The Real Gap by Hal Brands Those Who Study International Security and Those Who Practice It See the Same World Through Very Different Conceptual Lenses
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CYBERQUAKE!! • BLACKS IN PRISONS • SIR ROBERT COOPER ON SHAKESPEARE American Interest Policy, Politics & Culture Vol. XIII, No. 1 | September/October 2017 THE THERAPEUTIC UNIVERSITY A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Go Forth and Learn s The American Interest begins its 13th year, magazine and online both, our original purpose remains unchanged: We seek to explain America to the A world and the world to America; and to do it through an ideologically un- fettered, problem-solving orientation. As always, we use history leaned forward and social science admixed with the vast and varied experience of our authors. We aspire to go beyond explanation from time to time to propose reform in both domestic and foreign policy. As a recent case in point, the July-August issue is rich with specific ideas for genuine health care reform, and offers specific proposals to fix the State Department and shore up the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The issue you see be- fore you, however, only implies policy prescriptions, for it takes on questions of great difficulty and significance—we must truly understand a challenge before we can have an inkling of how to solve it. The first of these questions boils down to how rapid and widely spread technologi- cal change is making mincemeat of our accumulated stock of knowledge about how political and social worlds work. Disintermediation is an old phenomenon, but in its current global form, hitched to hyperconnectivity, it is propelling us outward into heretofore unimagined places. The same technologies pointed inward, so to speak, are also busy disarranging the stabilities of our personal emotional lives, creating in- tergenerational cleavages we struggle to grasp. Beware: These two essays, if taken to heart, may well keep you up at night. A second question concerns the derangement of our political vocabulary of the moment. Is all nationalism populism, or is nationalism only populism when it rushes upon us in recoil from globalist idealism unhinged? Are current manifestations of what is commonly presumed to be both populism and nationalism congruent with the generic label “conservative”? The short answer is no, and knowing the distinc- tions is, as usual, far more useful than any number of lazy conflations. Enlightened conservatism, insofar as it still may exist, is neither static nor populist—as the two essays in our “Up and to the Right” section illustrate, each in their own way. The third major question treated in this issue concerns the West’s institutions of higher learning—specifically, what seems not quite right about them lately. The three essays in our “Academentia” cluster investigate different aspects of this subject—none of them, mercifully, obsessing on the by-now hackneyed plaint concerning political correctness and associated assaults on free speech and open debate. Not that these problems are imaginary; they’re not. It’s just that they do not begin to exhaust the topic, properly defined. I have tended over the years to use the review section to broaden the shoulders of The American Interest, even thereby admitting some entertaining lighter fare into our pages. Not this time. If you think parsing the sources of inequality, of the mass incarceration of African-Americans and the racist history of American eugenics, and plumbing the depths of Shakespeare’s approach to politics are examples of lighter fare, then you probably pursue more serious hobbies than I do. We do not apologize for the focused and serious character of this issue. These are seriously troubled times, after all. So, as a certain ancient religious pamphlet adjures: “Go forth and learn.” 2 THE AMERICAN INTEREST CONTENTS 4(%!-%2)#!.).4%2%34s6/,5-%8))) .5-"%2 !545-.3%04%-"%2/#4/"%2 CYBERQUAKE 6 Flattened: Disintermediation Goes Global by Dee Smith The unpredictability of the current global system goes all the way up, and all the way down. 15 Exposed: The Burdens of Pseudo-Intimacy by R. Jay Magill, Jr. The origins and effects of the advancing Age of Self-Exposure. 6 UP AND TO THE RIGHT 26 Conservatism and Nationalism: Varieties of Engagement by Paul D. Miller Behind Trump’s trade, immigration, and national security rhetoric lurks a greater danger: the conversion of America’s liberal nation- alism into an illiberal cult. 36 Enlightened Conservatism: The Fifth Marquess of Lansdowne by John Bew & Andrew Ehrhardt 44 With the “art of the deal” back in the vogue in American diplo- macy, the career of the Fifth Marquess of Lansdowne is overdue for a reappraisal. ACADEMENTIA 44 The Real Gap by Hal Brands Those who study international security and those who practice it see the same world through very different conceptual lenses. 