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Number 125 • May / June 2013 • $8.95
The Democracy Industry
Robert W. Merry Obama’s Leftist Designs
Bruce Riedel Intelligence and Trust
Christopher Whalen The Triumph of Fiat Money
Walter Laqueur The Meaning of Marx
Jordan Michael Smith www.nationalinterest.org
THEN
AND
NOW
The Origins of
Zionist Colonialism
by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Fissures in the
Special Relationship
by Jacob Heilbrunn
Number 125
.
May/June 2013
The Realist
5
The Myth of a Moderate Obama by Robert W. Merry
Articles
9
Zionism’s Colonial Roots by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
16
Israel’s Fraying Image by Jacob Heilbrunn
While the American Left and some media outlets portray President Obama as a political centrist, in fact
he represents a markedly leftist ideology. He wants to expand the scope and intrusiveness of the federal
government far beyond what the country has seen before, and his chief political tool is what once was called
“prejudicial class baiting.”
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu insists his countrymen “are not neo-colonials.” And yet a careful look at the
country’s founding suggests there has always been a colonial element to the Israeli project, as reflected in the
call of Vladimir Jabotinsky, leading “Revisionist” of his day, for a “colonisation regime.” That reality haunts
Israel at a time when colonialism has long since gone out of fashion.
The Israel lobby in the United States has enjoyed unparalleled political clout for many years. But distant
drumbeats are raising new questions about America’s relationship with the Jewish state—and whether Israel’s
foreign policy is always convergent with Washington’s. Israel’s image is under challenge as never before.
26
The U.S. Democracy Project by Jordan Michael Smith
U.S. nongovernmental organizations promoting democracy abroad—dubbed the “Democracy
Establishment” by one scholar of the phenomenon—have become a cottage industry underpinned by
substantial federal largesse. But foreign governments are pushing back hard against the movement and its
implicit goal of regime change in other lands.
39
Lessons of the Syrian Reactor by Bruce Riedel
When the Israeli Air Force destroyed a Syrian nuclear facility at Al Kibar in September 2007, it culminated
an intelligence-gathering collaboration by Tel Aviv and Washington. But Washington was constrained in its
response because of its intelligence failure leading up to the Iraq War. “Robust options” for the United States
were not on the table.
47
How to Reverse Failed Policy by Ray Takeyh
Too often foreign-policy officials and bureaucracies cling to prevailing orthodoxies and approaches even
after it has become clear they aren’t working. But in rare instances leaders emerge who divert history by
successfully bringing about a change in policy. Presented here are three examples of such beneficial course
corrections.
Reviews & Essays
59
The Priesthood of Central Bankers by Christopher Whalen
Central bankers have amassed unprecedented power over the economies of the industrial nations—and
hence the world—in recent decades, and yet they remain largely unaccountable to any serious political
counterweight. The Washington Post’s Neil Irwin probes this phenomenon in a telling, but perhaps overly
worshipful, narrative.
69
Dilemmas of the Modern Navy by James Holmes
The U.S. sea services—the navy, Marines and coast guard—are under mounting strain, as policy makers
neglect the hard national power needed to back up America’s interests and ambitions. That’s the theme of
Seth Cropsey’s new book, and our reviewer accepts the basic point while questioning some nuances and
stated implications of the argument.
78
Lifting the Veil on North Korea by Bruce Cumings
The conventional Western view of North Korea is that it is an irrational nation run by irrational people.
Now comes Andrei Lankov to say that it is “not irrational,” as evidenced by its continuing survival “against
all odds.” Lankov doesn’t think the problems posed by this “Orwellian nightmare” of a nation will be solved
anytime soon.
88
The Many Faces of Neo-Marxism by Walter Laqueur
Marxism has become a kind of catchall basket into which poststructuralists, postmodernists and gender
scholars toss their theories, which seem to have little connection to Marx’s rigorously crafted, though often
wrong, economic treatises. Jonathan Sperber’s well-written biography offers an occasion to ponder the
meaning of Marx in our time.
Images AP Images: pages 20, 37, 56; Corbis: pages 19, 24, 29, 30, 50, 53, 61, 64, 67, 79, 83, 86, 91;
Getty: pages 11, 14, 35, 40, 43, 94; iStockPhoto: pages 71, 74
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The Realist
The Myth of a
Moderate Obama
By Robert W. Merry
T
he greatest myth in American
politics today is the view, perpetrated by the Democratic Left and
elements of the news media, that Barack
Obama is a political moderate. In truth
he represents an ideology that is barely
within the American mainstream as understood over two and a quarter centuries
of political experience. Indeed, the crisis
of American politics in our time is a crisis
of political deadlock, and it is a deadlock
born largely of the president’s resolve to
push an agenda for which he has no clear
national consensus.
That agenda turns on a number of
pivots related mostly to the size and role
of government and its level of intrusiveness
into the lives of Americans. If Obama
has his way through the remainder of his
presidency, and he thoroughly intends to,
he will leave behind an American polity
very different from the one he inherited.
But, aided and abetted by news-media
acolytes, he has managed to finesse his true
domestic intentions. And his intentions,
given the political strife they unleash and
the threat to fiscal soundness they pose,
Robert W. Merry is editor of The National Interest
and an author of books on American history and
foreign policy.
The Realist
could seriously undermine America’s
standing in the world.
Throughout America’s political history
a fundamental fault line has divided those
who wish to enhance and aggrandize the
power of government and those who fear
the abuse of unchecked governmental
prerogative. Every citizen with a political
consciousness stands on one side or the
other of that divide. Those who want more
power invested in government are liberals;
those who don’t are conservatives. Thus can
one determine the fundamental political
outlook of his fellow citizens though this
one litmus test.
But within the contingent on the liberal
side of the fault line can be seen wide
variations in the extent to which particular
politicians wish to expand and empower
government. Some—Bill Clinton, for
instance—have been content to operate
largely within the power interrelationships
they inherited. Others—including
Obama—want to infuse government with
powers and prerogatives far beyond their
previous scope.
In our history, the great opponents of
governmental aggrandizement have been
Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson,
James Polk, Calvin Coolidge and Ronald
Reagan. Often citing the Constitution,
they fought their adversaries’ efforts to
expand governmental power and activity.
In the Republic’s early decades, this effort
was highly successful. Jefferson pummeled
Alexander Hamilton’s political machine,
and his opposition to the Hamilton
philosophy, carried through by his two
successors (James Madison and James
May/June 2013 5
If Obama has his way through the remainder of his
presidency, and he thoroughly intends to, he will leave behind
an American polity very different from the one he inherited.
Monroe), essentially killed Hamilton’s
Federalist Party. Jackson and Polk held
at bay the “American System” of Henry
Clay, and each in turn thwarted Clay’s
presidential ambitions in the 1832 and
1844 elections. Clay’s Whig Party, that
era’s big-government institution, brought
forth only two elected presidents (both
army generals) during its quarter century of
existence.
A century later, Coolidge forged a
limited-government philosophy into a
popular governing salient as he cleaned up
the mess left by Woodrow Wilson—who,
in taking the country into World War I,
greatly expanded governmental authority,
bruised the nation’s political sensibilities
through unprecedented federal intrusiveness
and ruined the economy. Half a century
later, Reagan sought to reverse long decades
of steady governmental growth set in
motion with powerful force by Franklin
Roosevelt and pushed further by Lyndon
Johnson.
These presidents shared a commitment to
low taxes, small government, hard money
and strict construction of the Constitution.
Jefferson eliminated internal taxes, cut
the size of government and reduced the
national debt. Jackson reduced tariff
rates, actually paid off the national debt
(for the first and last time), and vetoed
legislation designed to expand the scope
of government. Polk cut tariff rates
further and established an “independent
treasury” designed to maintain currency
stability. Coolidge slashed income-tax rates
along with governmental expenditures
and trimmed the national debt to $17.65
6 The National Interest
billion from $27 billion. Reagan cut the
growth rate in federal domestic spending,
acquiesced in a Federal Reserve tight-money
regimen that could have destroyed his
presidency (but ultimately killed spiraling
inflation) and cut the top income-tax rate
to 28 percent from 70 percent. All enjoyed
substantial popularity (though Polk’s war
with Mexico undercut his standing with
voters), and all represent a powerful strain
of political sentiment in the American
tradition.
B
ut there is another strain much more
favorable toward governmental aggrandizement. The great exponents of this philosophy were Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt
and Lyndon Johnson. And now Obama.
(Abraham Lincoln consolidated federal and
executive power with a strong will during
the Civil War, but he did so in ways designed to make the consolidations largely
temporary.) Wilson’s effort to expand governmental authority came a cropper, as we
have seen, through wartime initiatives that
upended the economy. The result was a
national resolve to return to “normalcy,”
which paved the way for Coolidge.
Then came the Great Depression and the
ensuing global chaos that spawned World
War II. It was a great opportunity to expand
the federal government, and fdr grabbed it
with zest and contempt for the check-ongovernment sensibilities of his predecessors.
His instrument was the federal income tax,
first enacted in 1913. Not only did he jack
up the top rate to a confiscatory 91 percent
during the war, but he also greatly expanded
the number of Americans on the tax rolls—
The Realist
to thirty-nine million from four million—
by reducing the personal exemption and
lowering the income level at which workers
must start paying taxes. Meanwhile, lowend wage earners saw their starting tax rate
go up to 24 percent from just 4 percent,
according to Burton Folsom Jr. and Anita
Folsom of Hillsdale College.
Roosevelt accompanied his economic
assault on the nation’s wealthy with a
vicious rhetorical attack, railing against “the
purblind rich” and their “swollen fortunes.”
fdr’s Senate ally, Kentucky’s Democratic
senator A. B. “Happy” Chandler, actually
suggested that the “government can take
everything we have if the government
needs it.” Just as Obama’s opponents today
object to his “class warfare” rhetoric, fdr’s
opponents attacked his “prejudicial class
baiting,” as Michigan’s Republican senator
Arthur Vandenberg called it.
Roosevelt created a new America
with a much larger and more intrusive
government. But, after his first reelection
victory in 1936 and his court-packing
power grab of 1937, voters put a clamp on
his New Deal by handing him a big defeat
in the 1938 congressional elections. Then
thirty years later lbj sought to build upon
the New Deal legacy with his Great Society,
promoted in conjunction with the nation’s
need to address its unfinished business in
civil rights. Richard Nixon continued the
Johnson approach in the regulatory realm,
in part to further his crucial war aims, but
efforts to expand the federal bureaucracy
were largely put on hold.
Meanwhile, economic dislocations
wrought by unwise fiscal policies in the
The Realist
late 1960s and through the 1970s created
an economic crisis that brought Reagan to
the White House in 1980, and the political
balance of power shifted to the JeffersonJackson-Polk-Coolidge philosophy. Bill
Clinton began his first presidential term
by saying he wanted to “repeal Reaganism,”
then began his reelection campaign, after
being chastened by voters in the 1994
midterm elections, with the words, “The
era of big government is over.”
N
ow Obama wants to establish a new
era of big government. His central
ideological weapon, like Roosevelt’s, is
the tax code. His chief rhetorical weapon,
again like Roosevelt’s, is “prejudicial class
baiting.”
But there are some important differences
between Obama now and Roosevelt then.
First, Obama is seeking to expand the
federal government’s reach far beyond
anything fdr could accomplish. His
“Obamacare” health program inserts the
federal government more directly than ever
into some 15 percent of the economy. His
Dodd-Frank legislation, including the new
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
seeks to regulate financial markets through
widespread bureaucratic meddling (a far
different approach than fdr’s simpler GlassSteagall proscriptions on certain financialinstitution activities). His cap-and-trade
energy legislation, rejected by the Senate
in his first term, seems to be back on the
agenda, even as he seeks to use government
funds to promote a clean-energy industry.
And he is employing the country’s
regulatory apparatus more aggressively
May/June 2013 7
than ever. As David Brooks of the New
York Times has written, “Capitalism is just a
feeding trough that government can use to
fuel its expansion.”
Second, Obama’s zest for power seems
to breed a contempt for the legislative
and judicial branches of government.
Since Congress rejected his cap-and-trade
legislation, he has sought to implement
much of it through regulatory activity and
executive decision making. In unleashing
military action in Libya, he stiffed
Congress’s constitutional authority in
war-making decisions. His drone-warfare
efforts have been conducted largely without
regard to the sensibilities of Congress. He
has entered into a “binding” agreement—a
quasi treaty, really—outlining U.S.
relations with Afghanistan without seeking
congressional consultation, although the
Afghan legislature voted on it. He sought to
make recess appointments when Congress
wasn’t in recess; when a federal court
declared three such appointments to the
National Labor Relations Board (nlrb)
illegal, his nlrb simply ignored the court
and proceeded with its agenda.
Third, and perhaps most important,
Obama coddles the “middle class” even as
he goes after the so-called wealthy. Recall
that Roosevelt expanded the number of
Americans subject to the income tax, which
brought a certain balance to his soak-therich tax initiatives. Just about everybody
had to pay something. But Obama’s classbaiting takes place in a context in which
half of U.S. households don’t pay federal
income tax at all. Hence his class assaults
drive a powerful wedge between the
8 The National Interest
wealthier citizens, deemed responsible for
most of the country’s ills, and the rest of
society, who are considered blameless and
held harmless. This at a time when the top
1 percent of Americans pay 37 percent of all
income taxes, while the top 5 percent pay
nearly 60 percent.
Further, every thinking American
knows that the country’s out-of-control
entitlement system is significantly
responsible for its public-debt overhang,
which represents the most dire threat facing
the country today. Yet Obama offers to
address this problem—in limited ways
—only if opposition Republicans agree
to further lopsided tax increases on the
wealthy. His underlying aim seems to be
to get a compromise budget bill through
the Senate so he can resume his class-driven
assault on House Republicans—and thrust
that wedge ever deeper into the nation’s
political consciousness.
This is new. And it bears a greater
resemblance to Latin American populism
than to the U.S. political tradition. As
Charles Krauthammer has written, Obama’s
populism is “so crude that it channels not
Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez.”
Too true. But Venezuela’s Chavez had what
the Economist calls an “oil-fueled bounty”
to “buy himself popular support, with
social programmes and handouts.” Obama
only has the American rich, and he can’t
squeeze enough bounty from that source
to sustain the magnitude of his programs
and handouts without breaking the U.S.
economy. The only question is how much
damage he will be able to generate before
the next election. n
The Realist
Zionism’s Colonial Roots
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
O
ver the last months before his
much-lamented death in August
2010, Tony Judt talked at length
with Timothy Snyder, his friend and fellow
historian. Their conversations, published
after Judt died as Thinking the Twentieth
Century, were about “the politics of ideas,”
the subject of the book on which Judt had
embarked after Postwar, his splendid history of Europe since v-e Day, but which he
knew he would not live to write. Some of
these political ideas had affected him personally, in particular Zionism. As a schoolboy in London and a Cambridge undergraduate, Judt had been not only a committed supporter but also an energetic activist
in Dror, a small socialist-Zionist group. He
spent summers working on a kibbutz and
in 1967 flew to Israel in the hour of peril as
the Six-Day War began.
The story of Judt’s disenchantment
with Israel and Zionism is well known,
culminating in a 2003 essay in the
New York Review of Books in which he
concluded that Zionism, as a version of
late nineteenth-century nationalism, had
itself become anachronistic in a twentyfirst century of open borders and multiple
identities. In Thinking the Twentieth
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and
author. His books include Yo, Blair! (Politico’s
Publishing, 2007), The Strange Death of Tory
England (Allen Lane, 2005) and The Controversy of
Zion (Perseus Books, 1997), which won a National
Jewish Book Award.
Zionism’s Colonial Roots
Century, Judt talks again at some length
about these questions, and there is one
particularly arresting passage. Despite his
own early indoctrination in the socialist
variant of Zionism, “I came over time
to appreciate the rigor and clear-headed
realism of Jabotinsky’s criticisms.”
Today there are perhaps not many readers
of the New York Times or the Washington
Post, let alone most other Americans, even
if they warmly support Israel, who could
identify Vladimir Jabotinsky by name.
“Jabo” died in 1940 at a training camp near
New York City and might seem a remote
historical figure. And yet, as a South African
historian once wrote, although his pages
told of distant events, “they are also about
today.” While such essays as Akiva Eldar’s
fascinating “Israel’s New Politics and the
Fate of Palestine” in this magazine give
much insight into the here and now, that
in itself cannot be understood without the
there and then. What Jabotinsky once said
and did is acutely relevant now, ninety years
after he founded his “Revisionist” New
Zionist Organization.
He may have died long ago, but his
soul went marching on. In 1946–1948,
the Irgun, the Revisionist armed force—
“terrorists” to the British and the New
York Times at the time—practiced violence
against British and Arabs. It was led by
Menachem Begin, who in 1977 would
become the first Israeli prime minister from
the Right, ending almost three decades of
Labor hegemony. Two more recent leading
May/June 2013 9
Israeli politicians, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi
Livni, a former prime minister and a onetime foreign minister, respectively, are
children of Irgun activists. Jabo’s portrait
hangs at Likud party meetings, and
Benjamin Netanyahu, the present Likud
leader and prime minister, has a direct
personal connection with him. As for the
Jewish Americans who continue to support
the Jewish state, they may never have read a
word of him, but they might be troubled if
they did. Jabo is very much about today.
H
e was born in 1880 into a prosperous,
educated Jewish family in Odessa,
but when he was a young man the hint
of promise given by that city’s cosmopolitanism was bitterly falsified by more pogroms. This experience radicalized Jabotinsky and made him a Jewish nationalist,
or Zionist. He traveled throughout Europe
to preach the cause, speaking and writing
fluently in almost more languages than can
be counted. One was Hebrew, which—in
its modern form and its attendant literature—he helped invent. Among the many
things about him likely forgotten by Likudniks today is that he translated the Sherlock
Holmes stories into Hebrew. All in all, this
polyglot polymath may be the one man of
authentic genius to have been produced by
the Zionist movement.
During the Great War, he helped
organize—and then served in—the Jewish
Legion that fought with the British Army
against the Ottoman Empire, and he
remained in Palestine under the British rule
that followed the war and the Ottoman
collapse. In November 1917, the London
government had issued the Balfour
Declaration, favoring a national home for
the Jewish people in Palestine, with the
hypocritical or even absurd reservation “that
nothing shall be done which may prejudice
the civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
10 The National Interest
But once they ruled the land, the British
soon began to repent of this undertaking
they had lightheartedly given, and they
despaired of governing a country with two
communities facing each other in bitter
mutual antagonism.
Soon after the creation of the British
mandate over Palestine, Arab violence
erupted, which Jabotinsky encouraged
the Jewish settlers to resist, fighting force
with force. In 1923, he broke with the
mainstream movement to found the New
Zionist Organization and the doctrine
known as Revisionism. If few Americans
have heard of Jabotinsky, not all Israelis,
one finds, can explain what was supposed
to be revised by the Revisionists. That
wonderfully protean or adaptable word
has variously been applied to a form of
late nineteenth-century German Marxism
and a group of late twentieth-century Irish
historians. But in the 1920s, it came to
mean nationalists who wished to rescind
or revise the partition of their country:
Hungarian revisionists wanted to undo the
1920 Treaty of Trianon, which they believed
(not without reason) had most brutally
and unjustly dismembered the historic
Kingdom of Hungary.
In the year after Trianon, the British
colonial secretary was busy rearranging the
vast area between Turkey in the north and
Arabia in the south, which the Western
allies had carved out of the corpse of the
Ottoman Empire in arbitrary and cynical
fashion. This man was Winston Churchill,
whose brief tenure at the Colonial Office
from February 1921 to October 1922
was crucially important, and fraught with
implications for the future. The British
had acquired two huge territories, named
almost at random “Mesopotamia” to its
east and “Palestine” to its west. In March
1921, Churchill summoned a conference
in Cairo, where he took two contrary
decisions.
Zionism’s Colonial Roots
Mesopotamia would become
an independent kingdom called
Iraq, under the Hashemite prince
Faisal, even though this new
country, “unduly stocked with
pepper y, pugnacious, proud
politicians and theologians,” as
Churchill told Parliament (plus ça
change, it’s tempting to add), was
a completely artificial amalgam of
Shia, Sunni and Kurd: its creation
has been described vividly by
Christopher Catherwood in his
aptly titled book Winston’s Folly.
But on the other hand, Churchill
divided what had been called
Palestine, stretching from the
Mediterranean to the borders of
Iraq. The larger, easterly portion
became another Arab kingdom
under Abdullah, Faisal’s brother,
now dubbed Transjordan, and
with us still as Jordan. All the
Zionists were dismayed by this
partition, as they had been hoping
for colonies east as well as west of the
Jordan, but Chaim Weizmann, the leader of
the World Zionist Organization, expressed
his regrets in private and stuck to his policy
of cooperation with the British.
B
y contrast, Jabotinsky campaigned
openly to revise or undo that 1921
partition, on the uncompromising slogan,
“A Jewish state with a Jewish majority on
both sides of the Jordan.” But it was not
merely his platform and organization that
distinguished Jabotinsky: there was also his
unsparing analysis, expounded in his 1923
essay “The Iron Wall.”
“There can be no voluntary agreement
between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs,”
Jabotinsky wrote. “It is utterly impossible to
obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine
Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an
Arab country into a country with a Jewish
Zionism’s Colonial Roots
majority.” Everyone should be aware how
colonization had taken place elsewhere, he
said. There was not “one solitary instance of
any colonisation being carried on with the
consent of the native population. There is
no such precedent. The native populations,
civilised or uncivilised, have always
stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective
of whether they were civilised or savage.”
These sentiments underlaid Jabotinsky’s
whole career. The Betar, his uniformed
youth movement, marched for—and
before long fought for—a Jewish state
with a Jewish majority, while Jabo agitated
vigorously for his cause, from Palestine to
Europe, North America to South Africa.
In 1929, there was further grim violence in
Palestine. The Revisionists had organized
demonstrations at the Western Wall and,
much as Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple
Mount in September 2000 precipitated
May/June 2013 11
Jabotinsky campaigned openly to revise or undo that
1921 partition, on the uncompromising slogan, “A Jewish
state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan.”
the second intifada, the demonstrations
provoked anti-Jewish riots. In the view of
the British high commissioner for Palestine,
the Revisionists had “deliberately seized
upon” the contested status of the Western
Wall “and worked it for all it was worth,
and converted a religious question into a
political one.”
In a letter to the London Times in
September 1929, Jabotinsky rebutted
the charge of “extremism.” He placed the
blame on the British authorities for not
controlling Arab violence and on London
for abandoning what he insisted were
the principles of the mandate: “All the
Revisionist demands are nothing else but
this principle: the Mandate means a largescale immigration of Jews maintained for
a period sufficient to build up a Jewish
country.” The Revisionists demanded “what
we call a ‘colonisation regime.’”
After one fiery oration, another British
official ruefully said that “Jabo’s speech
is eloquent and logical, but certainly
dangerous in its tendency so far as law
and order are concerned,” which was
true enough. The British decided not to
prosecute him, but while he was visiting
South Africa he was refused further
admission to Palestine. He never saw
Jerusalem again. After traveling to Poland
to encourage the Revisionists there, and
to warn that the Jews of Eastern Europe
were on the brink of disaster, he went to
the United States, where he died in August
1940.
Not long before his death, he engaged
as his private secretary the young scholar
Benzion Netanyahu, a notable medieval
12 The National Interest
historian. Netanyahu remained an ardent
Revisionist, living long enough to shock
David Remnick, the current editor of
the New Yorker, with his “outrageously
reactionary table talk” and contempt “for
Arabs, for Israeli liberals, for any Americans
to the left of the neoconservatives.”
Netanyahu died last year at age 102. He
had three sons: the eldest, Jonathan, became
an Israeli hero when he was killed leading
the commando raid to rescue hostages at
Entebbe in 1976; the youngest is a doctor
and writer; and the middle son, Benjamin,
might now claim to be Jabotinsky’s heir.
Today, Benjamin Netanyahu is seen
widely as a leader of the Right (although
in comparison with Avigdor Lieberman
and others who have held office in Israel
lately, Netanyahu could look moderate), and
Israeli politics have long been categorized
in terms of Left and Right, with the
Revisionists cast as right-wing no-goodniks.
That was so from the 1930s: with the rise
of fascism, it became quite common to
characterize Jabotinsky as a fascist, a word
widely used by his Zionist foes. Rabbi
Stephen Wise, a prominent liberal Jewish
American of his day, called Revisionism
“a species of fascism,” while David BenGurion—the leader of the Labor Zionists in
the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in British
Palestine) and then a founding father and
first prime minister of Israel—referred to
his foe privately as “Vladimir Hitler,” which
didn’t leave much to the imagination. And
to be sure, while Jabo called himself a freemarket liberal with anarchist leanings, the
oratory of Revisionism—“in blood and
fire will Judea rise again”—and the visual
Zionism’s Colonial Roots
rhetoric—the Betarim in their brown shirts
marching and saluting—had alarming
contemporary resonances.
I
n view of that, it’s striking how often
left-wing writers have expressed admiration for Jabotinsky. The self-proclaimed social democrat Judt was one. Looking back,
he saw that political Zionism had been created by Theodor Herzl and others with a
“liberal view of History . . . as the story
of progress in which everyone can find a
place.” A Jewish state, Herzl optimistically
thought, could be built in friendly cooperation with the existing inhabitants. But
this seemingly enlightened attitude was dismissed by Jabotinsky as mere illusion. In
Judt’s words: “What the Jews were seeking
in Palestine, he used to say, was not progress but a state. When you build a state
you make a revolution. And in a revolution
there can only ever be winners and losers.
This time around we Jews are going to be
the winners.” Likewise, Perry Anderson of
the New Left Review and ucla, one of the
best-known Marxist historians of his generation, has said that the Revisionist tradition was more intellectually distinguished
than Labor Zionism, no doubt thinking of
Netanyahu père as well as Jabotinsky. The
British scholar Jacqueline Rose of Queen
Mary, University of London, also has written with deep admiration about Jabotinsky’s
remarkable novel, The Five, and his literary
stature in general. And most amusing of all
is the eminent Anglo-Israeli historian Avi
Shlaim, a professor at Oxford.
In 2001, Shlaim was on “Start the Week,”
the Monday-morning bbc radio program,
talking about his latest book, The Iron Wall,
about the relationship between Zionists
and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. At the
time, the show was hosted by the sometimes
short-tempered broadcaster named Jeremy
Paxman, and one supposes that he (or his
research assistants) must have typecast
Zionism’s Colonial Roots
Shlaim in advance as a peacenik or radical,
which indeed he is in private life, as it were.
Shlaim lucidly expounded the book, with
its title from Jabotinsky, and Jabo’s larger
challenge to his fellow Zionists. The Arabs
were never going to give up what they
believed was their country, he said. Why
should they? They are normal, intelligent
people, a point he habitually emphasized,
and Jacqueline Rose is not alone in sensing
that this intransigent right-winger was
in some ways less “racist” than the Labor
Zionists, who simply ignored the Arabs.
As Shlaim summarized him, Jabo said
that no Jewish state could ever be created by
goodwill and good nature. If their project
was worthwhile, then the Zionists must
accept the consequences and recognize that
their settlement had to be built and then
guarded by force, behind that “Iron Wall.”
This succinct summary was listened to with
almost-audible impatience by Paxman, who
finally cut in to ask: So, was Shlaim saying
that he thought this man Jabotinsky was
wrong? “No,” Shlaim replied quietly. “I
mean I think he was right.”
Was Jabo right? He always said that he
opposed “transfer” or the forcible expulsion
of Arabs, but in that case his plan for
a Jewish state with a Jewish majority was
even more quixotic. In the land between
the Jordan and the sea—British mandatory
Palestine from 1921 to 1948, or the territory
ruled by Israel since 1967, including the
West Bank—Jews were believed to comprise
about 5 percent of the population in 1896,
when Herzl published his little book Der
Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”). They were
roughly 10 percent twenty-one years later
when the Balfour Declaration was published,
and about a third when the Zionists (but not
the Arabs) accepted the partition proposed
by the United Nations in 1947. As to “both
sides of the Jordan,” there were then as now
scarcely any Jews at all on the east side of the
river.
May/June 2013 13
Creating the necessary Jewish majority
assumed enormous migration from Europe
and a “colonisation regime” in Palestine,
which would use whatever means were
necessary to subdue indigenous resistance,
after which the Arabs would be a decently
treated minority, Jabotinsky said, and there
is no reason to doubt his sincerity. Like
Weizmann and other Zionists, Jabotinsky
failed to see that the British, whatever
they had said in the stress of war in 1917,
could not in practice afford to alienate
the hundreds of millions of Muslims
over whom they ruled, or the countries
that owned so much oil. And by the time
Israel was created, after Jabotinsky’s death, a
crucial factor in his plan had been hideously
disrupted: there were no longer millions
of European Jews to immigrate because
they had been murdered. That meant that
the newborn state of Israel could only
create a Jewish majority, even inside the
old Green Line before the Six-Day War, by
driving out Palestinian Arabs, in which the
Labor Haganah, directed by Ben-Gurion,
participated as well as the Irgun.
P
art of Jabotinsky’s vision is plainly dead
and may never have been realistic. The
old Revisionist map of a state stretching far
14 The National Interest
to the east of the Jordan can be seen carved
on the gravestone of Tzipi Livni’s father. But
Livni herself has said that, although when
she was a child “all I ever heard about was
that we Jews have the right to a state on
both sides of the Jordan,” she now knows
that Jews will before long be once more in
a minority even between Jordan and the
sea, let alone to the east. That creed of a
Greater Israel on which she was reared “had
no provisions for a Palestinian state, but
instead envisioned our living together with
the Palestinians in one state.” But she now
says, “My goal is to give the Jewish people a
home, and that’s why I must accept a Palestinian state. I had a choice, and I chose two
states for two peoples.”
