Alexandria

Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot --- more

2005-02-08T10:43:00.000-08:00

New York Times
Week In Review
July 6, 2003
A Century of Small Wars Shows They Can Be Won
By MAX BOOT
After a series of smashing military victories, the president declared the war over. Yet far
from giving up, the forces resisting American occupation switched to guerrilla tactics.
Isolated sentries were killed by assailants who pretended to be friendly civilians. Patrols
in the countryside ran into booby traps. One carefully staged ambush wiped out half an
infantry company. American forces responded with harsh countermeasures that led to
charges of brutality.
That may sound like a portrait of today's Iraq, but it actually describes the Philippines a
century ago. Having kicked out the Spanish in 1898, the United States decided to keep
the archipelago for itself. Many Filipinos resisted American rule. President William
McKinley thought the struggle was over by early 1900, when the regular Filipino armed
forces were routed, but the resilient insurrectos proved him wrong.
The United States eventually won, but it was a long, hard, bloody slog that cost the lives
of more than 4,200 American soldiers, 16,000 rebels and some 200,000 civilians. Even
after the formal end of hostilities on July 4, 1902, sporadic resistance dragged on for
years.
There is no reason to think that the current struggle in Iraq will be remotely as difficult.
But the Philippine war is a useful reminder that Americans have a long history of fighting
guerrillas — and usually prevailing, though seldom quickly or easily.
Many lessons of those counterinsurgencies were set down in "The Small Wars Manual,"
written by a group of Marine Corps officers in the 1930's. This book, which was reprinted
in the 1980's, was intended to draw on the experience of leathernecks who had battled
"bandits" (as the authors preferred to call all resistance movements) in Haiti, the
Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and elsewhere during the early years of the 20th century.
In contrast to major wars, the manual warns, "in small wars no defined battle front exists
and the theater of operations may be the whole length and breadth of the land. . . . In
warfare of this kind, members of native forces will suddenly become innocent peasant
workers when it suits their fancy and convenience." Confronted with such elusive foes,
the manual counsels a two-pronged approach to "establish and maintain law and order."
On the one hand, occupying forces must stay on the offensive against rebel groups,
hunting them down wherever they hide. "Delay in the use of force . . . will always be
interpreted as weakness," the authors warn. On the other hand, the manual is keenly
aware of the limits of firepower in an ambiguous environment.
"Peace and industry cannot be restored permanently without appropriate provisions for
the economic welfare of the people," they write. They also warn that the "hatred of the
enemy" usually inculcated among combat troops is entirely inappropriate during an
occupation. Brutal repression — of the kind carried out by some American soldiers who
used a torture technique called the "water cure" to extract information from Filipino
suspects — only creates more recruits for the rebels. "In small wars, tolerance, sympathy
and kindness should be the keynote to our relationship with the mass of the population."
However skillful they are in the application of carrots and sticks, the manual teaches,
American troops cannot win a permanent victory by themselves: "Native troops,
supported by marines, are increasingly employed as early as practicable in order that
these native agencies may assume their proper responsibility for restoring law and order
in their own country."
American troops followed this advice with a great deal of success in combating
insurgencies from the Philippines to, in more recent years, countries like El Salvador. So
did the British in postwar Malaya.
In Vietnam, by contrast, The Small Wars Manual was conspicuously neglected. Gen.
William Westmoreland tried a conventional big-unit approach, with disastrous
consequences. The relations of American soldiers with civilians were not, for the most
part, characterized by "tolerance, sympathy and kindness." Nor did the Americans turn
over the fight to "native troops . . . as early as practicable."
Of course, the biggest problem in Indochina was outside the army's control. The
guerrillas operating in South Vietnam had a virtually impregnable base in North Vietnam.
That made it impossible to isolate the battlefield, as the United States Navy had been able
to do in the islands of the Philippines.
In Iraq, American forces may also find it difficult to cut off the insurgents they now face,
since the country shares long borders with Syria and Iran, both hostile to the United
States. From Washington's standpoint, the good news is that both countries should be
much more vulnerable to American pressure than North Vietnam was, because they lack
a superpower patron.
In many respects, the American campaign in Iraq has been straight out of The Small
Wars Manual. Security sweeps in Sunni areas of central Iraq are combined with efforts to
reopen schools and hospitals. This is not bleeding-heart humanitarianism but, as the
manual reminds us, a vital step to winning hearts and minds.
Achieving that goal also requires that American troops avoid the sort of excesses
committed in the Philippines. Brig. Gen. Jacob Smith was court-martialed for ordering
his men to "kill and burn"` indiscriminately — a case as shocking in its day as the My Lai
massacre in Vietnam was.
While the behavior of American troops in Iraq has been for the most part exemplary, one
area where they have lagged is in using indigenous security forces. In the early years of
the 20th century, United States occupiers generally set up constabularies trained and led
by Americans but made up of local enlisted men. Quasi-military organizations like the
the Philippine Scouts proved to be formidable instruments of counterinsurgency because
their soldiers knew the local culture and language. This is especially important in fighting
foes without uniforms, where the chief challenge is simply to identify the enemy. Small
wars place a great premium on accurate intelligence.
As the Afghanistan experience shows, it will take a long time to set up a new military in
Iraq. Until then, the occupation authorities will not be able to proceed to the last two
sections of "The Small Wars Manual": "Supervision of Elections" and "Withdrawal."
Max Boot is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The Savage
Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power."

Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot

2005-02-08T10:39:00.000-08:00

NATIONAL SECURITY:
Savage Wars of Peace

Max Boot

Much as we dislike doing so, when necessary we must send our military forces on peacekeeping missions and into regional conflicts. And in the war on terror, it will be necessary.

Max Boot is the editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal.

As you read this article, America is at war. On distant battlefields, from Kandahar to the Hindu Kush, American soldiers are risking their lives to defeat a shadowy enemy. But it doesn’t feel like a war does it? Industry hasn’t been mobilized, civilians haven’t been drafted. There have been some added security measures at home but nothing like the rationing and other disruptions that the United States experienced during World War II. So what kind of war is this anyway?

It’s a small war, a term used during the twentieth century to describe encounters between small numbers of Western soldiers and irregular forces in what is now called the Third World. When we think of war most of us think of the Civil War or World Wars I and II—conflicts fought by millions of citizen soldiers supported by the total mobilization of the American home front. By contrast, U.S. involvement in places like Kosovo, Bosnia, or Afghanistan barely qualifies as a war in the popular imagination. Yet, as I discovered during the course of researching my book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, such “small wars”—fought by a small number of professional U.S. soldiers—are much more typical of American history than are the handful of “total” wars that receive most of the public attention.

Between 1800 and 1934, U.S. Marines staged 180 landings abroad. And that’s not even counting the Indian wars the army was fighting every year until 1890. Much of this history is forgotten today, which is a shame because it’s full of so many thrilling episodes featuring so many amazing characters. Consider sailors such as Stephen Decatur, one of America’s first military heroes, who battled the Barbary pirates and the British before dying in a duel with a brother officer; soldiers such as “Fighting Fred” Funston, an army officer who helped end the Philippine war by leading a daring commando raid to capture the leader of the insurrectos; and marines such as Smedley Butler, America’s foremost colonial soldier in the early years of the twentieth century, who, on retiring from the Marine Corps, turned into a leading anti-imperialist and pacifist.

The kind of wars we’ve been fighting the past decade, in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, and now Afghanistan, would have been instantly familiar to Decatur, Funston, and Butler. But these conflicts seem disorienting to many in the Pentagon who believe their role is to prepare for big conventional wars—to fight, if not World War III, then a replay of the Gulf War or Korean War. Their ethos is summed up in the Powell Doctrine, which holds that America should only commit its forces to battle if it intends to win a quick, decisive victory and then withdraw immediately.

There was much complaining, at least during the Clinton administration, that U.S. forces were being frittered away on “nation building,” that they were being sent on missions without “exit strategies,” without clearly defined goals, and without mobilizing the American people. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Condoleezza Rice complained that U.S. troops shouldn’t be escorting students to kindergarten—a reference to the U.S. peacekeeping role in the Balkans. And, sure enough, though the Bush administration successfully fought an unconventional campaign in Afghanistan, in its wake the president has refused to commit U.S. troops to a long-term peacekeeping presence, which may turn out to be a costly mistake.

The president’s hostility to “peacekeeping” is based on the widespread belief that U.S. troops have not traditionally undertaken this kind of mission and are not particularly good at it. This view, like many other common myths about the “American Way of War,” has little basis in historical fact. For more than 200 years, the U.S. military has routinely violated every tenet of the Powell Doctrine—and done so with great success. To be specific, there is absolutely nothing novel about (1) wars without a “vital national interest,” (2) wars without significant popular support, (3) wars without declarations of war, (4) wars without exit strategies, and (5) wars that force U.S. troops to act as “social workers.” Let me briefly explain what I mean, starting with the lack of vital interests in most of our past small wars.

A few small wars, such as those against the Barbary pirates from 1801 to 1805 or the Chinese Boxers in 1900 or the Mexican Villistas in 1916, were fought to protect American nationals or territory and so presumably would meet a narrow definition of self-interest. But it would be a stretch to claim that most small wars were fought in defense of “vital” interests. Consider the events leading up to the 1914 invasion of Veracruz, Mexico. A handful of U.S. sailors visiting another Mexican port were briefly detained by the authorities. The Mexican government apologized, but this wasn’t good enough for the admiral commanding the local U.S. naval squadron. He demanded that the Mexicans fire a 21-gun salute in honor of the U.S. flag. The Mexican government refused, and, to make a long story short, the United States wound up occupying Veracruz for seven months. Admittedly there were other reasons for the invasion, but this was the precipitating incident. Now, does anyone think getting a 21-gun salute to the Stars and Stripes represents a vital national interest?

Most U.S. small wars were undertaken for less trivial causes, but many were equally far removed from traditional, realpolitik conceptions of national interests. Often the armed forces were sent into harm’s way for reasons that were as much moral as strategic. The moral component is sometimes hard to discern from the vantage point of the twenty-first century because the terms in which it is expressed have changed. In the early twentieth century, Americans talked of spreading Anglo-Saxon civilization and taking up the “white man’s burden”; today they talk of spreading democracy and defending human rights. But whatever you call it, this represents an idealistic impulse, and it has always been a big part of the reason why America goes to war, whether to free Cuba in 1898 or to free Kosovo in 1999.

Second, there is nothing new about wars without significant popular support. Almost all the wars chronicled in my book did not arouse much enthusiasm among the American public. Readers who picked up the New York World—Joseph Pulitzer’s mass circulation daily—on July 29, 1915, would have found the news that the marines had just landed in Haiti relegated to a small item on page nine. Among the more important stories splashed across the front page: “Elsie Ferguson, Actress, Will Be a Banker’s Bride.”

When most of these small wars aroused any notice back home it was usually due to opposition mobilizing—particularly notable in the case of the Philippine war, which was opposed by Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and other leading Americans. But small numbers of professional soldiers were able to function well far from home even in the face of domestic sniping. Mass mobilization of public opinion is needed for big wars, especially those that call on legions of conscripts. It is much less necessary when a relatively small number of professional soldiers are dispatched to some trouble spot.

Nor are declarations of war needed to send U.S. forces into combat. A myth prevalent in some quarters is that the Korean War was America’s first “undeclared war” and that ever since then presidents have been traducing the Constitution to deploy military forces abroad on their own initiative.

It is certainly true that Korea was America’s biggest undeclared war up to that point, but it was hardly the first. All the wars chronicled in my book were undeclared, starting with the Tripolitan war, when Thomas Jefferson sent a naval squadron to the Mediterranean without bothering to ask for congressional approval.

Just as there is nothing new about undeclared wars, so there is nothing new about wars without exit strategies: The U.S. military stayed continuously in Haiti from 1915 to 1933 (19 years). We stayed continuously in Nicaragua from 1910 to 1933 (23 years). We stayed continuously in the Philippines from 1899 to 1946 (47 years). We stayed continuously in China from the 1840s to the 1940s (100 years). These long-term deployments should be no surprise. After all, the United States still has not found an “exit strategy” from World War II or the Korean War; American troops remain stationed in Germany, Japan, Italy, and South Korea more than a half-century after the end of the wars that brought them there. This runs counter to the assumption implicit in the Powell Doctrine that U.S. troops should win a battle and go home.

Finally, there is nothing new about wars in which U.S. soldiers act as “social workers.” This phenomenon, said to be prevalent in the 1990s, raises hackles among veterans who complain, “It wasn’t like that in my day. Our job was fighting wars, period.” It is true that, during World War II and the Cold War, the U.S. military did concentrate for the most part on its conventional war-fighting capabilities and for good reason. But this is far from the norm in American history. Throughout U.S. history marines, both at home and abroad, have found themselves providing disaster relief, quelling riots, guarding mail trains, and performing other unconventional duties. Although Condoleezza Rice complains about soldiers escorting kids to school, that’s precisely what the 101st Airborne Division did in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1956—with great success. Soldiers also have often acted as colonial administrators—in the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua, Veracruz, and so on, to say nothing of post–World War II Germany and Japan or the post–Civil War South.

In fact occupation duty is generally necessary after a big war in order to impose the victor’s will on the vanquished. If ground forces win a battle and go home, as the Powell Doctrine advocates and as actually happened in the Gulf War, the fruits of victory are likely to wither on the vine. Only boots on the ground can guarantee a lasting peace.

It is clear, then, that many deeply held shibboleths about the American way of war—which can be summed up in the misconception that the job of the armed forces is limited to “fighting wars” in defense of “vital national interests”—have little historical basis. Nor, it must be added, is history kind to the warnings of post-Vietnam alarmists that America risks disaster every time it asks the armed forces to stray into other types of duties. Not all the operations chronicled in my book were a total success—U.S. troops never caught up with either Pancho Villa or Augusto Sandino—but the only real military failure was Woodrow Wilson’s expedition to fight the Russian Bolsheviks in 1918–1920, and it was a pretty small-scale failure, hardly comparable to the grand disaster that transpired in Indochina.

In most cases the armed forces, however ill-prepared for the job at hand, quickly adapted, figured out what they had to do, and did it with great success. Look at how successfully the U.S. armed forces have adapted to the unconventional challenges of Afghanistan.

The bottom line is that the American armed forces should not be unduly afraid of small wars. The risk of another Vietnam is relatively small. Much more common are successes such as Afghanistan, which is probably just as well, because small wars are unavoidable as long as America remains committed to preserving its power abroad.

If there is one theme that emerges throughout my book it is that, though the reasons have changed over the years, the United States has always found itself being drawn into “the savage wars of peace.” Economists describe this as a yield curve—when cost is low, demand is high. For America the relative cost of intervening anywhere around the world is fairly low; therefore, we’re likely to intervene even when the cause might appear marginal in a realpolitik interpretation of our national interests.

America’s strategic situation today presents more opportunities than ever before for such entanglements. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, America has stood head and shoulders (and also probably torso) above all other nations, possessor of the world’s richest economy and its most potent military. In many ways the chaotic post–Cold War environment resembles that of the post-Napoleonic world, with the United States thrust willy-nilly into Britain’s old role as globocop. Of course, unlike nineteenth-century Britain, twenty-first-century America does not preside over a formal empire. Its “empire” consists not of far-flung territorial possessions but of a family of democratic, capitalist nations that eagerly seek shelter under Uncle Sam’s umbrella. The inner core of the American empire—North America, Western Europe, Northeast Asia—remains for the most part stable and prosperous, but violence and unrest lap at the periphery—in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, and other regions teeming with failed states, criminal states, or simply a state of nature. This is where America has found itself getting involved in its recent small wars and no doubt will again in the future.

When it exercised a lesser degree of international hegemony, Britain battled the “enemies of all mankind,” such as pirates and slavers, and took upon itself the responsibility of keeping the world’s oceans and seas open to navigation. Today America faces equivalent tasks—battling terrorists, ethnic cleansers, narco-traffickers, and weapons proliferaters and ensuring open access not only to the oceans but to the skies and space as well.

That does not mean that the armed services should be redirected exclusively toward a constabulary role. This would be as misguided as not preparing for such missions at all. Although no major-power threat confronts America at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the odds are that one will emerge in the years ahead; one always has. In the meantime, however, the military cannot simply turn its back on “peace” operations that hold out the promise of resolving small problems before they fester into major crises. We can only wonder what might have happened if, after having driven out the Soviets in the early 1990s, the United States had remained behind to build up Afghanistan into a viable state. It might not have become the home of the Taliban and Al Qaeda—and the World Trade Center might still be standing. In the Balkans there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the involvement of NATO troops has stopped Bosnia and Kosovo from turning into mini-Afghanistans in the heart of Europe.

This shows the great benefits that can come from relatively small expenditures of military power. Of course there are costs too, as we saw in Beirut in 1983 and in Somalia in 1993. Small wars are never going to be glorious or easy. But history indicates that they’re inevitable. So the armed forces had better be ready. If the past is any indication of the future, we have a lot more savage wars ahead.

Special to the Hoover Digest.

Max Boot’s new book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, has just been published by Basic Books.

The Tipping Point -- review

2005-02-05T19:30:00.000-08:00

Small Things Make A Big Difference
An Unintended Primer for Political Activists

By Timothy Noah

The Tipping Point

By Malcolm Gladwell
Little Brown
Click on the title to buy the book

In 1966, Robert Kennedy gave the speech in South Africa that included his now-famous statement about the improbably large changes for the good brought about through individual bravery and idealism. "Each time a man stands up for an ideal," Kennedy said, "or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance." Not only can, but in the case of South Africa, did, just one generation later.

But how? How were Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and others able to defeat apartheid? Why have their counterparts in China and North Korea failed to defeat communism? And why have their counterparts in Russia and Eastern Europe been successful in defeating communism? Malcolm Gladwell, the author of this gem of a book, would say that events in South Africa, Russia, and Eastern Europe reached a "tipping point," while events in China and North Korea did not.

Gladwell, a talented staff writer for The New Yorker who began his career writing for conservative publications like The American Spectator, is not the sort of person who's burning to change the world. There is, in fact, nothing in Gladwell's book about turning the tides of history or throwing off the shackles of oppression, and quite a lot about how to devise a successful children's television show or sell a new brand of sneaker. Even when Gladwell writes about emotional issues like teenage suicide, he does so with a detachment that can seem other-worldly. Nonetheless, The Tipping Point could well prove to be an influential text for political activists.

Gladwell's book is built around the theory that ideas, trends, habits, and other kinds of social behavior spread much the same way that infectious diseases do. This idea is not a new one. Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, coined the term "meme" (from the Greek "mimesis," which means "to imitate") to describe the non-biological mechanism by which certain behavioral patterns spread through the human race. What genes do through reproduction, memes do through imitation. Aaron Lynch, in his 1996 book, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, elaborated on Dawkins' idea and demonstrated the ways that memes for such various things as parenting strategies, religious convictions, sexual habits, and political beliefs replicate themselves. In Lynch's view, people don't acquire ideas so much as "ideas acquire people."

One particularly compelling example Lynch cites is the seemingly irrational taboo regarding teenage masturbation. As Charles Peters recently observed in these pages, it's one of the most efficient ways for young people to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Yet when promoted, especially within the political realm, it draws snickers at best and strong moral disapproval at worst. Why? According to Lynch, the taboo is self-perpetuating: People who have no other outlet for their sexual urges will likely marry young, have many children, and then teach these children that masturbation is wrong. People who masturbate, however, will likely stay single longer and do other "immoral" things like have premarital sex using birth control. The downside to separating the pleasures of sex from the necessities of procreation, in other words, is that you end up spreading your memes to fewer offspring.

Where Dawkins and Lynch described, on a fairly abstract level, the march of memes from one generation to the next, Gladwell describes, much more concretely, how particular behavior patterns spread within a few months or years. According to Gladwell, behavioral patterns (he doesn't actually call them "memes") don't change gradually; they change quite suddenly when a small but critical number of strategically-placed converts reaches a tipping point.

The "tipping point" term was first used by social scientists to describe the number of black families moving into a predominantly white neighborhood that it takes to trigger "white flight"--i.e., a mass exodus of white families that effectively resegregates the neighborhood, this time as predominantly black. But it can also be used to describe more favorable trends--for example, the point at which a few, seemingly symbolic policing policies in New York City (such as a crackdown on subway farebeaters) triggered a massive decline in murders and other violent crimes. And it can also be used to describe trends that are neither particularly good nor particularly bad, like the revival of Hush Puppies as a popular shoe brand in the early 1990s.

In Gladwell's scheme, behavior patterns are transmitted by "mavens" (experts), "salesmen" (people who go to unusual lengths to persuade others to do a certain thing) and "connectors" (people who have an unusually large number of social contacts with whom they swap information). Gladwell's example of a classic "connector" is a woman named Lois Weisberg who is Chicago's commissioner of cultural affairs. By Gladwell's count, Weisberg is connected to eight disparate subcultures: the worlds of actors, writers, doctors, lawyers, park-loving conservationists, politicians, railroad buffs, and flea market aficionados. This places her at the axis of an amazing number of people. An example of her extraordinary reach is that even though I live in Washington, not Chicago, and am not especially sociable, I myself know at least half-a-dozen people who know her. (Her son Jacob is a friend and Slate colleague.)

To demonstrate the historical impact connectors can have, Gladwell cites Paul Revere. It's well known that Revere's midnight ride in 1775 alerted the people of Boston and its environs to the imminent British attack, and helped the colonial militia defeat the British at Concord. Less well known is that a tanner named William Dawes simultaneously tried to spread the word through an alternate route, but that the towns he rode through failed to rally in any significant numbers against the British. The reason, Gladwell theorizes, is that Dawes didn't know the right people to contact--that is to say, he didn't know the key people who would activate participation the next day by lots of other people. Dawes, according to Gladwell, was just an ordinary guy, whereas Revere, an intensely social person, was "the Lois Weisberg of his day." (As this example shows, Gladwell has a gift for making his points with great economy and humor.)

Simply communicating information, however, doesn't necessarily create an epidemic. Another crucially important factor, according to Gladwell, is "stickiness." By this Gladwell means that the information has to be compelling. Inherent worth helps, of course; in the example of Revere's ride, there was obviously great interest in the impending invasion. But gimmicks can work too. Gladwell tells the story of a hugely "sticky" direct marketing campaign launched in the 1970s for the Columbia Record Club by a man named Lester Wunderman. Wunderman took out TV ads in the wee hours of the morning directing viewers to look up print ads for the club in certain publications. If a viewer found a little gold box on the coupon in the ad, he got a free record. Even though the TV ads reached a small audience, and even though the gold box gambit was, as Gladwell puts it, "a really cheesy idea," and even though (as Gladwell is too polite to point out) the Columbia Record Club is probably a pain in the ass to belong to, the campaign got lots of people to examine print ads for the club, which in turn got huge numbers of people to sign up. It was, in a word, "sticky."

The final component of Gladwell's scheme is context. One of Gladwell's more intriguing examples of context is the story of Kitty Genovese, a young woman in Queens who was stabbed to death in 1964. The story is a famous example of urban horror because it later came out that 38 neighbors watched the stabbing from their windows, but none called the police. As articulated at the time by Abe Rosenthal (then the Times city editor) and others, the presumed lesson was that big-city life makes people monstrously insensitive. But Gladwell cites a study by two New York City psychologists to argue that, in fact, the problem was that the eyewitnesses were too acutely sensitive to what was going on. Each eyewitness was aware not only that Genovese was being stabbed, but that many others were watching the horrific scene; each assumed one of the other eyewitnesses would alert the authorities. "The lesson is not that no one called despite the fact that 38 heard her scream," Gladwell sums up pithily. "It's that no one called because 38 people heard her scream. Ironically, had she been attacked on a lonely street with just one witness, she might have lived."

Gladwell writes early on that the big change-the-world question his eclectic research raises is: "What can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?" This question is what makes Gladwell's book of great interest to political activists. Of course, trying to figure out the dynamics of an epidemic after the fact, though far from easy, is a lot easier than figuring them out before the epidemic occurs. (Baby boom readers will recall the public health scare in 1976 surrounding an anticipated "swine flu epidemic" that proved a dud.)

Gladwell's one feint in the direction of do-gooderism is a chapter where he recommends that the government stop funding anti-smoking ads aimed at keeping teens away from cigarettes, and instead focus on developing and distributing cigarettes with lower levels of nicotine and drugs like Zyban that could help addicts kick the nicotine habit. (Another interesting idea along these lines that Gladwell doesn't mention is forwarded by John Slade of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Slade says: Take out the tar, the stuff that makes cigarettes deadly in the first place. Then who cares how addictive they are?) Gladwell is a little too dismissive of the idea that public-service announcements can work: They were sufficiently effective in the late '60s that cigarette companies voluntarily pulled their own TV ads just to make the public service spots go away. Remember the coughing cowboy ad--where a Marlboro Man knock-off strode into a saloon, six-shooters at the ready, and dissolved into a seizure of hacking? Gladwell may well be right that his tactics would be more effective, but one senses in this part of the book something largely absent from the rest--an ideological distaste for certain categories of behavior-changing efforts (in this instance, one that smacks too much of ambitious government regulation).

