Greg R. Lawson's
Blog
The demonstrators certainly included Western-style liberalizing elements, but they also included adherents of senior clerics who wanted to block Ahmadinejad’s re-election. And while Ahmadinejad undoubtedly committed electoral fraud to bulk up his numbers, his ability to commit unlimited fraud was blocked, because very powerful people looking for a chance to bring him down were arrayed against him.
The situation is even more complex because it is not simply a fight between Ahmadinejad and the clerics, but also a fight among the clerical elite regarding perks and privileges — and Ahmadinejad is himself being used within this infighting. The Iranian president’s populism suits the interests of clerics who oppose Rafsanjani; Ahmadinejad is their battering ram. But as Ahmadinejad increases his power, he could turn on his patrons very quickly. In short, the political situation in Iran is extremely volatile, just not for the reason that the media portrayed."
What this means for the region as a whole is raised in this quote:Rafsanjani has frequently been held up in the West as a pragmatist who opposes Ahmadinejad’s radicalism. Rafsanjani certainly opposes Ahmadinejad and is happy to portray the Iranian president as harmful to Iran, but it is hard to imagine significant shifts in foreign policy if Rafsanjani’s faction came out on top. Khamenei has approved Iran’s foreign policy under Ahmadinejad, and Khamenei works to maintain broad consensus on policies. Ahmadinejad’s policies were vetted by Khamenei and the system that Rafsanjani is part of. It is possible that Rafsanjani secretly harbors different views, but if he does, anyone predicting what these might be is guessing."
As always, I find Spengler's coloumn at First Things thought provoking. Below is a comment I left to this article.
" 'I think it is the sense of our own miserable tininess next to the Transcendent that terrifies us, and the recognition of mortality that horrifies us.'
I believe that is absolutely true. All desire to transcend “this” life stems from a fundamental fear of both the transitory and mortal. Doesn’t even an existentialist feel this too?
All humans want immortality. The question is what path do we each choose. Do we choose to become our own Gods or do we choose to offer thanks to our creator? That is the line that seperates atheists (and probably agnostics) from those of faith.
Meaning can only be found in the Transcendent, and the quest of humanity is to discover (or listen to) the Transcendent."
I honestly can't think of anything more terrifying nor anything more awe inspiring than the infinite and transcendent creator. Anything else must, by definition, be small.
It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.
First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.
Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.
Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.
Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.
For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.
Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then proceeded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression."
Let's see what happens if there are recounts and where the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini eventually (and finally) comes down. Perhaps, the west is correct in its views, but the troubling question not yet fully answered is- what if we were wrong?
The danger liberalism poses to the American experiment comes from its disposition to deplete rather than replenish the capital required for self-government."
This quote is completely in line with arguments I have made previously regarding the necessity for cultural renewal in order to remain vibrant enough to withstand the challenges confronting us as a nation. Contemporary liberalism deplinishes the reservoir of will that makes it possible to stand up and deal with the dangers and complexities of modernity.
The debate within conservatism between "traditionalists" and "reformers" and any other sub groups must be robust, but also must be quick. We do not have time to attend a multitude of seminars on how to rediscover what we are for. We must begin articulating that very soon or risk being washed away by the remorseless tide of history.
Conservatism, as I have said before, is about pragmatism in the face of radicalism and about respect for the past vs. its casual dismissal as being irrelevant to the ever change course of the future. Indeed, conservatism can be progressive, but progressive within the bounds of what human nature tolerates. The sin of modern liberalism is that it thinks it knows no boundaries even when those boundaries starkly stare it in the face.
Its our job to highlight this and usher in real hope, not delusions and pious morality hollowed by a lack of connection to any sense of Truth.
The following are two more entries in the declinist school, this time not from the traditional leftist perspective, but from the more distinctively "right" perspective.
The first is from David P. Goldman, also known as Spengler. I quote a large section from this entry he does over at Asia Times, Inner Workings, which is devoted more to banking and economis issues. The piece argues that with the new and seemingly endless government intrusions into the market, the ability of the US economy to be as productive as we have been accustomed to will evaporate. Incentive, or that lovely capitalist phrase "animal spirits" , won't be animated by statism, taxation, and government fiat.
While we won't crash spectacularly, absent radical changes, America will become a stiffled, petty, navel gazing, former Superpower that watches power ebb to the hungry, vibrant, and dedicated Eastern Asian powers.
"What worries me more than anything else is that America’s young people, who offered such overwhelming support for Obama, may continue to huddle underneath the federal umbrella as times get tough. A self-feeding problem may ensue as Asia decouples from the American economy and opportunities for wealth creation in the United States shrink. Americans are facing a degree of competition from Asian university graduates on a scale they never before encountered, and cannot possibly imagine. One example: China has 40 million primary and secondary school students studying classical piano, a hallmark of the hot-housed, tutored, overachieving character of Chinese youth. America has just 30 million primary and secondary school students.
During the next generation, talented young Asians won’t start their businesses in the United States. They still will learn computer science at Stanford and international law at Yale, but unlike the 1980s and 1990s, they will not leave their families behind to put roots down in the US. Asian capital markets are sufficiently developed to provide them an adequate platform at home. Young Americans, who used to think that a business or law degree was a ticket to prosperity, will find the pickings all the slimmer in the new global competitive environment. They may look to the federal government for protection, much like their European counterparts.
America’s economic decline relative to Asia is not baked in the cake — yet — but the cake batter is in the pan, and the pan is en route to the oven. And the administration is more concerned about consolidating its own power than promoting economic efficiency. In third world countries, economic weakness increases the power of the comprador elite, because it leaves economic factors all the more dependent on the combination of government and oligopoly. It is possible to foresee a long and self-inflicted American economic decline."
The second piece is from Mark Steyn in the Washington Times. With a morose title like "Hollow Superpower" there can't be any question as to the thesis being espoused by Steyn. However, while Steyn himself may be a somewhat controversial figure due to his tendency to gravitate towards the polemical, he quotes someone manifestly non-polemical in summarizing his op-ed. He quotes Leslie Gelb, the former President of the Council on Foreign Relations, "The country's economy, infrastructure, public schools, and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit."
Steyn concludes by referring to the "mediocity of spirit." I have spent a lot of time discussing my fears as to this very subject and what its longterm consequences will be. I am saddened that what was at one time, even recently, only a latent fear, is becoming vocally expressed by many, including those that are judicious and not extreme. This means that there is likely some fire below the darkening clouds.
Decline is in the air and while it can be reversed, it won't happen with a culture that no longer believes in anything sacred.
What makes Mencken’s “libertarianism,” if we’re to call it that, so startling and intriguing is that it is not primarily based on the polarities we’ve become used to in the postwar libertarian and conservative movements: for instance Liberty and Tyranny, the Individual and the State, Collectivism and Freedom. Instead, Mencken concerns himself with the interaction between physiological types—the, in Mencken’s mind, inevitable conflict between the superior man and the resenter, between those capable of advancement and creating abundance and those who simply want to get their fingers in the eyes of their betters, between the strong and the weak."
I have not read Mencken, but I have read Nietzsche. It is often assumed that Nietzsche is the ultimate emblem of all that is wrong with modernity, or more accurately, post-modernity, since it is largely through him that relativism found its first and probably best proponent. In some ways, this is true, though I do not believe that was Nietzsche's goal and is actually represntative of a bastardization of a far more complex project he attempted.
Nietzsche wanted man to love life here and now and not wait for an ethereal future that he thought did not exist. Consequently he attacked those things that denigrated what he perceived as natural, healthy impulses. His attacks were aggressive and when read in today's politically correct universe are shocking. He disdained religion because he thought it destroyed the qualities that made man strong and attempted to replace them with weaknesses enthroned as the highest virtues.
Clearly, this is a very dangerous line of thought. That said, I believe he is a great prognosticator of the very things that have made the modern world actually rather dehumanizing.
Nietzsche was a full throated humanist. Today's secular humanists by contrast are those who actually plagiarize Christian faith while simultaneously jettisoning the very foundation of what allows their morality to exist.
Niezsche was in this sense far more honest than many of those who deny faith but ape its goals.
Nietzsche (and ultimately Mencken if one ascribes to him quasi-Nietzschean views) is not a good model for modern conservatism, but he may be the best critic modern conservatives will ever have of the perils associated with humanism devoid of Christian faith.
How can you aspire to Christian goals in the finitude of time on earth while denying the infinitude of immortality?
I do not believe you can, at least not honestly. To be honest, would mean embracing the Will to Power and all the things that make Nietzsche so frightening, because he sees what humanity devoid of God would really be.
I always admire the writings of Victor Davis Hanson. As a classical military historian and a farmer, he has a unique perspective on America. He has seen and lived a traditionalist lifestyle, written about the common western heritage, and dealt with the world of self flagellation in academia.
With the recent nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, it is evident that, the desire for "empathy" has clearly trumped the need to interpret law as it is constructed. Others have written on this issue extensively, so I won't go into this in much detail. However, th below section from this work of Hanson's raises in my mind one of the core challenges America faces. Namely, the desire of the political, elite left to raise the race issue ad nauseum. This is not really multiculturalism, it the beginning of factionalism which, as Hanson explicitly states devolves into tribalism. That is the opposite of the universal aspirations of America.
For America to retain its strength, it must become color blind and race blind. Anything else enshrines parochial loyalties rather than broad, national loyalties. This is no way for the world's strongest nation to remain strong. It is a path leading to navel gazing and disunity.
Hanson sums up well,
"In a weird way, I don’t think we’ve seen officials of a government as racially conscious since the days of the 1930s. Surely in the last three decades one’s race has never been so emphasized as it is now-and large numbers of all races will begin to resent that once again we are not talking about the content of our characters, but our racial pedigrees and the degree to which we can all showcase the modern populist version of being born in a log cabin. There is a feeling I think that every Obama appointment for some reason either will fit some desirable race/class/gender rubric, or, if not, will soon have to be “offset” one-for-one, by another PC selection to come: sort of Obama’s racial version of Al Gore’s carbon offsets. This is very disturbing, and one is surprised that sensible people seem to be happy with seeing people in terms of racial profiles rather than simple human beings with a common humanity...
one should remember the story of the last 3,000 years is the escalation of such tribalism into mayhem, as those of different races and religions went at it ad mortem. Why emulate the former Yugoslavia, or Kurd/Shiite/Sunni, or Rwanda, when the US alone had created the basis for a multiracial culture under the aegis of a shared Western paradigm?"
I happened to stumble upon the American Chesterton Society the other day. While I assume this to be a somewhat obscure organization, I found it to be a grandly educational experience. It gave me an excuse to learn about who G.K Chesterton was. My previoulsy knowledge being limited to recognizing the name when finding the occassional quote.
The Society's webpage included numerous shorter pieces of writing Chesterton produced (he was a bit of a polymath as he was a journalist, philosopher, fiction writer, and even a bit of a theologian). I found two to be particularly insightful relating to why having a conscious philosophy of life is a good thing and why Christianity makes more sense than agnosticism and certainly more than atheism. Here is his reasoning for having a
"The best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest; he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have catalogued above. Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts. In some cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else's thinking. That means that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts. He will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else's philosophy; which the beasts do not have to inherit; hence their happiness. Men have always one of two things: either a complete and conscious philosophy or the unconscious acceptance of the broken bits of some incomplete and shattered and often discredited philosophy."
I think this is largely true. We must have some understanding (even if not necessarily correct and true with a capital "T") of what life is. Not to have that is to wander about aimlessly as stormy waters throw one back and forth.
As it relates to Christianity, I am not sure I have ever seen as strong a summation of its need than this,
"Now when Christianity came, the ancient world had just reached this dilemma. It heard the Voice of Nature-Worship crying, "All natural things are good. War is as healthy as he flowers. Lust is as clean as the stars." And it heard also the cry of the hopeless Stoics
and Idealists: "The flowers are at war: the stars are unclean: nothing but man's conscience is right and that is utterly defeated."
Both views were consistent, philosophical and exalted: their only disadvantage was that the first leads logically to murder and the second to suicide. After an agony of thought the world saw the sane path between the two. It was the Christian God. He made Nature but He was Man.