In another way Jabo was, and remains,
a reproach to other Israelis, including
his political heirs, and also to American
supporters of Israel, who don’t know what
Jabo said or understand its implications.
That goes for Benjamin Netanyahu. In a
frankly comical interview with the Daily
Telegraph two years ago, he complained
about the British today, who look at Israel
through their “colonial prism” and thus
“see us as neo-colonialists.” But “we are
not Brits in India!” he exclaims. Still,
Netanyahu retains one great British hero: he
Zionism’s Colonial Roots
Jabo never shirked the language of colonialism, never denied that
the Zionists were settlers and never regretted that this settlement
was taking place under the auspices of the British Empire.
has a portrait of Winston Churchill in his
room, and posed beside it for the Telegraph
photographer. It evidently did not occur to
the interviewer to ask Netanyahu whether
he was under the impression that Churchill
condemned colonialism, or was ashamed of
the Raj.
It is quite true that Churchill was a
romantic supporter of Zionism, and in
1937 he met Jabotinsky. Their cordial
discussions influenced what Churchill said
and wrote about Palestine immediately
afterward. Churchill had already stated in
very plain terms that he saw nothing wrong
in the Jewish settlers’ supplanting the
Arabs, along the lines of an earlier pattern.
“I do not admit,” he said,
that a great wrong has been done to the Red
Indians of America, or the black people of
Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has
been done to these people by the fact that a
stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any
rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that
way, has come in and taken their place.
Churchill is a hero to the neoconservatives
of the Weekly Standard as well as to Netanyahu; they are all free to quote those words
with approval.
For his own part, Jabotinsky would have
Zionism’s Colonial Roots
dismissed Netanyahu’s “We are not neocolonials” as dishonest evasion. He never
shirked the language of colonialism, never
denied that the Zionists were settlers
and never regretted that this settlement
was taking place under the auspices
of the British Empire. What Netanyahu
correctly, if quite unintentionally, identified
is a central problem for Israel and her
supporters today. “Britain was a colonial
power, and colonialism has been spurned,”
the prime minister said two years ago. He
is correct. Colonialism has gone out of
fashion, along with imperialism and the
language of “higher grade” races, used by
Churchill to express his support.
That is part of the problem today for
Israel, which finds itself on the wrong
side of a great rupture between “the West”
and “the rest.” And while Jabotinsky
was demonstrably right in his time in
insisting honestly on the need for force
and dismissing the illusion of voluntary
cooperation with Palestinians, and while
the doctrine of an iron wall and an iron fist
has built and preserved the Jewish state for
sixty-five years, it is not easy to see how it
can work in perpetuity. Or maybe Israel has
adopted Keynes’s well-known maxim: when
asked what would happen in the long run,
he said, “In the long run we are all dead.” n
May/June 2013 15
Israel’s Fraying Image
By Jacob Heilbrunn
W
hen the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (aipac)
holds its annual spring meeting
in Washington, dc, the organization takes
elaborate measures to present a portrait of
overwhelming political clout. Huge video
screens featuring footage on Israel’s geopolitical perils, thousands of attendees, rousing
speeches, a steady stream of Democratic
and Republican politicians proclaiming
their undying fealty to Israel—all are meant
to suggest an irrepressible organization on a
roll. This year, as in previous ones, Iran was
the dominant topic. “Words alone will not
stop Iran,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu told the conference by satellite.
“Sanctions alone will not stop Iran.” He
then admonished his American audience:
“Sanctions must be coupled with a clear
and credible military threat if diplomacy
and sanctions fail.” At the same time, Senator John McCain excoriated the Obama
administration for not being sufficiently
friendly toward the Jewish state, while Vice
President Joe Biden sought to assuage lingering unease about the administration’s
stance by declaring that Obama is “not
bluffing” when he threatens Iran with military action to forestall its nuclear-weapons
development.
Bu t , a s a i pac o n c e a g a i n t r i e d
ostentatiously to display its influence,
distant drumbeats raised new questions
Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National
Interest.
16 The National Interest
about America’s relationship with the
Jewish state—and whether aipac’s influence
is perhaps not always exercised strictly in
Israel’s or America’s interest. Washington’s
local metro system displayed ads, sponsored
by Jewish Voice for Peace and the Avaaz
advocacy group, that featured various
ordinary American Jews denouncing aipac
as antithetical to peace and not speaking for
them. Although such protests by left-wing
Jewish organizations may have only slight
influence, they reflect a broader reality:
Israel’s image seems to be under challenge
as never before, in Europe as well as in
America.
A number of incidents suggest a cultural
shift is emerging that could presage a
reexamination of the nature of America’s
political ties to Israel. This shift is rooted
in a mounting perception that Israel
cannot be exempted from culpability
for its current predicament; that it is
isolating itself from its neighbors in ways
that are problematic for itself and for its
one staunch ally, America; that its robust
and illegal expansion of settlements—
including in East Jerusalem, where more
than five hundred thousand Israelis live—is
inimical to any chance of peace; that its
recent initiative to segregate Israelis and
Palestinians on separate buses represents
just another step toward colonization; and
that it must strike out on a new course
or risk becoming an international pariah.
President Obama did not really deviate
from this position during his recent visit to
Israel’s Fraying Image
As aipac once again tried ostentatiously to display
its influence, distant drumbeats raised new questions
about America’s relationship with the Jewish state.
Israel in March. Obama made it clear that
America supports Israel, and he brokered
renewed diplomatic ties between Israel and
Turkey. But he also emphasized that it is
up to Israelis themselves to take back their
country from the retrograde forces that
are driving it into the abyss. Obama even
went on to take a swipe at Netanyahu and
his coterie: “Political leaders will not take
risks if the people do not demand that they
do. You must want to create the change
that you want to see. Ordinary people
can accomplish extraordinary things.”
Essentially, Obama was telling Israelis to
perform an end run around their own
government—to view the conflict not just
from their own perspective but also that of
the Palestinians.
Obama’s remarks were impassioned,
friendly and moving. Their import could
not be clearer. He offered both promise
and admonition. And in uttering obvious
truths, Obama exemplified a broader
phenomenon—namely, the crumbling of
a longtime taboo in America on criticizing
Israel. Glenn Greenwald, writing as a Salon
columnist a few years ago, put it starkly
when he referred to the “mainstreaming”
of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s
depiction of a powerful Israel lobby that
is undermining American foreign policy.
The University of Chicago’s Mearsheimer
and Harvard’s Walt—both “considered
A-list scholars,” according to npr—were
excoriated in the media in 2006 when
they published in the London Review of
Books (after the Atlantic, which initially
commissioned the piece, declined to
publish it) their now-famous article
Israel’s Fraying Image
suggesting that the United States frequently
subordinates its own interests to the wishes
of Israel, in part because of “the unmatched
power of the Israel Lobby.” The duo
expanded their argument into a book, The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the
following year.
Their scholarship unleashed a concerted
effort on the part of many academics and
journalists to portray the two professors as
lurking outside the confines of respectable
thought. Johns Hopkins University
professor Eliot Cohen flatly labeled the
article “anti-Semitic” and a reflection of
“bigotry,” while Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz
declared Walt and Mearsheimer to be
conspiracy theorists as well as anti-Semites.
Words such as “smelly,” “nutty” and “oddly
amateurish” were bandied about. The aim
was to marginalize the authors. The truth
is that Walt and Mearsheimer’s book, as
a 2007 National Interest symposium
noted, did suffer from some serious flaws,
including a failure to appreciate that it is
possible to side with Israel without being
pressured by an Israel lobby. Further, the
authors elide any Palestinian responsibility
for the failure of the peace process.
But Walt and Mearsheimer’s blunt
account did have one big virtue, which was
to shatter the carapace of unanimity around
the question of examining Israel’s conduct.
As Greenwald observed, the Mearsheimer/
Walt thesis has moved from the margins
of respectability to become a matter of
acceptable contention within the country’s
intellectual mainstream. The Atlantic,
for example, ran a laudatory profile of
Mearsheimer and his realist philosophy by
May/June 2013 17
the prolific author Robert D. Kaplan early
in 2012. Around the same time came Peter
Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism, an anguished
meditation on the state of Israel by a selfdescribed Zionist and former editor of the
New Republic, until lately a bulwark of
reflexive defenses of Israel. Beinart decried
leading American Jewish organizations
and their elderly funders for propagating
a willful blindness to the country’s
palpable shortcomings, which, in turn, was
prompting younger and more liberal Jews
to become disaffected or indifferent to its
fate. The book had a potent influence on
the mounting debate.
N
ow we are seeing another phenomenon that reflects the ongoing erosion in Israel’s standing in the American
cultural consciousness. Gal Beckerman
notes in the Forward that the mainstreaming of Mearsheimer and Walt “has continued apace and now, I’m afraid, we are seeing the pop-culturizing” of the professors’
viewpoint. Beckerman points to this year’s
Oscars ceremony, where an animated teddy
bear named Ted explained to actor Mark
Wahlberg that Jews were all-powerful in
Hollywood and that the way to move up
was to announce: “I was born Theodore
Shapiro and I would like to donate money
to Israel and continue to work in Hollywood forever. Thank you. I am Jewish.”
A cr uder dig emerged after the
confirmation hearing of Chuck Hagel before
the Senate Armed Services Committee for
secretary of defense. The harsh treatment
meted out to the former senator, much of it
concentrated on his alleged lack of sufficient
support for Israel, prompted Saturday
Night Live to create a skit that ended up
on YouTube (after the network show aired
without it). It has McCain asking Hagel,
“You get an urgent call from the prime
minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who truly
is one of the greatest men of this or any
18 The National Interest
age. And he says to you, ‘It is vital to Israel’s
security that you go on national television
that night and perform oral sex on a donkey.’
Would you do that for Israel?”
This clip struck some as disturbing, even
disgusting. But it was remarkable that a
mainstream television program of parody
humor would produce a clip so dismissive
of the sensibilities of Israel’s American
supporters. Still, it captured an element of
the mounting absurdity of the debate over
America’s—and, by extension, the Obama
administration’s—ties to Israel. Nothing
did more to illustrate the peculiar nature
of that debate than the Hagel hearing. It
demonstrated that an element of hysteria
increasingly is attaching itself to the selfappointed defenders of Israel and that their
fervent attempts to paint any mild dissent
from prevailing orthodoxy as heresy reflects
weakness more than strength.
At first it didn’t look that way. When
Hagel arrived on Capitol Hill for his
confirmation hearing, he could have
been forgiven for thinking that his ordeal
bore some resemblance to the infamous
“Cadaver Synod” that took place in
medieval Rome in 897. There the corpse
of Pope Formosus, who had died a few
months earlier, was placed in a chair and
posthumously accused by a screaming Pope
Stephen VI—intent on shoring up his own
claims to power—of having committed
perjury, while a trembling deacon tried
to defend the dead pope’s reputation.
The verdict was a foregone conclusion:
Formosus was posthumously declared guilty
and his papacy null and void. The decaying
corpse was flung into the Tiber.
Of course, Hagel was alive and breathing
during his hearing. But he barely won
confirmation, and his experience before
his former Senate colleagues seemed more
like an inquisition about alleged past errors
of judgment than a judicious inquiry into
America’s foreign-policy choices. There was
Israel’s Fraying Image
little discussion of how Hagel might guide
the Pentagon as America withdraws from
Afghanistan and faces terrorist threats and a
rising China.
If anything, the hearing seemed to echo
many of the accusations leveled at Hagel
by neoconservative entities such as the
Emergency Committee for Israel, which
took out a full-page New York Times ad to
paint him as viciously anti-Israel. At the
hearing, McCain blasted away at Hagel
for his impassioned opposition to the Iraq
War and the 2007 troop surge, as well as
his denunciation of George W. Bush as the
worst president since Herbert Hoover. Ted
Cruz of Texas suggested, in the absence
of any evidence, that Hagel might have
accepted speaking fees from North Korea or
terrorist organizations. This didn’t even rise
to the level of speculation; it was character
assassination pure and simple. In this bill
of indictment, no issue loomed larger than
Hagel’s stance toward Israel, which, the
Washington Post reported, was mentioned
no fewer than 178 times in the space of a
single day, while Iran got 169 mentions.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan, where America
is fighting a war that Hagel now has to
oversee, was mentioned
all of thirty-eight times.
During this welter of
questions, Hagel might have
wondered if he was being
considered for the post of
ambassador to Israel rather
than the defense secretary of
a country at war.
Hagel remained on his
best behavior, rather like
the dead pope Formosus,
delivering anodyne
responses that were deemed
weak and faltering even
by his supporters among
Democratic senators
intent on saving President
Israel’s Fraying Image
Obama from a humiliating political defeat.
But what if Hagel had responded more
imaginatively and offered answers closer to
the truth? It’s interesting to speculate on the
fallout if he had told the assembled senators
something like the following:
“I appreciate your concern about the
state of Israel, which is a valuable ally of
America. Israel’s security is paramount
to America for both strategic and moral
reasons. It is threatened by hostile terrorist
groups and states, and I can assure you that
I have never doubted that Iran and other
Middle Eastern states wish it ill. But at the
same time, I am not being nominated as
secretary of defense to deal exclusively with
Israel, which, according to the Office of the
U.S. Trade Representative, is our twentyfourth-largest trading party. Nor do we have
a mutual-defense treaty with Israel—which,
as you know, possesses its own substantial
nuclear deterrent and is, moreover, the only
country in the region that possesses such
weapons. In the context of the Middle East
region, Israel enjoys superpower status. I
would add that, just as it is important for
us to maintain close security ties with Israel,
it is also imperative for us to promote a
May/June 2013 19
peace process between Palestinians and
Israelis that will ease tensions more broadly
in the region. Finally, let me say it would be
strategically unwise for the United States to
devote so much attention to Israel that we
neglect our relations with China, Russia,
India and other important regional powers.
Our prosperity and security depend upon
fortifying our relations with a number of
countries around the globe rather than
predominantly with any single country,
even Israel, as this hearing may have
suggested. Indeed, our national interests
encompass more than the Middle East, a
region that may well become less significant
relative to other areas of the globe as
America becomes increasingly energy
independent and new challenges present
themselves in Eurasia and the Far East.”
Had Hagel said something along these
lines, it certainly would have destroyed his
nomination. His detractors would have
interpreted such a view as reflecting a
thinly veiled hostility to the Jewish state,
and it would have provided an opening
to muster sufficient opposition to thwart
his confirmation. But might the country
be approaching a day when it is, in fact,
20 The National Interest
possible to say something along these lines
without being vilified or disqualified from
high office?
Despite the invective hurled at Hagel, he
weathered the hearing and was confirmed.
At the same time, former senator John
Kerry has become
secretary of state. With
these two men in the
Obama cabinet, the road
to bombing Iran faces a
new roadblock. Neither
man has displayed
much enthusiasm for
enmeshing America
in yet another Middle
Eastern war. A good
case can be made, as
commentator M. J.
Rosenberg has suggested,
t h a t Ob a m a s u b t l y
outfoxed his detractors
and adversaries,
including Netanyahu,
by naming Hagel to the defense post. At a
minimum, he signaled that he continues to
favor diplomacy over bellicosity—a stance
far different from the position espoused
consistently by Netanyahu. Beyond that, he
challenged the hard-line pro-Israel forces to
go after his Pentagon nominee. When some
did, they lost.
I
ndeed, it seems increasingly clear that
Netanyahu miscalculated in his effort
to undermine Obama during his first term
and throughout his reelection campaign.
He relied on a phalanx of Senate and House
Republicans to brand as heretical any deviation from reflexive support for his intransigent approach to the Middle East and the
Palestinians. Further, he took the audacious
step of all but endorsing Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in last year’s
presidential election. This was considered
by many in both countries to be an untow-
Israel’s Fraying Image
ard intervention in American domestic politics by a foreign leader.
Now, with Obama ensconced in the
White House for another four years, it
seems inevitable that the president will
hold a stronger hand in his dealings with
Netanyahu. The Israeli leader may want to
consider carefully any decision to repeat
his May 2011 effort to humiliate Obama
and teach him a lesson by lecturing him in
a televised Oval Office conversation about
the precariousness of Israel’s security, then
continuing the tutorial in a pointed address
to a joint session of Congress. The reelected
president may be less inclined to tolerate
that again.
But it isn’t likely that Netanyahu, who
narrowly won another term, will abandon
his goals or his effort to enlist America
in his country’s strategic cause. Indeed,
he seems to be going into overdrive in an
effort to push the Obama administration
to endorse a military strike on Tehran.
Reflecting this sentiment, aipac is pushing
for the designation of Israel as a “major
strategic ally” of the United States—a
designation no other country enjoys and
one that could serve as a kind of carte
blanche resolution potentially embroiling
Washington in wars it may wish to avoid.
This rush to codify the relationship
between the two countries also is based on
a calculation that America may be drifting
away from involvement in foreign conflicts.
Indeed, aipac itself is starting to
acknowledge with some alarm this apparent
American war-weariness. At its recent
Washington conference, aipac president
Michael Kassen deplored what he described
as the “growing allure of isolationism” in
America, which is another way of saying
that Israel, among other nations, may
command less deference and interest
among a new and younger generation of
legislators. He lamented that “important
roles on congressional committees vital to
Israel’s Fraying Image
the U.S.-Israel relationship are increasingly
held by individuals with little foreign policy
experience.”
Kassen’s apprehensions are not misplaced.
The conservative backing of Israel has
been based on what might be called the
gop’s new Southern strategy—an alliance
of convenience forged between two
improbable partners: neoconservatives
and the Christian Right. But as the
influence of Southern conservatives
dwindles, this is likely to become a very
shaky base. Moreover, as America changes
demographically, its relation with Israel may
become less cozy, reverting to something
closer to the two countries’ traditional state.
It may be that in basing his relations with
America so heavily on neoconservative
influence, Netanyahu has misjudged the
state of play in U.S. politics.
Indeed, the relationship between the
two countries may have reached its highwater mark. Even if it has, there can be
no doubt that the strategic partnership
between America and Israel is not under
threat and will remain rock solid. The
two countries share too many common
interests for it to be severed. But that
doesn’t mean the relationship can’t take
on a different shape and tone. The
Netanyahu strategy dates to the George
W. Bush era, when the neoconservatives
held sway over the administration and
congressional Republicans. These hard-line
advocates saw Israel and the United States
as facing similar threats—menaced by
Islamic terrorists, unable to rely upon allies
and required to act unilaterally. But this
approach now appears dubious. As Francis
Fukuyama cogently observed in these pages
when first breaking with the neocons in
2004, Israel may be a small state that has
difficulty attracting allies (though under
Netanyahu it has also been repelling them).
But why should the United States, a great
power, want to follow suit?
May/June 2013 21
D
espite the pious asseverations of mutual interests that resound in the
halls of Congress whenever Netanyahu visits Washington, it has not always been so.
When Israel was founded, the Soviet Union
was one of its biggest backers. The Soviets
saw a potential ally in the socialist Jewish
state, and one of its Eastern European satellites, Czechoslovakia, funneled weaponry to
Jewish resistance fighters battling the British
for independence. In Washington, by contrast, the Truman administration was riven
by disputes over whether to recognize Israel. Truman, who years later declared “I am
Cyrus,” a reference to the Persian king who
freed the Jews from Babylon, was unflinching in his support for Israel. Most of his advisers were not. According to Clark Clifford
in his memoir (coauthored with Richard
Holbrooke), Secretary of State George C.
Marshall
firmly opposed American recognition of the
new Jewish state; I did not. Marshall’s opposition was shared by almost every member of the
brilliant and now-legendary group of men, later
referred to as “the Wise Men,” who were then
in the process of creating a postwar foreign
policy that would endure for more than forty
years. The opposition in­cluded the respected
Undersecretary of State, Robert Lovett; his
prede­cessor, Dean Acheson; the number-three
man in the State Department, Charles Bohlen;
the brilliant chief of the Policy Planning Staff,
George F. Kennan; the dynamic and driven
Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal; and a
man with whom I would disagree again twenty years later when we served together in the
Cabinet, Dean Rusk, then the Director of the
Office of United Nations Affairs.
In sum, the wasp foreign-policy establishment was pretty much united in its rejection of close relations with Israel.
This approach was followed by the next
administration under Dwight Eisenhower.
22 The National Interest
His mantra was that America should be an
honest broker in the Middle East, pursuing
a strategy of being “above politics.” His
approach was tested in the 1956 Suez crisis,
when Great Britain, France and Israel
attacked Egypt on a pretext to recapture
the Suez Canal from Egypt’s Gamal Abdel
Nasser. Eisenhower forced all three powers
to retreat. “I gave strict orders,” Eisenhower
said, “to the State Department that they
should inform Israel that we would handle
our affairs exactly as though we didn’t have
a Jew in America.” Given the makeup of
the State Department, his admonition
was hardly necessary. But his handling of
Suez was, as Washington Post columnist
David Ignatius has observed recently, the
genesis of the Eisenhower Doctrine, which
offered direct American military assistance
to Middle East nations threatened by
Communist aggression. America was now
an independent power in the Middle East.
But it wasn’t always easy to act as an
interlocutor between the restive Arab
states and Israel. A turning point arrived
during the Kennedy administration, and
it started America’s embrace of Israel. An
early jfk effort to establish warm relations
with Egypt’s Nasser proved fruitless.
During Egypt’s invasion of Yemen in 1962,
America intervened to safeguard Saudi
Arabia from any Egyptian incursions. That’s
when Israel began to look more attractive
as an ally, though America harbored deep
reservations about its attempt to develop
nuclear weapons. According to historian
Warren Bass in his book Support Any
Friend, when Kennedy supplied Israel with
Hawk missiles, it was, more or less, the
start of a new special relationship. “What
began with the Hawk in 1962,” writes Bass,
“has become one of the most expensive
and extensive military relationships of the
postwar era, with a price tag in the billions
of dollars and diplomatic consequences
to match.” When Israel defeated the
Israel’s Fraying Image
Does Israel really want to rely only on the United States, bereft
of all other allies, for its security at a moment when Washington’s
attentiveness to foreign affairs appears to be waning?
Arab coalition that sought to destroy
it in 1967, American Jews were jubilant.
Jerusalem was united. The West Bank
was liberated. In short, the humiliation
of 1956—Eisenhower’s diktat—had been
reversed. Almost overnight, Labor prime
minister Levi Eshkol approved what were
euphemistically described as military
defensive settlements in the West Bank.
Over the next decades the links between
America and Israel steadily strengthened.
Richard Nixon rescued Israel with arms
shipments during the Yom Kippur War,
primarily at the behest of his secretary of
state, Henry Kissinger, while Jimmy Carter
brokered the 1978 Camp David accords
between Egypt and Israel. Still, the U.S.Israeli relationship was viewed in traditional
terms—as one in which interests could
diverge without undoing the alliance.
No one ever questioned the Reagan
administration’s commitment to Israel,
for example, but the country was not the
recipient of any kind of diplomatic carte
blanche. Through very strong entreaties,
Reagan forced Likud prime minister
Menachem Begin to cease the bombing
of Lebanon in 1983. And, over strenuous
objections from Israel, Reagan sold hightech awacs surveillance planes to Saudi
Arabia. When the Senate sought to thwart
the sale at aipac’s behest, Reagan personally
and tirelessly lobbied senators to kill the
blocking maneuver. He won.
Furthermore, multiple efforts were made
to get Israel to curb its settlement drive in
the occupied territories of the West Bank.
It was during the George H. W. Bush
administration, and in the aftermath of
Israel’s Fraying Image
the Gulf War, that the last serious attempt
took place. It failed. Then with the George
W. Bush administration, Israel was given
a degree of American support that it had
never previously enjoyed. This was the
golden age of the Likud-neocon partnership.
The credulous Bush came under the spell
of the neocons, who dazzled him with a
ready-made plan for action to triumph over
terrorism. He now had a mission to pursue,
and he pursued it with zeal.
It is true that Bush was the first American
president to call for the creation of a
Palestinian state, but he voiced no criticisms
of Israeli settlements and, indeed, may have
embarked upon the Iraq War partly in the
conviction—most notably championed
by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz—that the road to Middle East
peace led through Baghdad, not the West
Bank. Not until the end of his presidency
did the sway of the neocons begin to
abate. In Elliott Abrams’s new memoir of
the Bush years, Tested by Zion, the former
deputy national-security adviser and leading
neocon hard-liner records his distress that,
by July 2007, even the sainted Bush began
to come around to the idea of a peace
process between Israelis and Palestinians.
That’s when Bush announced that he would
convene an international meeting that
fall of “representatives from nations that
support a two-state solution, reject violence,
recognize Israel’s right to exist, and commit
to all previous agreements between the
parties.” Bush’s tepid effort went nowhere.
So did Obama’s subsequent effort. He
tried to follow in the footsteps of the elder
Bush by insisting that Israeli settlements
May/June 2013 23
had to stop as a precondition for peace
talks between the Palestinians and Israelis.
He was rebuffed by Israel amid stark
criticism at home from Israel supporters.
Netanyahu was hailed as a conquering hero,
a new Winston Churchill, when he spoke
luxury that America can no longer afford. It
can and must invest in the relationship. But
the relationship could evolve into a more
clinical one, particularly if the Republican
Party pursues the course advocated by
Senator Rand Paul. Such a development,
at the May 2011 session of Congress. Since
then, a cold peace has settled in not just
between the Israelis and Palestinians but
also between Netanyahu and Obama. Will
it thaw in the wake of Obama’s March visit
to Israel? As successful as Obama’s visit may
have been in terms of reassuring Israelis
about his enthusiasm for the Jewish state
and in boosting his personal popularity,
it seems unlikely that either the Israelis or
Palestinians will engage in real compromise.
Netanyahu may view his ability to stymie
a peace process as a political victory
for himself and a diplomatic one for his
country. But in the long term it may be
more of a victory for American lassitude
born of frustration. And that can’t be
good for Israel or its longtime leader. It’s
conceivable that America’s interests in
Israel’s fortunes could wane in coming years.
This is not to say that America will
become antipathetic to Israel. Israel is not a
which appears possible, could spur the gop
toward a less interventionist foreign policy
abroad and a greater willingness to trim
military budgets. Paul himself is a persistent
critic of foreign aid, a theme that is most
uncomfortable for Israel, which receives
some $3 billion a year from Washington.
24 The National Interest
T
hus, the longer Netanyahu waits to
reach an accommodation with the Palestinians, the more precarious Israel’s position becomes. That’s because the biggest
threat Israel faces is not external. It is not
Iran, any more than it was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. It is the demographic and
religious challenges that the country confronts internally. As Yuval Elizur and Lawrence Malkin outline in their new book,
The War Within, the traditional aspiration
to create a secular democracy along European lines is jeopardized by the haredim,
or ultra-Orthodox. In their refusal to in-
Israel’s Fraying Image
tegrate into the wider society, the haredim
rapidly are becoming something of an economic and cultural time bomb inside Israel.
“If one-fifth or more of all pupils in Israel
schools do not learn mathematics, English,
and civics,” write Elizur and Malkin, “part
of an entire generation will be dependent
on handouts for the rest of their lives.” As
Israel’s situation becomes more dire—manifest in the fact that it is now almost entirely
surrounded by walls—the solutions that
are being advanced to break the stalemate
are becoming more radical. In 2003, the
late, distinguished historian Tony Judt argued that it could become a binational state,
which would entail the dismantling of Israel
as a Jewish state. He said the country risked
becoming a “belligerently intolerant, faithdriven ethno-state.” Not surprisingly, this
proposal evoked a furor in America, with
Judt being dismissed widely by critics as a
“self-hating Jew.”
Now Yehouda Shenhav, a professor of
sociology at Tel Aviv University, suggests
in Beyond the Two-State Solution that Israel
should become what is sometimes called a
“consociational democracy.” He audaciously
maintains that West Bank settlers are no
more illegitimate than the Israelis who
settled the country after 1948. The two-
Israel’s Fraying Image
state solution, he says, is a bogus mythology
cooked up by the Israeli Left. The only path
is for everyone to live where he or she wants,
Palestinian and Israeli alike.
This may sound far-fetched. But if
Israel remains stymied in dealing with the
Palestinians, even under a new and more
moderate coalition led by Netanyahu, its
predicament is likely to intensify. And
the range of options for dealing with the
country’s mounting problems is likely to
expand toward more radical solutions.
That can’t be good for Israel’s standing in
the world. Already Europe is talking about
imposing sanctions on goods produced by
Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Turkey is
indulging in anti-Semitic language. Egypt
is led by the Muslim Brotherhood. And the
Arab Spring could reach into the kingdom
of Jordan. So does Israel really want to rely
only on the United States, bereft of all other
allies, for its security at a moment when
Washington’s attentiveness to foreign affairs
appears to be waning? Is that its best option
in seeking protection from mounting threats
abroad? Obama has it right: the chance for
peace will not come from Israel’s stubborn
leaders, but from ordinary Israelis who force
their leaders to recognize that peace must be
chanced. n
May/June 2013 25
The U.S. Democracy Project
By Jordan Michael Smith
C
arl Gershman has the confident air
of a man who knows his importance in Washington. As president
of the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy (ned), he oversees
an organization of 171 employees. In 2012,
his organization dispensed approximately 1,236 grants, averaging some $50,000
each—a total of close to $62 million—to
nongovernmental organizations (ngos) in
ninety-two countries.
Thus, it isn’t surprising that Gershman
would exude an unusual combination of
idealism and political savvy about the ways
of Washington. Well turned out in elegant
suits and fashionable ties, he occupies a
spacious office on the eighth floor of a fine
building on Washington’s F Street. The
pleasant coffee mug he carries, decorated
with pictures of his children, understates
the power and controversial nature of his
work.