Overall, though, and in spite of the fact that Gladwell's no liberal, The Tipping Point delivers a message that could help revitalize liberalism. The feeling is widespread that government action aimed at solving big problems is futile. But the thrust of Gladwell's book is that seemingly small gestures can have fantastically large and rapid outcomes. Mightn't government programs--strategically conceived and executed--constitute the sort of leverage he's talking about? Even though Gladwell doesn't have much to say about that in his important and compelling book, many others who are inspired by Robert Kennedy's famous words likely will.

The Tipping Point --essay

2005-02-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

June 3, 1996

DEPT. OF DISPUTATION

The Tipping Point

Why is the city suddenly so much safer---

could it be that crime really is an epidemic?

As you drive east on Atlantic Avenue, through the part of New York City that the Police Department refers to as Brooklyn North, the neighborhoods slowly start to empty out: the genteel brownstones of the western part of Brooklyn give way to sprawling housing projects and vacant lots. Bedford-Stuyvesant is followed by Bushwick, then by Brownsville, and, finally, by East New York, home of the Seventy-fifth Precinct, a 5.6-square-mile tract where some of the poorest people in the city live. East New York is not a place of office buildings or parks and banks, just graffiti- covered bodegas and hair salons and auto shops. It is an economically desperate community destined, by most accounts, to get more desperate in the years ahead-which makes what has happened there over the past two and a half years all the more miraculous. In 1993, there were a hundred and twenty-six homicides in the Seven-Five, as the police call it. Last year, there were forty-four. There is probably no other place in the country where violent crime has declined so far, so fast.

Once the symbol of urban violence, New York City is in the midst of a strange and unprecedented transformation. According to the preliminary crime statistics released by the F.B.I. earlier this month, New York has a citywide violent-crime rate that now ranks it a hundred and thirty-sixth among major American cities, on a par with Boise, Idaho. Car thefts have fallen to seventy-one thousand, down from a hundred and fifty thousand as recently as six years ago. Burglaries have fallen from more than two hundred thousand in the early nineteen-eighties to just under seventy-five thousand in 1995. Homicides are now at the level of the early seventies, nearly half of what they were in 1990. Over the past two and a half years, every precinct in the city has recorded double-digit decreases in violent crime. Nowhere, however, have the decreases been sharper than Brooklyn North, in neighborhoods that not long ago were all but written off to drugs and violence. On the streets of the Seven-Five today, it is possible to see signs of everyday life that would have been unthinkable in the early nineties. There are now ordinary people on the streets at dusk-small children riding their bicycles, old people on benches and stoops, people coming out of the subways alone. "There was a time when it wasn't uncommon to hear rapid fire, like you would hear somewhere in the jungle in Vietnam," Inspector Edward A. Mezzadri, who commands the Seventy-fifth Precinct, told me. "You would hear that in Bed-Stuy and Brownsville and, particularly, East New York all the time. I don't hear the gunfire anymore. I've been at this job one year and twelve days. The other night when I was going to the garage to get my car, I heard my first volley. That was my first time."

But what accounts for the drop in crime rates? William J. Bratton-who as the New York City Police Commissioner presided over much of the decline from the fall of 1994 until his resignation, this spring-argues that his new policing strategies made the difference: he cites more coördination between divisions of the N.Y.P.D., more accountability from precinct commanders, more arrests for gun possession, more sophisticated computer-aided analysis of crime patterns, more aggressive crime prevention. In the Seven-Five, Mezzadri has a team of officers who go around and break up the groups of young men who congregate on street corners, drinking, getting high, and playing dice-and so remove what was once a frequent source of violent confrontations. He says that he has stepped up random "safety checks" on the streets, looking for drunk drivers or stolen cars. And he says that streamlined internal procedures mean that he can now move against drug-selling sites in a matter of days, where it used to take weeks. "It's aggressive policing," he says. "It's a no-nonsense attitude. Persistence is not just a word, it's a way of life."

All these changes make good sense. But how does breaking up dice games and streamlining bureaucracy cut murder rates by two-thirds? Many criminologists have taken a broader view, arguing that changes in crime reflect fundamental demographic and social trends-for example, the decline and stabilization of the crack trade, the aging of the population, and longer prison sentences, which have kept hard-core offenders off the streets. Yet these trends are neither particularly new nor unique to New York City; they don't account for why the crime rate has dropped so suddenly here and now. Furthermore, whatever good they have done is surely offset, at least in part, by the economic devastation visited on places like Brownsville and East New York in recent years by successive rounds of federal, state, and city social-spending cuts.

It's not that there is any shortage of explanations, then, for what has happened in New York City. It's that there is a puzzling gap between the scale of the demographic and policing changes that are supposed to have affected places like the Seven-Five and, on the other hand, the scale of the decrease in crime there. The size of that gap suggests that violent crime doesn't behave the way we expect it to behave. It suggests that we need a new way of thinking about crime, which is why it may be time to turn to an idea that has begun to attract serious attention in the social sciences: the idea that social problems behave like infectious agents. It may sound odd to talk about the things people do as analogous to the diseases they catch. And yet the idea has all kinds of fascinating implications. What if homicide, which we often casually refer to as an epidemic, actually is an epidemic, and moves through populations the way the flu bug does? Would that explain the rise and sudden decline of homicide in Brooklyn North?

When social scientists talk about epidemics, they mean something very specific. Epidemics have their own set of rules. Suppose, for example, that one summer a thousand tourists come to Manhattan from Canada carrying an untreatable strain of twenty-four-hour flu. The virus has a two-per-cent infection rate, which is to say that one out of every fifty people who come into close contact with someone carrying it catches the bug himself. Let's say that fifty is also exactly the number of people the average Manhattanite-in the course of riding the subways and mingling with colleagues at work-comes into contact with every day. What we have, then, given the recovery rate, is a disease in equilibrium. Every day, each carrier passes on the virus to a new person. And the next day those thousand newly infected people pass on the virus to another thousand people, so that throughout the rest of the summer and the fall the flu chugs along at a steady but unspectacular clip.

But then comes the Christmas season. The subways and buses get more crowded with tourists and shoppers, and instead of running into an even fifty people a day, the average Manhattanite now has close contact with, say, fifty-five people a day. That may not sound like much of a difference, but for our flu bug it is critical. All of a sudden, one out of every ten people with the virus will pass it on not just to one new person but to two. The thousand carriers run into fifty-five thousand people now, and at a two-per-cent infection rate that translates into eleven hundred new cases the following day. Some of those eleven hundred will also pass on the virus to more than one person, so that by Day Three there are twelve hundred and ten Manhattanites with the flu and by Day Four thirteen hundred and thirty-one, and by the end of the week there are nearly two thousand, and so on up, the figure getting higher every day, until Manhattan has a full-blown flu epidemic on its hands by Christmas Day.

In the language of epidemiologists, fifty is the "tipping point" in this epidemic, the point at which an ordinary and stable phenomenon-a low-level flu outbreak- can turn into a public-health crisis. Every epidemic has its tipping point, and to fight an epidemic you need to understand what that point is. Take AIDS, for example. Since the late eighties, the number of people in the United States who die of AIDS every year has been steady at forty thousand, which is exactly the same as the number of people who are estimated to become infected with H.I.V. every year. In other words, AIDS is in the same self- perpetuating phase that our Canadian flu was in, early on; on the average, each person who dies of aids infects, in the course of his or her lifetime, one new person.

That puts us at a critical juncture. If the number of new infections increases just a bit-if the average H.I.V. carrier passes on the virus to slightly more than one person-then the epidemic can tip upward just as dramatically as our flu did when the number of exposed people went from fifty to fifty-five. On the other hand, even a small decrease in new infections can cause the epidemic to nosedive. It would be as if the number of people exposed to our flu were cut from fifty to forty-five a day-a change that within a week would push the number of flu victims down to four hundred and seventy-eight.

Nobody really knows what the tipping point for reducing AIDS may be. Donald Des Jarlais, an epidemiologist at Beth Israel Hospital, in Manhattan, estimates that halving new infections to twenty thousand a year would be ideal. Even cutting it to thirty thousand, he says, would probably be enough. The point is that it's not some completely unattainable number. "I think people think that to beat AIDS everybody has to either be sexually abstinent or use a clean needle or a condom all the time," Des Jarlais said. "But you don't really need to completely eliminate risk. If over time you can just cut the number of people capable of transmitting the virus, then our present behavior-change programs could potentially eradicate the disease in this country."

That's the surprising thing about epidemics. They don't behave the way we think they will behave. Suppose, for example, that the number of new H.I.V. infections each year was a hundred thousand, and by some heroic aids- education effort you managed to cut that in half. You would expect the size of the epidemic to also be cut in half, right? This is what scientists call a linear assumption-the expectation that every extra increment of effort will produce a corresponding improvement in result. But epidemics aren't linear. Improvement does not correspond directly to effort. All that matters is the tipping point, and because fifty thousand is still above that point, all these heroics will come to naught. The epidemic would still rise. This is the fundamental lesson of nonlinearity. When it comes to fighting epidemics, small changes-like bringing new infections down to thirty thousand from forty thousand-can have huge effects. And large changes-like reducing new infections to fifty thousand from a hundred thousand-can have small effects. It all depends on when and how the changes are made.

The reason this seems surprising is that human beings prefer to think in linear terms. Many expectant mothers, for example, stop drinking entirely, because they've heard that heavy alcohol use carries a high risk of damaging the fetus. They make the perfectly understandable linear assumption that if high doses of alcohol carry a high risk, then low doses must carry a low- but still unacceptable-risk. The problem is that fetal-alcohol syndrome isn't linear. According to one study, none of the sixteen problems associated with fetal-alcohol syndrome show up until a pregnant woman starts regularly consuming more than three drinks a day. But try telling that to a neurotic nineties couple.

I can remember struggling with these same theoretical questions as a child, when I tried to pour ketchup on my dinner. Like all children encountering this problem for the first time, I assumed that the solution was linear: that steadily increasing hits on the base of the bottle would yield steadily increasing amounts of ketchup out the other end. Not so, my father said, and he recited a ditty that, for me, remains the most concise statement of the fundamental nonlinearity of everyday life: Tomato ketchup in a bottle-None will come and then the lot'll

What does this have to do with the murder rate in Brooklyn? Quite a bit, as it turns out, because in recent years social scientists have started to apply the theory of epidemics to human behavior. The foundational work in this field was done in the early seventies by the economist Thomas Schelling, then at Harvard University, who argued that "white flight" was a tipping-point phenomenon. Since that time, sociologists have actually gone to specific neighborhoods and figured out what the local tipping point is. A racist white neighborhood, for example, might empty out when blacks reach five per cent of the population. A liberal white neighborhood, on the other hand, might not tip until blacks make up forty or fifty per cent. George Galster, of the Urban Institute, in Washington, argues that the same patterns hold for attempts by governments or developers to turn a bad neighborhood around. "You get nothing until you reach the threshold," he says, "then you get boom."

Another researcher, David Rowe, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, uses epidemic theory to explain things like rates of sexual intercourse among teen-agers. If you take a group of thirteen-year-old virgins and follow them throughout their teen-age years, Rowe says, the pattern in which they first have sex will look like an epidemic curve. Non-virginity starts out at a low level, and then, at a certain point, it spreads from the precocious to the others as if it were a virus.

Some of the most fascinating work, however, comes from Jonathan Crane, a sociologist at the University of Illinois. In a 1991 study in the American Journal of Sociology, Crane looked at the effect the number of role models in a community-the professionals, managers, teachers whom the Census Bureau has defined as "high status"-has on the lives of teen-agers in the same neighborhood. His answer was surprising. He found little difference in teen-pregnancy rates or school-dropout rates in neighborhoods with between forty and five per cent of high-status workers. But when the number of professionals dropped below five per cent, the problems exploded. For black school kids, for example, as the percentage of high- status workers falls just 2.2 percentage points-from 5.6 per cent to 3.4 per cent-dropout rates more than double. At the same tipping point, the rates of childbearing for teen-age girls-which barely move at all up to that point-nearly double as well.

The point made by both Crane and Rowe is not simply that social problems are contagious-that non-virgins spread sex to virgins and that when neighborhoods decline good kids become infected by the attitudes of dropouts and teen-age mothers. Their point is that teen-age sex and dropping out of school are contagious in the same way that an infectious disease is contagious. Crane's study essentially means that at the five-per-cent tipping point neighborhoods go from relatively functional to wildly dysfunctional virtually overnight. There is no steady decline: a little change has a huge effect. The neighborhoods below the tipping point look like they've been hit by the Ebola virus.

It is possible to read in these case studies a lesson about the fate of modern liberalism. Liberals have been powerless in recent years to counter the argument that their policy prescriptions don't work. A program that spends, say, an extra thousand dollars to educate inner-city kids gets cut by Congress because it doesn't raise reading scores. But if reading problems are nonlinear the failure of the program doesn't mean-as conservatives might argue-that spending extra money on inner-city kids is wasted. It may mean that we need to spend even more money on these kids so that we can hit their tipping point. Hence liberalism's crisis. Can you imagine explaining the link between tipping points and big government to Newt Gingrich? Epidemic theory, George Galster says, "greatly complicates the execution of public policy. . . . You work, and you work, and you work, and if you haven't quite reached the threshold you don't seem to get any payoff. That's a very tough situation to sustain politically."

At the same time, tipping points give the lie to conservative policies of benign neglect. In New York City, for example, one round of cuts in, say, subway maintenance is justified with the observation that the previous round of cuts didn't seem to have any adverse consequences. But that's small comfort. With epidemic problems, as with ketchup, nothing comes and then the lot'll.

Epidemic theory, in other words, should change the way we think about whether and why social programs work. Now for the critical question: Should it change the way we think about violent crime as well? This is what a few epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, suggested thirteen years ago, and at the time no one took them particularly seriously. "There was just a small group of us in an old converted bathroom in the sub- subbasement of Building Three at C.D.C.," Mark L. Rosenberg, who heads the Centers' violence group today, says. "Even within C.D.C., we were viewed as a fringe group. We had seven people and our budget was two hundred thousand dollars. People were very skeptical." But that was before Rosenberg's group began looking at things like suicide and gunshot wounds in ways that had never quite occurred to anyone else. Today, bringing epidemiological techniques to bear on violence is one of the hottest ideas in criminal research. "We've got a hundred and ten people and a budget of twenty-two million dollars," Rosenberg says. "There is interest in this all around the world now."

The public-health approach to crime doesn't hold that all crime acts like infectious disease. Clearly, there are neighborhoods where crime is simply endemic-where the appropriate medical analogy for homicide is not something as volatile as aids but cancer, a disease that singles out its victims steadily and implacably. There are, however, times and places where the epidemic model seems to make perfect sense. In the United States between the early sixties and the early seventies, the homicide rate doubled. In Stockholm between 1950 and 1970, rape went up three hundred per cent, murder and attempted murder went up six hundred per cent, and robberies a thousand per cent. That's not cancer; that's aids.

An even better example is the way that gangs spread guns and violence. "Once crime reaches a certain level, a lot of the gang violence we see is reciprocal," Robert Sampson, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, says. "Acts of violence lead to further acts of violence. You get defensive gun ownership. You get retaliation. There is a nonlinear phenomenon. With a gang shooting, you have a particular act, then a counter-response. It's sort of like an arms race. It can blow up very quickly."

How quickly? Between 1982 and 1992, the number of gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County handled by the L.A.P.D. and the County Sheriff's Department went from a hundred and fifty-eight to six hundred and eighteen. A more interesting number, however, is the proportion of those murders which resulted from drive-by shootings. Between 1979 and 1986, that number fluctuated, according to no particular pattern, between twenty-two and fifty-one: the phenomenon, an epidemiologist would say, was in equilibrium. Then, in 1987, the death toll from drive-bys climbed to fifty-seven, the next year to seventy-one, and the year after that to a hundred and ten; by 1992, it had reached two hundred and eleven. At somewhere between fifty and seventy homicides, the idea of drive-by shootings in L.A. had become epidemic. It tipped. When these results were published last fall in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the paper was entitled "The Epidemic of Gang-Related Homicides in Los Angeles County from 1979 Through 1994." The choice of the word "epidemic" was not metaphorical. "If this were a disease," H. Range Hutson, the physician who was the leading author on the study, says, "you would see the government rushing down here to assess what infectious organism is causing all these injuries and deaths."

Some of the best new ideas in preventing violence borrow heavily from the principles of epidemic theory. Take, for example, the so-called "broken window" hypothesis that has been used around the country as the justification for cracking down on "quality of life" crimes like public urination and drinking. In a famous experiment conducted twenty-seven years ago by the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, a car was parked on a street in Palo Alto, where it sat untouched for a week. At the same time, Zimbardo had an identical car parked in a roughly comparable neighborhood in the Bronx, only in this case the license plates were removed and the hood was propped open. Within a day, it was stripped. Then, in a final twist, Zimbardo smashed one of the Palo Alto car's windows with a sledgehammer. Within a few hours, that car, too, was destroyed. Zimbardo's point was that disorder invites even more disorder-that a small deviation from the norm can set into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality. The broken window was the tipping point.

The broken-window hypothesis was the inspiration for the cleanup of the subway system conducted by the New York City Transit Authority in the late eighties and early nineties. Why was the Transit Authority so intent on removing graffiti from every car and cracking down on the people who leaped over turnstiles without paying? Because those two "trivial" problems were thought to be tipping points-broken windows-that invited far more serious crimes. It is worth noting that not only did this strategy seem to work-since 1990, felonies have fallen more than fifty per cent-but one of its architects was the then chief of the Transit Police, William Bratton, who was later to take his ideas about preventing crime to the city as a whole when he became head of the New York Police Department.

Which brings us to North Brooklyn and the Seventy- fifth Precinct. In the Seven-Five, there are now slightly more officers than before. They stop more cars. They confiscate more guns. They chase away more street-corner loiterers. They shut down more drug markets. They have made a series of what seem, when measured against the extraordinary decline in murders, to be small changes. But it is the nature of nonlinear phenomena that sometimes the most modest of changes can bring about enormous effects. What happened to the murder rate may not be such a mystery in the end. Perhaps what William Bratton and Inspector Mezzadri have done is the equivalent of repairing the broken window or preventing that critical ten or fifteen thousand new H.I.V. infections. Perhaps Brooklyn-and with it New York City-has tipped.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

2005-02-05T19:01:00.000-08:00

The Tipping Point : How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000)

Author Info:
Malcolm Gladwell
1963-

The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to
understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter,
the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the
phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday
life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just
like viruses do.

...

[T]hree characteristics--one contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and
three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment--are the...three principles that
define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter. Of the
three, the third trait--the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment--is the most
important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest
insight into why modern change happens the way it does. The name given to that one dramatic
moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.
-Malcolm Gladwell, Introduction to The Tipping Point

Though this epidemic metaphor of Malcolm Gladwell's is interesting and offers a new, and somewhat helpful, perspective for considering human behavior, it is ultimately pretty circular and of rather severely limited utility. Similarly, though much of what Gladwell has to say in the book is fresh and on first glance exciting, upon further consideration many of his claims fall flat. In particular, his seeming desire to offer a third way of looking at human behavior, neither conservative, with its emphasis on morality, nor liberal, with its emphasis on material conditions, fails miserably as one section after another of the book confirms conservative dogma.

Gladwell's basic argument, deficient analysis, and unintentional confirmation of conservatism are evident in his discussion of how New York City broke its crime epidemic. He first charts the explosive growth of crime in the City and the nearly primitive conditions it created, culminating in the Berhard Goetz incident, with an otherwise model citizen forced to take the law into his own hands and receiving the approval of a jury for his action. By 1992 there were 2,154 murders and over 600,000 serious crimes in one year in New York City. But then crime begin to fall precipitously, with murder falling by 60+ percent and all serious crime by over 50%. The epidemic had hit one of Gladwell's Tipping Points, but why ?

Gladwell hypothesizes that there are basically three rules which govern these idea epidemics :

* The Law of the Few : that a few key individuals are generally responsible for most of the spread
of the idea.

* The Stickiness Factor : "...that there are specific ways of making a contagious message
memorable..."

* The Power of Context : "that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than
they may seem."

He argues that the drop in crime is especially a result of the Power of Context, and in particular of the imposition of "Broken Windows Policing." The basic concept here (first outlined by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, in a 1982 piece for Atlantic Monthly) is that when people live in neighborhoods where even the windows are broken, they receive the implicit message that societal constraints have ceased to function. In this situation they will naturally feel less constrained themselves, with the likelihood that crime will be more prevalent. Thus, on the New York City Subways, where cars were coated with graffiti, had no heat or air conditioning and where fare dodging was prevalent, a general sense of lawlessness took over and fed a rising tide of crime.

David Gunn, head of the New York City Transit System, hired George Kelling and put Wilson and Kelling's theory to the test. They first attacked the graffiti problem, eventually reaching a point where trains weren't allowed to ride the line if they had been tagged. Several years later, William Bratton was hired as head of the transit police and the department went after fare dodgers with a vengeance, frequently finding that those they arrested had other outstanding violations and crimes to their names. Soon, not just these crimes, but all crime on the transit system began to plummet.

Gladwell correctly notes that by changing several relatively minor facets of their law enforcement strategy the Transit system reaped huge rewards. However, his overall argument has several weaknesses. It helps to describe what happened, but isn't terribly useful for understanding what happened. First, while these changes were important, the drop in crime in New York City, and nationwide, also coincided with a twenty year economic boom, natural aging of the population, "three strikes and your out" legislation, a massive prison building effort, and several well publicized police brutality cases in which jurors refused to convict the officers. It is impossible to scientifically assign responsibility to each of these diverse elements and say, factor X caused 40% of the drop, or whatever. We certainly can't look at this complex series of events and say, as Gladwell does because he wants his idea to have social utility : James Q. Wilson, George L. Kelling, Rudy Guliani, David Gunn, and William Bratton pushed the crime epidemic to the Tipping Point by resorting to Broken Window Policing. Gladwell's problem here is the same as that which has plagued intellectuals, and through them the rest of us, since time immemorial, the belief that a few people with a good idea can effect precise changes on the rest of the population. Life just doesn't work that way (see Orrin's review of The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek).

Second, Gladwell's thesis is not testable. In order to show that Broken Window Policing caused the epidemic to tip, you would have to find a city with similar problems and attempt it as the only solution. But, of course, a city in the grip of such a reign of crime is hardly likely to settle for such a minimalist response. The fact that the entire nation has simultaneously experienced a decline in crime, though New York's has probably been the most dramatic, also serves to cast doubt on his premise.

Meanwhile, Gladwell is so intent on appearing iconoclastic and to differentiate himself and his theories from classical categories of liberalism and conservatism that he puts a spin on his notions that the facts do not bear out. Thus, in his analysis of why Broken Windows Policing worked, he says that the Power of Context suggests :

...that the criminal--far from being someone who acts for fundamental, intrinsic reasons and who
lives in his own world--is actually someone acutely sensitive to his environment, who is alert to all
kinds of cues, and who is prompted to commit crimes based on his perception of the world around
him. That is an incredibly radical--and in some sense unbelievable--idea. The Power of Context is
an environmental idea. It says that behavior is a function of social context. ... Guliani and
Bratton--far from being conservatives, as they are commonly identified--actually represent on the
question of crime the most extreme liberal position imaginable, a position so extreme that it is
almost impossible to accept.

This statement is either disingenuous or ignorant. Liberals and conservatives both argue that the social environment is the key to human behavior, but are divided over whether the economic environment (liberals) or the moral environment (conservatives) is more important. As mentioned earlier, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that these have been economic boom times, so the liberals should be able to claim at least a little vindication, that rising incomes have reduced crime. However, let us accept Gladwell's position for a moment, that Broken Windows Policing is the single most important factor--the Tipping Point. It is also, indisputably, a matter of changing the moral environment, As such it was propounded by conservatives, implemented by conservatives, and today--when, despite its manifest success, it is under attack from the Left because it is supposedly too absolutist and brutal--is defended almost exclusively by conservatives.

It is at least arguable that Broken Windows Policing demonstrates that the entire conservative attack on Modernity is absolutely correct. The conservative critique, in its simplest most classical form, maintains that the moral relativism which intellectual elites have foisted upon Western Civilization over the last century or more has led to a steady decline in the quality of that civilization. The debilitation, delegitimization, and even destruction of Judeo-Christian morality and of various social institutions has led to any number of social pathologies, not least among them the extraordinarily high crime rates in the West. Liberalism, with its modern basis in Marxist materialism, places its emphasis
on Man's financial well being. It assumes that all of society's problems are a result of too low
standards of living and too great income disparities. But the 20th Century effectively disproved their
case. Despite the greatest rise in standards of living in human history, social behavior, rather than
improving, declined to Hobbesian levels. Obviously wealth has fairly little to do with it.

The standard liberal response to crime has always been to spend more money. Raise welfare payments, increase the minimum wage, hire more cops, fund midnight basketball, etc., etc., etc.... Conservatives have always insisted on law and order. As James Q. Wilson has said of Broken Windows Policing :

...the most important requirement is to think that to maintain order in precarious situations is a vital
job.