Lastly, there is a word to be said about the Fall. It can only be a word, and it is this. Without the doctrine of the Fall all idea of progress is unmeaning."
So is that the truth? Only faith knows. That said, I do believe Mr. Chesterton to have been a prodigious intellect who offers golden nuggets of thought that can help man make some sense of that which often seems senseless.
I am glad to have found this little corner of the web, it certainly makes me think.
Yet another thougtful read from Spengler, or David P. Goldman. In this blog entry, he throws a devastating roundhouse to the notion that "mediocrity" can lead to greatness. That concept is pedalled far more frequently than one might imagine. He highlights recent op-eds by David Brooks in the New York Times that seems a paean to the wonders not of genius, but to the mediocre.
Spengler states that such mediocrity leads to corruption as those that are not likely to be successful based on their merits seek alternative methods for obtaining what they want.
The entire thesis is provocative and I believe does have a kernal of truth in it. However, we must also be careful. Elitism is not attractive. On the contrary, it breeds resentment and defiance, regardless of whether there is any legitimacy to the opposition or not.
Also, we should remember, genius is like fire. It may bring warmth and provide illumination, but it can also burn. Sometimes, the average and the safe are all that is really needed and should not be viewed with scornful derision. Sometimes the average is what saves humanity from its excesses and provides the stability necessary to ever achieve a posterity. Raw genius can burn itself out and consume everything in an amazing, but apocalyptic conflagration.
Balance and stability are not sexy, but they are necessary. We should just take care not to enshrine them as the summum bonum of existance.
Wars of immense risk are born of desperation. In World War II, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan took immense geostrategic gambles — and lost — but knowingly took the risk because of untenable geopolitical circumstances. By comparison, the postwar United States and Soviet Union were geopolitically secure. Washington had come into its own as a global power secured by the buffer of two oceans, while Moscow enjoyed the greatest strategic depth it had ever known.
The U.S.-Soviet competition was, of course, intense, from the nuclear arms race to the space race to countless proxy wars. Yet underlying it was a fear that the other side would engage in a war that was on its face irrational. Western Europe promised the Soviet Union immense material wealth but would likely have been impossible to subdue. (Why should a Soviet leader expect to succeed where Napoleon and Hitler had failed?) Even without nuclear weapons in the calculus, the cost to the Soviets was too great, and fears of the Soviet invasion of Europe along the North European Plain were overblown. The desperation that caused Germany to seek control over Europe twice in the first half of the 20th century simply did not characterize either the Soviet or U.S. geopolitical position even without nuclear weapons in play. It was within this context that the concept of mutually assured destruction emerged — the idea that each side would possess sufficient retaliatory capability to inflict a devastating “second strike” in the event of even a surprise nuclear attack.
Through it all, the metrics of nuclear warfare became more intricate. Throw weights and penetration rates were calculated and recalculated. Targets were assigned and reassigned. A single city would begin to have multiple target points, each with multiple strategic warheads allocated to its destruction. Theorists and strategists would talk of successful scenarios for first strikes. But only in the Cuban Missile Crisis did the two sides really threaten one another’s fundamental national interests. There were certainly other moments when the world inched toward the nuclear brink. But each time, the global system found its balance, and there was little cause or incentive for political leaders on either side of the Iron Curtain to so fundamentally alter the status quo as to risk direct military confrontation — much less nuclear war.
So through it all, the world carried on, its fundamental dynamics unchanged by the ever-present threat of nuclear war. Indeed, history has shown that once a country has acquired nuclear weapons, the weapons fail to have any real impact on the country’s regional standing or pursuit of power in the international system.
Thus, not only were nuclear weapons never used in even desperate combat situations, their acquisition failed to entail any meaningful shift in geopolitical position. Even as the United Kingdom acquired nuclear weapons in the 1950s, its colonial empire crumbled. The Soviet Union was behaving aggressively all along its periphery before it acquired nuclear weapons. And the Soviet Union had the largest nuclear arsenal in the world when it collapsed — not only despite its arsenal, but in part because the economic burden of creating and maintaining it was unsustainable. Today, nuclear-armed France and non-nuclear armed Germany vie for dominance on the Continent with no regard for France’s small nuclear arsenal.
This August will mark 64 years since any nation used a nuclear weapon in combat. What was supposed to be the ultimate weapon has proved too risky and too inappropriate as a weapon ever to see the light of day again. Though nuclear weapons certainly played a role in the strategic calculus of the Cold War, they had no relation to a military strategy that anyone could seriously contemplate. Militaries, of course, had war plans and scenarios and target sets. But outside this world of role-play Armageddon, neither side was about to precipitate a global nuclear war.
Clausewitz long ago detailed the inescapable connection between national political objectives and military force and strategy. Under this thinking, if nuclear weapons had no relation to practical military strategy, then they were necessarily disconnected (at least in the Clausewitzian sense) from — and could not be integrated with — national and political objectives in a coherent fashion. True to the theory, despite ebbs and flows in the nuclear arms race, for 64 years, no one has found a good reason to detonate a nuclear bomb."
I would like to touch upon the following snippet in a bit more detail,
"New additions to the nuclear club are always cause for concern. But though North Korea’s nuclear program continues apace, it hardly threatens to shift underlying geopolitical realities. It may encourage the United States to retain a slightly larger arsenal to reassure Japan and South Korea about the credibility of its nuclear umbrella. It also could encourage Tokyo and Seoul to pursue their own weapons. But none of these shifts, though significant, is likely to alter the defining military, economic and political dynamics of the region fundamentally.
Nuclear arms are better understood as an insurance policy, one that no potential aggressor has any intention of steering afoul of. Without practical military or political use, they remain held in reserve — where in all likelihood they will remain for the foreseeable future."
Essentially, this argues that nuclear weapons will always remain in reserve and that the potential for their actual use is virtually inconceivable. I am less sanguine.
As I constantly refer to the "Golden Age of Proliferation" my concern is not so much that a stable nation would ever use (or even sell) nuclear weapons. Yet, instability could well raise the specter of use or, more likely, them being sold or stolen.
Obviously, we are not talking about ballistic missiles as those would be next to impossible for any terrorist group to utilize, however, serious dangers from less full blown devices still can level major portions of a modern, iindustrial city. Therein lies the challenge and the fear. North Korea is far from stable as no one knows what the status of Kim jong-Il is or how any subsequent transfer of power will take place.
We assume the North Korean military is rational. This is probably correct. But internal power struggles and ambiguity make everyone on edge.
Anyone paying attention to the news over the last several days could not miss that North Korea not only conducted another nuclear test (though admittedly small), but that it also fired multiple short range missiles while saying it will no longer abide by the 1953 armistice that put a lid on the Korean War.
Obviously, this is huge news, though it also is not overly surprising. With all the controversy and uncertainty surrounding the health of leader Kim jong-Il and any efforts underway to begin a possible transfer of power in the not so distant future, this “showmanship” could be expected. Kim has proven himself quite adept at knowing when to apply pressure to the global community in his efforts to extort concessions.
No one thinks North Korea will be launching a missile attack any time soon on South Korea , Japan , or, especially the US . However, as with the ongoing issue with Iran ’s nuclear program, this illustrates the immense, if not impossible, challenge of keeping the nuclear genie bottled up. How long before North Korea may sell technology to a terrorist group? It already appears they were helping Syria In that nation’s effort to acquire weapons.
I know, experts are convinces that no sovereign nation (at least none that are not suicidal) would run the risks associated with pawning their WMD ware to terrorist groups they could not be sure of controlling. However, experts are often wrong and contingencies must be planned for, especially when the stakes are high.
As we continue marching in the new Age of Proliferation, we need to examine our old notions of deterrence and update them for a more unstable time. It is never too early to start.
A lot of anticipation is palpable relative to the upcoming Cairo speech that President Obama intends to deliver to the Muslim world from Cairo, Egypt.
A very thoughtful analysis is provided here by the blog Diplomat of the Future. I find this to always be a solid read even with its somewhat inaccessible to the layman academic tenor.
In this piece, the absurdity of Obama's likely speech and the similar view shared by the current British Foreign Secretary is highlighted ruthlessly. In essence, "understanding", "compromise", and other euphemisms for greater cultural sensitivity border on the ridiculous. As it states,
"Let us be clear: diplomacy and statecraft is at times a messy or indeed a nasty business. As the late great Max Weber pointed out above, if one is interested in savings souls, one should probably not enter politics. The ultimate, 'art of the possible', as the even more great Otto von Bismarck-Schonhausen once put it. The real issue as it relates to the Muslim world, indeed the troubled, ugly and not very appealing world outside of the USA, Canada, Japan (other parts of East Asia) and Europe, is how does one hold hands or co-operate with rulers who while not in the least democratic or tolerant, are: a)legitimate; b) not aggressive outside of their own borders...
The reality of the situation, is that due to a variety of differing and not very intelligent or cogent reasons, Western views and policies as they relate to the Muslim world are at best quixotic and at worst idiotic & simply mindless."
There really are major differences between cultures in the world that are not capable of being papered over despite the brilliance of those making the attempt. America has a hard time accepting this. Both Bush's "democracy" agenda and Obama's "respect" agenda are flawed because they assume a universal commonality between cultures that is not there.
All humans want respect and to this extent there is at least some universal commonality. The problem is, what illustrates this respect to one may be quite the opposite of what represents it to another. At the end of the day I do not think President Obama will be all that much more effective at bridging these divides between the West and the Muslim world than President Bush.
We should hope to simply manage these challenges and limit their potential for exploding in such a way as to permanently damage our interests. Doing otherwise may superficially make one "feel better" but it won't matter substantively.
On the other hand, what political alternative does President Obama have?
Below is a poem I wrote over a decade ago. I began thinking about it as I explored the history of civilizations by reading Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, and reflected on the numerous postings of the pseudonymous Spengler, or David P. Goldman ,at the Asia Times and now, First Things. The rise and fall of civilizations seems sometimes so comparable to the birth, maturation, decline, and death of man.
It made me again wonder about the meaning of life and the fact that understanding that mystery is an impossibility. There is no way to penetrate that which is impenetrable. Finite minds can only understand so much of infinity and only an infinite perspective could ever allow us to fully "understand" history and its chronicle of life.
I admit this poem has limitations as it reflects a late teen's perspective on the unanswerable. For all I know now that I did not know then, I still have to grapple with the exact same questions and am unable to come any closer to the truth with a capital "T" without a faithful abandonment of the hope of rationally "knowing." Perhaps, that is the key difference of what I believe I know now, faith.
This Conundrum (Life)
When one gazes into the placid reflection of smooth mirror glass, what do they see?
Is any man or woman ever able to actually see the truth staring back at them?
Questions seem to abound and fly from all walks of known existence, demanding explanation
What delicate creature is this and what provides it's sustenance for today, tomorrow, and the next day?
Out of the mother's bossom all light seems to blind and obfuscate perceptions of reality
Mystical dreams seem to make confusing sense as the struggle for identity ravenously consumes
Searching for themselves with the ignorance of a disconnected element of nature
A preacher espouses his holiest of messages and seeks to offer spiritual salvation
Eyes peer behind a magician's curtain, feverishly hoping to spy a trick unable to grasped
Yet their disconnectedness from themselves and each other closes their eyes prematurely
The delicate creatures writhe spasmodically in their own quagmire of self induced delusion
A scientist with infinitely small amount of wisdom preaches secular religion for enlightened times
Eyes again peer, this time into secret notebooks with the desire to steal their own respect
As life moves forward, the less pieces of the puzzle seem to fit where small minds expect them to reside
Again, one gazes at the mirror in the twilight of their time on this hurtling sphere
No religion, no science, no philosophy illuminates the ultimate question of questions
Of all conundrums known by mankind, only one remains hidden from the soul's guiding light: life itself
I posted this originally as a comment on the Becker-Posner blog .
Conservatism, especially an intellectually stimulating and worthwhile conservatism, needs to reassert itself.
A certain degree of populism is always an essential ingredient to political, electoral success, however, to rely on pure emotionalism lends itself to poorly conceived policies as Mr. Posner clearly states.
Therefore, it is important that those who believe that cultural conservatism is not retrograde, but a pivotal mechanism for avoiding the growth of nihilistic despair, must better articulate their reasoning.