Gershman’s job is to promote democracy
in foreign lands with as much force
and reach as his budget and operational
effectiveness will allow. The ned disperses
grants not to individual dissidents or
activists but directly to ngos—civic
organizations, associations and independent
media. Unlike other U.S. democracypromotion enterprises, it does not work
with governments in the countries in which
Jordan Michael Smith, a contributing writer
at Salon and the Christian Science Monitor, is a
contributing editor at the American Conservative.
26 The National Interest
it promotes democracy. This pursuit sounds
like a particularly honorable one to most
Americans, given the widespread devotion
to democratic institutions that is embedded
in the U.S. national consciousness. “All
people want freedom,” says Gershman,
encapsulating a view widely shared
throughout America, inside and out of the
growing democracy-promotion movement.
But others question both this activity and
the notion that U.S. federal dollars should
fund efforts by Americans to determine the
governmental systems of other countries,
which inevitably takes on a coloration of
seeking to undermine existing governments
and interfere with civic systems around the
world. A recent commentary on the website
of Russia’s state-funded international
television channel, RT (for Russia Today),
expressed a view widely held outside the
United States: “‘Private’ organizations like
ned are nothing but funding channels for
activities that used to be run by the cia
under the title of ‘subversion.’” Given that
the English-language RT is essentially the
Russian government’s external propaganda
arm, this view of U.S. democracypromotion activities isn’t surprising.
But that foreign perspective is echoed
by a former acting president of the ned
who later served as the archivist of the
United States. “A lot of what we do today,”
said Allen Weinstein in a 1991 interview,
“was done covertly 25 years ago by the
cia. The biggest difference is that when
such activities are done overtly, the flap
The U.S. Democracy Project
potential is close to zero. Openness is its
own protection.”
Some two decades after Weinstein’s
celebration of openness, flaps have
emerged aplenty. Just months after
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was
ousted from office through massive street
demonstrations—a development heralded
as a potential turn toward more democracy
in Arab lands—the new government
raided the offices of ten local civil-society
organizations, including the International
Republican Institute (iri) and the National
Democratic Institute (ndi), two core
grantees of the ned. Some forty-three ngo
workers, including nineteen Americans,
were arrested and charged with crimes.
The matter looked harrowing until the
aid workers were finally released some
months later, but Egypt’s ngo crackdown is
ongoing.
Russia soon acted to curtail or thwart
ngo activities within its borders. The U.S.
Agency for International Development
(usaid) was expelled last fall, and the
government later enacted a law requiring
foreign-funded groups to register as “foreign
agents.” The United States and other
governments also require citizens working
with foreign governments to register that
fact. But in late December, the Russian
legislature passed a law that would outlaw
U.S.-funded “nonprofit organizations that
engage in political activity” within Russia.
C
learly, some foreign governments are
not keen about activities within their
borders that many Americans view simply
as idealistic efforts to support universal values. But criticism of such activities is voiced
in the United States as well. Writer and
thinker David Rieff suggested in this magazine that democracy promotion is the product of adherents who “will not or cannot
acknowledge either the ideological or the
revolutionary character of their enterprise.”
The U.S. Democracy Project
He adds that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, whose 1956 boast that the Soviets
would “bury” the West was “an expression
of historical determinism at its most vulgar,” looks like a “philosophical pragmatist”
alongside some of today’s earnest democracy-promotion cadres.
In addition, recent scholarship questions
democracy promotion’s effectiveness.
“Despite all of the attention that has been
given to democracy promotion over the past
decade, we actually know very little about
which programs policy makers should
fund where,” says Sarah Bush, a Temple
University political scientist who is writing
a book on the subject. Though many
Americans instinctively assume supporting
democracy in foreign countries is beneficial
to all concerned, the research doesn’t
match that theory. “Unfortunately, even if
we accept that U.S. government-funded
programs are, on average, associated with
democratization, figuring out what type
of programs work best is a whole different
challenge,” says Bush.
She adds that American prodemocracy
activities are often seen by others as
meddling or duplicitous. “The United
States suffers from a credibility problem
when it promotes democracy overseas,” she
says, continuing:
American leaders are trying to support democratic transition in countries such as Libya and
Tunisia. They are also supporting the survival
of friendly dictators in countries such as Bahrain and Jordan. As a consequence, the United
States’ pledges to support democracy around
the world often ring hollow, especially in the
Middle East.
Notwithstanding such contrary thinking,
America’s democracy-promotion enterprise
is going strong. Bush has coined the
phrase “Democracy Establishment” to
describe the players in what has become
May/June 2013 27
“All people want freedom,” says Gershman, encapsulating
a view widely shared throughout America, inside and
out of the growing democracy-promotion movement.
a virtual cottage industry. Getting precise
numbers on U.S.-funded democracypromotion spending is difficult because
the programs are not labeled as such.
However, in 2012 the U.S. government
planned to spend $2.6 billion to support
democracy, good governance and human
rights overseas, according to the Foreign
Assistance Dashboard, a website produced
by the State Department and usaid. That
assistance was distributed through several
institutions, including usaid, the State
Department and the ned. Such funds
are in addition, of course, to cash raised
privately by the Democracy Establishment.
Most of the money from private sources is
donated by George Soros’s Open Society
Foundations, but the Ford Foundation and
the MacArthur Foundation also are big
contributors.
Bush estimates that there are “about
two dozen core ngos in the Democracy
Establishment, such as Freedom House
and the ned, that work in many countries
and are agenda-setters in the field.” She
adds, “There are, however, scores of
additional American organizations that
are also involved in democracy promotion
that collaborate and compete with the core
ngos on democracy-assistance programs.”
A lot of money is up for grabs, and the
field is getting crowded. Since American
democracy assistance began in the 1980s,
the competition among ngos for the U.S.
government’s grants has gotten fiercer,
according to Bush. More and more ngos
today are fighting to get a piece of the
lucrative democracy-assistance pie. For
example, she indicates that the ned gave
28 The National Interest
as much as 90 percent of its grants in 1985
to large ngos that worked in multiple
countries, whereas in 2009 that amount
dropped to around 50 percent, while the
rest went to hundreds of organizations
based abroad.
The increased competition for funds has
major implications for how organizations
promote democracy. Bush says:
It encourages those organizations to focus on
implementing projects that will help them survive and thrive as organizations—such as projects that will yield quick, measurable results and
projects that will allow them to work in many
countries—even though such projects have uncertain consequences for democratization.
T
o understand how groups in the Democracy Establishment work, it’s best
to begin with the ned, which distributes
half of its grant money, and serves as an
umbrella organization, to what it calls its
“core grantees”—the iri and the ndi, which
work for free and fair elections; the Center
for International Private Enterprise, which
pushes for free markets and economic reforms; and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, which assists
trade unions. Each of these organizations
receives an equal portion of the ned’s grant
budget, and their programs are approved
like those of other grantees. The other half
of the ned’s funding is awarded annually
to foreign-based organizations seeking support. (No American organizations receive
grants under this program.)
In the digital age, getting an ned grant
is easier than ever. Applications can be sent
The U.S. Democracy Project
with a click of a mouse by any organization
outside America that is independent of a
government—public universities, for
example, cannot receive funding. Four
times a year, the ned’s board examines
proposals to determine the credibility of
applicants and to ensure the applications
are consistent with the organization’s
overall agenda of strengthening democratic
institutions and advancing democratic
goals.
Though it raises some private
contributions from foundations,
corporations and individuals, 99 percent of
the ned’s funding comes from Congress,
according to its 2011 tax return. As a
result, its independence has always been
suspect. “Our board gets full autonomy in
the specific activities it does,” Gershman
insists. Still, Congress sometimes mandates
that some ned money must go to grantees
in specific countries,
such as Burma, Cuba
or Iraq. In addition, all
ned grants and activities
are subject to multiple
layers of oversight by the
State Department and
Congress, which are not
in the habit of giving away
money without gaining a
voice in how it is spent.
But whatever the
ned’s actual level of
independence, it can’t
escape its identity as a
quasi arm of the U.S.
government, devoted
to supporting groups
wishing to subvert autocratic governments
or prevent them from gaining strength.
Foreign governments in particular view the
organization as merely a screen for U.S.
foreign-policy interests, as reflected in an
RT commentary suggesting that the “ned
is so clearly part of the US government that
The U.S. Democracy Project
legislators had to pass a specific law stating
that it was not.”
The ned was born in the Reagan
administration, when democracy promotion
came into its own. As the late political
scientist Samuel Huntington put it in
1984, “The Reagan administration moved
far beyond the Carter administration’s
more limited concern with human
rights.” Though Reagan initially scorned
the Carter administration’s emphasis on
human rights, once in office he called for
a “democratic revolution.” In a famous
speech at London’s Westminster in 1982,
Reagan said, “It is time that we committed
ourselves as a nation—in both the public
and private sectors—to assisting democratic
development.” To that end, Reagan
announced an initiative to study democracy
promotion, which led to the establishment
of the ned in 1983.
The ned’s initial budget was $31.3
million. “At first, we were very small,” says
Gershman. But the organization’s small
size didn’t shield it from controversy. Its
original board included Democrats and
Republicans, representatives from the
U.S. labor, business and education fields,
May/June 2013 29
foreign-policy specialists and members of
Congress. Its first permanent chairman
was John Richardson, a former assistant
secretary of state. Gershman, a former aide
to the U.S. representative to the United
Nations, became president at age forty on
April 30, 1984.
Almost immediately, some outsiders
viewed the organization as a kind of
handmaiden of the American establishment.
Suspicions and allegations that it was merely
an extension of the U.S. government were
not long in emerging. Prominent board
members, including former secretary
of state Henry Kissinger and former vice
president Walter Mondale, underscored
its government alignment, in the minds
of many. The only difference between
the ned’s activities and previous U.S.
interventions in foreign countries, critics
that country’s Communist rulers—and,
as a result, was banned by the Polish
government. “We had a discussion with
board members, to determine whether
we could violate the laws of another
country,” Gershman recalls. “Ultimately we
concluded that we had to observe the laws
only of the United States.”
Whatever the merits of this decision,
it was to have major implications in later
decades when nations with significant ngo
activities within their borders complained
that their customs and electoral systems
were being trampled by outside agitators.
But the immediate result in Poland was
excellent. The ned worked closely with
then cia chief William Casey to provide
vital supplies to Solidarity, which soon
played an essential role in liberating
Eastern Europe from Soviet rule. Zbigniew
alleged, was that the ned operated under
a spotlight, heralded by defenders as proof
that the ned was a valuable and pristine
institution.
The ned enjoyed undeniable successes
in the 1980s. Soon after its founding, ned
leaders had to decide whether to support
Poland’s Solidarity trade union, which
had emerged as a major force against
Brzezinski, national-security adviser
to President Carter, credits these efforts
with preserving Solidarity during its
most harrowing times so it could play its
subsequent liberating role. “To sustain an
underground effort takes a lot in terms of
supplies, networks, etc.,” he told Time in
1992, “and this is why Solidarity wasn’t
crushed.”
30 The National Interest
The U.S. Democracy Project
Other efforts proved less salutary. In
1985, the New York Times reported that the
ned had funneled $1.4 million to French
center-right groups opposed to the policies
of then president Francois Mitterrand’s
Socialist Party. The cash was distributed
secretly, in violation of the ned’s charter.
Worse, one of the anti-Communist
groups funded by the ned had ties to an
illegal, extreme-right paramilitary group.
Gershman lamely insisted that none of the
money was “intended for activities that in
any way could be construed as criticism
of the Mitterrand government.” This
interference in one of the world’s oldest
democracies contradicted the ned’s stated
mission, spirit and ethics. Upon finding
out about the program, one persistent
ned critic, Representative Hank Brown
of Colorado (later a senator), argued that
what he called “the French connection
. . . requires Americans to ask how they
would feel if they learned that the French
Government was giving millions of dollars
to the afl-cio to oppose the policies of
Ronald Reagan.”
More generally, the ned’s prominent
advocacy has served as a kind of inspiration
for others bent on creating their own
nonprofit organizations devoted to
democracy promotion. Thus did the
Democracy Establishment emerge as an
important player in Washington. But the
roots of the prodemocracy movement
stretch back more than a century in U.S.
history.
T
he movement can be said to have
begun in the fateful year of 1898 with
America’s war with Spain, which resulted
from many factors, practical as well as idealistic. But the central trigger was America’s
agitation about Spain’s colonial treatment of
the Cuban people, some of whom had been
in revolt against their Spanish overlords for
years. Once the victory over Spain was com-
The U.S. Democracy Project
plete, which took a mere three months, the
United States decided it must build democracies in Cuba and the Philippines, which it
now dominated, and a tradition of overseas
nation building was born. President Woodrow Wilson’s interventions in Mexico, Haiti
and the Dominican Republic, as well as
his participation in World War I, were all
rhetorically defended at least in part by an
American duty to support democracy in beleaguered nations. The failures of those adventures cooled America’s nation-building
ardor, leading to the “isolationist” policies
of the 1920s and 1930s.
Then World War II transformed the
world and altered U.S. attitudes. “The
first phase of the project of building an
international network to promote
democracy began in the early years of the
cold war,” writes Nicolas Guilhot in The
Democracy Makers. President Franklin
Roosevelt, along with British prime
minister Winston Churchill, pushed
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the 1945
Yalta Conference (unsuccessfully) to allow
free elections in Poland. Roosevelt and
his successor, Harry Truman, determined
that the destroyed nations of Japan and
Germany must be rebuilt in America’s
democratic image. The Marshall Plan, John
Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in Latin
America, the interventions in Southeast
Asia—all were at least in part attempts to
export democracy to countries with weak or
nonexistent consensual governments. The
Cold War became defined by America not
as a competition between two countries, the
Soviet Union and the United States, but as
one between two systems, democracy and
totalitarianism.
During this time, prominent scholars
such as Seymour Martin Lipset, David
Apter and Samuel Huntington launched
an academic subfield by studying the
factors that led to democratic transitions.
Variously called “modernization theory” or
May/June 2013 31
“development theory,” this field implicitly
offered the U.S. government advice on how
to foster democratic governments overseas.
But the military failures of the Vietnam
War revealed weaknesses in the democracypromotion ethos and led to a new wave
of liberal isolationism that captured the
Democratic Party in the 1970s, while the
Nixon and Ford administrations developed
a narrower conception of the U.S. national
interest. The result was a retreat from
expansive efforts at democracy promotion.
ngos such as Amnesty International
began to fill the void. So, too, did the
European Commission and the Catholic
Church. The Helsinki accords, signed
in 1975, led to the establishment of the
Moscow Helsinki Group and Helsinki
Watch (later changed to Human Rights
Watch), which monitored the Soviet
Union’s declared commitment to human
rights. Freedom House began publishing its
annual reports on the state of democratic
rights in countries around the world.
Then came the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the Cold War’s end, foreseen
by almost nobody of note in the realm of
international relations. This development
had a profound impact on the American
consciousness. To many, it demonstrated
the widespread, if not universal, appeal
of democracy. Eastern European peoples
destroyed Communist dictatorships
in order to make their countries more
responsive to popular sentiment
through the construction of marketbased democracies. The Russian people
responded, overrunning efforts by leaders
such as Mikhail Gorbachev to reform
Communism in order to save it.
All this spawned in the American mind
and heart a strong faith in the superiority of
the American system. This was powerfully
reflected in Francis Fukuyama’s “The End
of History?” essay in this magazine, which
posited that liberal democracy was the
32 The National Interest
political-ideological end point of mankind’s
civic development.
There followed even more striking
odes to the magic of democracy. The
great diplomat and geopolitical thinker
George Kennan abandoned his former
dismissal of Wilsonism and now praised
Woodrow Wilson’s “broad vision and acute
sensitivities.” Samuel Huntington, who
in 1984 had described the possibility of
democratic development in Eastern Europe
as “virtually nil,” now hailed the democratic
wave there and wrote that “the dialectic of
history upended the theories of social science
. . . the movement toward democracy was a
global one.”
The Washington nonprofit community
soon joined in. As the ned’s Gershman
puts it, democracy-promotion forces
go “where the action is.” The result was
a wave of new democracy-promotion
enterprises and the emergence of today’s
Democracy Establishment. Even before
the 1989 collapse of the Soviet empire,
the International Foundation for Electoral
Systems was established “to support
electoral and other democratic institutions
in emerging, evolving, and experienced
democracies.” Founded by Republican Party
consultant F. Clifton White and now headed
by businessman and former Democratic
consultant Bill Sweeney, the organization
gets some 95 percent of its $103 million
operating budget from the State Department
and usaid, according to its 2011 tax filings.
I
f the West’s Cold War victory spawned
new democracy-promotion entities, the
9/11 attacks on the American homeland by
Islamist terrorists generated an even greater
wave as many democracy champions concluded that such attacks and the angers behind them resulted from the Middle East’s
closed societies. Some new organizations
were born, while others expanded their
Middle East activities.
The U.S. Democracy Project
All ned grants and activities are subject to oversight by the
State Department and Congress, which are not in the habit of
giving away money without gaining a voice in how it is spent.
One new organization involved in that
effort was the Project on Middle East
Democracy (pomed), which was founded
in 2006 as an organization devoted to
“examining how genuine democracies
can develop in the Middle East and how
the U.S. can best support that process.”
pomed hosts seminars and conferences
and publishes policy briefs on the state of
democracy in the Middle East. It brings
Middle Eastern activists, dissidents and
civil-society workers to the United States for
training sessions and to meet with officials
at the White House, State Department and
usaid, as well as with members of Congress.
Former congressmen Jim Kolbe, an Arizona
Republican, and Jim Moody, a Wisconsin
Democrat, sit on its board of advisers.
Stephen McInerney, executive director
of pomed, disavows any intent to foster
the protest movements of the Arab Spring,
which erupted in December 2010 and
brought down governments in Egypt,
Tunisia and Libya the following year.
But he claims credit for enhancing their
effectiveness. “We didn’t fund them to start
protests,” he told the New York Times, “but
we did help support their development of
skills and networking. That training did
play a role in what ultimately happened,
but it was their revolution.”
An older organization that expanded
its role after 9/11 is Freedom House,
established in 1941. It became more widely
used by the U.S. government following
9/11. In 1997, Freedom House merged
with the National Forum Foundation,
enhancing its capacity to conduct on-theground projects in fledgling democracies
The U.S. Democracy Project
in target areas such as Central and Eastern
Europe, the Balkans and the former Soviet
Union. Although Freedom House gets at
least 75 percent of its $41.5 million annual
funding from the U.S. government, it
describes itself as independent. But it isn’t
merely the group’s financial independence
that can be questioned. R. James Woolsey,
a former head of the cia, was Freedom
House’s chairman for many years, a
connection that inevitably raised questions
abroad about the independence of Freedom
House from U.S. foreign-policy aims.
Freedom House has been prominently
on the side of major U.S. interventions,
including the Iraq War. On the eve of that
war, the organization called for a long-term
occupation of Iraq and waxed eloquent
on the importance of the mission: “We
fervently hope that the war effort American
forces are now engaged in goes well and
that Saddam Hussein’s tyranny falls with
minimal loss of life,” the organization said.
Freedom House’s activities sometimes
reflect a tendency to allow the wish for
democracy to become a perception
of emerging democracy. In 2003, the
organization assured its members that the
“Gulf monarchies of Bahrain, Kuwait, and
Qatar are moving toward constitutional
rule in which significant power resides with
democratically elected representatives.”
A year later, events demolished that
optimism. And, in the wake of the Arab
Spring, we know that Bahrain’s monarchy
is prepared, with the help of Saudi Arabia,
to do whatever is necessary to suppress
democracy movements there—with U.S.
acquiescence. Stability in Bahrain, home to
May/June 2013 33
a crucial U.S. naval base, is more important
to Washington than democracy.
Freedom House retreated similarly
in subsequent assessments of democratic
trends in Qatar and Kuwait. These retreats
from initial positive assessments reflect
a disturbing trend for the Democracy
Establishment: often its members are so
focused on their desire to see democracies
sprouting in foreign lands that they find
themselves viewing the world through rosecolored glasses. Good examples are Egypt
and Libya, whose Arab Spring revolutions
didn’t lead to the smooth transition to
democracy that many had anticipated.
B
ut in the heady days of that Middle
East protest movement, some observers
credited U.S. democracy-promotion organizations with providing vital training
and support to the protest groups. In April
2011, the New York Times ran an article
headlined “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture
Arab Uprisings.” The article reported that
American officials and others
are seeing that the United States’ democracybuilding campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known,
with key leaders of the movements having
been trained by the Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and
monitoring elections.
The ned also played a role, both before
and during the protests. From 2005 to
2011, it gave more than $234,200 to the
Libya Human and Political Development
Forum, a group that opposed Muammar
el-Qaddafi’s rule. According to the ned
website, one $105,000 grant was “to foster
constructive dialogue and cooperation
among Libyan democrats and civic
groups inside and outside the country
and establish a presence for the Forum
inside Libya.” Along with other ned-
34 The National Interest
sponsored groups, this organization helped
bring attention to the effort to depose
Libya’s longtime strongman leader. That
contributed to a dizzying cycle of events
that ultimately entangled America in the
conflict and posed a need for weapons and
other supplies from U.S. companies. In
2011, nato, with heavy U.S. involvement,
established a no-fly zone and launched air
strikes in the North African country. By
the close of the year, the United States had
spent more than $1.2 billion on the Libyan
effort.
What that interventionist effort will
yield for Libya’s future remains an open
question. On the second anniversary of the
outbreak of the revolt against Qaddafi, the
Economist wrote that “political, economic
and security reforms are proceeding at a
snail’s pace at best.” Violence is endemic,
the national army is weak and civil society
is moribund. None of this is to say that
Libya was better off under a dictator—
but interventions spurred in part by the
Democracy Establishment often have
unintended consequences.
Those unintended consequences also can
affect the United States adversely. When
the country helped Qatar and the United
Arab Emirates funnel arms to Libya’s antiQaddafi groups, some of them ended up
in the hands of anti-American Islamists.
In October 2012, it was revealed that the
United States dispensed $8 million to help
the beleaguered Libyan government create
a commando force that would establish
“Libya’s ability to combat and defend
against threats from Al Qaeda and its
affiliates,” which were a relatively minor
problem in Libya during Qaddafi’s rule.
It’s worth noting, moreover, that
Qaddafi, while a brutal leader and once
a sponsor of anti-American terrorism,
had abandoned his effort to accumulate
weapons of mass destruction and his
anti-Western posture in exchange for
The U.S. Democracy Project
more normalized relations
with the West. Hence, he
didn’t pose a direct threat to
American interests, whereas
the subsequent situation in
Libya ultimately did. One
result was the killing of four
American diplomats, including
Ambassador J. Christopher
St e ve n s , a t t h e Be n g h a z i
consulate. Moreover, questions
have been raised about the
impact of America’s Libya
action on Iran, which is under
substantial pressure from the United States
and other nations to abandon any nuclearweapons program it may be pursuing.
America’s turnabout in its dealings with
Libya, following the two countries’
previous understanding, isn’t seen as strong
encouragement to Iranian leaders. Such
unintended consequences raise the question
of whether the quest for democracy, in any
and all circumstances, is the best approach
in terms of American interests. A case can
be made that American interests should
sometimes take a backseat to humanitarian
concerns, but the detriment to those
interests should at least be acknowledged.
T
here also can be a diplomatic price
to pay in U.S. relations with foreign
governments bent on protecting themselves
from internal dissent and rebel movements.
Their hostility toward the American democracy-promotion movement is on the rise.
Egypt now has some of the world’s strictest
laws governing ngos. When the Egyptian
government raided the offices of ten local
civil-society organizations in late 2011, it
made clear its aversion to outside forces
meddling in the country’s internal affairs.
The country’s justice minister said the organizations were “betraying Egypt by deliberately promoting political strife.” After the
ngo workers’ release, the country sought to
The U.S. Democracy Project
promulgate a law that would require local
organizations to obtain permits to receive
foreign funding. And foreign ngos would
be required to receive permits in order to
operate in the country.
The Russian government quickly
embraced the Egyptian crackdown amid
suggestions that the U.S. government was
fostering antigovernment activities by
the American groups. “As the continuing
violent crackdown by security forces against
the protests has left 17 dead and more
than 700 injured this month alone, Egypt’s
military is becoming increasingly fearful of
foreign interference in the country’s internal
affairs,” Russia’s RT website declared
immediately after the government raids
on ngo offices. The article suggested the
United States was behind the fall of the
Mubarak government. That assertion was
not idle. As the New York Times reported in
April 2011:
A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping
the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human
Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar
Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National
Democratic Institute and Freedom House.
May/June 2013 35
Such unintended consequences raise the question of whether
the quest for democracy, in any and all circumstances,
is the best approach in terms of American interests.
Through these organizations, the U.S. government was able to deny responsibility
for fomenting the revolutions. But, wrote
the Times, “The work of these groups often
provoked tensions between the United
States and many Middle Eastern leaders,
who frequently complained that their leadership was being undermined.”
Russia soon took action against similar
organizations in its country. In November
2011, Vladimir Putin accepted his party’s
nomination for president with these words:
“The representatives of certain foreign
governments gather people to whom they
give money—so-called ‘grantees’—whom
they instruct, find them ‘suitable work’ in
order to influence the result of the election
campaign in our country.” After his election
the following year, Putin’s government
expelled usaid in September, two weeks
before local elections, saying the agency
was making “attempts to influence political
processes—including elections at different
levels—through its distribution of grants.”
The government compounded the move
weeks later with a law requiring foreignfunded groups to register as “foreign
agents.” The State Department opposed
this, with department spokesperson Victoria
Nuland promising, “We will continue to be
vigilant in supporting democracy, human
rights, civil society in Russia. We’ll just do
it another way.” That prompted the Russian
government to complain about America’s
“gross interference.” Said Russian prime
minister Dmitri Medvedev: “Imagine if
an ngo in the U.S. dealing with politics
received money from the Russian federal
budget. There would be an outcry.”
36 The National Interest
On October 1, RT put the ned on
notice. An editorial declared:
Russia needs to enforce its decision and shut
operations of ned and its all [sic] four mandated grantees, namely the International Republican Institute (iri), the National Democratic Institute (ndi), the Center for International Private Enterprise (cipe) and the American Center
for International Labor Solidarity (acils).
It continued, “The fact that Washington is
planning to redirect usaid funding through
‘private’ organizations reflects an outrageous
level of disrespect for the decision of the
Russian government.” This agitation quickly got results.
In October, the ndi pulled most of its
staff out of Russia, transferring employees
to nearby Lithuania. In December, the iri
followed suit. “They have to pull out, given
the conditions,” Senator John McCain told
Foreign Policy magazine. McCain, a leading
proponent of democracy promotion, is
chairman of the iri. On December 28,
things got worse, with Putin signing the
notorious law prohibiting U.S. citizens
from adopting Russian children. The bill
also suspended activities of nonprofit
organizations that receive money from the
United States. In response, the U.S. Senate
passed a resolution condemning the ban.
Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican from
Missouri who adopted a son from Russia
several years ago, called the adoption ban
“outrageous.”
Nonetheless, in February of this year, at
a meeting with top officials of the main
successor agency to the kgb, the Federal
The U.S. Democracy Project
Security Service, Putin put all foreign ngos
on notice, warning them against “meddling
in our internal affairs.” He told officials
at the agency that they must be prepared
to thwart foreign attempts to derail plans
for Russia to integrate with its neighbors.
“They may use various instruments of
pressure, including mechanisms of the socalled ‘soft power,’” he said. “The sovereign
right of Russia and its partners to build
and develop its integration project must be
safely protected.” Democracy promotion
thus directly undermines relations between
the United States and a regional power that
the Obama administration had hoped to
woo back into constructive relations.
In the face of such governmental
hostility, some dissidents in foreign
countries have demonstrated a certain
level of wariness toward America’s
Democracy Establishment. In 2006, then
secretary of state Condoleezza Rice asked
The U.S. Democracy Project
Congress to transfer $85 million into the
Iran Democracy Fund to, as she put it,
“promote political change inside Iran.”
Most controversially, $20 million of that
was to support the efforts of civil-society
groups—media, legal and human-rights
ngos—both outside and inside Iran. An
internal State Department memo obtained
by the Center for American Progress
confided that the money was meant in
part to “reach out to the Iranian people
to support their desire for freedom and
democracy.”
It soon became apparent that the money
wasn’t wanted, for it undermined other
human-rights work under way inside Iran.
“The [democracy] money is a blade,” an
Iranian journalist named Emadeddin Baghi
told the New York Times. “Our government
accuses us of receiving money from the
Americans. All of a sudden, my normal
human rights work becomes political.” In
2009, the Obama administration killed
the fund. Individuals in the Democracy
Establishment were apoplectic, but Iranians
weren’t. Akbar Ganji, Iran’s most famous
political dissident, told the bbc:
The US democracy fund was severely counterproductive. None of the human right activists
and members of opposition in Iran had any
interest in using such funds, but we were all accused by Iran’s government of being American
spies because a few groups in America used
these funds.
The Iran Democracy Fund also soured
already-fractious relations between the
United States and the Iranian government.
Iran deplored such activities as efforts to
upend its government. “Is there even a
perception that the American government
has democracy in mind?” Iran’s former
ambassador to the United Nations, Javad
Zarif, asked a reporter. “Except among a
few dreamers in Eastern Europe?”
May/June 2013 37
A
poignant example of when ngo activity
intersects with U.S. covert action involves the case of Alan Gross, who worked
for a private contractor—Development Alternatives Inc., an employee-owned development corporation—that was granted $6
million in usaid funds to promote democracy in Cuba. During several trips to the
island nation, he provided communications
equipment to the Havana Jewish community as a way of breaking the Cuban government’s “information blockade,” as the
Washington Post put it. After his trips, he
or other Development Alternatives officials
filed reports to usaid.