Why then does Gladwell think that conservatives would be surprised when imposing order leads to huge social benefits ? Liberals love to scoff at the conservative "slippery slope" argument; the example of New York City would seem to prove it, by reversing the process. Take even the most minor seeming moral transgressions seriously and soon the major ones will be effected too. Guliani and Bratton don't represent extreme liberalism; they represent entirely traditional conservatism

Another section of the book, where Gladwell tries to be more specific about why things tip, ends up being unintentionally humorous. He says that one of the things that makes a fad take hold is the "stickiness" of the idea behind it. He discusses this stickiness factor in the context of children's television. He starts with Sesame Street, which was apparently developed to conform to every single inane child rearing and educational theory that had been dreamed up at the time of its creation. The show was then rigorously test marketed to kids to see of the theories worked. It will come as no surprise that they turned out to be mostly wrong. For instance, in the initial versions they segregated humans from the Muppets, having been told that children could not separate fantasy from reality. This would surely have been news to Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Stan Lee. So then they showed the program to kids and found that they only paid attention when the Muppets were on screen and completely ignored the segments with live actors. Duh? Or take the creators of Blue's Clues, who had the revolutionary insight that they could just take one episode of the show and then broadcast it every day for a week, because--are you ready for this ?--kids don't mind repetition. In fact, they like it and learn better from it. Have any of these people ever had a kid ? Do you know a kid who doesn't want to read the same book over and over and over again? Here again, this cutting edge, revolutionary, radical, whatever you care to call it, social science merely proves that the traditional intuition of conservatives is right : we've done things the same way for thousands of years because they work, and no half-baked theories dreamed up by a bunch of pointy headed intellectuals in a lab are likely to improve upon them.

But these objections to the Tipping Point idea pale in comparison to its most fundamental problem. As a general matter Gladwell's Tipping Point idea, like Darwin's idea of Evolution, is grounded more in literary metaphor than in science. If you ask, as Gladwell does, why Hush Puppies suddenly became fashionable again after years of declining or stagnant sales, the answer must be that they hit a Tipping Point. If you ask why they stayed unpopular for so long, the answer must be there were no Tipping Points during that time. Why did the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood become a best seller, while Rebecca Wells's previous books hadn't, or other (better) novels didn't ? One hit a Tipping Point, the others didn't. But this doesn't really add anything to our understanding of the human behavior and desires that fueled the crazes nor does it help us to determine how to tip other products and processes in the future. Gladwell's argument, like all pseudoscience, is a closed loop--if something tips then it hit a Tipping Point; if it doesn't, then it didn't. Rather than explaining what happened, the metaphor, once accepted, stifles intelligent analysis. The fact that something happened comes to seem a sufficient explanation and a justification for saying that the process occurred; the actual elements of this theoretical process need never be demonstrated, nor tested; it's as if the circular beauty of the metaphor precludes questioning its validity.

One final quarrel, the big attention grabbing application of his ideas here is that since most cigarette smokers get hooked as youths, and the young seem to react with predictable rebelliousness to adult messages that smoking is dangerous, Gladwell proposes a simple reduction in the nicotine levels of cigarettes as a way of preventing addiction. This is a fine, predictably technocratic, remedy. But as the book has accidentally shown, old-fashioned absolutist morality seems to work best. Rather than attempting a solution which accepts the teenagers law breaking, how about this ? Kids seem to start smoking mostly because they think it makes them cool. But what is the pinnacle of cool for teenagers ? Driving a car. Why not just deny a drivers license to anyone who gets caught smoking before they are 21. I'm just not seeing a whole lot of kids who are willing to act the hoodlum at the cost of riding Shank's mare, are you?
I don't mean to dismiss the book out of hand. The Tipping Point metaphor is thought provoking and there's a lot of other interesting stuff here. Just don't take the premise too seriously; it's more an artistic tool than a scientific theory.

(Reviewed:06-May-01)

THE LONG BOOM by Peter Schwarz (Dissection)

2005-01-16T13:31:00.000-08:00

The Long Boom by Peter Schwartz

The really LB began in the 19^th century but was disrupted by war and Depression.

The LB was reenergized in the 1980s starting with Reagan, Thatcher and the PC.

IBM vs. MSFT shows openness good even though now MSFT on wrong side of openness

Same with msft vs apple; also at the same time you had the breakup of ATT; so more openness in the telcom industry

Reorganizing work through outsourcing and telecommuting and freelancing

Reorganizing finance through computers and telecom – faster, easier, more information flow

Then you have increasing productivity and globalization

We need to have 4 to 6 percent global growth to raise up the global living standards.

Globalization may seem like Americanization, but India and China will end that perception

Malls may become more and more like entertainment complexes

Global economy made of clusters around cities and regions rather than countries

PAGE 60…really sees this in china

Global governance -- via rule setting institutions – rather than global government

THE NEW AMERICAN IDEOLOGY:

Center of civilization has continued to move west from Rome to London to the West Coast – and the ideology out there is more utilitarian than Left or Right – now embodied by Ahnuld…libertarian with a small L …whenever possible, pull govt out and let people make own choices –but there are some services only govt can provide ..inclusive, high-tech and global minded…send knowledge workers out into the Third World or The Gap .. we must be a learning society …

European Renaissance

EU is an example of the third way where you are productive and global but also make sure no one gets left behind --- but lets see what happens why demographics and slow growth impair the welfare state.

Europeans my identify more with city than with county

100

Latin America

Cathotic background vs protestant background

Good record of melding various cultures and races

Social Tranistion Fund, taxes on business to pay for dislocated workers

Global capital gains taxes to fund global equity fund for the poor

Microloans—all this to pave the way for more private DFI

ASIA

Need the rule of two to have a healthy system or even threes 60-30-10 in business or in UK politics

Also need transparency in business and government

Without these, you will not have self-correcting, adaptive systems and you get statis and lots of corruption= financial crisis in Asia in the late 1990s.

Good at incremental innovation; take good products and make them beter

Aging of Japan may lead to a more static society

Chinese are great networkers, look at Greater China; real self starters and self organizers

But lots of family based business which leads to corruption and lousy managers

GLOBAL CHALLENGES

Not letting Russia fail

Help ME get better, don’t let modernization be equated with Westernization

Africa must move up production chain, maybe in fashion and textiles

ENGINES OF THE 21^st CENTURY

Hydrogen economy and green nukes; you don’t want crisis over oil, perhaps in the Caspian area

Micro generators – also a more decentralized infrastructure, better vs terrorism—using fuel cells; and let your car help power your home

Tell China to tleapfrog to new technologies and abandon old plants in exchange for investment in those technologies

Plus biotechnology and nanotechnology

The New Global Middle Class

Emergence of Woman – ME backlash

KEY CONCEPTS

1) Go Global: you are competing with everyone

2) Open Up: free flows of capital, labor, information

3) Let Go: let go of the past and trust people to make decisions

4) Grow more: need faster growth to save the world

5) Always Adapt

6) Keep Learning: like Singapore

7) Value innovation and change

8) Get Connected

9) Be Inclusive

10) Stay Connected

Message to new President

1) Help workers on the losing to adapt and feel more secure

2) Charter schools for more competition
Large investment in basic research

Turkey Unveiled (review) !

2005-01-13T13:01:00.000-08:00

After the Ottoman Empire
Husband-and-wife journalists explore the culture and politics of contemporary Turkey.

Related Link First Chapter: 'Turkey Unveiled'

By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

TURKEY UNVEILED
A History of Modern Turkey.
By Nicole Pope and Hugh Pope.
Illustrated. 373 pp. Woodstock, N.Y.:
The Overlook Press. $29.95.

urkey, a sprawling land without oil but with plenty of water and military discipline, gives shape to the post-cold-war Middle East. Its fluid hybrid regime -- whereby the military and a democratically elected Parliament patrol each other -- will probably outlast both the suffocating dictatorships of neighboring Arab states and the paper democracies of Russia and the developing world. Its new military alliance with Israel has affected the strategic map of the Middle East to the same degree that the Chinese-Soviet split affected Asia. Its economy is larger than the economies of the oil giants Iran and Saudi Arabia. The growing strength of both its military and its Islamists could spur the formation of a new kind of caliphate. Yet, like a familiar old uncle from whom one can always beg a favor, Turkey is often overlooked by the West.

''A new generation of Turks has a wide general knowledge of English; vivacious Turkish television shows have found audiences throughout the Middle East. Millions of Turks now work abroad,'' Nicole Pope and Hugh Pope report in ''Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey.'' They also observe that ''there has been a multiplication of speakers of Turkish languages in diplomatic get-togethers'' since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of several Turkic republics to the south of Russia.

Two journalists based in Istanbul, the Popes have written a deeply revealing guide to modern Turkish culture and politics that fills a wide gap in general knowledge. It is also a brave and at times an ironic book. The authors show how Turkey's bad human rights record has its antecedents in Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's authoritarianism; how Turkish democracy played a role in aggravating the Cyprus problem; how Kenan Evren, the stern-faced general who led the 1980 coup, left Turkey in much better shape than he found it, setting the stage for the economic boom of the 80's and 90's; and how the greatness of Turgut Ozal, Turkey's leader through most of the 1980's, was in a way inseparable from his corruption.

The book begins a bit unsteadily, with a fast and somewhat undigested encyclopedia-style treatment of Turkey's history until the death throes of the Ottoman Empire. By the time the Popes reach World War I, however, they settle down and begin enlightening the reader on every page.

The finest section of this book deals with the 1915 Turkish massacres of Armenians. With an Allied fleet bombarding the Dardanelles in the west, Turkey open to Russian attack in the east, Christian Armenians in the Turkish Army deserting to the Russian side while Armenians in the Caucasus were organizing anti-Turkish militias, the ''Young Turk'' rulers began rounding up, deporting, starving and slaughtering Armenian civilians. ''The massacres that occurred may often seem local, but the pattern is repeated so often as to seem organized,'' the Popes write. They have laid out a story that both preserves the specifics of mass slaughter while also suggesting how what happened was in a separate category from the Nazi Holocaust.

But whereas the German authorities have formally confronted the Holocaust, the Armenian tragedy is a ghost that the Turkish state has yet to face up to. This is partly because of the Turkish military's strict limitation on democracy, which results from its deep-seated insecurity -- an insecurity that goes back to World War I and the way the Ottoman Empire was humiliated and carved up by the Allies.

Ataturk was a World War I hero who forged a disciplined, modern state out of the chaos of the Ottoman Empire's destruction. He Westernized Turkey -- giving it a Western calendar and alphabet, and a secular ruling class -- but he never truly democratized it. Because the military's hierarchical, command culture stifles civilian responsibility, the authors note, Turkish parliamentarians have ''never really developed the concept of teamwork central to party politics.'' That is why Turkish politics is essentially a passionate drama of personal rivalries, often unconnected to policy differences. Such irresponsibility both permits and forces the generals to act as paternalistic pashas.

The generals deal harshly with dissent. Torture and repression in Turkey today, the Popes observe, differ little from the way Ataturk brutally suppressed a Kurdish-Islamic revolt in the 1920's. The pigheaded attitude toward Kurdish rights that persists in Turkish military circles, like the failure to own up to the truth about the Armenian massacres, rests on the belief that Western pressure on behalf of minorities is a ruse to destabilize Turkey (because championing minority rights was how European governments tried to dismember the Ottoman Empire).

Turkey's first real experiment with democracy took place in 1950, when Adnan Menderes, a wealthy landowner, was chosen Prime Minister in an election that marked the end of virtual one-party rule. Menderes liberalized the economy and returned some rights to religious Turks after Ataturk's fierce secularization. But when inflation got out of control and criticism of him mounted, Menderes muzzled the press and interfered with the judiciary. In 1960 the military intervened; Menderes was hanged the following year.

Turkey's joining NATO in 1952 played a role in the tragedy. NATO membership had brought new equipment and responsibilities to young Turkish officers, but also allowed them to compare their life styles with those of European and American soldiers just as Turkish living standards were plummeting. It was these younger officers who toppled Menderes -- a point to consider given the way East European militaries are now being incorporated into NATO while the economies and parliamentary institutions in those countries remain fragile.

The experiment with democracy, the Popes say, also brought ''cheap nationalist politics'' and ''distorted media coverage'' to the situation in Cyprus, which worsened as Turkish politicians outdid one another in their nationalism and as the military took advantage of weak parliamentary coalitions to intimidate prime ministers. While the military was at least willing to consider handing back some territory to Greek Cypriots after Turkey's 1974 invasion of the island, nationalist elements in the governing coalition at the time were not.

The authors make the unimpeachable case that the military coup of 1980 was both necessary and a long time coming. In fact, had General Evren not acted, he would, by any rational standard, have been guilty of irresponsibility. By the late 1970's, Turkish politics was a Grand Guignol of short-lived minority coalitions, and the country -- especially on the university campuses -- had become a vast battle zone for armed right- and left-wing militants and for Shiites and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had just come to power in neighboring Iran, suggested publicly that Turkey too needed an Islamic revolution.

When on Sept. 12, 1980, Evren and the other generals finally took power in the ''Coup in Velvet Boots,'' as it was known -- because nobody was killed -- the country breathed a deep sigh of relief. The number of political killings dropped dramatically, the Popes write, ''as if a referee had blown a whistle.'' Evren used his time in office to campaign for women's rights (he legalized abortion) and to attack Islamic extremists, whom he called bigots. The Popes conclude that ''the showy civilian Turgut Ozal was to take . . . credit for building the so-called Turkish economic miracle of the 1980's. But the fact remains that the ground was cleared and guarded by Evren.''

Ozal was a religious Muslim who embraced Western consumer culture and social mobility, believing it no crime to be nouveau riche. He was a bundle of energy who threw open the gates of Turkey's state-controlled economy. He wanted his countrymen to be entrepreneurs, not peasants and military officers, and if corruption arose, that was part of the process. The result was, in the Popes' words, a ''hell-for-leather'' economic dynamism: shopping malls, glossy magazines and business enterprises sprang up, and Turkish factories began to produce world-class products.

Turkey is now more prosperous and complex than ever, its Islamic movement tempered by experience in parliamentary politics and by the country's growing sophistication. Nevertheless, Turkish governments remain unstable and party leaders are as irresponsible as ever. Thus the military continues to control macropolitics. Yet, as the Popes wisely conclude, it is the society's ''convergence with the rest of the world'' that will keep Turkey stable.

Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of ''The Ends of the Earth.''

Terror and Liberalism by Gary Rosen (review) !

2005-01-13T11:21:00.000-08:00

ril 13, 2003

What Would Woodrow Wilson Do?
By Gary Rosen

TERROR AND LIBERALISM
By Paul Berman.
214 pp. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. $21.

IN the final chapter of his book ''A Tale of Two Utopias'' (1996), Paul Berman laid out the rival historical claims of Francis Fukuyama and André Glucksmann, big thinkers with very different notions of what the cold war's end would bring. Fukuyama, the optimistic American, looked forward, in his famous thesis about ''the end of history,'' to the slow, sure spread of liberal democracy. Glucksmann, a Frenchman and chastened ex-Maoist, saw dark, even monstrous possibilities ahead in the likely reaction to the free world's triumph. Berman himself split the difference: ''Since I am a critic and not a philosopher, I see no reason not to say that both messages seem true enough.''

Though more of a gloomy Glucksmannite these days -- who isn't? -- Berman has not given up on the idea of a globe-sweeping democratic revolution. What has changed, as his new book attests, is his frame of mind. No longer content to sit back and watch the world-historical drama unfold on its own, he has exchanged his critic's pen -- employed with distinction over the years in the pages of this review and at magazines like The New Yorker, The New Republic and Dissent (where he sits on the editorial board) -- for the more personal, engaged style of an advocate.

In the raging debate over what to do about Islamism and Iraq, Berman has been that rarest of creatures, a banner-waving liberal interventionist, eager to see the United States stand, as he writes here, ''for the freedom of others.'' ''Terror and Liberalism'' is his manifesto -- an eloquent, strangely quixotic, frustratingly uneven effort to chart a course between right-wing ''realists,'' with their cold calculations of national interest, and left-wing ''anti-imperialists,'' who recoil at their country's every international move. Neoconservatives occupy a similar ideological terrain, but, as Berman himself notes, his approach is too ''drippy'' for membership in that camp. Call his position Wolfowitz for lefties, or (to borrow an apt Woody Allen quip) a severe case of Dissentary.

Berman is reluctant to describe the present crisis as a ''clash of civilizations.'' Samuel Huntington (who popularized the phrase) may have been prescient when he noticed, a decade ago, that ''bloody borders'' marked every point of contact between Muslim and non-Muslim peoples, but Islam itself, in Berman's view, explains only part of the problem. The Middle East's tyrants, terrorists and raving ayatollahs owe their nastiest qualities less to their own traditions, he believes, than to ours. They are, in a word, totalitarians.

Though hardly alone since Sept. 11 in making this claim, Berman is one of the few commentators who haven't used the label simply as an epithet. He wants us to see Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein -- not to mention such affiliated villains as the Taliban, Hezbollah and Hamas -- in a new light, as heirs to a mode of thought handed down by the Bolsheviks, fascists and Nazis, and anticipated in the words and deeds of Saint-Just, Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov and an assortment of bomb-throwing anarchists. Left or right, Berman argues, liberalism's sworn foes have always shared the same ideal -- ''submission,'' ''the one, instead of the many,'' ''the total state, the total doctrine, the total movement'' -- and, upon encountering intransigent reality, have always brought in their wake the same bloody result: ''a cult of death.''

Does the totalitarian shoe fit? Berman makes a compelling case, particularly with regard to the Islamists, who have obligingly practiced the ''politics of slaughter'' everywhere they have appeared. From Khomeini's ''human wave'' attacks in the Iran-Iraq war, to the devastation wrought by the Algerian and Sudanese civil wars, to the suicide missions of ''holy martyrs'' in the Middle East, the United States and elsewhere, the toll in human lives has been in the millions -- mass death on a scale that would have made Hitler or Stalin proud. As for doctrine, Berman offers a long, subtle exegesis of the work of Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), the chief ideologist of the Islamist movement. Qutb emerges as a thinker of sinister depths, convinced that the modern West, and those Muslim societies influenced by it, suffer from a ''hideous schizophrenia,'' brought on by the separation of civil and religious authority. Qutb's solution to the anomie and alienation? Jihad by an Islamic ''vanguard'' to restore what should never have been sundered.

Against this ominous backdrop, Berman rightly cheers the American rout of the Taliban, seeing it as a promising start to the sort of idealistic, antitotalitarian war that he hopes Washington will continue to wage. In Afghanistan, he writes, ''the scenes of victory were plainly scenes of liberation'' -- women flocking to schools, men shedding their ''hated beards,'' movies and music back in the public square -- and the country found itself with a leader who was neither a warlord nor a mullah but, wonder of wonders, a ''man with

democratic aspirations.'' For this, and against a chorus of liberal critics, Berman gives due credit to President Bush, but he worries (with good reason) about the limits of the administration's plans for securing Afghanistan's fragile achievement. Looking ahead, he takes Bush to task for failing to make democracy the centerpiece of his case for what Berman matter-of-factly calls ''the next stage of the war, in Iraq.''

That war is now a fact, of course, as Berman recognized it might be while writing his book. The great virtue of his account is to lay bare just what sort of evil the United States has chosen to confront. As he shows, Baath ideology is a noxious totalitarian brew -- a mix of mystical pan-Arabism, Soviet-style economic and political principles, and violent anti-Semitism, with a cult of the leader thrown in for good measure. Nor can anyone doubt Saddam Hussein's character. His rule in Iraq has been, as Berman observes, ''irrational, paranoid, murderous, grandiose and demagogic,'' replete with serial atrocities and aggressions.

Nucleaer Terrorism by Graham Allison (review)

2005-01-13T11:07:00.001-08:00

September 5, 2004

Counting Down to the New Armageddon
By James Hoge

NUCLEAR TERRORISM
The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.
By Graham Allison.
263 pp. Times Books/
Henry Holt & Company. $24.

Some experts think a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons is already unstoppable. Allison disagrees -- up to a point. He argues that prevention is still possible, and he gives the Bush administration some credit for several post-9/11 initiatives meant to tighten the security of nuclear weapons and material. However, he calls for far bolder measures, more money and forceful American leadership to improve what is at present rather lax international cooperation. His bottom line is blunt: anything less will make nuclear terrorism inevitable.
Allison blames both the White House and the Congress for falling short of meeting the challenge. To take one example, since 9/11 the rate of funding has hardly changed for the Nunn-Lugar program, which was established to destroy or secure Russia's enormous stockpile of fissile material and nuclear weapons. Much remains to be done. Of special concern is Russia's large supply of suitcase-size nuclear bombs, which terrorists could smuggle into the United States in cargo containers or as airline baggage. The safeguards on these weapons are loose at best. (In 1997, Russia acknowledged that 84 of some 132 such weapons were missing.)
At present, it will take 13 years, in Allison's estimation, to secure Russia's fissile material. Allison's position, adopted by the Kerry campaign, is to spend whatever dollars are necessary to complete the job in four years, though achieving this objective would also require elimination of Congressionally imposed impediments to Nunn-Lugar and overcoming Russian resistance to intrusion into their facilities.
We face many vulnerabilities -- limited intelligence of the terrorists' plans; poorly protected ports, borders and nuclear power plants. But the most urgent danger is that terrorists could acquire the fissile material with which to construct a nuclear weapon in a relatively short period of time. Russia presents the greatest problem; 90 percent of all existing fissile material outside the United States is stored within the former Soviet Union. Still, it's not the only region we need to focus on. At least 32 countries possess weapons-grade fissile material.
Allison would round up all fissile material and ban the creation of any more. This is a daunting task. Allison himself observes that there are some 200 locations around the world where nuclear weapons or fissile material could be acquired, and he pinpoints the most dangerous -- Russia because of its huge supplies, shaky safeguards and extensive corruption; Pakistan because of its indiscriminate spreading of nuclear know-how and equipment; North Korea because of its history of selling missile systems and its apparent nuclear development program; and lastly, the research reactors (some 20-odd) with significant quantities of bomb-grade uranium located in developing countries.
Allison's other remedies -- like imposing intrusive nuclear power plant inspections and sanctioning violators -- may also prove difficult to implement in the real world of suspicious governments and corrupt officials. Because the United States is widely viewed with hostility these days, it may not be able to marshal the international support needed to shut down black markets or block the emergence of new nuclear weapons states. And then there is the question of money. Governments are reluctant to spend lavishly on prospective threats when tax-conscious citizens have not yet experienced any consequences.
As a champion of the idea that nuclear terrorism is preventable, Allison emphasizes the elements of an offense -- improved intelligence, tighter treaties, more transparency and intrusion. But a stronger homeland defense is also needed in case prevention by offense fails. And currently, homeland security is getting short shrift. For the 2005 budget, Congress has allotted $7.6 billion to improve the security of military bases but only $2.6 billion to protect the nation's vital infrastructure. Within the Department of Defense, $10 billion is spent annually on missile defense, compared with only a few billion on all other counterproliferation programs.
Homeland security becomes an even higher priority if one broadens one's thinking about the potential damage from nonnuclear weapons to include more than simply the number who would die. Allison is less concerned with biological and chemical weapons and so-called dirty bombs because they kill in the thousands, not millions. But these unconventional arms can still cause mass disruption; a few anthrax incidents, after all, virtually shut down the Congress. The release of pathogens in a public space, or a biological attack on the food supply system, or a dirty bomb set off in a seaport could have enormous economic consequences. Large-scale government efforts are needed to minimize the danger of such attacks.
What makes the job of prevention all the more difficult is that the threat of nuclear terrorism is growing at the same time as the need for nuclear-generated electricity. Allison points out that all signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty are permitted to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium to make fuel for peaceful power reactors, provided they declare what they are doing and submit to periodic inspections. In other words, states can come to the brink of nuclear weapons capability without explicitly violating the treaty. Then, without penalty, they can withdraw from the treaty and turn enriched uranium or plutonium into bombs.
This is a loophole that both Iran and North Korea have sought to take advantage of. Allison and other experts argue that the United States should not discard the treaty but take the lead in fixing it. Their preferred solution is to distinguish ''fuel cycle'' states from ''user states.'' Those states where fuel-producing facilities already exist would provide enriched fuel to other states that wish to generate electricity from nuclear reactors. Coupling this with stiffer inspection provisions and penalties for withdrawal from the treaty would return the nonproliferation treaty to an important (if limited) role in countering proliferation.
Nuclear dangers come in several forms, those that might be mounted by states and those from terrorists that cannot be contained by treaties alone, no matter how strict. Allison covers all the potential eventualities but might have been clearer in setting priorities, since resources are limited. Rogue states, capable of launching nuclear-tipped missiles, may ultimately be a threat. But the evidence indicates that the danger currently lies elsewhere. The urgent threat is nuclear terrorism, and funds need to be freed up to fill the considerable holes remaining in our counterterrorism programs.
Allison's comprehensive but accessible treatment of this vital subject is a major contribution to public understanding. In turn, an informed public could spur the government to complete the counterterrorism agenda. Only then, as Allison argues, will nuclear terror against America prove preventable.