It is not enough to say that "God says it's wrong" as there are too many interpretations of what God means. However, conservatism, as in conserving tradition and allowing progress to move slowly and pragmatically, as opposed to radically, is an emminently defensible position.
The loss of the culture wars has led to too many single household families and many economic hardships that correspond to that reality.
The loss of the culutre wars has a bred a post-modernist sensibility in too many youth that now seems to believe that any judgements made are by definition "oppressive" and or/ignorant.
The loss of the culture wars has unmoored legitimate capitalist instincts from ethics and allowed greed to run rampant and the disadvantaged to seek salvation in unrealistic messianism.
The loss of the culture wars has been an unmitigated disaster for this nation and it was lost during the conservative ascendancy. That is a strong rebuke.
Today, the remaining culture warriors, disillusioned by the decline in values, too often come across as angry and unwilling to engage is reasoned debate. This makes it too easy for them to be caricaturized, delegitimzed, and stigmatized.
For the conservative movement to rise again, it must use reason to bolster its arguments and find intellectual champions who can battle the new rise of leftist "Liberalism" on its own terms.
To be pro-life, pro-family, pro-second amendment,strong on national security are not backwards looking positions. They are forward looking, we just have to present them as such.
I have frequently posted stories on my blog linking to the pseudonymous “Spengler” at Asia Times. The real identity of this erudite, yet controversial writer was for years something of an Internet parlor game. I suppose choosing to write under the name of an author whose pessimistic and deterministic view of human history was encapsulated in the well known title, the Decline of the West, raises questions of identity and intended purposes.
This article finally tears away the veil of mystery surrounding Spengler as he sketches his own intellectual odyssey and the reason he chose to write under that name.
Also, in this article, Spengler, or David P. Goldman, examines the competitive nature of many Chinese and contrasts that with what he clearly believes to be a slothfully indulgent West.
I do not subscribe to all of Spengler’s ideas, but his general thesis that civilizations die by no longer valuing their future posterity, while new, hungry civilizations rise, is a sobering thought experiment for those convinced of the possibility of manmade utopias at the end of the rainbow.
Civilizations, in fact most civilizations, die. Only those that are still relatively young seem to still be alive and even as they live, they struggle. Competition is ceaseless and once the will for competition ceases to exert its gravitational pull, lethargy is spawned.
To be a conservative is to recognize the limitations of man and be willing to even take pride in some of the very things that make him parochial. This doesn’t mean we should remain standing in one place forever with feet of clay, but it should sober us to the prospects of what is the best that can happen in this world.
Progress appears; often only in retrospect, to be linear, but really occurs in fits and starts. Two steps forward and one back. There are no “final solutions” that will ever be final. That is the central tenet of conservatism.
Civilizations die when their youthful vigor peters out. This happens because man becomes so convinced of his “solutions” to the exigencies of the moment that he fails to remain connected even to shards of tradition and memories that stir deeply in the unconscious. In a sense, the desire to seek unbounded “progress” destroys the foundations necessary for society to exist in a healthily functional way. A void emerges like a Black Hole that eventually will suck all goodness and hope into its infinite vortex.
Perhaps, then, civilizations are the most ironic of human constructs- both the highest culture and the beginning of the end of that culture.
Globalization is not universalism, “westernization”, or “Americanization.” It is merely a tool that can be used by any number of cultures. Some will reap its fruits more than others.
Fundamentally, the question is- will globalization bring man together or will it find new ways to tear him apart? An unyielding adherent to progress will believe it to bring man together, a conservative anticipates the absurdity of this “final solution” to history’s grand problems and recognize the transience of the moment. A conservative will also smell decay long before the rot has decimated the structures underpinning their civilization, because it as an odor only tradition and history rightfully appreciates.
A conservative must defend what has been great, because to defend what “may be great” is a leap of faith more difficult than believing in God and far more likely to sow seeds of bitterness when the inevitable disappointment saps that once youthful vigor. At that point, a rootless, existential ambiguity consumes those once well meaning hopes.
Tradition is posterity and the cumulative total of history’s lessons. Losing tradition will kill civilization.
I wrote the below blog in response to a thoughtful piece by Roger Ebert (yes, the movie critic) on his blog regarding how he conceives of God. The comments ijn response to his blog were, for the most part, quite thoughtful and intriguing. I found it stimulating, though I was troubled by the atheistic bent of many comments. That said, the below encapsulated my own, often conflicting and complex feelings about God and Christianity and the necessity of faith.
God, the universe, knowledge, truth, these are all very difficult things to wrap oneself around. I believe there is a "Truth" with the capital "T", yet the more one reads philosophy and engages with the great minds of the past and present, the more one realizes they simply cannot know what that "Truth" is through intellectual understanding. The "Truth" is simply too large and man's mind too finite to be able to stand at a point far enough above and beyond to have the necessary total vision that would allow one to say they see the completeness of "Truth."
Socrates was wise in a most fundamental way because he acknowledged that he did not really know. His skill was in forcing others to realize that they too, irrespective of their seeming assurances to the contrary, do not really know.
Does God exist? I am a firm believer in an uncaused cause. I suppose this is Aristotelian and in Catholic terms, the view of Aquinas. Our linearly inclined minds simply are unable to conceive of something that exists outside that which has a beginning and an end, an Alpha and an Omega.
Whether that God is the God of monotheism and the Judeo-Christian tradition is a question I do not feel answerable via the intellect. As other posters have made clear here, there must be an "experience" that draws one to these conclusions.
That said, I do believe atheism is every bit as arrogant and unyielding in its own way as the narrowest religion has ever been. To be an atheist is to be certain of an absence of God. That may be a label, but if it fits, it is folly to pretend it to be something other than what it is.
I also believe secular humanism is a disease that will not save mankind. I do not believe it will lead to a utopia at the end of the rainbow where man will feel infinite love for his neighbors not just next door but in the continent over the ocean. Secular humanism does not have an external reference point for morality. At best, ethics under purely secularized humanism is little more than utilitarianism when all the pious pontifications are stripped away.
God is necessary, because only God gives such a reference point. It allows a true morality that is not a cover for that which has been (and remains) animalistic about man.
Whether "God" actually exists in the realm of "Truth" with a capital "T" then becomes of secondary if not tertiary importance. Man needs God to survive here and now in a world and universe that is only barely grasped in multifaceted manifestations.
Faith is like stepping off a cliff and is truly a Kierkeggardian Leap. Yet that leap is all that will ultimately allow man to find salvation here now; just as much as salvation in the netherworld of unfathomed infinity.
There may be a whiff of utilitarianism in this line of argument, but man is a utilitarian entity and must seek out that which is most beneficial. Where does one go if not to that which is beneficial?
Man, contrary to Nietzsche and his desire for the transvaluation of values, is not really able to create a morality out of whole cloth. Thus utility becomes necessity. The “Ubermensch” finds that the will to power leads back to a possibly even more primordial need than that for power- the desire for eternity.
Nothing gives eternity but faith, faith in history, faith in memory, faith in that that bestows life itself.
The last twelve months have been great for the though-provoking action film genre. Two instant classics have been released, the Dark Knight and now Watchmen.
Both are based on comic book characters and/or stories. Yet both delve into both deep psychological and philosophical terrain.
The Dark Knight asks serious questions of how far does society go to protect itself from the ravages of those who seek chaos. How can you, as Nietzsche warns, take care that when fighting monsters, one does not become a monster oneself? How do you avoid the abyss’ gaze as it stares into you own soul?
I have written on that film in previous blogs. Now, Watchmen has been released.
While I did not enjoy that film nearly as much, despite the appearance of Henry Kissinger advising President Nixon in an alternate reality 1985, it definitely treads along some of the same lines as the Dark Knight. In this case it does so on an even grander scale. It takes the battle for the soul of a city and amplifies it into a global battle for the survival of mankind.
I am not an aficionado of the critically acclaimed comic book series that spawned the movie, so I offer no illusions that I have ruminated on the meaning of Watchmen for years. A lot of questions are raised in the dense film including the nature of damaged psyches, how does a God actually feel towards creatures as seemingly inconsequential to it as ants to man, and what is justice in a world laden with corruption. However, I was most interested in the largest question that is resolved at the end.
With no spoilers involved, I was impressed with the final minutes of the film. It raises an imminently human question on the broadest of scales: what might it take to create a world in which the differences between peoples and nations are set aside in order to avoid unleashing apocalypse on our own heads.
If, as Thomas Hobbes would say of life in the state of nature, life is nasty, brutish, and short, how do we forestall that when we now have near god-like power over the atom?
Obviously, to reflect on these questions is not unique, but it does seem many people avert their eyes from confronting these questions. Fortunately, through the entertainment media, there are new pathways for people to wrestle with these concepts. We are not all philosophers, but we can all embrace some philosophical methods.
Both the Dark Knight and Watchmen deal very much with what is essentially the “noble lie” referred to as far back as Plato. Is civilization based upon a fiction, a “necessary myth?” Both films respond in the affirmative to this question, though they do not gloss over the enormous personal consequences of this.
Using philosophical method, which is really the willingness to question, they invite everyone to grapple with that notion.
I know what I believe. I wonder how many really understand what they believe? Maybe movies like these will bring people closer to that understanding.
Though it is still very early to be pronouncing judgment on the newly installed Obama Administration, the very nature of the historical moment makes it more necessary than ever to examine its progress.
I posted a previous blog entry that indicated Obama was stocking his national security team with a virtual cornucopia of talent. This process has definitely continued. There is no doubt that his Administration is not loaded with overly pacifist thinkers. While it certainly is not as nationalistic and rhetorically militant as the former Bush Administration, it has also, thus far, not come off as the second coming of a naïve Jimmy Carter.
While I question the movement by the Administration towards nuclear negotiations with the Russians that will reduce our stockpile for a variety of strategic reasons, am not sure Team Obama has been as friendly as it should with what ought to be a strong strategic partner in India, and believe hundreds of millions of reconstruction to Gaza is premature, overall, I am not shaking my head in amazement at poor choices. Even the gambit, possibly inaccurately portrayed by the media, of a potential quid pro quo with Russia over Central European based missile defense systems vis a vis Russian assistance with the Iranian nuclear program does not trouble me at this point. While we may learn that the move was a rash and naïve diplomatic gesture that needlessly threw Eastern Europe’s faith in America as an ally into question; we do not know the details or the overall strategic design and goal of the letter from Obama to Medvedev. Consequently, we must wait before casting aspersions.
With an empowered National Security Council consolidating White House control over foreign and defense policy, Obama is actually making, in my opinion, a wise decision as the Executive Branch is the key element of government capable of real strategic thinking. Additionally, by maintaining a solid grip on overall policy, the White House is hoping to avoid bureaucratic non-compliance through never ending discussion and protocol for protocol sake.
In a nutshell, while I by no means love Obama’s foreign policy yet, I am not nearly as horrified by it as I may have expected during the campaign last year. It appears to be pragmatic and sober, something American foreign policy is in dire need of.
However, my fears of what Obama would do domestically are being realized. I have written extensively about the “socialization” of the U.S. Clearly, this is becoming the conservative line of attack on Obama and, it appears largely true.
Obama is using the current economic crisis as a way to push forward a laundry list of leftist domestic programs. Raising taxes, raising energy costs, downgrading charitable giving, re-empowering unions are not what America needs today.
While a compelling case may be made for more activist government due the current nature of the economic crisis and as a result of three decades of constant deregulation in the financial sector that removed some pivotal safeguards, a full blown leftist grab bag of policies is not the solution. Moderation is. A thoughtful and appropriate regulation of banks, financial instruments, and futures markets makes sense. Human nature all too easily succumbs to greedy impulses in the absence of some restraint. However, Obama is not being moderate, despite his choice of words.
When the stock market declines 20 percent since his inauguration there’s a message.
He may not completely be turning us into a complete European like state, but he certainly is pushing us in that general direction. Unfortunately, America cannot afford to become as statist as Europe has become. For all America’s flaws, it is still the great global stabilizer. This requires a vibrant economy to afford the tools needed for power projection.