He was arrested in December 2009
by Cuban officials who accused him of
being “contracted to work for American
intelligence services,” an allegation heatedly
denied by U.S. officials. In March 2011,
he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
His sentence unleashed a torrent of protests
from U.S. lawmakers and Jewish groups,
and in early December 2012 the U.S.
Senate passed a resolution calling for Gross’s
release, based in part on reports of serious
health problems. Yet he carried out his
Cuban activities in what clearly appeared
to be a clandestine fashion and was aware
of the risks involved, according to usaid
reports that were later published. And the
usaid funds that fueled his activity were
appropriated by Congress as part of a law
that called specifically for regime change
in Cuba. When U.S. citizens engage
in foreign activity born of idealism but
predictably seen as threatening by targeted
governments, the potential fallout can be
highly significant.
The sad Gross episode also underscores
two fundamental yet rarely acknowledged
realities about America’s democracypromotion movement. The first is that
ultimately it is about regime change. That’s
because any regime adjudged by that
movement to be insufficiently democratic
38 The National Interest
will, sooner or later, come under pressure
from the vast democracy-promotion
machinery.
The second is that these democratic
evangelists are not independent operators.
The prodemocracy activists may insist
they are independent from Washington
as they go about their missionary work
in nations run by leaders who don’t want
democracy and may even harbor wellhoned philosophical objections to it. But to
a very real extent they are doing the work of
a U.S. government that often seems fixated
on democracy promotion.
Yet the question emerges whether this
is smart diplomacy for the United States
at a time of upheaval around the world
and powerful new developments in
the global balance of power. Can Russia
realistically be expected to cooperate with
the West’s efforts to deal with Iran when its
government is being openly undermined by
the United States? How do Egyptians see it
when Washington openly sides with certain
factions in the midst of a low-level civil
war? And in regions such as the Middle East
that have experienced centuries of Western
interference, how is American intervention
perceived?
These questions don’t seem to get asked
at the comfortable ned headquarters on
F Street or the other major ngo offices
t h ro u g h o u t Wa s h i n g t o n — o r t h e i r
far-flung outposts around the world.
But they are questions that yearn for
answers as the world faces a future that
many believe holds in store the reality of
American decline. Whatever the merits
of the prediction of American decline, it
is certain that the country’s standing in
the world will be challenged more severely
in the future than it has been over the
past seven decades. And the sprawling
prodemocracy project of America’s ngos
could actually hamper its efforts to address
those challenges. n
The U.S. Democracy Project
Lessons of the Syrian Reactor
By Bruce Riedel
T
he office of the assistant to the
president for national-security affairs in the West Wing of the White
House is a spacious, well-lit corner room
in a building where space is at a premium.
It contains not only the national-security
adviser’s large desk but also a table for lunch
discussions and other small meetings as well
as a couch and easy chairs for more relaxed
discussions. In April 2007, this commodious setting was the scene of a remarkable
meeting. Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser at the time, welcomed Meir
Dagan, head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence
service, who came with a special briefing
for his American host. Dagan revealed a
secret nuclear reactor in the final stages of
construction in the Syrian desert, developed
with the help of North Korea. Knowledge
of this project constituted a stunning intelligence coup for Israel.
Later that year, on September 6, 2007,
the Israeli Air Force destroyed Syria’s nuclear
facility at Al Kibar along the Euphrates
River. The mission emerged from more than
two decades of comprehensive intelligence
collection and analysis by American and
Israeli intelligence services targeting
Syria’s development of weapons of mass
destruction. It was a dramatic demonstration
Bruce Riedel is director of the Intelligence Project
at the Brookings Institution. A career cia officer,
he has advised four presidents on Middle East and
South Asian issues on the staff of the National
Security Council.
Lessons of the Syrian Reactor
of intelligence success—all the more so given
the ongoing civil war that has devastated
Syria since 2011. The world does not need
to worry about a Syrian nuclear reactor
under threat of capture by Islamic radicals.
Israel took that concern off the table.
But the incident also demonstrated that
once a policy-intelligence feedback loop
becomes dysfunctional, as happened to
the George W. Bush administration after
it exaggerated and distorted intelligence
estimates to justify the Iraq War, there are
serious policy implications. Israel wanted
America to take out the reactor, but
Bush was constrained by an intelligence
community unwilling to cooperate with
another major military operation based
primarily on intelligence data.
T
he story begins in the early 1980s,
when the Syrian government began
developing weapons of mass destruction.
Despite achieving strategic surprise in the
Yom Kippur War and foiling Israel’s ambitions to remake Lebanon into an ally in the
1982 Lebanon war, Damascus recognized
that it was no match for Israel in a conventional war. The Israel Defense Forces (idf )
marched to the outskirts of Damascus in
1973 and nine years later evicted the Syrians
from Beirut and southern Lebanon. Thus,
President Hafez al-Assad sought to develop
chemical weapons to create a balance of terror between Israel and Syria that would deter
Israel from threatening Damascus or trying
to oust his regime in any future conflict.
May/June 2013 39
Assad turned to Syria’s preeminent
scientific-research establishment to begin
developing weapons of mass destruction
to threaten Israel’s cities. By the mid1980s the Centre d’Etude et de Recherche
Scientifique (cers) in Damascus was able
to develop a reliable chemical weapon using
the nerve agent sarin. Sarin, discovered by
four German scientists just before World
War II and named as an acronym of their
last names, is estimated to be more than
five hundred times as toxic as cyanide. cers
scientists were able to produce the nerve
agent in significant quantities and achieve a
high level of purity to make it lethal.
The Syrians then mated the chemical
weapon with a reliable delivery system, the
Soviet-built Scud missile, also a weapon of
German design. The Russians essentially
copied the German v-2 missile after the
Second World War and in the 1970s began
exporting the system to their Arab allies.
Mating a chemical warhead to a missile is
40 The National Interest
not a simple technical challenge, but the
Syrians succeeded in doing so in the mid1980s and successfully carried out tests with
the system. Syria also developed chemical
bombs that could be dropped by aircraft.
Syria was not alone in developing sarin
weapons; Iraq did so as well and actually
used them extensively, along with other
chemicals, on the battlefields of the IranIraq war.
In January 1988, the Sunday Times of
London reported on its front page that
Israeli officials had informed the paper
that Syria had successfully developed the
chemical warheads for its Scud missiles and
that Israel was considering a preemptive
attack to destroy the manufacturing plants.
Syria denied that it was making chemical
weapons. In the end, Israel chose not
to initiate a preemptive strike, probably
because the Syrians had developed a
sufficient number of manufacturing
plants, finished warheads and missiles that
an attack likely would fail to
eliminate the danger and might
provoke a Syrian strike on Tel
Aviv.
Syria continued to refine its
chemical weapons during the
1990s even as it pursued peace
negotiations with the Israelis. In
addition to sarin warheads, it also
developed the even more toxic
nerve agent vx and expanded the
number of its missile delivery
systems with assistance from
North Korea. The American and
Israeli intelligence communities
monitored the improvement of
the Syrian arsenal. In January
2000, the Syrian-Israeli peace
process led to a summit in
Shepherdstown, West Virginia,
that came tantalizingly close to
a peace agreement. But it fell
just short of culmination. The
Lessons of the Syrian Reactor
draft agreement made no mention of Syria’s
wmd. Two months later, a final effort
to arrange a peace agreement failed at a
summit between Assad and President Bill
Clinton in Geneva. In June 2000, Assad
died and was succeeded by his son Bashar.
Before the elder Assad’s death, he entered
into discussions with North Korea on a
highly secret program to build a nuclear
reactor in western Syria with Pyongyang’s
assistance. According to former cia director
Michael Hayden, cooperation between
Syria and North Korea on nuclear issues
began in the late 1990s, perhaps in 1997.
A subsequent review of imagery indicates
that construction at Al Kibar began in
2002. According to Hayden, the cia saw
the construction as suspicious but did
not recognize it as a nuclear reactor until
“a report from a foreign partner initially
identified the structure at Al-Kibar as a
nuclear reactor similar to one in North
Korea.”
T
he Israelis tentatively identified the reactor for what it was in late 2006. According to Israeli and German press reports,
the Mossad obtained access to the laptop
computer of a Syrian government official
while he was visiting London in 2006. The
laptop contained construction plans, letters
and hundreds of photographs of the reactor
at various stages in its development since
2002. Most importantly, the photographs
of the interior of the site demonstrated it
was a nuclear reactor. It is unclear if the
Israelis had British cooperation in gaining
access to the computer.
T h e c i a t h e n e m p l oy e d c l a s s i c
“multidisciplinary, blue-collar analysis,” as
Hayden put it, to bring together “virtually
every form of intelligence—imagery,
signals, human source, you name it . . . so
that they were never completely dependent
on any single channel” of source material.
He highlighted the “quality of tradecraft,
Lessons of the Syrian Reactor
in terms of collection and analysis, and
the value of collaboration . . . with foreign
services.”
A six-minute cia video, released after
the reactor’s destruction, indicates the
agency analysis demonstrated that the Al
Kibar facility was a gas-cooled, graphitemoderated nuclear reactor intended to
produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Al
Kibar was a North Korean design, similar
to that country’s reactor at Yongbyon.
Only North Korea had built reactors of
this design in the previous thirty-five years.
The cia reached its conclusions by using
satellite imagery, ground photographs of
the interior of the facility and a computerproduced graphic image of the reactor. It
also photographed North Korean personnel
in Syria involved in the construction.
The cia video concluded that the
construction was complete by April 2007,
after which the reactor could have gone
operational at any time with sufficient fuel.
Hayden noted that the American analysts
reviewed potential alternative explanations
for the facility, but “the arguments simply
didn’t add up.” He stressed that the “foreign
partnerships . . . were critical to the final
outcome” of the analysis. They were “akin
to working together on a complex equation
over a long period. Each tries to solve a
variable that in turn helps a partner solve
another, and so on until we’ve cracked the
case. That’s what good intelligence is all
about.”
The Israelis supplemented their data
with soil and plant samples acquired by an
idf commando mission in August 2007.
Soldiers from the Sayeret Matkal, the idf ’s
elite commando unit, were covertly flown
in by ch-53 helicopters to the Al Kibar
region to acquire the samples.
This intelligence collection, and the
detection of the Syrian nuclear reactor,
represented an unqualified intelligence
success. American and Israeli covert
May/June 2013 41
The absence of a reprocessing facility suggests the reactor at
Al Kibar may have been for supplying North Korea and its
nuclear-weapons program more than it was for a Syrian program.
operations had successfully tracked
Syria’s efforts to develop weapons of mass
destruction over two decades. But the
interaction between intelligence and policy
was more complicated, especially on the
American side.
Some press accounts of the reactor
episode in Israel and elsewhere emphasize
a possible Iranian role in the project. Israeli
accounts suggest the Syrian project was
funded in part or in full by Tehran, and one
says Iran provided $2 billion for the project.
But the cia’s video and Hayden’s public
comments don’t mention Iran, and
President Bush’s account of his discussions
with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert makes
no mention of any Iranian role. Nor did
Vice President Dick Cheney’s subsequent
accounts suggest involvement by Iran. No
Israeli government source has claimed an
Iranian role in the Syria project, either,
and Israeli government officials normally
are not hesitant to discuss Iranian nuclear
developments. A senior Israeli intelligence
officer directly involved in the operation
told me that the evidence does not confirm
an Iranian role in or even knowledge of the
reactor, although it is always difficult to be
definitive about funding sources for secret
projects.
Israeli accounts also stress the role
of General Mohammed Suleiman in the
project. Suleiman was in charge of the
reactor’s construction and security. An
engineering graduate from Damascus
University, Suleiman was Assad’s chief
adviser on all wmd projects and dealt
extensively with the North Koreans and
Iranians. Suleiman was assassinated in
42 The National Interest
August 2008 at his seaside home near
Tartus, Syria, reportedly by Israeli naval
commandos.
Importantly, neither American nor
Israeli intelligence located a plutoniumreprocessing facility near Al Kibar or
anywhere in Syria. While a nuclear reactor
potentially represents the first step toward a
nuclear-weapons capability, it alone would
not be sufficient to build the weapons. The
country would also need a reprocessing
facility—a more difficult technical
challenge to build—in order to convert the
plutonium from the reactor’s spent fuel into
a high enough grade for it to be usable in
nuclear weapons. Syria also lacked sufficient
fuel to start the reactor on its own; it would
need a fuel supply from some outside
source. That presumably would have been
North Korea. The absence of a reprocessing
facility suggests the reactor at Al Kibar may
have been for supplying North Korea and
its nuclear-weapons program more than it
was for a Syrian program, at least until Syria
built a reprocessing facility. This intriguing
absence would raise questions that would
have serious implications for the policy
community in the United States.
I
n March 2007, Israeli prime minister
Ehud Olmert set up a small team of experts to advise him and Defense Minister
Ehud Barak on what to do about the Syrian
threat. The following month, as previously
mentioned, Mossad director Meir Dagan
came to Washington to see Stephen Hadley to discuss the situation. Dagan brought
photographs from his laptop and imagery taken by Israel’s satellites to share with
Lessons of the Syrian Reactor
Hadley, who also previously had his own
briefing from the cia. Cheney was present
for Dagan’s briefing, which he describes as
including satellite imagery and photographs
of the North Korean team leaders in Syria.
Bush described the American decisionmaking process in his memoir. In spring
2007, shortly after the Dagan visit,
he was briefed extensively on the Israeli
information. “Our strong suspicion was
that we had just caught Syria red-handed
trying to develop a nuclear weapons
capability with North Korean help,” he
wrote. Shortly thereafter, Olmert called
Bush to request that the United States
“bomb the compound.” Bush asked for
options from his national-security team and
an intelligence assessment from Hayden.
The military favored an air strike if force
was to be used, while the diplomatic option
would be to brief allies on the intelligence
diplomatic option. Cheney supported an
American military attack.
The intelligence assessment “clarified
my decision,” according to Bush. Hayden
told the president that intelligencecommunity analysts “had high confidence
that the plant housed a nuclear reactor.
But because they could not confirm the
location of the facilities necessary to turn
the plutonium into a weapon, they had
only low confidence of a Syrian nuclear
weapons program.” In her memoir, Rice
credits the intelligence assessment as
critical in convincing her that to bomb
the reactor in the “face of uncertain
intelligence was, to put it mildly, reckless.”
Bush informed Olmert that he had chosen
the diplomatic option on the basis of the
intelligence analysts’ estimate. “I cannot
justify an attack on a sovereign nation
unless my intelligence agencies stand up
and collectively go to the International
Atomic Energy Association (iaea) to
demand Syria shut down and dismantle
the reactor under iaea supervision. If Syria
refused, then “we would have a clear public
rationale for military action.” Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice both favored the
and say it’s a weapons program,” he told
Olmert. A diplomatic approach would fully
protect Israel’s “interests and your state,”
he argued, telling the prime minister that
this approach “makes it more likely we can
achieve our interests as well.”
Cheney later described the decisionmaking process as well. He attended the
Lessons of the Syrian Reactor
May/June 2013 43
first briefing with Dagan in April 2007.
At a national-security principals meeting
in the family quarters on the second floor
of the White House on June 17, Cheney
urged an American military attack on the
reactor. He later wrote that Director of
National Intelligence Mike McConnell
had “high confidence” it was a reactor,
but he makes no mention of the second
low-confidence judgment. Cheney also
describes a second principals meeting in
late June, at which the president asked
his top advisers for advice. Only Cheney
favored an American military strike, while
Rice, Hadley and Gates supported a
diplomatic response.
“The prime minister was disappointed,”
Bush relates. The Israeli leader told the
president that a Syrian nuclear-weapons
program represented an “existential” issue
for Israel. Olmert predicted that diplomacy
“would bog down and fail,” and added that
the U.S. strategy was “very disturbing to
me.” He then ended the conversation.
On September 6, 2007, Israel launched
a military strike and destroyed the reactor
without any effort to alert the iaea, the
United Nations or the international
community. Israel’s decision was consistent
with its history. In 1981, Israel used force to
destroy Iraq’s nuclear reactor and maintain
its own regional nuclear monopoly. It is
well known that Israel has its own nuclear
arsenal, although it has never acknowledged
as much publicly. Every Israeli prime
m i n i s t e r s i n c e Da v i d Be n - Gu r i o n
deliberately has taken an evasive posture
on the issue, but Israel never has signed the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Ben-Gurion set up the Israeli Atomic
Energy Commission in 1952, just four
years after the country’s independence, and
concluded a deal with France a few years
later to secretly build the Dimona nuclear
reactor. By 1960 the cia had uncovered the
project and was convinced that “plutonium
44 The National Interest
production for weapons is at least one
major purpose of this effort.” President
John F. Kennedy tried to persuade Israel to
forgo the bomb without success. By 1974
the U.S. intelligence community concluded
that Israel had produced and stockpiled a
small number of fission weapons, and press
reporting about the Israeli program was
commonplace.
The Federation of American Scientists’
latest estimate of global nuclear stockpiles
pegs the size of Israel’s arsenal today at
roughly eighty nuclear weapons, deliverable
by aircraft, cruise missiles from Israeli
submarines built in Germany or Jericho
ballistic missiles. This estimate is consistent
with those from other think tanks around
the world.
Israel has threatened to use its nuclear
arsenal at least once. In 1991, on the eve
of the Gulf War, Israel’s then deputy chief
of staff Ehud Barak told King Hussein
of Jordan to pass a message to Saddam
Hussein and Iraq at a secret meeting in
England. “If one single chemical warhead
falls on Israel, we’ll hit Iraq with everything
we have got. . . . Look at your watch and
forty minutes later an Iraqi city will be
reduced to ashes.” It worked. Saddam fired
conventionally armed warheads at Tel Aviv,
Haifa and Dimona, but no chemicals.
Given the power of such a threat, it is
understandable why Israel would seek to
preserve its monopoly on nuclear weapons
in the Middle East. The decision to
attack and destroy Syria’s reactor was fully
consistent with that long-standing but
unstated Israeli policy.
T
he American decision not to attack
was more complex. Bush says he was
constrained by the analysts’ assessment that,
while Al Kibar was clearly a nuclear reactor,
they were “less confident” it was part of a
Syrian nuclear-weapons program, given the
lack of a reprocessing facility.
Lessons of the Syrian Reactor
When policy makers lose the trust of the intelligence
community and the public, the consequences are serious.
That decision reflected the state of
intelligence-policy interaction in the later
stages of the Bush administration. The
Iraq War had significantly influenced this
interaction. The intelligence community
had been heavily criticized in the media
and Congress for allegedly allowing the
Bush administration to pressure it into
exaggerating the Iraqi wmd program to
justify the war. Under intense political
pressure, Bush created the Commission
on the Intelligence Capabilities of the
United States Regarding Weapons of
Mass Destruction, which reported to the
president on March 31, 2005.
The commission concluded that
on the brink of war, and in front of the whole
world, the United States government asserted
that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, had biological weapons
and mobile biological weapon production facilities, and had stockpiled and was producing
chemical weapons. All of this was based on the
assessments of the U.S. Intelligence Community. And not one bit of it could be confirmed
when the war was over. . . . making this one of
the most public—and most damaging—intelligence failures in recent American history.
It was a devastating conclusion. The commission—composed of experienced public
servants who had served in both Republican
and Democratic administrations—put the
burden of blame for analytic and collection
shortcomings on the intelligence community. It specifically did not address, and was
not authorized to address, the issue of how
the policy community used the intelligence
Lessons of the Syrian Reactor
it received in 2003. The commission did
examine “the possibility that intelligence
analysts were pressured by policymakers to
change their judgments” to support policy.
It said the intelligence analysts “universally
agreed” this was not the case, although it
also agreed that “it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked
in an environment that did not encourage
skepticism” about Iraqi possession of wmd.
Many in and out of the intelligence
community sharply and publicly disagreed
with the commission’s decision not
to pursue aggressively the question of
“politicization” of intelligence. Intelligence
officers who retired after the war began
were among the most critical of the
administration. Tyler Drumheller, a twentyfive-year veteran of the clandestine service
who rose to European division chief
in the cia’s Directorate of Operations,
wrote in 2006 that “never have I seen
the manipulation of intelligence that has
played out since the second President Bush
took office.” Drumheller reported that
intelligence suggesting there were no Iraqi
wmd was overlooked or ignored in the cia
because of political pressure from the White
House, especially from Cheney. He asserts
that “the books had been cooked, the bets
placed.”
Former director of central intelligence
George Tenet was more restrained in his
2007 memoir. Although he conceded the
intelligence community had made serious
errors in its Iraq wmd estimates, he was
less harsh on the Bush policy team. Six
former intelligence officers released a letter
to Tenet immediately thereafter in which
May/June 2013 45
they accused the former director of being
“a willing participant in a poorly considered
policy to start an unnecessary war. . . . You
were well aware that the White House tried
to present as fact intelligence you knew was
unreliable.” In short, the 2007 environment
was toxic with strong accusations from
former senior intelligence officers that
the Bush team consciously manipulated
intelligence to justify policy decisions it had
made independent of intelligence estimates.
Whatever the merits of the arguments on
either side of this controversy, my purpose
here is to probe the impact of the issue.
By 2007, the controversy had created a
reality in which Bush was constrained by
his track record in dealing with intelligence
assessments. As he puts it in his memoir,
he simply had no option to take military
action once the intelligence community said
it had “low confidence” of a Syrian nuclearweapons program. The policy-intelligence
interface had become a public issue like
never before in American history.
Cheney agreed. He concluded his
account of the decision-making process
46 The National Interest
in the Bush White House in 2007 with
the judgment that “although the evidence
about the nuclear reactor was solid, the
intelligence community’s failure on Iraq
was still affecting our decision making.”
He added, “That experience made some
key policymakers very reluctant to consider
robust options for dealing with the Syrian
plant.”
It can be argued that the outcome was
nonetheless positive because Israel, taking
the action Bush could or would not take,
destroyed the reactor. It seems clear today
that ensuring Syria would not possess a
nuclear reactor under Assad’s despotism was
the right choice, particularly in light of the
political and social chaos that subsequently
descended upon that country. But for
America the story illustrates what happens
when the policy-intelligence process breaks
down dramatically and publicly. In that
circumstance, American policy makers
become tightly constrained politically.
When policy makers lose the trust of the
intelligence community and the public, the
consequences are serious. n
Lessons of the Syrian Reactor
How to Reverse Failed Policy
By Ray Takeyh
S
cholars and specialists often lament
that once the United States commits
itself to a course of action abroad,
it rarely adjusts its path. Bureaucracies
prize continuity over innovation and cling
to the prevailing orthodoxy. Top officials
often embrace positions predetermined by
past prejudices and lessons. The gravitational pull of politics induces presidents
and secretaries of state to persist with existing policies even when they aren’t working. Although such inflexibility may not be
particularly harmful in ordinary times, big
problems can arise when the United States
finds itself in uncharted territory or facing
unexpected geopolitical shifts.
This reality raises the question of how the
country can move from failure to success.
How do policy makers transcend their
penchant for the familiar and bureaucracies
move beyond their attachment to
continuity? History tells us that mere
presidential frustration with a failed policy
does not always bring about change.
Consider Lyndon Johnson’s failed Vietnam
War policy from 1965 to 1968. Presidents
facing multiple national issues rarely start
over with entirely new strategic paradigms.
Inertia, staff influences and operational
prejudices all militate against that.
But there are exceptions worthy of study.
In essence, for the United States to move
from failure to success, three things must
Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern
studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
How to Reverse Failed Policy
happen. Failure must be seen as posing a
cataclysmic threat to both national security
and the political fortunes of the incumbent
party. A plausible alternative strategy must
be evident. And a senior policy maker who
enjoys presidential trust and confidence
must embrace that alternative, convince the
president of its viability and subtly impose
it on the system.
In America’s postwar history, three
occasions stand out as times when success
was salvaged from impending failure: the
shift in U.S. containment policy during the
early stages of the Truman presidency; the
changed U.S. approach to the Vietnam War
after Richard Nixon’s 1968 election; and
George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq. These three
cases took place in different international
contexts. But they all demonstrate how
change actually can occur and highlight the
role of key policy makers in fostering such
change.
S
hortly after Franklin Roosevelt’s death
in 1945, the New York Times assured
readers that “there will prevail in Washington a continuity.” The deceased president’s
lofty goals, embodied in compacts such
as the Atlantic Charter and the Yalta accords, would guide his successor. Roosevelt
curiously believed that the United States,
China, Britain and the Soviet Union would
act as global policemen, patrolling their regional beats and ensuring a level of stability
that had eluded the international order for
most of the twentieth century. This was a
May/June 2013 47
vision predicated on cooperation with unlikely allies and circumspection on behalf
of a determined adversary. It was a vision
that devalued ideology and assumed pragmatism on the part of the major actors.
The ubiquitous European colonial empires
would accede to new realities; the revolutionary Soviet leadership would accept the
mandates of the new order; and the Chinese
Nationalists, however unreliable in the past,
would guard the gateways of East Asia.
Joseph Stalin’s increasing penchant for
violating his commitments did not dissuade
fdr from what he considered his pragmatic
vision. Although the peculiar pantheon of
gods and devils that occupied the Soviet
leader’s mind remained impervious to
Roosevelt’s blandishments, that didn’t alter
the debilitated president’s strategy. It has
been suggested that fdr became skeptical of
his own diplomacy as he approached death.
It is impossible to know now what he was
thinking then. What is beyond doubt is
that Roosevelt bequeathed to his successor
an uncertain legacy and a policy whose
assumptions rested upon a shaky foundation.
The persistent Soviet transgressions
did not jolt Harry Truman away from
sustaining the fallen leader’s path.
Uncertain of himself and surrounded by
men with superior knowledge of foreign
affairs, Truman was prone to yield, follow
and acquiesce. Whether at the Potsdam
Conference or in deliberations over Poland,
Truman sought to reconcile his call for
Eastern European self-determination with
his desire to sustain the security cooperation
with the Soviet Union. To be sure, Truman
soon grew uneasy about his circumstances
amid confusion about his options, but the
gravitational pull of policy still drew him
toward the Yalta accords and its spirit of
compromise.
The question of how to approach the
Soviet Union turned on one’s perception of
the causes behind Moscow’s conduct. The
48 The National Interest
consensus within the U.S. government was
that the Soviet Union’s aggressive moves
were largely defensive and an American
policy of understanding was the best course.
Leading policy makers such as Secretary
of State James Byrnes acknowledged
the Soviet mischief but attributed it to
insecurity and vulnerability. A nation that
had been devastated twice by the German
war machine was bound to be concerned
about the developments in its immediate
periphery, argued Byrnes and others, and
a response of conciliation would take the
edge off Soviet actions.
Thus, Truman and his advisers continued
to embrace the Grand Alliance and tried
to convince the Soviets of its appeal. The
United States was prepared to accept
a Soviet sphere of influence but hoped
that it would have a benign complexion.
The attempt to get the Soviets to see
the difference between influence and
domination consumed much time and
attention. But slowly it became apparent
that domination was the Soviet goal.
The process by which the United States
moved from considering the Soviet Union
an ally (if a stubborn and problematic
one) to seeing it as an adversary whose
ambitions had to be thwarted was halting
and extremely difficult. The task of
shifting policy from its established pattern
to a new framework proved enormously
challenging even when the existing
approach was increasingly deemed deficient.
But then the ingredients materialized
that are indispensable to a policy shift
of such magnitude. First, the failure to
mitigate Soviet ambitions was proving
so catastrophic to American security that
it had to be addressed energetically and
imaginatively. But the two additional
factors—a viable alternative to the existing
approach and a powerful presidential
intimate bent on fostering new thinking—
ultimately emerged as well.
How to Reverse Failed Policy
Unlike many members of the East Coast establishment who belittled
Truman as an unworthy successor to fdr, Acheson treated him with
respect and deference, thus gaining the president’s confidence.
Truman had the fortune of inheriting
sober minds such as Admiral William
Leahy, who acted as his chief of staff,
and U.S. ambassador to Moscow Averell
Harriman, who fed him a steady stream of
criticisms of Stalin’s rule and stressed the
impracticality of uncritical engagement.
Increasingly, these advisers challenged
accommodationists such as Harry Hopkins
and Henry Wallace. Truman initially was
not prone to accept their views and disrupt
the continuity of policy, but he now had
an alternative explanation should his
frustrations require it.
It is here that a memo and a speech
added further urgency to the need for a
course correction. The strength of George
Kennan’s iconic memorandum on the
sources of Soviet conduct was that it
offered authoritative intellectual validation
of the emerging anti-Soviet sentiment
percolating within the bureaucracy. The
“Long Telegram” eviscerated the popular
notion that reassurance and concessions
could blunt Soviet power and preserve the
Grand Alliance. The idea that bargaining
and compromise could foster a durable
settlement with Stalin was now exposed as
flawed as Kennan portrayed a revolutionary
state that required external enemies for
legitimization of its internal repression.
The call for confrontation came not
only from Kennan’s eloquent pen but
also from the elegant oratory of a world
leader of nearly unrivaled esteem, Winston
Churchill. The former prime minister’s
speech at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5,
1946, was alarming as well as prophetic.
“Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and
How to Reverse Failed Policy
its Communist international organization
intends to do in the future,” he declared.
“What are the limits, if any, to their
expansive and proselytizing tendencies.”
Churchill quickly moved to the next arena
of conflict by keenly noting that “Turkey
and Persia are both profoundly alarmed
and disturbed at the claims which are being
made upon them.” While Kennan had been
imprecise about the next flash point of the
U.S.-Soviet conflict, Churchill was quick
to point to the eastern Mediterranean as
a place of Soviet intrigue. Although the
essential purpose of the speech was to call
for an Anglo-American alliance as a bulwark
of resistance to Soviet encroachment,
Churchill echoed Kennan in stressing
that only power, and not lofty speeches or
international organizations, could forestall
the Soviet menace.