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Some Books for 2005 (1)

2005-01-11T18:19:00.000-08:00

1) The Long Boom
2) Why Globalization Works by Martin Wolf
3) Cowboy Capitalism
5) Lexus and the Olive Tree
6) Genome in 23 Chapters
7) The Pentagon's New Map
8) The Age of Genomics
9) Fewer
10) World War One
12) The Persian Puzzle
13) The Tipping Point
14) Faster
15) A Short History of Nearly Everything
16) Linked
17) Sync
18) On Intelligence

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (another review)

2005-01-10T20:32:00.000-08:00

Dominance and Submission
The author dissects the complex reasons behind the lopsided course of global history
By JAMES SHREEVE

GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
The Fates of Human Societies.
By Jared Diamond.
Illustrated. 480 pp. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. $27.50.

n the morning of Nov. 16, 1532, the Incan Emperor Atahualpa greeted the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca. Atahualpa was surrounded by some 80,000 Indian warriors; Pizarro came accompanied only by a ragged group of 168 horsemen and foot soldiers. The meeting was ostensibly friendly, but when Atahualpa scorned an offered Bible, the Spaniards attacked. By nightfall, 7,000 Indians had been slaughtered, without the loss of a single Spanish soldier. (Atahualpa was captured alive and held for an enormous ransom of gold. When the ransom was delivered, Pizarro executed him anyway.) Within a few decades the Incan, Aztec and Mayan civilizations had crumbled, and within a few centuries 95 percent of the native population of two entire continents had disappeared as well.

In ''Guns, Germs, and Steel,'' an ambitious, highly important book, Jared Diamond asks: How did Pizarro come to be at Cajamarca capturing Atahualpa, instead of Atahualpa in Madrid capturing King Charles I? Why, indeed, did Europeans (and especially western Europeans) and Asians always triumph in their historical conquests of other populations? Why weren't Native Americans, Africans and aboriginal Australians instead the ones who enslaved or exterminated the Europeans?

Mr. Diamond, the author of ''The Third Chimpanzee'' and a professor of physiology at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine, should be applauded just for asking this powerfully original question. Perhaps it had never been posed in quite the same terms before because the answer was assumed to be obvious: the Europeans triumphed because they were technologically and politically superior to the indigenous populations they encountered. Left to ferment unexamined, this assumption has led to the corollary belief, most often unconsciously held, that European hegemony had something to do with the Europeans' innate superiority as a people. We may no longer speak of ''the white man's burden'' or proclaim our ''manifest destiny,'' but books are still written and sold (''The Bell Curve,'' to cite a particularly insidious recent example) that seek to reinforce the notion that Europeans got where they are today because they deserved to.

Before analyzing the deeper (and ultimately accidental) causes behind European domination, Mr. Diamond cleverly finesses the biological determinists with another tale of annihilation of one society at the hands of another. In the last two months of 1835, the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, off the coast of New Zealand, were slaughtered and enslaved by a small group of invaders who, like Pizarro's men, used sophisticated weapons and unmitigated brutality to defeat a politically and technologically more primitive native population. In this case, however, the conquerors were some 900 Maori warriors from the New Zealand mainland, 500 miles away. Both the Maori and the Moriori were Polynesians; the Moriori were descendants of a group of Maori who had colonized the Chatham Islands only a few centuries before. Biology was thus clearly not a factor in their separate fates. What lay behind the Maori triumph was instead the very different political and social organization of the two tribes. The invaders were members of a dense population of farmers with a penchant for belligerence fostered by generations spent living in proximity to other equally ferocious tribes, while the Moriori were peaceful hunter-gatherers who had developed elaborate mechanisms for avoiding conflict rather than for profiting from it. These differences in social structure in turn had their roots in the very different natural environments that had produced them.

With this object lesson in mind, the reader is primed to follow Mr. Diamond's dissection of the more complex ''chains of causation'' that led to the decidedly lopsided course of history on a global scale. The proximate cause of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, for instance, was the potent triad of ''guns, germs and steel'' of the book's title. But Pizarro and his compatriots did not enjoy the benefit of steel swords and horses because Spaniards were inherently smarter folk. Mr. Diamond traces these advantages instead to the early development of farming in prehistoric Europe -- a means of food procurement that supported denser populations, which in turn allowed for the establishment of hierarchical societies with centralized governments, strong leaders and social classes such as soldiers and bureaucrats, who, freed from the daily toil of providing food, were available to carry out other functions furthering the interests of the larger society. Lest the headstart on agriculture in Europe be itself mistaken for some kind of witness to European intelligence, Mr. Diamond shows how it in fact originated elsewhere (in the ''Fertile Crescent'' of southwestern Asia), and not through any particular cleverness on the part of the people of that region either. It just happened that the Fertile Crescent offered by far the world's richest assortment and abundance of wild grasses and other plants that lent themselves to a gradual, almost unconscious process of domestication. And it just happened too that the east-to-west orientation of the Eurasian continent meant that regions with similar climate and growing seasons butted up against one another, leading to the faster spread of agriculture there than on the largely north-to-south-oriented continents of the Americas and Africa.

Similar happenstances of prehistory, Mr. Diamond says, underlay the devastating effect of Old World diseases on New World people. Smallpox had arrived in Peru only five years before Pizarro, but so many of the ruling class of the Incas had already succumbed that their entire political leadership was in shambles. Had it been otherwise, the Spaniards would have faced a more powerful emperor with a more unified force behind him. But why did Native Americans fall prey to European germs instead of the other way around? Dense human populations are required for the spread of infectious diseases, but before contact some Native American societies were as densely populated as European ones. Why didn't the conquistadors return to their homeland carrying germs that would wipe out 95 percent of the population of Europe?

Most deadly human pathogens, Mr. Diamond says, actually originated in animal hosts. The domestication of animals emerged in the Fertile Crescent around 8000 B.C. and quickly spread. Europeans had thus been living close to animals for millenniums -- ample time to develop a genetic resistance to diseases harbored in livestock and pets. In contrast, most of the wild animals that might have been suitable for domestication in the New World had been hunted to extinction by the earliest arrivals over the Bering land bridge, 12,500 years before the Europeans arrived. Ironically, if those first Native Americans had been less adept hunters, their descendants might have been able to domesticate the indigenous American horse and camel, providing them with an invisible arsenal of microbes of their own when Columbus made his first fateful landing thousands of years later. The European conquest of the New World would have been far more difficult, and might never have taken place at all.
In similar fashion, Mr. Diamond peels away the causes beneath the causes of other European cultural advantages, as if the humanized world were a gigantic onion and recorded history only its blighted surface. His multilayered analysis, however, should be consumed with a grain or two of salt. Its sheer depth compels him to wear the hats of anthropologist, archeologist, plant geneticist, epidemiologist and social, military and technological historian, as well as his own academic headgear. Mr. Diamond acknowledges that no single person can be an authority in all these fields, yet he mentions most of the other scholars who must have informed his ideas not in the text but only in an addendum. This makes for a smoother exposition, perhaps, but combined with the sometimes didactic style of the narrative, it imparts an unwarranted sense of objectivity, as if everything happened when, where and how in prehistory just as Jared Diamond says it did. Each of the disciplines into which he delves to further his argument is rife with uncertainties, differing interpretations and opposing viewpoints. A closer examination of them would have only strengthened an already formidable work

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (another review)

2005-01-10T20:30:00.000-08:00

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997)

Pulitzer Prize (Nonfiction)

Author Info:
Jared Diamond
1937-

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples'
environments, not because of differences among people themselves.
-Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel

No development of the 20th Century was more unfortunate than the politicization of practically everything. Possibly the worst aspect of this catastrophe is the degree to which science has been corrupted. Robert Bork and Tom Wolfe have written eloquently about the consequences of the politicization of the Law (see Orrin's review) and the Arts (see Orrin's review) respectively, but these are essentially human constructs, so some corruption is inevitable and probably natural. But Science lays claim to a special status as a wholly impartial, rational and incorruptible system, independent of human influence, revealing certain immutable "truths' about the world around us. Since its right to this mantle has gone largely unchallenged, except by a few intrepid philosophers like Karl Popper and those who are easily dismissed as religious fanatics, the modern tendency of scientists to use scientific theories to prove that their own political views are "correct" is especially troubling. Environmentalists and population doomsayers have been doing this for so long and have made so many inaccurate predictions that we are mostly wise to their shenanigans. But there are other, more respected, folks who do much the same thing. One example that comes to mind is Stephen Jay Gould's book, The Mismeasure of Man (see Orrin's review), which even made the Modern Library Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century, wherein he essentially argues that since the validity of phrenology has been disproved, there is no scientific basis for believing there to be any differences between the human races. Similarly, this book by Jared Diamond, which even won the Pulitzer Prize, uses scientific sleight of hand to argue that differences in the respective levels of development between human societies are purely a function of environment. The book is fascinating, entertaining and eminently readable, but it is also either maddeningly obtuse or an exercise in utter intellectual dishonesty, for Diamond's argument is ultimately little more than a house of cards and the bottom card is especially weak.

Diamond, who is an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, has done extensive field work in New Guinea. A native friend named Yali once asked him:

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we
black people had little cargo of our own?

This book attempts to answer Yali's question. But it seeks to answer it in a very specific and seemingly underhanded way, by trying to completely discount biological, intellectual and cultural differences and relying instead on environmental happenstance as the sole cause of this disparity. In one of the strangest moments in the book, Diamond seems to recognize that different ethnic groupings might have genuinely differing intellectual capacities. In fact, he argues that a native of New Guinea must be more intelligent than a contemporary western European because while we sit around watching TV and eating fast food, they are out trying to figure out how to put dinner on the table (or grass mat or whatever). Let's ignore, for the moment, the question of who's smarter. The bizarre thing, given the context of the rest of the book, is that after arguing here that there are such differences, Diamond never even acknowledges the possibility that such differences had any influence on the subsequent development of human societies.

Instead, he argues that societies developed almost exclusively according to their geographical setting and the ease of domestication of the flora and fauna located nearby. At the end of the last Ice Age, some 11,000 or 13,000 years ago, virtually all human societies were at a similar hunter-gatherer stage of development, but from that point on they diverge drastically. It is Diamond's contention that the Fertile Crescent in mesopotamia was endowed with a package of grains and animals which were especially easy to domesticate, along with an ideal climate for doing so. Once humans can grow or raise their own food they settle down and form communities. These are gradually aggregated into nation-states with population densities that allow for divisions of labor and an elite class of intellectuals and so on. These nations eventually became expansionist and began to encounter and conquer the less organized societies. Living in close proximity to animals and grains, the developed societies were exposed to devastating diseases. Their members acquired some level of resistance to such diseases, but when they came into contact with the undeveloped peoples, who had never been exposed to these germs, the diseases were particularly lethal. And as the developed nations continued to progress they became more and more advanced until they had technologies like steam power and guns which gave them a prohibitive advantage in their encounters with the undeveloped world. Thus, the ultimate differences in levels of development between societies are very real, and they allowed the "developed" nations to dominate the "undeveloped", but in Diamond's view the reasons for this all trace their way back to the fact that wheat and cows sprang full blown from Hera's head and dropped into our laps ready to be planted or milked.

Given A, no doubt B and C and D follow nicely. So let's look at this initial point most carefully--what of the idea that certain grains and animals were just sitting there waiting to be used by man? Diamond does a great job of demonstrating that most of the animals and foodstuffs that we have ever domesticated occurred in abundance in only those places where domestication occurred. But wait, that's kind of circular isn't it? At one point, when he's talking about human domestication of dogs, he marvels at the mechanics that allowed us to eventually breed the dachshund after starting with the wolf. But then when he examines why horses were domesticated but zebras were not, he simply avows that it was because zebras are bad tempered. Hello? Are we to believe that the ancient ancestor of the modern horse was essentially tame before we ever put a halter around it's neck? And is it really the case that we couldn't breed zebras for a few generations and get them to the point where they are more manageable? Ditto the cow vs. the buffalo. Diamond makes a huge production out of the fact that while a large variety of large herd animals occur in the Fertile Crescent and the rest of Eurasia, very few such animals occur in places like Australia and the Americas. But what of the buffalo? Shouldn't the fact that there were so few animals to choose from have given the Native Americans even more impetus to domesticate bison? Suppose they are trickier than the Ur-cows that we tamed, shouldn't that superior intellect that Diamond maintains results from more challenging life circumstances have enabled them to tame a more difficult beast? We don't know Diamond's answers to such questions because he necessarily ignores them.

In a letter to The New York Review of Books, refuting some points made in their review of his book, Diamond states that:

Historians' failure to explain history's broadest pattern leaves us with a huge moral gap. In the
absence of convincing explanations, many (most?) people resort, consciously or unconsciously, to
racist assumptions: the conquerors supposedly had superior IQ or culture. That prevalence of racist
theories, as loathsome as they are unsupported, is the strongest reason for studying the long-term
factors behind human history.

Okay, suppose that we grant him that most of us assume racial differences help explain the differing levels of development in different human societies. Suppose we further grant that this supposition is unfounded and pernicious, that it is racist and not simply racialist--racism implies that the more successful culture is superior in some abstract sense, while racialism would merely notice a racial component to the relative success levels of these cultures. Does any of this justify using parlor tricks and shoddy reasoning to try and replace the arguably racist assumptions with totally dubious environmental ones? I suppose you could argue that it is better in societal terms to have our faulty understanding rest on the dicey assumptions which are least hurtful to other people, but this is not science, it is social engineering. We should not grant it the same implicit level of authenticity which we typically allow to scientific theory.
The book is truly fascinating and Diamond's grasp of 13,000 years of human history is really impressive. But his argument is finally just so silly that you have to question either his motives or his own understanding of the material he presents. I'll assume that his motives, though perhaps noble, lead him to propound a dubious scientific theory in order to undermine racially based theories that may or may not be equally weak. This is a book to be read and enjoyed, but with a skeptical eye.

(Reviewed:02-May-00)

GG&S by Jared Diamond (more reviews)

2005-01-10T20:20:00.000-08:00

Review of Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

J. Bradford DeLong
delong@econ.berkeley.edu
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net

November 1999

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton: 0393038912).

I put this book on my website as book-of-the-month a while ago, but I never wrote up why I thought it was worth reading. I think it is very much worth reading: it may well be the best book I read in the 1990s. It is truly a work of complete and total genius.

Let me explain why.

Why is English becoming the default world language? Why did people from Europe conquer the people on the other continents--in the Americas, in Oceana, in Australasia, in Africa, and even in large chunks of Asia. Over all the globe only China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Ethiopia avoided a permanent European conquest that destroyed their previous political regime. (Moreover, Ethiopia was occupied by Italy for five years; Taiwan and Korea were conquered and occupied by Japan; and for the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century Chinese independence was a near-run thing.)

Why? Why did Europeans conquer Peru, Mexico, Ghana, and Australia? Why didn't Incas, Aztecs, Ashanti, or Australians conquer Eurasians. That is the question that Jared Diamond answers--largely successfully--in this book. And his answer can be summed up in one phrase: "seeds, germs, size, and guns." (Note that the answer is not "guns, germs, and steel"--a phrase that is more euphonious but less meaningful.)

Eurasian societies acquired a key advantage relative to other societies because of seeds.

Eurasian societies acquired a key advantage (relative to other societies) in their resistance to germs.

The relatively advantageous biological endowment of Eurasian societies was then reinforced because of the size of Eurasia.

And the relative edge possessed by Europeanguns. societies was then amplified to overwhelming proportions by

Begin with seeds. Over the past twelve thousand years--roughly since the end of the last Ice Age--agriculture has been invented at least six times around the globe: in New Guinea, in China, in the Middle East, in North America, in Mexico, in the Andes, and in all probability in other places as well. But those humans who lived in the Middle East were lucky. The plants they had available to domesticate were the easiest to tame, grew the fastest, and had the largest seeds. Thus Middle Eastern agriculture--based on wheat and its cousins--had the potential to support higher population densities.

Those who invented agriculture in the Middle East were fortunate in another area. Eurasia had lots of large animals, and lots of large animals--aurochs, boar, ancestral sheep and goats, horses--that could be domesticated. Successful domestication of large animals gave a further boost to Middle Eastern productivity, and allowed still higher population densities. Moreover, living in close proximity to animals gave Eurasians both the epidemic diseases that were to devastate the populations of the Americas, Oceana, and Australia when contact came, and the resistance to those diseases.

Technologies invented in the Middle East (and elsewhere in Asia) then diffused over the entire great continent. Moving east or west from the Middle East one encounters roughly similar climates for long distances. Thus a pattern of agricultural technology that was good and productive in the Indus Valley had a good chance of also being useful in (say) Spain. The size of Eurasia meant that there were many different groups of people who could invent new technologies. The long east-west axis of Eurasia meant that invented technologies could then diffuse.

By contrast, technologies invented elsewhere had a difficult time diffusing across oceans, or through ecological barriers within which technologies ceased to be of use. Corn took several thousand years to diffuse from Mexico north across the desert to the Mississippi Valley, in large part because corn selectively-bred for Mexico germinates too early and takes too long to grow for it to be of any use in Missouri. The llama never made it north from the Andes to the Valley of Mexico. The inhabitants of New Guinea and of Australia were on their own, able to draw only on the technologies they could invent by themselves. Because their population was low, and because one head was less than two, the growth of their technology was low.

Africa as well found itself largely on its own as far as technological development was concerned. Middle Eastern agriculture did very well on the north coast of Africa, but could not diffuse across the Sahara desert--and would have been of little use had it done so, for temperate agriculture does not flourish near the equator. (the failure of Indian Ocean traders to carry Eurasian agriculture to the highlands of Kenya and the grasslands of South Africa remains a mystery.)

The better agriculture of Eurasia gave it higher population densities. The enormous size and high population densities of Eurasia gave it the overwhelming bulk of world population. The large population share meant that Eurasia generated the lion's share of inventions and innovations. The ease of communication and diffusion across Eurasia meant that inventions in one part spread within centuries to other parts: China could not long retain the silkworm for itself, nor could India long retain the zero. Faster and widely-diffused technological progress gave Eurasians the wheel, sophisticated textiles, advanced metalworking, shipbuilding, the state--and the gun.

Thus when 1492 came Eurasian cultures had extraordinary advantages over others: decimated by diseases against which they had no resistance, out-organized, and without guns, other cultures found themselves conquered and dominated by those who came to their lands to serve the king, to serve God, to win glory, and to get rich.

But why Europe? Why did the subcontinent at the western edge of Eurasia acquire so much dominance over the rest of Eurasia. Many key inventions--the compass, gunpowder, block printing, and the zero--came to Europe from the rest of Eurasia. So why did small numbers of Europeans conquer large chunks of the rest of Eurasia in the period from 1500 to 1900?

Diamond doesn't have an answer. He runs through a laundry list of factors that have been noted by economic historians. This is a book about why Eurasians conquered the world in the past half-millennium. It is not a book about why Europeans conquered the world in the past half-millennium.

But to have brilliantly illuminated the first of these--the sources of Eurasian dominance--is more than enough for any one book.

Do not think that the book is perfect. For one thing, it begins badly. Too many of the opening pages are spent assuring readers that the inhabitants of New Guinea are in fact smarter than the rest of us because in New Guinea, where the principal causes of death were not plague but "murder... warfare, accidents, and problems procuring food," natural selection "promoting genes for intelligence has... been far more ruthless." The argument is implausible: Eurasian populations have been "dense" from the perspective of disease transmission for only an eyeblink of Darwinian time. There is a smell of excessive political correctness about the claims for the superior genetic intelligence of the aboriginal inhabitants of New Guinea. It almost made me put the book down then and there, while still reading its early pages.

But I did not put it down. Instead, I read on. And I am very glad that I did so. For what follows is truly a work of genius

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

2005-01-10T20:12:00.000-08:00

"GUNS, GERMS & STEEL"

April 17, 1998

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript

A conversation with Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Diamond won this year's Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Jared Diamond and his book "Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" has won this year's prize for general nonfiction. The work explores the environmental and geographical factors behind differences of power and wealth among the world's people. Diamond is a professor of physiology at the University of California-Los Angeles Medical School. He also pursues research in evolutionary biology in New Guinea and other countries. Thank you for being with us, and congratulations, Mr. Diamond.
JARED DIAMOND, Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction: Thank you, thank you.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Your book, I believe, grew out of a question posed to you by a politician in New Guinea. What was that question?
JARED DIAMOND: I'd been studying bird evolution in New Guinea for 34 years. New Guineans used stone tools until relatively recently. And eventually in 1972, a politician that I ran into on a beach in New Guinea asked me straight out, why is it that we New Guineans were the people using stone tools and you Europeans and Americans were the people who brought steel tools and writing and ships to us. It's a straight question. I couldn't tell 'em the answer, and I've spent much of the last five years trying to understand the reason.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And in the book you use a very dramatic moment in human history, the moment in 1531, when Francisco Pizarro confronted and defeated the leader of the Incas, Atahuallpa, in Peru to also get us into this question. Tell us about that.
JARED DIAMOND: That was an incredible moment, one of the most dramatic moments in world history. The Spanish Conquistador, Pizarro, with an army of 169 Spaniards out of contact with his home base marched up to Camajarca in the Andes and ran into the Inca emperor, Atahuallpa, with an army of 80,000. You might think that the 169 Spaniards were about to get smushed. Instead, what happened within a few minutes is that Pizarro captured the Inca emperor, Atahuallpa, and that--held him for ransom--and that led to the downfall of one of the two most powerful native American states in the new world. That really requires explaining.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. And you're quite explicit in this book that you're out to prove that racial factors do not play a role, right?
JARED DIAMOND: That's right. Most people, if you ask why is it that here in the United States people of European, Africa, and Asian background are now sitting here occupying land that used to be the land of native Americans, why did history turn out that way, instead of native Americans conquering Africa and bringing in Europeans as slaves, and most people say, well, or, you know, I hate to admit it but let's face it, it's because Europeans were smarter and they had the get up and go initiative, whereas, these other peoples didn't, and yet there's no evidence whatsoever for intellectual superiority for any IQ advantage of Europeans. So there must be some other explanation. And that was the goal of my book.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. Let's go through some of those. Let's being with agriculture and the fertile crescent, that very rich area that's now part of Iraq and Iran.
JARED DIAMOND: Agriculture began in the world about 12,000 years ago. The place where it began was the fertile crescent, the area that today is Iraq, Iran, and Syria. And the beginning of agriculture was a key step in the development of what we call civilization because there's no point having a printing press while you're still a nomadic hunter-gatherer. If you move camp every three weeks, you have enough work carrying around your spears and the baby. You don't want--you have no use for a printing press. But once people settle down in agricultural communities, that was the beginning for the development of kings, for feeding people to develop technology, crafts people, people who would develop metal tools, and riding to serve the purposes of the king, and it was also the beginning of the evolution of nasty germs like smallpox and measles that played a key role in European conquest of the new world. It was smallpox and measles and other germs that killed 95 percent of native Americans. But those germs evolved in dense agricultural societies that arose in the fertile crescent and then China 11,000 years ago.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And what's so interesting is that you explain that agriculture arose there because the right wild specially grasses where there and could be domesticated, whereas, they weren't say here in California or in other places.
JARED DIAMOND: That's right. It's not that ancient people of the fertile crescent were more gifted or smarter and saw the advances of agriculture. They have no idea what was in store for them. Instead, it just happened, and Eurasia as the biggest continent had the largest number of wild plants and animal species, and, in particular, the fertile crescent was the area where the wild ancestors of the most valuable crop and domestic animals of the modern world grew. Wheat and barley and wild calves and sheep and goats and pigs and horses were native to the fertile crescent, but contrast that say with Australia. Why do you think Aboriginal Australians remained hunter-gatherers? Because no one today has been able to domesticate kangaroos, the only large wild mammals of Australia and the only plant of Australia that has been domesticated was macadamia nuts, but you can't feed a civilization on macadamia nuts alone. You can based on wheat, barley, peas, lentils, and so on. So that's why native Australians remained hunter-gatherers and Eurasians became the first farmers.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And the germs--this surprised me very much--you mentioned the germs. They actually developed from the domesticated animals, and that's why Pizarro could bring the germs that killed, what, 95 percent of the people that he met in the new world.
JARED DIAMOND: That's right. And that's one of the surprising discoveries that we've gained from molecular biology in the last decade or two. That's why people couldn't figure out a hundred years ago the ways in which geography tipped the balance of fate among the world's people. We now know that smallpox, measles, and other epidemic diseases of humans like that evolve from epidemic diseases of our domestic animals with which we came into intimate contact when we started to domesticate them 11,000 years ago. Smallpox may have evolved from a disease of our domestic camels. Measles certainly evolved from a disease of our domestic cattle. And so Eurasian people were exposed to these nasty diseases, gradually evolved immune and genetic resistance to them, but Native Americans, without big domestic animals, except the llamas and El Pacas, did not evolve nasty germs of their own, and so had no immunity when Europeans arrived, bringing smallpox and measles and these other nasty germs. So most native Americans died before they could even reach the battlefield. They were killed by Eurasian germs.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now, you've been criticized in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere for being too geographically determinist, for not taking into account enough, although you certainly talking about writing and other things, ideas, culture. How do you answer that criticism?
JARED DIAMOND: I would answer that by saying that ideas and culture, of course, they're essential in human society, in human history, but ideas and complex technology and culture can evolve only where you have the right environmental conditions, where people are settled down in large societies, in villages, and in cities, which depended upon agriculture. Now, cultural idiosyncracies, yes, of course, they're crucial when you're talking about differences in the fates of societies a hundred miles apart over ten or twenty years or over a century. For example, the fact that that bomb that was planted in Hitler's headquarters on July 20, 1944, the fact that the bomb was two feet too far from Hitler to kill him had enormous consequences but over the course of 13,000 years, accidents to individual people like Hitler or Alexander the Great, you have geniuses for the better or for the worse in Australia and in the new world accidents that happened; accidents where a particular bomb or spear was placed have short-term consequences but not long-term consequences. In the long run what counts is geography that sets the envelope of human societies.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, Jared Diamond, congratulations again and thank you very much.
JARED DIAMOND: Thank you. You're welcome.
JIM LEHRER: This year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to Philip Roth for his novel "American Pastoral." For the record, we invited Mr. Roth to appear on the program but he declined and he sent this statement: "My hope is that the Pulitzer Prize will encourage people to sit down and seriously read my book. Nothing could please me, or, for that matter, any writer more."