Sadly, I am firmly convinced that the end game of Obama’s plan will not be a vibrant economy. It will be a slow growth behemoth with limited adaptability that will not yield the same creative sparks it has been so successful at engendering in the past. Eventually, this will lead to weakness in the face of adversaries and allies. If not today, then tomorrow.
In a nutshell, I would say Obama is exceeding my expectations in foreign policy, though not without some reservation. He is also confirming all my fears on domestic policy.
Since Obama's ascencion to the Presidency, there has been a renewed focus on many elements of foreign policy. It is quite likely that few will equal in importance the new overtures being made towards Russia as it relates to new agreements on both nations' nuclear weapon stockpiles.
With the START Treaty expiring at the end of 2009, there is a unique opportunity to revisit the issue of how many nuclear weapons the US and Russia will maintain in their arsenals. President Obama has made clear his desire to push for a dramatic reduction to the tune of 1,000.
President Obama clearly believes that by our limiting the number of weapons we have (which can only be done in conjunction with comparable Russian limits), the US will have the moral authority to reach out to would be nuclear weapons states and convince them that they need not continue moving down that path.
To that end, there has been some press coverage that then President-elect Obama essentially sent former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin and open the door to further conversations along these lines. This article from a british paper details this rumour, which it must be made clear, both Obama and Kissinger deny. Rather, Kissinger admits to meeting Russian President Medvedev, but never says he met with Putin, nor does Kissinger indicate that the conversations were in any way authorized by the President.
Of course, given Kissinger's long history of secretive diplomacy while serving President Nixon (see Paris Peace Talks with the North Vietnamese and, spectacularly, the opening to China where he feigned illness and secretly boarded a plane in Pakistan to go to China without the press' knowledge), his protestations of Presidential intent may be viewed with some skepticism.
Clearly, Kissinger appears to want to cement his legacy as a peacemaker. As I referred to previously, Kissinger is advocating heartily for a strong US-China relationship to manage economic issues. Now, it appears, he is pushing just as hard to cement a strong US-Russian relationship in order to stem the seemingly inevitable tide of nuclear proliferation. This article that Kissinger wrote for Newsweek, does an excellent job of outlining his positions on prolferation. A few excerpts are in order:
"More than 200 years ago, the philosopher Immanuel Kant defined the ultimate choice before mankind: if world history was to culminate in universal peace, would it be through moral insight, or through catastrophe of a magnitude that allowed no other outcome? We are approaching a point where that choice may be imposed on us. The basic dilemma of the nuclear age has been with us since Hiroshima: how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that are being pursued. Any use of nuclear weapons is certain to involve a level of casualties and devastation out of proportion to foreseeable foreign-policy objectives. Efforts to develop a more nuanced application have never succeeded, from the doctrine of a geographically limited nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s to the "mutual assured destruction" theory of general nuclear war in the 1970s."
This paragraph is fascinating as it encapsulates so much of Kissinger's thoughts over the years. He returns to Immanuel Kant, the philosopher that developed the concept of the "categorical imperative" and the notion of cosmopolitan, perpetual peace as a way to explain the juncture he feels we are at when it comes to the future of nuclear weapons. Of course, Kissinger spent a lot of time with Kant in his younger days, writing his senior thesis at Harvard (the longest thesis ever written at Harvard) on the topic of the "Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant." Though by no means a Kantian in the sense that Kant is somewhat of a determinst (as are both Spengler and Toynbee), it appears Kissinger wanted to avoid the full blown pessism inherent in at least Spengler's views of the "Decline of the West." Kant did accomplish this at a certain, though imperfect level.
Given that consideration, for Kissinger now to return to Kant so late in his career, and quite likely his life, is telling. This is especially so given the issue of choice which has always been at the core of his thought. Additionally in the paragraph above, you can also see references to the debates over the use of nuclear weapons from previous eras of the Cold War. Kissinger was quite influential in those early debates. In fact, the "nuanced application" was very much an idea he expounded upon in one of the books that brought him to the attention of a mass audience, or at least and audience of key policy intellectuals.
That he now embraces a Kantian choice and is critical of not just the theory of "Mutually Assured Destruction" but his own previous inclinations towards flexibility in the use of nuclear weapons, shows a man in a reflective mood pondering how to shape a legacy that will outlive his own immediate impact.
Is this, what is driving this push by Kissinger? I know that other famous gray beards of foreign policy: Sam Nunn, George Schultz, and William Perry have signed on as supporters of renewed efforts at nuclear arms reductions. But it is Kissinger who is most interesting. For a man so often vilified as an unscrupulous "realpolitiker" who was more Machiavelli than Kant, it appears he is trying his hand at embracing a high morality that can be viewed favorable by those not inculcated by the dour spirit of European "realism."
In his Harvard thesis Kissinger has been quoted saying: "Transitoriness is the fate of existence. No civilization has yet been permanent, no longing completely fulfilled. This is necessity, the fatedness of history, the dilemma of mortality.”
It appears Kissinger is tempting fate by attempting to resolve one of the thorniest of moral dilemas. He is much too intelligent to believe this to be an easy task, or even one that can be completed. He states this in the Newsweek piece, "My colleague Sam Nunn has described the effort as akin to climbing a mountain shrouded in clouds. We cannot describe its top nor be certain that there may not be unforeseen and perhaps insurmountable obstacles on the way. But we are prepared to undertake the journey in the belief that the summit will never come into view unless we begin the ascent and deal with the proliferation issues immediately before us, including the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs."
I have long argued we are entering the "Golden Age of Proliferation." Kissinger is making a last gasp effort to block this as he says it is not inevitable. However, his own admonition, "Our age has stolen fire from the gods; can we confine it to peaceful purposes before it consumes us?" I believe betrays what he thinks will ultimately happen.
Prometheus stole fire and suffered immensely for his hubris. From the day we successfully developed nuclear weapons, we too stole fire. Thus far, except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mankind has avoided a similar fate despite our trangression. Can such fate be tempted indefinitely?
History will be the judge. I hope we choose wisely, not rashly and not naively.
I came across two articles today that firmly encapsulate in my mind the direction our nation is moving in and I found myself deeply troubled. I am troubled at a level that is visceral and almost makes me ill because I fear that the problems of the moment, as bad as they undeniably are, will usher in not a better world, but a worse one.
The first article is from Newsweek. The headline proclaims it all- "We Are All Socialists Now." Rather than explain the full piece let me leave a quote from the piece that sums it well:
"A decade ago U.S. government spending was 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent in the euro zone—a roughly 14-point gap, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2010 U.S. spending is expected to be 39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone—a gap of less than 8 points. As entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French...
Now comes the reckoning. The answer may indeed be more government. In the short run, since neither consumers nor business is likely to do it, the government will have to stimulate the economy. And in the long run, an aging population and global warming and higher energy costs will demand more government taxing and spending. The catch is that more government intrusion in the economy will almost surely limit growth (as it has in Europe, where a big welfare state has caused chronic high unemployment). Growth has always been America's birthright and saving grace."
The second article comes from an author that I have always been deeply fond of, the Classical military historian, Victor Davis Hanson. As I read his concluding paragraphs and thought about them in conjunction with the Newsweek story my fears of the past came back to me. Hanson makes explicit how the post-modern, secularized man that refuses to reproduce and looks only for the pleasures of this world has led to statism. Below is the relevant section.
"I had a conversation (an argument) recently with a European, about contemporary culture. I tried to explain the mutually reinforcing elements of socialism, atheism, utopianism, pacifism, and statism (he was giving America a second chance to morph into Euros under Obama). But if one believes in no transcendence, that there is nothing other than the present, then for too many satisfying the appetites becomes the prime directive. Childlessness, living at home in one's 30s, dependence on the state, all that derives from a system that ensures equality of result, and substitutes Logos and Ratio for any notion of a deity that sees sin and sacrifice, and reminds us that our souls are immortal and affected by their brief residences in our flesh. In other words, that Euros expect free health care, free care for their elderly parents, free schools, free defense from the USA, harbor little hopes for rising above the station of anyone else, find housing and jobs scarce, and don't feel they can or want to leave behind something for their children larger than what they inherited-- are all interrelated phenomena. European postmodern man offers mostly platitudes that he thinks please those who might be dangerous to him, and finds psychological recompense and solace by gratuitously trashing those who aren't. Note how such constitution peoples favor Hamas over Israel--and usually almost anyone over the US. Were Hamas a successful democracy that took no European aid and offered it in turn no threats, and Israel a failed fascistic terrorist movement that depended on Europe for aid and comfort, while engaging in terrorism and voicing postmodern platitudes about oppression, then we would expect Israel to be a strong European ally. (I think many Europeans are more sympathetic to the Palestinian Authority or Syria or Iran than the incipient democracy in Iraq)."
So how is "post-modern" man different from Nietzsche's terrible vision of the "Last Man." Compare for yourself as Nietzsche's prophet, Zarathustra speaks:
"I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.
'We have invented happiness, 'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth...
One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink...
One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
'We have invented happiness', say the last men, and they blink."
I see little difference.
Nietzsche said that God is Dead, by which he meant that WE have killed him in our desire to be "enlightened" during our push to become masters of our own fate in this world without transcendance. Nietzsche saw that without God, nihilism, a lack of faith in anything, was inevitable. He tried to replace God with a Godlike man- the notorious Ubermensch or Overman.
He may have been wrong in his solutions, but he clearly diagnosed the malady of modern man. Today more than ever we stand on the precipice of America joining Europe and becoming "post-modern" which is really nothing more than becoming "Last Men."
The greatness of spirit that was such a constant through most of human history is intentionally being homogeneized with the vague, but discernable desire to enforce equality of outcome. "Greatness" is scoffed at, ridiculed, and referred to as "selfish", "narrow-minded", and contrary to the communitarian ideals that supposedly will save this planet from our own evil born of ignorance.
There will not be a levelling up, there will only be a levelling down. From where will come the next Plato, Aristotle, Alexander, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, or Dante? Where will even be the next Washington, Lincoln, or Churchill?
Socialism breeds sloth. I know that there is a need for government to restrain the excesses that are inherent in flawed man. However, we are taking steps that go far beyond the necessary restraints and limited assistance that is needed to assure people don't "fall through the cracks." We are choosing to make the world that our children (if we choose to have them) are born into a world of bland mediocrity that denigrates what has been so noble about humanity.
Yes, its true, the price for greatness and nobility is some instability, some danger, but the desire to eradicate that can only lead to a sterility that saps man of what has made him human.
The religious societies are vastly more human than the experiment we are attempting to consolidate. Ironically, there is disorder in those societies, but they are human. Perhaps, that is not as bad a thing as so often we think it is. Perhaps, we'll look more deeply before setting sail for a destination that is preordained to destroy our very souls and leave us empty husks that will over time be easy pickings for those that still understand how to be humans.
The Romans largely failed to do that and they became history. America is not yet doomed for a repeat performance, but our Attila and Alaric is out there waiting for an opportune moment to strike at our cracked foundations. We should defend those foundations and not become the "Last" Post-Modern Man.
In recent days, both Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have written op-eds that call on the US and China to continue a cooperative relationship so as to avoid the potential of global instability, especially in the wake of the global financial crisis.
While both are rivals, they also played pivotal roles in the establishment of modern Sino-American relations. Kissinger and the President he served, Richard Nixon, opened the door to China as a way to create diplomatic flexibility vis a vis the Soviet Union within the context of the Cold War. Brzezinski, while serving as President Carter's National Security Advisor played a key role in normalizing diplomatic relations with China which, he asserts in his piece, enabled Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, to liberalize China's economy.
The combined result of these policies has been the extraordinary rise of China, an economic miracle of almost unprecedented proportions. It also opened the door to the very strange and symbiotic relationship the US and China now have where the US needs China to buy our debt in order to fund our domestic spending habits while they have required us to purchase their exports to maintain high employment so as to avoid political unrest.
The recent financial crisis undounbtedly puts this relationship in question. It is not surprising that China is beginning to focus more on its own domestic consumption as a way to maintain what it perceives to be an adequate growth. However, as Kissinger points out, without a global infrastructure of governance, actions like this could well become harbingers of a new wave of mercantilism. This, in his view, would lead not to stability, but to a new age of chaos as the integration that has led to vast wealth creation comes apart.