The intriguing point remains that
some of the milestones of the Cold War
such as the “Long Telegram,” Churchill’s
Iron Curtain speech and even the Soviet
attempts to peel off portions of northern
Iran were not decisive turning points. The
elegance and historical analysis of Kennan’s
memorandum concentrated many minds,
but there is little to suggest that it redirected
the machinery of the state. And as imposing
a figure as Churchill was, his speech did not
reorient America’s policy toward the Soviet
Union. Given the speech’s controversy,
Truman quickly backtracked from his
implied endorsement by falsely claiming
that he had not seen an advance copy.
Secretary Byrnes similarly distanced himself
from its call for vigilance as he embarked on
further summitry with Soviet functionaries.
May/June 2013 49
As for Moscow’s moves in Iran, Washington
still hoped that it could preserve both
cooperation with the Soviet Union and
the sovereignty of Iran. The United States
did call for Soviet withdrawal of its troops
from northern Iran as stipulated by wartime
agreements, and it did take its case to the
United Nations, but such moves did not
imply America’s readiness to abandon the
homilies of the Grand Alliance.
To be sure, the events of 1946 were not
without consequence. Given the egregious
nature of the Soviets’ conduct, those
prone toward firmness were even more
fortified in their views. Still, the advocates
of cooperation, who had the advantage
of continuity on their side, stressed that
the Soviet actions were unexceptional for
a great power. The Soviets might have to
be rebuffed on occasion—as they were in
Iran—but that hardly meant ushering in
a new doctrine that treated the Kremlin
like an adversary with a global appetite
that had to be resisted systematically.
Amid this debate, Truman stood confused,
oscillating between dramatically differing
alternatives. A sweeping transformation
50 The National Interest
of American policy required not just
presidential frustration and a bureaucratic
constituency with a discerning alternative
but also a senior official enjoying the
president’s confidence and prone to break
down existing barriers to
new thinking. That person
was Dean Acheson. The
United States may still
not have had a coherent
containment strategy in
1946 had Acheson not been
in government service.
Acheson’s centrality in
the Truman administration
stemmed from his proximity
and temperament. As an
effective State Department
number two—and given
Byrnes’s frequent absences
from Washington—Acheson
spent much time with
Truman. And, unlike many
members of the East Coast
establishment who belittled Truman as
an unworthy successor to fdr, Acheson
treated him with respect and deference,
thus gaining the insecure president’s
confidence. As a result, Acheson was
pivotally positioned to guide U.S. policy in
a different direction.
Acheson already was exposed to a steady
diet of anti-Soviet advocacy from some
of his aides as well as his friend Averell
Harriman. However, even though he found
Soviet truculence disturbing, he seemed
averse to abandoning the core assumptions
animating the Grand Alliance. He insisted
on continued negotiations and attempted
to ease the Soviet Union into the emerging
international structures as a means of
alleviating its suspicions. He feared the
discord over Germany would lead to a
division of Europe, a prospect he didn’t like.
He wanted the Soviet troops out of Iran but
in a manner that did not inject additional
How to Reverse Failed Policy
tensions into great-power relations. He
admired Churchill but cancelled a New
York dinner appearance with him once
the prime minister’s Iron Curtain speech
proved controversial. He favored sharing
nuclear information with the Soviet
Union and went so far as to coauthor a
plan for international control of nuclear
technologies. These were hardly attributes
of a cold warrior battling against the naïveté
of his countrymen.
But developments in Turkey proved
decisive in establishing the containment
doctrine. Since 1945, Moscow had been
pressing the Turkish government to allow
Soviet ships to pass through the Turkish
Straits connecting the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean. In August 1946, the Soviets
augmented their demand with ominous
naval maneuvers in the Black Sea and the
dispatch of additional forces to the Balkans.
Ankara, fearing a Soviet invasion, appealed
to the West for assistance.
The Turkish crisis was pivotal for
Acheson. All along, he had seen various
episodes of Soviet aggression as unrelated
events. Thus, he had made no connection
between Stalin’s brutal methods in Eastern
Europe and his expansionist efforts in the
Mediterranean. Now he saw a pattern of
Soviet aggression, which disabused him of
the notion that conciliation would temper
Stalin’s ambitions. He concluded the only
real deterrent to Soviet plans for engulfing
Turkey and the Middle East would be the
“conviction that the pursuance of such a
policy will result in a war with the United
States.” Meeting with Truman, Acheson
argued that the imperative was not just
negating Stalin’s designs on Turkey but
confronting him with a new approach
of firmness and confrontation. In a
memorable exchange, Acheson turned to
Truman and asked if he understood the
gravity of the moment. “We might as well
find out whether the Russians [are] bent
How to Reverse Failed Policy
on world conquest now as in five or ten
years,” declared Truman. The president’s
inclination toward toughness was now
buttressed and legitimized by the man he
came to trust. The months of dithering
came to an end as the United States would
now pursue a new policy of vigilance.
Ultimately, it was Stalin’s aggression in
the periphery of Europe that provoked a
new direction in U.S. policy. The Soviet
moves in the Turkish Straits finally
tipped the bureaucratic scales, adding the
considerable weight of Acheson to the ranks
of those who were calling for change. Faced
with joint Anglo-American protest, Stalin
quietly backed off his claims on the straits.
The fact that the new policy of firmness
yielded results so quickly further affirmed
its logic. Although the great initiatives
of the containment doctrine such as the
Marshall Plan and the establishment of
nato would come later, 1946 proved the
decisive year in shifting the conceptual
foundation of U.S. policy away from
conciliation and toward containment.
National-security decisions sometimes
seem clearer viewed in retrospect. The
process that propelled Truman toward
his reconsideration was never without
hesitancy, second-guessing and ambiguity.
Despite his awareness that the Soviets
were violating their pledges, Truman still
harbored lingering hopes of rebuilding past
cooperation. Although George Kennan
is often credited with ushering in the age
of containment, it was Dean Acheson
who guided U.S. policy away from its
predetermined course. Acheson’s formidable
intellectual powers allowed him to grasp
the salience of the moment and the need
for strategies that met the exigencies of the
time. Possessing the trust of his president
and the inner confidence to revisit and
change his assumptions, Acheson used his
critical position to translate his vision into a
successful policy.
May/June 2013 51
M
any observers have long assumed that
the terms of the 1973 peace treaty
ending the Vietnam War were largely the
same as those available in 1969. Thus, the
war was prolonged for no reason other than
Richard Nixon’s obsession with credibility. North Vietnam’s swift victory in 1975
seemingly lends credence to this perception.
However, such views simplify a far more
complicated diplomatic dance.
America’s Vietnam policy changed under
Nixon in a manner that compelled Hanoi
to alter its war objectives and accept a
compromise settlement. True, the peace
treaty could be enforced only through
American airpower and continued material
assistance to Saigon, and neither continued
after Nixon became embroiled in the
debilitating Watergate scandal. Still, the
changes brought about by Nixon altered
the context of the war and compelled
Hanoi to accept an agreement that
could have preserved South Vietnamese
sovereignty.
While an under secretary of state was
critical to ushering in a different Cold War
policy, it was the president himself who
guided the Vietnam shift. Nixon proved
the rarest of presidents, taking command
of both the direction and the details of a
policy. As early as 1967, in his important
Foreign Affairs article, Nixon clearly
understood that America’s path in Vietnam
had to change radically. “The war has
imposed severe strains on the United States,
not only militarily and economically but
socially and politically as well,” conceded
the future presidential candidate. Although
aided by Henry Kissinger, this would be a
top-down assault on the assumptions and
processes by a president unimpressed by an
unimaginative bureaucracy. Nixon, whose
mastery of foreign affairs exceeded that
of most presidents, actively participated
in formulating a new strategy to salvage
America’s Indochina effort. Among his most
52 The National Interest
innovative policy changes was a realignment
in great-power relations that proved crucial
in inducing Hanoi to come to terms with
the United States.
By 1969, America’s war effort in Vietnam
was unsustainable due to stalemate
on the battlefield and turmoil at home.
To the extent that Hanoi participated
in talks, its terms called for a unilateral
American withdrawal, cessation of all
attacks on North Vietnam, the replacement
of the Saigon regime with a coalition of
neutralists and Communists, and respect
for the territorial unity of Vietnam.
Clearly, the North looked at diplomacy
as a means of dividing the Western
camp and empowering the U.S. peace
movement. Upon becoming president,
Nixon confronted an adversary whose
diplomacy was driven by the notion that
revolutionary violence could transform the
situation and that there was no point in
bargaining seriously with capitalist barons.
Hanoi’s objective remained the defeat of the
United States, and the talks were merely an
extension of that aim.
The new Nixon strategy for reclaiming
the initiative had a number of components.
He assumed initially that bluster could
nudge Hanoi away from its intransigence.
An unimpressed North Vietnamese
leadership not only persisted with its
infiltrations but also rejected Nixon’s offer
of secret talks. Having been rebuffed, Nixon
launched a new strategy. He removed
some of the restraints on his military
operations, particularly in escalating the
air war. He embraced General Creighton
Abrams’s replacement of General William
Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy strategy
with a more robust counterinsurgency
one. A result was the near destruction of
Hanoi’s southern Communist cadre, and
its privileged sanctuaries in Laos and
Cambodia also came under sustained
attack. The intensification of the military
How to Reverse Failed Policy
assaults presented Hanoi with a new and
more ominous reality.
Meanwhile, the Americans initiated
a “Vietnamization” program designed
to transfer much of the ground fighting
to South Vietnamese armed forces.
This strategy not only buttressed South
Vietnamese capabilities but also
transformed the conflict into a Vietnamese
one. The North had long depicted its war as
emancipating Vietnam from the clutches of
Western imperialism. Now it was a civil war
with Vietnamese fighting each other. The
enhanced capacity of South Vietnam and
the disruption of the North’s supply lines
did much to soften Hanoi. The argument
can be made that despite the success of such
tactics, given Hanoi’s resilience, it would
soon find ways to cope with these measures.
But Nixon added his détente with the
Soviet Union and reconciliation with
China, which differentiated the president
from his predecessors and made a profound
impression on the North.
To be sure, Nixon was the inadvertent
beneficiar y of the cracking of the
Communist monolith. Since the mid1960s many Western officials had
acknowledged the fissures in the Soviet
bloc and the essential breakdown of the
Sino-Soviet alliance. But
by 1969, those tensions
manifested themselves
in large-scale military
clashes. It appeared to
many that the first use of
the Soviet nuclear arsenal
might actually be against
a fellow Communist
power. Nixon’s triangular
diplomacy sought to
exploit this situation
by further luring China
away from its erstwhile
ally while simultaneously
negotiating arms-
How to Reverse Failed Policy
control and trade agreements with
the Soviet Union. Nixon perceived no
contradiction between his outreach to
Beijing and his quest to harmonize relations
with Moscow. Indeed, he sensed—far
more than Kissinger—that a diplomatic
opening to China could induce Russian
accommodation.
There was still one more twist to the
triangular diplomacy that directly affected
America’s Vietnam struggle. The White
House quickly settled on the notion of
linkage—tying issues of mutual concern
with the Soviet Union and China to
Vietnam. This stood in stark contrast to
a bureaucracy that viewed arms control
as too critical to be disturbed by other
issues of contention. Meanwhile, the State
Department remained skeptical of any
opening to China given the ideologically
rash nature of Mao’s regime and the
obstacles this could create for détente with
the Soviet Union.
The psychological impact on North
Vietnam of Nixon being toasted in both
Beijing and Moscow has often been
underestimated. As with most ideological
regimes, the North had invested much
in the notion of socialist solidarity and
strongly objected to the Communist giants’
May/June 2013 53
It was the president himself who guided the Vietnam
shift. Nixon proved the rarest of presidents, taking
command of both the direction and the details of a policy.
embrace of Nixon. Ironically, Chinese and
Russian attempts to reassure Hanoi only
inflamed its anxieties. The fear of betrayal
was one of the critical factors that led the
North toward a more serious diplomacy.
C o n f ro n t e d w i t h Vi e t n a m i z a t i o n’s
continued progress and the devastation of a
more intensified air war, Hanoi abandoned
some of its revolutionary shibboleths.
Beijing’s defection to détente policy was
even more unsettling for Hanoi than Soviet
diplomatic practices. After all, Moscow
had long engaged in summit diplomacy
with Washington and had even agreed to
various nuclear agreements. China, on the
other hand, had been a strident critic of
the United States and made supporting
national-liberation movements the defining
tenet of its foreign relations. It was
inconceivable to Hanoi that Mao could
abandon his long-standing aversion to
dealing with the Americans or move away
from his support for Third World liberation
struggles. It was only a matter of time
before Chinese pragmatism and self-interest
overwhelmed the country’s revolutionary
commitments. Geography and history had
long bound the North Vietnamese and
Chinese Communist parties together. Now
Hanoi was isolated.
Once the United States agreed that the
North did not have to withdraw its forces
in exchange for an American departure,
China began to view the arguments for
persisting with the conflict as increasingly
hollow. For Beijing, Hanoi’s insistence that
South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van
Thieu resign before a peace compact could
be concluded seemed shortsighted. As Mao
54 The National Interest
warned a visiting Pham Van Dong in 1971,
“Where the broom cannot reach, the dust
is not swept away.” This was significant,
as China previously had persistently
advised the North not even to enter
negotiations. As a succession of American
emissaries passed through Beijing, Hanoi
grew concerned that Vietnam and Taiwan
would be conjoined after the United States
had tied the withdrawal of its forces from
Taiwan to a favorable Vietnam accord.
Although China’s leadership pointedly
rejected Kissinger’s attempt to craft such a
linkage, the North Vietnamese began to fear
that time was not on their side.
In 1972, North Vietnam gambled its
fortunes on a major military offensive that
it hoped would end the conflict decisively
and compel the United States to accept its
terms. Hanoi’s leadership seemed also to
have perceived that its military invasion
would complicate the great powers’ détente
policy, as it would be difficult to persist
with summits and diplomatic conclaves
while the war intensified in Vietnam. This
was a grave miscalculation. The bombing
campaign unleashed by Nixon crippled
the invasion, while the South Vietnamese
army proved surprisingly effective, even
launching counteroffensives of its own. The
offensive’s failure disabused the North of
its perception that it could garner a quick
victory on the battlefield.
The Communist giants’ reaction to the
offensive demonstrated the complexity of
North Vietnam’s war strategy in the midst
of an unfolding détente. The U.S. bombing
was greeted with perfunctory criticism from
China and the Soviet Union. Contrary to
How to Reverse Failed Policy
Hanoi’s wishes, Leonid Brezhnev refused
to cancel a forthcoming summit meeting
with Nixon, while the Soviet leadership
once more urged the Vietnamese to come
to terms with the Americans. For his
part, Mao now declared, “If I were North
Vietnam, I would not refuse to speak
to Thieu.” Both Beijing and Moscow
registered their displeasure with Hanoi
by reducing their aid. The Communist
powers’ behavior confirmed Hanoi’s fear
that its sources of support might yet
prove unreliable. The seeming success of
Vietnamization and the pressures of détente
finally compelled the North to seek a
settlement on less than its maximalist terms.
Among North Vietnam’s concessions was
acknowledgement of the integrity of the
demilitarized zone (dmz) separating the two
Vietnams. In essence, the accords implied
that the line partitioning Vietnam was a
potential boundary denoting two sovereign
entities. For a regime that had denied the
legitimacy of South Vietnam, this was a
bitter pill. If the dmz agreement were to be
enforced, the North would have difficulty
supplying and rotating its remaining troops
in the South. The United States retained the
right to provide South Vietnam’s army with
advisers, and the Thieu government could
remain in power in advance of an armistice.
Nixon had succeeded in imposing terms on
Hanoi that it had long abjured.
The Paris peace accords have been
perceived widely as a prelude to the collapse
of South Vietnam—a decent interval at
best. Hanoi’s determination to violate the
agreement seemingly affirms this notion.
However, the key issue was whether the
United States had the appetite to reengage
in the conflict when the North launched
its inevitable invasion. In 1972, American
airpower fortified South Vietnamese morale
while its punishing blows curtailed Hanoi’s
advance. But, with its troops withdrawn
and prisoners home, would a Washington
How to Reverse Failed Policy
mired in Watergate and the economic
recession muster the same resolve? For the
agreement to hold, the United States had
to continue providing aid to Saigon and
keep its airpower at the ready. Ultimately,
Congress was not prepared for such a
prolonged commitment. If the NixonKissinger team missed anything, it was
not Hanoi’s propensity to violate its treaty
obligations but the willingness of the
American people to rebuff those violations.
Given the collapse of South Vietnam,
it may seem strange to proclaim Nixon’s
policy a success. However, the relevant
factors suggesting a switch from failure
to success are actually present here. The
collapse of South Vietnam was seen as
endangering America’s national security.
A new set of policy makers inherited a
failed strategy and proceeded to draft an
imaginative alternative. The issue was of
sufficient importance that it engaged not
just the top policy makers but the president
himself. Continuity had ceased to be a
viable option.
A treaty is a living organism: it must be
implemented and enforced every day. The
failure of the Nixon administration was not
the content of its Vietnam policy, which
turned the tide of battle, isolated North
Vietnam internationally and buttressed
the power of America’s South Vietnamese
ally. Its failure was its inability to hold the
domestic front together and craft a national
consensus behind enforcement of the treaty.
And that failure stemmed from factors
beyond Nixon’s actual Vietnam policy.
B
y 2006, the Iraq War had turned into
a divisive conflict that polarized the
public and estranged some of America’s
most important allies. An emerging civil
war threatened to envelop Iraq, while in
America the rosy optimism of the initial
invasion gave way to a severe decline in
the Bush administration’s political standing
May/June 2013 55
and a Democratic Party resurgence. The
Republican Party, whose political fortunes
were vanishing in the sands of Iraq, was
growing uneasy amid calls for withdrawal
from America’s political class as well as its
rank and file. George W. Bush, who had
staked his presidency and legacy on the Iraq
War, found himself confronting prospects
of defeat.
In invading Iraq, Washington made
certain assumptions about how the
war and the occupation would unfold.
The U.S. strategy was predicated on the
notion that a cumbersome and intrusive
American military presence would stir Iraqi
nationalism. So U.S. forces were housed in
large bases and would undertake sporadic
raids against Al Qaeda cells and insurgent
strongholds and then return to their
command centers. In a strange way, the
American military brass seemed to accept
the arguments of war critics who warned
that the U.S. presence would fuel and not
extinguish the insurgency.
As Iraq continued to disintegrate,
the United States sought to train Iraqi
forces and transfer security obligations
to them as quickly as possible. In the
meantime, it was hoped that elections
56 The National Interest
and plebiscites would create opportunities
for political participation for all but the
most recalcitrant elements. The received
wisdom was that stability was possible
only through a democratically constituted
Iraqi government determined to reconcile
sectarian tensions. Thus, a stable and secure
Iraq would follow a genuine attempt at
reconciliation—not the other way around.
And then came the 2006 attack that
destroyed the golden dome of Al Askari
mosque in Samarra, one of the most
important Shia shrines. The attack was
accompanied by a killing spree that claimed
the lives of a hundred Iraqis within a day
and more than a thousand in the next few
days. Iraq quickly became immersed in a
sectarian civil war.
These powerful developments led to
a search for answers and alternatives in
Washington. But continuity proved a
persistent habit within the government.
A n o b s t i n a t e Do n a l d
Rumsfeld was a formidable
obstacle to fresh thinking.
Nor were the Joint Chiefs
of Staff prone to devote
more resources to Iraq.
The commanders on the
ground in Iraq, Generals
George Casey and John
Abizaid, advised that
Wa s h i n g t o n s h o u l d
maintain its patience
and not discard the
current train-and-transfer
strategy. The president’s
c l o s e s t f o re i g n - p o l i c y
adviser, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, had grown weary of
the Iraq entanglement. And a highly
praised bipartisan study group led by
foreign-policy mandarins James Baker
and Lee Hamilton had endorsed a path of
recalibration and retreat. For the president
to reject such a consensus would be viewed
How to Reverse Failed Policy
The future of Iraq remains uncertain. However, there is no doubt
that a change in strategy salvaged the American enterprise and
saved Iraq from collapsing further into a horrific civil conflict.
by many as an act of peculiar defiance.
Certainly, there was presidential
frustration and a faltering policy. But a
switch to a successful alternative requires
a high-ranking official who rejects the
prevailing consensus and offers a plausible
counterstrategy. Stephen Hadley, Bush’s
national-security adviser, assumed that role
in the Bush White House. As Bush recalled
later, “He knew my anxiety. He knew my
intensity on the issue. He read me like a
book.” Hadley did not originally devise the
actual strategy, but he provided high-level
sponsorship inside the administration for
those interested in rethinking the policy.
Under Hadley’s direction, a group of
National Security Council staffers, assorted
former generals and think-tank analysts
began formulating a different approach.
The views of the White House planning
group now coincided with the perceptions
of important military officers such as David
Petraeus, who already were thinking of a
different policy involving additional troops
to bolster a new counterinsurgency strategy.
Once the new strategy was articulated,
Hadley proved critical in getting it
adopted. To be sure, he was responding
to urgent concerns of a beleaguered but
determined president. Still, he had to
overcome bureaucratic barriers, determined
opposition from key military commanders
and U.S. diplomats, and a Democratic
Congress that was losing faith in the war.
Throughout this exercise, Hadley proved
a pivotal figure. He could have urged the
president to give the local commanders
more time. He could have joined the
withdrawal chorus. Instead, he opted to
How to Reverse Failed Policy
salvage the president’s policy.
The reigning assumptions of the previous
American strategy now came crumbling
down. The conflict had been seen as a battle
between the central government and an
insurgency seeking to displace it. But now it
was considered a sectarian conflict between
Sunnis and Shia, with Al Qaeda’s violence
aggravating those tensions. U.S. forces
were seen not necessarily as catalysts for
violence, but as agents whose more active
participation and patrol could mitigate the
sectarian war. The new strategy recognized
Iraq’s diverse landscape and tailored tactics
to that diversity. Instead of emphasizing
top-down reconciliation, the new approach
focused on bottom-up accommodation.
Population security became critical as
U.S. commanders reached out to Sunni
tribal leaders and even aligned with their
militias against Al Qaeda. The American
presence on streets and in neighborhoods
increased to give protection to Iraqis and
foster confidence that they could escape
their predicament. This naturally entailed
not just more troops, but also different
commanders and ultimately a different
secretary of defense.
The surge, which increased U.S.
deployments in Iraq by some twenty-one
thousand troops, provided an umbrella
of security that allowed nascent trends to
mature. In reality, between 2004 and 2006
Al Qaeda’s harsh tactics alienated Sunni
tribes at times, causing them to reach out
to local U.S. commanders. But subsequent
efforts at cooperation failed because the
United States did not have the capacity to
offer the necessary protection to cement
May/June 2013 57
deals. The Sunni tribesmen needed arms
and a degree of support in order to establish
a force able to patrol their areas and protect
them against Al Qaeda assaults. The new
strategy allowed Sunni tribal leaders, already
chafing under the threat of Al Qaeda, to
defect and thus allow moderate Sunni
opinion to gain greater force vis-à-vis
radical elements.
The surge probably would not have
succeeded without the central government
of Nuri al-Maliki committing itself to
declawing Shia militias, particularly the
movement of Moktada al-Sadr. In March
2008, the Shia government of Iraq moved
beyond its presumed sectarian affinities and
launched an assault on radical Shia forces
in Basra. Thus, the government proved to
skeptical Sunnis that it favored national
stability over sectarian empowerment.
The surge strategy emerged through a
series of thoughtful exercises that assessed
all options and their potential for success.
However diligent the process may have
been, the notion that additional forces
protecting population centers were essential
for stability had been around for some
time. The Pentagon could have embraced
that strategy at the outset of the invasion
and thus provided Iraqi institutions time
to establish themselves and their authority.
But, because Washington wanted regime
change on the cheap and with a limited
footprint, it pursued an occupation policy
that proved disastrous.
The future of Iraq remains uncertain.
However, there is no doubt that a change
in strategy salvaged the American enterprise
and saved Iraq from collapsing further
into a horrific civil conflict, with America
caught in the conflagration. It required not
only presidential anguish and leadership
but also an incisive policy maker to
translate concern into a new policy. The
surge brought about a quick turnaround.
Had the level of violence not declined as
58 The National Interest
quickly as it did, George W. Bush likely
would have met Nixon’s fate: a president
who launched a successful counterstrategy
only to run out of time.
I
t is rare for presidents to take direct
command of their foreign-policy failures. Presidential frustration doesn’t necessarily yield alternatives. Lyndon Johnson
indisputably was frustrated with his Vietnam strategy, as Barack Obama must be
with his Iran policy. Yet change doesn’t always emerge simply because a chief executive is exasperated and appreciates the cost
of failure. Nor will a bureaucracy, set in its
ways, often come to his rescue. An extraordinary alignment of interests and opportunities must come together for the ship of
state to change direction. Continuity in the
midst of failure has been more of the norm
than the exception.
The philosopher John Dewey said
that “institutions tremble when a new
idea appears.” In their own ways, Dean
Acheson, Richard Nixon and Stephen
Hadley not only transcended such fears but
also actively pursued new ideas. Acheson
today stands as one of the preeminent
historical figures in American foreign
policy primarily because, at a key historical
juncture, he turned his assumptions
into questions. Nixon proved the rarest
of presidents when he discarded the
conventional bureaucratic wisdom and
played a direct role in devising a different
path. The tragedy of Nixon’s presidency
was that his disgrace and fall prevented
his country from taking advantage of his
successful strategy. Hadley was an unlikely
catalyst for change, as circumspect and
cautious men steeped in legal training
usually don’t buck existing templates and
precedents. Yet these very different men can
lay a claim on history for accomplishing
the rarest of achievements: turning failure
into success. n
How to Reverse Failed Policy
Reviews & Essays
The Priesthood of
Central Bankers
By Christopher Whalen
Neil Irwin, The Alchemists: Three Central
Bankers and a World on Fire (New York:
Penguin, 2013), 400 pp., $29.95.
W
orshipping and lionizing central bankers is an increasingly
popular activity. This veneration
holds appeal not only for investors but also
for politicians and the media. Indeed, a
strong codependence exists between politicians and central bankers. Without the
political class, a central banker like Ben Bernanke is just a college professor. At the same
time, politicians often find central bankers to be useful foils for political rhetoric
around election time.
Although the growing power of central
bankers since the 1970s is largely a political
phenomenon, it has been scantly discussed
in political discourse. Outside the grim
ghettos of financial media, the issue of
central-bank accountability is not a hot
topic. The global bureaucracy of central
bankers operates across national boundaries,
exercising huge authority over both fiscal
and monetary policy while avoiding
Christopher Whalen is a writer and investment
banker who lives in New York City. He is the
author of Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the
American Dream (Wiley, 2010).
Reviews & Essays
explicit political responsibility. The Fed
is all-powerful, for example, yet largely
unaccountable.
In his classic 1995 book Confidence
Game, Steven Solomon described how
economic change in the 1980s and 1990s
created a political vacuum in terms of policy
mechanisms to address global currency
and capital flows—and how that void was
effectively filled by central bankers. Global
capital mobility caused governments’
sovereign control over national savings and
national monetary policy to slip away—or,
more specifically, to be pooled. According
to Solomon, George Shultz characterizes the
new era as one in which
the “court of the allocation of world savings”
every day judges the economic policies of governments, rewarding those it favored with investment and strong currencies and punishing
others by withholding capital and weak currencies. . . . Capital was free to pursue its innate
profit-expansive logic regardless of geographic
boundary or political consequences.
In his new book The Alchemists:
Three Central Bankers and a World on
Fire, Neil Irwin picks up the policy and
personal narrative of this global centralbank priesthood. Like other journalists
turned authors such as Solomon, William
Greider and Martin Mayer, Irwin brings to
the task his personal experience with the
people at central banks. Irwin, who has
covered the Fed and economic issues for the
Washington Post for over a decade, is now a
Post columnist and the economics editor of
Wonkblog.
May/June 2013 59
Irwin explains the evolution of the global
fraternity of central bankers through the
actions and deliberations of three key
figures: Ben Bernanke, chairman of the
U.S. Federal Reserve; Jean-Claude Trichet,
president of the European Central Bank
(ecb) from 2003 to 2011; and Mervyn
King, governor of the Bank of England
and chairman of its Monetary Policy
Committee. He starts right off with a blunt
assessment of the role of the central banker
in Western democracies:
Central bankers uphold one end of a grand
bargain that has evolved over the past 350
years. Democracies grant these secretive technocrats control over their nations’ economies;
in exchange, they ask only for a stable currency
and sustained prosperity (something that is
easier said than achieved). Central bankers determine whether people can get jobs, whether
their savings are secure, and, ultimately, whether their nation prospers or fails.
Regrettably, this is an accurate assessment
of the political situation with respect to
central bankers generally and the U.S.
Federal Reserve System in particular. They
have been given a very wide economic
portfolio. But it wasn’t always thus. A little
history provides a context for Irwin’s tale. In
the 1970s and 1980s, the chief concern of
central bankers and their political patrons
was inflation, an economic concept well
understood by Americans. Experience with
soaring living costs, scarcity of jobs and
price controls going back to World War
I meant Americans generally supported
efforts by the government to curb inflation,
60 The National Interest
even if jobs were also a big concern. Even
in colonial times, inflation and bad money
had chastened the common man against
paper currency issued by unscrupulous
bankers. This was one reason why the
United States did not have a central bank
for eighty years prior to World War I. This
sentiment was well articulated by President
Andrew Jackson when he killed, through
his veto, the reauthorization of the Second
Bank of the United States:
Every monopoly and all exclusive privileges
are granted at the expense of the public, which
ought to receive a fair equivalent. The many
millions which this act proposes to bestow on
the stockholders of the existing bank must
come directly or indirectly out of the earnings
of the American people. It is due to them,
therefore, if their Government sell monopolies
and exclusive privileges, that they should at
least exact for them as much as they are worth
in open market. The value of the monopoly
in this case may be correctly ascertained. The
twenty-eight millions of stock would probably
be at an advance of 50 per cent, and command in market at least $42,000,000, subject to the payment of the present bonus. The
present value of the monopoly, therefore, is
$17,000,000, and this the act proposes to sell
for three millions, payable in fifteen annual
installments of $200,000 each.
