The End of the American Era by Stephen M

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Articles

6 The End of the American Era by Stephen M. Walt It may be lonely at the top, but Americans have always found the view compelling. As Washington’s dominance wanes, a frightening future awaits. Two lost wars. Eroding infrastructure. A crippled economy. The time when the United States could create and lead a political, economic and security order in virtually every part of the world is over. The cure? A new American strategy.

18 We Bow to the God Bipartisanship by Leslie H. Gelb Bipartisanship: the Holy Grail of American politics. Long the go-to buzzword for presidents, elusive cross- aisle support at home has all too often been purchased at the price of good policy abroad. From Vietnam to Korea to Libya, the quest for donkeys and elephants to march overseas hand in hand has led to some of our most spectacular international blunders.

27 Night Thoughts on Europe by Walter Laqueur The Continent is fast becoming no more than a cultural theme park for well-to-do tourists from East Asia. Its problems go far beyond deflating currency and rising debt. Europe suffers from a lack of will, a crisis of confidence—and a serious identity problem. The once-great superpower has already fallen. We watch as centuries of predominance slip away.

36 The No-Growth Trap by Benjamin M. Friedman Washington is gripped by the twin plagues of financial stagnation and political paralysis. Now we face an unprecedented spiral: without economic recovery there can be no political consensus; without political consensus there can be no economic recovery. If we fail to overcome our current stalemate, we will be headed for a long period of not only monetary stagnation but moral decline as well.

45 Chinese Nationalism and Its Discontents by Robert S. Ross Beijing’s belligerence has alienated almost every Asian neighbor—and almost every industrialized nation. The Communist Party is being forced to choose between kowtowing to domestic nationalism and submitting to a peaceful rise. The White House is overreacting, encircling China and forging menacing alliances. Chinese prowess is greatly exaggerated. Yet the latent rivalry is ratcheting up to dangerous levels. Reviews & Essays

54 Pinker the Prophet by Robert Jervis Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is at it again. Contrarian argumentation, here we come. For those who think we live in an age of unrestrained violence, the media’s constant onslaught of images showing the starving, the murdered, the frightened and the weak has left you with a false impression. Mankind has learned to rein in its inner demons. But is Pinker’s civilization-as-progress thesis too good to be true?

65 Lest Ye Be Judged by R. Scott Appleby Enraged bloggers, grandstanding politicians and everyone in between eagerly denounce the Koran as a glorified terrorist manifesto. Philip Jenkins’s new tome challenges this simplistic logic with an analysis of the Bible’s equally—and often shockingly—bloodthirsty passages. Christians, Jews and Muslims are bound together in a dark Abrahamic family tradition of violence.

74 Somewhere, beyond the Sea by Benny Morris From Carthage to Bosnia, Persia to Palestine, the shores of the Mediterranean are filled with tales of warfare and hubris, excess and mass murder. David Abulafia proffers up a sweeping narrative steeped in culture, commerce and the struggle for dominance on the Great Sea. For all its detail and impartiality, his story may yet be a deficient, incomplete and jaundiced one.

81 A House That Bismarck Built by Jacob Heilbrunn Long have we lived in fear of a Germany predisposed to totalitarian dictatorship. And those who seek to lay Nazism at Prussia’s doorstep almost invariably blame the Iron Chancellor. Jonathan Steinberg’s new biography depicts a Bismarck rife with contradictions. Still, it comes dangerously close to conflating the mad Junker’s cautious conservatism with the führer’s nihilism. There is more to Germany than destiny alone.

92 In the Hall of the Vulcans by Anatol Lieven We thought the lessons of Vietnam could never be unlearned. But Washington warmongering heeds no warnings; it shuns expertise, rewards conventionality and repeats its costliest mistakes. America plunged headfirst into the quagmires that have become Iraq and Afghanistan. The depths of dysfunction behind these decisions seemingly know no bounds.

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By Stephen M. Walt

...he United States has been the premier Nikita S. Khrushchev’s pledge to dominant world power since 1945, “bury” Western capitalism might just come Tand U.S. leaders have long sought true. President John F. Kennedy report- to preserve that privileged position. They edly believed the ussr would eventually be understood, as did most Americans, that wealthier than the United States, and Rich- primacy brought important benefits. It ard Nixon famously opined that America made other states less likely to threaten was becoming a “pitiful, helpless giant.” America or its vital interests directly. By Over the next decade or so, defeat in In- dampening great-power competition and dochina and persistent economic problems giving Washington the capacity to shape re- led prominent academics to produce books gional balances of power, primacy contrib- with titles like America as an Ordinary uted to a more tranquil international envi- Country and After Hegemony.1 Far-fetched ronment. That tranquility fostered global concerns about Soviet dominance helped prosperity; investors and traders operate propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency with greater confidence when there is less and were used to justify a major military danger of war. Primacy also gave the United buildup in the early 1980s. The fear of States the ability to work for positive ends: imminent decline, it seems, has been with promoting human rights and slowing the us ever since the United States reached the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It zenith of global power. may be lonely at the top, but Americans Debates about decline took on new life have found the view compelling. with the publication of Paul Kennedy’s best- When a state stands alone at the pin- selling Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, nacle of power, however, there is nowhere which famously argued that America was to go but down. And so Americans have in danger of “imperial overstretch.” Ken- repeatedly worried about the possibility nedy believed Great Britain returned to the of decline—even when the prospect was unseemly ranks of mediocrity because it remote. Back in 1950, National Security spent too much money defending far-flung Council Report 68 warned that Soviet ac- interests and fighting costly wars, and he quisition of atomic weapons heralded an warned that the United States was headed irreversible shift in geopolitical momentum in Moscow’s favor. A few years later, Sput- 1 See Richard Rosecrance, ed., America as an nik’s launch led many to fear that Soviet Ordinary Country: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Future (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1976); and Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation Professor of International Affairs at Harvard and Discord in the World Political Economy University’s Kennedy School of Government. (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1984).

6 The National Interest The End of the American Era down a similar path. Joseph Nye challenged he American Era began immediately Kennedy’s pessimism in Bound to Lead: The T after World War II. Europe may have Changing Nature of American Power, which been the center of international politics for sold fewer copies but offered a more ac- over three centuries, but two destructive curate near-term forecast. Nye emphasized world wars decimated these great powers. America’s unusual strengths, arguing it was The State Department’s Policy Planning destined to be the leading world power for Staff declared in 1947 that “preponderant many years to come. power must be the object of U.S. policy,” Since then, a host of books and articles— and its willingness to openly acknowledge from Charles Krauthammer’s “The Unipo- this goal speaks volumes about the imbal- lar Moment,” G. John Ikenberry’s Liberal ance of power in America’s favor. Interna- Leviathan and Niall Ferguson’s Colossus to tional-relations scholars commonly speak of Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World this moment as a transition from a multipo- (to name but a few)—have debated how lar to a bipolar world, but Cold War bipo- long American dominance could possibly larity was decidedly lopsided from the start. last. Even Osama bin Laden eventually got In 1945, for example, the U.S. econo- in on the act, proclaim- ing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fatal blows to American power and a vindication of al-Qae- da’s campaign of terror. Yet for all the ink that has been spilled on the durability of American primacy, the protago- nists have mostly asked the wrong question. The issue has never been whether the United States was about to imi- tate Britain’s fall from the ranks of the great powers or suffer some other form of catastroph- ic decline. The real question was always whether what one might my produced roughly half of gross world term the “American Era” was nearing its product, and the United States was a major end. Specifically, might the United States creditor nation with a positive trade bal- remain the strongest global power but be ance. It had the world’s largest navy and air unable to exercise the same influence it force, an industrial base second to none, once enjoyed? If that is the case—and I sole possession of atomic weapons and a believe it is—then Washington must devise globe-circling array of military bases. By a grand strategy that acknowledges this new supporting decolonization and backing Eu- reality but still uses America’s enduring as- ropean reconstruction through the Marshall sets to advance the national interest. Plan, Washington also enjoyed considerable

The End of the American Era November/December 2011 7 goodwill in most of the developed and de- place without American support and ap- veloping world. proval. (The main exception, which sup- Most importantly, the United States was ports the general point, was the ill-fated in a remarkably favorable geopolitical posi- Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt dur- tion. There were no other great powers in ing the Suez crisis of 1956, an adventure the Western Hemisphere, so Americans did that collapsed in the face of strong U.S. op- not have to worry about foreign invasion. position.) The United States built an equal- Our Soviet rival had a much smaller and ly durable security order in Asia through less efficient economy. Its military might, bilateral treaties with Japan, South Korea, concentrated on ground forces, never ap- Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and proached the global reach of U.S. power- several others, and it incorporated each of projection capabilities. The other major these countries into an increasingly liberal power centers were all located on or near world economy. In the Middle East, Wash- the Eurasian landmass—close to the Soviet ington helped establish and defend Israel Union and far from the United States— but also forged close security ties with Saudi which made even former rivals like Ger- Arabia, Jordan, the shah of Iran and sev- many and Japan eager for U.S. protection eral smaller Gulf states. America continued from the Russian bear. Thus, as the Cold to exercise a position of hegemony in the War proceeded, the United States amassed a Western Hemisphere, using various tools to strong and loyal set of allies while the ussr oust leftist governments in Guatemala, the led an alliance of comparatively weak and Dominican Republic, Chile and Nicaragua. reluctant partners. In short, even before the In Africa, not seen as a vital arena, America Soviet Union collapsed, America’s overall did just enough to ensure that its modest position was about as favorable as any great interests there were protected. power’s in modern history. To be sure, the United States did not What did the United States do with these exert total control over events in the vari- impressive advantages? In the decades after ous regional orders it created. It could not World War II, it created and led a political, prevent the revolution in Cuba in 1959 or security and economic order in virtually Iran in 1979, it failed to keep France from every part of the globe, except for the sphere leaving nato’s integrated military command that was directly controlled by the Sovi- structure in 1966, and it did not stop Israel, et Union and its Communist clients. Not India, North Korea and Pakistan from ac- only did the United States bring most of quiring nuclear weapons. But the United the world into institutions that were largely States retained enormous influence in each made in America (the un, the World Bank, of these regions, especially on major issues. the imf, and the General Agreement on Tar- Furthermore, although the U.S. posi- iffs and Trade), for decades it retained the tion was sometimes challenged—the loss in dominant influence in these arrangements. Vietnam being the most obvious example— In Europe, the Marshall Plan revitalized America’s overall standing was never in dan- local economies, covert U.S. intervention ger. The U.S. alliance system in Asia held helped ensure that Communist parties did firm despite defeat in Indochina, and dur- not gain power, and nato secured the peace ing the 1970s, Beijing formed a tacit part- and deterred Soviet military pressure. The nership with Washington. Moreover, China position of supreme allied commander was eventually abandoned Marxism-Leninism as always reserved for a U.S. officer, and no a governing ideology, forswore world revo- significant European security initiative took lution and voluntarily entered the structure

8 The National Interest The End of the American Era Instead of trying to be the “indispensable nation” nearly everywhere, the United States will need to figure out how to be the decisive power in the places that matter.

of institutions that the United States had he past two decades have witnessed previously created. Similarly, Tehran became T the emergence of new power centers an adversary once the clerical regime took in several key regions. The most obvious over, but America’s overall position in the example is China, whose explosive econom- Middle East was not shaken. Oil contin- ic growth is undoubtedly the most signifi- ued to flow out of the Persian Gulf, Israel cant geopolitical development in decades. became increasingly secure and prosperous, The United States has been the world’s and key Soviet allies like Egypt eventu- largest economy since roughly 1900, but ally abandoned Moscow and sided with the China is likely to overtake America in total United States. Despite occasional setbacks, economic output no later than 2025. Bei- the essential features of the American Era jing’s military budget is rising by roughly remained firmly in place. 10 percent per year, and it is likely to con- Needless to say, it is highly unusual for a vert even more of its wealth into military country with only 5 percent of the world’s assets in the future. If China is like all pre- population to be able to organize favorable vious great powers—including the United political, economic and security orders in States—its definition of “vital” interests almost every corner of the globe and to will grow as its power increases—and it sustain them for decades. Yet that is in fact will try to use its growing muscle to protect what the United States did from 1945 to an expanding sphere of influence. Given 1990. And it did so while enjoying a half its dependence on raw-material imports century of economic growth that was nearly (especially energy) and export-led growth, unmatched in modern history. prudent Chinese leaders will want to make And then the Soviet empire collapsed, sure that no one is in a position to deny leaving the United States as the sole su- them access to the resources and markets perpower in a unipolar world. According on which their future prosperity and politi- to former national-security adviser Brent cal stability depend. Scowcroft, the United States found itself This situation will encourage Beijing to “standing alone at the height of power. It challenge the current U.S. role in Asia. was, it is, an unparalleled situation in his- Such ambitions should not be hard for tory, one which presents us with the rarest Americans to understand, given that the opportunity to shape the world.” And so United States has sought to exclude out- it tried, bringing most of the Warsaw Pact side powers from its own neighborhood into nato and encouraging the spread of ever since the Monroe Doctrine. By a simi- market economies and democratic institu- lar logic, China is bound to feel uneasy if tions throughout the former Communist Washington maintains a network of Asian world. It was a triumphal moment—the alliances and a sizable military presence apogee of the American Era—but the cel- in East Asia and the Indian Ocean. Over ebratory fireworks blinded us to the trends time, Beijing will try to convince other and pitfalls that brought that era to an end. Asian states to abandon ties with America,

The End of the American Era November/December 2011 9 and Washington will almost certainly resist World War II are increasingly obsolete and these efforts. An intense security competi- in need of reform. tion will follow. Each of these new regional powers is a The security arrangements that defined democracy, which means that its leaders the American Era are also being under- pay close attention to public opinion. As a mined by the rise of several key regional result, the United States can no longer rely powers, most notably India, Turkey and on cozy relations with privileged elites or Brazil. Each of these states has achieved military juntas. When only 10–15 percent impressive economic growth over the past of Turkish citizens have a “favorable” view decade, and each has become more will- of America, it becomes easier to understand ing to chart its own course independent of why Ankara refused to let Washington use its territory to attack Iraq in 2003 and why Turkey has curtailed its previously close ties with Israel despite repeated U.S. efforts to heal the rift. Anti-Americanism is less prevalent in Brazil and India, but their democratically elected leaders are hardly deferential to Washington either. The rise of new powers is bringing the short-lived “unipolar moment” to an end, and the result will be either a bipolar Sino- American rivalry or a multipolar system containing several unequal great powers. The United States is likely to remain the strongest, but its overall lead has shrunk— and it is shrinking further still. Of course, the twin debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan only served to accelerate the waning of American dominance and under- score the limits of U.S. power. The Iraq War alone will carry a price tag of more than $3 trillion once all the costs are counted, and the end result is likely to be an unstable quasi democracy that is openly hostile to Israel and at least partly aligned with Iran. Indeed, Tehran has been the main benefi- Washington’s wishes. None of them are on ciary of this ill-conceived adventure, which the verge of becoming true global powers— is surely not what the Bush administration Brazil’s gdp is still less than one-sixth that had in mind when it dragged the country of the United States, and India and Turkey’s to war. economies are even smaller—but each has The long Afghan campaign is even more become increasingly influential within its likely to end badly, even if U.S. leaders own region. This gradual diffusion of power eventually try to spin it as some sort of is also seen in the recent expansion of the victory. The Obama administration finally G-8 into the so-called G-20, a tacit recogni- got Osama bin Laden, but the long and tion that the global institutions created after costly attempt to eliminate the Taliban and

10 The National Interest The End of the American Era build a Western-style state in Afghanistan quent speech endorsing change, but no- has failed. At this point, the only interest- body in the region paid much attention. ing question is whether the United States Indeed, with the partial exception of Libya, will get out quickly or get out slowly. In U.S. influence over the entire process has either scenario, Kabul’s fate will ultimately been modest at best. Obama was unable be determined by the Afghans once the to stop Saudi Arabia from sending troops United States and its dwindling set of allies to Bahrain—where Riyadh helped to quell leave. And if failure in Afghanistan weren’t demands for reform—or to convince Syrian enough, U.S. involvement in Central Asia leader Bashar al-Assad to step down. U.S. has undermined relations with nuclear- leverage in the post-Mubarak political pro- armed Pakistan and reinforced virulent an- cess in Egypt and the simmering conflict in ti-Americanism in that troubled country. If Yemen is equally ephemeral. victory is defined as achieving your main One gets a vivid sense of America’s altered objectives and ending a war with your secu- circumstances by comparing the U.S. re- rity and prosperity enhanced, then both of sponse to the Arab Spring to its actions in these conflicts must be counted as expen- the early years of the Cold War. In 1948, sive defeats. the Marshall Plan allocated roughly $13 But the Iraq and Afghan wars were not billion in direct grants to restarting Europe’s simply costly self-inflicted wounds; they economy, an amount equal to approximate- were also eloquent demonstrations of the ly 5 percent of total U.S. gdp. The equiva- limits of military power. There was never lent amount today would be some $700 bil- much doubt that the United States could lion, and there is no way that Washington topple relatively weak and/or unpopular could devote even a tenth of that amount governments—as it has in Panama, Af- to helping Egypt, Tunisia, Libya or others. ghanistan, Iraq and, most recently, Libya— Nor does one need to go all the way back to but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan 1948. The United States forgave $7 billion showed that unmatched power-projection of Egypt’s foreign debt after the 1991 Gulf capabilities were of little use in construct- War; in 2011, all it could offer Cairo’s new ing effective political orders once the of- government was $1 billion worth of loan fending leadership was removed. In places guarantees (not actual loans) and $1 billion where local identities remain strong and in debt forgiveness. foreign interference is not welcome for America’s declining influence is also re- long, even a global superpower like the vealed by its repeated failure to resolve United States has trouble obtaining desir- the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. It has been able political results. nearly twenty years since the signing of the Nowhere is this clearer than in the greater Oslo accords in September 1993, and the Middle East, which has been the main focus United States has had a monopoly on the of U.S. strategy since the ussr broke apart. “peace process” ever since that hopeful day. Not only did the Arab Spring catch Wash- Yet its efforts have been a complete failure, ington by surprise, but the U.S. response proving beyond doubt that Washington further revealed its diminished capacity to is incapable of acting as an effective and shape events in its favor. After briefly try- evenhanded mediator. Obama’s call for “two ing to shore up the Mubarak regime, the states for two peoples” in his address to the Obama administration realigned itself with Arab world in June 2009 produced a brief the forces challenging the existing regional moment of renewed hope, but his steady order. The president gave a typically elo- retreat in the face of Israeli intransigence

The End of the American Era November/December 2011 11 and domestic political pressure drove U.S. Thomas Friedman (and other popular writ- credibility to new lows. ers) argued that the rest of the world needed Taken together, these events herald a to adopt U.S.-style “DOScapital 6.0” or fall sharp decline in America’s ability to shape by the wayside. Yet it is now clear that the the global order. And the recent series of U.S. financial system was itself deeply cor- economic setbacks will place even more sig- rupt and that much of its economic growth nificant limits on America’s ability to main- was an illusory bubble. Other states have tain an ambitious international role. The reason to disregard Washington’s advice and Bush administration inherited a rare budget to pursue economic strategies of their own surplus in 2001 but proceeded to cut fed- making. The days when America could drive eral taxes significantly and fight two costly the international economic agenda are over, wars. The predictable result was a soaring which helps explain why it has been seven- budget deficit and a rapid increase in federal teen years since the Uruguay Round, the last debt, problems compounded by the finan- successful multilateral trade negotiation. cial crisis of 2007–09. The latter disaster The bottom line is clear and unavoidable: required a massive federal bailout of the fi- the United States simply won’t have the nancial industry and a major stimulus pack- resources to devote to international affairs age, leading to a short-term budget shortfall that it had in the past. When the president in 2009 of some $1.6 trillion (roughly 13 of the staunchly internationalist Council on percent of gdp). The United States has been Foreign Relations is penning articles decry- in the economic doldrums ever since, and ing “American Profligacy” and calling for re- there is scant hope of a rapid return to vig- trenchment, you know that America’s global orous growth. These factors help explain role is in flux. Nor can the United States ex- Standard & Poor’s U.S. government credit- pect its traditional allies to pick up the slack rating downgrade in August amid new fears voluntarily, given that economic conditions of a “double-dip” recession. are even worse in Europe and Japan. The Congressional Budget Office projects The era when the United States could persistent U.S. budget deficits for the next create and lead a political, economic and twenty-five years—even under its optimis- security order in virtually every part of the tic “baseline” scenario—and it warns of world is coming to an end. Which raises plausible alternatives in which total federal the obvious question: What should we do debt would exceed 100 percent of gdp by about it? 2023 and 190 percent of gdp by 2035. State and local governments are hurting he twilight of the American Era ar- too, which means less money for roads, T rived sooner than it should have be- bridges, schools, law enforcement and the cause U.S. leaders made a number of costly other collective goods that help maintain a mistakes. But past errors need not lead to healthy society. a further erosion of America’s position if The financial meltdown also undermined we learn the right lessons and make timely an important element of America’s “soft adjustments. power,” namely, its reputation for compe- Above all, Washington needs to set clear tence and probity in economic policy. In priorities and to adopt a hardheaded and the 1990s, a seemingly robust economy unsentimental approach to preserving our gave U.S. officials bragging rights and made most important interests. When U.S. pri- the “Washington Consensus” on economic macy was at its peak, American leaders policy seem like the only game in town. could indulge altruistic whims. They didn’t

12 The National Interest The End of the American Era The biggest challenge the United States faces today is not a looming great-power rival; it is the triple whammy of accumulated debt, eroding infrastructure and a sluggish economy.

have to think clearly about strategy be- can still topple minor-league dictators, but cause there was an enormous margin for it has no great aptitude for creating stable error; things were likely to work out even and effective political orders afterward. if Washington made lots of mistakes. But It follows that the United States should when budgets are tight, problems have eschew its present fascination with nation multiplied and other powers are less defer- building and counterinsurgency and return ential, it’s important to invest U.S. power to a grand strategy that some (myself in- wisely. As former secretary of defense Rob- cluded) have labeled offshore balancing.2 ert Gates put it: “We need to be honest Offshore balancing seeks to maintain be- with the president, with the Congress, with nevolent hegemony in the Western Hemi- the American people . . . a smaller mili- sphere and to maintain a balance of power tary, no matter how superb, will be able among the strong states of Eurasia and of to go fewer places and be able to do fewer the oil-rich Persian Gulf. At present, these things.” The chief lesson, he emphasized, are the only areas that are worth sending was the need for “conscious choices” about U.S. soldiers to fight and die in. our missions and means. Instead of try- Instead of seeking to dominate these re- ing to be the “indispensable nation” nearly gions directly, however, our first recourse everywhere, the United States will need to should be to have local allies uphold the figure out how to be the decisive power in balance of power, out of their own self- the places that matter. interest. Rather than letting them free ride For starters, we should remember what on us, we should free ride on them as much the U.S. military is good for and what it as we can, intervening with ground and air is good at doing. American forces are very forces only when a single power threatens good at preventing major conventional ag- to dominate some critical region. For an gression, or reversing it when it happens. offshore balancer, the greatest success lies in We successfully deterred Soviet ambitions getting somebody else to handle some pesky throughout the long Cold War, and we problem, not in eagerly shouldering that easily reversed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in burden oneself. 1991. The U.S. naval and air presence in To be more specific: offshore balanc- Asia still has similar stabilizing effects, and ing would call for removing virtually all the value of this pacifying role should not be underestimated. 2 On “offshore balancing,” see Christopher Layne, By contrast, the U.S. military is not good “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: at running other countries, particularly in America’s Future Grand Strategy,” International cultures that are radically different from our Security 22, no. 1 (1997); John J. Mearsheimer, own, where history has left them acutely The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. hostile to foreign interference, and when W. Norton, 2001); and Stephen M. Walt, Taming there are deep ethnic divisions and few American Power: The Global Response to U.S. democratic traditions. The United States Primacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), chap. 5.