At that point, it is inevitable that inward looking nations and frusterated populations may fall prey to nasty ways of thinking that we only think have been relegated to the dust bins of history.
Both Brzezinski and Kissinger are unambiguous in their support for a new global architecture that will keep economic integration from breaking apart due to political contingencies. At the core of this is the Sino-American relationship. Indeed, it is the most important bilateral relationship in the world.
There are no guarantees. I am skeptical that a new infrastructure will be found because man continues to be a parochial creature. However, for those who seek peace, some form of architecture must be found. As strong a proponent of American exceptionalism as I am, America alone is incapable of maintaining global stability. America has already been Atlas for half a century. I hope we do not shrug. The consequences will be a new age of instability married with amazingly destructive technology. That is not a world one would want to leave to their children.
Last Wednesday evening, a group of Islamist operatives carried out a complex terror operation in the Indian city of Mumbai. The attack was not complex because of the weapons used or its size, but in the apparent training, multiple methods of approaching the city and excellent operational security and discipline in the final phases of the operation, when the last remaining attackers held out in the Taj Mahal hotel for several days. The operational goal of the attack clearly was to cause as many casualties as possible, particularly among Jews and well-to-do guests of five-star hotels. But attacks on various other targets, from railroad stations to hospitals, indicate that the more general purpose was to spread terror in a major Indian city.
While it is not clear precisely who carried out the Mumbai attack, two separate units apparently were involved. One group, possibly consisting of Indian Muslims, was established in Mumbai ahead of the attacks. The second group appears to have just arrived. It traveled via ship from Karachi, Pakistan, later hijacked a small Indian vessel to get past Indian coastal patrols, and ultimately landed near Mumbai.
Extensive preparations apparently had been made, including surveillance of the targets. So while the precise number of attackers remains unclear, the attack clearly was well-planned and well-executed.
Evidence and logic suggest that radical Pakistani Islamists carried out the attack. These groups have a highly complex and deliberately amorphous structure. Rather than being centrally controlled, ad hoc teams are created with links to one or more groups. Conceivably, they might have lacked links to any group, but this is hard to believe. Too much planning and training were involved in this attack for it to have been conceived by a bunch of guys in a garage. While precisely which radical Pakistani Islamist group or groups were involved is unknown, the Mumbai attack appears to have originated in Pakistan. It could have been linked to al Qaeda prime or its various franchises and/or to Kashmiri insurgents.
More important than the question of the exact group that carried out the attack, however, is the attackers’ strategic end. There is a tendency to regard terror attacks as ends in themselves, carried out simply for the sake of spreading terror. In the highly politicized atmosphere of Pakistan’s radical Islamist factions, however, terror frequently has a more sophisticated and strategic purpose. Whoever invested the time and took the risk in organizing this attack had a reason to do so. Let’s work backward to that reason by examining the logical outcomes following this attack.
The most striking aspect of the Mumbai attack is the challenge it presents to the Indian government — a challenge almost impossible for New Delhi to ignore. A December 2001 Islamist attack on the Indian parliament triggered an intense confrontation between India and Pakistan. Since then, New Delhi has not responded in a dramatic fashion to numerous Islamist attacks against India that were traceable to Pakistan. The Mumbai attack, by contrast, aimed to force a response from New Delhi by being so grievous that any Indian government showing only a muted reaction to it would fall.
India’s restrained response to Islamist attacks (even those originating in Pakistan) in recent years has come about because New Delhi has understood that, for a host of reasons, Islamabad has been unable to control radical Pakistani Islamist groups. India did not want war with Pakistan; it felt it had more important issues to deal with. New Delhi therefore accepted Islamabad’s assurances that Pakistan would do its best to curb terror attacks, and after suitable posturing, allowed tensions originating from Islamist attacks to pass.
This time, however, the attackers struck in such a way that New Delhi couldn’t allow the incident to pass. As one might expect, public opinion in India is shifting from stunned to furious. India’s Congress party-led government is politically weak and nearing the end of its life span. It lacks the political power to ignore the attack, even if it were inclined to do so. If it ignored the attack, it would fall, and a more intensely nationalist government would take its place. It is therefore very difficult to imagine circumstances under which the Indians could respond to this attack in the same manner they have to recent Islamist attacks.
What the Indians actually will do is not clear. In 2001-2002, New Delhi responded to the attack on the Indian parliament by moving forces close to the Pakistani border and the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, engaging in artillery duels along the front, and bringing its nuclear forces to a high level of alert. The Pakistanis made a similar response. Whether India ever actually intended to attack Pakistan remains unclear, but either way, New Delhi created an intense crisis in Pakistan.
The United States used this crisis for its own ends. Having just completed the first phase of its campaign in Afghanistan, Washington was intensely pressuring Pakistan’s then-Musharraf government to expand cooperation with the United States; purge its intelligence organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of radical Islamists; and crack down on al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Afghan-Pakistani border region. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had been reluctant to cooperate with Washington, as doing so inevitably would spark a massive domestic backlash against his government.
The crisis with India produced an opening for the United States. Eager to get India to stand down from the crisis, the Pakistanis looked to the Americans to mediate. And the price for U.S. mediation was increased cooperation from Pakistan with the United States. The Indians, not eager for war, backed down from the crisis after guarantees that Islamabad would impose stronger controls on Islamist groups in Kashmir.
In 2001-2002, the Indo-Pakistani crisis played into American hands. In 2008, the new Indo-Pakistani crisis might play differently. The United States recently has demanded increased Pakistani cooperation along the Afghan border. Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama has stated his intention to focus on Afghanistan and pressure the Pakistanis.
Therefore, one of Islamabad’s first responses to the new Indo-Pakistani crisis was to announce that if the Indians increased their forces along Pakistan’s eastern border, Pakistan would be forced to withdraw 100,000 troops from its western border with Afghanistan. In other words, threats from India would cause Pakistan to dramatically reduce its cooperation with the United States in the Afghan war. The Indian foreign minister is flying to the United States to meet with Obama; obviously, this matter will be discussed among others.
We expect the United States to pressure India not to create a crisis, in order to avoid this outcome. As we have said, the problem is that it is unclear whether politically the Indians can afford restraint. At the very least, New Delhi must demand that the Pakistani government take steps to make the ISI and Pakistan’s other internal security apparatus more effective. Even if the Indians concede that there was no ISI involvement in the attack, they will argue that the ISI is incapable of stopping such attacks. They will demand a purge and reform of the ISI as a sign of Pakistani commitment. Barring that, New Delhi will move troops to the Indo-Pakistani frontier to intimidate Pakistan and placate Indian public opinion.
At that point, Islamabad will have a serious problem. The Pakistani government is even weaker than the Indian government. Pakistan’s civilian regime does not control the Pakistani military, and therefore does not control the ISI. The civilians can’t decide to transform Pakistani security, and the military is not inclined to make this transformation. (Pakistan’s military has had ample opportunity to do so if it wished.)
Pakistan faces the challenge, just one among many, that its civilian and even military leadership lack the ability to reach deep into the ISI and security services to transform them. In some ways, these agencies operate under their own rules. Add to this the reality that the ISI and security forces — even if they are acting more assertively, as Islamabad claims — are demonstrably incapable of controlling radical Islamists in Pakistan. If they were capable, the attack on Mumbai would have been thwarted in Pakistan. The simple reality is that in Pakistan’s case, the will to make this transformation does not seem to be present, and even if it were, the ability to suppress terror attacks isn’t there.
The United States might well want to limit New Delhi’s response. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is on her way to India to discuss just this. But the politics of India’s situation make it unlikely that the Indians can do anything more than listen. It is more than simply a political issue for New Delhi; the Indians have no reason to believe that the Mumbai operation was one of a kind. Further operations like the Mumbai attack might well be planned. Unless the Pakistanis shift their posture inside Pakistan, India has no way of knowing whether other such attacks can be stymied. The Indians will be sympathetic to Washington’s plight in Afghanistan and the need to keep Pakistani troops at the Afghan border. But New Delhi will need something that the Americans — and in fact the Pakistanis — can’t deliver: a guarantee that there will be no more attacks like this one.
The Indian government cannot chance inaction. It probably would fall if it did. Moreover, in the event of inactivity and another attack, Indian public opinion probably will swing to an uncontrollable extreme. If an attack takes place but India has moved toward crisis posture with Pakistan, at least no one can argue that the Indian government remained passive in the face of threats to national security. Therefore, India is likely to refuse American requests for restraint.
It is possible that New Delhi will make a radical proposal to Rice, however. Given that the Pakistani government is incapable of exercising control in its own country, and given that Pakistan now represents a threat to both U.S. and Indian national security, the Indians might suggest a joint operation with the Americans against Pakistan.
What that joint operation might entail is uncertain, but regardless, this is something that Rice would reject out of hand and that Obama would reject in January 2009. Pakistan has a huge population and nuclear weapons, and the last thing Bush or Obama wants is to practice nation-building in Pakistan. The Indians, of course, will anticipate this response. The truth is that New Delhi itself does not want to engage deep in Pakistan to strike at militant training camps and other Islamist sites. That would be a nightmare. But if Rice shows up with a request for Indian restraint and no concrete proposal — or willingness to entertain a proposal — for solving the Pakistani problem, India will be able to refuse on the grounds that the Americans are asking India to absorb a risk (more Mumbai-style attacks) without the United States’ willingness to share in the risk.
That will set the stage for another Indo-Pakistani confrontation. India will push forces forward all along the Indo-Pakistani frontier, move its nuclear forces to an alert level, begin shelling Pakistan, and perhaps — given the seriousness of the situation — attack short distances into Pakistan and even carry out airstrikes deep in Pakistan. India will demand greater transparency for New Delhi in Pakistani intelligence operations. The Indians will not want to occupy Pakistan; they will want to occupy Pakistan’s security apparatus.
Naturally, the Pakistanis will refuse that. There is no way they can give India, their main adversary, insight into Pakistani intelligence operations. But without that access, India has no reason to trust Pakistan. This will leave the Indians in an odd position: They will be in a near-war posture, but will have made no demands of Pakistan that Islamabad can reasonably deliver and that would benefit India. In one sense, India will be gesturing. In another sense, India will be trapped by making a gesture on which Pakistan cannot deliver. The situation thus could get out of hand.
In the meantime, the Pakistanis certainly will withdraw forces from western Pakistan and deploy them in eastern Pakistan. That will mean that one leg of the Petraeus and Obama plans would collapse. Washington’s expectation of greater Pakistani cooperation along the Afghan border will disappear along with the troops. This will free the Taliban from whatever limits the Pakistani army had placed on it. The Taliban’s ability to fight would increase, while the motivation for any of the Taliban to enter talks — as Afghan President Hamid Karzai has suggested — would decline. U.S. forces, already stretched to the limit, would face an increasingly difficult situation, while pressure on al Qaeda in the tribal areas would decrease.
Now, step back and consider the situation the Mumbai attackers have created. First, the Indian government faces an internal political crisis driving it toward a confrontation it didn’t plan on. Second, the minimum Pakistani response to a renewed Indo-Pakistani crisis will be withdrawing forces from western Pakistan, thereby strengthening the Taliban and securing al Qaeda. Third, sufficient pressure on Pakistan’s civilian government could cause it to collapse, opening the door to a military-Islamist government — or it could see Pakistan collapse into chaos, giving Islamists security in various regions and an opportunity to reshape Pakistan. Finally, the United States’ situation in Afghanistan has now become enormously more complex.
By staging an attack the Indian government can’t ignore, the Mumbai attackers have set in motion an existential crisis for Pakistan. The reality of Pakistan cannot be transformed, trapped as the country is between the United States and India. Almost every evolution from this point forward benefits Islamists. Strategically, the attack on Mumbai was a precise blow struck to achieve uncertain but favorable political outcomes for the Islamists.
Rice’s trip to India now becomes the crucial next step. She wants Indian restraint. She does not want the western Pakistani border to collapse. But she cannot guarantee what India must have: assurance of no further terror attacks on India originating in Pakistan. Without that, India must do something. No Indian government could survive without some kind of action. So it is up to Rice, in one of her last acts as secretary of state, to come up with a miraculous solution to head off a final, catastrophic crisis for the Bush administration — and a defining first crisis for the new Obama administration. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once said that the enemy gets a vote. The Islamists cast their ballot in Mumbai."
