminished and minimal economic role for the state. To be sure, this is not the only position currently discussed among Chinas elite, nor is it necessarily the dominant one. Confronting a significant slowdown in Chinas remarkably rapid growth of the past three decades, some influential voices have recently urged an expansion of public investment and an enlarged role for the already strong state-owned enterprises, at the expense of private business. Because Double Paradox emphasized the boost to corruption resulting from the transition to a marketized economy and the ensuing arbitraging between controlled- and market-driven prices, it is especially worthwhile to call attention to the fact that a move in the opposite direction that would enlarge the states economic role is no less (and in some ways probably even more) prone to corrupt practices. A case in point is the so-called Chongqing model of development, and the Bo Xilai scandal referred to above that has followed in the wake of this megacitys model. The model consisted of a huge expansion of public investment for housing, urban infrastructure, and reforestation all financed by municipal bonds and vigorously advocated by the citys populist mayor and former Politburo member, recently expelled from the Communist Party, Bo Xilai. Chongqings economic growth burgeoned in the short run, accompanied by heavy tolls exacted by the mayors family and other members of his entourage from construction contracts, as well as a massive accumulation of debt by the city itself. Generalizing from this case, Id suggest that public investment, which is ungoverned by competitive bidding, typically unmediated by market pricing, and nontransparent to outsiders constitutes an invitation to misallocation of resources, as well as misfeasance in behavior by those overseeing the process. If the move from a planned to a market economy in the 1980s and 1990s opened the way for a surge of corruption, an attempted reversal back toward a more state-centered economy would be even more rife with corruption in the coming decade. When opportunities for corrupt practices are accessible, their curtailment depends on a rule of law that is overseen by an independent and uncorrupted judiciary. These institutions are yet to be developed in China.
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Policy Review - February & March 2013, No. 177

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What perspective do some Chinese Communist Party members have regarding corruption and the state's role in the economy?

What perspective do some Chinese Communist Party members have regarding corruption and the state's role in the economy?

PO LICYReview

February & March 2013, No. 177, $6.00

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