Chief among Jackson’s objections to
the Second Bank of the United States was
governance—namely, the role of private
individuals as shareholders and a lack of
accountability to the states. But in the
eighty years following Jackson’s veto, much
Reviews & Essays
changed. By 1913 the
concept of a central bank
was greeted with a good
bit of relief in the business
community. The economy
was in a miserable state,
and many Americans were
weary of periodic financial
crises. The creation of the
Fed in 1913 marked a
new willingness on the part of Americans to
tolerate management of the economy by the
federal government in Washington.
T
he U.S. economy surged early in
the World War I period, but when
the credit ran out, the exports to Europe
stopped. The American economy once
again fell into the doldrums. In those days,
the Fed was constrained to back all of the
paper money in circulation—that is, “Federal Reserve notes”—with 40 percent gold
and 100 percent commercial paper. Because
of such restrictions, monetary policy was
not a significant factor in the 1920s economy, especially compared to today.
Such was the antipathy to inflation
a century ago that the idea of artificially
stimulating economic activity—which in
our day goes by the name of “quantitative
easing” and is the current policy of the
Fed and other world central banks—
would never have been considered. But
government action in the form of war
spending and debt issuance did have a
big impact on the economy during World
War I. O.P. Austin, chief statistician of the
foreign-trade department of the National
City Bank of New York (the predecessor of
Reviews & Essays
Citigroup), observed in 1917 that “world
currency” had grown by 80 percent in
the preceding five years and government
debt by 140 percent, while population
had grown by only 2.5 percent. He noted
further that significant price increases
soon followed this rise in spending and
government debt issuance—instituted to
support World War I—and that most of the
inflation came via “uncovered paper.”
The U.S. economy slid into the
Roaring Twenties, a decade of commodity
deflation, rising urban unemployment,
land speculation and financial shenanigans
that would conclude with the crash
of 1929. Through the Great Depression
and World War II, central banks took a
backseat to government agencies such as
the Reconstruction Finance Corporation,
which funded policy objectives through
direct borrowing. The Fed kept interest
rates artificially low until the outbreak of
the Korean War, in part because creating
jobs for returning soldiers was a national
priority. Rapid domestic growth and job
creation after the war made inflation the
primary concern of Fed policy, but interest
rates remained relatively low through the
late 1960s. But by the early 1970s, the
May/June 2013 61
The creation of the Fed in 1913 marked a new willingness
on the part of Americans to tolerate management of the
economy by the federal government in Washington.
forces of inflation and unemployment once
again rose to a level of national concern.
In 1971, Richard Nixon announced a
cluster of momentous policy initiatives—
the end of official sales of gold, effective
devaluation of the dollar, and federal wage
and price controls. This potent brew was
crafted by a special working group that
included Secretary of the Treasury John
Connally, Under Secretary of the Treasury
for Monetary Affairs Paul Volcker and
others. It is fair to say that Nixon only
vaguely understood what he was doing.
While it is true that fdr actually closed
the gold window decades earlier with his
confiscation of domestic precious metals
held by individuals, it was Nixon who
loosed the Fed from “the surly bonds of
earth” in a fiscal and monetary sense.
Nixon unleashed domestic debt issuance
and inflation by officially abandoning
the limiting equivalence of the dollar and
gold set at Bretton Woods. When fdr and
Abraham Lincoln had taken similar actions
in the past, it was on the eve of war. Nixon’s
decision, by contrast, turned largely on
personal political considerations.
After 1971, the dollar became a pure fiat
currency, meaning its value was set by law
or other governmental interventions. It is
worth noting that after the vast monetary
expansions during the Civil War and World
War I, the U.S. government eventually
returned to gold convertibility. There was
no such intention with Nixon’s unilateral
decision, which caused an international
panic and forced other countries to follow
suit and allow their currencies to “float”
against the dollar. Thus did fiat money
62 The National Interest
become commonplace around the globe.
By the time of his reelection campaign
in 1972, Nixon had seen the dollar lose
a quarter of its purchasing power to
inflation during his first term. The financial
credibility of the U.S. government and the
Federal Reserve System had reached a new
low.
The late 1970s and the 1980s were
difficult years for the United States as issues
such as employment, inflation and trade
competition with other nations came back
to political prominence. For the first time
since World War II, the poor economic
outlook revived American fears of inflation
or worse. Policy makers struggled for
solutions. In 1978, Congress made longrun growth, low inflation and price stability
the explicit goals of Fed policy through
the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. In America,
you understand, growth can simply be
legislated. But the powerful demographic
force of the post-wwii baby boom drove
national priorities and inflation, forcing
Fed chairman Paul Volcker to raise interest
rates well into double digits in 1979 to cool
the fires of inflation. Volcker’s bold political
stroke set the stage for the economic
expansion in the 1980s under Ronald
Reagan.
By the early 1990s, the United States had
lived through a real-estate boom and bust
with the savings-and-loan crisis. Fed policy
was increasingly focused on keeping interest
rates low to spur consumer activity and
jobs, with little concern about inflation.
America turned inward in its search for
jobs and growth, and naturally turned
again to housing as a solution. Depression-
Reviews & Essays
era agencies such as Fannie Mae and the
Federal Housing Administration “were
repurposed by the Clinton administration
to direct social policy through the
housing and mortgage markets,” author
and financial analyst Joshua Rosner told
a subcommittee of the House Financial
Services Committee this March. “In 1994,
the [Clinton] Administration set about to
‘raise the [home] ownership rate by 0.5%–
1.0% per year for the seven years, from
65% to 70% by the year 2000.’” The years
of subprime boom and bust that followed
under President George W. Bush were only
made possible by Bill Clinton’s housing
policies. In place of the military-industrial
complex that propelled U.S. growth from
the 1950s to the 1980s, the affordablehousing lobby used public policy to drive
employment and growth from the 1990s
onward. The 2007 subprime crash, like
the crash of 1929, was merely the climax
of more than a decade of housing-market
speculation.
S
ince the 2007 crisis, while Congress has
hid its head in the sand with respect
to fiscal issues, the Federal Open Market
Committee (fomc) effectively has managed
both fiscal and monetary policy. By keeping
rates artificially low compared to the true
rate of inflation, the Fed subsidizes the U.S.
Treasury’s debt load to the tune of hundreds
of billions of dollars per year.
Meanwhile, Washington’s subsidy for the
U.S. banking system amounts to hundreds
of billions more annually, far more than the
industry reports in profits. Subsidies for the
banks range from federal deposit insurance
Reviews & Essays
to low interest rates maintained by the Fed
to federal guarantees for mortgages and
small-business loans. To pay for the subsidy
of artificially low interest rates, individual,
institutional and corporate savers pay a
repressive tax levied by the central bank in
the form of quantitative easing, where the
Fed buys financial assets from commercial
banks and other private institutions in order
to inject more fiat money into the economy.
Irwin, who falls into the camp of those
who tend to lionize central bankers, likens
the U.S. central bank’s low-interest-rate
policy to a modern version of alchemy, but
old-fashioned, nineteenth-century socialist
redistribution from savers to debtors is
perhaps a more accurate description of the
policy direction of the Bernanke Fed.
Ir w i n u s e s s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y
Sweden and a story familiar to students
of economics to illustrate his dubious
“alchemist” metaphor. A Swedish banker
named Johan Palmstruch creates an
early model of a modern central bank,
Stockholms Banco. The bank uses various
metals to back its activities, but one day
it runs up against an age-old problem
of money and banking—liquidity.
Palmstruch quickly discovers the magic of
issuing unbacked paper money to provide
additional liquidity, but eventually the bank
fails. He is tried for fraud and imprisoned.
“All it took to create wealth where there’d
been none was some paper,” writes Irwin of
the Swedish experience, “a printing press,
and a central bank, imbued with the power
from the state, to put it to work.” Sadly,
with the rise of modern central banking,
people who “create” such money are no
May/June 2013 63
longer thrown into prison. Even as recently
as the 1920s, the business of finance was
seen in classical—that is, negative—terms,
but today investment banking and even
central banking are considered acceptable
by many parts of society.
Early in his book, Irwin uses a couple
of additional examples of central banking
as a backdrop for the rest of the volume.
He covers the failure of the Overend,
Gurney & Company bank in the 1860s in
the United Kingdom, Jackson’s assault on
the Second Bank of the United States, the
hyperinflation of Weimar Germany and
the secret meeting at Jekyll Island prior to
the creation of the Federal Reserve System
64 The National Interest
in 1913. Following this background,
Irwin gets his readers to 1971 and Nixon’s
decision to close the gold window.
In a chapter titled “The Anguish of
Arthur Burns,” we learn of a fundamental
reality of central banking—namely, its
intimate relationship to politics despite
pretensions of independence. Irwin draws
on the diaries of former Fed chairman
Burns to capture his distress over the
decision to break the link between the
dollar and gold. “The gold window may
have to be closed tomorrow because we now
have a government that seems incapable,
not only of constructive leadership, but
of any action at all,” wrote Burns, leaving
some readers wondering, no doubt: What
would he say about Washington today?
Burns was probably the last Fed chairman
to recognize any limits on his actions in
terms of monetary policy. Irwin, betraying
his journalistic background, places
much blame on Burns for his failure to
control rising prices in the 1970s. This is
probably an oversimplification. In fact,
demographics, free trade and external
shocks such as rising oil prices, which Irwin
notes, probably did more to spur inflation
than the specific actions taken or not taken
by the fomc.
I n d e e d , B u r n s’s c o n t e m p o r a r i e s
considered him a “tight money” Fed
chairman. He operated in the poisonous
political environment that swirled
around Washington during the Nixon
years, making concepts like central-bank
“independence” ridiculous. Moreover,
Volcker was a protégé of Burns, so
drawing a great distinction between
Reviews & Essays
Since the 2007 crisis, while Congress has hid its head in the sand
with respect to fiscal issues, the Federal Open Market Committee
effectively has managed both fiscal and monetary policy.
the two is not particularly useful. “To
attribute the inflation of the first part of
the 1970s solely to Burns’s leadership is
wrong,” wrote Fed economist Robert
Hetzel in 1998. “Monetary policy under
Burns’s fomc was never as expansionary
as vocal congressmen urged and, through
1972, was less expansionary than the
Nixon Administration desired.” He adds
that the inflation of the 1970s “represented
the failure of an experiment with activist
economic policy that enjoyed widespread
popular and professional support. Burns
was part of a political, intellectual,
and popular environment that expected
government to control the economy.”
W
hen Irwin recounts the transition
from Burns to G. William Miller
and then to Paul Volcker, he falls into the
familiar trap of Volcker hero worship, crediting Volcker with leading the great struggle
against inflation beginning in 1979. But as
I noted in my 2010 book Inflated, although
Volcker was nominated by a conservative
Southern Democrat, Jimmy Carter, his Republican predecessor, Gerald Ford, took the
battle against inflation every bit as seriously. Few commentators adequately note the
irony of the Democrat Volcker engineering
the 1971 decision by the Republican Nixon
to devalue the dollar and then, eight years
later, being asked by Carter to fix the inflation problem unleashed by that very action.
Volcker did break the back of inflation
and, for a while at least, restored public
confidence in the ability of Washington
to manage the economy. William Silber,
writing in Volcker: The Triumph of
Reviews & Essays
Persistence, notes that Volcker “earned his
unparalleled credibility over the course
of his professional career by approaching
public service as a sacred trust.” But had
not Volcker broken that trust by embracing
a pure fiat currency? It can be argued
that, while Volcker did defeat inflation in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, his more
significant action came in 1971, when he
set the course for decades of American fiscal
dissolution and the financial crises that
followed.
Irwin notes that Volcker’s success in
fighting inflation made it possible for his
successor, Alan Greenspan, to keep interest
rates low, again part of the collective (and
false) Washington narrative that gives
Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin credit for
balancing the budget during the 1990s.
In fact, swelling contributions to Social
Security from aging baby boomers took
enormous pressure off the Fed and the
Treasury Department during this period.
So great were the cash inflows to Social
Security, we should recall, that officials
warned about the disappearance of public
Treasury bonds. The Fed’s purchases of
Treasury and mortgage bonds today are
on a scale with the positive cash inflows
from the baby boomers of two decades ago,
but the cash flow of Social Security is now
negative.
While restoring public credibility
to the Fed was certainly helpful to Alan
Greenspan and his colleagues on the fomc
after Volcker left in 1987, the central bank
was entering a period of relative calm. The
neoliberal philosophy of free markets and
deregulation was grafted on to Washington’s
May/June 2013 65
New Deal apparatus, fueling nominal
growth along with mounting public
deficits. Then came the great effort to
promote home ownership, fostered by Bill
Clinton, well-placed members of Congress
such as Barney Frank of Massachusetts,
and the government-sponsored enterprises
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That
begat the wave of housing investment
that would become the massive housing
bubble of the last decade. Alan Greenspan
became the high priest of the period of
expansion known as the “great moderation,”
but the wave Greenspan’s fomc rode was
demographic—a product of the famous
baby-boom generation, which drove the
U.S. economy, as well as cultural trends,
for decades. It dominated American life,
including consumer purchases, housing,
saving, education and government
spending.
Irwin is on target in describing the Fed’s
famous 2005 Jackson Hole meeting and
the procession of economists lionizing
Greenspan as the greatest Fed chairman
ever. Even monetary economist Allan
Meltzer, among the great historians of the
institution and a staunch conservative,
genuflected before Greenspan. Yet even in
2005, the cracks were starting to appear in
the U.S. banking system. Officials from the
Fed and their colleagues in the economic
profession congratulated themselves
with supreme confidence that inflation,
jobs and growth were all manageable via
the right government policies. The U.S.
federal debt grew unabated and excesses
were visible in the housing market, but
low unemployment and buoyant economies
66 The National Interest
around the world blunted complaints.
Only when some of the major Wall Street
firms started to implode in 2007 did Fed
officials really begin to understand that
the idea of global bureaucrats managing
economies and avoiding serious financial
corrections was an illusion. Irwin notes
that officials at the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York dismissed warnings about
the housing sector as early as 2005—a
policy of deliberate ignorance that has
received far too little attention. The fact
that serious economists could ignore the
special demographic factors underlying the
period of the “great moderation” remains a
source of wonderment to this reviewer. The
housing bust that began in 2007 was largely
the result of a phenomenon that began six
decades earlier, when World War II soldiers
came marching home, started families and
had lots of babies. As the baby boomers
reached retirement, an inevitable decline in
housing sales was the result.
T
he Bernanke Fed has been distinguished by greater openness and transparency than previous regimes, but this
does not necessarily mean greater understanding on the part of the public about
what central bankers do. By focusing on
Trichet, Bernanke and King, Irwin has indeed placed our attention on the key policy
makers in global finance over the past decade. The largest part of The Alchemists is
devoted to telling the story of how these
men navigated the crises that seemed to
cascade across the U.S. economy and then
Europe. Irwin is not particularly critical of
Bernanke, former New York Fed president
Reviews & Essays
and later Treasury
Secretary Timothy
Geithner, or any
of the other players in this financial and economic drama. The
role of Geithner,
for example, in
the bailouts of
American International Group
and Citigroup is
treated in generous and approving terms. Irwin
essentially says a government rescue was the
best course. “We came very, very close to
a depression,” Bernanke warns. “The markets were in anaphylactic shock.” This sort
of logic is used frequently by Fed officials
to justify virtually all of their actions and
omissions from 2007 onward.
Respectful references are made to
Bernanke’s studies of the Great Depression,
especially his conclusion that allowing large
firms to fail is bad. But the only lesson
learned by the former Princeton economics
lecturer seems to be that bailouts and
deficits are the best course. Five years after
the crisis, the fomc continues to subsidize
the structural fiscal deficits enacted by
Congress. Echoing the arguments of most
Fed officials, the author bemoans the fact
that Lehman Brothers was not somehow
saved and that fiscal austerity has followed
decades of libertine fiscal delusion in the
industrial nations. Like the intellectually
pugnacious Nobel laureate Paul Krugman
Reviews & Essays
and Bernanke
h i m s e l f, Ir w i n
seems to suggest
that printing
money
and
issuing new debt
were reasonable
policy choices.
But the sad fact
is that Lehman
Brothers could
not be sold and
had to fail. And
nations such
as Britain that
lack sufficient
economic growth must restrain their
spending. Compare the resolution of
Lehman to the continued “anguish”
of Bank of America over time and
economic resources lost because of
litigation over legacy mortgage-backed
securities. Citigroup, likewise, wallows
in Japan-like torpor under the weight of
hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of
moribund assets. The litigation against
Bank of America could still force a legal
restructuring à la Lehman Brothers,
depending upon how the courts decide key
issues related to billions of dollars in claims.
Bernanke and his counterparts in Europe
have worked tirelessly to keep under wraps
situations such as Bank of America and
many others like it in the eu, but this
merely keeps those situations unresolved.
King, for example, faces a uk banking
system that has been crippled since 2007,
and the final disposition of several large
banks remains up in the air. The main
May/June 2013 67
players among the central bankers never
actually seem to get around to dealing with
real-world problems such as zombie banks,
those economically deformed financial
institutions whose net worth is less than
zero but which continue to operate because
they are shored up by governmental credit
support. If there is a weakness in this
thorough book it is that, while the author
makes a number of useful observations as
part of a largely journalistic narrative, he
could have provided more critical analysis
of the actions taken and not taken by his
three main protagonists. I’d like to know
more about what the author thinks of these
events and issues.
The decision to build a wall of money,
as Irwin accurately describes it, to meet
the crisis was no doubt a practical choice.
It also put Bernanke, Trichet and King,
however, in the position of picking winners
and losers, and ultimately making highly
significant political decisions that once
required democratic assent. The most recent
2013 Fed bank stress tests, for example,
had one purpose: to present a convincing
facade as to the health of zombie banks
such as Citigroup and Bank of America.
The central bankers’ support for rescues of
countries such as Greece and their de facto
embrace of the concept of “too big to fail”
work against the public’s interest in terms of
economic efficiency and long-term growth.
Without restructuring, there is little chance
for growth.
Irwin describes the clubby atmosphere at
private meetings and dinners in which the
central bankers foster an environment where
bailouts are considered routine while tough
68 The National Interest
questions are often avoided. A reader of this
book could contrast the sharp rebukes of
Mervyn King to the uk government over its
runaway deficits with the accommodation
of Bernanke’s fomc and Trichet’s ecb
toward their respective host governments.
Using Irwin’s own criteria from his tough
judgment of Arthur Burns, Bernanke has
shown a lack of courage to face the necessity
of restructuring the big banks and ending
Washington’s fiscal dysfunction. King
emerges in this book as the clear leader in
force of advocacy and in courage.
Is there another Paul Volcker waiting
in the wings, prepared to slap sense into
spendthrift American politicians on
federal spending? Perhaps, but was Volcker
really so radical a departure from Burns?
Or Greenspan after them? In terms of
their willingness to bail out large banks,
Volcker is the father of “too big to fail,”
and Bernanke seems little different. The
alchemists led by Bernanke, Trichet and
King were right to buy time with the wall
of money, but they erred by not using
that precious time to restructure the
economies of the United States and Europe.
By following the philosophy of Volcker
and Bernanke—that it is bad to allow
big enterprises to fail—we have missed
an opportunity to restore a more stable,
sustainable path to the future. The rise of
the alchemists among central bankers has
given us less political accountability, less
economic restructuring and renewal, and
far fewer real possibilities for growth in the
global economy. The reality remains that
nobody can spin straw into gold, not even
central bankers. n
Reviews & Essays
Dilemmas of the
Modern Navy
By James Holmes
Seth Cropsey, Mayday: The Twilight of
American Naval Superiority (New York:
Overlook, 2013), 336 pp., $29.95.
S
ea power is a conscious political
choice. A maritime power’s world
standing depends on keeping taut
the sinews of naval might. According to the
famed American geostrategist Alfred Thayer
Mahan, that means amassing international
commerce, forward bases, and merchant
and naval shipping. But just as Great Britain, in a “fit of absentmindedness,” assembled an empire on which the sun never set,
it may be possible to abdicate world leadership thoughtlessly. Indeed, slipping into imperial retrenchment would be easier for the
United States, which maintains no colonies
abroad, than it was for bygone empires that
conquered vast territories and then—having connected national dignity and pride to
geographic objects—had to defend them.
Withdrawing from diplomatic entanglements and drawing down armed forces are
easier than surrendering territory.
James Holmes is professor of strategy at the Naval
War College and coauthor of Red Star over the
Pacific (Naval Institute Press, 2010), which is
forthcoming in paperback later this year. The views
presented here are his alone.
Reviews & Essays
That’s doubly true since the benefits
of policing the global system are remote
and abstract, while the benefits of pulling
back—cost savings in particular—are
concrete and quantifiable. No wonder naval
proponents fret about what the future may
hold. They fear the United States will back
into a decision of enormous importance,
letting dollars and cents drive the process
rather than strategic thinking. Such fiscal
imprudence is not uncommon. As the late
admiral J. C. Wylie observes in his treatise,
Military Strategy, lawmakers make strategic
decisions through the budget process,
whether they realize it or not.
Which brings us to Seth Cropsey’s
new book, Mayday. Cropsey warns that
the United States, consciously or not, is
allowing a chasm to open between political
ends and the ways and means of strategy.
Much like Walter Lippmann, who lacerated
early twentieth-century presidents for
“monstrous imprudence” in foreign policy,
Cropsey maintains that—with apologies
to Theodore Roosevelt—America still
comports itself like a hyperpower while
toting smaller and smaller sticks. It has
neglected the hard national power needed
to back up ambitious policies. Misaligning
purpose and power invites challenge and
failure. That’s especially true in Asia, where
a new maritime contender, China, is on the
make.
American sea power, says Cropsey,
is in a parlous state. He has the chops to
make such a case. A senior fellow at the
Washington-based Hudson Institute,
Cropsey served as deputy under secretary
of the navy during the administrations
May/June 2013 69
of Ronald Reagan and George H. W.
Bush. Thus, he was intimately involved
in developing the 1986 maritime strategy,
the guiding document for maintaining sea
supremacy in the event of war with the
Soviet Union. Since then, his career has
included stints at the American Enterprise
Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
Cropsey comments on naval matters
regularly in such outlets as the Weekly
Standard. He writes fluently about affairs in
great waters.
It’s difficult to gainsay Cropsey’s
central message, which is that the U.S.
sea services—the navy, Marines and
coast guard—are under mounting strain.
Arresting this decline, in both numbers
and capability, is crucial if Washington
wants to sustain the dominant position it
inherited after World War II. Failing that,
national leaders will have to scale back their
policy aims to more modest goals that are
executable despite straitened circumstances.
There are few other alternatives. Nothing
good comes from a mismatch between
policy, strategy and means—as Lippmann
testified. He blamed the power vacuum
created by U.S. ineptitude for encouraging
Japanese troublemaking in the 1930s.
C
ropsey applies a back-to-basics approach to his topic. He starts with
Mahan and his groundbreaking book, The
Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–
1783, which served as a kind of blueprint
for the creation of the modern U.S. Navy.
A prolific writer and thinker, Mahan also
served as the second president of the Naval
War College (the institution I call home).
70 The National Interest
Historian Margaret Tuttle Sprout dubbed
him America’s “evangelist” of sea power, and
indeed he beseeched Americans to build
up domestic industrial production at home
and trade commerce abroad; create fleets
of merchantmen and warships; and establish forward bases to support the voyages
of fuel-hungry vessels. For him, sea power
consisted of this merger of geographic, economic and military implements. Mahan
envisioned a symbiotic relationship whereby
trade and commerce would generate sufficient tariff revenue to maintain a navy,
which in turn would protect commerce.
He coined the term “statesmanship directing arms” to denote the art of using naval
power for political ends. Sea power thus
connotes far more than fleets of armored
dreadnoughts battering away at each other
on the high seas. It encompasses national
purpose, as well as operations and tactics.
Mayday next surveys U.S. maritime
history, touching on the classical history
that molded the thinking of sea-oriented
founders such as John Adams. Oddly,
Cropsey spends far more pages reviewing
the half-forgotten War of 1812 than he
does World War II, a conflict of far greater
magnitude and strategic consequence. But
he correctly portrays the War of 1812 as a
debacle. Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt
wrote histories of the war precisely to
debunk the popular fantasy that the plucky
U.S. Navy had whipped the foremost
navy of the day. Cropsey, too, refrains
from hyping the single-ship victories of
the war’s first year. Henry Adams, in his
chronicle of the war, rightly points out that
the suffocating Royal Navy blockade drove
Reviews & Essays
the American economy to “exhaustion.”
A shift in British tactics broke U.S. heavy
frigates’ string of early successes, even as the
approaching defeat of Napoleonic France
freed up warships in Europe for blockade
duty off North America. Sobriety, not
euphoria, represents the proper attitude as
Americans now mark the bicentennial of
the War of 1812.
Following this capsule history, the book
is largely a venture in net assessment.
Net assessment refers to the art of sizing
up the physical, diplomatic and military
surroundings within which an endeavor
will unfold. Carl von
Clausewitz provides
probably the handiest
checklist for assessments,
urging statesmen and
commanders to appraise
the strength and situation
of the competitors; the
nature of their political
goals and the importance
they attach to those
goals; the capacity of the
contending governments,
societies and armed forces;
and the competition’s
likely influence on third
parties and bystanders.
Cropsey roughly follows
the Clausewitzian template, though not
explicitly. He finds the United States
increasingly wanting across all of these
parameters, in stark contrast to ambitious
competitors on the march. He takes stock
of such factors as budget deficits and the
national debt, competing demands on
Reviews & Essays
taxpayer dollars, and the escalating cost of
fielding ships, aircraft and naval weaponry.
These factors have merged into a perfect
storm, buffeting efforts to sustain a robust
fleet.
How much stress the inventory can
stand is open to question. The author notes
that, in simple numbers of hulls, the fleet
is now smaller than it has been in nearly
a century. He also points out that the
navy is modifying the composition of the
fleet—and attenuating its striking power
in the process. It is important to note that
not every ship is a shooter. Carrier and
amphibious groups travel with entourages
of escorts, logistics vessels and other support
craft. Each of these vessels, however light
or heavy its armament, counts toward the
overall tally as one hull.
Numbers, then, can be deceptive.
For example, a three-hundred-ship fleet
May/June 2013 71
The benefits of policing the global system are remote and abstract,
while the benefits of pulling back are concrete and quantifiable. No
wonder naval proponents fret about what the future may hold.
composed entirely of aircraft carriers or
destroyers bristling with weapons would
clearly be a different creature from a threehundred-ship fleet made up of unarmed
oilers and ammunition ships. Yet the
United States could claim to have fielded a
three-hundred-ship navy in both instances.
Cropsey argues that the navy, in its effort
to keep up overall numbers, is diluting
its fleet’s combat power. To estimate the
navy’s true combat strength, it is necessary
to factor in the proportion of battle-force
combatants, light combatants such as the
new Littoral Combat Ships and support
vessels.
Cropsey bemoans this U.S. strategic
drift particularly in light of the activities of
prospective competitors. Foremost among
these is China. In focusing on China’s
impressive naval and military buildup of the
past two decades, the author points out that
the military balance is a relative thing. If the
U.S. Navy thins out its combat power and
its capacity to project that power into farflung regions such as East Asia, it in effect
accelerates China’s rise to great maritime
stature. Summoning up the resolve and the
resources to sustain U.S. maritime primacy
is critical to preserving the Far Eastern
military balance. Americans, says Cropsey,
must make the conscious political choice
anew for sea power.
I
t’s difficult to fault Cropsey’s general
conclusions. American sea power does
face perilous times—times that warrant
soul-searching on the part of officialdom
and rank-and-file citizens. Still, it is possible to take issue with the route by which
72 The National Interest
he reaches his conclusions. I offer here a
few thoughts designed not to contradict his
overarching thesis but rather to enrich the
debate over America’s nautical destiny.
For one thing, the author presents a
rather static, all-or-nothing view of the
strategic setting. On several occasions he
makes the doubtful claim that maritime
decline is irrevocable. Indeed, he opens
his treatise by proclaiming, “No state
that has allowed its seapower to decline
has succeeded at recovering it.” Really?
Cropsey himself acknowledges that the
downfall of classical Athens, recounted by
Xenophon, lasted only a minute against
the sweep of history. After crushing the
vaunted Athenian navy at Aegospotami,
Spartan commanders ordered that navy
dismantled. Athens was permitted to
maintain a minuscule twelve-ship flotilla.
The long walls that had enclosed the city
and its seaport were pulled down, rendering
Athens vulnerable to overland assault.
Within scant decades, the Athenians
refurbished their democracy, restored the
long walls, constructed a new navy and
assembled a new maritime league. They
repaired all of the lineaments of sea power.
True, the quarrelsome Greek city-states
subsequently fell under Persian domination,
and Athens ultimately ran into a buzz saw
named Alexander the Great. That may
testify to poor Athenian diplomacy and
strategy, but it says little about the resilience
of seagoing peoples.