2)

The Clash of Continents

by Steve Sailer

www.iSteve.com

Published in National Review, 5/19/97, as "Why Nations Conquer"

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, 448 pp., $27.50

An early version of this book's subtitle illustrates its ambitiousness: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years. Jared Diamond's goal is to explain why Eurasians conquered Africans, Australians, and Americans instead of the other way around, even though conventional social scientists shy away from such a fundamental question out of fear of what they might find. Since random accidents of personality and culture appear too trivial to account for the clash of continents' lopsided outcomes (e.g., a few hundred Conquistadors demolished the grandest empires of the New World), this leaves only two possible underlying causes: either the winners had better homelands or better bodies and brains. Deeming genetic explanations "racist" and "loathsome," Diamond sets out to reaffirm the equality of humanity by showing the inequality of the continents. To him, the three most important engines of history are location, location, and location.

Few are more broadly qualified to write history in terms of geography and sociobiology. A molecular physiologist at UCLA, Diamond is also an evolutionary biologist in the field. His 33 years birdwatching in the tropics, especially in New Guinea, home to 1000 of Earth's 6000 languages, put him in touch with a remarkable variety of humans. Diamond wrote surprisingly little for popular audiences before his dazzling 1992 book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. In contrast to that kaleidoscopic page-turner, Guns, Germs, and Steel hammers away at a single thesis, sometimes repetitiously. Nonetheless, it rewards the effort.

Diamond argues that the broadest aspects of the modern world -- e.g., North America's domination by whites -- were largely determined by the continents' dissimilar natural resources of domesticatable plants and animals. Regions offering an abundance of these could support the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer-herder, allowing higher population densities. And those communities that could free up the most manpower from farming to specialize in technology and war could conquer their neighbors. A few areas, especially the Middle East, were home to many easily domesticated foods: both wild grains like wheat and large mammals like cows and sheep. Other parts of Eurasia such as Europe were close enough to the Fertile Crescent for early diffusion of these crops and livestock.

In contrast, much of the Earth, including seemingly congenial landscapes like California, lacks native plants that would be more profitable to cultivate than to gather. What valuable vegetation the New World did possess, like Mexico's corn, was slow to migrate north and south along the Americas' main axis because crops' growing seasons are sensitive to latitude. (Since the vast Eurasian continent's main axis is east-west, however, foods diffused more easily there.)

Also, the New World was badly lacking in large domesticatable mammals. Excluding boutique operations, today humans raise just 14 species of mammals of over 100 pounds. Of these, only the llama/alpaca is native to the Americas. Of course, 13,000 years ago the New World teemed with potentially useful beasts like horses and camels. Then the American Indian arrived and, Diamond says, ate them. This rapacity made their Aztec and Inca descendants both militarily impotent and dreadfully susceptible to the Conquistadors' diseases. The Spaniards, in contrast, were heirs to not just Eurasia's foods and technologies (including Chinese inventions like paper, gunpowder, and the compass), but also to immunities to its germs. Since the worst epidemics are descended from farm animals' diseases (e.g., smallpox from cows), native Americans had no diseases of their own (except possibly syphilis) with which to fight back.

Diamond's geohistorical approach certainly clarifies continental-scale history. Most of world history, however, is Eurasian history, and he's only sketchy on why the West Eurasians eventually overcame the East and South Eurasians.

Diamond is not content, however, to merely write the history of the last 13,000 years. He also claims that his evidence is of great political momentuousness because it shows that no ethnic group is inferior to any other: each exploited its local food resources as fully as possible. For example, after the Australian Outback explorers Burke and Wills exhausted their Eurasian-derived supplies, three times they had to throw themselves on the mercy and expertise of the local Stone Age hunter-gatherers. These Aborigines, the least technically advanced of all peoples, may not have domesticated a single Australian plant in 40,000 years, but in 200 years down under scientific whites have domesticated merely the macadamia nut. Farming only pays in Australia when using imported crops and livestock.

But, are indigenous peoples merely not inferior? In truth, on their own turf many ethnic groups appear to be somewhat genetically superior to outsiders. Diamond makes environmental differences seem so compelling that it's hard to believe that humans would not become somewhat adapted to their homelands through natural selection. And in fact, Diamond himself briefly cites several examples of genetic differences impacting history. Despite military superiority, Europeans repeatedly failed to settle equatorial West Africa, in part because they lacked the malaria resistance conferred on many natives by the sickle cell gene. Similarly, biological disadvantages stopped whites from overrunning the Andes. Does this make Diamond a loathsome racist? No, but it does imply that a scientific-minded observer like Diamond should not dogmatically denounce genetic explanations, since he is liable to get tarred with his own brush.

The undeniability of human biodiversity does not prove that we also differ somewhat mentally, but it's hard to imagine why the brain would differ radically from the rest of the body. Consider the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. The ant's personality traits -- foresight and caution -- fitted him to survive his region's predictably harsh winters. Yet, the grasshopper's strengths -- improvisation and spontaneity -- might furnish Darwinian superiority in a tropical land where the dangers are unpredictable.

Like many, Diamond appears to confuse the concepts of genetic superiorities (plural) and genetic supremacy (singular). The former are circumstance-specific. For example, a slim, heat-shedding Somalian-style body is inferior to a typically stocky, heat-conserving Eskimo physique in Nome, but it's superior in Mogadishu (and in Manhattan, too, if, you want to become a fashion model and marry David Bowie, like Somalian supermodel Iman). In contrast, genetic supremacy is the dangerous fantasy that one group is best at everything. Before the European explosion began in the 15th Century, it seemed apparent that no race could be supreme. Even the arrogant Chinese were periodically overrun by less-cultured barbarians. The recent European supremacy in both the arts of war and of peace was partly an optical illusion masking the usual tradeoffs in talents within Europe (e.g., Italian admirals were as inept as English cooks). Still, the rise and reign of Europe remains the biggest event in world history. Yet, the era when Europeans could plausibly claim supremacy over all other races has been dead for at least the 60 years since Hitler, of all people, allied with Japan.

The historian who trumpets the political relevance of his work must consider both the past and the future, which Diamond fails to do. Surprisingly, ethnic biodiversity is becoming more important in numerous ways. Until recently, one's location and social position at birth closely constrained one's fate. But, as equality of opportunity grows, the globalized marketplace increasingly exploits all advantages in talent, including those with genetic roots. Pro sports offer a foretaste of the future: many are resegregating themselves as ethnic groups increasingly specialize in those games they're naturally best at. In summary, Diamond may prove a better guide to the last 13,000 years than the to next 13.

# # #

Steve Sailer (steveslr@aol.com) is a businessman and writer.

Inevitable Surprises -- reviews

2005-01-10T19:45:00.000-08:00

Press homepage|Review|Books|Newport Papers|Reader services

BOOK REVIEWS

HOW TO AVOID SUDDEN SHOCK

Schwartz, Peter. Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence. New York: Gotham, 2003. 245pp. $27

The intelligence community is getting a bad rap these days as it attempts to help policy makers weather the myriad national security challenges in the Age of Disruption. The controversy over weapons of mass destruction and protracted post-conflict insurgency in Iraq are only two incidents in a series of surprises. Whether it is the demise of the Soviet Union, economic collapses in Southeast Asia, the development of nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, terrorist attacks on the United States, or the subsequent anthrax attacks, being taken by surprise is becoming the norm.

Peter Schwartz, however, was not knocked for a loop by many of these events—in some cases he predicted them. Schwartz is an expert at avoiding surprises. Starting with his work with Royal Shell in the 1970s, his efforts with the Pentagon’s eighty-year-old futurist and director of the Office of Net Assessment, Andrew Marshall, and the U.S. National Security Commission in the last decade, up to his present consulting work with the Global Business Network, Schwartz has made a career out of helping clients avoid strategic surprises. He does not necessarily make forecasts, but he does predict that denial, defensiveness, and ignorance are the principal preceptors for sudden shock.

Schwartz’s specialty is researching the innumerable drivers and wild cards in our environment from which he can craft scenarios that will help strategic planners and decision makers anticipate crises well before they happen. He is no stranger to naval readers, who will be familiar with his The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World (Currency, 1991), once required reading at the Naval War College. In Inevitable Surprises, Schwartz points out that we will face numerous sharp jolts or major discontinuities in political, military, and economic areas. “If anything,” he notes, “there will be more, not fewer, surprises in the future, and they will all be interconnected.”

These interconnected surprises, which Schwartz calls discontinuities, will bring about a different world, one in which the rules of the game are fundamentally altered. The critical value of this work is the author’s belief that many of these discontinuities have their roots in ongoing trends and that we can anticipate them. By realizing what today’s driving forces are, we can alter our perception about today’s emerging realities, anticipate the consequences, and avoid surprise.

Schwartz offers a simple process for thinking anew and avoiding major shocks. The first step is to pay attention and identify and monitor the driving forces that influence tomorrow’s world, get ahead of the so-called inevitable surprises, and prepare for them. The second step is to remove ourselves from the rigid mental paradigms about what is fixed and what can be changed in the landscape. The final step is to envision new strategies for dealing with new circumstances.

Most of this book discusses macro-level factors in terms of social, economic, and technological change. Some of the discontinuities Schwartz deals with in chapter-length detail include: dramatic extension in human longevity based on improvements in medical science, with substantial influences on retirement, social institutions, and the political power of influential centenarians; a “great flood” of immigration with resultant social tensions in China, Europe, and the United States; continued economic growth in the developing world and a return to what Schwartz called the “long boom,” predicated upon the enhanced productivity of the Information Age and the updated critical infrastructure that undergirds it; a series of interrelated breakthroughs in science and technology, especially nanotechnology, biomaterials, and regenerative medicine, quantum computers, and fuel cells; and a few environmental crises, including the impact of global climate warming and the coming of a great plague.

Military professionals and policy analysts will be particularly interested in Schwartz’s range of geopolitical scenarios. In one scenario, the European Union consolidates into an effective bloc and begins to challenge what it perceives as America the rogue superpower. China also grows in political and military muscle, and it too seeks to check the global dominance and influence of the United States. On the other extreme, Schwartz paints a scenario of American preeminence, including complete dominance of space with instant global strike. In this scenario, because the benefits of a benign superpower are shared, a quiet and sustained Pax Americana emerges.

Before anyone gets complacent about American preeminence, read chapter 5, in which the author details the dismal prospects of the near future. His “catalog of disorder” includes an updated version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, beginning with terrorism, religious wars—including evangelical Christianity in Africa—criminal statehood in Mexico, ethnic conflict, and HIV/AIDS. Schwartz’s grasp of the interrelated nature of many of these depressing transnational problems is masterful. His grim projections of such disorders are largely predetermined, thus inevitable and therefore troubling. These future flashpoints are all too rarely identified as issues in the national security community until U.S. military forces are dispatched to provide some form of stability.

Inevitable Surprises is well worth anyone’s time, as long as the reader understands that predicting is like planning—it is not the prediction or the plan itself that is important but the diligent process of identifying drivers and developing scenarios that is invaluable. To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke, no forecast survives contact with reality; good forecasters, like good planners, excel because they have gone through the rigorous intellectual process of examining the mental geography of a problem and anticipating the various contours and conditions that could arise.

Read this book only if you would like to avoid being surprised by tomorrow’s predictable discontinuities.
-----------------

INEVITABLE SURPRISES by Peter Schwartz -- dissection

2005-01-10T19:41:00.000-08:00

Inevitable Surprises

AGING

longer lifespans

anti-aging treatments, very popular in third world

lots of elders in the workplace

lots of old ex-cons and gang members starting 2010

older societies more rigid

MIGRATION

Europe’s economy is less dynamic and permits less mobility … status quo … will have a tough time with immigrants

Chinese men will be brining back women, encourages by govt.

Inner migration makes economic slowdown very risky

Will cities look like Bangkok or Singapore

Terrorism could shatter EU

Improve GAP countries so more people stay there

RETURN OF THE LONG BOOM

Innate value of transforming infrastructure like traditional utilities and broadband and wireless …universities are infrastructure too

Productivity from technology and better management techniques like Drucker, Six Sigma, big box retailing, etc.

Globalization – investment, trade flows, tourism flows

Surface transportation must improve, but not just mass transit

2000 FCC decision kill tech market by delaying broadband

War could end the long boom

NEW WORLD ORDER

US dominance of space for satellite, rods from gods…no one else permitted to challenge

China has more mass manufacturing and satellite nations, while India has more western institutions and English.

Russia may get richer unless AIDs

Return of public faith in government. Scwartz things US is poorly governed, I disagree

DISORDER

Bin Laden tax – all the cost of security

Pakistan, Egypt, Saudia Arabia – one will fall

Path to modernity goes through fundamentalism…modernity will be the opposition

Religious wars in Philipines, Africa, Indonesia

Caspain sea oil countires have lots of ethnic tensions –civil wars drawing in great powers

Sub-sahran Africa going backwards, even tourism falling off\

AIDs really bad in Russia, such a high percentage of population

TECHNOLOGY

Speech recognition, no secrets with ubiquitous retinal scans, giant displays, quantum computers which in turn will help things like protein folding, Wolframism – a new kind control over the universe,

Turning over old capital is necessary to a cleaner world …old factories and cars… a 2003 fridge uses 80 percent less energy than a 1973 fridge …fuel cells are likely…lots of advances in oil production … will not run out of energy … carbon sequestration …pebble nuclear reactors …

Disease is more dangerous than ever --- good stuff

SUMMARY

Greater lifespan, human migration, long boom, US superpower, more nations recognizing The Rules for living together, Gap nations posing even a bigger danger, pollution free energy, reprogram reality via nanotech or Wolfram.

THE YEAR 2030

If US cant handle diversity, what chance Europe, though if it does, its more secular nature might give it biotech edge … quantum computers help biotech as well a traffic control! … global religious war sparked in Africa? …

Collapse by Jared Diamond

2005-01-09T13:26:00.000-08:00

January 05, 2005
Jared Diamond Wrong To Worry About Environmental Collapse
Jared Diamond has a new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, about past societies that failed due to damage they inflicted on their environments through deforestation, overfarming, and other bad things that humans have done to the environment. He also argues that today we are at risk of a similar fate. Oh humans, you terrible people. Look at how you get your just desserts if you don't do right by the environment. Picture me rolling my eyes. Yet Diamond will be taken seriously in some quarters.

Steve Sailer points out that most societies that have fallen (and there have been many) did not do so as a result of damage they inflicted upon their environment.

Contra Diamond, in reality, most societies down through history died because they were conquered. Generally speaking, not suicide, but homicide was the fate of most extinct societies.

Diamond cites the Maya, but I cite the Aztecs and the Incas. He cites the Anasazi, but I cite the Cherokee, the Sioux, and countless others. He cites the Easter Islanders, but I cite the Maoris, the Tasmanians, the Australian Aborigines, the Chatham Islanders (exterminated by the Maori), and so forth. He cites the Vikings in Greenland, but I cite the Saxons in Britain and the Arabs in Sicily, both conquered by the descendents of the Vikings. We can go on like this all day.

Diamond used to be a terrific independent thinker, as shown in his 1993 book The Third Chimpanzee (indeed, many of my examples come from this book). But he sold out to political correctness, most profitably, in his bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel.

How many people will pick up on the absurdity of Diamond's latest argument? It is so politically correct that it deserves parody Onion-style. But some suckers will buy it. I predict he'll make a fair amount of money off of a left-leaning segment of our society prone to being excited by uncontextualized trivia about environmental disaster. This sort of thing reinforce their prejudices and so will be welcome. P.T. Barnum was right after all. Those who treat environmentalism as a sort of secular religion will see Diamond's book as a bunch of clever new arguments (and they are in need of such arguments) to use to make new conversions to the faith and to buck up their own belief in their faith. Bjorn Lomborg and other rationalists (notably Julian Simon before him) have been bringing up disquieting rational arguments against some of the nuttier environmentalist claims. The faithful need something like this book.

Speaking of parody, how about WWII? The Germans, by attacking 3 major powers including one that had a few times greater industrial base (albeit one that was terribly polluting at the time), brought on a counter-attack that devastated the environment of Germany. Allied bombings caused an ecological disaster which wrecked the quality of German water and food supplies and left many Germans without adequate shelter. This directly led to the fall of the Third Reich. The Germans should have had more fighter interceptors to protect their environment. The Luftwaffe should have been rebranded as the Aerial Environmental Protection Agency.

Or hey, how about the Carthaginians? By challenging the supremacy of Rome the Carthaginians provoked counter-attacks on the environment around Carthage. How irresponsible. The Carthaginians did not put enough resources into environmental protection (probably because their capitalists were funnelling money off to invest in Egypt or Syria) and eventually the Romes were able to defeat the Carthaginians on the field of battle. This left Carthaginian farm fields completely unprotected from Roman efforts to salt the earth. The result? Carthaginian fields became an unfarmable ecological disaster that the Carthaginians (at least those few still left alive) failed to repair.

There was an alternative for the Carthaginians. They could have pursued a policy of appeasement and let themselves become servants of Rome. Appeasement mightEPA Superfund program to repair their damaged environment. Looked at this way by righteous environmentalists the Carthaginians clearly deserved their fate. have protected their fields. Though the Romans might have forced them to overfarm in order to ship more grain to Rome. That might have allowed the Roman Empire to go on longer before ecological collapse caused by the damage from all those Visigoth horse hooves. In any case, not only did the Carthaginians fail at their responsibility of environmental protection but they also failed to set up (let alone adequately fund) something like the

Tyler Cowen makes the correct argument that we have far too many technological and human resources to be unable to deal with any environmental problems.

The key to the "meta-book" is Diamond's claim that part one -- the history of deforestation -- means we should worry more about part two, namely current environmental problems. The meta-book fails.

Yes we should worry about the environment today, but largely because of current data and analysis, not because of past history. If you look at the past, the single overwhelming fact is that all previous environmental problems, at the highest macro level, were overcome. We moved from the squalor of year 1000 to the mixed but impressive successes of 2005, a huge step forward. Environmental problems, however severe, did not prevent this progress. We may not arrive in 3005 with equal ease, but if you are a pessimist you should be concerned with the uniqueness of the contemporary world, not its similarities to the past.

Tyler's argument is ultimately why I am not deeply concerned about the possibility of global warming. Humanity's base of technological capabiltiies is only going to grow more advanced in the future. What global scale environmental problems we have now are ultimately solvable. For example, should we ever need to stop using fossil fuels then as I've previously argued, nuclear power plants could provide all the power we need for transportation and for a cost that would still allow modern lifestyles. Huge amounts of capital are available to build new coal-fired electric power plants. As CO2 extraction and sequestration technologies advance the costs of adding on CO2 emissions control systems will fall to the point where stopping CO2 emissions will become much cheaper than it would be to do today. Energy shortages are not going to stop us.

How can environmental pollution bring down modern civilization? I just do not see it. Take the apocalyptic warnings of future water shortages as an example. In the industrialized countries we have too many ways to deal with potential future water shortages. We can desalinate. Desalination is more expensive but still affordable. We can stop subsidizing agricultural uses of water. Farmers can adopt practices that use water more efficiently. We can put on more efficient fixtures in showers. We currently mix all waste water together even though some types are much harder to process. So we could gradually build our plumbing and waste water street pipes to separate them out. There are just too many options for handling water more efficiently for more efficient use and reuse that are doable for affordable prices. In the face of warnings about water shortages starting in the year 2003 for the first time in history more than half of the human race now has piped water. As China, and some other Asian countries industrialize hundreds of millions more will get piped water. Nanotech advances in materials and biological engineering will make water filtration cheaper. So water isn't going be what brings us low.

So what should we worry about with regard to the future? I think Tyler hits the right note when he speaks of the uniqueness of modern problems. Future dangers I worry about are nuclear proliferation, germ warfare pathogens, robots some day taking over, self-replicating nanotech that gets out of control, and genetically engineered ruthless semi-humans who lack the necessary empathy and feelings of fairness and altruism to make a workable society. You can read some of those items as ecological. But they would not be the result of overusing resources or emitting pollutants (unless someone wants to take seriously my strategic bombing pollution parody or perhaps categorize robots as pollutants).

Steve Sailer says once upon a time before Diamond made his run for fame and fortune pitching appealing arguments to the politically correct Diamond had much more interesting and insightful things to say about the human condition.

Jared Diamond didn't used to be so boring: Jared Diamond has a new book out called Collapse about societies that have collapsed due to environmental disasters such as deforestation. It's a useful topic, but in the large scheme of things, a minor one, which is why Diamond spends so much time on famously trivial edge-of-the-world cultures like the Vikings in Greenland and the Polynesians on Easter Island. But Diamond is so good at getting publicity that the fact that ecology has little to do with the reason most societies collapse will likely be overlooked. The main reason you don't see many Carthaginians or Aztecs or members of other collapsed civilizations around these days is they got beat in war, as Edmund Creasy's famous 1851 book "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World" makes clear.

Steve is not the only one to make that argument. As Godless Capitalist has found, a younger and less politically correct Jared Diamond once said provocative things about selective pressures in human populations. But those days are long past.

In a way Diamond has flipped from the position he took in Guns, Germs, & Steelcan alter the environment. One of my favorite historians, William Hardy McNeill wrote a great review of Diamond's GG&S for the NY Times Book Review. McNeill's review Diamond's response and McNeill's reply and here is a bit of what McNeill said: (my bold emphasis added). when he now focuses on the worries that come from noticing that humans costs 4 dollars. It prompted Diamond to write a letter to the New York Review of Books and you can read

Secondly, Diamond accuses historians of failing "to explain history's broadest patterns." I answer that some few historians are trying to do so, among them myself, and with more respect for natural history than Diamond has for the conscious level of human history. He wants simple answers to processes far more complex than he has patience to investigate. Brushing aside the autonomous capability of human culture to alter environments profoundly—and also irreversibly—is simply absurd.

So now Diamond is overemphasising the importance of human damage to the environment. Before he was overemphasising the importance of environment as restraints on human achievements and development while simultaneously sidestepping the importance of local environments as selective pressures. But Diamond is responding to his own left-liberal academic environment and allowing himself to be far too constrained in what causes of history he will consider and what conclusions he will allow himself to draw.

Update: back40 examined some essays by Diamond that he wrote as shorter versions of the arguments in his book.

As stated earlier, Diamond isn't convinced by his own analysis and is still perplexed. I am perplexed why we should pay much attention to the prescriptions of someone who is bewildered by the problem he seeks to cure.

Why were Easter Islanders so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them? This is a key question that nags everyone who wonders about self-inflicted environmental damage. I have often asked myself, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" Like modern loggers, did he shout "Jobs, not trees!"? Or: "Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood"? Or: "We need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature"?

No, they didn't want to abandon their projects in which they had invested so much already and they didn't want to disrupt their group consciousness. They couldn't bear that double loss even though in the end it meant that they would lose everything. It is the self justification noted by Brockner: "when the group is faced with a negative feedback, members will not suggest abandoning the earlier course of action, because this might disrupt the existing unanimity." The individual human susceptibility to the "Concorde fallacy" is amplified by group consciousness.

It isn't the "globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet" that Diamond worries about that are the problem, it is the “Concorde fallacy”, big projects entered into for flimsy reasons and maintained even when it is crystal clear that they are nothing but resource sinks. It's important to grasp this because Diamond's solution is to engage in even "greater integration of parts" so that he can enforce his proposed bans on logging or whatever. Group behaviors are less intelligent than individual behaviors for such problems and the larger the group the more this is true.

As long as we have enough energy we can clean up any industrial or agricultural processes that cause environmental problems. With sufficient wealth and energy any environmental disaster can be avoided. In Western industrialized societies overall environments are getting better, not worse. We already have enough wealth and technology to get plenty of energy from non-fossil fuel sources. So I do not see some coming future collapse of society due to lack of energy. Resource depletion and pollution are poor choices for speculations about disasters in the future. If you want to worry about the future worry about natural dangers such as an asteroid collision or a repeat of the Yellowstone area eruption of 600,000 years ago that spewed out 240 cubic miles of debris. Or if you want to worry about human dangers worry about run-away nanotech lifeforms or a robot take-over. Common forms of pollution or depletion of trees or fish or minerals just aren't going to bring down our civilization.