Thus far, President-elect Barack Obama should be commended. Many people, including me, were very concerned that he came from the far left wing of the Democratic party and would be unwilling to really look at all components of national power. This included both diplomacy and that ubiquitous phrase “soft power” as well as the hard power of military arms. My fear was that he would tilt too far from the willingness to use force when needed. In most ways, I thought he would be a mirror image to President Bush who may have been too willing to use force.
However, President Obama’s national security team appears to not represent that type of turn. Rather, it appears he is assembling an extremely competent team that will adjust the excesses of the Bush years and calibrate a shrewd foreign policy for a time when the waters of international relations seem especially troubled and magnified by the worst economic crisis in a generation.
Here, here, here, and here are several media accounts of this team. Of course, much press goes to his selection of vanquished democratic primary rival Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and his keeping President Bush’s second Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. However, his selection of retired Marine and NATO commander James L. Jones as National Security Advisor is no less auspicious in its own way.
Each speaks to an understanding that we can and must upgrade our diplomatic efforts, but that we also cannot be perceived as “weak” by potential adversaries (a point well illustrated by the recent Mumbai terrorist attacks).
Obviously, time will tell how shrewd the incoming President is, however, thus far, he has been politically sensitive and wholly practical in his measured statements on major policy issues and his selection of national security advisors. I hope the best for this Administration, it will have quite the canvas on which to paint as we are definitely in a historically meaningful time if for no other reason than that all certainty has been thrown out the window. With capable ministers at hand, President Obama may be uniquely positioned to reap quite the reward and shape a new world. While failure is always a possibility for any new administration, it is certainly not preordained in this case.
I wrote in a previous posting that Sen. Obama and his seeming “messianism” could be problematic and that empty rhetoric of “change” would not be enough to confront the dangers that really exist in the world, however, Obama seems to not want to fall into this trap. He is showing that he does “get it” and is willing to do what is necessary to be a success in the real world as well as the campaign trail.
Once more I turn to Stratfor for an excellent macroscopic view of what is going on in the world. What is in teresting in this analysis is the role ascribed to the nation-state which has, as Stratfor makes clear, been much derided recently in our rush to embrace globalization and international institutions.
Perhaps, Westphalia does live in ways good and bad. International anarchy will remain with us for a long time to come.
"In 1989, the global system pivoted when the Soviet Union retreated from Eastern Europe and began the process of disintegration that culminated in its collapse. In 2001, the system pivoted again when al Qaeda attacked targets in the United States on Sept. 11, triggering a conflict that defined the international system until the summer of 2008. The pivot of 2008 turned on two dates, Aug. 7 and Oct. 11.
On Aug. 7, Georgian troops attacked the country’s breakaway region of South Ossetia. On Aug. 8, Russian troops responded by invading Georgia. The Western response was primarily rhetorical. On the weekend of Oct. 11, the G-7 met in Washington to plan a joint response to the global financial crisis. Rather than defining a joint plan, the decision — by default — was that each nation would act to save its own financial system with a series of broadly agreed upon guidelines.
The Aug. 7 and Oct. 11 events are connected only in their consequences. Each showed the weakness of international institutions and confirmed the primacy of the nation-state, or more precisely, the nation and the state. (A nation is a collection of people who share an ethnicity. A state is the entity that rules a piece of land. A nation-state — the foundation of the modern international order — is what is formed when the nation and state overlap.) Together, the two events posed challenges that overwhelmed the global significance of the Iraqi and Afghan wars.
In and of itself, Russia’s attack on Georgia was not globally significant. Georgia is a small country in the Caucasus, and its fate ultimately does not affect the world. But Georgia was aligned with the United States and with Europe, and it had been seen by some as a candidate for membership in NATO. Thus, what was important about the Russian attack was that it occurred at all, and that the West did not respond to it beyond rhetoric.
Part of the problem was that the countries that could have intervened on Georgia’s behalf lacked the ability to do so. The Americans were bogged down in the Islamic world, and the Europeans had let their military forces atrophy. But even if military force had been available, it is clear that NATO, as the military expression of the Western alliance, was incapable of any unified action. There was no unified understanding of NATO’s obligation and, more importantly, no collective understanding of what a unified strategy might be.
The tension was not only between the United States and Europe, but also among the European countries. This was particularly pronounced in the different view of the situation Germany took compared to that of the United States and many other countries. Very soon after the Russo-Georgian war had ended, the Germans made clear that they opposed the expansion of NATO to Georgia and Ukraine. A major reason for this is Germany’s heavy dependence on Russian natural gas, which means Berlin cannot afford to alienate Moscow. But there was a deeper reason: Germany had been in the front line of the first Cold War and had no desire to participate in a second.
The range of European responses to Russia was fascinating. The British were livid. The French were livid but wanted to mediate. The Germans were cautious, and Chancellor Angela Merkel traveled to St. Petersburg to hold a joint press conference with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, aligning Germany with Russia — for all practical purposes — on the Georgian and Ukrainian issues.
The single most important effect of Russia’s attack on Georgia was that it showed clearly how deeply divided — and for that matter, how weak — NATO is in general and the Europeans are in particular. Had they been united, they would not have been able to do much. But they avoided that challenge by being utterly fragmented. NATO can only work when there is a consensus, and the war revealed how far from consensus NATO was. It can’t be said that NATO collapsed after Georgia. It is still there, and NATO officials hold meetings and press conferences. But the alliance is devoid of both common purpose and resources, except in very specific and limited areas. Some Europeans are working through NATO in Afghanistan, for example, but not most, and not in a decisive fashion.
The Russo-Georgian war raised profound questions about the future of the multinational military alliance. Each member consulted its own national interest and conducted its own foreign policy. At this point, splits between the Europeans and Americans are taken for granted, but the splits among the Europeans are profound. If it was no longer possible to say that NATO functioned, it was also unclear after Aug. 8 in what sense the Europeans existed, except as individual nation-states.
What was demonstrated in politico-military terms in Georgia was then demonstrated in economic terms in the financial crisis. All of the multinational systems created after World War II failed during the crisis — or more precisely, the crisis went well beyond their briefs and resources. None of the systems could cope, and many broke down. On Oct. 11, it became clear that the G-7 could cooperate, but not through unified action. On Oct. 12, when the Europeans held their eurozone summit, it became clear that they would only act as individual nations.
As with the aftermath of the Georgian war, the most significant developments after Oct. 11 happened in Europe. The European Union is first and foremost an arrangement for managing Europe’s economy. Its bureaucracy in Brussels has increased its authority and effectiveness throughout the last decade. The problem with the European Union is that it was an institution designed to manage prosperity. When it confronted serious adversity, however, it froze, devolving power to the component states.
Consider the European Central Bank (EC
, an institution created for managing the euro. Its primary charge — and only real authority — is to work to limit inflation. But limiting inflation is a problem that needs to be addressed when economies are otherwise functioning well. The financial crisis is a case where the European system is malfunctioning. The ECB was not created to deal with that. It has managed, with the agreement of member governments, to expand its function beyond inflation control, but it ultimately lacks the staff or the mindset to do all the things that other central banks were doing. To be more precise, it is a central bank without a single finance ministry to work with. Unlike other central banks, whose authority coincides with the nations they serve, the ECB serves multiple nations with multiple interests and finance ministries. By its nature, its power is limited.
In the end, power did not reside with Europe, but rather with its individual countries. It wasn’t Brussels that was implementing decisions made in Strasbourg; the centers of power were in Paris, London, Rome, Berlin and the other capitals of Europe and the world. Power devolved back to the states that governed nations. Or, to be more precise, the twin crises revealed that power had never left there.
Between the events in Georgia and the financial crisis, what we saw was the breakdown of multinational entities. This was particularly marked in Europe, in large part because the Europeans were the most invested in multilateralism and because they were in the crosshairs of both crises. The Russian resurgence affected them the most, and the fallout of the U.S. financial crisis hit them the hardest. They had to improvise the most, being multilateral but imperfectly developed, to say the least. In a sense, the Europeans were the laboratory of multilateralism and its intersection with crisis.
But it was not a European problem in the end. What we saw was a global phenomenon in which individual nations struggled to cope with the effects of the financial crisis and of Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been a tendency to view the world in terms of global institutions, from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization. In the summer of 2008, none of these functioned. The only things that did function effectively were national institutions.
Since 2001, the assumption has been that subnational groups like al Qaeda would define the politico-military environment. In U.S. Defense Department jargon, the assumption was that peer-to-peer conflict was no longer an issue and that it was all about small terrorist groups. The summer of 2008 demonstrated that while terrorism by subnational groups is not insignificant by any means, the dynamics of nation-states have hardly become archaic.
Clearly, the world has pivoted toward the nation-state as the prime actor and away from transnational and subnational groups. The financial crisis could be solved by monetizing the net assets of societies to correct financial imbalances. The only institution that could do that was the state, which could use its sovereign power and credibility, based on its ability to tax the economy, to underwrite the financial system.
Around the world, states did just that. They did it in very national ways. Many European states did it primarily by guaranteeing interbank loans, thereby essentially nationalizing the heart of the financial system. If states guarantee loans, the risk declines to near zero. In that case, the rationing of money through market mechanisms collapses. The state must take over rationing. This massively increases the power of the state — and raises questions about how the Europeans back out of this position.
The Americans took a different approach, less focused on interbank guarantees than on reshaping the balance sheets of financial institutions by investing in them. It was a more indirect approach and less efficient in the short run, but the Americans were more interested than the Europeans in trying to create mechanisms that would allow the state to back out of control of the financial system.
But what is most important is to see the manner in which state power surged in the summer and fall of 2008. The balance of power between business and the state, always dynamic, underwent a profound change, with the power of the state surging and the power of business contracting. Power was not in the hands of Lehman Brothers or Barclays. It was in the hands of Washington and London. At the same time, the power of the nation surged as the importance of multilateral organizations and subnational groups declined. The nation-state roared back to life after it had seemed to be drifting into irrelevance.
The year 1989 did not quite end the Cold War, but it created a world that bypassed it. The year 2001 did not end the post-Cold War world, but it overlaid it with an additional and overwhelming dynamic: that of the U.S.-jihadist war. The year 2008 did not end the U.S.-jihadist war, but it overlaid it with far more immediate and urgent issues. The financial crisis, of course, was one. The future of Russian power was another. We should point out that the importance of Russian power is this: As soon as Russia dominates the center of the Eurasian land mass, its force intrudes on Europe. Russia united with the rest of Europe is an overwhelming global force. Europe resisting Russia defines the global system. Russia fragmented opens the door for other geopolitical issues. Russia united and powerful usurps the global stage.
The year 2008 has therefore seen two things. First, and probably most important, it resurrected the nation-state and shifted the global balance between the state and business. Second, it redefined the global geopolitical system, opening the door to a resurgence of Russian power and revealing the underlying fragmentation of Europe and weaknesses of NATO.
The most important manifestation of this is Europe. In the face of Russian power, there is no united European position. In the face of the financial crisis, the Europeans coordinate, but they do not act as one. After the summer of 2008, it is no longer fair to talk about Europe as a single entity, about NATO as a fully functioning alliance, or about a world in which the nation-state is obsolete. The nation-state was the only institution that worked.
This is far more important than either of the immediate issues. The fate of Georgia is of minor consequence to the world. The financial crisis will pass into history, joining Brady bonds, the Resolution Trust Corp. and the bailout of New York City as a historical oddity. What will remain is a new international system in which the Russian question — followed by the German question — is once again at the center of things, and in which states act with confidence in shaping the economic and business environment for better or worse.
The world is a very different place from what it was in the spring of 2008. Or, to be more precise, it is a much more traditional place than many thought. It is a world of nations pursuing their own interests and collaborating where they choose. Those interests are economic, political and military, and they are part of a single fabric. The illusion of multilateralism was not put to rest — it will never die — but it was certainly put to bed. It is a world we can readily recognize from history."
