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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 Published by The Center for the National Interest Maurice R. Greenberg Chairman Henry A. Kissinger Honorary Chairman James Schlesinger Chairman, Advisory Council Robert W. Merry Editor Dimitri K. Simes Publisher & CEO Lewis E. McCrary Managing Editor Paul J. Saunders Associate Publisher Alexa McMahon Assistant Managing Editor Contributing Editors Aram Bakshian Jr. Ian Bremmer Ted Galen Carpenter Ariel Cohen Amitai Etzioni Bruce Hoffman Paul R. Pillar Kenneth M. Pollack Advisory Council Morton Abramowitz Graham Allison Conrad Black Patrick J. Buchanan Ahmed Charai Leslie H. Gelb Evan G. Greenberg Gary Hart Zalmay Khalilzad Kishore Mahbubani John J. Mearsheimer Richard Plepler Alexey Pushkov Brent Scowcroft Ruth Wedgwood J. Robinson West Dov Zakheim Owen Harries Editor Emeritus Robert W. Tucker Editor Emeritus Cover Design: Emma Hansen Cover Image: © Micha Perry/Getty Images Robert Golan-Vilella Assistant Editor John Allen Gay Assistant Editor Senior Editors Nikolas K. Gvosdev Jacob Heilbrunn Anatol Lieven Editorial Office The National Interest, 1025 Connecticut Ave, nw, Suite 1200, Washington, dc 20036. Telephone: (202) 467-4884, Fax: (202) 467-0006, Email: [email protected], Website: http://nationalinterest.org Subscription Office Postmaster and subscribers please send address changes and subscription orders to: The National Interest, P.O. Box 1081, Selmer, tn 38375. Telephone: (856) 380-4130; (800) 344-7952 Rate: $39.95/yr. Please add $5/year for Canada and $20/year for other international deliveries. The National Interest (ISSN 0884-9382) is published bimonthly by the Center for the National Interest. Articles are abstracted and indexed in P.A.I.S., Historical Abstracts, International Political Science Abstracts, U.S. Political Science Documents, Political Science Abstracts and America: History and Life; articles are available on microfilm from University Microfilms International, and archived on Lexis-Nexis. Periodicals postage is paid at Washington, dc, and at additional mailing offices. ©2013 by The National Interest, Inc. The National Interest is printed by Fry Communications, Inc. It is distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Ingram Periodicals (18 Ingram Blvd., La Vergne, tn 37086; 615-793-5522) and Source Interlink Companies (27500 Riverview Center Blvd., Bonita Springs, fl 34134; 239-949-4450). 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 Reviews & Essays 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 Reviews & Essays 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 Reviews & Essays 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 Reviews & Essays 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. Reviews & Essays 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