Sea power, then, is not as perishable
as Mayday maintains. Other examples of
resilience come from American and British
history, as ably retold by Mahan himself. A
Reviews & Essays
central theme of his Influence of Sea Power
series is that British governments let the
Royal Navy slip following the smashing
victory over France in 1763. The 1781
battle of the Virginia Capes, when the
Comte de Grasse’s fleet fought the British
to a standstill—and thereby sealed off Lord
Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown, allowing
George Washington to prevail—marked
a nadir of British naval prowess. But the
Royal Navy bounced back within a year,
crushing de Grasse’s fleet at the battle of
the Saintes, far to the south in the West
Indies. British naval might remained on the
upswing through the French Revolutionary
and Napoleonic wars, when British
mariners won the laurels Cropsey rightly
acclaims.
Similar tales can be found in U.S.
maritime history. Neglect of the U.S. Navy
was commonplace in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, despite spasms
of popular and elite enthusiasm for naval
preparedness. During the Civil War, the
Union Navy briefly stood at the forefront
of technological innovation while boasting
impressive numbers. But after the war, the
U.S. Navy atrophied. Mahan, a veteran
of Civil War blockade duty, wrote in his
memoir, From Sail to Steam, that the service
endured an interval of “dead apathy.” The
fleet shriveled to about fifty creaky, largely
obsolete wooden men-of-war by the late
1870s, inferior even to minor forces such as
the Chilean Navy.
Congress inaugurated a naval renaissance
in the 1880s, when it ordered the keels
laid for the U.S. Navy’s first steel-hulled,
steam-propelled battle fleet. The navy
Reviews & Essays
destroyed two Spanish fleets in 1898,
wresting an island empire from that hapless
power. Americans accepted a second-rank
navy during the prelude to World War
I. Only with the 1916 Naval Expansion
Act did Congress and President Woodrow
Wilson lead the Republic into its quest for
a navy “second to none.” Even then, the
sea services sank into another interlude of
decline during the interwar years. The navy
failed to build even to treaty limits until the
late 1930s. Sea powers go through ups and
downs, and they can restore their fortunes
through determined effort.
Similarly, the Japan Maritime SelfDefense Force rose from the wreckage of
the Imperial Japanese Navy within scant
years after World War II. The Soviet Navy
that mounted such a stiff challenge to
the West in the 1970s and 1980s was a
descendant of the Russian Pacific and Baltic
fleets whose remains lay strewn across the
bottom of the Yellow Sea and Tsushima
Strait following the Russo-Japanese War
of 1904–1905. Sea power can be rebuilt
even if it slips owing to enemy action,
slipshod decision making, economic
malaise or other maladies that work against
naval preparedness. Let’s not succumb to
determinism.
I
n addition, no commitment or theater
appears secondary or expendable for
Cropsey. No foreign power seems capable
of helping balance a hegemon or keeping
order in its environs. No alliance or coalition is worthy of joint stewardship over all
or part of the system of global trade and
commerce. He discounts the capacity of any
May/June 2013 73
entente to balance China, for instance, and
brands a combined fleet “as politically unimaginable as it is tactically unmanageable.”
A power vacuum would be the “certain
outcome” if Washington were to “vacate or
substantially abbreviate its global maritime
duties.” Even drawing down U.S. participation in the modest counterpiracy operation
in the Gulf of Aden would have an “immediate” and “shattering” effect on the global
economy, not to mention “longer-term negative effects on the region—and the world.”
Grim stuff.
Cropsey is hardly alone in his reluctance
to shed old or secondary commitments
while concentrating policy energy and
military resources on the most vital ones.
Great powers appear to face a ratchet effect.
The 2007 U.S. maritime strategy, for
instance, purports to focus on the western
Pacific and greater Indian Ocean. Yet its
framers also declare that the sea services will
maintain their capacity to seize command
of any navigable expanse on the face of
the globe—unilaterally if need be. The
Obama administration’s pivot to Asia has
encountered fierce pushback from “Europe
first” advocates, who insist on retaining a
strong Atlantic naval presence for—well, for
some reason.
Cropsey’s logic is unassailable if you
accept his premises. If the United States
refuses to disentangle itself from any theater
or contingency, if its military resources keep
dwindling and if it cannot entrust part of
the load to others, then it will spread itself
thin trying to uphold its interests. Forces
that try to do everything, everywhere,
end up accomplishing little, anywhere.
74 The National Interest
Commanders and political officials on every
scene will clamor in vain for more ships
and planes. Top leaders will find themselves
compelled to shift resources around in an
effort to accomplish the same expansive
goals with less.
But is there really no alternative to
U.S. marine hegemony, in the same form
we have seen it in since 1945? It’s worth
looking back, and ahead, to get some
purchase on this question. Looking back,
we see that before the Two-Ocean Navy
Act of 1940, when Congress ordered
construction of a Pacific navy, few could
imagine that the U.S. sea services could
manage all of the earth’s seas. Mahan
saw the U.S. Navy mainly as a force of
the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico,
shooing hostile—probably German—fleets
away from sea-lanes leading to the Panama
Canal, and thence to the Far East. Along
with kindred naval enthusiasts such as tr,
Reviews & Essays
he fretted over the prospect of European
naval stations athwart southern sea lines of
communication.
Mahan’s vision, then, was one of regional
preponderance, not global supremacy.
America need not rule the waves—or not all
of them, anyway—to make itself a seafaring
power of consequence.
Naval officials of Mahan’s day argued
ceaselessly about where to position the fleet
to manage risk. How could they apportion
assets in peacetime to enable the fleet
to combine quickly for wartime action?
To what degree could detachments be
dispersed between the Atlantic and Pacific,
and between the eastern Pacific and Asiatic
stations? For example, shortly after the
outbreak of World War I in 1914, Mahan
exchanged notes with former president
Theodore Roosevelt and Assistant Secretary
of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt on where
to station the battle fleet. They decided
it should remain concentrated, and thus
superior to any single foe. Moreover, it
should drop anchor in Pacific waters, lest
Imperial Japan make mischief as European
navies evacuated the Far East to prosecute
the European war. Should the unexpected
occur, the U.S. East Coast would have
to take its chances until the fleet could
reposition itself.
This more fatalistic and realistic attitude
toward risk is worth rediscovering in today’s
strategic debates. U.S. leaders should learn
to say no to new commitments while
divesting themselves of legacy obligations.
Looking forward, it can be seen that
these are challenging times for good order
at sea. Cropsey rightly maintains that a
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single trustee has overseen the nautical
order since Great Britain rose to world
power in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, supplanting the Spanish,
Portuguese and Dutch. As Walter Russell
Mead documents in his book God and
Gold, Britain in effect passed the torch to
the United States sometime in the early
twentieth century. The “weary Titan,” in
Joseph Chamberlain’s memorable phrase,
had exhausted itself in a naval arms race
against Germany and in the two world wars
that followed. Cropsey also notes that there
is no successor-in-waiting to supplant the
United States. Over time, China may amass
the capacity to manage the system. Thus
far, however, Chinese leaders have evinced
little appetite for policing the briny main
beyond Asia. Furthermore, Beijing scarcely
shares the liberal vision of a Washington or
London, predicated on freedom of the seas.
Whether anyone would want to live in a
world dominated by the People’s Liberation
Army Navy, rather than the U.S. Navy, is a
question worth pondering.
Still, alternative models of custodianship
over the commons could emerge. The
choice need not be between a single
world-straddling hegemon and a war of
all against all on the high seas. Why not
experiment with a multinational guarantor
of maritime security, or with a patchwork
of regional alliances and partnerships—an
idea countenanced by the 2007 maritime
strategy? Fashioning such arrangements
would doubtless be messier, and certainly
less uniform, than superintending a Pax
Americana. Coalition politics are like that.
But it behooves pundits and practitioners
May/June 2013 75
of sea power to think ahead to a world
where the United States remains first
among equals—where it encourages local
powers to shoulder constabulary duty in
their neighborhoods while consolidating
its own effort and assets where compelling
political and strategic interests lie. Judging
from official statements of purpose, that
means East and South Asia.
C
lassic works offer strategists ample
insights into the future. Although
Cropsey puts Mahan’s face on his case for
shoring up the sea services, his reading of
Mahan is partial and fails to engage with
much of Mahan’s corpus. For example,
he writes, “If Mahan’s history had continued beyond the Treaty of Paris in 1783, he
might have illustrated his explanation of
naval power’s silent influence by pointing
to England’s success following the Battle of
Trafalgar in 1805,” when a close blockade
applied stifling pressure on French seaports
and shipping. In fact, Mahan continued
his series with a two-volume account of
The Influence of Sea Power upon the French
Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812, and a
two-volume chronicle of Sea Power in Its
Relations to the War of 1812.
That five-volume cycle brings the
story up to 1815, even leaving aside his
commentaries on later conflicts such as the
Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the
Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War. The
bibliography of his works is itself a book.
In his tale of the Napoleonic wars, Mahan
waxed lyrical about the “far distant, stormbeaten ships, upon which [Napoleon’s]
Grand Army never looked.” These ships
76 The National Interest
purportedly stood between France and “the
dominion of the world.” From his pen also
issued a glowing two-volume biography of
Lord Nelson, the victor of Trafalgar. Mahan
styled Nelson “the embodiment of the sea
power of Great Britain.”
Other theorists besides Mahan can help
illuminate possible future strategies. His
contemporary and occasional foil Sir Julian
Corbett is eminently worth consulting
to complete the picture. Whereas the
American theorist writes about “overbearing
power” wrested from rival navies, the
Briton notes that an “uncommanded sea”
is the norm. The oceans are too big, the
biggest navy too small, to exert absolute
sea command. Mahan urges battle on the
high seas. Corbett observes that since men
live on land, wars are settled there. For him,
the art of maritime strategy is figuring out
how to use navies in concert with armies to
shape events ashore. Mahan concentrates
on capital ships. Corbett gives capital ships
their due while inquiring into how lesser
craft exercise control of the sea once it’s in
hand. Continental theories of sea power
also may be worth exploring in this hightech age, when the seaward reach of landbased combat aircraft, antiship cruise and
ballistic missiles, and other weaponry can
empower coastal states to influence events
off their coasts without ever putting battle
fleets to sea. Sea power is not just about
navies. Increasingly, it is accessible to land
powers. In any event, a fuller reading of
maritime theory would help the United
States mold its seaborne future.
It’s also important to establish appropriate
benchmarks for fleet size. During the
Reviews & Essays
Cropsey’s logic is unassailable if you accept his premises.
But is there really no alternative to U.S. marine
hegemony, in the same form we have seen it in since 1945?
2012 presidential campaign, Republican
candidate Mitt Romney noted that the
U.S. Navy is now the smallest it has been
since 1917. True. And Cropsey draws that
comparison as well. But how significant is
the World War I tally? Numbers do matter,
no doubt. But today’s threat environment,
not that of some bygone age, is the proper
yardstick for sizing the fleet. The navy may
need more assets than it possessed during
the Wilson administration if it hopes to
ride out an increasingly stressful “antiaccess”
setting and keep punching. I suspect that is
the case. Nonetheless, the 1917 figure tells
observers little, one way or the other.
During the same campaign, the Barack
Obama camp emphasized that the U.S.
Navy is bigger than the next thirteen
fleets combined. But the reference was
to aggregate tonnage—not firepower or
any other meaningful measure of battle
performance. Like raw numbers, tonnage
matters. But it isn’t everything. Myriad
factors determine how much it matters,
just as many factors determine how many
hulls is enough to accomplish operational
and strategic goals. Unless, that is, you
consider the 157,000-ton container ship
Emma Maersk more powerful than the
supercarrier uss George H. W. Bush. After
all, the mammoth merchantman displaces
one and a half times as much as the nuclearpowered flattop.
T
he chief strength of Mayday falls in its
final two chapters, where the author
mulls over future force structures. This is
the ground where he seemingly feels most
comfortable. Earlier on, Cropsey insists that
Reviews & Essays
strategy, not budgets, must determine the
size and shape of the sea services. His position is both understandable and theoretically sound. It is also, alas, unrealistic. Policy
makers and politicians have the final say
in strategic decisions, and dollars and cents
often dominate their deliberations. A fit of
legislative absentmindedness could carry
grave repercussions. That is the American
way.
Nevertheless, the author explores several
less expensive, ostensibly more battleworthy
configurations for the U.S. Navy. He pays
special heed to a 2009 Naval Postgraduate
School report titled “The New Navy
Fighting Machine.” The monograph was
compiled by a team headed by one of my
heroes, retired captain Wayne Hughes,
who literally wrote the book on Fleet
Tactics and Coastal Combat. The Hughes
report recommends boosting fleet numbers
by introducing smaller, more numerous,
less expensive platforms that still pack a
wallop. One example among many: the
team suggests gradually scaling back the
number of big-deck aircraft carriers from
the current eleven to six or eight. It would
use the savings to construct eighteen smaller
carriers. Such moves would expand the U.S.
Navy’s geographic coverage, diversify its
combat power and reduce the consequences
of losing any individual ship.
Cropsey appears much taken with such
ideas, and justifiably so. Mayday offers
an excellent starting point for thinking
through the vexing challenges before the
United States and its maritime services—
challenges that will confront the nation for
a long time to come. n
May/June 2013 77
Lifting the Veil
on North Korea
By Bruce Cumings
Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life
and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia
(New York: Oxford University Press), 304
pp., $27.95.
N
orth Korea is routinely described
a s u n k n ow a b l e — “t h e m o s t
opaque country in the world,” according to William Keylor, a professor of
international relations at Boston University. Not so for Andrei Lankov, whose new
book, The Real North Korea, arrives just in
time to inform our ignorance. Lankov, a
history professor at Kookmin University in
Seoul, South Korea, offers a highly readable
book and a unique perspective that yields
a knowledgeable, sardonic, acerbic and not
entirely dispassionate view of North Korea.
(In the interest of disclosure, I blurbed the
book.) Lankov grew up in Leningrad’s last
days, before it emerged again as St. Petersburg; thus, a fortiori, he lived through the
collapse of the Soviet Union. (As a young
exchange student in Pyongyang in the
1980s, he became fluent in Korean. While
this might seem to be a commonplace reBruce Cumings is the chairman of the History
Department at the University of Chicago and the
author of Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History
(W. W. Norton, 2005).
78 The National Interest
quirement, most of the American experts
and pundits parading in our media do not
know the language, and Kathleen Stephens,
who served from 2008 to 2011 as the U.S.
ambassador to Seoul, was the first and so far
only ambassador there who was fluent in
Korean.) Lankov therefore casts a knowing
gaze on a country bending toward the same
fate, in his opinion, as the Soviet regime he
grew up in. But, as he avers, North Korea
remains insistent on staving off this rendezvous with history.
We get fresh air on the very first page:
“North Korea is not irrational, and nothing
shows this better than its continuing
survival against all odds.” The North’s
alleged “irrational and erratic” behavior
is carefully calibrated; its leaders “know
perfectly well what they are doing.”
Lankov even calls them “perhaps the best
practitioners of Machiavellian politics that
can be found in the modern world.” That
might take things a jot too far. Joseph
Stalin was of this same modern world, as
were Cesar Chavez, Richard Nixon and
Machiavelli’s irrepressible countryman,
Silvio Berlusconi (whose unflagging
buffoonery rivals Kim Jong-un’s). But
Lankov’s point is well taken: the North
emits bluster, brinkmanship and, from time
to time, measured violence, but its leaders
“have known where to stop.”
The author also dishes up a rare treat,
mostly unfound in books of this genre:
common sense and humility about the
North’s future, a theme from beginning to
end. Those looking for “silver bullets or
magic potions” to solve the North Korean
problem will not find them. And those who
Reviews & Essays
hope for the quick demise of “the plum and
jolly looking young new Kim” might also
reckon with his youth: if he lives to eightytwo as his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, did,
he will still be around in 2065 (or 2066;
experts assume he was born in 1983 but,
alas, they don’t really know). Instead of
clear-cut policy recommendations, by the
end of the book Lankov offers up a number
of melancholy and unsettling scenarios for
the future—suggestions we will come to in
due course.
Lankov is very good on the ubiquitous,
top-to-bottom surveillance state created
in the Democratic People’s Republic
of Korea (dprk); he calls it the world’s
“closest approximation to an Orwellian
nightmare.” Neighbors watch neighbors;
innkeepers report every guest to the police;
travel permits are required to move any
distance within the country; and exit from
the country is of course entirely prohibited
without state permission. Lankov is a bit
taken aback at the draconian reach of this
system, noting that in Stalin’s time Soviet
citizens could travel freely between city and
countryside, even if changing domiciles
required permission. A droll and mordant
humor colors this section of the book, as
Lankov, a former Soviet citizen, dwells on
the ubiquitous neighborhood inminban
Reviews & Essays
(people’s group or unit) and tacitly
imagines himself living under such heavy
restrictions. But he does not tell the reader
that these local organizations were, in the
first instance, agencies of Japanese wartime
control, that similar organizations and
practices persisted in South Korea into the
1980s, that the North’s widespread norm
of everyone surveilling everyone else was
in place by 1946, and that a similar system
emerged in China.
The author’s opprobrium also descends
on the way in which family background
exercises a lasting effect on individual
life chances in the North, with everyone
categorized into one slot or another, and
the families of police or military officers
who served the Japanese bringing up the
rear. Thus, the entire society is organized
around the citizens’ songbun, or family
status, or at least this was the case until
the late 1990s, when Kim Jong-il relaxed
the practice. Lankov characterizes this as a
caste-like system, but he does not remark
on the caste-like system that marked
premodern Korea. For half a millennium
there, a few hundred aristocratic families
monopolized not just the land and wealth
but also the civil-service exams, which
offered scant upward mobility. This is
in contrast to neighboring China, where
May/June 2013 79
The Korean People’s Army—not the Worker’s Party—was
always the real basis of the Kim family’s power.
similar exams fostered at least a limited
extent of upward mobility. Nor does he let
the reader know that in South Korea, tens
of thousands of families (and thus millions
of South Koreans) were blacklisted because
they were deemed to be from leftist, proNorth or antiregime families. That changed
only after the militarists were overthrown in
the late 1980s. Of course, the dprk’s system
is much worse and ongoing—and much less
susceptible to resistance and dissent than
was the South’s dictatorship. Lankov reports
a chilling detail that I was unaware of: the
confiscation and destruction of privately
held foreign books in the late 1960s, most
of them being Japanese and . . . Soviet.
This atrocity coincided with the full
emergence of the two Kims and their
nativist ideology. They ruled over a
Communist country where even Pravda and
China’s People’s Daily were unavailable. Back
in the 1970s, I got a small grant from the
New York–based Social Science Research
Council to study the dprk’s social sciences.
It took only a few days in the Library of
Congress to realize that there were none;
the newly created Social Sciences Institute
did put out a journal, but it was nothing
but a mouthpiece for limitless mastication
on “the great Juche idea,” the political
thesis put forth by Kim Il-sung as the
foundational philosophy of his regime.
Soon nearly every trace of MarxismLeninism (not to mention Stalinism) was
subordinated to the reigning regime maxim
that Kim Il-sung originated the dprk and
just about everything else—in Lankov’s
words, he became “the greatest human
being to ever live.”
80 The National Interest
Lankov rightly notes that open state
terror is not so important in the North
because so much preventive work has
already been done, beginning with the two
male faces first seen by the country’s babies:
Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. This may be
why the author does not dwell much on
the prison camps that get so much foreign
attention. Perhaps he sees the country
itself as one big prison. But he also probes
unexpected anomalies—for instance, when
high officials are sent off to the camps with
their families and then reemerge years or
decades later in high positions. He briefly
discusses the most famous product of these
camps, Kang Chol-hwan, whose book
The Aquariums of Pyongyang brought him
much attention and an Oval Office visit
with George W. Bush. But Lankov doesn’t
mention that this same person somehow
got into the most prestigious school in the
country (Kim Il-sung University, of course),
after spending ten years of his youth in the
camp.
T
he book’s most affecting pages reveal
a paradox that foreigners sense almost
immediately but really have no way of explaining: “I could not help but find it remarkable,” Lankov writes of his years as a
student in Pyongyang, “how ‘normal’ the
daily lives usually were.” People were neither “brainwashed automatons” nor “docile slaves,” but fully realized human beings
who were, as often as not, warm and goodhearted people. Their concerns were similar
to those of the rest of us: falling in love,
family, children’s educations, job promotions. “They enjoyed romance, good food,
Reviews & Essays
and good books, and didn’t mind a glass
of liquor.” They also cared about health
care, infant mortality and life expectancy.
Mostly free national systems provided basic
human services, which until the famine
years put North Korea in the ranks of developed nations (life expectancy was seventytwo before the famine of the 1990s; now it
is sixty-nine). Even today, child mortality is
“remarkably lower than in many developing
countries of a comparative economic level,”
Lankov writes. Schoolchildren’s skills in
basic literacy and numeracy are also at comparatively advanced levels. Moreover, in the
past decade gdp growth has averaged 1.4
percent a year (not robust but steady), and
even a shimmer of affluence is now noticeable in the capital.
Lankov asserts that the dprk may
be “one of the most idiosyncratic places
in the entire world,” but unfortunately he
doesn’t seem to appreciate fully the various
idiosyncrasies of the regime, and he doesn’t
spell them out with any completeness.
Thus, he relegates the reigning ideology
of this regime, the ever-trumpeted “Juche
Idea,” to one sentence, saying that the best
translation is not self-reliance, but “selfimportance” or “self-significance.” In
fact, this ideology bears traces of native
neo-Confucian doctrine, particularly in
its rejection of materialism in favor of a
metaphysical idealism (it is more Hegelian
than Marxist). As Cornell University scholar
Victor Koschmann has shown, the discourse
of “subjectivity” (shutaisei in Japanese,
chuch’esong in Korean) has been a dominant
concern of Japanese intellectuals throughout
the postwar period as they have sought
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to understand how their country might
be (or remain) modern and still reflect a
unique Japanese essence. As to the words
that do translate as self-reliance (charyok
kaengsaeng), Lankov dismisses that ideology
as a pale knockoff of Maoist doctrine; in
fact, the Japanese deployed this term during
the militarist period of the 1930s, when
American embargoes forced them to fend
for themselves. Its literal translation is
“regeneration through one’s own efforts,”
and I have seen it mostly in the Korean
countryside, not in Pyongyang. But the
nuance is the same: fend for yourselves, and
don’t expect investment from the center.
North Korea approached its chuch’e-based
idiosyncrasy, Lankov suggests, only after
a period of outright Soviet dominance,
where barely a word was uttered, barely a
thing moved, without Soviet authorization.
If Kim Il-sung first used the term chuch’e
in 1955, it did not emerge full-blown as
the raison d’être of the regime until the
1960s. Lankov is correct in this. But when
Soviet troops were on the ground in the
late 1940s, Kim used many nationalist
synonyms to convey such sentiments as
self-reliance, an independent economy and
defense, and Koreans pulling themselves
up by their own bootstraps. The Korean
People’s Army—not the Worker’s Party—
was always the real basis of the Kim family’s
power (here is the biggest idiosyncrasy: this
is the most fully realized garrison state in
the world). At this army’s inauguration in
February 1948, thousands of its soldiers
goose-stepped past a podium where only
Korean officers stood, bereft of Soviet
officials. Meanwhile, highly secret North
May/June 2013 81
Korean documents show that among
hundreds of officers in the fledgling army,
two-thirds had fought with the Chinese
Communists either as guerrillas or in the
ongoing Chinese civil war, imprinting
Maoist concepts of people’s war into their
consciousness.
In that same year, Kim’s favored
ideologues smuggled Maoist doctrine in
through the front door in the party’s lead
journal, going so far as to plagiarize Mao’s
famous “mass line” doctrine and putting
the words in Kim’s mouth instead. From its
start in 1946, the Worker’s Party was not
the representative of a class (vanguard of the
proletariat), but a “mass party” enrolling a
huge percentage of the adult population.
Nor was the land reform in 1946 another
example of Soviet “people’s democracy”
directives, as Lankov claims. Rather, it
drew upon ancient Korean regeneration
palliatives going back to “practical learning”
scholars of the seventeenth century and
upon contemporary land-redistribution
strategies in nearby Manchuria, by then
under Chinese Communist control. It was
a land-to-the-tillers strategy that, compared
to the bloody Soviet or Chinese experience,
was relatively nonviolent. Landlords who
were actually willing to work the land as
farmers were given small plots outside their
home county, thus breaking their age-old
local power and, well, giving them a break.
Most of them, however, ran off to the
South.
I
mention these examples because they
reflect a flaw in this book—namely, a
consistent tendency to interpret dprk his-
82 The National Interest
tory in the light of the Soviet experience
and especially its demise. This is unsurprising: Andrei Lankov is part of a generation
that lived through an utterly unexpected
rupture, perhaps the most singular unanticipated grand event of the last century. Harking back to the abject collapse of a global
superpower, Lankov foresees a dprk death
rattle. He does not know when it will come
but thinks it inevitable and most likely to
happen—you guessed it—utterly unexpectedly. In the wake of the demise of Western
Communism (save Cuba), Lankov cannot
imagine how this regime can sustain itself
and particularly how it can revive its economy. Such socialist economies are ipso facto
inefficient, he argues, and thus doomed to
fail. North Korea’s only way out is to mimic
Chinese economic reforms. But that too
will mean the end of this regime because
it cannot stand the fresh brush with reality
that would inevitably come with a genuine
opening to the world.
Lankov shares another similarity with
most Russian scholars and those who base
their interpretations on Soviet documents.
Like them, he inflates Soviet control over
the direction of Korean affairs. (This is the
opposite of the outlook of most Americans,
who view themselves as innocent bystanders
during post-1945 Korean history, save for
the war years in the early 1950s.) It is a
historical fact that Soviet troops left North
Korea at the end of 1948, never to return.
This contrasts sharply with the Soviets’
practice in Eastern Europe; 365,000 Soviet
troops were garrisoned in East Germany,
for example, when the Berlin Wall fell.
Stalin, who famously dismissed the pope’s
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significance by asking how many divisions
he had, never thought he could control
satellites without troops on the ground.
After the Soviet troops left Korea, Kim and
his allies promptly proclaimed their state
to be the inheritor of the anti-Japanese
guerrilla tradition, not that of the ussr. In
1949, on the first anniversary of the North
Korean army’s founding, Kim’s retinue went
so far as to give him the moniker suryong,
an ancient Korean term translated as “great
leader.” This title, up until that point, had
been reserved for Stalin. This was utter
heresy in the Communist world of the time,
but it remained Kim’s title until his death in
1994.
Strong evidence of this remarkably
swift Koreanization is hidden away in the
one concrete thing that General Douglas
MacArthur carried back with him from
his disastrous run-up to the Yalu River
in 1950: thousands of archival boxes of
secret North Korean materials, otherwise
known as Record Group 242, “Captured
Enemy Documents.” They reside in the
U.S. National Archives, where they were
declassified in 1977. Lankov does not
appear to have used these materials, which
accounts for some of his misinterpretations.
Nor does Lankov seem to grasp the
salience of the new history pouring out
of South Korea from numerous scholars
since it democratized twenty years ago.
He is quick to dismiss this history as the
product of starry-eyed leftism or puerile
anti-Americanism—and to chide these
scholars for not using Soviet documents.
Thus, the author makes much of Kim
Il-sung’s membership in the Chinese
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Communist Party during his guerrilla
days as “a junior officer in the essentially
Chinese guerrilla force.” Here he seems to
draw upon forty-year-old scholarship by
Chong-sik Lee and Dae-sook Suh (both
now retired from teaching at American
universities). But South Korean scholar Han
Hong-gu showed in his 1999 dissertation
that upwards of 80–90 percent of what was
officially the “Chinese Communist Party”
and the guerrilla units in Manchuria were
Koreans; that Chinese Communists arrested
and nearly executed Kim (while the Japanese
murdered his first wife, scholars believe);
and that his sojourn in a Soviet-Chinese
training camp along the two countries’
border near Khabarovsk in the last few
years of World War II was far less influential
on Kim and his subsequent regime than
his decade-long anti-Japanese resistance.
In slighting this history, Lankov chooses
instead to focus on the Soviets’ tutelage of
Kim and their subsequent puppetry.
May/June 2013 83
The North would lose a war with the United States and the
South. But any victory for America and South Korea would
unleash overwhelming and probably insoluble challenges.
It may strike readers as odd, but Soviet
and Chinese Communist leaders who
knew Kim Il-sung well could be just as
bone-headed and ham-handed in their
dealings with him as were American
leaders trying to rid themselves of former
allies such as dictators Ngo Dinh Diem,
Rafael Trujillo or even South Korea’s first
president, Syngman Rhee (against whom
the United States considered fostering
coups at least twice, in 1950 and 1953).
Moscow and Beijing knew so little about
Kim and his close associates—and so little
did they understand their deep base in
the dprk’s huge land army—that the two
supposedly allied capitals conspired with
weak pro-Chinese and Soviet internal
factions to overthrow Kim in 1956.
Lankov downplays the external impetus
for this failed gambit and seems to miss the
historical reality that from 1945 onward
there were no formidable rivals to Kim’s
guerrilla group because it controlled the
guns.
L
ankov notes correctly that Kim came
out of the Korean War much strengthened in his leading position, but this war—
so crucial for understanding Korean affairs then or today—gets little attention in
the book. Koreans are portrayed decrying
“American imperialist wolves,” but we get
only a sentence on the three-year American
incendiary-bombing campaign that razed
every North Korean city and, according
to U.S. Air Force statistics, was proportionally more effective at city busting than
the World War II assaults on German and
Japanese urban centers. One in four North
84 The National Interest
Koreans died during the war, 70 percent of
them civilians (compared to 40 percent in
Vietnam). One of my guides on my first trip
to the country, as companionable as anyone
I met there, told me he had lost his brother
to the American bombing. One wonders if
Americans would forget, a couple generations later, having Washington or New York
or Chicago reduced by 75 or 80 percent. Yet
most Americans are blithely unaware of the
real history of this “forgotten war.”