The End of the American Era November/December 2011 13 U.S. troops from Europe, while remain- To succeed, Washington will have to keep ing formally committed to nato. Europe is air and naval forces deployed in the region, wealthy, secure, democratic and peaceful, pay close attention to the evolving military and it faces no security problems that it can- and political environment there, and de- not handle on its own. (The combined devote more time and effort to managing a fense spending of nato’s European members large and potentially fractious coalition of is roughly five times greater than Russia’s, Asian partners. which is the only conceivable conventional Perhaps most importantly, offshore bal- military threat the Continent might face.) ancing prescribes a very different approach Forcing nato’s European members to take to the greater Middle East. And prior to the lead in the recent Libyan war was a good 1991, in fact, that’s exactly what we did. first step, because the United States will The United States had a strategic interest never get its continental allies to bear more in the oil there and a moral commitment to of the burden if it insists on doing most of defending Israel, but until 1968 it mostly the work itself. Indeed, by playing hard to passed the buck to London. After Britain get on occasion, Washington would encour- withdrew, Washington relied on regional al- age others to do more to win our support, lies such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel to instead of resenting or rebelling against the counter Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. self-appointed “indispensable nation.” When the shah fell, the United States cre- In the decades ahead, the United States ated the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force should shift its main strategic attention to (rdjtf) but did not deploy it to the region; Asia, both because its economic importance instead, it kept the rdjtf over the horizon is rising rapidly and because China is the until it was needed. Washington backed Iraq only potential peer competitor that we face. against Iran during the 1980s, and the U.S. The bad news is that China could become Navy escorted oil tankers during the Iran- a more formidable rival than the Soviet Iraq War, but it deployed U.S. ground and Union ever was: its economy is likely to be air forces only when the balance of power larger than ours (a situation the United broke down completely, as it did when Iraq States has not faced since the nineteenth seized Kuwait. This strategy was not perfect, century); and, unlike the old, largely autar- perhaps, but it preserved key U.S. interests kic Soviet Union, modern China depends at minimal cost for over four decades. on overseas trade and resources and will be Unfortunately, the United States aban- more inclined to project power abroad. doned offshore balancing after 1991. It first The good news is that China’s rising sta- tried “dual containment,” in effect con- tus is already ringing alarm bells in Asia. fronting two states—Iran and Iraq—that The more Beijing throws its weight around, also hated each other, instead of using each the more other Asian states will be looking to check the other as it had in the past. to us for help. Given the distances involved This strategy—undertaken, as the Nation- and the familiar dilemmas of collective ac- al Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi tion, however, leading a balancing coali- and Brookings’ Kenneth Pollack suggest, tion in Asia will be far more difficult than in good part to reassure Israel—forced the it was in Cold War Europe. U.S. officials United States to keep thousands of troops will have to walk a fine line between doing in Saudi Arabia, sparking Osama bin Lad- too much (which would allow allies to free en’s ire and helping fuel the rise of al-Qae- ride) and doing too little (which might da. The Bush administration compounded lead some states to hedge toward China). this error after 9/11 by adopting the even

14 The National Interest The End of the American Era more foolish strategy of “regional trans- is it destined to become just one of sev- formation.” Together with the “special re- eral equals in a future multipolar world. lationship” with Israel, these ill-conceived To the contrary, the United States still has approaches deepened anti-Americanism in the world’s strongest military, and the U.S. the Middle East and gave states like Iran economy remains diverse and technological- more reason to consider acquiring a nu- ly advanced. China’s economy may soon be clear deterrent. It is no great mystery why larger in absolute terms, but its per capita

Obama’s eloquent speeches did nothing to income will be far smaller, which means its restore America’s image in the region; peo- government will have less surplus to devote ple there want new U.S. policies, not just to expanding its reach (including of the more empty rhetoric. military variety). American expenditures One can only imagine how much policy on higher education and industrial research makers in Beijing have enjoyed watching and development still dwarf those of other the United States bog itself down in these countries, the dollar remains the world’s re- costly quagmires. Fortunately, there is an serve currency and many states continue to obvious solution: return to offshore balanc- clamor for U.S. protection. ing. The United States should get out of Furthermore, long-term projections of Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible, U.S. latent power are reassuring. Popula- treat Israel like a normal country instead tions in Russia, Japan and most European of backing it unconditionally, and rely on countries are declining and aging, which local Middle Eastern, European and Asian will limit their economic potential in the allies to maintain the peace—with our help decades ahead. China’s median age is also when necessary. rising rapidly (an unintended consequence of the one-child policy), and this will be a on’t get me wrong. The United States powerful drag on its economic vitality. By D is not finished as a major power. Nor contrast, U.S. population growth is high

The End of the American Era November/December 2011 15 compared with the rest of the developed that means having better schools, the best world, and U.S. median age will be lower universities, a scientific establishment that than any of the other serious players. is second to none, and a national infrastruc- Indeed, in some ways America’s strategic ture that enhances productivity and dazzles position is actually more favorable than it those who visit from abroad. These things used to be, which is why its bloated military all cost money, of course, but they would do budget is something of a mystery. In 1986, far more to safeguard our long-term security for example, the United States and its al- than spending a lot of blood and treasure lies controlled about 49 percent of global determining who should run Afghanistan, military expenditures while our various ad- Kosovo, South Sudan, Libya, Yemen or any versaries combined for some 42 percent. number of other strategic backwaters. Today, the United States and its allies are The twilight of the American Era is not responsible for nearly 70 percent of military an occasion to mourn or a time to cast spending; all our adversaries put together blame. The period when the United States total less than 15 percent. Barring addition- could manage the politics, economics and al self-inflicted wounds, the United States is security arrangements for nearly the entire not going to fall from the ranks of the great globe was never destined to endure forever, powers at any point in the next few decades. and its passing need not herald a new age of Whether the future world is unipolar, bipo- rising threats and economic hardship if we lar or multipolar, Washington is going to be make intelligent adjustments. one of those poles—and almost certainly Instead of looking backward with nos- the strongest of them. talgia, Americans should see the end of the And so, the biggest challenge the United American Era as an opportunity to rebal- States faces today is not a looming great- ance our international burdens and focus power rival; it is the triple whammy of ac- on our domestic imperatives. Instead of cumulated debt, eroding infrastructure and building new Bagrams in faraway places of a sluggish economy. The only way to have little consequence, it is time to devote more the world’s most capable military forces attention to that “shining city on a hill” of both now and into the future is to have which our leaders often speak, but which the world’s most advanced economy, and still remains to be built. n

16 The National Interest The End of the American Era FROM THE EDITORS-IN-CHIEF OF REASON AND REASON.COM

Available now in hardcover and e-book from PUBLICAFFAIRS www.declaration2011.com

GHFODUDWLRQDGUHDVRQLQGG 30 We Bow to the God Bipartisanship

By Leslie H. Gelb

pon his departure as secretary of scholarship to bear on it. You’ll prove it out of defense, none other than Wash- existence if you’re not careful. U ington’s latest living legend Robert Gates cautioned those he was leaving be- The intent here is not to slaughter the hind to cherish and nurture bipartisanship. sacred cow, but to reduce its high-flying “When we have been successful in national levitation, thereby giving its Washington security and foreign affairs, it has been be- worshippers a better view of when biparti- cause there has been bipartisan support.” To sanship might be useful and harmful—and drive the point home, he added: “No major to whom. Presidents seek bipartisanship to international problem can be solved on one tamp down domestic critics and to convince president’s watch. And so, unless it has bi- foreign leaders that they cannot outlast or partisan support, unless it can be extended undermine presidential policies—as hap- over a period of time, the risks of failure pened with Hanoi during the Vietnam War, [are] high.” Moscow during arms-control talks of the Contrary to Gates’s Holy Grail senti- Cold War and the Taliban in the current ments and to most homilies to bipartisan- war in Afghanistan. But in these and many ship, Dean Acheson tagged the practice a other cases, bipartisan backing at home has “magnificent fraud.” As President Truman’s too often been purchased at the price of secretary of state and thus one of its earliest good policy abroad. practitioners, he knew of what he spoke. When worrying too much about bipar- In a 1971 interview at the Truman Library, tisanship, presidents also would do well to Acheson offered a taste of his usual rough- reflect on their vast powers to make foreign and-tumble candor: policy, powers to act as they think best— even in the face of serious political attacks. The question, who is it bad for, and who is it My concern is that Gates and many others good for, is what you ought to put your mind have so inflated bipartisanship’s centrality on. . . . No, I wouldn’t be too serious about that it has become a distraction from, and bipartisanship. It’s a great myth that ought to detriment to, making good policy. And if be fostered. And don’t bring too damn much it is greater political support presidents are seeking, they’d find it better in the results of Leslie H. Gelb is president emeritus of the smart thinking than in compromised posi- Council on Foreign Relations, a former senior tions. Good policy enhances the chances official in the State and Defense Departments, of success abroad, which in the end is good and a former New York Times columnist. He is politics as well. also a member of The National Interest’s Advisory The distance from Gates to Acheson is Council. not small: Gates holds that two-party to-

18 The National Interest We Bow to the God Bipartisanship getherness is essential to successful foreign policy. Acheson saw it as a useful political tool for presidents, presum- ably to curb domestic opposition and add some weight to U.S. foreign policy—but did not want key decision makers to be teary eyed and reverent about it. Three national-security advisers interviewed for this article—Brent Scowcroft for Presidents Ford and George H. W. Bush, Sandy Berger for President Clinton and Stephen Hadley for President George W. Bush—fall somewhere in between, though closer to the latter. Whatever their differences, all agree that a review of bipartisanship—its meaning, practice and value—is long overdue.

ndeed, the story and study of bipar- I tisanship best reveal why Acheson’s cynicism is preferable to Gates’s worship. And most begin the narrative with Webster, as a member of the House dur- Truman, Acheson and George Marshall. ing the War of 1812. “Even our party di- More or less, this trio maneuvered Sena- visions, acrimonious as they are, cease at tor Arthur Vandenberg, then chair of the the water’s edge,” said the great orator. He Senate Foreign Relations Committee, into was either hallucinating or wishing upon a being their cat’s-paw in a Republican-con- star, for even in his day, political divisions trolled Senate. They needed the very in- abounded over international affairs. As for fluential Michigan senator to cajole more Vandenberg, he actually preferred the term than a dozen of his fellow conservatives to “unpartisan,” similar to President Franklin vote for Truman’s highly controversial Cold D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state Cordell War initiatives: the Marshall Plan, nato, Hull’s “nonpartisan.” fdr himself and, later, the World Bank, the International Mon- President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary etary Fund, the United Nations and the of state John Foster Dulles used today’s like. With the brilliance and effectiveness favored term, “bipartisanship.” Whoever of these initiatives, cries for bipartisanship first framed the incantation and whatever became a Washington staple. The idea grew its exact origins, the propagators all had the so agreeable that few policy hands care- same idea in mind: while squabbles at home fully examined exactly what bipartisanship represent democracy at work and are fine, meant or searched for its telling derivations. unity abroad is necessary. The roots of bipartisanship go back to Ignoring Acheson’s injunction to leave the well-worn trope that “politics stops at the subject well enough alone for fear of the water’s edge.” Vandenberg is often cred- debunking “the myth,” scholars plunged ited as its author, but it seems that the first in and proved with data that the prac- utterer of this biblical phrase was Daniel tice of bipartisanship has been greatly ex-

We Bow to the God Bipartisanship November/December 2011 19 Brent Scowcroft put it best: “Our policies are too often constructed to deal with domestic politics rather than the realities of world politics.”

aggerated. Indeed, according to political comes close to holding its own. On aid and scientists James McCormick and Eugene trade, legislators have fought hard and well, Wittkopf, bipartisanship—defined strin- and above all, here their local political inter- gently yet commonly as majorities of each ests cannot be ignored. party supporting the president—has been absent for most of the post-wwii period. et us take it case by case. In the face of Amazingly, they found that since 1947, L constant Republican barrages, Truman’s only Eisenhower met the standard in both Cold War initiatives proved successful in houses of Congress for most of his foreign- establishing containment, deterrence and policy positions. Even after 9/11, George a worldwide ring of alliances. True, his de- W. Bush achieved only a modest spike in tractors among both Republicans and con- cross-aisle largesse. servative Democrats prevented him from Bipartisanship has been in short supply, engaging the Chinese Communists, but he and partisanship has been the norm. Since steadfastly avoided their insistence on un- 1947, every president won far more sup- leashing a war against them. As for Eisen- port from members of his own party in both hower, he settled for a highly unpopular congressional bodies than from the opposi- stalemate on the Korean Peninsula while tion; in fact, on average 20 percent more in conservatives clamored for a nuclear attack. each chamber on foreign-policy issues. The Nor did he bend to incessant pressures from reality has been that on many key congres- hawks in both parties to vastly expand mili- sional votes dealing with foreign policy and tary spending and confront Moscow. national security, Congress has split along John F. Kennedy looked like a hawk, al- party lines. In other words, the reality is that beit a befuddled one, to Democrats as well politics rarely stopped at the water’s edge. as Republicans. Early on he botched the Despite the absence of bipartisanship Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and an ini- since World War II, presidents have general- tial meeting with his Soviet counterpart. ly survived the political deluge and followed In short order, however, he faced down a their desired foreign-policy paths. That’s be- Soviet threat in Berlin and Cuba, initiated cause they have the bulk of the political and arms-control talks with the dreaded Soviet bureaucratic guns—the State and Defense regime, began a huge military buildup and Departments’ expertise, the intelligence crept into a war in Indochina. Kennedy was agencies’ claim on facts and so on. By com- able to do all this his way, even though his parison, congressional staffs are puny. Add victory in 1960 was a squeaker over Richard to this, when push comes to shove, Con- Nixon—and despite widespread skepticism gress’s traditional deference to the president about his experience and executive maturity. as commander in chief plus key Supreme For Lyndon Johnson, foreign policy began Court decisions favoring executive authority and ended with Vietnam. Congressional in foreign policy. Indeed, it’s only in trade leaders raised their doubts about the war negotiations and foreign aid that Congress publicly, and mobs raged outside the White

20 The National Interest We Bow to the God Bipartisanship House and Pentagon, but he persisted in es- and Republican control of the House. After calating the bombing of North Vietnam and he promised to extract the troops in a year, raising troop levels in the South (all the way he kept them there. up to 550,000). No president before him George W. Bush, also bereft of foreign- had ever confronted more open and violent policy credentials and confronted by Dem- opposition on a foreign-policy issue—and ocratic majorities in Congress, possessed still he basically kept to his course, good or something perhaps more empowering than bad. It was to get worse for Richard Nixon. the Soviet enemy—the terrorism threat set Indeed, what Johnson sowed in the Viet- in motion by 9/11. Everyone applauded nam War—exploding doubts and fears his attack on Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s safe about grossly excessive, unchecked and dan- haven, and many bought into his fear- gerous White House power on foreign af- mongering about Saddam Hussein. As op- fairs—Presidents Nixon, Carter and Reagan position to the Iraq War grew steadily in were to reap. Suffice it to say, however, they the public and in Congress, he nonethe- too called most shots. less persisted in escalating the number of George H. W. Bush staunchly followed U.S. forces. As Stephen Hadley told me, his own path despite constant fire from “In theory, it would have been easy for both parties. He and his team essentially Congress to block the surge with a combi- got Mikhail Gorbachev to dismantle the nation of deadline setting, revising readi- Soviet empire. Though conservatives lam- ness requirements and defunding the war basted him for “being taken in” by the effort.” None of that happened. Further, Soviet leader, Bush persisted and succeeded. Bush doubled the intelligence and baseline In order to keep following a traditional defense budgets almost without a legisla- realist course on China, Bush the elder also tive peep. successfully vetoed bills to tighten sanctions Barack Obama, besieged by a declin- on the Beijing regime after the Tianan- ing economy and two major land wars, has men Square massacre. He got the necessary largely shaped his own path abroad. He has majorities to drive Saddam Hussein out bobbed and weaved as he sees fit with Iran of Kuwait, though significant numbers of and North Korea and intervened in Libya Democratic senators dissented. Besides, his against public opinion. Only regarding the aides made clear that he would go to war long war in Afghanistan did he first bend to with Iraq with or without a congressional criticism from the right by increasing force resolution, citing his power as commander levels from twenty-one thousand to one hun- in chief. Above all, he ended the Cold War dred thousand, and then to the left by an- without a shot fired; all the while conserva- nouncing cuts to seventy thousand in 2012. tives screamed “sellout!” This recital of presidential power is not Though William Jefferson Clinton had meant to suggest that their policies ranged no foreign-policy experience, and though free of serious domestic attack or proved White House powers over national secu- generally effective abroad. What the record rity seemed to wane with the demise of shows is this: with or without bipartisan the Great Russian Bear, the former Arkan- backing, the White House usually preserves sas governor did his foreign-policy thing— its desired policy core. To do their business when he was interested in it. For him, do- overseas, they did not need bipartisanship. mestic issues came first. Still, as Bosnia’s bloody civil war escalated, he sent in troops ellingly, since wwii, only three presi- and aircraft, despite bipartisan complaints T dents—Nixon, Carter and Reagan—

We Bow to the God Bipartisanship November/December 2011 21 suffered outright defeats by Congress on surgencies and governments in Nicaragua. major issues. More telling still, they were The first Boland vote in 1982 passed the defeated by bipartisan majorities. Yet even House 411–0 and was later approved by in defeat on particular issues, the presidents the Senate. all found ways to follow their desired paths. To beat presidents in up-or-down votes Bipartisanship, one way or the other, was requires a perfect storm of botched policy not decisive in the end. making and bad politics. In most instances, When Nixon took office, Congress had White House opponents cannot prevail not rejected any president’s main foreign- without a full barrage: the weakening of the policy initiative since fdr’s initial failure to president’s overall popularity; the apparent revise the Neutrality Acts in 1939. With failure (and the presumed dangers) of his the Watergate scandal aborning and the policies in human and financial cost; and, Vietnam War doubling in costs and casu- perhaps most critically, the resistance from alties over the Johnson years, significant overwhelming numbers of the party in con- majorities in Congress handcuffed Nixon trol of Congress—plus a healthy chunk of two ways on Vietnam: by banning air op- the other side. Two-party backing is not erations over Indochina and by prohibiting necessary for the president to make and arms shipments to South Vietnam. On top conduct foreign policy; it is often essential of this, Congress passed the War Powers to defeat it. Act over Nixon’s veto in 1973. The Senate Remarkably, even these outright defeats override vote was bipartisan, and the House were not utterly debilitating. All Nixon’s vote was disproportionately Democratic. tribulations notwithstanding, he essen- Before Jimmy Carter even completed tially fought and concluded the Vietnam his oath of office, the foreign-policy com- War as he secretly expected. Although be- munity went for his jugular. They judged sieged by Congress, he was able to re- him to be naive and incompetent. High gas verse Cold War history, pursuing a détente prices and the failed attempt to rescue U.S. policy with the ussr that greatly displeased hostages in Iran only made matters worse. his own party. Equally impressive, he re- Carter suffered a flat-out defeat with the opened ties with China, the devil of devils Senate’s failure to even vote on, let alone in American politics. approve, his salt ii treaty with the ussr. Weakened as Carter was, he still carried Congressional majorities as well as many out a controversial human-rights policy, foreign-policy experts cringed at Reagan’s openly criticizing the shah of Iran and jeop- provocative rhetoric regarding Moscow. ardizing Soviet arms talks; cut U.S. arms Accordingly, congressional majorities tied sales to Taiwan, Guatemala and Argentina; his hands on nuclear-weapons systems and won passage of the Panama Canal Treaty on the arms-control negotiating process. (approved by two-thirds of the Senate de- In 1985, the Senate voted seventy-eight spite public disapproval); and sold fighter to twenty and the House passed legisla- planes to Saudi Arabia and Egypt in 1978 tion to undercut Reagan’s plans to deploy (despite the resistance of the Israeli lobby). one hundred new mx missiles, presum- After being battered in Congress, Reagan ably a big bargaining chip in arms talks still had the strength to reverse course and with Moscow. Congress also feared war in pursue the most wide-ranging arms-control Central America. A Democratic-controlled agreements with Gorbachev, against the Congress passed the Boland amendments, will of leaders in his own administration sharply curtailing aid to fight left-wing in- and his own party.

22 The National Interest We Bow to the God Bipartisanship his history should quiet passions for ocratic divide, but because the American T bipartisanship or, at least, pressures people increasingly conclude that the war to pay a high price for it. But it doesn’t. is too costly, too long and no longer vital to Presidents, their advisers and foreign-poli- U.S. interests. cy experts all get uneasy about disunity at The real and consequential problems arise home. It’s not easy to shake the belief that when leaders believe they must have biparti- enemies successfully use America’s internal san help and tailor their positions to facades splits to their advantage. Those at war with of unity. So it is that the Obama adminis- a divided America outwait us; those negoti- tration, not untypically, is pursuing poli- ating with Washington play one side of the cies with respect to North Korea, Iran, the aisle against the other. As Sandy Berger put Arab Spring, Palestinian-Israeli negotiations it to me, “A lack of bipartisanship gives for- and the Afghan war, to name a few exam-

eign governments an opportunity to drive a ples, where it has little faith its efforts will wedge between our political parties.” succeed. To go for a more decisive course Yet the advantages gained by foreigners would risk heated domestic opposition. are mostly at the margins. Whether it be As with other administrations, it’s nearly China, Pakistan or Iran, all have failed to impossible to document the importance significantly alter the presidentially desired of politics in making such decisions be- course because of internal disunity. China cause the myth reigns that security must gains advantages in certain negotiations less reside well above politics—untouchable. because of domestic splits and more because Not surprisingly, leaders rarely leave a writ- of its newfound power. Even the Soviets’ ten record of how they integrate policy with gaming of American politics rarely allowed politics, however legitimate and necessary them to get the better of us during arms that integration may be. It’s not discussed at talks. In the Afghan war, the Taliban gain White House meetings, even though there leverage not because of a Republican-Dem- isn’t a White House session where it’s out

We Bow to the God Bipartisanship November/December 2011 23 of mind. Consequently, these key political Scowcroft put it best: “Our policies are too calculations are made without discussion, often constructed to deal with domestic for good and ill. Without this data, it is no politics rather than the realities of world surprise that the acclaim for bipartisanship politics.” has not been carefully examined. Congress can also lose from excessive pur- Even Acheson, cynic that he was, didn’t suit of bipartisanship. Sure, legislators gain want to abandon bipartisanship, arguing leverage in the process, but it can weak- it “is ideal for the Executive because you en political resolve to challenge presidents cannot run this damn country under the openly and hard. This is especially the case Constitution any other way.” By this, he in early stages of key policy debates when apparently meant that without it, the con- presidential thinking is most in need of gressional rabble would get totally out of hard scrutiny. Legislators know full well hand. Thus, even the cynic, in his own way, that presidents use “unity” to stifle or quiet contributed to suffocating a hard look at tough questions. Indeed, both sides tend to the subject. use bipartisanship as a political hammer. By Presidents have to closely examine what bowing to this Holy Grail, Congress short- they gain and lose by making political changes itself, the American people and the compromises on policy for political back- president as well. ing. Obama quiets complaints at home by The foreign-policy community should denying Iran the right to have a uranium- look again at the costs and benefits of bi- enrichment facility under international partisanship. A strong case can be made that inspection. But that condition makes ne- a winning U.S. foreign policy turns not so gotiations with Tehran impossible. Obama much on politics and political parties but avoids criticism from human-rights camps on other factors: the strength and vibrancy by joining the effort to overthrow Colonel of the economy (declining seriously), the Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. But does credibility of our military capability (still he do so at the expense of a very uncer- strong for deterrence and punishment), and tain and possibly dangerous future? He ap- how well policy corresponds to realities on peases conservatives by minimizing defense the ground and applicable U.S. power. cuts. But what price is paid for the U.S. Step one in the quest for better policy is economy, the bedrock of power? Brent to stop drinking the bipartisan Kool-Aid. n

24 The National Interest We Bow to the God Bipartisanship

Night Thoughts on Europe

By Walter Laqueur

n 1849, the year of the “spring of na- Second World War. I have returned for tions,” a peace congress took place in many short visits and some long stays since, I Paris. The main address given by Victor been to most European countries and made Hugo, the most famous author of the time, the Continent one of my fields of study. announced that My children went to school on both sides of the Atlantic. European culture has been A day will come when you, France—you, Rus- the formative influence in my life (that of sia—you, Italy—you, England—you, Germa- the past admittedly more than the present). ny—all of you, nations of the Continent, will, Thus I had the good fortune to benefit without losing your distinctive qualities and from a variety of global perspectives. When your glorious individuality, be blended into I look out of our windows in Washington, a superior unity, and constitute an European dc, I can see the raccoons and squirrels in fraternity. . . . A day will come when bullets the trees of Rock Creek Park; when I look and bombshells will be replaced by votes, by out of our apartment in Highgate, London, the universal suffrage of nations, by the vener- I see the squirrels of Waterlow Park and, in able arbitration of a great Sovereign Senate, winter when the leaves are down, the grave which will be to Europe what the Parliament is of Karl Marx. to England, what the Diet is to Germany, what Having seen Europe and the Europeans the Legislative Assembly is to France. in good times and bad, the day may have come for a summing-up. I learned long ago One hundred sixty years have passed since that a crisis is merely the period between this noble vision was enounced; a European two others, but the present one is consider- parliament of sorts has come into being, but ably deeper and could be fateful. Five years not exactly a European brotherhood, and ago, in a book entitled The Last Days of one suspects that Victor Hugo would still Europe, I referred to the passing of a Europe not be too happy with the present state of I had known. The reception was skeptical in the Continent. part; the views I expressed were unfashion- My memories of Europe go back to a able, and the book certainly came too early. childhood in Weimar Germany and grow- According to a wide consensus, the twenty- ing up in the Nazi Third Reich. I left the first century belonged to the Continent, the country shortly before the outbreak of the civilian superpower that would be envied and emulated by all others. Walter Laqueur is the author of the forthcoming Europe, and especially the European After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and Union, was not doing badly at all. Had it the Decline of a Continent, an assessment of the not progressed to a common currency? The European crisis (Thomas Dunne Books, 2012). reviewer in the Economist (my bible among