He explicitly does not want to kill Batman ("What would I do without you?"), but he certainly wants Batman to kill him. This would violate Batman's "one rule" and prove the Joker's point. That is why Harvey Dent, the promised "White Knight" is so central. The Joker kills Dent's fiancee, not because he wants her dead, but because he wants to drive Dent to darkness. If he can transform the incorruptible district attorney into a murderer, the argument is won. Recall the Joker's delight as he hands Dent a loaded gun and presses it against his own head, enticing Dent to shoot him. When Dent leaves this decision to the toss of a coin, then exclaims: "Now you're talking!" he knows Dent has fallen.
Is that a political cause? In a very broad sense it is, though not in the sense we often use the phrase. He does not seek any clearly identifiable, concrete political outcomes. His politics are far more abstract, philosophical, even artistic. He argues not for a world ruled by him, but for one without rules altogether. Ideologically, he is not so much an anarchist as a nihilist. He is a terrorist, then, but one who advocates a belief in nothing."
We have no wish to advise you how to vote. That’s your decision. What we want to do is try to describe what the world will look like to the new president and consider how each candidate is likely to respond to the world. In trying to consider whether to vote for John McCain or Barack Obama, it is obviously necessary to consider their stands on foreign policy issues. But we have to be cautious about campaign assertions. Kennedy claimed that the Soviets had achieved superiority in missiles over the United States, knowing full well that there was no missile gap. Johnson attacked Barry Goldwater for wanting to escalate the war in Vietnam at the same time he was planning an escalation. Nixon won the 1968 presidential election by claiming that he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. What a candidate says is not always an indicator of what the candidate is thinking.
It gets even trickier when you consider that many of the most important foreign policy issues are not even imagined during the election campaign. Truman did not expect that his second term would be dominated by a war in Korea. Kennedy did not expect to be remembered for the Cuban missile crisis. Jimmy Carter never imagined in 1976 that his presidency would be wrecked by the fall of the Shah of Iran and the hostage crisis. George H. W. Bush didn’t expect to be presiding over the collapse of communism or a war over Kuwait. George W. Bush (regardless of conspiracy theories) never expected his entire presidency to be defined by 9/11. If you read all of these presidents’ position papers in detail, you would never get a hint as to what the really important foreign policy issues would be in their presidencies.
Between the unreliability of campaign promises and the unexpected in foreign affairs, predicting what presidents will do is a complex business. The decisions a president must make once in office are neither scripted nor conveniently timed. They frequently present themselves to the president and require decisions in hours that can permanently define his (or her) administration. Ultimately, voters must judge, by whatever means they might choose, whether the candidate has the virtue needed to make those decisions well.
Virtue, as we are using it here, is a term that comes from Machiavelli. It means the opposite of its conventional usage. A virtuous leader is one who is clever, cunning, decisive, ruthless and, above all, effective. Virtue is the ability to face the unexpected and make the right decision, without position papers, time to reflect or even enough information. The virtuous leader can do that. Others cannot. It is a gut call for a voter, and a tough one.
This does not mean that all we can do is guess about a candidate’s nature. There are three things we can draw on. First, there is the political tradition the candidate comes from. There are more things connecting Republican and Democratic foreign policy than some would like to think, but there are also clear differences. Since each candidate comes from a different political tradition — as do his advisers — these traditions can point to how each candidate might react to events in the world. Second, there are indications in the positions the candidates take on ongoing events that everyone knows about, such as Iraq. Having pointed out times in which candidates have been deceptive, we still believe there is value in looking at their positions and seeing whether they are coherent and relevant. Finally, we can look at the future and try to predict what the world will look like over the next four years. In other words, we can try to limit the surprises as much as possible.
In order to try to draw this presidential campaign into some degree of focus on foreign policy, we will proceed in three steps. First, we will try to outline the foreign policy issues that we think will confront the new president, with the understanding that history might well throw in a surprise. Second, we will sketch the traditions and positions of both Obama and McCain to try to predict how they would respond to these events. Finally, after the foreign policy debate is over, we will try to analyze what they actually said within the framework we created.
Let me emphasize that this is not a partisan exercise. The best guarantee of objectivity is that there are members of our staff who are passionately (we might even say irrationally) committed to each of the candidates. They will be standing by to crush any perceived unfairness. It is Stratfor’s core belief that it is possible to write about foreign policy, and even an election, without becoming partisan or polemical. It is a difficult task and we doubt we can satisfy everyone, but it is our goal and commitment.
Ever since 9/11 U.S. foreign policy has focused on the Islamic world. Starting in late 2002, the focus narrowed to Iraq. When the 2008 campaign for president began a year ago, it appeared Iraq would define the election almost to the exclusion of all other matters. Clearly, this is no longer the case, pointing to the dynamism of foreign affairs and opening the door to a range of other issues.
Iraq remains an issue, but it interacts with a range of other issues. Among these are the future of U.S.-Iranian relations; U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan and the availability of troops in Iraq for that mission; the future of U.S.-Pakistani relations and their impact on Afghanistan; the future of U.S.-Russian relations and the extent to which they will interfere in the region; resources available to contain Russian expansion; the future of the U.S. relationship with the Europeans and with NATO in the context of growing Russian power and the war in Afghanistan; Israel’s role, caught as it is between Russia and Iran; and a host of only marginally related issues. Iraq may be subsiding, but that simply complicates the world facing the new president.
The list of problems facing the new president will be substantially larger than the problems facing George W. Bush, in breadth if not in intensity. The resources he will have to work with, military, political and economic, will not be larger for the first year at least. In terms of military capacity, much will hang on the degree to which Iraq continues to bog down more than a dozen U.S. brigade combat teams. Even thereafter, the core problem facing the next president will be the allocation of limited resources to an expanding number of challenges. The days when it was all about Iraq is over. It is now all about how to make the rubber band stretch without breaking.
Iraq remains the place to begin, however, since the shifts there help define the world the new president will face. To understand the international landscape the new president will face, it is essential to begin by understanding what happened in Iraq, and why Iraq is no longer the defining issue of this campaign.
In 2006, it appeared that the situation in Iraq was both out of control and hopeless. Sunni insurgents were waging war against the United States, Shiite militias were taking shots at the Americans as well, and Sunnis and Shia were waging a war against each other. There seemed to be no way to bring the war to anything resembling a satisfactory solution.
When the Democrats took control of Congress in the 2006 elections, it appeared inevitable that the United States would begin withdrawing forces from Iraq. U.S expectations aside, this was the expectation by all parties in Iraq. Given that the United States was not expected to remain a decisive force in Iraq, all Iraqi parties discounted the Americans and maneuvered for position in anticipation of a post-American Iraq. The Iranians in particular saw an opportunity to limit a Sunni return to Iraq’s security forces, thus reshaping the geopolitics of the region. U.S. fighting with Iraqi Sunnis intensified in preparation for the anticipated American withdrawal.
Bush’s decision to increase forces rather than withdraw them dramatically changed the psychology of Iraq. It was assumed he had lost control of the situation. Bush’s decision to surge forces in Iraq, regardless by how many troops, established two things. First, Bush remained in control of U.S. policy. Second, the assumption that the Americans were leaving was untrue. And suddenly, no one was certain that there would be a vacuum to be filled.
The deployment of forces proved helpful, as did the change in how the troops were used; recent leaks indicate that new weapon systems also played a key role. The most important factor, however, was the realization that the Americans were not leaving on Bush’s watch. Since no one was sure who the next U.S. president would be, or what his policies might be, it was thus uncertain that the Americans would leave at all.
Everyone in Iraq suddenly recalculated. If the Americans weren’t leaving, one option would be to make a deal with Bush, seen as weak and looking for historical validation. Alternatively, they could wait for Bush’s successor. Iran remembers — without fondness — its decision not to seal a deal with Carter, instead preferring to wait for Reagan. Similarly, seeing foreign jihadists encroaching in Sunni regions and the Shia shaping the government in Baghdad, the Sunni insurgents began a fundamental reconsideration of their strategy.
Apart from reversing Iraq’s expectations about the United States, part of Washington’s general strategy was supplementing military operations with previously unthinkable political negotiations. First, the United States began talking to Iraq’s Sunni nationalist insurgents, and found common ground with them. Neither the Sunni nationalists nor the United States liked the jihadists, and both wanted the Shia to form a coalition government. Second, back-channel U.S.-Iranian talks clearly took place. The Iranians realized that the possibility of a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad was evaporating. Iran’s greatest fear was a Sunni Iraqi government armed and backed by the United States, recreating a version of the Hussein regime that had waged war with Iran for almost a decade. The Iranians decided that a neutral, coalition government was the best they could achieve, so they reined in the Shiite militia.
The net result of this was that the jihadists were marginalized and broken, and an uneasy coalition government was created in Baghdad, balanced between Iran and the United States. The Americans failed to create a pro-American government in Baghdad, but had blocked the emergence of a pro-Iranian government. Iraqi society remained fragmented and fragile, but a degree of peace unthinkable in 2006 had been created.
The first problem facing the next U.S. president will be deciding when and how many U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Iraq. Unlike 2006, this issue will not be framed by Iraq alone. First, there will be the urgency of increasing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Second, there will be the need to create a substantial strategic reserve to deal with potential requirements in Pakistan, and just as important, responding to events in the former Soviet Union like the recent conflict in Georgia.
At the same time, too precipitous a U.S. withdrawal not only could destabilize the situation internally in Iraq, it could convince Iran that its dream of a pro-Iranian Iraq is not out of the question. In short, too rapid a withdrawal could lead to resumption of war in Iraq. But too slow a withdrawal could make the situation in Afghanistan untenable and open the door for other crises.
The foreign policy test for the next U.S. president will be calibrating three urgent requirements with a military force that is exhausted by five years of warfare in Iraq and seven in Afghanistan. This force was not significantly expanded since Sept. 11, making this the first global war the United States has ever fought without a substantial military expansion. Nothing the new president does will change this reality for several years, so he will be forced immediately into juggling insufficient forces without the option of precipitous withdrawal from Iraq unless he is prepared to accept the consequences, particularly of a more powerful Iran.
The nuclear issue has divided the United States and Iran for several years. The issue seems to come and go depending on events elsewhere. Thus, what was enormously urgent just prior to the Russo-Georgian war became much less pressing during and after it. This is not unreasonable in our point of view, because we regard Iran as much farther from nuclear weapons than others might, and we suspect that the Bush administration agrees given its recent indifference to the question.
Certainly, Iran is enriching uranium, and with that uranium, it could possibly explode a nuclear device. But the gap between a nuclear device and weapon is substantial, and all the enriched uranium in the world will not give the Iranians a weapon. To have a weapon, it must be ruggedized and miniaturized to fit on a rocket or to be carried on an attack aircraft. The technologies needed for that range from material science to advanced electronics to quality assurance. Creating a weapon is a huge project. In our view, Iran does not have the depth of integrated technical skills needed to achieve that goal.
As for North Korea, for Iran a very public nuclear program is a bargaining chip designed to extract concessions, particularly from the Americans. The Iranians have continued the program very publicly in spite of threats of Israeli and American attacks because it made the United States less likely to dismiss Iranian wishes in Tehran’s true area of strategic interest, Iraq.
The United States must draw down its forces in Iraq to fight in Afghanistan. The Iranians have no liking for the Taliban, having nearly gone to war with them in 1998, and having aided the United States in Afghanistan in 2001. The United States needs Iran’s commitment to a neutral Iraq to withdraw U.S. forces since Iran could destabilize Iraq overnight, though Tehran’s ability to spin up Shiite proxies in Iraq has declined over the past year.
Therefore, the next president very quickly will face the question of how to deal with Iran. The Bush administration solution — relying on quiet understandings alongside public hostility — is one model. It is not necessarily a bad one, so long as forces remain in Iraq to control the situation. If the first decision the new U.S. president will have to make is how to transfer forces in Iraq elsewhere, the second decision will be how to achieve a more stable understanding with Iran.
This is particularly pressing in the context of a more assertive Russia that might reach out to Iran. The United States will need Iran more than Iran needs the United States under these circumstances. Washington will need Iran to abstain from action in Iraq but to act in Afghanistan. More significantly, the United States will need Iran not to enter into an understanding with Russia. The next president will have to figure out how to achieve all these things without giving away more than he needs to, and without losing his domestic political base in the process.