WHAT WENT WRONG by Bernard Lewis

2004-12-29T20:08:00.000-08:00

A key graf from this NY Times review

Sometime around 1760, Britain, then France and America took off to another world, one that was increasingly secular, democratic, industrial and tolerant in ways that left many of the other regions gasping at the combined implications of such changes. Certain societies in parts of Latin America or India or Russia felt they had little choice but to follow suit, although hoping to brake the impacts of Western man. The Middle East, powerful a half-millennium earlier, when Europe was a bundle of inchoate, backward states and unworthy of attention, did not. Yet Europe rose while the Muslim world rested on its laurels -- until it was besieged by Western ships, armaments, iron goods and cheap textiles, to all of which it became harder and harder to respond.

The West's cultural messages, especially about democracy, made things even more difficult. Those with power in Muslim societies found it impossible to contemplate the separation of religion and state, or admit to a changed place in society for women or permit the free exchange of ideas, particularly unpleasant ideas, on the lines argued by John Stuart Mill and others. But there is even more to it than that. As Lewis shrewdly points out, the works of Mozart and Shakespeare and Voltaire have traveled around the globe, as for that matter have Stravinsky, jazz and George Orwell. But they all pretty much stop at the frontiers of the Arab world, which has shown little interest in how others think, write, compose; there are few translations of these writers and few performances of these musicians, nor are there great libraries and museums of Western art to match the impressive collections of Muslim culture in the West. (There is no presumption by Lewis here that Western or Slavic or Japanese culture is inherently superior, only that it is disturbing that this troubled part of our planet has never really cared.)

It is not that the Muslim world was totally without attempts at reform and renewal in the face of global trends, or that there was no appreciation that its own earlier superiority had vanished. In fact, Lewis is extremely good in detailing Ottoman and Arab and Iranian scholars who, from the 18th century onward, called with growing alarm for change. The sad fact is that for the most part their calls went unheeded.

Among the many reasons for such a failure discussed in this remarkably succinct account, one especially stands out. It is that the reformers split into two diametrically opposed camps: the Western-oriented movements, which sought adaptation, imitation and accommodation with modernity, though within a moderately Muslim order of things; and the conservatives, who angrily claimed that the reason for the decline was traitorous forces within their own societies, those who had strayed from the true path of the prophet. These forces, the conservatives argued, were even more sinful and deserved more punishment than the infidels themselves. It is not difficult, in reading these earlier denunciations of Arab liberals, to recall bin Laden's recent ferocious speeches against the Saudi leadership and others in the Middle East for defiling the true faith.

From the Brothers Judd

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/979

Bernard Lewis, 85 year old professor emeritus at Princeton University, is the universally acknowledged dean of Middle East studies in the West, so it is only fitting and proper that we turn to him to tell us "what went wrong" in the Islamic world to breed the hatred and violence that was so horrifically brought home to the United States on September 11th. The fascinating case he makes here is that the early success of Islam has actually been a bane rather than a blessing, retarding the development of the Muslim Middle East and resulting in a particularly anxious reaction to the rise to world dominance of the West.

Mr. Lewis begins, as he is always careful to do, by calling our attention to the preeminence that the Islamic world once enjoyed. He pays homage to the civilization they created and justifies the enormous pride they took in their achievements :

For centuries the world view and self-view of Muslims seemed well grounded. Islam represented the greatest military power
on earth--its armies, at the very same time, were invading Europe and Africa, India and China. It was the foremost economic
power in the world, trading in a wide range of commodities through a far-flung network of commerce and communications in
Asia, Europe, and Africa; importing slaves and gold from Africa, slaves and wool from Europe, and exchanging a variety of
foodstuffs, materials, and manufactures with the civilized countries of Asia. It had achieved the highest level so far in human
history in the arts and sciences of civilization. Inheriting the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece, and
of Persia, it added to them new and important innovations from outside, such as use and manufacture of paper from China
and decimal positional numbering from India. It is difficult to imagine modern literature or science without one or the other.
It was in the Islamic Middle East that Indian numbers were for the first time incorporated in the inherited body of mathematical
learning. From the Middle East they were transmitted to the West, where they are still known as Arabic numerals, honoring not
those who invented them but those who first brought them to Europe. To this rich inheritance scholars and scientists in the Islamic
world added an immensely important contribution through their own observations, experiments, and ideas. In most of the arts
and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a pupil and in a sense a dependent of the Islamic world, relying on Arabic
versions even for many otherwise unknown Greek works.

But he also notes that even before the Renaissance, the West had begun to progress rapidly and soon caught up, then passed, and eventually came to dominate--militarily, economically and culturally--the Islamic world. Thus :

In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that
things had indeed gone badly wrong. Compared with its millennial rival, Christendom, the world of Islam had become poor,
weak, and ignorant. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the primacy and therefore the dominance of the West
was clear for all to see, invading the Muslim in every aspect of his public and--more painfully-even his private life.

This provides the conceptual framework within which we must seek to understand the anti-Western, and particularly anti-American, animus that seems to have become the defining feature of much of Middle Eastern culture. Obviously, from a Muslim perspective, something went terribly wrong. In an analysis that has profound implications for the future, Mr. Lewis traces the causes of this decline to the very roots of the Islamic past.

In its simplest terms, Mr. Lewis's argument is that the success of Muhammad in establishing not merely the Muslim religion, but also a state dominated by that faith, served to create a society that is totalitarian by its very nature, bound by rules and strictures that make it too static to adapt and compete with a West where Christianity, in contrast, does not demand control over the political and economic spheres. The problem is to be found at the very foundations of the respective faiths :

The absence of a native secularism in Islam, and the widespread Muslim rejection of an imported secularism inspired by
Christian example, may be attributed to certain profound differences of belief and experience in the two cultures.

The first, and in many ways the most profound difference, from which all others follow, can be seen in the contrasting
foundation myths--and I use this expression without intending any disrespect--of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The
children of Israel fled from bondage, and wandered for 40 years in the wilderness before they were permitted to enter
the Promised Land. Their leader Moses had only a glimpse, and was not himself permitted to enter. Jesus was humiliated
and crucified, and his followers suffered persecution and martyrdom for centuries, before they were finally able to win over
the ruler, and to adapt the state, its language, and its institutions to their purpose. Muhammad achieved victory and triumph
in his own lifetime. He conquered his promised land, and created his own state, of which he himself was supreme sovereign.
As such, he promulgated laws, dispensed justice, levied taxes, raised armies, made war, and made peace. In a word, he
ruled, and the story of his decisions and actions as ruler is sanctified in Muslim scripture and amplified in Muslim tradition.

In a sense, Judaism and Christianity had the concept of the secular state forced upon them by circumstance from their very beginnings, whereas in Islam the eventual separation of church and state will mark a tremendous departure from the system established by the Prophet. Where Christian theologians like St. Augustine developed complex theories to explain and justify the secular state, Muslim thinkers never even had to face the dilemma. Little wonder then that modern Muslims are so reluctant to take this necessary step.

There is another important effect to consider, of the failure to separate church and state in the Islamic world. The faith itself has become implicated in the decline of Islam relative to the West. For quite some time, the Muslim Middle East, which still boasted the expansive Ottoman Empire, was able to more or less ignore the developments in the West, but finally in the 1800s when Western texts began to be translated into Turkish, they had to take notice :

With the crumbling of the language barrier direct observation of the West was now possible, and an increased recognition and
more intimate awareness of European wealth and strength. The question now was more specific--what is the source of this wealth
and strength, the talisman of western success? Traditional answers to such a question would have been in religious terms. All
problems are so to speak ultimately religious, and all final answers are therefore religious. The final answers given by traditional
writers to the older formulation of the question were always 'let us go back to our roots, to the good old ways, to the true faith,
to the word of God.' With that of course there was always the assumption that if things are going badly, we are being punished
by God for having abandoned the true path. That argument loses cogency when it is the infidels who are benefiting from the change.

Middle Easterners found it difficult to consider what we might call civilizational or cultural answers to this question. To preach a
return to authentic, pristine Islam was one thing; to seek the answer in Christian ways or ideas was another--and, according to the
notions of the time, self-evidently absurd. Muslims were accustomed to regard Christianity as an earlier, corrupted version of
the true faith of which Islam was the final perfection. One does not go forward by going backward. There must therefore be
some circumstance other than religion or culture, which is part of religion, to account for the otherwise unaccountable superiority
achieved by the Western world.

This can not have been other than shocking to the Islamic world, this sudden realization that the infidels were outdistancing the faithful. As Mr. Lewis writes, there have been many attempts to explain away this turn of events, many of them centered around conspiracy theories, but several hundred years on, and with the nations of Asia too having surpassed the Middle East in terms of economic development, such theories are no longer tenable.

So we are arrived at the present moment and it seems inarguable that the Islamic world does find itself in dire straits, falling further and further behind the West. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it seems, because many Muslim states are able to paper over their real weakness thanks to their enormous oil revenues. Remove this source of state income and just imagine how awful the economic situation would be in the Middle East. In her book Islam : A Short History, religious scholar Karen Armstrong explains where Muslims find purpose in their lives and religion :

In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Koran, gave them a historical mission. Their chief
duty was to create a just community in which all members, even the most weak and vulnerable, were treated with absolute respect.
The experience of building such a society and living in it would give them intimations of the divine, because they would be living
in accordance with God's will. A Muslim had to redeem history, and that meant that state affairs were not a distraction from
spirituality but the stuff of religion itself. The political well-being of the Muslim community was a matter of supreme importance.
Like any religious ideal, it was almost impossibly difficult to implement in the flawed and tragic conditions of history, but after
each failure Muslims had to get up and begin again.

Mr. Lewis, though he does a terrific job of explaining what has happened to disrupt the well-being of the Muslim community, does not really offer solutions to the current crisis. But how, we must ask, can Islam begin again?

If the analysis Mr. Lewis presents is accurate--and one would note, we've yet to hear a better explanation of what went wrong--then Islam is faced with only three possibilities :

(1) Islam can retreat into isolation and try to ignore the rest of the world--sort of the North Korea option.

(2) Islam can fight the rest of the world and try to return humankind to a kind of pre-modern status, plunge us backward
toward the point where we were when Islam was briefly regnant.

or,
(3) Islam can submit itself, at least partially, to the process of secularization, which will be rapidly abetted by the forces
of globalization, and undergo a radical Reformation.

The first option seems unrealistic based on what we know of human beings. If nothing else, the Islamic world is too geographically widespread to really isolate itself and too dependent on oil revenues to withdraw completely. The second is foolhardy, because the West will inevitably win this struggle and may then simply force option three upon a defeated and depopulated Islamic world.

That leaves the third option, certainly the most desirable from our perspective, but one which requires a series of steps which will be truly wrenching, and which have only previously occurred in the Islamic world when a pro-Western dictator controlled the countries involved and secularized against the will of the people (Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Iran under the Shah, laying the ground work for today's Iran which is at least groping towards some kind of secularization). This process--which can hopefully be done more democratically than in those prior instances and which we could think of as an Islamic Reformation--will involve decoupling the Muslim faith and clerisy from the political state and from the economy. It will mean that government will not always act in accord with Islamic tradition, and may not even make a pretense of trying to maintain some of those traditions. It will require the acceptance of less economic equality (egalitarianism is central to Islamic economic teachings), in exchange for greater wealth and rising living standards in the entire society. It will entail making women full participants in Islamic society. It will require accepting the existence of Israel, but will guarantee the creation of a Palestinian state. Most of all, it will require acceptance of the idea that Islam itself will decline somewhat in popularity, and in its centrality to society, and that it will suffer some significant doctrinal alterations, all of which has happened to Judaism and Christianity in the West. In turn, the culture will display certain inevitable signs of moral degradation as people are freed from strict observance of Islamic law. It is unfortunate but true that as people's material wants are sated, their spiritual needs seem to change, and their willingness to follow strict moral codes deteriorates.
However, one would like to think that the Islamic states could actually improve upon the Western example in this regard. Many Muslims are justifiably repelled by much of Western culture, particularly : the sex, drugs, and violence; the disintegration of families; and the overemphasis on individuals at the expense of a coherent and cohesive society. But they now have a unique opportunity to learn from our mistakes and to try to avoid the worst of these problems. Imagine, for instance, if a Muslim nation adopted a constitution which at the same time that it reduced the control of Islamic law over the purely political and economic spheres, enunciated that it was the intention of the state to still vindicate the most important ethical and moral precepts of the faith in the social sphere. Where the American Constitution has a Bill of Rights that declares certain individual liberties to be beyond the control of the state and the society; an Islamic constitution might, in addition, contain explicit provisions that protect certain Islamic practices and moral decrees from interference by the state. Such an innovation might enable these states to combine greater freedoms with higher purpose, to free up the energies, imaginations, and productive capacities of their peoples, while also keeping them focused on working toward achieving a morally and spiritually centered society. In the end, such a regime might enable them to more fully realize the kind of just community which their faith demands of them, one which creates material wealth more efficiently than does their current system, but which retains its unique Islamic character. If they could accomplish this bold vision, Islam, which seven hundred years ago led the West toward the Enlightenment, might again blaze a trail toward a brighter future for all mankind. In this book, Bernard Lewis has ably described what has gone wrong in the Islamic world; it is long past time for them, and us, to start addressing these problems.

SURPRISE, SECURITY AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE by John Lewis Gaddis

2004-12-28T18:09:00.000-08:00

For a super-long review see here
http://www.futurecasts.com/book%20review%206-5.htm

SURPRISE, SECURITY, AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
By John Lewis Gaddis.
150 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $18.95.

hen President Bush enunciated his national security strategy in September 2002, few Americans outside the foreign policy community paid much attention. When he acted in accord with that strategy by going to war with Iraq without United Nations sanction, more people began to take notice. In this election year, a vigorous public debate on issues related to the Bush policy seems certain. However, in the confusion of a presidential campaign, we cannot be confident that the debate will focus on what is most important.

John Lewis Gaddis's latest book, ''Surprise, Security, and the American Experience,'' directs attention to the core issues. Based on three lectures delivered at the New York Public Library, this thoughtful volume can help us distinguish polemical chaff from kernels of truth.

Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett professor of history and political science at Yale, points out that three salient elements of the Bush security strategy -- pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony -- have deep roots in the country's history. When threatened, Americans have typically taken the offensive rather than hide behind a static defense.

Following the burning of Washington during the War of 1812, John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, elaborated policies based on the same three principles that are at the heart of the Bush strategy. For example, he approved Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida, then a Spanish possession, asserting the right of pre-emption. Unilateralism goes back at least to George Washington's Farewell Address, and Adams solidified the tradition by rejecting an alliance with Britain to keep other European powers out of the Western Hemisphere; he opted instead for a unilateral declaration, the Monroe Doctrine. And he rejected the European balance-of-power doctrine, arguing that the United States must be the predominant power in North America -- in other words, the regional hegemon.

Gaddis argues that pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony remained persistent features of American behavior until World War II, when they were modified by Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Roosevelt acted to extend American hegemony beyond the Western Hemisphere, he discarded unilateralism. Rather than going it alone, the United States took the lead in creating a series of multinational institutions. But Roosevelt took this route not in order to subject the United States to the control of others, but to achieve goals the country could not reach alone. ''F.D.R. quietly sought to ensure, in all of these structures, predominance for the United States,'' Gaddis writes. Multilateralism was used to ensure American hegemony, not to undermine it.

Roosevelt also discarded pre-emption, refusing to approve actions that violated his agreements with Stalin, even though Stalin was reneging on his commitments. Roosevelt, Gaddis believes, felt that if there was to be a war with the Soviet Union, the United States must not fire the first shot. By dividing Europe and establishing an Iron Curtain, Stalin in effect initiated the cold war and ceded the moral high ground to the United States.

America's allies were willing to accept United States hegemony throughout these years because the alternatives were worse. American predominance was preferable to losing World War II, or suffering economic collapse when it ended, or living under Soviet domination. In addition, most recognized the moral superiority of American policy. One can argue that the United States emerged from the cold war as the unquestioned global hegemon precisely because it had been willing to mute its traditional unilateral tendencies and to avoid the temptation of preventive war against its principal adversary.

Gaddis says that the Clinton administration erred in acting as if there were no longer any credible threats to American security. This misperception stemmed from a failure to recognize the implications of two cold war legacies in the international environment: ''the declining authority of the international state system, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.''

While it is clear, as Gaddis suggests, that some modification of Roosevelt's approach is necessary to deal with 21st-century threats, we cannot be confident that the Bush administration's reversion to unilateralism and pre-emption will work. The administration is already finding it difficult to win the peace in Iraq without recourse to the very international institutions that have been weakened by its own actions.

I would have welcomed more discussion of the difference between hegemony and empire, and between pre-emption and preventive war. At times, Gaddis seems to use the words in each pair interchangeably, but they are distinct concepts, even though it is hard to define precisely at what point one becomes the other. The distinctions are important, for the world and the American taxpayer are much more likely to tolerate a benign American hegemony than a rush to empire, and international law has always considered pre-emption of an immediate threat as legitimate self-defense. A preventive war is a different matter, since its justification rests on the perception, often questionable, of a potential rather than actual threat.

When he looks to the future, Gaddis raises more questions than he answers, but he raises the right ones. One of these is whether the administration's domestic policy is consistent with its grand strategy. Gaddis notes the contrast between Roosevelt's call for national sacrifice to win World War II and Bush's decision to place the burden of today's wars only on those who do the fighting -- and on future generations that must pay the bills. One has to wonder whether the administration's fiscal and energy policies are consistent with the goal of maintaining American global predominance.

Throughout his essays, Gaddis employs a judicious tone and avoids categorical or simplistic answers. He recognizes that the United States faces a different sort of threat from those of the cold war and earlier. Traditional deterrence and balance-of-power policies are inadequate to confront the devil's brew of failed states, rogue regimes, suicidal terrorists and proliferating weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, there are no magic potions or certain cures, despite the tendency of both sides in the political debate to pretend that there are.

Jack F. Matlock Jr., the United States ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, is the author of the forthcoming ''Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended.''

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Colossus (a essay by Ferguson)

2004-12-25T19:20:00.000-08:00

MSNBC.com

American Terminator
Character flaws: The U. S. can inflict great damage while sustaining none, and is programmed to rebuild itself, but not others. That’s its problem.

By Niall Ferguson

Newsweek International

Issues 2004 - The United States is now an empire in all but name—the first case in history of an empire in denial. That may explain why a country which accounts for nearly a third of total world output now has such surprising trouble getting what it wants. The last great Anglophone empire ruled over a quarter of the world’s land surface and population, despite the fact that Britain accounted for less than a tenth of global production. Yet the United States has spent recent months struggling to control just two foreign countries: Afghanistan and Iraq. If it is indeed an empire, it seems a strangely feeble one.

America’s imperial anemia takes some serious explaining; it is not enough simply to blame its troubles on the Bush administration’s alleged diplomatic ineptitude. To understand what has gone wrong this past year, it is necessary to rethink what we mean by power. For all too often we confuse that concept with other, quite different things: wealth and weaponry, influence and appeal. It is quite possible to have a great deal of all these things, yet to have only limited power. That is the American predicament.

The United States has an enormous economy: in current dollar terms, its gross domestic product is 30 times bigger than Russia’s, 20 times bigger than India’s, eight times bigger than China’s, more than two and a half times bigger than Japan’s and 22 percent bigger than the European Union’s. Its military capability is unrivaled: it spends more on its armed forces than the next dozen or more countries combined, and produces weaponry so much better than that of any conceivable competition that talk of “full-spectrum dominance” does not seem exaggerated.

Yet look at the record of recent months. Establishing law and order in Iraq has proved to be beyond the capacity of America’s armed forces, even with British assistance. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein raised hopes that America just might be able to break the deadlock in the Middle East, but by the autumn, Yasir Arafat had reasserted control over the Palestinian administration and Ariel Sharon was building a replica of the Berlin wall around the Palestinians. Meanwhile, a repulsive tin-pot dictator in North Korea was defying American hyperpower with impunity, openly restarting his nuclear-weapons program and threatening to “open the nuclear deterrent to the public as a physical force.”

Some pax Americana. The United States even hesitated before sending a tiny force to the one basket-case country in Africa for which it can be said to have any historical responsibility, Liberia. In August three ships, carrying about 4,500 sailors and Marines, were sent to Liberia after repeated requests for American intervention. In all, 225 Americans went ashore, of whom 50 contracted malaria. Two months later the Americans pulled out. This halfhearted African adventure exemplifies the limits of American power.

But how are we to explain these limits?

The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California offers an important clue to the nature of American power. In his most recent film, “Terminator 3,” Schwarzenegger plays an almost indestructible robot programmed to protect a young man who is destined to save the world. In the climactic scene, the Terminator’s operating system becomes corrupted: instead of saving the future savior, he comes close to killing him. As his original program battles this contradictory command, the word abort flashes in big red lights in his head, finally preventing him from doing anything.

In three distinct ways, “T3” is a perfect metaphor for the deficits that constrain American might. Though he has the body of a man half his age, Schwarzenegger himself is, in fact, just four years short of his 60th birthday. His determination to remain forever Mr. Universe typifies the determination of an entire generation never to grow old, though grow old they must—with important economic consequences. As he contemplates the finances of the state of California, the real Arnold Schwarzenegger now confronts just a fraction of the huge economic deficit that is the first real constraint on American power.

The Terminator is also a very American hero for the simple reason that there is only one of him. In this he personifies the chronic manpower shortage that constrains American nation-building. Above all, the Terminator exemplifies the American attention deficit. Less than a year after the invasion of Iraq, a growing number of Americans have already got that five-letter word flashing in their heads: abort.

Let’s first take a closer look at the fabled $10 trillion U.S. economy. The lion’s share of the annual output of the American economy is, in fact, accounted for by private consumption. That share has risen from about 61 percent in 1967 to 70 percent in 2002. As they have consumed more, so Americans have saved ever less: the savings rate averaged about 10 percent between 1973 and 1983; at its low point, in 1999, it touched 1.6 percent, and it has risen only slightly to 3.6 percent in 2003. The only way that the United States has been able to achieve such rapid economic growth in the past decade has been by financing investment with the savings of foreigners. As a result it has gone from being the world’s banker to being the world’s debtor: the country’s net international-investment position was about 12 percent of GDP in 1980; in 2002 it was close to minus 25 percent.

Foreign lending also underwrites the American government. Some 46 percent of the total federal debt in public hands is now held by foreigners, and the bulk of the most recent purchases have been made by Asian central banks, particularly the Japanese and the Chinese. The fact that the financial stability of the United States today depends on the central bank of the People’s Republic of China is not widely known. Yet the significance is great. A debtor power can’t possibly exert the same leverage as a creditor power, and U.S. deficits look likely to grow as the baby-boom generation approaches retirement, because only a minority will have made adequate provision for the idleness and illness of old age. One recent estimate of the implicit “fiscal imbalance” between future spending and tax revenue arrived at the mind-boggling figure of $45 trillion.

That’s not the only troubling U.S. deficit. As has become obvious in Iraq, the United States does not have an especially large pool of combat-effective troops on which it can draw. With about 130,000 personnel required for active service in postwar Iraq, the Pentagon admits that it is at full stretch. Since the end of the cold war, service-personnel cuts have lowered the number of Americans troops abroad to little more than 200,000 at any one time. The rest are, or expect to be, at home. Foreign postings are expected to last six months, or at most a year.

This manpower deficit is compounded by the attention deficit: to be precise, a reluctance on the part of voters to tolerate prolonged commitments of American forces in hostile territory. It took about three years—from 1965 to 1968—and more than 30,000 men killed in action to reduce popular support for the Vietnam War by 25 percent. Between April and September 2003, by contrast, there was a comparably large drop in the popularity of the war in Iraq. Yet in that five-month period, little more than 300 U.S. service personnel lost their lives, a third of whom were the victims of accidents or sickness. Small wonder the Bush administration has felt compelled to promise the swiftest possible transfer of power to the Iraqi people.

Of the three deficits that eat away at American power, this last is the most serious. The economic deficit need not be fatal. Why shouldn’t the Japanese and Chinese fund American consumption indefinitely if Americans are happy to consume their products rather than those produced by American manufacturers? The manpower deficit may also be solvable. Why shouldn’t the United Nations help the United States create a peacekeeping force big enough to provide an effective constabulary for Iraq?

But the attention deficit is the real source of American weakness. For the creation of stable economic, legal and political institutions in a country like Iraq simply cannot be achieved in a 12-month time frame. The shorter the life of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the more difficult it will be to elicit the collaboration of local elites on which all imperial power must ultimately rely. Why would anyone want to collaborate with foreign occupiers who will soon, by their own admission, be gone?

If the United States is not quite as strong as it looks, the knee-jerk response of “realist” analysts of international relations is to look for signs that another power may be rising. Some point to the European Union. Others point to China. Yet there are good reasons to doubt whether either can be regarded as a credible rival—the EU because it is too economically sclerotic and politically fragmented, China because it is too economically volatile and politically centralized. In any case, the United States, the EU and China have more reasons to cooperate than they have to compete, whether the enemy is terror, AIDS or climate change.

The paradox of globalization is that as the world becomes more integrated, so power becomes more diffuse. The old monopolies on which power was traditionally based—monopolies of wealth, political office and knowledge—have been in large measure broken up. Unfortunately, thanks to the proliferation of modern means of destruction, the power to inflict violence has also become more evenly distributed—so that a poison dwarf like North Korea can resist the will even of the American giant.