Night Thoughts on Europe November/December 2011 27 the weeklies) blamed my book for “unduly ter off than ever. But it had not recovered apocalyptic conclusions.” And now I see its self-confidence. True, there was much that a recent editorial in the same magazine talk about common European values, but in about the very same issue is headlined “star- reality consumerism and materialism (not ing into the abyss.” of the philosophical variety) as a way of life But I was not staring into the abyss at were certainly more important factors. the time, and I am not now; I was merely And yet, students of history know all too considering the possibility of Europe turn- well that the subject of decline has to be ing into a museum or cultural theme park approached with caution, and there have for well-to-do tourists from East Asia. Not been many false prophecies. There have a heroic or deeply tragic future, but not my been incidents not only of survival but also idea of an apocalypse either. Certainly, at of recovery of countries, continents and the time I was dealing more with the long- civilizations that had been given up as lost term challenges facing the Continent, such causes. When western Rome fell, it was as the demographic trends. More recently, generally assumed that the eastern part of as a result of the global recession and espe- the Roman Empire was also doomed, but cially the European debt crisis, the immedi- Byzantium survived for another thousand ate dangers resonate. This is only natural, years. After the defeat by the Prussians in for the collapse of banks, the instituting of 1871, the general view in France was that austerity budgets and rising unemployment Finis Galliae had arrived—that in view of are clear and present dangers. Long-term the shrinking population, general defeat- threats can be pushed aside; there is always ism, the lack of patriotism and self-respect, a chance that they may not happen. Five as well as social evils such as alcoholism and years on—no more than a minute in his- what was then called “eroticism,” France tory—can also seem like an eternity. was finished, never to rise again. And yet, within thirty years the situation radically ondering the future of Europe, one changed: decadence became unfashion- P is reminded of Frenchman Raymond able, it was largely replaced by militarism Aron’s In Defense of Decadent Europe, pub- and even chauvinism; the Eiffel Tower was lished in the 1970s, and the debate it trig- built; sport was discovered and became gered. Despite his native pessimism, Aron popular; and France was itself again. More did not believe that decadent Europe would recently, it took Germany a mere fifteen fall victim to the superior ideological attrac- years after its defeat in World War I to tion of Communism and the economic, reemerge as the strongest and most feared military and political power of the Soviet country in Europe. Union. The European Dream thus arrived: a With all his sympathy for liberal Europe, postnationalist model of peace, prosper- Aron was aware of the process of deca- ity, social justice and ecological virtue. It dence (or decline, to use a more value-free is certainly encouraging to know that the term), which set in with the First World homicide rate in Europe is one-quarter that War and accelerated with the Second. The of the United States, that the literacy rate reasons are known: the devastation from and the life span are higher. A revolution the conflicts, the great bloodletting and took place in Europe during the last sixty the deeply destructive ideologies they bore. years that most Americans simply did not By the 1950s and ’70s, Europe had largely notice. It achieved a new balance between recovered in the material sense; it was bet- individual property rights and the common

28 The National Interest Night Thoughts on Europe It would be unfair to conclude that Europe has become lazy, but it certainly has become inward looking and lethargic, lacking curiosity and enterprise.

good, between government regulation and achieved these aims. Europe was quiet and the free market, between liberty and equal- civilized, no sounds of war. ity—which America with its naive belief in It simply is not true that the present crisis the all-curative power of the free market had is entirely the fault of John Maynard Keynes never achieved. The excesses of consumer and the Social Democrats. Keynes has been capitalism had been tempered. It had pio- dead for a long time, and no major Euro- neered a new approach to a humanitarian pean country (save Spain) has been ruled foreign policy. At long last it had come to by Social Democrats for years. And yet, at live in peace with itself and the rest of the a certain period the European idea began to world. Europe was healthy and sustainable; lose steam. It was based on the assumption it was stress-free in contrast to feverish, un- of permanent economic growth, and it did balanced America. The future seemed to not take into account the problem of aging belong to the European model. It would be European societies. Once growth stalled and emulated all over the world, a shining bea- people lived longer, the base of the scheme con to all mankind. eroded. Basic mistakes were made in other respects as well, such as the accumulation n a depressing morning with the only of debts and the belief that an economic- O news in the media about Ireland on financial union could be established in the the brink of collapse, Britain facing years absence of a political one. of austerity, Greece in despair, Portugal be- Europe needed to be based on a feeling of yond despair, Italy and Spain in grave dan- European identity and common values. But ger, “chronically weak demand,” “debilitat- it began, after all, as an iron, steel and coal ing cycles,” “collision course in Europe,” union. True, Jean Monnet, the father of the “killing the Euro,” “pernicious consequenc- European Union, later said that he would es” and “towards the precipice”—it now put the emphasis on culture rather than the sounds much like the end of days. economy if he had to start all over again. It is easy, far too easy, to ridicule now the But he did begin with the economy, and this illusions of yesteryear. The postwar gen- approach was probably not without reason. eration of European elites aimed to create European integration was so difficult more democratic societies. They wanted not because it had to overcome what some to reduce the extremes of wealth and pov- called the artificial concept of nation-state- erty and provide essential social services hood (nation-statehood had developed over in a way that prewar government had not. the centuries; perhaps the world and Eu- They wanted to do all this not just because rope would have been better off without it, they believed that it was morally right but but it was certainly not artificial) but be- also because they saw social equity as a way cause the community of communities was to temper the anger and frustrations that artificial. All investigations have shown that had led ultimately to war. For several de- people feel an attachment to the place and cades many European societies more or less the country in which they were born (90

Night Thoughts on Europe November/December 2011 29 percent), but much less so to a wider insti- which, initially at least, were movements of tution involving a different way of life or the youth. a different language. According to a 1996 If there will be a rejuvenation of Eu- Eurobarometer survey, only 51 percent of rope, it will come to a considerable extent Europeans “felt European,” and this figure from young people with non-European seems not to have increased since. Various backgrounds. But with notable exceptions, attempts have been made to strengthen Europe has not been able to attract the the feeling of a common cultural heritage, best of them, and there is no need to re- including a Euro- capitulate in detail pean anthem and a the great problems European flag, so far that have arisen in to little effect. Some the integration of common cultural so many of the new events have been immigrants. In any slightly more suc- case, the youth co- cessful, including hort will shrink in the Eurovision Song Europe in the de- Contests (which also cades to come. The generated a consid- Continent is aging erable amount of ill as a result of low will as the result of fertility and rising political maneuver- life expectancy. This ing) and the Vienna means not only in- New Year’s Eve Jo- creasing pressure on hann Strauss concer- the European health to (but this was also services and pension enjoyed by many schemes but also, millions in China quite likely, a de- and Japan). cline in the standard It would be un- of living. At the fair to conclude that same time, paradox- Europe has become ically, massive youth lazy, but it certainly unemployment is has become inward likely to persist, and looking and lethargic, lacking curiosity and the young will have to shoulder the burden enterprise. There is nothing wrong with the of the massive debts accumulated in the desire to enjoy life, but it is disconcerting if past. A far smaller cohort of young people this is accompanied by a dearth of interest will have to work for the well-being of a far in the future. larger group of the old. Sometimes in history profound changes Hence generational conflict will be the have come with the rise of a new genera- new norm. Youth revolts were not infre- tion, the eternal lucky chance of mankind, quent in nineteenth-century Europe, but to echo Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. they were mainly political not social in But young generations have also produced character. More recently, rebellions of the great mischief on the Continent, such as young have taken place in France, Britain, the victories of Fascism and Communism Spain and Greece. Will national (or Euro-

30 The National Interest Night Thoughts on Europe pean) solidarity be strong enough to with- Perhaps Robert Cooper is right. He has stand these pressures in the coming years? been advising eu foreign policy on and off There is an almost unlimited number of for a long time. In his view Europe is post- possibilities for the failure of the European modern, believing in peaceful interdepen- Union, but it would appear that the deci- dence and modern cooperation, whereas sive issues are not the technical decisions the policy of other states is rooted (at best) that will be taken concerning the economy in ideas of traditional zones of influence and the finances of the Continent but the and balance of power. But how will the deeper political and psychological factors— postmodern survive in a world in which all nationalism or postnationalism, whether too often chaos prevails, not the laws of the dynamism or exhaustion will prove stron- International Criminal Court but the laws ger. There are trends that can be predicted of Hobbes? The postmodernists will have with a certain degree of probability, but to act according to two sets of rules: one be- there are also the imponderabilia which tween “civilized” nations and another (“the cannot be measured or weighted, let alone rougher methods of an earlier era”) when predicted, because they can be subject to dealing with the ruffians who have not yet sudden change. And it seems that the im- reached the advanced stage of postmod- ponderabilia will be more decisive. ernism. This may sound sensible, but it is impractical. “Liberal imperialism” is an un- any Europeans complain about a lack necessarily provocative term, not a realistic M of democracy and they fear, right- policy for sending a few thousand people ly perhaps, that a Europe dominated by for a limited time to a faraway country with Brussels will be even less democratic. Few the order not to shoot. complain about a lack of leadership even Cooper’s theses, not surprisingly, have though this is certainly as much needed if irritated those willing to forgive clerical fas- not more. For Europe has been drifting, cism, dictatorship, even genocide, provided and it is not even clear in what direction. they happen outside Europe and the United How much democracy can there be in States. But the real weakness of this policy the world of tomorrow? The system of the is elsewhere—it embodies not only dis- old Polish parliament with its liberum veto, crimination but also a determination that in which the negative vote of one sufficed seems to be absent on the Continent these to bring any initiative to a halt, certainly days. Europe as a forceful player would be will not work. The last Treaty of Lisbon most welcome, but how does one become (2009) brought some movement in this a forceful player? Does Europe in its apathy respect, but in practice it has not changed want it? As Schopenhauer put it, to wish that much. Germany and France got to- is easy but to wish to wish (wollen wollen) gether to streamline the eu, make the deci- is next to impossible. In a recent book en- sion process quicker and more efficient, titled Un monde sans Europe? (2011), Pierre and impose stricter regulations and con- Hassner writes that Europe should be a trols. But it did not help much, and there factor of equilibrium, of coordination and has not been full agreement between the conciliation because it is strong enough to two. Other countries did not like the at- influence others and to defend itself but not tempts to remodel the eu in the image of to conquer and dominate: “Europe needs France and Germany, however badly they the world, the world needs Europe.” Noble needed help. But they, of course, had no words, true words—who could not agree alternative either. with such sentiments? But does the world

Night Thoughts on Europe November/December 2011 31 The Europe I have known is in the process of disappearing. In its place will be something in between a regional power and a valuable museum.

share these sentiments, does Europe have it seems doubtful whether substantial prog- the inner strength, the ambition to fulfill ress will be made. this mission? The prospects for European prosperity The Asian political philosophers and are far worse. Poor in raw materials and en- statesmen were probably right when they ergy resources, Europe will find it difficult told the Europeans that their more au- to maintain its standard of living and social thoritarian model of governance will be achievements unless united. Unlike Latin more suitable to confront the tasks of the America, its geopolitical location makes it years to come. Europe, as they see it, is a more exposed to political pressures from spent force, essentially a customs union its energy suppliers. Unless economic gov- that never seriously intended to become ernance is strengthened, there will be re- a global power. They find it strange that current crises, the imbalances between the Europe seems not to be aware of its mod- countries will increase, and there will be a est role in world affairs and has not come return to economic nationalism and pro- to terms with it. Whether there will be one tectionism. Unless there is a common en- Europe, or a Europe des patries (in Charles ergy policy, Europe will find it difficult to de Gaulle’s phrase), or no united Europe at compete in world markets. Unless there is a all, it will hardly be more democratic than common defense policy, Europe will count at present. It will be increasingly difficult for even less in world affairs. in the struggle for survival to maintain the At present, the majority seems to be un- present level of democratic freedoms. decided what way to choose. They are reluc- There never was a European superstate, tant to make a clean break with the eu but not even the blueprint for one. True, there equally reluctant to move forward toward are common interests, but could not Latin a superstate. Some feel that they may fare America serve as a model? The countries better facing the years to come alone; small, of Latin America live in peace with each it used to be said, is beautiful. Small-town other and cooperate to a certain extent; life in the past had its great charms. The ev- they have established a common market eryday as depicted in the paintings of Carl of sorts (Mercosur), providing free transit Spitzweg, the German romantic painter, of goods, and a customs union. Two hun- was certainly more pleasant than life among dred years ago, Venezuelan Simón Bolívar the satanic mills of England. had more ambitious plans for unifying the Perhaps the common ties and values and region, but his vision collided with Latin the mutual trust are not strong enough to American realities and was not to happen, serve as the basis for a real union. Perhaps though these countries had much more with each country fending for itself they in common than Europe (even, with the will do as well as with forces combined. exception of Brazil, a common language). And if they do not do as well, this could There have been of late some attempts to be compensated for by greater happiness. establish a closer political framework, but It is not certain that even a united Europe

32 The National Interest Night Thoughts on Europe would have the vigor and political will to play a truly important role in international politics. And there is always the chance that the coming storms will bypass a Eu- rope taking a low profile. Keeping a low profile seems to come easier these days than generating political will—and certainly appears to be less risky.

he Europe I have known is in T the process of disappearing. In its place will be something in between a regional power and indeed a valuable museum. For the time being I tend to agree, despite everything, with Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.” There is much that is admirable in Europe’s past and even in its present, weakened state. But I am no longer certain to what extent Tennyson’s sentiments are shared by a ma- Europe’s status in the world was pre- jority of Europeans, to what degree there dominant for a few centuries just as that still is firm belief in a European identity, a of other powers earlier on; this has come European model and European values—and to an end. All recorded history is the story above all the will to defend them. Instead of rise and decline. Unlike university pro- there is the comforting thought that other fessors, superpowers have no tenure. At parts of the world seem to be in decline too. the dawn of the modern age Giambattista The present crisis is not primarily a finan- Vico in his famous and influential Scienza cial-debt crisis but a crisis of lack of will, in- Nuova argued that history moves in recur- ertia, tiredness and self-doubt, and, however rent cycles—the divine, the heroic and the often “European values” are invoked, a crisis human (an imperfect translation of l’eta of lack of self-confidence, a weak ego in psy- degli uomini). Europe is post-heroic. We are choanalytical terms. seeing it turn human. n

Night Thoughts on Europe November/December 2011 33

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By Benjamin M. Friedman

....ell before the summer’s hor- of order, even if not civility. In Japan, the ..rific shootings in Norway, many debate over Tokyo’s response to the Tohoku Wcitizens of the Western democra- earthquake and tsunami, and what to do cies had the sense that the social fabric was about the resulting loss of nuclear-gener- fraying in unexpected places. The Danes ating capacity, led to a no-confidence vote restricted immigration in violation of the that the then prime minister Naoto Kan European Union’s Schengen Agreement. survived only by promising to resign—on The lower house of the Dutch parliament a timetable that, within hours of the vote, voted—by nearly four to one—to outlaw spawned yet further acrimonious argument ritual Muslim butchers (and, along the way, over just when he was supposed to depart kosher butchers too). The French banned (eventually the finance minister took the burkas in the streets. The Swiss banned helm). The prize for the most fundamental minarets. In America, we are fighting over stalemate goes to Belgium, where antago- whether to build a wall between Texas and nism between the French- and Flemish- Mexico and litigating how far individual speaking parties has prevented the forma- states can go in enforcing their own laws tion of a government for over a year. An that bar undocumented immigrants and end to this ugly process is now in sight, deny public benefits to those here legally. but for a while even normally phlegmatic Most recently, a swath of cities across Brit- observers were wondering whether the two ain exploded in racial violence and riots. regions could continue as a single country. But the tensions on display across so What has received less attention is the much of the Western world are hardly lim- underlying economic cause of these trou- ited to questions of immigration or race or bling tensions: they are all-too-predictable religion. A dismissively antagonistic, often manifestations of the discontent that sets outright nasty, tone of public debate has in whenever most of a nation’s citizens become the new norm, in some countries suffer a period of protracted stagnation in accompanied by outright political paralysis. their living standards, and lose too their According to the latest opinion surveys, optimism that the material progress they most Americans were appalled at the U.S. used to enjoy will resume anytime soon. A government’s inability to resolve the debt- pervasive economic stagnation has now set limit crisis with at least some semblance in across almost all the world’s advanced economies. Here in America, the family Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph right in the middle of the country’s income Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard distribution earned $64,200 (in today’s University. His most recent book is The Moral dollars) at the beginning of the last de- Consequences of Economic Growth (Knopf, 2005). cade. Seven years later, the median fam-

36 The National Interest The No-Growth Trap ily’s income was $64,500—less than half prejudice, rancorous public discourse, a percent greater, not per annum but cu- political stalemate and paralysis, eroding mulatively over those seven years. With the generosity toward the disadvantaged—all 2007–09 financial crisis, the recession that are the predictable pathologies that ensue followed and the sluggish recovery since from stagnating incomes and living stan- then, by 2010 the median family income dards. In America, the agricultural depres- fell to just $60,400, down 6 percent from sion of the 1880s and early 1890s led to the previous peak and lower than in any violent labor unrest (most dramatically, year since 1997. The Census Bureau has the Homestead and Pullman strikes), a not yet released data on median income wave of religious bigotry, and the rise of for 2011, but with the continuing weak Jim Crow (and not just in the South). economy it is unlikely there has been any The rocky economic period that followed significant uptick. The majority of Ameri- World War I, even before the onset of the can families have now gone nearly a decade Great Depression, led to the resurgence and a half with no improvement. of the Ku Klux Klan (again, not just in Many countries in Europe have suffered the South), the end of America’s early at- parallel experiences. In Britain as in the tempts to provide government assistance United States, the 1990s saw fairly ro- to women and children in poverty, and bust income growth, but stagnation set in immigration laws both more restrictive after 2001. In Italy, the median income and more discriminatory than anything remained largely flat through the 1990s and the United States had seen before, or has the 2000s until the financial crisis hit. In seen since. The protracted stagnation from the Netherlands, both the 1990s and the the early 1970s to the early 1990s led to aughts—up to 2007—saw stagnant median widespread resistance to desegregation in incomes (apparently separated by a large schooling and affirmative action in the one-year gain in 2001 that may have been workplace, renewed anti-immigrant outcry an illusion created by a change in statistical proce- dures). After 2007, the crisis and ensuing economic downturn depressed incomes everywhere. Japan has suffered even worse stagnation: median income fell by 3 percent in the 1990s overall, and then yet another 5 percent between 2000 and 2007. By 2009, median income in Japan was down nearly 18 percent from the mid- 1990s peak and back at a level the Japanese last saw in the early 1980s. Anti-immigrant agita- tion, racial and religious

The No-Growth Trap November/December 2011 37 (California voters approved Proposition nally generated spur to America’s economic 187, but the courts threw it out), and, as growth, would originate. The United States Bill Clinton put it, the movement “to end is already engaged in two wars. Most of the welfare as we know it.” The experience economies that regularly buy American of other Western democracies is replete exports in large volume—Canada, Mex- with similar episodes. This latest round of ico, Japan, Britain, in effect all of them such pathologies simply reminds us that but China—are in straits similar to ours. even those societies whose citizens talk the Home building, a traditional leading sector best game of having advanced beyond car- in U.S. postrecession recoveries, remains ing about further gains in material living suffocated by the overhang of too many standards—the Dutch, the Swiss, even the houses built in the years of rising prices, Scandinavians—are no less subject to this too many of which are now empty or fac- familiar frustration than their more trans- ing foreclosure. Most consumers who have parently materialistic American cousins. continued to pay their mortgages see both their home equity and their stock portfolios ut what if this time the political stale- back where they were a decade ago. Many B mate we now see also blocks policies state and local governments are facing their that would restore the growth of incomes own budget crises, and most are laying off and living standards? Then the economy, more employees than they are hiring. Only and the society more broadly, would find the corporate sector is flush with cash, but itself in a trap: absence of growth leading to most firms see little incentive to build fa- political paralysis, political paralysis leading cilities or expand their workforces, at least to absence of steps to restart growth, ab- not in the United States. sence of growth . . . The particular focus of today’s nexus Of course, it is possible that some timely between stagnant incomes and paralyzed and convenient external force could come policy making is the federal-budget debate. along to cut the circle. Seven decades later, The current budget imbalance is enormous. for example, economists still debate how According to the latest projections for the long it would have taken America to recover fiscal year that ended on September 30, from the Great Depression had it not been 2011, the U.S. government spent $3.6 tril- for World War II. As late as 1940, with the lion but took in only $2.3 trillion. The dif- United States still not at war but produc- ference, nearly $1.3 trillion, represents 8.5 ing warships and guns and other matériel percent of U.S. national income, well above to send to Britain and our other future al- the Reagan-era peak of 6 percent and nearly lies, nearly 15 percent of the labor force reas great as the post–World War II record of mained unemployed. It was not until 1942, 10 percent just two years ago at the bottom the first year of full mobilization following of the “Great Recession.” A significant part Pearl Harbor, that unemployment finally of this imbalance reflects the decline in tax dipped below 10 percent. And not until revenues and the increase in cyclically vari- 1943, with 9 million men and women in able spending (unemployment benefits, for uniform and the country’s new defense in- example) that occur whenever a business dustries operating far beyond normal capac- downturn depresses incomes and profits ity, did unemployment fall back to the pre- and puts people out of work. But not only Depression level of 3 percent. is the budget deficit today out of propor- But at present it is hard to see where such tion to prior experience; in the absence of a helpful deus ex machina, or even an inter- significant policy changes, it is unlikely to

38 The National Interest The No-Growth Trap What if this time the political stalemate we now see also blocks policies that would restore the growth of incomes and living standards?

abate even as the economy gradually returns but they appear to have little prospect of to full employment. passage. Either way, the potential for further The ugly process that culminated in a depressing an economy that is already weak, last-minute agreement on August 1—really or at least retarding a precarious expansion more an agreement to disagree—was not that may well not display much vigor in any randomly focused. The U.S. government’s case, is clear. taxing and spending policies are sharply But continuing on the current trajectory at variance with one another, not just for is not an acceptable option either. Former the moment but over a longer time frame vice president Dick Cheney to the contrary, as well. And now that the Federal Reserve budget deficits do matter. Although govern- System has mostly exhausted its arsenal of ment spending in excess of revenues is help- tools for stimulating the economy through ful when people are out of work and busi- monetary means (including, to the cen- ness is underproducing—additional spend- tral bank’s credit under the circumstances, ing, by the government or by recipients some actions that have stretched the mean- of tax cuts or government benefits, creates ing of “monetary”), it is primarily through needed demand for many products—con- what the government does in its taxing tinued deficits once the economy regains and spending that public policy is likely to full employment do harm. The borrowing have the greatest impact on the economy’s that the government needs to do to fund growth prospects, for good or ill, for some its shortfall absorbs the savings that in a years to come. fully employed economy would otherwise The August 1 agreement calls for nearly go into investments in new factories, new $1 trillion of cuts in government spending equipment, new office buildings, new re- over the coming ten years, but almost none search and new houses. Firms seeking to in- of this saving (only $21 billion) is to take vest, therefore, either do less, in which case effect before 2013, and the remainder is the economy’s productivity suffers, or invest scheduled to build slowly. The twelve-mem- anyway but finance it by borrowing from ber congressional panel that the agreement abroad. Either way, the economy’s ability to created is to report by December, speci- provide jobs with rising wages, and there- fying a further $1.5 trillion in combined fore an improvement over time in Ameri- spending cuts and tax increases over this cans’ average standard of living, is impaired. period. And if Congress rejects the panel’s proposal, then—at least according to the he more fundamental issue, however, is provisions of the agreement as enacted—ad- T not simply a generic budget imbalance. ditional cuts (but no tax increases) of this There is a reason this problem has become magnitude will take place in a mechani- so politically intractable. Although partici- cal way. Most recently, President Obama pants in today’s debate rarely acknowledge has advanced a set of proposals that would it—indeed, much of the discussion seems preempt the congressional panel’s actions, deliberately couched in abstract budget lan-