The U.S. president also will have to come up with an Afghan policy, which really doesn’t exist at this moment. The United States and its NATO allies have deployed about 50,000 troops in Afghanistan. To benchmark this, the Russians deployed around 120,000 by the mid-1980s, and were unable to pacify the country. Therefore the possibility of 60,000 troops — or even a few additional brigades on top of that — pacifying Afghanistan is minimal. The primary task of troops in Afghanistan now is to defend the Kabul regime and other major cities, and to try to keep the major roads open. More troops will make this easier, but by itself, it will not end the war.
The problem in Afghanistan is twofold. First, the Taliban defeated their rivals in Afghanistan during the civil war of the 1990s because they were the most cohesive force in the country, were politically adept and enjoyed Pakistani support. The Taliban’s victory was not accidental; and all other things being equal, without the U.S. presence, they could win again. The United States never defeated the Taliban. Instead, the Taliban refused to engage in massed warfare against American airpower, retreated, dispersed and regrouped. In most senses, it is the same force that won the Afghan civil war.
The United States can probably block the Taliban from taking the cities, but to do more it must do three things. First, it must deny the Taliban sanctuary and lines of supply running from Pakistan. These two elements allowed the mujahideen to outlast the Soviets. They helped bring the Taliban to power. And they are fueling the Taliban today. Second, the United States must form effective coalitions with tribal groups hostile to the Taliban. To do this it needs the help of Iran, and more important, Washington must convince the tribes that it will remain in Afghanistan indefinitely — not an easy task. And third — the hardest task for the new president — the United States will have to engage the Taliban themselves, or at least important factions in the Taliban movement, in a political process. When we recall that the United States negotiated with the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, this is not as far-fetched as it appears.
The most challenging aspect to deal with in all this is Pakistan. The United States has two issues in the South Asian country. The first is the presence of al Qaeda in northern Pakistan. Al Qaeda has not carried out a successful operation in the United States since 2001, nor in Europe since 2005. Groups who use the al Qaeda label continue to operate in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but they use the name to legitimize or celebrate their activities — they are not the same people who carried out 9/11. Most of al Qaeda prime’s operatives are dead or scattered, and its main leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, are not functional. The United States would love to capture bin Laden so as to close the books on al Qaeda, but the level of effort needed — assuming he is even alive — might outstrip U.S. capabilities.
The most difficult step politically for the new U.S. president will be to close the book on al Qaeda. This does not mean that a new group of operatives won’t grow from the same soil, and it doesn’t mean that Islamist terrorism is dead by any means. But it does mean that the particular entity the United States has been pursuing has effectively been destroyed, and the parts regenerating under its name are not as dangerous. Asserting victory will be extremely difficult for the new U.S. president. But without that step, a massive friction point between the United States and Pakistan will persist — one that isn’t justified geopolitically and undermines a much more pressing goal.
The United States needs the Pakistani army to attack the Taliban in Pakistan, or failing that, permit the United States to attack them without hindrance from the Pakistani military. Either of these are nightmarishly difficult things for a Pakistani government to agree to, and harder still to carry out. Nevertheless, without cutting the line of supply to Pakistan, like Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Afghanistan cannot be pacified. Therefore, the new president will face the daunting task of persuading or coercing the Pakistanis to carry out an action that will massively destabilize their country without allowing the United States to get bogged down in a Pakistan it cannot hope to stabilize.
At the same time, the United States must begin the political process of creating some sort of coalition in Afghanistan that it can live with. The fact of the matter is that the United States has no long-term interest in Afghanistan except in ensuring that radical jihadists with global operational reach are not given sanctuary there. Getting an agreement to that effect will be hard. Guaranteeing compliance will be virtually impossible. Nevertheless, that is the task the next president must undertake.
There are too many moving parts in Afghanistan to be sanguine about the outcome. It is a much more complex situation than Iraq, if for no other reason than because the Taliban are a far more effective fighting force than anything the United States encountered in Iraq, the terrain far more unfavorable for the U.S. military, and the political actors much more cynical about American capabilities.
The next U.S. president will have to make a painful decision. He must either order a long-term holding action designed to protect the Karzai government, launch a major offensive that includes Pakistan but has insufficient forces, or withdraw. Geopolitically, withdrawal makes a great deal of sense. Psychologically, it could unhinge the region and regenerate al Qaeda-like forces. Politically, it would not be something a new president could do. But as he ponders Iraq, the future president will have to address Afghanistan. And as he ponders Afghanistan, he will have to think about the Russians.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Russians were allied with the United States. They facilitated the U.S. relationship with the Northern Alliance, and arranged for air bases in Central Asia. The American view of Russia was formed in the 1990s. It was seen as disintegrating, weak and ultimately insignificant to the global balance. The United States expanded NATO into the former Soviet Union in the Baltic states and said it wanted to expand it into Ukraine and Georgia. The Russians made it clear that they regarded this as a direct threat to their national security, resulting in the 2008 Georgian conflict.
The question now is where U.S.-Russian relations are going. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union a geopolitical catastrophe. After Ukraine and Georgia, it is clear he does not trust the United States and that he intends to reassert his sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union. Georgia was lesson one. The current political crisis in Ukraine is the second lesson unfolding.
The re-emergence of a Russian empire in some form or another represents a far greater threat to the United States than the Islamic world. The Islamic world is divided and in chaos. It cannot coalesce into the caliphate that al Qaeda wanted to create by triggering a wave of revolutions in the Islamic world. Islamic terrorism remains a threat, but the geopolitical threat of a unifying Islamic power is not going to happen.
Russia is a different matter. The Soviet Union and the Russian empire both posed strategic threats because they could threaten Europe, the Middle East and China simultaneously. While this overstates the threat, it does provide some context. A united Eurasia is always powerful, and threatens to dominate the Eastern Hemisphere. Therefore, preventing Russia from reasserting its power in the former Soviet Union should take precedence over all other considerations.
The problem is that the United States and NATO together presently do not have the force needed to stop the Russians. The Russian army is not particularly powerful or effective, but it is facing forces that are far less powerful and effective. The United States has its forces tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan so that when the war in Georgia broke out, sending ground forces was simply not an option. The Russians are extremely aware of this window of opportunity, and are clearly taking advantage of it.
The Russians have two main advantages in this aside from American resource deficits. First, the Europeans are heavily dependent on Russian natural gas; German energy dependence on Moscow is particularly acute. The Europeans are in no military or economic position to take any steps against the Russians, as the resulting disruption would be disastrous. Second, as the United States maneuvers with Iran, the Russians can provide support to Iran, politically and in terms of military technology, that not only would challenge the United States, it might embolden the Iranians to try for a better deal in Iraq by destabilizing Iraq again. Finally, the Russians can pose lesser challenges in the Caribbean with Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, as well as potentially supporting Middle Eastern terrorist groups and left-wing Latin American groups.
At this moment, the Russians have far more options than the Americans have. Therefore, the new U.S. president will have to design a policy for dealing with the Russians with few options at hand. This is where his decisions on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan will intersect and compete with his decisions on Russia. Ideally, the United States would put forces in the Baltics — which are part of NATO — as well as in Ukraine and Georgia. But that is not an option and won’t be for more than a year under the best of circumstances.
The United States therefore must attempt a diplomatic solution with Russia with very few sticks. The new president will need to try to devise a package of carrots — e.g., economic incentives — plus the long-term threat of a confrontation with the United States to persuade Moscow not to use its window of opportunity to reassert Russian regional hegemony. Since regional hegemony allows Russia to control its own destiny, the carrots will have to be very tempting, while the threat has to be particularly daunting. The president’s task will be crafting the package and then convincing the Russians it has value.
One of the problems the United States will face in these negotiations will be the Europeans. There is no such thing as a European foreign policy; there are only the foreign policies of the separate countries. The Germans, for example, do not want a confrontation with Russia under any circumstances. The United Kingdom, by contrast, is more willing to take a confrontational approach to Moscow. And the European military capability, massed and focused, is meager. The Europeans have badly neglected their military over the past 15 years. What deployable, expeditionary forces they have are committed to the campaign in Afghanistan. That means that in dealing with Russia, the Americans do not have united European support and certainly no meaningful military weight. This will make any diplomacy with the Russians extremely difficult.
One of the issues the new president eventually will have to face is the value of NATO and the Europeans as a whole. This was an academic matter while the Russians were prostrate. With the Russians becoming active, it will become an urgent issue. NATO expansion — and NATO itself — has lived in a world in which it faced no military threats. Therefore, it did not have to look at itself militarily. After Georgia, NATO’s military power becomes very important, and without European commitment, NATO’s military power independent of the United States — and the ability to deploy it — becomes minimal. If Germany opts out of confrontation, then NATO will be paralyzed legally, since it requires consensus, and geographically. For the United States alone cannot protect the Baltics without German participation.
The president really will have one choice affecting Europe: Accept the resurgence of Russia, or resist. If the president resists, he will have to limit his commitment to the Islamic world severely, rebalance the size and shape of the U.S. military and revitalize and galvanize NATO. If he cannot do all of those things, he will face some stark choices in Europe.
Russian pressure is already reshaping aspects of the global system. The Israelis have approached Georgia very differently from the United States. They halted weapon sales to Georgia the week before the war, and have made it clear to Moscow that Israel does not intend to challenge Russia. The Russians met with Syrian President Bashar al Assad immediately after the war. This signaled the Israelis that Moscow was prepared to support Syria with weapons and with Russian naval ships in the port of Tartus if Israel supports Georgia, and other countries in the former Soviet Union, we assume. The Israelis appear to have let the Russians know that they would not do so, separating themselves from the U.S. position. The next president will have to re-examine the U.S. relationship with Israel if this breach continues to widen.
In the same way, the United States will have to address its relationship with Turkey. A long-term ally, Turkey has participated logistically in the Iraq occupation, but has not been enthusiastic. Turkey’s economy is booming, its military is substantial and Turkish regional influence is growing. Turkey is extremely wary of being caught in a new Cold War between Russia and the United States, but this will be difficult to avoid. Turkey’s interests are very threatened by a Russian resurgence, and Turkey is the U.S. ally with the most tools for countering Russia. Both sides will pressure Ankara mercilessly. More than Israel, Turkey will be critical both in the Islamic world and with the Russians. The new president will have to address U.S.-Turkish relations both in context and independent of Russia fairly quickly.
In some ways, China is the great beneficiary of all of this. In the early days of the Bush administration, there were some confrontations with China. As the war in Iraq calmed down, Washington seemed to be increasing its criticisms of China, perhaps even tacitly supporting Tibetan independence. With the re-emergence of Russia, the United States is now completely distracted. Contrary to perceptions, China is not a global military power. Its army is primarily locked in by geography and its navy is in no way an effective blue-water force. For its part, the United States is in no position to land troops on mainland China. Therefore, there is no U.S. geopolitical competition with China. The next president will have to deal with economic issues with China, but in the end, China will sell goods to the United States, and the United States will buy them.
Latin America has been a region of minimal interest to the United States in the last decade or longer. So long as no global power was using its territory, the United States did not care what presidents Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bo
In approximately one month, I will be a first time father at the age of 31.
While not old, I am certainly older than many, perhaps most, first time fathers. I approach this with both excitement and trepidation. I have always been an inwardly focused person, not enamoured of material things, but enamoured of the internal life of the mind and its cultivation.
I have fears that I will lose this and no longer be able to continue in my own process of growth and exploration. How can one converse with the greatest minds if you cannot sleep and escape the cries of an infant?
My hope, however, is that this will also be a learning experience that will teach not only me, but my child. I look very much forward to teaching them, especially in a world that has lost touch with so much of its own heritage. I believe this will be my greatest gift to my child and, to me, this is an indescribable source of excitement.
So I approach this task, I pray, with the right mixture of humility and brazeness. I hope that I can bestow something permanent, because transience doesn't interest me and I hope shall not interest my child. I hope to instill a passion for things of "greatness" and to be worthy of a child's admiration up to and including their own rendezvous parenthood. This despite the effects of a culture that seems fated to unhesitatingly embrace the transcience and emptiness of materialism and the ennervation of spirit.