Power is not just about being able to buy whatever you want; that is mere wealth. Power is about being able to get whatever you want at below the market price. It is about being able to get people to perform services or deliver goods they would not ordinarily offer to sell at any price. Yet power diminishes as it is shared. One country with one nuclear bomb is more powerful, if the rest of the world has none, than a country with a thousand nuclear bombs, if everyone else has one. And this brings us to the final respect in which America resembles the Terminator.

The United States has the capability to inflict appalling destruction while sustaining only minimal damage to itself. There is no regime it could not terminate if it wanted to—including North Korea. Such a war might leave South Korea in ruins, but the American Terminator would emerge more or less unscathed. What the Terminator is not programmed to do is to rebuild anyone but himself. If, as seems likely, the United States responds to pressure at home and abroad by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan before their economic reconstruction has been achieved, the scene will not be wholly unfamiliar. The limits of American power will be laid bare when the global Terminator finally admits: “I won’t be back.”

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3606145/site/newsweek/

Empire (a great essay by Ferguson)

2004-12-25T19:13:00.000-08:00

From the issue dated March 28, 2003

http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i29/29b00701.htm

America: an Empire in Denial

By NIALL FERGUSON

Once there was an empire that governed roughly a quarter of the world's population, covered about the same proportion of the Earth's land surface, and dominated nearly all its oceans. The British empire was the biggest empire ever, bar none. How an archipelago of rainy islands off the northwest coast of Europe came to rule the world is one of the fundamental questions not just of British but of world history.

Why should Americans care about the history of the British empire? There are two reasons. The first is that the United States was a product of that empire -- and not just in the negative sense that it was founded in the first successful revolt against British imperial rule. America today still bears the indelible stamp of the colonial era, when, for the better part of two centuries, the majority of white settlers on the Eastern Seaboard were from the British Isles. Second, and perhaps more important, the British empire is the most commonly cited precedent for the global power currently wielded by the United States. America is the heir to the empire in both senses: offspring in the colonial era, successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of American politics is, Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited? I do not believe that question can be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell; and of what it did, not just for Britain but for the world as a whole.

Was the British empire a good or bad thing? It is nowadays quite conventional to think that, on balance, it was a bad thing. One obvious reason for the empire's fall into disrepute was its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself. This is no longer a question for historical judgment alone; it has become a political, and potentially a legal, issue. The questions recently posed by an eminent historian on BBC television may be said to encapsulate the current conventional wisdom. "How," he asked, "did a people who thought themselves free end up subjugating so much of the world? ... How did an empire of the free become an empire of slaves?'' How, despite their "good intentions," did the British sacrifice "common humanity" to "the fetish of the market"?

Despite a certain patronizing fondness for postcolonial England, most Americans need little persuading that the British empire was a bad thing. The Declaration of Independence itemizes "a long train of abuses and usurpations" by the British imperial government, "pursuing invariably the same Object," namely "a design to reduce [the American colonists] under absolute Despotism" and to establish "an absolute Tyranny over these States." A few clear-sighted Americans -- notably Alexander Hamilton -- saw from an early stage that the United States would necessarily become an empire in its own right; the challenge, in his eyes, was to ensure that it was a "republican empire," one that did not sacrifice liberty at home for the sake of power abroad. Even Hamilton's critics were covert imperialists: Jefferson's expanding frontier implied colonization at the expense of Native Americans. Yet the anti-imperialist strain in American political rhetoric proved -- and continues to prove -- very resistant to treatment.

It is a striking feature of the current debate on American global power that the opponents of an "imperial" American foreign policy can be found on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. In his later years, the novelist Gore Vidal has become an outspoken critic of the American "imperial system," which, he claims, "has wrecked our society -- $5-trillion of debt, no proper public education, no health care -- and done the rest of the world incomparable harm." In a similar vein, Chalmers Johnson argues that America is "trapped within the structures of an empire of its own making" and warns that "the innocent of the 21st century are going to harvest unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent decades" -- implying that terrorist attacks like those of September 11, 2001, are an understandable reaction to American aggression.

What is surprising to European eyes is that the fulminations of the anti-imperialist left should be matched -- with almost perfect symmetry -- on the isolationist right. In his book A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America, Pat Buchanan issued the solemn warning: "Our country is today traveling the same path that was trod by the British Empire -- to the same fate. ... If America is not to end the coming century the way the British ... ended this one, we must learn the lessons history has taught us." For Buchanan, as for Vidal, overseas adventures subvert the ethos of the original, pure-of-heart republic in order to further the interests of sinister special interests. The remedy is to cease "running around on these moral crusades" and bring American troops back home.

The question that remains unresolved in this debate is whether the United States today is more powerful than the British empire of the mid-19th century. On one hand, as Paul Kennedy has pointed out, Britain was never as militarily dominant then as the United States is today. On the other, American power today remains in large measure informal or "soft" -- exercised through economic and cultural agencies rather than colonial structures. Anarcho-Marxists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri insist that such informal empire is just as powerful as the formal imperialism of occupying armies and administrators. In their view -- and it is a view widely shared by the multifarious critics of "globalization" -- multinational (but mainly American) corporations, aided and abetted by apparently supranational (but mainly American) public institutions like the International Monetary Fund, exercise just as much power as the soldiers and civil servants who enforced the pax britannica. Yet there clearly is a difference between influencing a nominally sovereign state, whether through economic pressure or cultural penetration, and actually ruling a colony. The United States in 2003 formally controls a far smaller area of the world than the United Kingdom did in 1903. Its weapons have a longer range, but not its writ.

Moreover, there are challenges to American power today that Britain did not have to contend with a hundred years ago. In Joseph Nye's image of a three-dimensional chessboard, American power is greatest on the top "board'' of traditional military power; more circumscribed on the middle board of economic power; and relatively weak on the bottom board of "transnational relations that cross borders outside government control," where the players range from "bankers electronically transferring sums larger than most national budgets at one extreme [to] terrorists transferring weapons or hackers disrupting Internet operations at the other." The British empire also had to contend with over-mighty bankers and terrorists, but the technological possibilities of the 19th and early 20th centuries favored the imperialists over the individual troublemaker. Only in his wildest dreams could the Mahdi, the leader of the Sudanese dervishes, have devastated the City of London the way Osama bin Laden devastated Lower Manhattan.

... There is no need here to recapitulate in any detail the arguments against imperialism. They can be summarized, I think, under two headings: those that stress the negative consequences for the colonized; and those that stress the negative consequences for the colonizers. In the former category belong both the nationalists and the Marxists, from the Mughal historian Gholam Hossein Khan, author of the Seir Mutaqherin (1789), to the Palestinian academic Edward Said, author of Orientalism (1978), by way of Lenin and a thousand others in between. In the latter camp belong the liberals, from Adam Smith onward, who have maintained for almost as many years that the British empire was, even from Britain's point of view, "a waste of money."

The central nationalist/Marxist assumption is, of course, that imperialism was economically exploitative: every facet of colonial rule, including even the apparently sincere efforts of Europeans to study and understand indigenous cultures, was at root designed to maximize the surplus value that could be extracted from the subject peoples. The central liberal assumption is more paradoxical. It is that precisely because imperialism distorted market forces -- using everything from military force to preferential tariffs to rig business in the favor of the metropolis -- it was not in the long-term interests of the metropolitan economy either. In this view, it was free economic integration with the rest of the world economy that mattered, not the coercive integration of imperialism. Thus, investment in domestic industry would have been better for Britain than investment in far-flung colonies, while the cost of defending the empire was a burden on taxpayers, who might otherwise have spent their money on the products of a modern consumer goods sector.

The common factor in these arguments was and remains the assumption that the benefits of international exchange could have been and can be reaped without the costs of empire. To put it more concisely: Can you have globalization without gunboats?

It has become almost a commonplace that globalization today has much in common with the integration of the world economy in the decades before 1914. But what exactly does this overused word mean? Is it an economically determined phenomenon, in which the free exchange of commodities and manufactures tends "to unite mankind in the bonds of peace"? Or might free trade require a political framework within which to work?

The leftist opponents of globalization naturally regard it as no more than the latest manifestation of a damnably resilient international capitalism. By contrast, the modern consensus among liberal economists is that increasing economic openness raises living standards, even if there will always be some net losers as hitherto privileged or protected social groups are exposed to international competition.

But economists and economic historians alike prefer to focus their attention on flows of commodities, capital, and labor. They say less about flows of knowledge, culture, and institutions. They also tend to pay more attention to the ways government can facilitate globalization by various kinds of deregulation than to the ways it can actively promote and indeed impose it. There is growing recognition of the importance of legal, financial, and administrative institutions such as the rule of law, credible monetary regimes, transparent fiscal systems, and incorrupt bureaucracies in encouraging cross-border capital flows. But how did the West European versions of such institutions spread as far and wide as they did?

In a few rare cases -- the most obvious being that of Japan -- there was a process of conscious, voluntary imitation. But more often than not, European institutions were imposed by main force, often literally at gunpoint. In theory, globalization may be possible in an international system of multilateral cooperation. But it may equally well be possible as a result of coercion if the dominant power in the world favors economic liberalism. Empire -- and specifically the British empire -- is the instance that springs to mind.

Today, the principal barriers to the optimal allocation of labor, capital, and goods in the world are, on one hand, civil wars and lawless, corrupt governments, which together have condemned so many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia to decades of impoverishment; and, on the other, the reluctance of the United States and its allies to practice as well as preach free trade, or to devote more than a trifling share of their vast resources to programs of economic aid. By contrast, for much (though certainly, as we shall see, not all) of its history, the British empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection, and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world. The empire also did a good deal to encourage those things in countries which were outside its formal imperial domain but under its economic influence through the "imperialism of free trade." Prima facie, therefore, there seems a plausible case that the empire enhanced global welfare -- in other words, was a Good Thing.

Many charges can, of course, be leveled against the British empire. I do not claim, as John Stuart Mill did, that British rule in India was "not only the purest in intention but one of the most beneficent in act ever known to mankind," nor, as Lord Curzon did, that "the British empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen." The empire was never so altruistic. In the 18th century the British were indeed as zealous in the acquisition and exploitation of slaves as they were subsequently zealous in trying to stamp slavery out; and for much longer they practiced forms of racial discrimination and segregation that we today consider abhorrent. When imperial authority was challenged -- in India in 1857, in Jamaica in 1831 or 1865, in South Africa in 1899 -- the British response was brutal. When famine struck -- in Ireland in the 1840s, in India in the 1870s -- the response was negligent, in some measure positively culpable.

Yet the fact remains that no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital, and labor than the British empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order, and governance around the world. To characterize all this as "gentlemanly capitalism" risks underselling the scale -- and modernity -- of the achievement in the sphere of economics; just as criticism of the "ornamental" (meaning hierarchical) character of British rule overseas tends to overlook the signal virtues of what were remarkably nonvenal administrations.

The difficulty with the achievements of empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of empire. It is, however, instructive to try to imagine a world without the British empire. But while it is just about possible to imagine what the world would have been like without the French Revolution or the First World War, the imagination reels from the counterfactual of a world without the British empire.

As I traveled around that empire's remains in the first half of 2002, I was constantly struck by its ubiquitous creativity. To imagine the world without the empire would be to expunge from the map the elegant boulevards of Williamsburg and old Philadelphia; to sweep into the sea the squat battlements of Port Royal, Jamaica; to return to the bush the glorious skyline of Sydney; to level the steamy seaside slum that is Freetown, Sierra Leone; to fill in the Big Hole at Kimberley; to demolish the mission at Kuruman; to send the town of Livingstone hurtling over the Victoria Falls -- which would of course revert to their original name of Mosioatunya. Without the British empire, there would be no Calcutta; no Bombay; no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but these vast metropoles remain cities founded and built by the British.

It is of course tempting to argue that it would all have happened anyway, albeit with different names. Perhaps the railways would have been invented and exported by another European power; perhaps the telegraph cables would have been laid across the sea by someone else, too. Maybe the same volumes of trade would have gone on without bellicose empires meddling in peaceful commerce. Maybe too the great movements of population that transformed the cultures and complexions of whole continents would have happened anyway.

Yet there is reason to doubt that the world would have been the same or even similar in the absence of the empire. Even if we allow for the possibility that trade, capital flows, and migration could have been "naturally occurring" in the past 300 years, there remain the flows of culture and institutions. And here the fingerprints of empire seem more readily discernible and less easy to wipe away.

When the British governed a country -- even when they only influenced its government by flexing their military and financial muscles -- there were certain distinctive features of their own society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the more important of these would run as follows:

1. The English language
2. English forms of land tenure
3. Scottish and English banking
4. The Common Law
5. Protestantism
6. Team sports
7. The limited or "night watchman" state
8. Representative assemblies
9. The idea of liberty

The last of these is perhaps the most important because it remains the most distinctive feature of the empire -- the thing that sets it apart from its continental European rivals. I do not mean to claim that all British imperialists were liberals -- far from it. But what is very striking about the history of the empire is that whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behavior from within British society. Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain's imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British empire something of a self-liquidating character. Once a colonized society had sufficiently adopted the other institutions the British brought with them, it became very hard for the British to prohibit that political liberty to which they attached so much significance for themselves.

Would other empires have produced the same effects? It seems doubtful. In my travels I caught many glimpses of world empires that might have been: in dilapidated Chinsura, a vision of how all Asia might look if the Dutch empire had not declined and fallen; in whitewashed Pondicherry, which all India might resemble if the French had won the Seven Years' War; in dusty Delhi, where the Mughal empire might have been restored if the India Mutiny had not been crushed in 1858; in Kanchanaburi, where the Japanese empire built its bridge on the River Kwai with British slave labor. Would New Amsterdam be the New York we know today if the Dutch had not surrendered it to the British in 1664? Might it not resemble more closely Bloemfontein, an authentic survivor of Dutch colonization? For better, for worse -- fair and foul -- the world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain's age of empire.

Of course no one would claim that the record of the British empire was unblemished. On the contrary it often failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation, and the "ethnic cleansing" of indigenous peoples. Yet the 19th-century empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements, and, with the abolition of slavery, free labor. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the 20th century, too, it more than justified its own existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.

What lessons can the United States today draw from the British experience of empire? The obvious one is that the most successful economy in the world -- as Britain was for most of the 18th and 19th centuries -- can do a very great deal to impose its preferred values on less technologically advanced societies. It is nothing short of astonishing that Great Britain was able to govern so much of the world without running up an especially large defense bill. To be precise, Britain's defense expenditure averaged little more than 3 percent of net national product between 1870 and 1913, and it was lower for the rest of the 19th century. That was money well spent. No doubt it is true that, in theory, open international markets would have been preferable to imperialism; but in practice global free trade was not and is not naturally occurring. The British empire enforced it.

By comparison, the United States today is vastly wealthier relative to the rest of the world than Britain ever was. In 1913 Britain's share of total world output was 8 percent; the equivalent figure for the United States in 1998 was 22 percent. Nor should anybody pretend that, at least in fiscal terms, the cost of expanding the American empire, even if it were to mean a great many small wars like the one in Afghanistan, would be prohibitive. In 2000 American defense spending stood at just under 3 percent of gross national product, compared with an average for the years 1948 to 1998 of 6.8 percent. Even after big cuts in military expenditure, the United States is still the world's only superpower, with an unrivaled financial and military-technological capability. Its defense budget is 14 times that of China and 22 times that of Russia. Britain never enjoyed such a lead over her imperial rivals.

The hypothesis, in other words, is a step in the direction of political globalization, with the United States shifting from informal to formal empire much as late Victorian Britain once did. That is certainly what we should expect if history does indeed repeat itself. Like the United States today, Britain did not set out to rule a quarter of the world's land surface. Its empire began as a network of coastal bases and informal spheres of influence, much like the post-1945 American "empire." But real and perceived threats to their commercial interests constantly tempted the British to progress from informal to formal imperialism. That was how so much of the atlas came to be colored imperial red.

No one could deny the extent of the American informal empire -- the empire of multinational corporations, of Hollywood movies, and even of TV evangelists. Is this so very different from the early British empire of monopoly trading companies and missionaries? Nor is it any coincidence that a map showing the principal U.S. military bases around the world looks remarkably like a map of Royal Navy coaling stations a hundred years ago. Even recent American foreign policy recalls the gunboat diplomacy of the British empire in its Victorian heyday, when a little trouble on the periphery could be dealt with by a short, sharp "surgical strike." The only difference is that today's gunboats fly.

Yet in three respects the process of "Anglobalization" is fundamentally different today. On close inspection, America's strengths may not be the strengths of a natural imperial hegemon. For one thing, British imperial power relied on the massive export of capital and people. But since 1972 the American economy has been a net importer of capital (to the tune of 15 percent of gross domestic product last year), and it remains the favored destination of immigrants from around the world, not a producer of would-be colonial emigrants. Britain in its heyday was able to draw on a culture of unabashed imperialism which dated back to the Elizabethan period, whereas the United States will always be a reluctant ruler of other peoples. Since Woodrow Wilson's intervention to restore the elected government in Mexico in 1913, the American approach has too often been to fire some shells, march in, hold elections, and then get the hell out -- until the next crisis. Haiti is one recent example; Kosovo another. Afghanistan may yet prove to be the next.

The reality is that the United States has -- whether it admits it or not -- taken up some kind of global burden. It considers itself responsible not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states, but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas. And just like the British empire before it, the American empire unfailingly acts in the name of liberty, even when its own self-interest is manifestly uppermost.

Yet the empire that rules the world today is both more and less than its British begetter. It has a much bigger economy, many more people, a much larger arsenal. But it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people, and its culture to those backward regions that need them most urgently and that, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.

The former American Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said that Britain had lost an empire but failed to find a role. Perhaps the reality is that the Americans have taken our old role without yet facing the fact that an empire comes with it. The technology of overseas rule may have changed -- the dreadnoughts may have given way to F-15s. But like it or not, and deny it who will, empire is as much a reality today as it was throughout the 300 years when Britain ruled, and made, the modern world.

Niall Ferguson is a professor of financial history at New York University. This essay is excerpted from Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and Lessons for Global Power, to be published next month by Basic Books. Copyright © 2002 by Niall Ferguson.

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Colossus (an essay by Ferguson)

2004-12-25T19:08:00.000-08:00

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WHEN EMPIRES WANE

The End of Power
Without American hegemony the world would likely return to the dark ages.

BY NIALL FERGUSON
Monday, June 21, 2004 12:01 a.m.

We tend to assume that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In the history of world politics, it seems, someone is always bidding for hegemony. Today it is the United States; a century ago it was Britain. Before that, it was the French, the Spaniards and so on. The 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, doyen of the study of statecraft, portrayed modern European history as an incessant struggle for mastery, in which a balance of power was possible only through recurrent conflict.

Power, in other words, is not a natural monopoly; the struggle for mastery is both perennial and universal. The "unipolarity" identified by commentators following the Soviet collapse cannot last much longer, for the simple reason that history hates a hyperpower. Sooner or later, challengers will arise, and back we must go to a multipolar, multipower world.

But what if this view is wrong? What if the world is heading for a period when there is no hegemon? What if, instead of a balance of power, there is an absence of power? Such a situation is not unknown in history. Though the chroniclers of the past have long been preoccupied with the achievements of great powers--whether civilizations, empires or nation states--they have not wholly overlooked eras when power has receded. Unfortunately, the world's experience with power vacuums is hardly encouraging. Anyone who dislikes U.S. hegemony should bear in mind that, instead of a multipolar world of competing great powers, a world with no hegemon at all may be the real alternative to it. This could turn out to mean a new Dark Age of waning empires and religious fanaticism; of endemic rapine in the world's no-go zones; of economic stagnation and a retreat by civilization into a few fortified enclaves.

Why might a power vacuum arise early in the 21st century? The reasons are not especially hard to imagine.

• The clay feet of the colossus. The U.S. suffers from at least three structural deficits that will limit the effectiveness and duration of its crypto-imperial role in the world. The first is the nation's growing dependence on foreign capital to finance excessive private and public consumption. It is difficult to recall any empire that has long endured after becoming so dependent on lending from abroad. The second deficit relates to manpower: The U.S. is a net importer of people and cannot therefore underpin its hegemonic aspirations with real colonization; at the same time, its relatively small volunteer army is already spread very thin as a result of recent military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Finally, the U.S. is afflicted by what is best called an attention deficit. Its republican institutions make it difficult to establish a consensus for long-term "nation-building" projects.

• "Old Europe" grows older. Those who dream that the European Union might become a counterweight to the U.S. should continue slumbering. Impressive though the EU's enlargement has been, the reality is that demography likely condemns it to decline in international influence. With fertility rates dropping and life expectancies rising, European societies may, within less than 50 years, display median ages in the upper 40s. Indeed, "Old Europe" will soon be truly old. By 2050, one in every three Italians, Spaniards and Greeks will be 65 or over, even allowing for immigration. Europeans therefore face an agonizing choice between "Americanizing" their economies, i.e., opening their borders to much more immigration, with the cultural changes that would entail, or transforming their union into a fortified retirement community.

• China's coming economic crisis. Optimistic observers of China insist that the economic miracle of the past decade will not fade--that growth will continue at such a pace that within three or four decades China's GDP will surpass that of the U.S. Yet it is far from clear that the normal rules that apply to emerging markets have been suspended for Beijing's benefit. First, a fundamental incompatibility exists between the free-market economy, based inevitably on private property and the rule of law, and the persistence of the Communist monopoly on power, which breeds rent-seeking and corruption, and impedes the creation of transparent institutions. As usual in "Asian tiger" economies, production is running far ahead of domestic consumption--thus making the economy heavily dependent on exports. No one knows the full extent of the problems in the Chinese domestic banking sector. Western banks that are buying up bad debts with a view to establishing themselves in China must remember that this strategy was tried a century ago, in the era of the Open Door policy, when American and European firms rushed into China only to see their investments vanish in the smoke of war and revolution. Then, as now, hopes for China's development ran euphorically high, especially in the U.S. But those hopes were disappointed, and could be disappointed again. A Chinese currency or banking crisis could have earth-shaking ramifications, especially when foreign investors realize the difficulty of repatriating assets held in China.

• The fragmentation of Islamic civilization. With birthrates in Muslim societies more than double the European average, Islamic countries are bound to put pressure on Europe and the U.S. in the years ahead. If, as is forecast, the population of Yemen will exceed that of Russia by 2050, there must be either dramatic improvements in the Middle East's economic performance or substantial emigration from the Arab world to senescent Europe. Yet the subtle colonization of Europe's cities by Muslims does not necessarily portend the advent of a new and menacing "Eurabia." In fact, the Muslim world is as divided as it has ever been. This division is not merely between Sunni and Shiite. It is also between those seeking a peaceful modus vivendi with the West (embodied in Turkey's desire to join the EU) and those drawn to the Islamic Bolshevism of the likes of Osama bin Laden. Opinion polls from Morocco to Pakistan suggest high levels of anti-American sentiment, but not unanimity. In Europe, only a minority expresses overt sympathy for terrorist organizations; most young Muslims in England clearly prefer assimilation to jihad. We are a long way from a bipolar clash of civilizations, much less the rise of a new caliphate that might pose a geopolitical threat to the U.S.

In short, each of the obvious 21st-century hegemons--the U.S., Europe, China--seems to contain within it the seeds of decline; while Islam remains a diffuse force in world politics, lacking the resources of a superpower.

Suppose, in a worst-case scenario, that U.S. neoconservativism meets its match in Iraq and that the Bush administration's project to democratize the Middle East at gunpoint ends in withdrawal: from empire to decolonization in 24 months. Suppose also that no rival power shows interest in filling the resulting vacuums--not only in Iraq but conceivably also Afghanistan, to say nothing of the Balkans and Haiti. What would an "apolar" future look like?

The answer is not easy, since there have been very few periods in history with no contenders for the role of global or at least regional hegemon. The nearest approximation might be the 1920s, when the U.S. walked away from Woodrow Wilson's project of global democracy and collective security. But that power vacuum was short-lived. The West Europeans quickly snapped up the leftovers of Ottoman rule in the Middle East, while the Bolsheviks reassembled the Tsarist empire.

Indeed, one must go back much further in history to find a period of true and enduring apolarity; as far back, in fact, as the ninth and 10th centuries, when the heirs of the Roman empire--Rome and Byzantium--had receded from the height of their power, when the Abbasid caliphate was also waning and when the Chinese empire was languishing between the Tang and Sung dynasties. In the absence of strong secular polities, it was religious institutions--the Papacy, the monastic orders, the Muslim ulema--that often set the political agenda. That helps explain why the period culminated with the holy war known as the Crusades. Yet this clash of civilizations was in many ways just one more example of the apolar world's susceptibility to long-distance military raids directed at urban centers by more backward peoples. The Vikings were perhaps the principal beneficiaries of an anarchic age. Small wonder that the future seemed to lie in creating small defensible entities like the Venetian republic or the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England.

Could an apolar world today produce an era reminiscent of that troubled time? Certainly, one can imagine the world's established powers retreating into their own regional spheres of influence. But what of the growing pretensions to autonomy of the supranational bodies created under U.S. leadership after World War II? The U.N., the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO each regards itself as in some way representing the "international community." Surely their aspirations to global governance are fundamentally different from the spirit of the Dark Ages?