The No-Growth Trap November/December 2011 39 guage in order to avoid mentioning the sub- debt has therefore centered on entitlements. ject—the issue at stake is the livelihood and But simply referring to “entitlements” is care of America’s retired elderly. an obfuscation—and one that prevents the By now most Americans are aware that public discussion from addressing what is the largest parts of the federal govern- really at issue. The U.S. government has many entitlement programs— ranging from food stamps to foster care to farm supports to retirement benefits for the government’s own civilian employees—but two of these programs together account for nearly two- thirds of the total entitlements budget: Social Security (last year $726 billion) and Medicare ($555 billion). Adding in more than $80 billion of Medicaid spending that pays for nursing- home stays by patients aged sixty-five or older brings the share of the entitlements budget now ment’s spending go to defense and “entitle- devoted to the support and care of Ameri- ments.” In the fiscal year that just ended, ca’s elderly population to nearly 72 percent. defense and entitlement programs together Worse yet, for three familiar reasons this accounted for 81 percent of all govern- share will rise over time. Most importantly, ment spending apart from interest pay- the post–World War II baby-boom genera- ments on the national debt. The budget for tion has now begun to become eligible for defense (including for this purpose veter- Social Security and Medicare. This process ans’ and military-retirement benefits) was will continue for another decade and a half. $829 billion. All nonmilitary entitlements Second, like the populations of other high- combined added up to nearly $1.9 tril- income countries, Americans are living lon- lion. Most Americans also have their own ger. The life expectancy for a sixty-five-year- views on the value of a larger versus smaller old American man is now another seven- defense establishment. With the U.S. mili- teen years; for an American woman, anoth- tary now scheduled to withdraw at least in er twenty. Third, ongoing improvements in part from both Iraq and Afghanistan over medical technology turn out, on average, to the coming few years, some reduction in be cost increasing. While some innovations, defense spending is already in the govern- like laparoscopic surgery and antidepres- ment’s planning. Leon Panetta, President sant medications, save money compared to Obama’s new defense secretary, has publicly prior forms of treatment, most new drugs, argued that significant further cuts would internal scanning devices and other such harm U.S. national security, and most Re- improvements deliver better-quality care publicans in Congress are sympathetic to and even save lives, but do so at significant this point of view. It is easy to understand added cost. The combined result of these why the debate over what to do about the three ongoing forces is that, under Social government’s outsized deficit and rising Security’s and Medicare’s current configura-

40 The National Interest The No-Growth Trap tions, the share of the entitlements budget structing a new monetary system to escape that provides income and medical care for the systematic instability of an international America’s elderly population will rise from gold standard combined with note-issuing today’s 72 percent to 77 percent ten years banks; alleviating the human misery created from now. by the Great Depression and at the same None of this is news. But the fact that time arresting the cumulative economic we have known about these forces for de- collapse even if not effectively restoring full cades yet have done little to address them employment; full-scale military mobiliza- shows how fundamental are the economic tion in response to the Japanese attack on and moral choices at issue. It is now near- America and Germany’s seizure of most of ly thirty years since the 1983 Greenspan Europe; mobilization of a different kind to Commission restructured the financing of meet the military as well as scientific threat Social Security to put that program on a of the Cold War; programs sufficient to firmer footing for what then seemed the make the retired elderly the segment of the foreseeable future. It is no criticism to ob- U.S. population with the lowest incidence serve that a change in policy adequately ad- of poverty when it previously had the high- dressed a major national problem for “only” est; and the rescue of the nation’s banking two generations. But those two generations system from what would surely have been have now largely passed by, and the coun- collapse on a scale not seen since the Great try has taken no further significant action. Depression: in every case the debate was Now the question of income support for intense, usually partisan, often acrimoni- the retired elderly is on the table again. The ous and sometimes bitterly personal. But issue of medical care for this population is in every case the country made its way to a on the table too, right where it has always satisfactory resolution and then moved on. been. Today’s acerbic political rhetoric not- Only once in the nation’s history—the mid- withstanding, the impediment is not Wash- nineteenth-century slavery crisis—did the ington infighting or the search for partisan American political apparatus fail to deliver advantage or the lack of public understand- a solution to a challenge of national scope ing—although each of those amplifiers is and first-magnitude importance. present, and each does make the challenge A parallel lesson from this lengthy expe- more daunting. The real point is that this rience, however, is that this country’s un- problem is hard to begin with. usual system of governance imposes a need for accommodation and agreement, or at n the past the American political system least willingness not to let disagreement I has had a pretty good record of com- stop the government’s basic machinery, ing to grips with major challenges, if not well beyond what parliamentary systems right away then at least in more or less ad- require. The familiar “checks and balances” equate time. Investment in what the early built into the Constitution of the United Federalists and Whigs called “internal im- States preclude the president—or, for that provements” (at first on canals and turn- matter, the Congress—from acting in the pikes, later on railroads) to open up the way most democracies’ prime ministers, new country’s interior for economic de- backed by their parliamentary majorities, velopment; expansion across a huge conti- can and regularly do. The U.S. president’s nent (inspired by the ideology of Manifest proposals mean nothing without a major- Destiny); regulating, on a national scale, ity vote of both houses of Congress, a vote an increasingly nationwide economy; con- the chief executive has no guarantee of

The No-Growth Trap November/December 2011 41 getting. Congressional votes, unless they in a democratic society lose the sense that reach a two-thirds majority in each house that society is delivering any material im- separately, likewise mean nothing without provement in their lives. The followers of the president’s approval. The opportunity William Jennings Bryan during Ameri- for stalemate is endemic. ca’s populist era, the Klan members of the In principle, the Senate could effectively 1920s (at its peak the Ku Klux Klan was nullify a presidential election by refusing to the country’s largest private organization, approve an incoming president’s nominees claiming as members one out of every six for any or even all of the three thousand or eligible Americans), and the volunteers in so cabinet- and subcabinet-level appoint- the “militias” that proliferated across many ments that any new chief executive needs to parts of America during the 1980s and make in order to staff his or her administra- early 1990s all had little interest in politi- tion. In principle, either house of Congress cal compromise. Each group was born of a could halt any or all government functions deep sense of exclusion from the country’s simply by not appropriating the requisite political process and, once having earned a funds. The Constitution does not specify a place at the table, displayed little familiar- route out of this kind of impasse. The fram- ity with and even less enthusiasm for long- ers apparently expected the country’s elected established ways of working matters out. In officials to negotiate their way. Not so this each case the perception, instead, was that time around—or at least not yet. the established way of running the coun- What makes the current impasse over try was what had produced the outcomes the federal budget seem intractable is not that they found so objectionable in the just the fundamental nature of the ques- first place, whether falling farm prices or tion of how and at what level to care for the the influx of non-Protestant immigrants or nation’s retired elderly but also the politi- what they perceived as excessive taxes and cal setting, created by prolonged economic burdensome regulation. (Other seemingly stagnation for so many of America’s citizens, novel aspects of today’s political landscape, in which it is playing out. In his repeated such as the opposition of many libertarians public remarks, President Obama has high- and Tea Party supporters to having a cen- lighted the unwillingness of many congres- tral bank, or the view, expressed by many sional Republicans to embrace a spend- citizens who now carry copies of the Con- ing-cuts/tax-increase compromise along the stitution with them to political meetings, lines that he and House Speaker John Boeh- that two hundred years of Supreme Court ner were pursuing early in the summer. To jurisprudence is irrelevant because any citi- Mr. Obama’s apparent surprise and frustra- zen who reads the document is fully capa- tion, many of those most adamantly op- ble of knowing what it means, are likewise posed to such a compromise have seen their characteristic of prior periods of ascendancy constituents—at least the most active and of new groups to political prominence, not vocal ones—enthusiastically endorse their just in America but elsewhere as well.) entrenched stance. What enabled America’s political ma- Wholly apart from the merits of these chinery to move beyond such hurdles was, groups’ views in this particular debate, the more often than not, the return of rising unwillingness to entertain compromise living standards. The agricultural depres- with one’s political opponents on the cen- sion that incubated the late-nineteenth- tral issues of the day is a phenomenon all century populist movement gave way in the too familiar in times when participants mid-1890s to two decades of vigorous—al-

42 The National Interest The No-Growth Trap beit irregular—economic expansion. The lies will block a resolution of the budget stagnation of middle-class incomes initially impasse—which is to say, it will preclude triggered by the opec cartel’s oil-price in- a satisfactory response to the demograph- crease finally ended in the early 1990s, and ic problem that has been looming since incomes then rose sharply throughout the the baby-boom generation began to arrive balance of that decade. The story of the nearly seventy years ago. If so, the resulting 1920s and 1930s is more complicated, in inaction (or action such as it will be) will that a new political mood began to emerge surely impede any prospects for the U.S. well in advance of any significant recov- economy to return to a trajectory of sus- ery from the outright depression that had tained growth shared broadly throughout followed four earlier post–World War I the workforce. Until the bulk of America’s citizens begin to see an improvement in their economic prospects, the political basis for addressing these challenges will remain weak if not perverse. Hence the “no- growth trap” that we now face. Recogniz- ing a threat is not the same as overcoming it. Nor will merely being straightforward about the economic and moral issues that the support of our retired elderly downturns. The most likely explanation is population entails—important as that po- that after 1929 the depression was not only litical honesty would be—answer the ques- so severe but also so sufficiently widespread tion of what we should do. But if we fail, as that Americans had a sense of everyone’s a nation, to overcome our current stalemate, going down together—a condition certain- and the rising acrimony that comes with it, ly not shared in the most recent financial we will be headed for a long period of not crisis, nor in the more general stagnation only economic stagnation but moral decline of incomes and living standards that set in as well. n more than a decade ago. The present threat, therefore, is that the This essay grew out of conversations with John continued absence of economic improve- Olcay. But responsibility for any errors or ment for the majority of America’s fami- controversy lies with me.

The No-Growth Trap November/December 2011 43

Chinese Nationalism and Its Discontents

By Robert S. Ross

t no time since the end of the Cold decision to sell arms to Taiwan, which included .War have U.S.-China relations been a threat to impose sanctions on U.S. companies A...worse. Yes, in the past there have that have defense cooperation with Taipei; been periodic confrontations over Taiwan, and tensions over the American bombing Mismanagement of North Korea’s sinking of of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the South Korean naval ship Cheonan in March the Chinese fighter-jet collision with an 2010, followed by widespread South Korean American reconnaissance plane over the anger toward China; South China Sea. But the current downturn reflects a potential long-term trend with the Strident Chinese diplomatic protests against likelihood of protracted strategic conflict. U.S.-South Korean naval exercises in interna- Equally troubling, this raising of tensions tional waters in the Yellow Sea; is not only unnecessary but also potentially costly to the United States. Excessive hostility to the Japanese detention, in Beginning in early 2009, China commit- September 2010, of the captain of a Chinese ted a series of diplomatic blunders that ulti- fishing boat for operating in Japanese-claimed mately elicited a near-universal condemna- waters and for steering his ship into a Japanese tion of Chinese diplomacy. The list is long: coast-guard vessel;

The March 2009 Chinese naval harassment of The Chinese government’s clumsy campaign the U.S. Navy reconnaissance ship Impeccable to compel Google to cease service of its search operating in China’s exclusive economic zone in engine on the mainland; the South China Sea; Its December 2010 harsh and persistent op- Beijing’s heavy-handed resistance to negotiation position to Liu Xiaobo’s selection as the Nobel at the December 2009 United Nations Climate Peace Prize recipient; Change Conference in Copenhagen, causing diplomatic friction between China and Europe Increasingly forceful assertion of its disputed and between China and the United States; economic and territorial claims in the South China Sea, eliciting apprehension throughout Its hard-line response to the January 2010 U.S. Southeast Asia.

Robert S. Ross is a professor of political science at In contrast to three decades of a successful Boston College and an associate at the John King peaceful-rise strategy that enabled Beijing to Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard develop cooperative interactions with nearly University. every country in the world, within two years

Chinese Nationalism and Its Discontents November/December 2011 45 China had managed to sour relations with antipiracy naval operations off the coast of virtually every Asian country and every ad- Somalia are basic. Its protection of its claims vanced industrial nation. in the South China Sea depends on coast- The source of all this strident Chinese guard ships. China is developing poten- diplomacy is not its emergence as a regional tially effective advanced-technology mari- great power with corresponding confidence time access-denial capabilities, including an in its new capabilities. Rather, China’s new improved missile capability, but none of it diplomacy reflects the regime’s spiraling do- has yet been adequately tested, much less mestic confidence and its increasing depen- deployed. Its antiship ballistic-missile pro- dence on nationalism for domestic stability. gram is not operational. China’s space pro- Washington has misread the state of affairs, gram is making great progress, but the Peo- exaggerating Chinese capabilities and fun- ple’s Liberation Army (pla) hasn’t developed damentally misinterpreting the source of all the capacity to significantly challenge U.S. the aggressive Chinese diplomacy. space-based communication capabilities or hasn’t built its own space-based war-fighting he truth is China is neither particu- capability. The pla is developing drones and T larly militarily strong nor particular- air-based radar systems, but again these and ly domestically stable. Beijing’s combative other such defense projects remain relatively diplomacy was not spurred by American primitive or experimental. China will con- economic weakness in the wake of the re- tinue to modernize its military capabilities, cession, and it was far from an indicator and it will eventually deploy advanced sys- of growing Chinese confidence. On the tems that may challenge U.S. security and contrary, in recent years Beijing has not de- regional stability, but Beijing’s new diploma- ployed and operationalized significant new cy cannot be explained by thirty years of de- advanced naval capabilities, and its domes- fense spending and military modernization. tic economic environment is worse today Nor does the strident diplomacy re- than at any time since the onset of the post- flect Chinese economic confidence. At the Mao economic reforms in 1978. height of the global financial crisis, the Beyond its coastal waters, China’s naval Chinese economy continued to grow at capability remains dependent on its ad- approximately 10 percent per year. But vanced diesel submarines, which were first beneath this facade of prosperity, China’s deployed in the mid-1990s. By 2000, Chi- economy was weakening significantly. na’s submarine force had already begun to In October 2008, as the global recession pose a formidable challenge to U.S. naval deepened, Chinese leaders unleashed a operations in the western Pacific Ocean. massive but dysfunctional stimulus pro- But since then it has not deployed any ad- gram. Not only did it fail to resolve most ditional naval capabilities that pose conse- of the deep-seated problems in the sys- quential new challenges to the U.S. Navy or tem, it also managed to foster many new to America’s defense of its security partners. ones. Despite the stimulus, unemployment China still cannot independently manu- in China remains high in rural areas and facture advanced military aircraft, and it among urban college graduates. In 2010, has yet to deploy a single Chinese-designed Premier Wen Jiabao estimated that there advanced aircraft. The j-15 and j-20 fighter were 200 million unemployed Chinese. planes are still in development. It has fi- Moreover, during the past two years, in- nally launched its first aircraft carrier, but equality—by international standards—has it does not have aircraft for the carrier. Its become extremely high. As a result of the

46 The National Interest Chinese Nationalism and Its Discontents stimulus, inflation has soared, affecting the September 2010 during the rallies against price of food, housing and transportation. Japan’s detention of the Chinese fisherman. By last year, China’s property bubble had Economic instability and the erosion of the significantly worsened, the condition of Communist Party’s control over society are national banks had de- teriorated more than at any time in the past ten years and local government debt had skyrock- eted. Economic growth has increasingly relied on government-stimulated investment, not on con- sumption—which fuels even-greater inflation. More worrying still, the state-owned sector is expanding at the expense of the private sector, thus undermining innovation while politicizing economic policy making. These are all protracted problems which occurring simultaneously. This domestic together suggest that social instability in weakness has forced the government to rely China will grow and that the Chinese more and more on nationalism for regime Communist Party’s economic-based legiti- legitimacy—and it explains Beijing’s diplomacy will significantly erode. matic blundering. Beijing’s problems are only exacerbated by As the Chinese people witness their rela- the fact that the tools of Chinese repression tive position in the world increasing (par- are deteriorating. In the past five years, the ticularly in light of the decline of Japan), number of spontaneous small- and large- the United States is seen as the obstacle to scale demonstrations has mushroomed. China’s international acceptance as a great More recently, the Internet has undermined power, so that Washington is gradually re- the government’s ability to control informa- placing Tokyo as the focus of nationalist tion—and to minimize nationwide hostility resentment. With its influence waning, the toward the party. It has become an effec- party is now more vulnerable to growing tive device for people to communicate their strident nationalist opposition. Since Janu- ire over unemployment and inflation, as ary 2010, on the web and in newspapers, well as over political and economic corrup- nationalists have demanded Chinese inter- tion, police brutality, criminal cover-ups, national assertiveness before the govern- environmental degradation and property ment can even consider a policy, putting seizures. In addition, peer-to-peer microb- Chinese leaders on the defensive. Indeed, in logging (via Twitter and its Chinese equiva- recent years nationalism has become more lents) can facilitate large-scale, independent widespread in urban areas, infecting not just and impromptu mass protests. China made the military and disaffected youth but also its first arrest for a microblog post back in workers, intellectuals, civilian leaders and

Chinese Nationalism and Its Discontents November/December 2011 47 businesspeople. Moreover, Internet com- 2010, during former secretary of defense munication technologies enable Chinese Robert Gates’s visit to Jakarta, the United nationalists to interact with each other and States agreed to expand military coopera- can facilitate popular protests against Chi- tion with Indonesia. In November, during nese foreign policy, thus magnifying the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to importance of nationalism and the danger New Zealand, the United States agreed to it poses to regime stability. China’s insecure reestablish full military cooperation with rulers, preoccupied with domestic stability, the Pacific island nation, despite New Zea- are thus compelled to pay evermore atten- land’s ban on visits by nuclear-powered tion to nationalist triumphalism as they ships to its ports. The United States ex- formulate foreign policy. panded military relations with the Philip- For the first time since the death of pines and strengthened its commitment to Mao Tse-tung, Chinese leaders have had the protection of Japan. During Sino-Jap- to choose between using nationalism and anese tension over the fishing-boat-captain strident diplomacy to accommodate their incident, Hillary Clinton stated that the domestic audience and using China’s peace- U.S.-Japan defense treaty covered military ful-rise strategy to accommodate the inter- contingencies involving the disputed Sen- national community. Until recently, China kaku Islands administered by Japan but also opted for the latter. But since 2009 the claimed by China. Subsequent to the release party’s effort to appease China’s nationalists of the captain, Washington and Tokyo car- has resulted in a bumbling foreign policy ried out their largest-ever joint naval exer- that has aroused global animosity and un- cise. Here then was a strong America reas- dermined China’s security. suring its allies—this may have encroached on China’s grand ambitions, but it was an his nationalist diplomacy bred consid- expected and appropriate response. T erable anxiety among America’s allies But then there was the overly assertive in East Asia. Did Washington have the will Washington that launched, in Hillary Clin- to sustain its strategic presence and balance ton’s formulation, its “forward-deployed China’s rise? A robust U.S. diplomatic re- diplomacy.” It was a volte-face of years of sponse was in order. But the United States American policy, and it was seen as a grow- went too far, challenging China’s security ing—and very different sort of—challenge on its continental periphery, creating the by Beijing. potential for protracted great-power security During the George W. Bush administra- conflict and heightened regional instability. tion, the United States reduced its troops Following the North Korean sinking of in South Korea by 40 percent, removed the South Korean naval ship Cheonan in its forces deployed between the demilita- March 2010 and China’s failure to pub- rized zone and Seoul, dramatically reduced licly condemn Pyongyang for the attack, the the size of the annual U.S.-South Korean United States developed a series of effective joint military exercises and stated in the initiatives in maritime East Asia designed Department of Defense’s Quadrennial De- to reaffirm its resolve to contend with the fense Review that in 2012 the United States rise of China. Many of these initiatives were would transfer to Seoul operational com- necessary and constructive. In late June, for mand (opcom) of South Korean forces. the first time since the end of the Cold War, These steps, regardless of the administra- three U.S. nuclear-powered submarines sur- tion’s intentions, created a China that was faced simultaneously in Asian ports. In July more secure on its periphery.

48 The National Interest Chinese Nationalism and Its Discontents Beginning in early 2009, China committed a series of diplomatic blunders that ultimately elicited a near-universal condemnation of Chinese diplomacy.

Now, the Obama administration has re- Secretary Clinton announced America’s versed course. The transfer of opcom to support for a “collaborative diplomatic South Korea has been deferred for at least process” to resolve the dispute. The move three years. Throughout 2010 the United constituted a sharp rebuke to Beijing, States conducted a series of high-profile, which has long claimed sovereignty over large-scale military exercises with Seoul, the territory, and suggested U.S. interven- including maritime drills in waters west of tion in support of the other claimants, South Korea. Later in the year, the Unit- which have advocated multilateral nego- ed States and South Korea signed the new tiations. In addition, the United States had “Guidelines for U.S.-rok Defense Coopera- previously expressed support for stability in tion,” which called for enhanced combined the South China Sea, but only in Washing- exercises and interoperability between the ton, dc, at the assistant-secretary level, and two armed forces. These developments all never through prior discussion with any of suggested a determined U.S. interest in re- the involved nations. establishing a significant conventional mili- The administration’s forward-deployed tary presence on the peninsula. diplomacy also includes strategic coopera- The U.S. security initiative with South tion with Vietnam. For over twenty years Korea has eroded Beijing’s confidence over Washington parried Vietnamese overtures, its strategic relationship with Seoul; China understanding that Indochina is not a vital is now increasingly dependent on North interest. Yet, in August, after Clinton’s sup- Korea as its only reliable ally on the pen- port in Hanoi for Vietnamese resistance to insula, and it has become more resistant Chinese maritime claims, the U.S. Navy, to Korean unification for fear that it could including the aircraft carrier uss George lead to an expanded U.S. military presence Washington, held a joint training exercise closer to China’s border. Chinese leaders with the Vietnamese navy for the first time. now place ever-greater value on stability in In October, Secretary Gates visited Hanoi, North Korea. Rather than use its economic where he proclaimed the potential for ex- leverage on Pyongyang in cooperation with panded U.S.-Vietnamese defense cooper- U.S. nonproliferation objectives, Beijing ation and his hope that Vietnam would has increased its support of North Korean continue to participate in military exercises economic and political stability. with the United States. Later that month, And in July 2010, as a U.S.-South Ko- Clinton returned to Hanoi and declared rean naval exercise took place in the Yellow U.S. interest in developing a “strategic part- Sea, Hillary Clinton launched a new U.S. nership” with Vietnam and in cooperating strategic initiative for Southeast Asia at an with the country on “maritime security.” Asian regional-security meeting in Hanoi. She then visited Phnom Penh and urged After Washington held extensive consulta- Cambodia to establish greater foreign-poli- tions and planning with all of the claim- cy independence from China. In addition, ants of the Spratly Islands except China, for the first time the United States expressed

Chinese Nationalism and Its Discontents November/December 2011 49 support for the Indochinese countries’ ef- uty foreign minister Cui Tiankai recently forts to constrain Chinese use of the head- warned that some Southeast Asian coun- waters of the Mekong River. tries were “playing with fire” and expressed Beijing is now intent on punishing Viet- his “hope that the fire will not be drawn to nam for its hubris in cooperating with the the United States.” United States. It wants to compel Hanoi Washington is thus engaged in an in- to accommodate Chinese power. In 2011 creasingly polarized conflict in Southeast it escalated the frequency and scale of its Asia. But more important, independent of armed harassment of Vietnamese fishing the course of the South China Sea mar- ships operating in disputed waters, causing itime disputes, U.S. collaboration with increased bilateral tension and damage to Vietnam’s effort to use America to op- the Vietnamese fishing industry. China also pose China is not only costly but also fool- stepped up its naval harassment of Philip- ish. Vietnam’s common land border with pine economic activities in disputed waters. China, its maritime vulnerability to the But in response, the United States has only Chinese navy and its economic depen- reinforced its commitment to the Southeast dency on Beijing ensure that the United Asian countries. In July 2011 it held an- States will not be able to develop meaning- other military exercise with Vietnam. Then ful defense cooperation with Vietnam. But it again sent an aircraft carrier to visit the having engaged China in this regional dip- country, and the Pentagon reached its first lomatic tussle, any U.S. effort to disengage military agreement with the Vietnamese from the island conflict by encouraging military. The Pentagon is also assisting the moderation on the part of its Southeast Philippines’ maritime intelligence capabili- Asian partners would risk being viewed as a ties in the South China Sea. China’s dep- strategic retreat. The Obama administration’s greater security cooperation with countries on the mainland’s perim- eter is a disproportionate reaction to Chinese nationalism. It is not reflec- tive of any recent improvements in Chinese naval capabilities that could challenge U.S. maritime dominance. Nor does it reflect an increased strategic importance of the Korean Pen- insula or Indochina for U.S. security. Since 1997, the United States deployed increasing quantities of its most advanced weaponry to East Asia and consolidated security cooperation with its maritime security partners, all the while maintaining significant U.S.-China cooperation. That was a productive policy. But now Chinese leaders are re- evaluating U.S. intentions. They have concluded that the United

50 The National Interest Chinese Nationalism and Its Discontents States is developing a forward-leaning policy United States, America has the responsibil- of encirclement and containment. Regard- ity to rein in its security partners as well. less of Washington’s intent, recent American The balance of power in East Asia is a actions have provided ample evidence to vital national-security interest, and the support China’s claims. United States must reassure its strategic partners that it will provide for their secu- eijing’s nationalist diplomacy is danger- rity, despite the rise of China. The United B ous. America’s ill-conceived response States military must continue to focus its makes it even more so. China is militarily weapons acquisitions and deployments on vulnerable to the United States, and the re- maintaining U.S. security in the region. gime is vulnerable to internal instability. At The task at hand for American policy is to this point, Washington is embroiled in ter- realize these objectives while maintaining ritorial disputes over worthless islands in the U.S.-China cooperation. Chinese national- South China Sea and is expanding its stra- ism will continue to challenge U.S. foreign tegic presence on China’s periphery. And in policy for a long time to come. This will an era when Chinese cooperation is increas- require the administration to acknowledge ingly important, Washington is needlessly both America’s maritime superiority and challenging Chinese security. China’s domestic and international vul- Just as America expects China to restrain nerabilities, and thus exercise confident its security partners in the Middle East and restraint and resist overreaction to Beijing’s Asia from exacerbating conflict with the insecure leadership. n