71 AUTUMN (SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER) 2017 3 55 The Therapeutic University by Frank Furedi How medicalized language and the therapeutic culture came to dominate Anglo-American institutions of higher education. EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Francis Fukuyama, chairman 63 Hard Future for a Soft Science Charles Davidson, publisher & CEO Walter Russell Mead, editor-at-large by Bradford Tuckfield & director, The American Interest Online Behavioral economics, the science behind governmental “nudging” Josef Joffe and studies disparaging conservatives, has run aground. It’s time to reform the field for the benefit of scientists and citizens alike. Adam Garfinkle, editor Daniel Kennelly, senior managing editor Rachel Hostyk, associate editor Danielle Desjardins associate publisher Richard Aldous, contributing editor REVIEWS R. Jay Magill, Jr., illustrator 71 Luck, Chance, and Taxes Damir Marusic, executive editor, by Christopher Jencks The American Interest Online Luck has more to do with economic success than Americans like to cover design by Rachel Hostyk believe. Robert Frank’s new book challenges us to reckon honestly cover image, Dan Hallman with fortune, and what it means for social policy. EDITORIAL BOARD Anne Applebaum, Eliot Cohen, Tyler 76 Locked In Cowen, Robert H. Frank, by Richard Thompson Ford William A. Galston, Owen Harries, “Racism” is the easy answer to the question of how America’s G. John Ikenberry, Stephen D. Krasner, prisons got so full of African Americans. A new book offers a more Bernard-Henri Lévy, Sebastian Mallaby, Michael Mandelbaum, C. Raja Mohan, complex and hopeful view. Ana Palacio, Itamar Rabinovich, Lilia Shevtsova, Hiro Aida, 80 A Race to Nowhere Mario Vargas Llosa, Wang Jisi, by Edward J. Larson Ruth Wedgwood [In Memoriam: Were Jim Crow and American eugenics laws the models for Nazi Peter Berger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Bronisław Geremek, Samuel race laws? Huntington, Ali Salem] 84 Shakespeare’s Politics by Richard Cooper ADVERTISING & SYNDICATION We know little of the Bard’s political opinions, but there’s much we Damir Marusic can learn of them from the recurrent themes of his works. [email protected] (202) 223-4408 website www.the-american-interest.com Subscriptions: Call (800) 362-8433 or visit www. the-american-interest.com. One year (6 issues): $39 print; $19 online; $49 for both. Two years (12 issues): $69 print; $38 online; $98 for both. Please add $14 per year for print-subscription delivery to Canada and $33 per year for delivery to addresses outside the United States and Canada. Postmaster and subscribers, send subscription orders and changes of address to: The American Interest, P.O. Box 15115, North Hollywood, CA 91615. The American Interest (ISSN 1556-5777) is published six times a year by The American Interest LLC. Printed by Fry Communications, Inc. Postage paid in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. ©2016, The American Interest LLC. Application for mailing at periodical pricing is pending in Washington, DC, and ad- ditional mailing offices. Editorial offices: 1730 Rhode Island 4 THE AMERICAN INTEREST Ave. NW, Suite 707, Washington, DC 20036. Tel.: (202) 223-4408. Fax: (202) 223-4489. AcAdementiA Those who study international security and those who practice it see the same world through very dif- ferent conceptual lenses. Te Real Gap Hal Brands cademics are a conflicted lot, simul- assessment issued that same year, New York taneously cherishing and bemoaning Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that A their isolation from the world. Pursu- “some of the smartest thinkers on problems at ing the life of the mind necessarily entails cul- home and around the world are university pro- tivating independence and even detachment fessors, but most of them just don’t matter in from politics, the news cycle, and government today’s great debates.”4 policy. Yet detachment can easily become ir- Such concerns are hardly new, of course; relevance, and in recent years there has been handwringing about academic irrelevance a tidal wave of concern—from academics and dates back decades. But there is nonetheless non-academics alike—that international rela- systematic evidence that the scholarship-policy tions scholarship has become ever more remote gap is real and widening. A 2011 survey found from the affairs of state. that 85 percent of American international re- In a 2009 Washington Post op-ed, Harvard lations scholars felt that the academia-policy scholar and former policymaker Joseph Nye divide was as great or greater than it had been warned of a “growing gap” between academics twenty to thirty years prior.5 The alienation and government.1 A contemporaneous study appears to be mutual. Another recent survey, concluded that “the walls surrounding the this time of policymakers, informed academ- ivory tower have never seemed so high.”2 Rob- ics that “what the academy is giving policy- ert Gallucci, then president of the MacArthur makers is not what they say they need from Foundation, lamented in 2014 that the acad- us.”6 emy was making only inadequate contribu- The gap endures, moreover, despite myriad tions to critical debates on global security and efforts to close it. The late, great international U.S. foreign policy.3 And in another stinging relations scholar Alexander George created his “Bridging the Gap” initiative to forge closer Hal Brands is the Henry A.