But not so the generals. Senior officers
on all sides are still fighting that war.
American war plans still say we would need
half a million American forces in Korea to
defeat an invading North—which is how
many we had there in the fall of 1950,
when we decided to march north of the
thirty-eighth parallel. In 2006, Diane
Sawyer of abc News journeyed to North
Korea and interviewed General Yi Chanbok, who commands the demilitarized
zone on the northern side. She asked how
long he had been there. “Forty years,” he
replied. She seemed amazed. General Yi
has been getting up every morning to riffle
through the enemy’s order of battle since
the year Lyndon Johnson ordered the U.S.
buildup in Vietnam to 550,000 troops.
Literally millions of Americans have served
in Korea and know the quotidian tension
that hovers like a plague over the middle of
the peninsula, yet so much of the writing
about North Korea elides the American part
of the equation. It’s as if the Americans were
merely innocent bystanders.
Lankov’s account of the state system’s
collapse in the early 1990s and the
subsequent famine is cogent and accurate.
Reviews & Essays
Being forced to pay world market prices for
oil cascaded North Korea into industrial
decline and agricultural catastrophe, given
how much chemical fertilizer it had been
ladling on the fields. The author also is
correct in estimating the dead from this
crisis at five hundred thousand (deduced
t h r o u g h t h e c a re f u l d e m o g r a p h i c
scholarship of Daniel Goodkind and
Loraine West), rather than the two million
routinely tossed out in the U.S. media.
In portraying the contemporary standoff
between the two Koreas, Lankov is
thorough and accurate. He knows there is
no military solution to the North Korean
problem. The North would lose a war
with the United States and the South. But
any victory for America and South Korea
would unleash overwhelming and probably
insoluble challenges, including the
daunting need to occupy the mountainous
North, fending off the three to four
hundred thousand crack troops in the
dprk special forces and guerrilla units, and
actually governing. This last challenge, in
turn, would generate cascading problems.
For one, the South sees the North not as
a country but as an antinational entity,
its laws and practices null and void since
1945. Since then, it has maintained shadow
provincial governments. (I remember
attending a wedding in Seoul in 1968,
and being introduced to the South Korean
“governor” of North Hamgyong Province,
which is in North Korea.) For another,
the former landed gentry—an aristocratic
elite that monopolized land throughout the
five-hundred-year Choson dynasty (1392–
1910) and subsequent Japanese colonial
Reviews & Essays
rule—regrouped in the South before and
during the Korean War. Families still
maintain land registers from their estates
in the North. They would want to enforce
them after unification, as other exiles have
done in post-1989 Eastern Europe. Lankov
argues strongly for retaining the land as
it is in the North or perhaps selling it off
to the farmers who work the cooperative
farms, lest land squabbles unleash bloody
internal strife. Finally, the Pyongyang
elite fears the consequences of defeat: not
just oblivion for their families and their
histories—a terrible fate in a country with
long genealogical memories—but trials and
even executions.
Instead, Lankov urges engagement with
the North and applauds the many gains
that came when two successive South
Korean presidents (Kim Dae-jung and Roh
Moo-hyun) pursued—with North Korean
counterpart Kim Jong-il—a decade-long
“sunshine policy.” The name itself was
unfortunate, for it suggested a kind of
softheaded engagement with an “axis of
evil” power in the vein of perhaps a Jimmy
Carter. And the concept couldn’t survive
a five-year hard-line drumbeat against it
from South Korea’s subsequent president,
Lee Myung-bak. But Lankov shows that
it worked, with years of “truly astonishing
increase[s] in inter-Korean exchanges.”
Its biggest legacy is the massive Kaesong
industrial zone, where more than fifty
thousand North Koreans work for a
multitude of South Korean and foreign
firms. That is the last surviving artifact
of that brief period of North-South
reconciliation.
May/June 2013 85
L
ankov ends his book with a thoughtful
and provocative rumination on what
the future holds for the North and for the
world it lives in. It is a pipe dream, he argues, to expect the dprk to give up the plutonium and missiles that it appeared to
forgo in two separate negotiations with the
United States: first, the 1994 agreement
that froze its plutonium facilities for eight
years, and second, the agreement that Kim
Jong-il and Bill Clinton were ready to sign
in December 2000 to mothball the missiles (a formulation that George W. Bush
quickly walked away from). The reason can
be summed up in some important recent
history. The North, writes Lankov, finds it
difficult to deal with a country that agrees
on a joint communiqué stating that neither
party “would have hostile intent toward
the other,” as both nations did in October 2000, and then places its partner in an
86 The National Interest
“axis of evil” and threatens it with preemptive attack. A Democrat such as President
Obama might have been able to go back
to the status quo ante and rejuvenate these
agreements, but the invasion of Iraq and
the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar
el-Qaddafi have rendered that all but impossible. As Pyongyang views recent events,
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein got inspected, gave
up his weapons of mass destruction and
then was invaded. Qaddafi did likewise, was
overthrown by an internal revolt supported
by a multinational intervention and then
was cruelly murdered. The North Koreans,
looking at this history with a cogent logic,
have resolved that this
isn’t going to happen to
them.
Nor is there much
chance that sanctions
w i l l c h a n g e No r t h
Korean behavior in
the future any more
than they have in the
past. And there is little
utility in Washington’s
persistent belief that
China should do the
right thing and rein in
the Nor th Koreans.
If China coddles and
cajoles Pyongyang
into good behavior, it
faces inevitable North Korean extortion;
if it hammers North Korea to end the
current regime, it will face a flood of
refugees into China, while South Koreans
and Americans once again position troops
at the Yalu River (this time for good).
Reviews & Essays
Americans kid themselves into believing
that capitalist China is no longer run by
hardened Communists. This idea ought to
have been dispelled when former president
Hu Jintao gave a secret speech lauding the
dprk’s political system (while excoriating
its economic pratfalls) or when the newly
ensconced president Xi Jinping also gave
a secret speech praising the early Mao
period, and demanding a return to strict
Leninism. Xi asked, “Why did the Soviet
Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet
Communist Party collapse? An important
reason was that their ideals and convictions
wavered.” That was exactly what Kim Jongil said throughout the 1990s: by giving up
on ideological indoctrination, the Soviets
prepared their deathbed.
Washington and Seoul have no choice
but to talk to the North Koreans, Lankov
writes, and try to get what they can. He
suggests this most likely would work
along the lines of former Los Alamos head
Siegfried Hecker’s suggestion that the
current programs be capped through the
“three no’s”—no more nukes, no better
nukes and no proliferation. Given the
North’s labyrinthine underground facilities,
we will never locate every bomb anyway,
and a small handful of nukes will provide
security and deterrence for the leadership
but be otherwise useless.
All people-to-people foreign exchanges
should be pursued, Lankov argues, because
they truly do influence those North
Koreans lucky enough to participate—
just as they did Soviet citizens from the
1950s onward. He also advocates efforts
to use technology and social media to
Reviews & Essays
penetrate the population, not in efforts to
overthrow the regime (a hopeless endeavor,
he thinks), but to work toward a longterm future where the regime will be
undermined from within. This will only
happen after a prolonged period of NorthSouth reconciliation, perhaps even through
a confederal scheme whereby North Korean
elites would retain their autonomy for some
time. Here we become aware of our losses,
because Lankov resuscitates ideas that
former South Korean president Kim Daejung first voiced in his inaugural address in
February 1998.
I was amazed on that warm and sunny
day when I attended that inauguration
(a good day for a “sunshine policy”) as
President Kim mounted the podium and
completely transformed South Korea’s
strategy toward the North. He pledged
to “actively pursue reconciliation and
cooperation” with the dprk, seek peaceful
coexistence, and support Pyongyang’s
attempts to improve its relations with
Washington and Tokyo—in complete
contrast with his predecessors, who
feared any hint of such rapprochement.
Kim explicitly rejected “unification by
absorption” (which was the de facto
policy of his predecessors), and in effect
committed Seoul to a prolonged period of
peaceful coexistence, with reunification put
off for twenty or thirty more years. The
key to a workable future, for Lankov and
President Kim, is to let Koreans handle it.
As Lankov puts it in contemplating the
dprk, “What can the outside world do?
Frankly, not all that much.” Let’s call that
hard-won wisdom. n
May/June 2013 87
The Many Faces
of Neo-Marxism
By Walter Laqueur
W
e are told these days that Karl
Marx—one of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth
century, if not the single most important
one—is enjoying a kind of renaissance. This
is attributed by some to the great economic
crisis that began in 2008 and destroyed considerable wealth around the world. Given
that this crisis is seen widely as a crisis of
capitalism, it is natural that many people
would think of Marx, who was of course
the greatest critic of capitalism in history.
Yet it is a strange renaissance, if indeed it
is any kind of renaissance at all. In recent
years, there have been many Marxism
conferences and countless workshops in
places such as Chicago, Boston and Berlin.
In London, one Marx “festival” lasted five
days under a slogan that cried, “Revolution
is in the air.” The invitation read:
Crisis and austerity have exposed the insanity
of our global system. Billions have been given
to the banks, while billions across the planet
face hunger, poverty, climate catastrophes and
Walter Laqueur is a historian and political
commentator. His most recent book is After the
Fall: The End of the European Dream and the
Decline of a Continent (Thomas Dunne Books,
2012).
88 The National Interest
war. We used to be told capitalism meant prosperity and democracy. Not any more. Now it
means austerity for the 99% and rule by the
markets.
But is revolution really in the air? France
got a socialist government, but it is already
in trouble. Britain may follow, but would it
fare any better? It seems only natural that,
at a time of crisis, public opinion would
turn against the party in power. Given the
severity of the crisis and the slowness of
the recovery, it is not surprising that some
people would turn to Marxism. But the fact
that the political reaction has been so mild
is more astonishing.
And, while some of the conferences and
festivals lauding the anticapitalist crusader
seem to be motivated by genuine neoMarxist sentiments, others appear to be
using the man as a kind of bandwagon
for separate trendy causes and impulses.
Consider the agenda at a recent such
meeting at the University of Washington.
One has to doubt whether these followers
of Marx are on the right track when the
papers under discussion contain titles such
as “Reconsidering Impossible Totalities:
Marxist Deployments of the Sublime,” “A
Few Thoughts on the Academic Poet as
Hobo-Tourist,” “Reading Hip-Hop at the
Intersection of Culture and Capitalism,”
“Annals of Sexual States” and “The Political
Economy of Stranger Intimacy.”
One wonders what Marx’s reaction
would be if he sat at his desk in the
British Museum’s Reading Room and
contemplated such discussions at a
gathering dedicated to rethinking his
Reviews & Essays
ideas. Would he be impressed, amused or
speechless? Perhaps it would remind him
of the carnival celebrations each February
in his native Trier: wine, funny masks and
customs, and pranks—all followed by a
hangover of five or six days.
T
hese musings are stirred by the arrival of the latest major Marx biography—Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century
Life, by Jonathan Sperber (W. W. Norton,
672 pp., $35.00). Sperber is an expert on
nineteenth-century Germany, and there is
much in his book about Marx’s adolescence
there, especially in his native Trier. Sperber
also deals with Marx’s political activism and
his relations with other German revolutionaries in exile in greater detail than previous
biographers. Sperber applauds a new interpretation of Marx that looks at the man in
the context of his own nineteenth century
rather than as a harbinger or instigator of
twentieth-century conflict.
“The view of Marx as a contemporary
whose ideas are shaping the modern world
has run its course,” he writes, “and it is
time for a new understanding of him as
a figure of a past historical epoch, one
increasingly distant from our own.” Among
elements of that past historical epoch,
he cites the French Revolution, G. W. F.
Hegel’s philosophy, and the early years of
English industrialization and the political
economy stemming from it. “It might even
be,” he adds, “that Marx is more usefully
understood as a backward-looking figure,
who took the circumstances of the first half
of the nineteenth century and projected
them into the future, than as a surefooted
Reviews & Essays
and foresighted interpreter of historical
trends.”
Thus, rather than seeking to illuminate
the intellectual clashes of the modern era by
bringing Marx into our own time, Sperber
attempts to illuminate Marx’s time by
transporting his readers back there.
This is not, strictly speaking, a book
review but rather an exploration of how
history has viewed Karl Marx through
various epochs and vogues of thought
since he dropped his momentous theories
into the Western consciousness a century
and a half ago. What can be said about
Sperber’s effort, though, is that he tells his
story well and should be commended for
his competence and reliability. Besides,
the publication of a new Marx biography
should be welcomed. If people today lack
the time or inclination to read Marx—and
he isn’t read much these days—one should
at least read about him.
One manifestation of the Mar x
renaissance is that Sperber is not alone. A
number of biographies of the man have
been published in recent years; one can
think of four in English alone. In the
decades after World War II, interest in Marx
was limited even though Communist and
Social Democratic parties were strong at
the time. But the basic facts about Marx’s
life were pretty well known: his years as a
student, his involvement with the young
Hegelians, his activity as a left-wing
democrat and his discovery of socialism, the
years in Paris and Brussels, and eventually
his life in London studying capitalism,
pondering the class struggle and historical
materialism. Information and documents,
May/June 2013 89
however marginal, that shed light on Marx’s
life were collected in major institutes in
Moscow, Amsterdam and London. The
Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow
was the largest and best equipped of these,
but it was closed in 1993. The Amsterdam
International Institute of Social History,
founded in 1935, still exists, as does
the Marx Memorial Library located in
Clerkenwell Green in London’s East End.
For many years, Franz Mehring’s Karl
Marx: The Story of His Life—first published
in 1918, and still in print today—was the
leading text in the field. Mehring was a
“bourgeois” journalist who found his way
at midlife to the socialist movement. It is a
decent work, very respectful of the master
but not entirely uncritical. Orthodox
Marxists never forgave Mehring for
defending Ferdinand Lassalle and Mikhail
Bakunin against often-intemperate attacks
by Marx. Lassalle, of German Jewish
origin, was the founder of the first German
socialist party. He was a very talented and
charismatic leader but highly unstable—
occasionally given to harebrained schemes
and actions. As a theoretician he was not
remotely in Marx’s league, but he resided in
Germany and was therefore more popular
and better known among workers than the
distant Marx. Lassalle died young in a duel
concerning the good name of a young lady
of aristocratic origin. Marx, who had been
in close contact with him, later referred to
him as that “Jewish nigger,” among other
ungracious epithets.
Author of an excellent biography of
the Marx family, Mary Gabriel decided
not to reveal to her readers such Marx
90 The National Interest
malefaction on the grounds that it might
create a mistaken impression. Of course,
such language was all too common at the
time and should not be measured against
today’s higher standards of discourse. Marx,
to borrow a phrase coined by Freud, was
“badly baptized.” Instead of dissociating
himself quietly and more or less elegantly
from his tribe, he seemed bothered and
self-conscious about his Jewish heritage. But
Lassalle wasn’t exactly a proud Jew either;
in a letter to his fiancé he wrote that he
hated the Jews. But in the end, Gabriel’s
sanitation seems misplaced; judgment
should be left to readers.
As for the famous Russian anarchist,
Bakunin, he too had once been close to
Marx but later fell out with him. There
developed between them genuine political
differences after Bakunin embraced
anarchism, but Marx’s deep and unshakable
Russophobia played a part as well. Marx
was a great believer in conspiracy theories;
for many years he insisted that Lord
Palmerston, the British prime minister, was
a secret Russian agent. On the other hand,
Marx trusted the spies that Prussian and
German governments had planted in his
inner circle. He was not much of a judge of
his fellow human beings.
T
he Mehring biography is no longer
adequate for our time. It was bound to
be incomplete because Marx’s early writings
and much of his correspondence became
accessible to a wider public only in 1932.
Nor was it known outside a very small circle
that Marx had fathered a boy with Helene
Demuth, the faithful domestic in the Marx
Reviews & Essays
London household. Marx’s illegitimate son
was the only member of the family to live
and witness the victory of socialism (as it
was then called) in Russia.
Among other biographies, there is
general agreement that David McLellan’s
Karl Marx: His Life and Thought is
the standard work. It was written in the
1970s, before the breakdown of the Soviet
Union, and is now in its fourth edition.
But other books have stressed distinctive
aspects of Marx’s life and merit attention
for that. Francis Wheen’s book, Karl
Marx: A Life, is well written and was well
received for its emphasis on Marx’s English
contemporaries. Wheen deals with Marx’s
exchanges with Darwin in greater detail
than other authors. Although Wheen takes
issue with other biographers, the bones of
contention are not fundamental.
Gabriel’s 2011 book, Love and Capital:
Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a
Revolution, is also well researched, though
more preoccupied with love than capital.
She deals primarily with Marx’s wife but
also with his children, four of whom died
before he did. Marx’s relations with his
children seem to have been very good,
and his daughters adored him. His wife,
born into the aristocratic German von
Westphalen family, had an unenviable fate.
For most of her marriage, she lived in dire
poverty, and her aristocratic background
and upbringing had not prepared her for
a life in such miserable conditions. Marx
himself wrote on more than one occasion
that he often felt reluctant to go home to
her because of the constant whining and
complaining. The only earlier serious and
Reviews & Essays
sympathetic study of her life was written
by her nephew once removed, the Prussian
nobleman Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk,
who served as Hitler’s finance minister
(though he was not a member of the Nazi
Party) and served time in Spandau prison
after the war.
Thus, there is no lack of serious and
reliable Marx biographies, including
relatively recent ones. Sperber’s entry is
a worthy addition to the collection. He
is to be commended particularly for his
warning against the faddish tendency of
modern scholars to make Marx’s ideas more
relevant to the present by putting them
through a Cuisinart along with various
bromides of our time such as structuralism,
postmodernism, existentialism and the like.
May/June 2013 91
Marx’s attack on capitalism, so powerful and sweeping, was
destined to find resonance through the decades whenever the faults
and limitations of capitalism became most visible and pronounced.
But Sperber’s nineteenth-century focus
raises some interesting questions of its own.
Marx’s historical importance, it could be
argued, is mainly as the man who gave
Lenin his ideas, not the polemicist who
wrote a book attacking the theories of, for
example, Carl Vogt, whose views are almost
entirely in eclipse today. Sperber certainly is
justified in dismissing various attempts to
update Marx, which have ranged from the
ridiculous to the absurd. At the same time,
he may go too far in dismissing as useless
the preoccupation with Marxism, which he
calls “Marxology.” After all, Marx’s private
life and his interventions in the politics of
his time, interesting as they are, aren’t why
he is remembered today.
He is remembered—for better or worse—
as the man who provided an outline, even if
somewhat vague, for a postcapitalist world.
Thus, the author of the draft of the future
society is remembered primarily by those
who lived to witness it. That is probably
why Moscow authorities have seriously
considered removing from the capital the
last remaining statue of Marx (it stands
opposite the Bolshoi Theatre). Interest in
Marx and Marxism seems to be least robust
today in the very countries in which his
teachings were once invoked and where
schoolchildren were instructed to study him.
But is it fair to blame philosophers for
any and every mutilation of their ideas—
the concept that a tree is known by its
fruits? Francis Wheen, for one, argues that
it is not. And it would indeed be wrong
to blame Marx for Stalin or Pol Pot, just
as Nietzsche cannot be made responsible
for Hitler or Eichmann. Still, a lot of civic
92 The National Interest
activity unfolded in the twentieth century
in Marx’s name, much of it tragic. And
his attack on capitalism, so powerful and
sweeping, was destined to find resonance
through the decades whenever the faults
and limitations of capitalism became most
visible and pronounced.
W
hich brings us back to the so-called
Marx renaissance and how it happened that he should be enjoying renewed
interest, however muted, after so much controversy over so long a time. Some knowledge of Marx’s writing was taken for granted in my generation, between the two world
wars. This was not true with regard to the
generation of the parents and certainly not
the grandparents. But when I was growing
up a third of the world was ruled under systems that were, or claimed to be, guided by
Marxism. How could people in such a time
make sense of current events unless one
knew something about the ideology that
was the lodestar of these countries?
It should probably be revealed that this
knowledge did not extend to Marx’s great
opus, Das Kapital. Outside a small circle
of specialists, I knew no one who had ever
read it to the end. But it was the norm to at
least pretend that one had started reading it.
And it is worth noting some
anecdotal evidence of Marx’s place in
the consciousness of people back then.
My little apartment in London is almost
literally a stone’s throw from Marx’s grave in
Highgate. In days of old, on an afternoon
stroll, rain or shine, I was asked at least once
for directions to the grave by visitors, often
from abroad—students from Germany,
Reviews & Essays
middle-aged Americans, on one occasion
monks from some Far Eastern country.
During the last two decades the stream of
those wishing to pay homage to the man
has dwindled almost to the vanishing
point. There was no great outcry when the
gravesite visiting hours were cut.
As for the circulation of Marx’s works, a
cursory inquiry shows that there has been
a rise of late, with 1,500 copies of Das
Kapital sold by one publisher in Germany
in 2008, up from the roughly two hundred
it previously sold annually. There has also
been an increase in China, where in 2009
one of the country’s principal publishing
houses reported a fourfold rise in the book’s
sales following the onset of the financial
crisis. But it isn’t much of an uptick. Marx’s
works don’t sell more notably than other
political-theory classics—less than Milton
Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, and
far less than certain cult books such as
those by Ayn Rand. But Marx’s Communist
Manifesto, a long essay of sixty to eighty
pages, does seem to sell well.
The Marx renaissance seems concentrated
mostly on the United States and Germany.
The German city Chemnitz, renamed KarlMarx-Stadt after the Communist takeover
of East Germany in 1945, has regained its
old name. But a local savings bank there has
issued a credit card called the “Marx card,”
complete with a rendering of the man,
and it proved to be a successful publicity
stunt. Leading German movie producer
Alex Kluge has made a ten-hour “poetic
documentary” (his words) on Das Kapital.
The idea was not entirely original to him.
The great Soviet movie director Sergei
Reviews & Essays
Eisenstein contemplated a similar project
decades ago and even tried to persuade
James Joyce to collaborate with him on it.
Nothing came of it.
But Kluge’s extended work, available on
dvd, takes Eisenstein’s concept as a starting
point and goes from there. He titled his
film News from Ideological Antiquity. And
it must be noted that the work serves to
justify Sperber’s misgivings about trying
to make Marx “more relevant to our
time” by reinterpreting him in the light
of structuralism, poststructuralism,
postmodernism, existentialism or elements
of so many other movements that have
littered the modern intellectual landscape
over the past century or so. Attempts have
been made, for example, to meld Marxism
with postcolonial criticisms of Western
imperialism, but this is a difficult argument
to make in light of Marx’s observation that
Britain played a progressive role in the
development of India.
One sees similar disconnected analysis
elsewhere in the Marx renaissance. Terry
Eagleton—who wrote Why Marx Was Right
and is a leading figure in the revival—is
a staunch fighter against Islamophobia
and a well-known theoretician in the
field of literary theory. Others involved
in the revival are students of religion,
philosophy, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism,
commensality (eating together), identity
politics, gender politics, the environment
and so on. All may be important subjects,
but they are not ones that were particularly
close to Marx’s heart and mind.
Some examples of people from various
specialties who have jumped on the Marx
May/June 2013 93
bandwagon: Etienne Balibar, who wrote
on Baruch Spinoza; Alain Badiou, whose
specialty is truth and logic; Slavoj Zizek, a
scholar of psychoanalysis, film theory and
many other subjects; and Jacques Ranciere,
a philosopher of education. A distinguished
professor of geography and anthropology
at the City University of New York, David
Harvey, offers a course dedicated to a close
reading of Das Kapital.
M
issing from this parade of people attempting to bring Marx up to date in
our time are professors and scholars whose
expertise centers on economics and finance—the subjects to which Marx devoted
most of his life and which are at the center
of the present global crisis. Historians such
as Sperber also are rare in this pantheon. Of
94 The National Interest
course, no one would argue that
only economists and actual scholars of Marxism should participate
in these debates, but their almosttotal absence makes one wonder
what this debate is all about.
It is difficult to discern, for
example, what creative impulses
Marx may have contributed to
“Marxist Feminist Notes on the
Political Valence of Affect,” the
title of a paper given by Rosemary
Hennessy of Rice University at the
Berlin Marxism conference.
All of which raises a question:
If this perceived Marx renaissance
has little to do with the actual
teachings of Marx, with which the
poststructuralists, postmodernists
and gender scholars seem only
vaguely familiar, how does one explain
the renaissance, however modest it may
be and however restricted to elite Western
universities that have little connection to
today’s industrial working class?
The answer, it seems, is that “Marx”
has become something like a shortcut
or a symbol indicating a predilection for
radical change in a wide variety of fields
loosely called “cultural studies.” It has little
or nothing to do with what Marxism was
really all about.
An exploration of this modern
phenomenon of Marxism requires that we
go back in time. Marx was a genius, but
he was not the most reliable of prophets.
He provided insights of great importance
to the study of economics and of society.
Without historical materialism, the
Reviews & Essays
“Marx” has become something like a shortcut or a
symbol indicating a predilection for radical change in
a wide variety of fields loosely called “cultural studies.”
importance of the class struggle in history
would not have been understood as clearly
as it has been. His impact on twentiethcentury politics was enormous. But even
before the nineteenth century ended,
some people closest to him realized that
history was not moving in the direction he
predicted.
One of these was Eduard Bernstein, a
native of Berlin who lived many years in
London. He was a friend of the family
and, together with Marx’s daughter
Eleanor, edited much of the unpublished
correspondence and papers of the master
after his death. Writing in 1898, he
said his intent was not to refute Marx
but simply to bring him up to date in
light of events. Bernstein saw clearly that
pauperization—the process of increasing
misery of the proletariat predicted by
Marx—was not taking place. Neither was
the concentration of capital in a few hands,
which Marx saw as an inevitable cause
of the collapse of capitalism. Neither did
Marx foresee the emergence of the welfare
state.
True, there were recurrent crises of
capitalism, but they were not those
anticipated by Marx. The workers of the
world did not unite. The industrial working
class did not grow but shrank. Following
technological progress, the composition of
the working class changed significantly. In
Europe, it encompassed many immigrants
for whom religion was more important
than class-consciousness. And the native
working class frequently gravitated to the
right—sometimes even to the far right, as
in France.
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Revolutions did emerge in some
countries, but not in the most developed
capitalist countries that Marx saw as the
spawning ground for revolution. Rather,
they occurred in less developed nations
whose new revolutionary societies were
quite different from what Marx had
imagined.
Thus did Marxism rise not on the
scientific character of its teaching but
on the utopian and romantic idea of
revolution. Marx had been contemptuous
of the utopian socialists of his time, and
his doctrine contained scientific elements.
But these elements soon gave way to the
general discontent among intellectuals with
the status quo, the wish of many to do
away with the system’s social and cultural
imperfections, and the yen for new cultural
values and norms.
What fresh impetus can reasonably be
expected from the contemporary Marx
renaissance? Expectations should be modest.
Marx’s preoccupation was with the inner
contradictions of capitalism and the
political future of the industrial working
class. The renaissance was triggered by
the crisis in the developed countries that
began in 2008. Marx focused primarily on
Britain but also, to a lesser extent, on other
European countries that then represented
the capitalist vanguard. Yet any serious
analysis of capitalism today would focus less
on England and more on China.
Among the topics of interest embraced
by those involved in the Marx renaissance,
in addition to those noted above, are
alienation, reification, and other such
literary and philosophical pursuits. But
May/June 2013 95
such matters have almost nothing to do
with today’s crisis of capitalism in Europe
and America. It is a debt crisis, raising
powerful questions about whether stimulus
or austerity is the best medicine to get the
economy balanced and moving again. This
crisis has almost nothing to do with, say,
Marx vs. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, the
Austrian School economist whose views
differed from Marx’s in important ways
that now seem trivial. Today the more
relevant debate is John Maynard Keynes vs.
Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.
In this situation, it is likely that the
regulatory state will play a greater role
than in the past. A great deal of ill will has
welled up against the financial system in
part because of the greed displayed by some
of its leading movers and shakers but also
because of their devastating incompetence.
Still, no one so far—neither individuals
nor political parties—has suggested the
wholesale nationalization of key branches
of the economy, the means of production or
the banks. That’s what a Marxist approach
would look like.
T
he challenge facing Europe and America now is that a new economic world
order is emerging. Europe—no longer the
main exploiter—will have to think and
work hard to save the welfare state, and
America will have to do the same for its
entitlements. How can these societies find
a niche that will enable them to keep their
standards of living, or at least prevent too
rapid a decline?
Where will they find guidance on how
to meet such challenges? It isn’t likely to
96 The National Interest
be found in the venerable works of the
British classical economist David Ricardo
or the later British economist Nassau
William Senior. And not even geniuses
such as Adam Smith or Marx can really
lead us much further in the pursuit of
such guidance. History has moved on. The
nineteenth century and its industrial fervor
are far behind us.
Will America lead the way? Will China?
Marx wrote in an 1850 article for a
German newspaper, “When our European
reactionaries in the flight to Asia . . . come
at length to the Great Wall of China . . .
who knows if they will not find there the
inscription: République Chinoise. Liberté,
Égalité, Fraternité.” But of course no such
inscription is to be found at that wall. At
most it symbolizes the observation of the
late Giovanni Arrighi, the Italian American
economics professor of Marxist persuasion,
who once wrote that China had a market
economy but not a capitalist one. An
interesting point but not particularly helpful
in meeting the challenge of the world’s
contemporary problems.
And so it appears we shall have to wait
a bit longer for some kind of lodestar to
emerge. In the meantime, it is clear that
the perceived renaissance of Marxism,
such as it is (which isn’t much), doesn’t
offer anything of value in this search. No
doubt it will continue to stir fascination
in the breasts of activists in various fields
of cultural studies, weary of the status quo
and hungry for a revolutionary new ethos.
But it has nothing to offer the economists
of our day—or the rest of mankind, for
that matter. n
Reviews & Essays