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scholars and much of the educated public Pinker the Prophet simply deny the good news. But prehistoric graves and records from twentieth-century By Robert Jervis hunter-gatherers reveal death rates due to warfare five to ten times that of modern Europe, and the homicide rate in Western Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Na- Europe from 1300 to today has dropped ture: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: by a factor of between ten and fifty. When Viking Adult, 2011), 832 pp., $40.00. we read that after conquering a city the ancient Greeks killed all the men and sold ....ith the United States fighting the women and children into slavery, we ..two wars, countries from Tu- tend to let the phrases pass over us as we Wnisia to Syria either in or on the move on to admire Greek poetry, plays and brink of intrastate conflicts, bloodshed civilization. But this kind of slaughter was continuing in Sudan and reports that sui- central to the Greek way of life. cide bombers might foil airport security by Implicit throughout and explicit at the planting explosives within their bodies, it is very end is Pinker’s passionate belief that hard to be cheerful. But Harvard psycholo- contemporary attacks on the Enlighten- gist Steven Pinker tells us that we should ment and modernity are fundamentally be, that we are living in the least violent misguided. Critics often argue that material era ever. What’s more, he makes a case that and technical progress has been achieved will be hard to refute. The trends are not without—or even at the cost of—moral im- subtle—many of the changes involve an provement and human development. Quite order of magnitude or more. Even when his the contrary, he argues; we are enormously explanations do not fully convince, they are better than our ancestors in how we treat serious and well-grounded. one another and in our ability to work to- Pinker’s scope is enormous, ranging in gether to build better lives. time from prehistory to today and covering To make such bold and far-reaching wars (both international and civil), crime, claims, one must draw on an equally vast torture, abuse of women and children, and array of sources. And so Pinker does. The even cruelty to animals. This breadth is bibliography runs to over thirty pages set in central because violence in all of these do- small type, covering studies from anthropol- mains has declined sharply. Students of any ogy, archaeology, biology, history, political one of these areas are familiar with a narrow science, psychology and sociology. With this slice of the data, but few have stepped back range comes the obvious danger of superfi- to look at the whole picture. In fact, many ciality. Has he understood all this material? Has he selected only those sources that sup- Robert Jervis is the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of port his claims? Does he know the limits of International Politics at Columbia University. the studies he draws on? I cannot answer

54 The National Interest Reviews & Essays these questions in all the fields, but in the methodologies to show that however much areas I do know—international relations we may fear crime, throughout the world and some psychology—his knowledge holds the danger is enormously less than it was up very well. With the typical insider’s dis- centuries ago. When we turn to torture, trust of interlopers, I was ready to catch domestic violence against women, abuse of him stacking the children and cru- deck or twisting elty to animals, the arguments and ev- progress over the idence about war. past two millennia While he does is obvious. Here miss some nuanc- what is particularly es, these are not interesting is not of major conse- only the decline quence. It is true in the incidence that despite the of these behaviors enormous toll of but also that until World Wars I and recently they were II, not only have the norm in both there been rela- the sense of being tively few massive expected and of bloody conflicts being approved. since then (and In all these di- an unprecedented verse areas, then, I period of peace think Pinker’s ar- among the major gument holds up. powers), but the Or, to put it more trends going back cautiously, the many centuries burden is now on reveal a decline in those who believe the frequency of war, albeit not a steady that violence has not declined to establish one. The record on intrastate conflicts is their case. (Whether our era sees new and muddier because definitions vary and histo- more subtle forms of violence is a different ries are incomplete, but most studies reveal question and I think would have to involve a decline there as well. In the aftermath of the stretching of this concept.) We often the Cold War, civil wars broke out in many scorn “mere” description, but here it is cen- areas, and some still rage (most obviously tral. The fact—if it is accepted as a fact— in Congo), but, contrary to expectations, that violence has declined so much in so this wave has subsided. In parallel, Pinker many forms changes the way we understand marshals multiple sources using different our era and the sweep of human history. It

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 55 shows how much our behavior has changed foresee the cataclysms that were to come and that even if biology is destiny, destiny and appeared to justify the dominance of does not yield constant patterns. It also puts racism and sexism around the world. It is in perspective our current ills and shows all too easy for any of us to imagine how we that notions of civilization and progress are could be ridiculed, generations from now, not mere stories that we tell ourselves to jus- for our naïveté and unwitting complicity in tify our lives. a new malign order. The recent past too seems to make a o why has all this good news generally mockery of Pinker’s argument. Just to men- S gone unrecognized, and why do many tion the names of Hitler, Stalin and Mao is people believe that our age is unprecedented to make us cringe at the thought of prog- in its bloodiness? One reason Pinker notes ress. Although the world has seen noth- is the tendency to whitewash history. Myths ing so horrific since then, readers of this of a better time in the past and portrayals journal will be familiar with the wars be- of our current era as degraded are common tween Iran and Iraq and between Eritrea among social critics on both the left and and Ethiopia, and any day’s newspaper re- right to goad us into shame—and action. veals numerous incidents of bloodshed. Our understanding of the massive slaughter Since they are happening now, they are and oppression levied by the dominance of very vivid, which makes it hard to maintain the Western world over less modern civili- a sense of proportion. Reading about the zations has magnified this propensity, and latest school massacre or serial killer grabs stressing how much violence there was in our attention more than the drab long-run earlier times, and in some contemporary statistics. Even if we are aware of the terrors non-Western societies, seems to stereotype of the distant past, we do not feel them in Others as barbarians. Ironically, the liberal our gut. worldview that Pinker credits with so much The wars of the twentieth century and of our progress involves a sensitivity to our the domestic mayhem caused by those ty- current and previous sins that encourages rannical leaders will lead many to ask how viewing distant societies such as the Ameri- previous eras could conceivably have wit- can Indians not only more favorably than nessed as many casualties at the hands of we did until recently but also more favor- oppressors or at the point of a gun. Well, ably than is warranted. they didn’t. But Pinker argues that what Related to this, the somewhat cynical is important for understanding social pro- spirit of our age makes us suspicious of cesses is not the absolute number of deaths claims about progress in human behav- but their proportion of the world’s popu- ior, especially because the plethora of such lation, which has greatly increased over claims by Western thinkers like Herbert time. To some, this will seem like a sleight Spencer and even Max Weber in the nine- of hand. In what way do tens of millions teenth and twentieth centuries failed to of deaths in wars and attempts to remake

56 The National Interest Reviews & Essays The fact—if it is accepted as a fact—that violence has declined so much in so many forms changes the way we understand our era and the sweep of human history.

societies become less significant because of And this makes us resist Pinker’s analysis. the rise of world population, including in Most broadly, we see less progress than continents far distant from these atrocities? we should because we are prone to what Morally, they do not. But if one wants to can be called the conservation of fears. If use body counts as a way to understand the through effort or good fortune the problem extent of violence in the world, proportions we worry most about disappears, all the and ratios are a better measure than abso- others move up a notch. Terrorist incidents lute numbers. were frequent during the Cold War, and Is it also appropriate to point to the lack although they did not kill as many people of a war between the United States and as did 9/11, they were a significant concern the ussr as evidence of growing peaceful- for citizens and policy makers. But no one ness? The Cold War of course saw American suggested that this was a menace of suf- troops fighting in Korea and Vietnam, not ficient magnitude to merit making it the to mention numerous smaller proxy wars. pivot of American foreign policy, let alone These were not large enough to move the the center of societal concerns. We are now needle on Pinker’s scale, but a nuclear war so worried about terrorism because our se- would have been. Pinker briefly notes many curity environment is otherwise so benign. of the arguments for why this did not occur, The fact that we no longer have to live but to the extent that peace was maintained under the shadow of instantaneous destruc- by the fear of total annihilation, one can tion has much less impact on our psyches certainly question how we should enter this and sense of how dangerous our world is period into our balance sheet. If we think than logic would suggest. that we were playing Russian roulette, then the fact that we were lucky does not count inker wants to do more than docu- quite so strongly for our living in a less vio- P ment the decline of violence; he wants lent time. to explain it. And that explanation comes An awareness that massive war could still in two forms: a “Civilizing Process” that break out today similarly inhibits our sense reduced violence, especially within states, of progress. Without a true rival state to the and a “Humanitarian Revolution” that ex- United States, the specter of world-destroy- tended rights not only to different races, ing conflict has disappeared, but even opti- but also to women and children. (The two mists agree that there is at least some chance processes have some overlap, and growing of a Sino-American war, and the danger of humanitarianism probably would have been a nuclear exchange between other hostile impossible without the earlier evolution pairs, most obviously India and Pakistan— away from barbarism and toward gentility, but also Israel and a nuclear-armed Iran— but they nevertheless remain distinct.) cannot be dismissed. These perils remind Civility, for Pinker, was promoted to a us that progress always comes with costs: no great extent by the rise of the state in early splitting of the atom, no nuclear holocaust. modern Europe. It is a Hobbesian notion

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 57 that statistics from nonstate societies con- a vital concern today: How do we devise it firm: without law supported by sufficient so that the government is strong enough to power, both self-defense and self-aggran- maintain order and guarantee rights with- dizement produce a violent world. The data out being so strong and independent as to are quite clear that the development of a be a menace to life, liberty and the pursuit state structure is associated with a sharp of happiness? decline in homicides. Here and elsewhere, The second major civilizing impulse Pinker is quick to note that correlation is the development of commerce. A fun-

does not necessarily mean causation, but damental intellectual breakthrough was both logic and chronology indicate a sig- the understanding that economic activ- nificant role for state power in quelling ities were not zero-sum and that unco- violence. erced trade was mutually beneficial. Trade Still, as Aesop noted in his fable of King also provided potential income streams for Log and King Stork (one of the few sourc- states and flourished when ruling parties es that Pinker does not cite), a strong gov- could provide internal order. Thus while ernment can kill, and a decline in homi- Columbia scholar Charles Tilly was cor- cide can be more than compensated for rect to say that “war made the state, and by an increase in state-sponsored killing. the state made war,” one too could say this Pinker acknowledges this, but I do not about commerce. think fully takes on board the central prob- To these well-known elements Pinker lem of government that has preoccupied adds the insights of the historical sociolo- so many thinkers, that underpinned the gist Norbert Elias who showed how the de- American Constitution and that remains velopment of royal courts led to forms of

58 The National Interest Reviews & Essays civilization that we now take for granted— the condescending diatribes of our elders table manners (including not brandishing along these same lines does not mean that knives that all too easily could be used Pinker is incorrect. But his case would be to stab food, as well as one’s neighbor), stronger if he could show that the march- not spitting, along with defecating and ers and protesters and anti–Vietnam War copulating only in private. Much of the brigades were the ones responsible for the evolution of etiquette and manners made increased violence. It is also hard to rule out social interactions more predictable and re- the possibility that both the social turmoil inforced self-control and the need to delay and the rise in crime were brought about by gratifications, practices that made sense third factors, most obviously the dislocation when being hot-blooded was likely to re- and diversion of resources caused by the duce rather than increase wealth, standing war and the heightened sense on the part and security. of many young and educated people that How convincing is this? The obvious ob- Western social institutions had failed to live jection is that it amounts to explaining his- up to the Enlightenment values on which tory with history; that it describes more they were founded. Indeed, the 1960s and than it enlightens. Pinker acknowledges ’70s witnessed a great expansion of rights that these mechanisms are all deeply in- and the reinvigoration of social inquiry tertwined and that proof is impossible. In that Pinker sees as an engine of progress. dealing with such large and complex phe- And while Pinker attributes the subsequent nomena, plausibility may be all that we decline in crime to a return to the earlier can hope for, and Pinker’s argument and norms, the drastic increase in the incar- evidence do meet this test. And his willing- ceration rate (which many consider to be ness to include anomalies in his explanation uncivilized) may have had something to do is admirable. But it is his desire to do so with it. that also provides grounds for skepticism. Pinker argues that the uptick in domestic hat Pinker calls the “Humanitarian violence in the West, and especially in the W Revolution” involved a recasting of United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, normal and appropriate human behavior. can be explained by a temporary “deciviliz- Part of our historical and biological heri- ing process.” The increase in homicides and tage, we now see torture, slavery, and sanc- crime was caused, he argues, by a decrease tioned violence against women, children in respect for authority, a rise in self-indul- and others who were powerless in society, gence, a scorn for self-discipline and other and often against those who held different “bourgeois values,” and a renunciation of political and religious beliefs, as repugnant. the belief that societies are held together The world became not only safer but also by a willingness to respect others. The fact more humane. that those of us who participated—even The cause, Pinker tells us, was the growth marginally—in these activities remember of literacy, writing and publishing. “Read-

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 59 ing is a technology for perspective-taking. gies that made ideas and people increasingly When someone else’s thoughts are in your mobile. . . . [and led to] a debunking of head, you are observing the world from ignorance and superstition. . . . [and] an in- that person’s vantage point,” which leads crease in invitations to adopt the viewpoints to at least a degree of empathy. Further- of people unlike oneself.” more, exposure to a wider range of people, It is the free flow of ideas, unrestrained thoughts and events “is the first step toward by dogmas, that is doing the work for asking whether [current practices] could be Pinker. Nevertheless, much as this idea done in some other way.” Fiction as well as is appealing to academics and intellectu- nonfiction can serve this purpose, and the als, skepticism is in order. We have come mid- and late-eighteenth century witnessed to see slavery as a violation of our values an explosion of novels. With the Enlighten- and sense of what it means to be human, ment, more and more ideas were exchanged but one does not have to be a Marxist to through letters and discussions in increas- doubt that this was the inevitable conse- ingly cosmopolitan cities. Such exchanges quence of free inquiry (it certainly was not are crucial, according to Pinker, and lest in the United States). Pinker displays a I be accused of caricaturing his claim for great faith—although he would dislike that how they lead to progress, let me give an word—in the ability of social science (he extended quotation: does not like current trends in the humani- ties) to lead us toward not only a better When a large enough community of free, ra- understanding of the human condition but tional agents confers on how a society should also the betterment of it. I love reading and run its affairs, steered by logical consistency doing social science, but think we should and feedback from the world, their consensus be wary about overclaiming. Empathy, for will veer in certain directions. Just as we don’t Pinker’s account, may lead naturally (but have to explain why molecular biologists dis- not inevitably) to at least a degree of do- covered that dna has four bases . . . we may unto-others-as-you-would-have-them-do- not have to explain why enlightened thinkers unto-you behavior. But Pinker realizes that would eventually argue against African slavery, one can see the world through someone cruel punishments, despotic monarchs, and else’s eyes and still want to harm him, and the execution of witches and heretics. With also appreciates that research on the effects enough scrutiny by disinterested, rational, and and, even more, the causes of empathy and informed thinkers, these practices cannot be sympathy are necessarily limited because of justified indefinitely. the difficulty in constructing appropriate experiments, without which it is hard to The later and parallel rights revolutions over move beyond correlation. Since kindergar- the past thirty years (greater rights for racial ten, most Americans have been taught to minorities, gays, women, children and even be empathetic, and human-subjects boards animals) were similarly rooted in “technolo- would likely object to manipulations that

60 The National Interest Reviews & Essays would try to make them less so. And even roots, and much of the energy behind cam- good knowledge can be put to bad ends. It paigns that Pinker and I applaud comes is not necessarily true that all good things from people who feel a higher calling to go together; more knowledge might lead help their fellow human beings. (Pinker’s us in directions that Pinker and I would one paragraph addressing this only scratch- deplore. For example, we could learn that es the surface of the question.) capital punishment does indeed deter mur- Pinker is on firmer ground on other cru- der or that genetic endowments help ex- cial points related to knowledge. The first is plain why there are so few women in the that the reduction of violence and the ex- ranks of top mathematicians. Pinker does pansion of humane treatment of people has realize that knowledge is not the same as been spurred by the conscious decision to enlightenment—no country was more edu- design incentives and institutions to these cated than Nazi Germany—but does not ends. The growth of commerce and state consider whether an open society might power may have lowered homicide rates, democratically decide to close off certain but only as an unintended by-product; with avenues of thought. the Enlightenment, people began to con- So dogma, the antithesis of open inqui- sciously develop arrangements to reduce ry, is Pinker’s bête noire, embodied above violence and protect not only their rights all in religion, but those of at which he associ- least some others as ates with intoler- well. Here intelli- ance and supersti- gent design works. tion. There is no The circle of em- doubt that religion pathy can be de- has often contrib- liberately increased uted to evil, and by measures like as a nonbeliever liberal education, myself I have and the framers of trouble empathiz- the American Con- ing with those stitution were not who think they alone in seeing that can understand they had to—and the will of God. could—build insti- But we should tutions that would give the Devil his limit their own due: many anti- power. This is of war and human- signal importance. rights movements At its core, this have deep religious is about self-aware-

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 61 ness—an understanding of human nature conflict. Students of international politics that can allow us to rein in our inner de- know that efforts to gain mutual security mons and give our better angels the upper can be foiled by the failure of the state to hand. Self-control, so central to the hu- realize that others may see it as a threat, manizing trends Pinker documents, can and therefore to interpret their undesired be strengthened. If empathy is developed moves as evidence that they are unreason- partly through novels, parents can urge able and aggressive. Throughout the Cold their children to read them and school War, Soviet leaders could not see that their curricula can be developed appropriately. behavior played a large role in their encir- Perspective-taking can be encouraged by clement by enemies; Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign travel. Although we should not intellectual breakthrough was to grasp this. expect too much from these efforts (indeed Self-knowledge is important and difficult they may produce contempt and hostility) here (religious teachings about our all being and Pinker does not advocate extreme so- sinners can help), but it can also be danger- cial engineering, he does say that societies ous. Be too quick to believe that the Other function best when they are built on the is behaving badly because of what you have realization that we are all prone to violence done and the lead-up to wwii happens all and abuse. over again. Pinker also points to the role of understanding in overcoming the particularly ome are likely to see all this as the pernicious psychological bias that he calls S Whig theory of history decked out in the “Moralization Gap.” Individuals and social-science clothes. There is something collectivities usually want to think well to this, but Pinker is aware enough to argue of themselves. This trait eases our way that his “is a kind of Whig history that is through a difficult life but causes great supported by the facts.” Although he sees problems when conflict arises because we deep forces as responsible for much of our are quick to blame others. Pinker’s cover- progress, he also acknowledges the role of age of the research on the role of this bias contingency. He might have done more to in intergroup and international conflict discuss how these two fit together; could is a bit thin (something I notice because I plausible historical counterfactuals have have contributed to it), but the basic point brought us to a very different outcome: is clear and important. Although some- Even with the Enlightenment, might full- times those we interact with are indeed blown racism have continued in the United responsible for the problem, the immedi- States had Gandhi’s campaign of nonvio- ate assumption that this is the case, and lence not succeeded and World War II not the social and psychological inhibitions been fought partly in the name of racial against seeing how we may be offending equality? others and infringing upon their legiti- It is the attempt to link so many dif- mate interests, is a major cause of escalating ferent types of declines in violence to one

62 The National Interest Reviews & Essays I am not sure he would appreciate the association, but Pinker’s argument echoes the motto engraved in the cia’s lobby: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

another that gives pause. Some links clearly lence is at best a necessary evil rather than are present. Early struggles to broaden the a valued mode of conduct. But it is quite circle of those who were believed to have possible to imagine a world in which wars inalienable rights led eventually to the civil coexist with some measure of domestic rights movement, just as it, in turn, con- peace and humane behavior. tributed to the movements for women’s For Pinker, much of what was believed equality and gay rights. But there are prob- in the more violent eras “can be considered lems in applying progress in one area to not just monstrous, but in a very real sense, progress in another. Humanitarian advanc- stupid,” and es do not necessarily lead to more peaceful and understanding relations among states. As humans have honed the institutions of Nor does more self-control in one individ- knowledge and reason, and purged supersti- ual lead to more self-control across groups tions and inconsistencies from their systems of of individuals. To his credit, Pinker real- belief, certain conclusions were bound to fol- izes this is a problem, but his attempts to low, just as when one masters the laws of arith- overcome it through social psychology are metic certain sums and products are bound to less than entirely successful. Pinker explains follow. the decline of homicide and the decline of slavery quite differently, and the decline Only in societies cut off from the free flow in war, coming later than the other mark- of ideas can enormous moral errors con- ers of progress, may be even more distinct. tinue to flourish. He realizes that this view Indeed, the two chapters on this subject seems self-congratulatory but does not do not build upon his previous arguments seem to see that it holds true only if one nor do they provide a foundation for later accepts contemporary values. His claim ones. I do not wish to argue that interna- that previous beliefs “would not stand up tional politics is entirely a world apart, but to intellectual scrutiny as being consistent wars continued to rage while other kinds of with other values [the people in earlier violence declined. Perhaps what changed eras] claimed to hold, and they persisted the incentives for peace and war must be only because the narrower intellectual spot- found elsewhere. Similarly, the connection light of the day was not routinely shone on between the decline in intra and interstate them” strains credulity. It implies that if we wars is loose. International tensions often were transported to those times we could feed internal violence as outside countries argue our new contemporaries out of their support disputing factions. And civil wars benighted beliefs and practices (assuming can transmit violence to the international we were not killed first). Pinker summarizes level. I agree with Pinker that some of these the correlations between reasoning and ed- trends are of a piece with the decline of ucation on the one hand and nonviolence, domestic violence, especially in the smaller cooperation and endorsement of individual role of honor and the general view that vio- rights on the other, but methodological

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 63 constraints mean that only a few of these was not torture (and that the United States studies can make claims for causation, and had the legal opinions to prove this). I even those cannot escape the possibility agree, and would not argue that we are that the results simply show that smarter headed back to the Dark Ages. But this people are more likely to be socialized into sorry episode, which I think will be re- prevailing Enlightenment views. One has peated if there is another major attack on to wonder whether those who believed in America, does show that people can reason Fascism in the 1930s or endorsed the burn- themselves into cruelty. ing of witches in the seventeenth century So what does Pinker’s analysis tell us were less able to reason consistently and about the future? He refrains from specu- abstractly than we are. lation, noting the role of contingency and I am not sure he would appreciate the statistical distributions with “fat tails”—i.e., association, but Pinker’s argument echoes unexpected events with large consequences. the motto engraved in the cia’s lobby: But this sensible if cautious stance does “And ye shall know the truth and the truth not sit entirely well with his central argu- shall make you free.” These claims place ment. If knowledge, reason and the free too much of a burden on reasoning. After flow of ideas have brought violence down he moves on from the Civilizing Process, in the past, they should continue to do so Pinker largely leaves material factors be- in the future. It would seem highly likely, hind. Power and interests, costs and ben- perhaps even inevitable, that free societ- efits play little role. This, I think, is clearly ies would develop even further where they wrong for the decline of war and question- are established and spread—if at uncertain able throughout. He also downplays the pace—where dogma now reigns, with the ways in which violence can result from result that the world would be even better reasoning, just as threats and, when neces- in the coming generations. Once stated, this sary, the use of force is deployed to estab- seems too triumphalist if not reminiscent of lish and maintain open societies. When George W. Bush, but it is to be welcomed these are engaged in war, they are also ca- both as a vision and a benchmark against pable of killing large numbers of enemy ci- which Pinker’s argument can be judged by vilians, as the United States and the uk did our successors. in the bombings of Germany and Japan In the end, even if Pinker’s explanations when they calculated, correctly most his- do not entirely convince and his faith in torians now believe, that this would help reason is exaggerated, he has succeeded in bring victory. Torture also had a return documenting the enormous decline in all engagement in the wake of the terrorist sorts of violence and cruelty. This achieve- attacks of 9/11. Pinker could see progress ment of humankind deserves to be better in the fact that it was quite limited and known, and readers of this important book was justified not only by the pressing cir- will remember it and ponder its causes. It is cumstances but also by the claim that it a story worthy of seven hundred pages. n

64 The National Interest Reviews & Essays blogosphere and sensationalist media outlets Lest Ye Be Judged but also some local churches, state assemblies and even the halls of Congress. How do they By R. Scott Appleby justify the bigotry evident in proposals and policies that deny (or would deny) full civil rights to some of their fellow Americans? Philip Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword: Why By framing Islam as an inherently violent We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (New religion and portraying Muslims as closet York: HarperOne, 2011), 320 pp., $26.99. jihadists harboring sympathy for al-Qaeda and other jihadist networks. This canard is decade after the national trauma of reinforced by the claim that the Holy Koran ..9/11, a rude chorus swells in the is, in the final analysis, a terrorist manifesto. A ....homeland, calling for restrictions From an unlikely source comes a power- on American Muslims’ rights to free assem- ful and provocative riposte. The prolific bly and free speech. The controversy over scholar and public intellectual Philip Jen- the Islamic prayer center in Lower Manhat- kins is a Welsh Catholic turned Episcopa- tan—characterized as “the victory mosque” lian who has written insightfully on topics by Islamophobes, who labor under no abro- ranging from designer drugs, child por- gation of their First Amendment rights—is nography and serial homicide to, more re- a notable but hardly isolated effort to deny cently, global Christianity, internal church Muslims access to public space. Anti-sharia conflict and the revival of anti-Catholicism measures, already the law in three states and in the wake of the sexual-abuse crisis. In being considered by a dozen more, serve Laying Down the Sword, he has delivered as warnings to any Muslims who would a thoughtful and frequently penetrating dare advocate for legislation consistent with analysis of the Bible’s own bloodthirsty pas- Islamic norms. Such morality-based, re- sages—and how Christians have both en- ligiously inspired speech is, of course, as shrined and ignored them over the course of American as apple pie. But no matter: Mus- two millennia of church history. lims, whether natural-born or naturalized At issue are the “Conquest texts” found in citizens, are today’s “traitors” of choice for the Old Testament books of Exodus, Num- the new McCarthyites. bers, Deuteronomy, Joshua and 1 Samuel, The critics of Islam, whether secular con- in which the Lord God of Israel commands servatives, evangelical Christians or Zionist the utter and merciless destruction (herem) defenders of Israel, now inhabit not only the of the Canaanites, the Midianites, the Ama- lekites and the people of Jericho. Compared R. Scott Appleby is a professor of history and to these apparently genocidal passages, Jen- the director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for kins remarks, the Koranic verses (suras) that International Peace Studies at the University of seem to legitimate deadly violence come off Notre Dame. as relatively restrained. In his vengeful dis-

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 65 dain for wayward tribes and people, Yahweh Christian evangelist Franklin Graham put takes a backseat to no deity, not even Allah. it) that whereas the Bible only reports vio- “While many Qur’anic texts undoubted- lence that occurred in the distant past, the ly call for warfare or bloodshed, these are Koran “preaches violence” (my emphasis) hedged around with more restrictions than in the here and now. Jenkins dismisses both their biblical equivalents, with more oppor- claims as nonsense. He insists on using the tunities for the defeated to make peace and term “Old Testament,” rather than the po- survive,” he writes. “Furthermore, any of litically correct “Hebrew Bible,” as a way the defenses that can be offered for biblical of reminding Christians that the Conquest violence—for instance, that these passages texts are their sacred scriptures too; this part are unrepresentative of the overall message of the canon may be “old” and “Jewish,” of the text—apply equally to the Qur’an.” but the church, following the example of Laying Down the Sword is not designed to Jesus himself, incorporated the Law and the please everyone, and it will infuriate many. Prophets and the Wisdom texts fully into its The Islamophobes will recoil at Jenkins’s own identity and mission. In doing so, the repeated assertion that when it comes to early Christian bishops overcame the popu- violent scriptures, the differences between larity of contrarians such as the eventually Islam and Christianity are minimal: “If excommunicated Marcion, who simply jet- Christians or Jews needed biblical texts to tisoned the Old Testament when he found justify deeds of terrorism or ethnic slaugh- it impossible to reconcile the genocidal ten- ter, their main problem would be an embar- dencies of Yahweh with the compassionate rassment of riches,” he notes wryly. Jenkins and forgiving God revealed by the Jesus of even provides a table categorizing “violent the New Testament. and disturbing scriptures” and finds that the More to Jenkins’s point, the troubling Bible abounds with “extreme” texts—those passages of the Torah did not become dead that call for the annihilation of the enemy letters once the pre-Christian eye-for-an- or direct violence against particular races eye, tooth-for-a-tooth era had passed. In- and ethnic groups. By contrast, “the Qur’an stead, they proved handy age after age: for has nothing strictly comparable.” Unlike Christian theologians and heresy hunters the Bible, he reports, “no Qur’anic passage (Augustine, Calvin, Torquemada), conquer- teaches that enemies in warfare should be ors and colonizers (Oliver Cromwell, Cot- exterminated.” Nor does the Koran “teach ton Mather, Theodore Roosevelt), racialists principles of war without mercy, or propose and eugenicists (Jonathan Bayley, John W. granting no quarter.” Haley), and genocidaires (present-day Rwan- Even more provocative is Jenkins’s ex- dan pastors). Nor was the political utility pressed doubt that Islam surpasses Chris- of the Conquest texts lost on subsequent tianity in incidents of scripture-inspired Jewish leaders, Jenkins avers, not least the violence. Those who despise Islam will not modern Zionists, up to and including the stand still for such heresy, responding (as current prime minister of Israel and the reli-

66 The National Interest Reviews & Essays gious nationalists and irredentists who keep him in power. If contemporary Muslim extremists retrieve violence-justifying suras and interpret them as timeless and timely injunctions to crush the presumed enemies of the faith, they are only upholding a long- standing Abrahamic family tradition. Quite reasonably, Jenkins lays the blame for religious violence on its perpetrators alone. Scriptures do not justify terrorism; terrorists do.

et Jenkins is concerned with more than Y poking self-righteous Christians in the eye or defending Muslims; he wants to understand the ways in which both Christi- tion, Christians have largely ceded to the anity and Islam and, by extension, other state the responsibility for large-scale killing religious traditions have coped with their on behalf of God. But this thinly veiled respective “problematic” sacred texts. Re- sacralization of state violence, accompanied plete with passages congenial to slave trad- by the relevant hymns and Bible passages, ers, absolute monarchs, ethnic chauvin- faces withering criticism from religious and ists, self-styled holy warriors and patriarchs secular humanists, whose putative creed is of all stripes, these foundational scriptures summarized elegantly in the lyrics of the have become more and more embarrassing folk singer John Prine: “Now Jesus don’t to faith communities. After all, they have like killing / no matter what the reason’s increasingly found it necessary (or at least for / and your flag decal won’t get you into honorable) to adapt the texts’ teachings and heaven anymore.” With all this Jesus talk, practices to modern, “enlightened” sensi- and with Jesus portrayed as the original bilities. Conforming to the human-rights nonviolent champion of “universal human regime which now prevails across much rights,” what’s a would-be Bible-thumping, of the world, at least in theory, and which empire-building Christian politician to do? was constructed over several generations It would fill several volumes to survey the by secular and religious thinkers alike, has strategies of accommodation, resistance and not been a straightforward process for reli- adaptation to secular-religious humanism gions, even for the Jews and Christians who employed by the Christian churches alone, recognize this modern tradition as largely so Jenkins can be forgiven for confining their own. The age-old temptation to co- himself to a handful of tactics for dealing ercion and violence is particularly hard to with the Bible’s dark side, which he evalu- resist. Ever since the Protestant Reforma- ates on the basis of how directly and frankly

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 67 each tactic confronts the most disturbing cluded in the lectionary or catechesis. Or, passages and books. Thus the rejection- when they are, the offending passages are ists (my term) are scorned for taking the construed as if they were allegories or met- easy way out. These Enlightenment and aphors—a spiritualizing technique that ren- post-Enlightenment figures, outraged by ders the brutally vanquished enemies of what they consider the ethical bankruptcy God as symbols of sins that were overcome of some or all of the Bible, cope by jettison- on the journey to the Promised Land. (“No ing the parts they do not like. For the radi- actual Canaanites were harmed in the mak- cal American revolutionary Thomas Paine ing of this scripture.”) and the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, Jenkins, though, introduces his own con- that means the story of Moses, Yahweh, and tradictions. On the one hand, he urges his the chastened but triumphant Israel. (Jen- Christian readers to accept and acknowl- kins quotes Buber: “Nothing can make me edge the violent scriptures “and to learn believe in a God who punishes Saul because to live with them.” And he treats evasive he has not murdered his enemy.”) For the maneuvers as if they are borderline patho- deists Matthew Tindal and John Toland, logical. (The pseudoscientific sidebar that everything in the Bible that does not con- “explains” this behavior by reference to form to reason and rational morality must “cognitive dissonance” and the brain’s dor- go. For creative rewriters such as Thomas solateral prefrontal cortex, or “Delete key,” Jefferson, “coping” means starting with the is a bit much.) “A bloodless Bible offers New Testament and excising all references cheap Grace,” he insists. And he seems to to supernaturalism and divine interven- agree with St. Augustine that the Bible must tion. For the new atheists of our own day be read whole, not selectively. (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, On the other hand, what Jenkins seems to Sam Harris and the like), “dealing with the admire in Augustine is precisely the fourth- Bible” means dismantling the God business century bishop’s skill in getting around the entirely (and then elevating secular human- stumbling blocks by avoiding their literal ism to the vacated perch in the heavens). meaning, ignoring their singular impact and Jenkins notes, correctly, that most of the burying them in layers of interpretation. solutions proposed by the rejectionists put Sounds pretty bloodless to me. In place of them outside the orbit of the Christian letting the troublesome texts stand on their tradition. The vast majority of Christians, own, Jenkins advocates “understanding why while accepting secular assumptions of sci- the various books were written, and appreci- ence and technology, continue to practice ating the core message that each is trying to their faith vitally and vividly—all the while teach.” This seems a coping strategy of the ignoring the books of blood held in their highest order, not far removed from the col- churchgoing hands. lective amnesia he castigates elsewhere. But it is easy to learn such forgetting And what is wrong, after all, with cop- when the unpalatable texts are seldom in- ing? The vicious and genocidal texts are

68 The National Interest Reviews & Essays Judaism and Christianity have made their respective Bibles into virtual rubber bands, the interpretive options so multiple and elastic that almost any proximity to the text is permissible.

a scandal, and fidelity to “tradition” has and the Prophets in Jesus the Messiah,” or always carried with it both connotations of “the unconditional love and forgiveness God the Latin root tradere—to bequeath (“hand offers to all people in Jesus.” down”) and to betray (“hand over”). Such distinctions have real-world consequences in the way various believers enact re Christians and Jews really so differ- what they understand their scriptures to A ent? Jenkins does not seem to think enjoin and, lest we forget, roughly one- so—and this is a central weakness in his third of the world’s population claims to biblical road map. For him, be “governed,” spiritually at least, by the one Jewish Prophet his followers hold to If we ask what Deuteronomy and Joshua are be the Son of God. Are we really to believe “really” about, their core theme is neither geno- that the branching off of one set of adher- cide nor warfare. Rather, the books represent ents away from Judaism, with its priority the clearest declarations of two essential ideas placed squarely on the Mosaic Law and vast in the Bible and in the Judeo-Christian world- commentaries, to Christianity, with its em- view—namely, monotheism itself, and election phasis on divine grace and spirit-inspired or chosenness. acts, did not introduce a fundamentally new religious paradigm, including a new While this is certainly a reasonable assertion, way of reading the sacred texts? Each of I am unconvinced. Why these ideas and not these religious traditions has developed its others which are also, arguably, central to own interpretive strategies, the instincts the Christian worldview? Part of the prob- and core values of which are embedded in, lem Jenkins has set for himself is encom- and have emerged from, its own distinctive passing both Christianity and Judaism with- experiences, memories, practices and au- in the same argument without sufficiently thoritative extrascriptural teachings. (Take a adjusting for the rather substantial differ- simple example: for Christians, Jesus is the ences between the two religions, not least Passover lamb first prefigured in the book the status and meaning of Jesus Christ. Thus of Exodus, and he is slain for the salvation Jenkins’s hermeneutic key seems to be the of all humankind, or at least all who be- “prophetic faith,” which means the teachings lieve in him—not only for those who keep of Amos, Isaiah, Micah and other prophets the Jewish law.) For Christians, or at least of the Old Testament, period. This approach for the subset who would accept Jenkins’s might work well for Jews, and certainly methods of biblical interpretation in the Christians recognize, honor and frequently first place, the key to interpreting the Old invoke the Prophets. It is less clear, however, Testament (as well as the New) is (once that Christians would choose “monothe- again) a person—the figure who embodies ism . . . and election or chosenness” as the the fulfillment of the Old Testament Law core themes of God’s revelation in the Bible and the Prophets. This, of course, is Jesus rather than, say, “the fulfillment of the Law of Nazareth, the Messiah anticipated by

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 69 the very Prophets to whom Jenkins gives exactly can we say that a religion or a scrip- an odd priority. At least from a Christian tural tradition directly caused an act of standpoint, this privileging of the lesser over crime or terrorism?” the greater is odd, a bit like focusing on the Ay, there’s the rub. Note, however, that “a messenger who announces the arrival of the religion” and “a scriptural tradition” are con- king rather than on the king himself. flated in this formulation of the problem of The interesting question is therefore: Has “religious violence.” Insufficient attention is the centrality of Jesus, “the Prince of Peace,” given to the distinctions between the way a made a difference in the level of religiously sacred text is read, who does the reading and inspired violence performed by Bible-be- how that reading is embedded in the life of lieving Christians, regardless of their specif- an actual historical community. ic historical contexts, or even within those Jenkins rightly emphasizes the difference contexts? between what the scriptures (whether the Old Testament, the New Testament or the ere is what Jenkins really cares about: Koran) themselves “say” on the one hand H the relationship between scripture and particular acts of violence on the other: and behavior, especially in the urgent matters of violence and warfare. “We talk about However bloody texts may be, however explicit, ‘religious violence,’” he laments, “but when their mere existence will not lead to actual violence unless and until particular circumstances arise. At that point, the texts can rise once again to the surface, to inspire and sacralize violence, to demonize opponents, and even to exalt the conflict to the level of cosmic war. But without those circumstances, without those particular conditions in state and society, the violence will not occur.

This statement is gratifying and surely accurate, but it is incomplete. As Jenkins well knows, the role, function and status of sacred scriptures varies within any particular religion, and from religion to religion, as does the degree of distance which each religious community has deemed permissible between “fidelity to the text” (whether it be actual or alleged fidelity) and the actual behavior (i.e., the operative beliefs and resulting practices) of the community, movement or individual

70 The National Interest Reviews & Essays in question. Over millennia, Judaism and even allow for the idea of a filtering process Christianity have made their respective Bibles through Muhammad’s seventh-century-ce into virtual rubber bands, the interpretive Arabian sensibilities. The closest analogue options so multiple and elastic as to stretch among the varieties of Christianity is “ple- the range of possibilities such that almost any nary verbal inspiration,” the theory favored proximity to the text is permissible. by fundamentalists and most evangelicals, Is this also to be said of Islam? Better put: according to which God inspired the vari- Is the range of Koranic interpretive strate- ous authors of the Bible even in their choice gies that have developed over centuries, of words. However, this is not quite the especially in the Golden Age of Islamic same as the Islamic notion of the Koran’s philosophy and learning from the mid- “eternity.” Moreover, Christians disagree eight h to thirteenth centuries, currently among themselves regarding theories of bib- available to the global Muslim community? lical inspiration, and Jenkins adopts an ap- Jenkins makes short work of Islamic terror- proach that contextualizes and “relativizes” ist groups such as al-Qaeda, demonstrating certain books and passages in a way most that they are profound distortions of what Muslims would never think of applying to the vast majority of Muslims recognize as the suras of the Holy Koran. traditional or mainstream Islam. And who Catholics and most Protestants will rec- would doubt this judgment? Yet it is worth ognize Jenkins’s method as a version of his- noting that much the same is said even of torical criticism that emphasizes the specific time-tested (if still controversial) scriptural times and “horizons of understanding” in methods such as those employed by the which the various Books, Psalms, Gospels mystically inclined Sufi brotherhoods. To and Epistles were compiled and redacted the interested and sympathetic outsider, the (edited according to theological purposes). Koranic fundamentalists currently seem to Yet—notwithstanding Jenkins’s assurances have the upper hand. that “some Islamic scholars historicize the One would therefore assume that Mus- texts, making them relevant to a particular lims, at least, would receive Laying Down period in the time of Muhammad, but not the Sword with gratitude. But perhaps not. applicable to later times”—only a tiny mi- Part of Jenkins’s strategy in comparing the nority of contemporary Muslims, most of Bible and the Koran is to equate, or come them scholars appointed to Western univer- close to equating, how the two texts func- sities or think tanks, will accept the notion tion in their respective religious traditions. that earthly influences shaped the Koran In this effort, though, he follows a decid- or that the interpretive methods currently edly Christian template. For Muslims, the being applied to the Bible are even remotely Koran is just what the word means in Ara- appropriate for the Koran. Let us call this bic—the “recitation” of the angel Gabriel the challenge of Koranic exceptionalism. to the Prophet Muhammad. It is the lit- Jenkins acknowledges this problem, but eral word of Allah. Most Muslims do not it may be a bigger obstacle than he re-

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 71 The road to peace among Muslims, and between Islam and other religious and secular traditions, runs through the Koran.

alizes. I write this essay from Mindanao, tual laws) derived not only from the Koran the southernmost chain of islands of the but also from the Hadith, a compilation of Philippines, where Christians and Muslims the Prophet Muhammad’s own teachings encounter one another amid the second- and practices. But the Koran has a different longest-running conflict in history, dat- level of authority within the (geographi- ing back to the arrival of the Spanish con- cally and culturally diverse and plural) Is- quistadors in 1521. The latest atrocity of lamic community today than does the Bible the al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group Abu within the (also breathtakingly diverse) Sayyaf was the beheading of three Filipino Christian community. If the admittedly marines on the island of Sulu. The govern- complicated figure “Jesus Christ” is the her- ment of the Republic of the Philippines meneutic key for Christians, and “the Law based in Manila, some five hundred miles and the Prophets” the key for Jews, it is away, has just reopened negotiations with not yet obvious to (most) Jews and (most) the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (milf), Christians what (most) Muslims consider a much-larger and more politically engaged the hermeneutic key for reading the Koran movement with its own violent wing. My as a guide to behavior. Nor is it obvious that hosts here in Zamboanga are the Catholic the majority of Muslims would even accept archdiocese and Silsilah, an organization or endorse the concept of an “interpretive dedicated to Muslim-Christian dialogue strategy” for reading the Koran (notwith- and nonviolent peace building. Each group standing the facts that such strategies are of Muslims involved in these three very being deployed constantly in the Muslim different clusters—Abu Sayyaf, the milf world and that Muslims obviously recognize and Silsilah—claim strict fidelity to the the existence of multiple and wildly varying literal word of God, which is the “whole” of constructions of Islam itself). the Holy Koran, without remainder. They Whether or not faithful Muslims formally draw radically different applications from acknowledge the reality of options, they re- it, however—a fact that infuriates the “fun- main confronted by the need to determine damentalists” among them. (In this regard, and observe guidelines for their behavior in they have much in common with the Jew- a globalizing, conflict-ridden world that is ish and Christian communities.) both secular and religious. In such a milieu they cannot long ignore the internal plural- he road to peace among Muslims, and ism of Islam itself—the competing voices T between Islam and other religious and and subtraditions of interpretation that are secular traditions, runs through the Koran. increasingly available to more and more Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam is cer- Muslims, as are the multiple “renegade,” tainly more (and less) than its holy book; do-it-yourself Islams placed on offer by In- the much-discussed (and much-reviled, ternet jihadists and would-be jurists like the among Islamophobes) sharia is a body of re- engineer Osama bin Laden and the medical ligio-legal principles (rather than a set of ac- doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri. At its core, this

72 The National Interest Reviews & Essays matter of defining rise of Koranic “au- orthodoxy (right be- thorities” of dubious lief) and orthopraxis lineage and training, (right action) is a the relative coher- perennial task for all ence of the main- the global religions, stream religion, and but it is being hotly the checks and bal- contested today ances it has evolved within the ummah over generations for (worldwide Islamic bringing the freelanc- community), and ers into the fold (or the competing alter- ejecting them), looks natives are not easy increasingly attrac- to map or rank according to legitimacy (es- tive. This authoritative and sometimes au- pecially in the majority-Sunni world, where thoritarian version of Islam remains the re- authority structures are not as far-reaching ligion of most American Muslims, as it is of as they are for Christians, who have bishops their global counterparts. Other Americans, and a pope to obey or disobey). if they are savvy, will want them to con- Jenkins argues forcefully that sacred tinue their fidelity to, and gradual reform of, scriptures are dependent variables, so to this Islam. They will hesitate before making speak, in the etiology of violence and war- Muslims uncomfortable in their own conser- fare. For social-justice revolutionaries (as in vative, orthodox, law-abiding skin. the mostly peaceful revolutions that swept Laying Down the Sword offers a timely across Eastern Europe in the wake of the warning in precisely this direction. Con- Cold War) and violent extremists alike, the cerning the culpability of the Koran for vio- utility of certain texts waxes and wanes ac- lent extremism, it proffers a much-needed cording to the situation. This assessment is exoneration. Concerning the relationship accurate as far as it goes. But Jenkins also between sacred texts, religion and violence, leaves dangling the impression that reli- it raises the right questions and sketches the gions themselves behave solely according to contours of deeper ones. Central to these what their specific social-political-cultural achievements is Philip Jenkins’s absorbing contexts allow—that is, according to “what discussion of the formidable obstacles found in the passage applies to me, to us.” Is it within Jewish and Christian scriptures and possible, however, that religions possess the histories to the nonviolent expression of bib- resources to resist their environments and to lical faith. That story, in all of its harrowing retrieve the scriptural passages that justify, twists and turns over the centuries, should and thus empower them in so doing? remind his fellow Christians to attend to the History offers hope. In light of the explod- beams in their own eyes before scorning the ing options within the Dar al-Islam and the motes in the eyes of American Muslims. n

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 73 waters a sense of anguished fulfillment. In such Somewhere, spots one can understand that if the Greeks beyond the Sea knew despair, they always did so through beauty. . . . Our time, on the other hand, has fed its despair on ugliness and convulsions. This By Benny Morris is why Europe would be vile, if suffering could ever be so. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (New York: He identified the sea with Greece, a place Oxford University Press, 2011), 816 pp., that revered moderation. “It never carried $34.95. anything to extremes, neither the sacred nor reason, because it negated nothing. . . . bal- n The Rebel, his treatise against totali- ancing shadow with light. Our Europe, on tarianism, particularly of the Left, and the other hand, off in the pursuit of totality, I in some of his earlier essays, Albert is the child of disproportion.” Camus hailed the Mediterranean, which Abulafia’s sweeping survey of the “sea be- for him embodied life, light, beauty (quite tween the lands” and its shoreline peoples— probably sex) and a sense of limits. He con- from the Stone Age through the present trasted what Cambridge don David Abula- era of global tourism—tells us a different fia calls “the Great Sea”—actually a Hebrew story. It is a tale in large part characterized designation (hayam hagadol)—with the by hubris, excess and mass murder. Take the darkness of northern Europe’s cities and for- Punic Wars of the third and second centu- ests, seedbeds as they were of the twentieth ries bc, the three bouts of combat between century’s encompassing murderous ideolo- the Phoenician colonies (with their center gies, Bolshevism and Nazism. in Carthage) and Rome for command of “The Mediterranean sun has something the central and western Mediterranean. It tragic about it,” Camus wrote in “Helen’s was a war to the finish, ending in the an- Exile” (1948): nihilation of Carthage and the sowing of its ruins with salt, its inhabitants put to quite different from the tragedy of [northern] the sword or consigned to slavery. Or take fogs. Certain evenings at the base of the seaside the campaigns of the Almohads, sectarians mountains, night falls over the flawless curve who ruled the western Mediterranean lands of a little bay, and there rises from the silent (Spain, Morocco) during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with an iron fist, dis- Benny Morris is a professor of history in the pensing death and terror in the name of a Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion pristine Islam. Or take some of the crusad- University of the Negev. He is the author of One ers, who slaughtered Muslims (and Jews) in State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine vast numbers in their efforts to reclaim and Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009). purify the Holy Land.

74 The National Interest Reviews & Essays Abulafia’s sweeping survey of the “sea between the lands” and its shoreline peoples tells us a story in large part characterized by hubris, excess and mass murder.

Abulafia doesn’t really tackle the contem- (1949) and Peregrine Horden and Nicho- porary resurgence, and its implications, of las Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study Salafist Islam around the Mediterranean of Mediterranean History (2000). Horden basin, from the Strait of Gibraltar through and Purcell dealt mainly with communi- Bosnia and Alexandria, which may yet her- ties and peoples living along the littoral, ald a new Mediterranean age (in The Great what happened on land, not with what Sea he postulates five eras between 22,000 transpired on the sea’s surface. Braudel, for bc and ad 2010, a periodization that is not his part, argued that geography, rather than completely persuasive). But he does refer men’s actions, was the real determinant of to a “new Ottomanism” when considering development and change in and around the Gaza flotilla incident of May 2010 and the vast water’s edges. “Braudel showed its aftermath. (He could well have added what almost amounted to contempt for Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdo- political history,” writes Abulafia. He could gan’s recent repeated threats to send Turkish have added military history as well. Sea and warships into the eastern Mediterranean to wind currents, climate and landscapes ruled assert the “rule of law.”) the tales of men. Abulafia prefers to stress Excess seems to be part of the human “the human hand” as “more important in condition, and while paragons of excess— moulding the history of the Mediterranean mass murderers, in short—may have flour- than Braudel was ever prepared to admit.” ished at certain times in certain places, there Abulafia is profusely informative about are probably few of the earth’s regions that commercial and cultural connections behave demonstrated complete immunity. tween the various communities that lived in the surrounding areas (Phoenician fertiliza- hat we have in The Great Sea is a tion of Italy, the gifts of the Sea Peoples to W history that emphasizes politics and the Levant) and allows for the importance warfare: these are the primary and most of geography in periodically determining significant arenas of human agency—and the foci of human activity, the sites em- the major vehicles of change. In fact, in his pires and peoples covet, attack or aban- “Introduction,” Abulafia, a man of noble don (Gibraltar dominating the sea’s western Sephardic Jewish lineage (and in his book throughway, Corfu controlling passage up one repeatedly encounters the Jewish di- the Adriatic). mension, almost invariably Sephardic, in But throughout, Abulafia casts an im- this or that period and land—and the oc- partial, not to say jaundiced, eye on the casional precursing Abulafia to boot), sets successive struggles for dominance in the out the parameters that distinguish his opus various Mediterranean theaters at differ- from previous major works of Mediter- ent times. Occasionally, he appears bent ranean historiography, most notably Fer- on provocation, and (inevitably) distortion nand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the is the result. Take Abulafia’s view of Persia Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II versus Greece in the fifth century bc, the

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 75 struggle, as traditionally taught in schools, forced the Ionians to give him ships and that helped forge who we Westerners are, men with which to subdue other Greek cit- where civilization battled and overcame ies and islands. In 509 bc, the Persians con- invading barbarism. “Whether the Greeks quered Lemnos and massacred many of its were really fighting for liberty against Per- inhabitants. Revolt ensued, and mainland sian tyranny is questionable,” he writes. Greek poleis came to the aid of the Ionians. Indeed, the Persians generally left alone cit- According to Abulafia, as the Ionian revolt ies that offered up the symbolic tribute “of “petered out, the Persians were surprisingly earth and water,” he tells us. Still, a good considerate, accepting democratic govern- case can be made that submission to an ments and attempting to remove a source Asiatic overlord meant loss of sovereignty of tension between cities by demanding and that political freedom was what was re- that they make trade agreements with one ally at issue. another.” But then, with the accession of

It all began when the Ionian Greek cities Xerxes to the throne in 486, Persian policy along Asia Minor’s Aegean coast and the “shifted . . . from tough accommodation Hellespont failed to help the Persian king with dissidents to vigorous suppression of Cyrus against the Lydians in the mid-sixth Persia’s foes.” Xerxes prepared huge armies century. The Persian ruler, after victory, and fleets to invade mainland Greece and

76 The National Interest Reviews & Essays then struck. He was briefly stalled by the had just defeated. Abulafia devotes a long Spartan three hundred at Thermopylae (the paragraph to describing the tos-and-fros of “hot gates”) and then was thoroughly de- the squadrons at Salamis—but not a word feated at sea at Salamis (480) and Mycale about Marathon, surely a crucial battle in (479) and on land at Plataea (479). European history and one which even in- Such is Abulafia’s presentation. But it serted itself into humankind’s vocabulary. is strangely deficient and incomplete. To crush Greece wasn’t the whim of a particu- nd then there is the question of clashes lar Persian emperor; it was consistent long- A of civilizations, another key histori- term imperial policy. From around 500, cal meme that Abulafia’s narrative seems to if not earlier, the Persians intended to ex- skirt. He certainly expends a great many tend their rule deep into Europe, including pages on tracing Muslim-Christian conflict over Greece. Facilitation of this was prob- and contact in the Mediterranean from the ably the main aim of their abortive expedi- seventh through the twentieth centuries. tion against the island of Naxos, midway And one is struck not merely by the quick in the Aegean. No wonder, then, that the succession of combat and commercial and Ionian rebels of 499–493 felt able to ask for, cultural intercourse but by the, on occa- and receive, help from the mainland. True, sion, simultaneous occurrence of these in- then Persian leader Darius subsequently teractions. While crusaders are out to beat treated the beaten rebels with (relative) kid back the Muslims and reclaim Palestine gloves—he needed their maritime support for Christendom, Christians and Muslims for the invasion of Greece—and demanded nearby are buying and selling and mak- of the mainland city-states relatively cheap ing cross-civilizational profits. Throughout, tokens of submission. But when these were Muslim warlords make pacts with Christian not forthcoming, the Persian army crossed warlords as their cousins are busy killing the Aegean and attacked Euboea and then, each other. in 490, landed in Attica, north of Ath- Take Francis I, king of France (1494– ens. There, at Marathon, a small, mainly 1547), at loggerheads with Charles V, the Athenian force roundly defeated the Per- Holy Roman Emperor (1500–1558), who sians, putting an end to the first invasion of was busy fighting the Turks. Francis goaded the mainland. Astonishingly, Abulafia fails the beys in Tunis to send corsairs against the even to mention the campaign and the sur- Kingdom of Naples and supplied the Mus- rounding circumstances, jumping straight lims with cannons to reduce the Spanish from the Ionian revolt to the (second and fort in Algiers. In 1543, a French ambas- larger) Xerxian invasion of 480, and then sador “accompanied [the Muslim] Hayret- moving on to detailed descriptions of post- tin’s fleet as it savaged the coasts of southern 479 Sparta and Athens as effectively non- Italy, carrying off the daughter of the gover- democratic imperial polities, as if to assert nor of Reggio.” The king even allowed the a moral equivalence with the empire they Turks to use Toulon for a winter bivouac;

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 77 with thirty thousand Turks dispersed in inhabited the Mediterranean littoral) than the town, the cathedral “was [temporarily] to the Armenians (most lived, and died, transformed into a mosque.” Meanwhile, in the interior of Asia Minor). And the the Turks made expeditions into the coun- Greeks—the descendants of the second- tryside to lay hold of young peasants to sell and first-millennium-bc Ionians and Black off as slaves. Sea settlers—also served between 1915 and Still, Christian and Muslim rulers con- 1923 as fodder for a harrowing and today tinuously fought, with the Mediterranean largely forgotten tale. serving as a major battlefield. Abulafia The Greeks had been fighting the Turks rightly pinpoints as crucial the late six- on and off for years. The Turks wanted the teenth-century engagements at Malta and Greeks out of Asia Minor (and, if possible, Lepanto in which the Ottoman Empire also out of the Aegean). The outbreak of was decisively contained in its expansion World War I interrupted the low-key 1914 westward. But when it comes to other epi- Turkish campaign to achieve that goal, sodes, Abulafia often pooh-poohs claims but it was renewed a year later. Greece that Muslim-Christian clashes were driven then joined the Allies and declared war by religious motives. on the Ottoman Empire in July 1917. By He may have it right when he asserts, 1919, with the Turks out for the count, quoting the historian Frank Lambert, the Greek army occupied the port city of that the American campaign against the Smyrna and part of the Ionian coastline North African Barbary pirates in the early and then pushed inland, reaching the out- nineteenth century was “primarily about skirts of Ankara. Economically and militar- trade, not theology.” But clearly theology, ily overstretched, the Greeks proved un- or straightforward religious-national ha- able to defeat the new nationalist Turkish treds, trumped commercial interests a cen- army or to retain the lands they had oc- tury later when Turks slaughtered Arme- cupied, and they were eventually driven nians during World War I and subsequently back. Then came revenge. The Turks first killed hundreds of thousands of Greeks. destroyed the Greek communities along No doubt, individual covetousness on the the Black Sea (Samsun, Ordu, Bafra) and part of Turkish neighbors played a part, then, in September 1922, reached the Io- and Turkish leaders were interested, for na- nian coast, with the Greek army and many tionalist reasons, in dispossessing and then Greek civilians from the interior retreating replacing the Greek and Armenian middle helter-skelter before their advance. The classes with a new Turkish one. But the tes- Greek troops boarded ships and departed timonies of Western, particularly German, for Piraeus. The Turks entered Smyrna, by witnesses at the time all point to religious then the chief Greek city, and torched the antagonism as a key motivating factor. Christian quarters. Thousands were killed Abulafia, reasonably, devotes far more (the presence of Allied warships proba- space to the Turkish-Greek episodes (they bly prevented a wider massacre). Within

78 The National Interest Reviews & Essays days, hundreds of thousands of civilians chief, Mark Bristol, and more, is justified. were evacuated to Greece—though tens of But the overall story, as illuminated by the thousands were slaughtered (Abulafia says contemporary documentation, is somewhat “something like 100,000”) and a similar different. While understandably reluctant or perhaps larger number were deported to go to war (again) with Turkey, the Allied by the Turks inland, never to be heard naval teams performed in the Smyrna crisis from again. (During World War I and its with courage and humanity, orchestrat- aftermath, the Turks managed to perform ing the withdrawal to safety of more than a linguistic sleight of hand: “deportation” a quarter of a million Ionians, mostly on became synonymous with annihilation, Greek ships, in one of the great maritime something the Nazis later replicated.) The evacuations in history. three-thousand-year-old Greek communities along the coast of Asia Minor and the nd—I can’t restrain myself—one last Black Sea were thus erased, never to be res- A point about Abulafia’s book in con- urrected. Today, only a small community nection with the battle of cultures—and of Greeks in Istanbul remains. religions. One of its principal theaters in Abulafia blames the United States, Brit- the twentieth century has been Palestine, ain and France for Smyrna, saving only where the Jews, seen by themselves and by “twenty thousand” by placing them aboard their Arab neighbors as representatives and Allied ships. He charges the Allied naval embodiments of the West, have repeat- commanders—and, by extension, their edly clashed with the country’s Arabs and governments—with “callousness.” And to the surrounding Arab world. The conflict be sure, everything bad he says about the is both political—over a patch of terri- American high commissioner and naval tory—and over values. Abulafia does not

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 79 What we have in The Great Sea is a history that emphasizes politics and warfare: these are the primary and most significant arenas of human agency—and the major vehicles of change.

put the Palestine conflict in these terms, or overland. . . . The United Nations had des- or, indeed, in any others, and devotes to ignated Jaffa as an exclave of the proposed Arab it only a small amount of space, mostly state that would coexist with a Jewish state in by zooming in on the history of the sea- Palestine. Following bombardment by Jew- side Arab town of Jaffa, on the site of a ish forces in late April, the population of Jaffa first-millennium-bc Philistine city, and the dwindled. emergence of its Jewish neighbor, Tel Aviv, founded in 1909. Arab attacks on Jews by No mention is made of the fact that the the late 1930s had turned Jaffa into an al- Palestinian leadership in 1947 rejected the most exclusively Arab place, but in April– partition resolution and launched, albeit in- May 1948 it was conquered by Jewish mi- efficiently, a war to prevent its implementa- litiamen and almost all of its population tion; no mention of the fact that from No- fled to Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. vember 30, 1947, the day after un General The town was then co-opted by its larger Assembly Resolution 181 (partition) was Jewish neighbor, creating one municipal passed, Jaffa’s militiamen daily assailed Tel area designated “Tel Aviv-Jaffa.” While tens Aviv with sniper and, occasionally, mortar of thousands of Arabs inhabit Jaffa today, fire and that the Jews finally attacked and Arab Jaffa no longer exists. conquered Jaffa after suffering these depre- Abulafia’s cool, evenhanded treatment dations for five months. of this microcosmic history leads to seri- Abulafia writes well and offers up a com- ous elisions that, to my mind, amount to prehensive, fair-minded history. For those distortion. He writes of the second bout who can plow through 650 pages of histori- of anti-Jewish rioting by the Arabs: “Out- ography, this is a good read. And, occasion- breaks of violence between Jews and Arabs ally, the prose is captivating. Abulafia has a soured relations from 1921 onwards.” And good eye for quotes. Take Pharaoh Merne- of the 1936–39 Arab revolt against the Brit- ptah’s (thirteenth-century-bc) inscription at ish government and its Zionist wards, he Karnak relating to his conquest and pacifi- writes: “The port of Jaffa serviced Tel Aviv cation of Canaan: until the outbreak of a new and even more serious round of violence in 1936.” Simi- Men can walk the roads at any pace without larly, his succinct reference to the 1948 war fear. The fortresses stand open and the wells also fails to attribute agency to any side— are accessible to all travellers. The walls and violence simply breaks out, no one starts it, the battlements sleep peacefully in the sun- no one is to blame. shine till their guards wake up. The police As to Jaffa during the 1948 war, no con- lie stretched out asleep. The desert frontier- text is provided. Abulafia tells us, simply: guards are among the meadows where they like to be. Over a number of weeks in spring 1948, . . . tens of thousands of Jaffan Arabs fled by ship Would that this were so today. n

80 The National Interest Reviews & Essays has sunk into the streams of world events for all A House That 1 Bismarck Built eternity. Travel safely. It should not be surprising that Bismarck would have evoked such conflicting emo- By Jacob Heilbrunn tions. From the outset of his career, he was a figure of contradictions as gargantuan Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (New as his appetite: a conservative who intro- York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 592 duced universal suffrage; an East Elbian pp., $34.95. landholder who helped launch an industrial revolution; a diplomat who never served in n August 4, 1898, the German the military but strode around in a yellow Jewish theater critic Alfred Kerr cuirassier uniform; an empire builder who O wrote a dispatch about the death forswore further imperial projects; a foe of of Otto von Bismarck. Ever since the impet- socialism who introduced the social-welfare uous young Kaiser Wilhelm II had abruptly state; and a crybaby who unsentimentally dismissed Bismarck in March 1890—an destroyed the career of anyone who threat- episode famously depicted by Punch maga- ened to cross him. He ended up a grumpy zine as “dropping the pilot”—the aggrieved old man, but it was Bismarck’s drive and squire had immured himself at Friedrich- magnetism, more than anything else, which sruh, his Pomeranian country estate near allowed him—a chancellor who had no real Hamburg. Now Kerr, who three decades basis of power other than his hold on King later would flee Nazi Germany for England, William—to reshape the destiny of Prussia expressed the sense of loss and unease per- and Europe. vading the German empire Bismarck had At the start of the nineteenth century, the forged under Prussian leadership: notion that Prussia would emerge as a great power in Europe would have seemed quite On Sunday morning you knew that he was fanciful. Where France had progressively dead. A newspaper hangs on the wall, you united its provinces since the Middle Ages, take it down and want to turn the first page Germany had followed the opposite path. in an unconcerned manner and read the news The House of Hohenzollern launched its of his departure. A shiver and tremor possess first real bid for power under Frederick the you—even if you don’t want them to. In this Great, who helped trigger the Seven Years’ second you experience, even if a sense of hatred War in 1756 after snatching Silesia from against him was the basic impulse, how deeply Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa over a you resentfully loved him. A piece of Germany decade earlier. But Napoléon almost put the

Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National 1 Alfred Kerr, Wo Liegt Berlin?: Briefe aus der Interest. Reichshauptstadt (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1998), 407.

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 81 Imagine a Teutonic version of Dick Cheney in power for several decades and you may start to get a sense of what Bismarck meant for his colleagues, for Germany and for its neighbors.

dynasty out of business, forcing Frederick national icon was so entrenched that the William III and Queen Louise to flee east- city of Hamburg erected a colossal statue of ward. Under the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit, Prus- a bareheaded Bismarck holding a sword. As sia lost almost half of its territory. It was the the historian Thomas Nipperdey observed, War of Liberation, or the “Prussian Rising,” the monument was supposed to function as it was known—a vast upsurge of patrio- as a form of “political protest” directed tism that included, to the discomfiture of “against pathos and prestige, exhibitionism the Prussian armed forces, free corps—that and a craving for renown.” If so, the rebuke led to the reconstitution of Prussia and Na- failed. Kaiser Wilhelm II plunged Germa- poléon’s final defeat. Overnight, the ques- ny into the abyss of World War I. And tion of a German national identity enjoyed though by November 1918 the last German a rebirth. emperor may have fled to Holland (where Bismarck was at the core of debates about he devoted himself to cultivating roses), what Prussia and Germany were supposed the myth of Prussia was alive and well— to epitomize. For some he personified the ready for exploitation by the Nazis. The noble hero who, in a mere decade, cre- newly appointed chancellor Adolf Hitler ated the empire that Germans had been met World War I hero and president Paul longing for ever since the days of Frederick von Hindenburg in a public ceremony on Barbarossa (legend has it that the sleeping March 21, 1933 (at the Garrison Church, kaiser lies resting in the mountains of Kyff- where Frederick the Great was buried) that häuser with his knights, waiting to reunite symbolized the fusion of Nazism with an- Germany after the ravens stop flying around cient Prussian military traditions. Two days him). For others, such as Theodor Fontane, later, the Reichstag gathered in the Kroll the novelist who chronicled Prussian soci- Opera House, surrounded by baying storm ety, the new empire was not an unalloyed troopers, to approve the Enabling Act, le- triumph. It destroyed the ancient and valor- gally snuffing out the Weimar Republic and ous virtues of Preussentum: stern abstinence vouchsafing the Austrian corporal dictato- and self-effacement were replaced by brag- rial powers. Soon the Nazis disseminated gadocio and preening; landowners by nou- pictures displaying the profiles of Frederick veau riche industrialists. There was good the Great, Bismarck and Hitler, suggesting reason for apprehension. The modern paral- an unbroken tradition between Prussia and lel to the brash Wilhelm II succeeding his the National Socialists. In reality, the Third cautious father in 1888 would be George Reich and the old aristocracy despised each W. Bush and George H. W. Bush. other; Hitler simply outwitted his adversar- In retirement Bismarck achieved a public ies, using them for his own ends, then killed popularity that he never really enjoyed in many of the Prussian blue bloods after they office. Political parties began to invoke his staged a failed assassination plot called Op- name. Monuments were built in his honor. eration Valkyrie on July 20, 1944. After By the early twentieth century, his role as World War II, the cult of Prussia came to

82 The National Interest Reviews & Essays an official end. In the Communist East, it was depicted as the culprit for everything bad in German history. And in the West, the Allied Control Council declared that “the Prussian state, which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, has ceased to exist,” and offi- cially abolished it. But when Germany reunified in 1990, these questions of whether there was something innately perfidious in Germany’s past that prompted it to elevate the state above the citizen and predisposed it to totalitarian dictatorship once more bubbled that the Federal Republic has traveled from to the surface. The old Adam of German the days of the Iron Chancellor. Bismarck nationalism was again descried by some has been the subject of many biographies, overly anxious pundits and European poli- including a sympathetic one by A. J. P. ticians. British prime minister Margaret Taylor, but none has succeeded in capturing Thatcher, for example, summoned sev- his remarkable personality and career as viv- eral leading historians to Chequers to dis- idly as Steinberg’s. He has drawn on a wide cuss whether or not the Germans suffered range of documents and memoirs penned from nasty, enduring national characteris- by Bismarck’s contemporaries, including tics. In his memoir, Five Germanys I Have the discerning Hildegard Freifrau Hugo von Known, Fritz Stern recounts that Thatcher Spitzemberg, to reproduce not simply the was firmly stuck in the past: she saw the statesman but also his milieu. Indeed, more Germans as “dangerous by tradition and than any other previous scholar, Steinberg character. . . . At the end, thanking us, pays close attention to Bismarck’s personal- the prime minister clapped her hands in a ity, concluding “it was Bismarck’s tragedy— schoolgirl gesture, mischievously promising and Germany’s—that he never learned how us, ‘I’ll be so nice to the Germans! I’ll be so to be a proper Christian, had no under- nice to the Germans!’”2 standing of the virtue of humility, and still less about the interaction of his sick body f the Iron Lady saw the specter of a mili- and sick soul.” What Bismarck did under- I tary feudal order returning to power in stand was provoking feuds and quarrels that a new Greater Germany intent on bullying led to wars that served what he perceived as its neighbors, she couldn’t have had it more Prussia’s true national interests. wrong. It is one of the many merits of Jona- than Steinberg’s new biography of Bismarck 2 Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (New that it reminds us of the immense distance York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 469.

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 83 Bismarck was born into the landed Junk- case that Bismarck’s personality was deci- er class on April 1, 1815. The “von” was sively shaped at an early age, both for good critical to his career. As Bismarck’s lifelong and ill. friend John Lothrop Motley, a Boston How otherwise, Steinberg observes, to aristocrat who went on to become a well- explain the fact that Motley, who first met known historian and ambassador to Vien- Bismarck at the University of Göttingen, na, wrote to his parents in 1833: “one can turned the seventeen-year-old freshman very properly divide the Germans into two into a character called Otto von Rabenmark classes: the Vons and the non Vons.” Not in his 1839 novel Morton’s Hope? Raben- until the Nazis, who carried out what the mark is “gifted with talents and acquire- American historian David Schoenbaum has ments immeasurably beyond his years” correctly called a “social revolution,” were and makes a name for himself by insulting these class distinctions largely effaced. the members of the dueling fraternity. In a Steinberg imaginatively speculates that country where the Schmiss, the dueling scar, Bismarck was able to serve William I for is the highest honor a university student can decades because he was a sort of surrogate display, daring and conflict are Rabenmark’s son. “By an uncanny set of circumstances,” watchwords. He announces: he writes: After I had cut off the senior’s nose, sliced off Bismarck ended up in a kind of permanent the con-senior’s upper lip, moustachios and all, parental triangle with his sovereigns, not just besides bestowing less severe marks of affection once but twice. He saw William I of Prussia as on the others, the whole club in admiration of a kindly but weak man and his Queen and later my prowess and desiring to secure the services Empress Augusta as an all-powerful, devious, of so valorous a combatant voted me in by ac- and malevolent figure. clamation . . . I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life. You It was his own family history all over again. see I am a very rational sort of person now and Bismarck’s relations with his parents were you would hardly take me for the crazy moun- troubled. He loved his father, Ferdinand, tebank you met in the street half-an hour ago. but viewed him as an ineffectual weakling; But then I see that this is the way to obtain his domineering mother, Wilhelmine, he superiority. I determined at once on arriving at resented for her emotional detachment. the university, that to obtain mastery over my “As a small child I hated her; later I suc- competitors, who were all, extravagant, savage, cessfully deceived her with falsehoods,” he eccentric, I had to be ten times as extravagant wrote. It is tempting to trace Bismarck’s and savage as any one else. later emotional turbulence—gluttony, rage, despair and exhilaration—back directly to Hyperbole? Not at all. Steinberg does not his childhood, a temptation that Steinberg mention it, but Mark Twain, who witnessed does not resist. But he makes a very strong several ferociously bloody duels in Heidel-

84 The National Interest Reviews & Essays berg, noted in A Tramp Abroad that “a corps na von Puttkamer,” Steinberg writes, “lost student told me it was of record that Prince her husband’s full attention even before Bismarck fought thirty-two of these duels they had formally been married.” in a single summer term when he was in college. So he fought twenty-nine after his ismarck may not have had much of a badge had given him the right to retire from B career, but he built close relations with the field.” prominent conservatives who were intent For all his ambition, Bismarck went on protecting the patrimonial interests of nowhere for many years. In 1845 his fa- the Junkers. Many of these conservatives ther’s death meant he had to move to re- believed in a rigorous branch of Lutheran-

mote Schönhausen to run the family es- ism known as Pietism, which stressed an tate. Bismarck, known as the “mad Junker” inward and direct relationship with God. As for his antics, which included firing pis- Steinberg notes: tols through the windows at his guests, was bored to tears. He ended up wedding the When the Crown Prince Frederick William dour Johanna Friederike Charlotte Doro- came to the throne in 1840, he brought Bis- thea Eleonore von Puttkamer, but his true marck’s new friends to power with him and, love was politics. The thirty-two-year-old when the unrest leading to the revolutions of country squire’s first post was to serve as a 1848 broke out, his neo-Pietist friends would member of the Prussian parliament: “Johan- make Bismarck famous.

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 85 This was the circle that would launch his sorship and assented to a constitution after career. And thus his great enemy at the out- he learned that Klemens von Metternich set was liberalism. He knew that the way to had fled Vienna to save his skin. Bismarck make a name for himself was to denounce it was horrified. He told a friend that the in the most vociferous terms possible. In his king had “an unsteady character . . . if one maiden speech before the Prussian United grabbed him, one came away with a hand- Diet of 1847, Bismarck committed the ul- ful of slime.” Bismarck wanted to stage a timate heresy, at least for pious liberals, by counterrevolution. The military demurred. mocking the notion that the War of Lib- What ended up happening was more in- eration had anything in common with the sidious: Bismarck’s conservative allies estab- demand for freedom or a constitution. In lished a secret shadow government known essence, he was saying that it was nothing as the “camarilla” that sought, at every turn, more than a bunch of sentimental claptrap. to vitiate liberal triumphs. At the very same The truth was that the Prussian army had time, the National Assembly in Frankfurt, always been very uneasy about the existence which was made up of liberal groupings of the free corps that had fought against from the farrago of German states and prin- Napoléon and the idealism they embodied. cipalities, adopted a constitution. But Fried- Now he declared, rich IV spurned its offer of a German imperial crown and tried to create his own con- It does the national honour a poor service . . . federation called the Erfurt Union. It failed. if one assumes that the mistreatment and hu- Friedrich capitulated to Austria in Novem- miliation which the foreign power holders im- ber 1850 and signed the Agreement of Ol- posed on Prussia were not enough on its own mütz. Known as the “humiliation of Ol- to bring their blood to boiling point and to let mütz,” the pact signified Prussia’s abandon- all other feelings be drowned out by hatred of ment of any pretension to lead the German the foreigner. states. Instead, Prussia docilely returned to the German Confederation headed by Aus- This was vintage Bismarck—contempt for tria, which had originally been established parliament and liberalism. Paranoid, rest- at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. less and scheming, he constantly searched In one of his classic realpolitik state- for real and imaginary enemies who might ments, Bismarck suggested that nationalist be trying to stymie or topple him. It was a grousing about Olmütz was jejune. In re- blood sport, little different from the duels treating, Prussia had made the right move: he had fought as a student. Bismarck’s first opportunity to shine Why do great states fight wars today? The only came during the 1848 revolution. Friedrich sound basis for a large state is egoism and not Wilhelm IV, who veered between trucu- romanticism; this is what necessarily distin- lence and obsequiousness—and between guishes a large state from a small one. It is not the hawks and the doves—lifted press cen- worthy for a large state to fight a war that is not

86 The National Interest Reviews & Essays An older line of historical inquiry suggests that the traits of absolutism and obedience inculcated in the German population made it susceptible to Nazism.

in its own interests. . . . The honour of Prussia who composed the majority of the parlia- does not in my view consist of playing Don ment, were aghast. But Bismarck simply Quixote to every offended parliamentary big- bypassed them. He produced military vic- wig in Germany who feels his local constitution tories that forced the parliament, in the is in jeopardy. end, to indemnify the state retroactively. By then, the liberals, who harbored more Now that Prussia had knuckled under than a dose of nationalism, were exultant to Austria, it needed to send an envoy to over German unification. But Bismarck’s Frankfurt, where the German Confedera- contempt for parliament meant that the tion was based. Bismarck was named Prus- institutions of the state relied on him to sian envoy to the federal diet in Frankfurt. function properly. His diplomatic path—which would also Consistent with his proclivity for seeking take him to St. Petersburg, where he be- out new alliances, Bismarck was soon to cut came a popular figure among the nobility— his ties with the conservatives. He was a re- had begun. alist par excellence. Before him, politicians, It was this intersection between domestic more often than not, at least made a show and foreign policy that vaulted Bismarck of following high-minded principles and to the twin posts of minister-president and predicated their partnerships on the basis foreign minister of Prussia in 1862. His of religious or political affinities. Not Bis- close friend Albrecht von Roon, the min- marck. He said such thinking was humbug: ister of war, had insisted upon expanding the size of the army. King William faced The system of solidarity of the conservative in- a conundrum: he wanted to implement terests of all countries is a dangerous fiction . . . sweeping reforms that included incorporat- We arrive at a point where we make the whole ing the free militias that had fought dur- unhistorical, godless and lawless sovereignty ing the War of Liberation, but the new swindle of the German princes into the darling parliament was balking at paying for them. of the Prussian Conservative Party. “That Prussia could easily afford such costs,” writes Steinberg, “had not yet entire- To the dismay of pious, conservative Chris- ly penetrated the consciousness of the tax- tians, Bismarck, in other words, was per- paying classes.” The crown and parliament fectly prepared to ally himself with the were at an impasse. Roon hammered home parvenu emperor Napoléon III to challenge the message that only Bismarck could sur- Austrian predominance in Europe. He was mount the stalemate, which he did. In his equally capable of turning on France. Only first speech—the famous “blood and iron” when Germany was united in 1871 did one—as minister-president, Bismarck flung Bismarck declare that Prussia was a “sati- down the gauntlet toward Austria, stating ated” power and that he feared the “night- that Prussia’s borders were unfavorable for mare of a coalition” directed against his its continued existence. German liberals, shiny new creation.

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 87 ismarck’s strategy was as cunning as it Prussian conflict with the empire. To stir B was simple: he saw that nationalism, up even more trouble for Vienna, he called the great force of the nineteenth century, for universal suffrage. The idea was that the did not have to be opposed to monarchy. Hapsburg empire, which contained numer- Instead, it could be harnessed and manipu- ous national groups, would be confronted lated. He was in many ways a populist con- with competing demands for freedom that servative, which proved to be anathema to it could not satisfy. Once again, orthodox his early backers. He did not want to cede Prussians were horrified. But Bismarck be- nationalism to the liberals, who championed lieved that even if the parliament was di- freedom and democracy. Instead, he wanted rectly elected, he could emasculate it—later to hijack it. His first move was to provoke on, as the Social Democrats became a mass war in 1864 with Denmark over the north- party, he wanted to repeal universal suf- ern province of Schleswig-Holstein, which frage. But on the eve of war with Austria in remains part of Germany today. By annex- 1866, he told his ambassador in Paris, “In ing the territory he was able to stir up na- the decisive moment the masses stand by tionalist feeling and set the stage for conflict the Monarchy, without distinction whether with Austria, which had troops stationed in it has a liberal or conservative direction at the region. England watched the march to- that moment.” Liberals and nationalists ward war with consternation: Lord Claren- were happy because Bismarck had defeated don, the British foreign secretary, wrote, “In the retrograde, Catholic Austrian empire. the name of all that is rational, decent and Bismarck’s third and final war came humane, what can be the justification of war against France in 1870. The cause was on the part of Prussia?” One of Bismarck’s trivial; the consequences immense. Prince early patrons, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, Leopold of Hohenzollern was supposed to a Pietist and lawyer, visited Bismarck in become the next Spanish king. The French 1866 and concluded, Steinberg writes, that lashed themselves into a frenzy of indigna- the minister-president had “abandoned any tion. War ensued. Prussia, expert at using semblance of the rigorous Christian moral- trains to deploy its troops quickly, prevailed. ity which the two brothers Gerlach and Yet it soon found itself bogged down in many others thought they had discerned partisan warfare as French irregulars picked in the young Bismarck.” But the Gerlachs off its forces. Then there was the fall of (Ludwig and his army-general brother, Leo- Napoléon III and the rise of the Paris Com- pold) were political dinosaurs; the fastidious mune. Eventually, Prussia bombarded Leopold had once reproved Bismarck for Paris with siege guns. The liberally minded visiting Paris, as though a visit to that cos- Crown Prince Frederick, married to Queen mopolitan city would corrupt him. Victoria’s eldest daughter, confided to his Bismarck was on a roll. He concluded war diary: a treaty with Italy, which stipulated that it would attack Austria in the event of a What good to us is all power, all martial glory

88 The National Interest Reviews & Essays and renown, if hatred and mistrust meet us at ut the speak-softly-and-carry-a-big- every turn, if every step we advance in our de- B stick approach Bismarck wielded in the velopment is a subject for suspicion and grudg- realm of foreign policy was nowhere to be ing? Bismarck has made us great and powerful found when it came to domestic politics. but he has robbed us of our friends, the sym- Imagine a Teutonic version of Dick Cheney pathies of the world, and—our conscience. in power for several decades and you may start to get a sense of what Bismarck meant Bismarck was at the height of his power. for his colleagues, for Germany and for its Steinberg’s verdict is unequivocal: neighbors. To combat his foes, Bismarck found himself resorting to increasingly ex- These nine years, and this ‘revolution’, con- treme measures—the Kulturkampf against stitute the greatest diplomatic and political Catholicism, the battle against the rise of achievement by any leader in the last two cen- the Social Democrats and the refusal to say turies, for Bismarck accomplished all this with- anything to counter the contumely heaped out commanding a single soldier, without dom- upon Jews. It is this last phenomenon that inating a vast parliamentary majority, without Steinberg brilliantly chronicles. Bismarck the support of a mass movement, without any was anything but immune to the anti-Semi- previous experience of government, and in the tism that permeated his class, which object- face of national revulsion at his name and his ed to the rise of Jews in the arts, journalism, reputation. This achievement . . . rested on banking, finance and industry. The young several sets of conflicting characteristics among Kaiser Wilhelm, as the historian John C. which brutal, disarming honesty mingled with G. Röhl has shown, also was a rabid anti- the wiles and deceits of a confidence man. He Semite. Steinberg acutely states that an- played his parts with perfect self-confidence yet ti-Semitism “represented a revulsion of a mixed them with rage, anxiety, illness, hypo- deeply conservative society against liberal- chondria, and irrationality. ism.” Liberals were well represented in parliament and often opposed Bismarck—and The German Constitution of 1871 retained were often Jewish. His hatred of opposi- Prussian particularism, and so Bismarck tion meant that he hated the Jews, to the rode roughshod over parliament, persecuted extent that, in a shameful episode, he actu- his foes, and tried to maintain stability in- ally refused to accept a telegram from the side and outside the new Reich. His friend U.S. Congress on the death of the German- Ludwig Bamberger once observed about the Jewish liberal politician and jurist Eduard Iron Chancellor’s self-confidence, “Prince Lasker hailing his devotion to freedom; in Bismarck believes firmly and deeply in a addition, he forbade five cabinet ministers God who has the remarkable faculty of al- from attending Lasker’s funeral at the Ora- ways agreeing with him.” Emperor William nienburg Synagogue (which has been newly put it more concisely: “it’s hard to be Kaiser restored) in Berlin. With his customary under Bismarck.” capacity for invective, Bismarck referred to

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 89 Ludwig Bamberger once observed about the Iron Chancellor’s self-confidence, “Prince Bismarck believes firmly and deeply in a God who has the remarkable faculty of always agreeing with him.”

the parliament itself as the “Guest House of Meanwhile, at war’s end, Thomas Mann the Dead Jew.” wrote Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, a se- In focusing on Bismarck’s unfortunate ries of murky lucubrations about the power behavior, Steinberg draws another paral- of creative irrationalism and Germany’s need lel between Wilhelmine Germany and the for an authoritarian and anti-Western gov- Nazi era. He essentially revives an older line ernment, which he later repudiated. As the of historical inquiry, one which suggested productions of the two brothers indicate, that the traits of absolutism and obedi- the notion that there were peculiarly Ger- ence inculcated in the German population manic traits that issued in the Nazi regime made it susceptible to Nazism. According is not so easy to wish away. One, Hein- to Steinberg: rich, was decrying what he saw as the Ger- man penchant for power worship; the other, [Bismarck] transmitted an authoritarian, Prus- Thomas, was explicitly hailing an anti-West- sian, semi-absolute monarchy with its cult of ern, antiliberal mode of thought as precisely force and reverence for the absolute ruler to the feature that signified German greatness the twentieth century. Hitler fished it out of (though he would later view the work with a the chaos of the Great Depression of 1929–33. measure of embarrassment). He took Bismarck’s office, Chancellor, on 30 Steinberg’s is thus a profoundly sober- January 1933. Once again a “genius” ruled ing book that is difficult to read without Germany. a mounting sense of apprehension about Bismarck’s accomplishments and legacy. So was Bismarck really at fault? Perhaps But he may go too far. The danger is of the earliest such line of argument came dur- adopting a teleological approach in which ing World War I, long before Hitler had later events get read backward into his- even come to power. In a fascinating de- tory. Can Nazism really be laid at Prussia’s bate between two estranged brothers, the doorstep? Did Wilhelmine Germany follow fissures of German society were exposed. a Sonderweg, a special path to modernity In 1914, Heinrich Mann completed his that condemned it to launching a geno- satirical novel pillorying autocratic rule and cidal war? As Henry Kissinger observed nationalism, The Loyal Subject, but could in his discussion of Steinberg’s work in not publish it until November 1918. Its the New York Times, Bismarck was, at bot- protagonist is Diederich Hessling, the owner tom, a cautious conservative who want- of a small factory in Netzig who tyrannizes ed to conserve, not expand, the German his workers and could not be more obsequi- Reich. Hitler, by contrast, was a nihilist. ous toward higher authority. Hessling, who The genocidal racism that Hitler espoused noisily trumpets his patriotism and twirls his was of a different order than Bismarck’s mustache in imitation of the kaiser, is sup- anti-Semitism. Hitler was probably closer posed to epitomize the corruption, servility to the kind of Napoleonic revolutionary and empty bombast of the Wilhelmine era. spirit that Bismarck was trying to contain

90 The National Interest Reviews & Essays and smother—the impulse to gamble and gent national movements that Bismarck had overthrow the European order. Instead, the once attempted to co-opt. The ineptitude of Iron Chancellor wished to integrate Prussia these regimes was exposed by the demands into Europe, not unify central Europe—let of modern warfare. It was no accident that alone the whole continent—under German the Romanov, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern hegemony. His successors at the Wilhelm- dynasties all crumbled under the stresses strasse were not as modest. In entering the of World War I—only to be supplanted by Kaiserreich into World War I, his epigones totalitarian regimes. shattered the empire that he had painstak- Were Bismarck to survey today’s Ger- ingly erected. many, he would doubtless be taken aback to Nevertheless, any system that rested on see that it was shorn of East Prussia, Pomer- one man was likely headed for collapse. ania and Silesia. But perhaps he would not There was Bismarck, but no such thing find it odd that Germany has once again as Bismarckianism. Instead of exemplify- become the most powerful country in the ing a coherent school of foreign policy, he heart of Europe, dictating from Berlin not represented an ad hoc approach, based on its military but, rather, its economic future. equal parts wily operator and profound The most that remains of Berlin’s Prussian thinker. It was enough to create but not heritage is an equestrian statue of Frederick sustain imperial Germany. “The ultimate the Great, “old Fritz” as he was known, and terrible irony of Bismarck’s career,” says on Unter den Linden. Bismarck has large- Steinberg, “lay in his powerlessness.” He ly vanished from the memories of most was always dependent on the royals for his Germans. Perhaps that is just as well. He authority. The wider point is surely that a himself asked that the epitaph on his grave patriarchal monarchy had itself become al- should simply read, “A faithful German ser- most impossible to reconcile with the resur- vant of Kaiser Wilhelm I.” n

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 91 the world changed little and in some ways In the Hall of was better for the war. In Indochina, vic- the Vulcans torious Vietnam was contained by Beijing. Meanwhile, the memory of the war meant that, very fortunately, Washington did not By Anatol Lieven plunge itself into direct military interven- tions in developing nations in far-flung Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb, Haunt- lands, which would have brought no gains, ing Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presi- only further costs—and more bitter domes- dency from Ford to Obama (Washington, tic divisions. It is true that the Soviet Union dc: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), 355 was emboldened and took advantage of the pp., $29.95. collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa more aggressively than it might Dov S. Zakheim, A Vulcan’s Tale: How the otherwise have done, but this proved utterly Bush Administration Mismanaged the Re- irrelevant to the overall balance of power. construction of Afghanistan (Washington, The ussr collapsed, largely through the dc: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), 320 colossal military overstretch of its strategic pp., $32.95. competition with the United States. The results of Vietnam for American ..our decades on, Vietnam remains thinking were of course much deeper. The ..America’s only major lost war. As Kalbs show how every subsequent U.S. de- F prominent journalists Marvin and cision on the use of force has been colored Deborah Kalb write in their new, quite by the Indochina adventure—whether by a gripping historical survey, this is a memory desire to avoid further costly entanglements that has haunted U.S. policy makers ever or by a desire to “exorcise the ghosts of Viet- since. Indeed, the defeat remains critical to nam” through the (vigorous and success- the calculations of the Obama administra- ful) wielding of hard power. It is true that tion as it tries to extricate the United States after every successful U.S. military operation from Afghanistan while preserving at least since 1975, parts of the media have raised the appearance of some success—and the the cry that “Vietnam is finally behind us.” avoidance of obvious failure. So far, they have always been wrong. Yet the effects of Vietnam were in fact Ironically, while thinking about the lost deeply paradoxical: America’s position in war all the time, Americans also did not think about it nearly enough. This was most Anatol Lieven, a senior editor at The National glaringly true of the U.S. armed forces. Interest, is a professor in the War Studies Rather than seriously considering how to Department of King’s College London. His latest do counterinsurgency better, the military book, Pakistan: A Hard Country, was published in essentially decided that it would never do it April by PublicAffairs. again. Never mind that America’s enemies

92 The National Interest Reviews & Essays also have a role in deciding where and when States’ right, duty and ability to build de- Washington fights—and that the consti- mocracy through military means in other tutional decision to wage war lies with the countries; the disastrous combination of president and Congress of the United States, this with an almost incredible ignorance not the chiefs of staff. If they really object to of those countries in U.S. policy-making a policy, senior officers have no recourse but circles; and the clash between these mega- to resign. In 2002–03, despite deep misgiv- lomaniac “nation-building” aspirations and ings, many senior officers signally failed to a U.S. military approach which for the let go of their posts in opposition to the Iraq first crucial years relied overwhelmingly on War. (Six years later, Admiral William Fallon firepower. In Iraq, wise military leadership did resign in opposition to Bush administra- adopted a different strategy just in time by tion policy toward Iran—thereby helping to once again amassing experience and ideas, block a possible attack.) which helped it to achieve a qualified vic- Yet because the armed forces held fast tory. In Afghanistan—as in Vietnam in the to the belief that they could avoid future early 1970s—it may however be too late counterinsurgency, the practical lessons of both on the ground and in the minds of Vietnam were almost entirely forgotten. the American public for this to make much The result was the horribly unprepared U.S. of a difference. military that found itself engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. or some of the explanation as to why All that said, the most significant resem- F the United States stumbled so badly, blances between Vietnam on the one hand readers can turn to a truly fascinating, deep- and the first years of the wars in Iraq and ly depressing memoir by Dov Zakheim, Afghanistan on the other lie not with the under secretary and comptroller at the De- insurgents, who for better and worse have partment of Defense from 2001 to 2004. been very different indeed from the Viet- Zakheim also blames the U.S. military in cong. Instead, the similarities have been part for failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, re- on the U.S. side: the nationalist sense of marking acidly that prior to these wars they America’s mission, which led even many had managed to forget everything that they liberal Americans to believe in the United had ever learned about counterinsurgency.

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 93 The bulk of Zakheim’s criticism, however, Sound a little like Vietnam, anyone? is reserved for the present U.S. system of And even after it was apparent that both national government in general, and the Afghanistan and Iraq would require pro- Bush administration in particular. Indeed, longed exercises in nation building, the con- coming as it does from one of the “Vulcans” fusion within the administration remained (the circle of people who served as President staggering. As Zakheim writes of his at- Bush’s closest foreign-policy advisers), an tempts to coordinate Afghan reconstruction insider who defends aspects of the Bush policy with the State Department after he administration and likes and respects some was appointed coordinator of that policy, of its members, this book must be one of the most devastating indictments of that There was one other fact that Rich [Armit- administration’s conduct of external policy age] never mentioned to me: there already was that has yet been written. Particularly fero- a government-wide coordinator for Afghani- cious are his portraits of Deputy Secretary stan—Richard Haass, the director of the Policy of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Coalition Provi- Planning Office at State, whose formal title was sional Authority administrator Paul Bremer, Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan. I and Office of Management and Budget suspect that Rich never mentioned this fact associate director Robin Cleveland. These because he assumed I knew it. And I certainly portraits do, it must be said, have a cer- should have known. In government service one tain air of score settling, and their accuracy should never assume anything, however. . . . might be doubted—were it not borne out Indeed, I did not learn about Haass’ role until both by abundant outside evidence and by quite some time after he left the State Depart- the actual results of their behavior. ment in mid-2003 to become president of the The core of the problem as far as the Council on Foreign Relations. And to this day lack of planning for Iraq was concerned is I do not know who appointed him, or when summed up by Zakheim in the following exactly he was appointed. (Zakheim’s italics) passage: The only appropriate response would The State Department undertook a broader seem to be: what a way to run a railroad. As effort to plan, but, as is widely known, the Zakheim writes, however, this sort of chaos Defense Department rejected State’s nuts- was not only due to the Bush administra- and-bolts approach. One reason was, again, tion but to the entire American system of the administration’s reigning assumption that government. A strong sense emerges of an the United States would not be in Iraq long apparatus that has simply grown far too enough to require detailed plans. But an almost big and too complicated to be managed magical corollary to this assumption also was at effectively, especially when one adds in the play: if one did not plan for a contingency that impact of oversight and interference by the one did not wish to happen, it thereby could U.S. Congress—each of whose members not happen. (Zakheim’s italics) acts like an independent prince who has

94 The National Interest Reviews & Essays In Afghanistan—as in Vietnam in the early 1970s—it may be too late both on the ground and in the minds of the American public to make much of a difference.

to be negotiated with, conciliated and re- son experts were ignored—and may well be warded. As a result, the system described again in future—is brought out by Zakheim by Zakheim often seems so entangled in at various points: it is the intense suspicion its own internal processes and battles that of “Arabists” by supporters of Israel within events in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere the administration. Incredibly, Zakheim— become almost peripheral. Thus, while Is- an Orthodox Jew and a deeply committed lamabad has often behaved appallingly in supporter of Israel (as he stresses in this Afghanistan, Zakheim also describes his book)—describes Wolfowitz criticizing him intense difficulty in extracting even a por- as being “too close to the Arabs” when he tion of the aid promised to Pakistan in the raised doubts about an attack on Iraq. fall of 2001, a time when the country’s help The most shattering reflection on the was absolutely vital to the United States. nature of the U.S.-Israeli alliance—once Not surprisingly, this undermined the Paki- again, recorded by a passionate friend of stani government and left Pakistanis feeling Israel—is as follows: deeply resentful. Zakheim excoriates Paul Bremer for his The Israelis did offer to provide materiel sup- decisions to dissolve the existing Baathist port for the U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghani- state institutions in Iraq, arguing that “as stan and did not insist on taking credit for it long as Iraq’s long-standing institutions— publicly. Initially I was delighted by the offer notably the army and the bureaucracy— on two counts. First, the Israeli military was were not tampered with, there was no com- reputed to be among the world’s best, and its pelling reason to think the country would systems would be a welcome addition to our fractionate.” This, however, smells of special own. And second, the United States provided pleading. Numerous experts before the in- Israel with billions of dollars’ worth of military vasion warned of precisely this eventuality, assistance, and it seemed appropriate, at least to and on page thirty-nine Zakheim himself me, that Israel should offer to help America in writes of his previous fears concerning an its own time of need. But then the Israelis told invasion set to topple Saddam Hussein: “I me that the U.S. government would “of course” worried about the impact of any military at- have to buy whatever it was that Israel made tack on the integrity of that largely artificial available. I was not amused, and told them country. I could not see how the breakup of “thanks, but no thanks.” Iraq could be in the national interest of the United States.” No additional comment is necessary on the virtually insane (from an American point of erhaps most depressing of all is the view) form that this relationship has now P shunning of expertise and openness, assumed. the rewarding of conventionality and the Hostility to “Arabists” has not been the total lack of incentive to give a damn about only reason why the U.S. government seems these countries over the long run. One rea- to have a certain difficulty in maintain-

Reviews & Essays November/December 2011 95 ing and listening to experts on particular administration (and once again, the sheer countries. The system of political appoint- inertia of the Washington system) destroyed ments ensures that most people with real a good chance to build a successful Afghan expertise will be kept out of the senior ranks state between 2001 and 2007 and enabled of the bureaucracy. The immense scale of the resurgence of the Taliban. To a consider- America’s global commitments means that able degree I would agree with this. people who reach the top are likely to be Yet it must also be said that the entire generalists. The intense prejudices and pre- Western state-building effort on the ground conceptions which have gripped the Belt- in Afghanistan in those years was deeply way establishment with regard to particular unimpressive, not so much because of lack countries (Russia is perhaps an even more of money but because of the lack of any real striking example than the Muslim world) commitment and willingness for sacrifice on mean that for long periods anyone who has the part of too many of the civilian officials wished for promotion has had to tailor his stationed there. Indeed, by far the greater or her attitudes to the prevailing norm. Fi- number seemed basically uninterested. As a nally, to repeat an earlier point, the central result, even before Taliban attacks became government has grown so enormous and truly dangerous, the Western official and complex that it spends far too much of its ngo world in Kabul became a closed round time administering itself, or engaged in frat- of paper shuffling and expatriate parties full ricidal turf wars. of people on short-term contracts, divorced When it comes to state building, how- from Afghan society and with neither the ever, there is another problem, which ap- time nor the inclination to find out about plies equally to Europe. Zakheim makes a the place. Thus the U.S. military (without very strong argument that by plunging into preparation and very much against its incli- Iraq and neglecting Afghanistan, the Bush nations) was forced to pick up most of the real work of nation building outside Kabul—alas, very probably several years too late. Unless these fail- ings can be corrected, any future Western attempts to create workable societies, governance and infrastructure in countries like Af- ghanistan will meet the same fate as the Afghan operation to date—a fate which Zakheim’s essential memoir does so much to explain. n

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