Yet universal claims were an integral part of the rhetoric of that era. All the empires claimed to rule the world; some, unaware of the existence of other civilizations, maybe even believed that they did. The reality, however, was political fragmentation. And that remains true today. The defining characteristic of our age is not a shift of power upward to supranational institutions, but downward. If free flows of information and factors of production have empowered multinational corporations and NGOs (to say nothing of evangelistic cults of all denominations), the free flow of destructive technology has empowered criminal organizations and terrorist cells, the Viking raiders of our time. These can operate wherever they choose, from Hamburg to Gaza. By contrast, the writ of the international community is not global. It is, in fact, increasingly confined to a few strategic cities such as Kabul and Sarajevo.

Waning empires. Religious revivals. Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might find itself reliving. The trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the one of the ninth century. For the world is roughly 25 times more populous, so that friction between the world's "tribes" is bound to be greater. Technology has transformed production; now societies depend not merely on freshwater and the harvest but also on supplies of mineral oil that are known to be finite. Technology has changed destruction, too: Now it is possible not just to sack a city, but to obliterate it.

For more than two decades, globalization has been raising living standards, except where countries have shut themselves off from the process through tyranny or civil war. Deglobalization--which is what a new Dark Age would amount to--would lead to economic depression. As the U.S. sought to protect itself after a second 9/11 devastated Houston, say, it would inevitably become a less open society. And as Europe's Muslim enclaves grow, infiltration of the EU by Islamist extremists could become irreversible, increasing trans-Atlantic tensions over the Middle East to breaking point. Meanwhile, an economic crisis in China could plunge the Communist system into crisis, unleashing the centrifugal forces that have undermined previous Chinese empires. Western investors would lose out, and conclude that lower returns at home are preferable to the risks of default abroad.

The worst effects of the Dark Age would be felt on the margins of the waning great powers. With ease, the terrorists could disrupt the freedom of the seas, targeting oil tankers and cruise liners while we concentrate our efforts on making airports secure. Meanwhile, limited nuclear wars could devastate numerous regions, beginning in Korea and Kashmir; perhaps ending catastrophically in the Middle East.

The prospect of an apolar world should frighten us a great deal more than it frightened the heirs of Charlemagne. If the U.S. is to retreat from the role of global hegemon--its fragile self-belief dented by minor reversals--its critics must not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony. The alternative to unpolarity may not be multipolarity at all. It may be a global vacuum of power. Be careful what you wish for.

Mr. Ferguson, professor of history at NYU and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, is the author of "Colossus: The Price of America's Empire" (Penguin, 2004). A longer version of this article appears in the upcoming edition of Foreign Policy.

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COLOSSUS by Niall Ferguson

2004-12-25T19:05:00.000-08:00

June 6, 2004
The Power To Do Good
by Victor Davis Hanson
New York Post, April 25, 2004

Colossus: The Price of America's Empire by Niall Ferguson, Penguin Press, 366 pages, $25.95

JOHN Kerry makes the case that the present administration has unduly alienated our allies - leaving us alone, isolated and increasingly frustrated in trying to do too much overseas with too few resources.

Should we Americans rightly be worried about similar charges from allies and enemies alike of unilateralism, preemption and hegemony?

Not to worry, Niall Ferguson assures us in his latest reflection on the state of the world. The problem of failed states, global terrorism and European fury abroad has nothing to do with George W. Bush and the present administration's muscular foreign policy. Instead, the culprits are the isolationist tendency and Americans' innate distaste for staying long abroad that allow most of the worlds' wounds to fester.

Those who got it right about America were not Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, but Teddy Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur. The latter did not welcome war, but accepted that the world outside our shores was often a pretty rotten place that would take and take until someone - usually us - stopped it.

In reality, we should be natural imperialists, given our wealth and expertise. Americans are also endowed with an exceptional moral sense. We are a generous people, whose checkered imperial interventions in the past rarely proved profitable or exploitive.

Americans' setbacks - from the negotiated settlement in Korea, the pullout from Vietnam, the mess in Haiti and the last quarter-century of appeasement accorded fundamentalist terrorists - resulted from an innate unease with using our power to its full extent to promote our own liberal values. What limited successes we have enjoyed in nation-building - most notably in postwar Germany and Japan - was a result of one of the few times Americans used their full military might and grasped that occupation was necessary to ensure such potentially dangerous societies reemerged under the aegis of the liberal West.

Does Ferguson propose a new American liberal empire? In fact, he does almost, but not before noting that the British Victorians themselves got a bad rap as exploitive colonialists. In fact, the record of the 18th and 19th centuries prove exactly the opposite: Former and once-prosperous colonies, following autonomy, quickly turned into self-induced miseries, while Britain itself thrived as never before once free of these costly obligations.

Empire turns out not to be a means of making money, but instead an idealist pursuit to keep sea lanes open, bullies at bay and nations trading rather than fighting. The world has been lucky to have the Americans fill this vacuum, inasmuch as the British once did a pretty good job of it as well. And the question anyway for a retiring United States is not if, but when another - far less humane - hyper-power will throw its weight around.

IRAQ is an interesting case study. Leftist critics cry that oil, Halliburton and neoconservative conspiracies are at the heart of our occupation. In fact, our $87 billion investment in security and reconstruction is both a gesture of American magnanimity and service to world stability by implanting consensual government where tribalism, state criminality and terrorism once helped to ruin the region.

The danger there is not military impotence or financial exhaustion, but rather a failure to invest our full military and civilian resources for a sufficient time to ensure success.

But aren't we in danger of going broke, with over 150 bases abroad and hundreds of thousands of troops in the Middle East, Japan, South Korea and Europe? Indeed, the latter continent is busy triangulating with our enemies (witness the latest Spanish appeasement), getting rich while we sacrifice and running huge trade deficits with us as we supply their own security needs.

Not to worry, Ferguson assures us. Despite superficial appearances, Europe is really a mess. Its new union is undemocratic and statist. Its population is static and soon to fall. Its entitlement overspending is far worse even than ours. And unassimilated minorities and a socialist mentality ensure that European electorates are not going to reflect robust unity or idealism any time soon.

True, we are running dangerous annual trade and budget deficits, as well as accruing massive long-term foreign debt that at present rates are simply unsustainable and eventually incompatible with a strong presence abroad. But again the problem, Ferguson assures us, is willpower, not ability. We are just too self-absorbed and suffer from chronic attention deficit disorder when it comes to the need to stay vigilant and engaged overseas.

SO, the real crises of American power are soaring entitlements, unfunded social mandates and ever-increasing laxity and affluence among an indulgent citizenry. While we fret about prescription-drug benefits, the madrassas turn out soldiers of Islam who are emboldened in their hostility precisely because of our restraint and self-absorption. We have deficits of sorts galore - but they involve shortcomings in galvanizing spiritual power, fielding enough willing soldiers and setting sensible budget priorities.

This is a bold, original and eccentric argument, and there will be plenty of critics who will pounce on Ferguson's Gibbonesque theory of internal decline and imperial denial. Indeed, sometimes Ferguson himself gives critics easy ammunition.

Need soldiers? Ferguson advises that we look at the millions of prison convicts, illegal immigrants and chronic unemployed who could easily be induced to serve in a massive new imperial army - as if the U.S. military is looking for such bodies for its high-tech, high morale expeditionary forces.

Ferguson really does argue that far from spending too little at home, our real problems are federal wasteful entitlements for couch potatoes. Americans risk becoming softies, pear-shaped and fat, with maxed-out credit cards, waiting to check out in luxurious rest homes - the entire society in danger of becoming an "inert lump of old iron."

But the Marines - some with dyed hair and Ray Bans - who drove to Baghdad in three weeks, and the Rangers who sleep out in the Hindu Kush, hardly seem the same sort of fellows as those who pour out into the streets of European cities to protest for a 35-hour work week and more government unemployment insurance.

Twenty-six days after 9/11, Americans were in Afghanistan; 40 hours after a similar al Qaeda attack, the Spanish electorate voted in Socialists on the promise that they would get out of Iraq pronto. Our population may seem soft and flabby on university campuses and think tanks, but the sort of Americans I see out here in rural central California like to fight, work to exhaustion and, for the most part, worry more about what we are going to do to our enemies in the Middle East, rather than they to us.

Ferguson, in contrast, thinks that if we keep this indulgence up as a nation, we should fear not the Chinese, Middle East or jealous Europeans, but rather ourselves, who will have to either appease, bribe or apologize to a growing group of emboldened barbarians and terrorists.

SOMETIMES "Colossus" reads as if it is slapped together as a collection of at least five previously published but unconnected essays that don't always work as unified and consecutive chapters. And often the analyses of popular American culture seem stereotyped and more the impressions of an Oxbridge don who has puttered around Boston, New York or San Francisco rather than hung out much in Kansas City or Salt Lake City.

But those are really minor complaints given Ferguson's great strengths as an astute diplomatic and economic historian and a fearless, politically incorrect critic who offers a needed warning for a country that he genuinely believes in. So this is a welcome and controversial book from a principled scholar - and it couldn't come at a better time.

Empire (another review)

2004-12-25T18:51:00.000-08:00

Book Reviews

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Imperial Tradition
Empire
The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
By Niall Ferguson
Basic Books. 352 p $35
Click here for price at amazon.com

Empire looks like a coffee-table book. Handsomely produced on slick paper, replete with copious illustrations and maps, it was originally published as a companion volume to a BBC television series. One would expect its contents to be bland, reflective of conventional wisdom. One would be fooled, however. Its author is the brilliant, iconoclastic Niall Ferguson, the enfant terrible of modern British historians. In beautifully written prose he challenges many sacred cows, going so far as to express the politically incorrect opinion that on balance the British empire was a good thing and must somehow be replaced by an American empire.

Ferguson’s announced intention is not to replicate past histories but “to write the history of globalization as it was promoted by Great Britain and her colonies. “The question,” he contends, “is not whether British imperialism was without a blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity.” His first chapter, “Why Britain?” stresses that England beat out its major imperial rival, France, because its naval superiority was based on its crucial ability to borrow money. In “White Plague” he says that migration overseas was a basic element, with England’s first colony, Ireland, as a laboratory. Not only economics motivated migration, religious fundamentalism played a great role; and slavery provided a major source of unwilling immigrants. The author argues that the American revolutionaries had little cause to complain—in the 1770’s New Englanders were possibly the wealthiest people in the world—and he wryly notes that the revolution caused slavery to remain in existence much longer than would have been the case had Britain won. With the American colonies lost, Australia became the place where surplus population, originally largely criminals, could be sent, and here as elsewhere, unlike the situation in other empires, the central government acted as a check on local oppression. The Durham Report of 1832, which laid the basis for self-government in Canada, has “good claim to be the book that saved the Empire,” for what it did “was acknowledge that the American colonies had been right.” From it evolved “responsible government,” “a way of reconciling the practice of empire with the principle of liberty.”

In his chapters “The Mission” and “Heaven’s Breed,” Ferguson underlines the extent to which the Victorians—believing they knew better than others—made the spread of Protestant Christianity a major motivation for imperial conquest. Religious fervor was behind the abolition of the slave system in the early 19th century and the British navy’s attempt to suppress the slave trade on the high seas.

But the missionaries were cultural imperialists, and only the deadly Indian mutiny of 1857 convinced the British that there were limits to their ability to impose their values on other civilizations. Indeed, the role of India in the empire is a key theme of this book; “it was the foundation on which the entire mid-Victorian Empire stood,” and the “white mutiny” of 1888 against attempts to improve the status of educated Indians in the government sparked the beginnings of organized Indian nationalism.

In “Maxim Force” Ferguson shows how superior military technology played a major role in the growth of the empire, especially in Africa, where the “Scramble for Africa” was a function of the contested European balance of power. Men like Cecil Rhodes dreamed of British rule from Cairo to the Cape, and the takeover of Egypt gave them hope. Rhodes was a racist, as were increasing numbers of his compatriots, when a vulgarized Darwinism made many believe that superior physical power meant inherent ethnic superiority. The climax of this arrogance was the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898 when the Maxim gun enabled the British to massacre thousands of dervishes while losing only 20 of their own men. The lesson was learned by rivals, and soon the Maxim gun became standard German equipment. But all was not well in Africa. In the last year of the century in Rhodes’s own South Africa, the Boer farmers fiercely resisted British incursions, and were defeated only after 28,000 people—mostly children—died in British concentration camps.

The nature of the victory began to shake the confidence of British intellectuals. Yet the average Briton still believed in empire. The lower classes probably lost rather than gained from it economically, but, as Ferguson puts it, “imperialism did not have to pay to be popular. For many people it was sufficient that it was exciting.... As a source of entertainment—of sheer psychological gratification—the Empire’s importance can never be exaggerated.”

In “Empire for Sale” Ferguson is adamant that the Empire was not really destroyed by internal dissention, but by rival empires, especially the German. World War I—which the author contends came about mainly through the “miscalculation” of statesmen—sounded its death knell. Military victory yielded to economic weakness, and while the Empire still paid financially, Britain failed to prepare to defend it. Malaise and indecision led to the Empire’s beginning to unravel where it had begun, in Ireland, with the Easter Rebellion of 1916; and the Irish example emboldened Indian nationalism. Hitler, Ferguson notes in typically contrarian fashion, was a fervent admirer of the British Empire, and would have allowed the British to keep it in exchange for a free hand in Europe. Britain heroically refused this “diabolical temptation” but lost the Empire anyway. Saved in World War II by its alliance with the United States and the Soviet Union, it could not resist their postwar pressures to abandon the Empire. “American war aims,” Ferguson writes, “...were in many ways more overtly hostile to the British Empire than anything Hitler had said.” The rival Japanese empire had shown by its atrocious treatment of prisoners—on which Ferguson minces no words—how relatively benign the British Empire was, and India had rallied to the imperial cause.

But the end was in sight. At war’s end Britain was broke financially, and therefore weak politically. The Americans forced the British out of Egypt after the 1956 Suez invasion largely through a major loan conditional on withdrawal. “Indeed,” Ferguson says, “it was at the Bank of England that the Empire was effectively lost.”

What lesson does the rise and fall of the Empire have for Americans as we seem to be setting up a new world order in the Middle East and elsewhere based on our own sense of military and moral superiority and political mission? Ferguson clearly believes that the United States today is far more economically dominant than Britain ever was and that its “informal empire” might soon, like Britain’s, evolve into a formal one. But there are major differences. Unlike Britain at its height, the United States is not a creditor nation but a debtor one, big time. We are not sending immigrants, but receiving them. Finally, we do not have an imperial tradition and “will always be a reluctant ruler of other peoples.” Yet we, like imperial Britain, have this belief in our inherent goodness and the habit of quelling disturbances on the periphery by surgical force. “The only difference is that today’s gunboats fly.” Ferguson is quite happy to believe that we have taken up “the white man’s burden” and that, as he says of our new hegemony, “It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.”

Whether one agrees with Ferguson or not, anyone seriously concerned with America’s rapidly changing role in the world should read this richly informative and thought-provoking book. Victor Ferkiss

EMPIRE by Niall Ferguson

2004-12-25T18:03:00.000-08:00

Empire
The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power

By Niall Ferguson

Review by Matthew Hinds

"Take Constitution Jesuits if obtainable and insert English Empire for the Roman Catholic Religion."

This quote is taken from the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes, outlining the original concept of the Rhodes Scholarships in 1888. At the time, the British Empire was 25% of the world's geographical landmass, whose commerce and political power dwarfed any empire the world had ever known, but it was also much more than this. For Britons of Rhodes' time, the Empire was a sacred covenant, the God-given right of Britannia's destiny, to rule, with or without evidence or inconvenient facts. The Empire was an article of faith.

Professor Niall Ferguson, economist and historian, explores a complicated and misunderstood subject in his comprehensive new book, Empire. Ferguson's expressive language brings to life the blood, sweat and toil of a cast of characters who helped shape and create the Empire, from the compelling Cecil Rhodes, to the humane and influential missionary Dr. David Livingstone.

It is interesting to note the Empire that was once viewed as Britain's greatest strength and greatest responsibility is now viewed with indifference, lampooned and vilified. For most modern day historians, Cecil Rhodes' words and views are interpreted as incredible hubris, and is an embarrassing reminder of Britain's past. Ferguson challenges these contemporary perceptions of the British Empire, and importantly, how the subject is taught to Britain's schools.

Ferguson, author of The Pity of War and The Cash Nexus, is arguably one of the most talented and bold historians of his generation. With every book, he has shaken the foundation the creaky Oxbridge establishment.

Ferguson could be considered a post-modern revisionist. Revisionist history has become the "true history"; Ferguson has correctly returned history to the most objective view. For example, the Empire was once considered mostly a positive event in the course of history, but for the past 50 years, the revisionist historians have denigrated the Empire to a rapacious crime syndicate. Great Britain has been blamed for impoverishing and brutalizing the unlucky members of its Empire. The historians also assert that the preservation of this Empire was the cause of all wars.

Ferguson's view, argued reasonably and dispassionately, proposes that the Empire should be seen at worst misguided, and at best, an overall and positive influence for civilization. Instead of looking at history from only a 21st century perspective, Ferguson urges the modern day student to study history through the eyes of the people who lived in the Empire. For Ferguson, without the advent of this Empire, the world would have been a much darker place for a much longer time.

Ferguson argues that before modern day globalization, there was "Anglobalization," the transformation of the world economy along British lines, a system that made the British Empire a flourishing and prosperous enterprise. Ferguson illustrates how Anglobalization fostered our modern day civilization. When the Empire became the world's banker, capitalism helped enlighten and dramatically improve the condition of those living in the rest of the world. The communication revolution is also directly related to the "annihilation of distance." British engineers who throughout the Industrial Revolution "harnessed the power of steam and the strength of iron to transform the world economy and the international balance of power" were at the forefront of this crucial development.

Politically, the countries throughout the world which imitated the Empire's system of parliamentary democracy and Common Law had a significantly better chance of being successful democracies after they were granted independence. Ferguson's unmatched economic knowledge helps him communicate how legal protection is necessary for the encouragement of capital and all the benefits that it brings to a country. A recent survey concluded that societies that have adopted Common Law (such as the former British Colonies) have had the strongest legal protection for investors, while those that have adopted French Civil Law (such as the former French Colonies) have had the weakest legal protection for investors. Ferguson believes that the commonly accepted idea that the Empire bankrupted its former colonies, which led to their demise, is a problematic conclusion.

Few also realize that the British Empire was at the forefront of ridding the world of one of the most tremendous obstacles to civilization, slavery. Ferguson sheds light on the sadly forgotten names of William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay, leaders of a group that convinced an entire country and its Empire that slavery was wrong and should be immediately abolished. Slavery was not only abolished throughout the British Empire, but prosecuted throughout the world. Great Britain, acting as a World policeman, intercepted 425 slave ships in 1848. So committed to slavery's abolishment was the Empire, that British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston almost declared war on Brazil for their brutal slave trade.

Ferguson shows that throughout this time, the progression of civilization was a direct result of the Empire's influence. Ferguson never tries to hide or conceal the British Empire's abuses; many times he shows how the Empire failed to live up to its sacred covenant of bringing liberty, trade and justice to the colonies. But Ferguson asks the question, what would have replaced the British Empire if the Empire hadn't existed? Judging by the examples of other countries' forays into colonization, it's hard to be optimistic.

Before the outbreak of World War II, Hitler made it clear that Britain could be allowed to keep its Empire if Germany could have a free hand in Europe. Britain could have entered this unholy alliance by leaving the rest of Europe to fend for itself while it protected its own empire, but its moral clarity stood in the way. Consequently, by taking this moral position, Britain ultimately lost their most valuable defining asset, their Empire. Ferguson ably argues that the British Empire justified its own existence through this sort of foreign policy. We only have to imagine the frightful world that would have been the result of a Japanese Empire or a Nazi Germany Empire.

Finally, Ferguson offers a cautionary word to America and what it can learn from the British Empire. As America has reached a period of global hegemony, like Great Britain in the past, America has also taken on a global burden with that power. Ferguson acknowledges American's natural aversion to the idea of Empire and Imperialism, but he asserts that America is "an empire in denial."

The ease and energy of his handling of such a daunting subject confirm Ferguson's reputation as one of today's brightest historians. The book is beautifully laid out and includes 125 illustrations capturing the period of the British Empire. In fact, the book's format would lend itself very well to the classroom, which I believe should be its next venue.

Niall Ferguson's Empire is an absolute tour de force of writing and scholarship. Thanks to Ferguson, a more balanced look at the British Empire will finally see the light of day, and the Empire will not just be seen as an Empire of evil. The gross abuses of the Empire should never be apologized for, but the British Empire and Anglobalization should be studied and recognized as one of the transforming forces of the modern world and a necessary bridge to the 21st century.

Matthew Hinds was a researcher for Andrew Rosindell, MP House of Commons. He has recently graduated from Catholic University of America, where he received honors on his thesis on the evolution of euroscepticism.

Dissection: "The Empty Cradle"

2004-12-19T07:20:00.000-08:00

Notes on “The Empty Cradle” by Phillip Longman

Chapter One: The Fundamentalist Moment

Population growth is a major source of population growth. More demands for products and more supply of labor. Economists aren’t sure how the economy would grow with a shrinking population. It would depend on pushing more people into the workforce and getting more out of them. Capitalists (scare labor and shrinking markets), liberals (unsustainable welfare state) and even environmentalists (less impact on nature) would find their agendas stymied. But religious strength would growth since they are having more babies. In the past, concerns about populations decline or “race suicide” has led to restrictions on abortion and birth control.

Chapter Two: Coffins and Cradles

-- Urbanization leads to fewer children. Less economic gain from them, unlike onteh farm.
Global fertility rates are half of what they were in 1977.
-- Influx of childrenin 1980s in places like Iran came from a huge drop in infant mortality rates, not fertility rates. Unlikely to be repeated. . Attempt to encourage natility, in Turkey for instance, are not not working.
-- Spread of contraception and sex education led women to take control over fertility and allowed them to compete in the workplace. Perhaps this led to rise of fundamentalism
-- By 2020, Chinese labor supply will be shrinking and it will have an average age older than the US
-- India will probably fall below replacement in a decade and by 2050 will be older than US is today. Rapid aging in China and India.
-- Global population may increase because of momentum – a large number of boomlet adults now having kinds – but not enough to replace themselves.

Chapter Three: America’s Vanishing Labor Supply

-- White fertility rates below replacement since the 1970s.
-- Only Hispanics are replacing themselves, primarily because of high-fertility immigrants.
-- A women’s education is the best predictor of how many children she will have.
-- Population growth depends on immigration.
-- By 250, more than 20 percent of Americans will be over 65, make the US much older than Florida is today.
-- Fertility rates may collapse here if the financial stress on the young is raised to pay for the oldsters.
-- Immigration is short-term fix; not as good as newborns since some immigrants are already adults. It would take a massive amount of immigration to keep worker ratios the same as they are today. And immigrants maybe look upon skeptically in a shirking population scenario.
-- Europe doing better attracting immigrants from Latin America.
-- 20 percent change world population will peak before 2050 and a 85 percent chance it will be falling by the end of the century.

Chapter Four: The New Human Environment

-- In a more urbanized world where children are not a economic advantage, they will be fewer of them.
-- Fertility Rate (FR) in Brazil has dropped by half in last 30 years. Link to how much they watch soap operas which show glamorous, childless life. Same with Hollywood films.
-- So less materialistic religious people will have more kids than non-religious with a possible huge impact of this demographic advantage, just like back in Roman days. What does this mean for modernity if secularists skip having kids. Religious are also cleaner living, giving them an edge with both the FR and Mortality Rate (MR).

Chapter Five:

-- Declining FR can bring a demographic advantage since it frees up more disposable income but that advantage has to be repaid since they are fewer people coming afterward.
-- Population growth drives economic growth: Rising population creates a spur to the discovery for more efficient ways of distributing and producing food, energy and other scarce goods. GDP is literally the sum of nation’s labor force times output per worker. So productivity will have to increase – a lot.
-- How do industries achieve new economies of scale when the number of consumers is falling. Or what happens to assets when they are fewer people to sell them to. How can poor nation’s attract capital if rich nation’s are using it for the old. How does this affect military strength.
-- Plus developing nation’s are getting old before they get rich. How will they cope? They will go back to the family.

Chapter Six: Fading Nations

-- Aging Japan may not have the dough to finance US deficits. Full of “parasite” singles. Very few Japanese schoolgirls think marriage is important.
-- China, Japan, Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain may all lose 20 to 30 percent of their population over the next 50 years. And China is particularly vulnerable to aging since it is much poorer than those other countries and less politically stable.
-- Soviet pro-natalist policies did not work, just encouraged women to have kids earlier – not more of them.
-- Europe will shrink except for France, UK, Ireland and one or two others. Could push more women into workforce, but that would hurt FR even more. They will also to encourage later retirements.
-- Maybe they will have to turn to more automation.

Chapter Seven: The Cost of Children

-- People may need two incomes to support kids but that economic gain then provides a disincentive to have kids. And many families won’t give up materials gains to have children. Polls show people want more kids than what they are having so there is a breakdown here. One more point: Parents are expected to make a greater investment of time in kids further raising costs; we just don’t send them out on their bikes for the day.

-- The whole chapter points out how expensive it is to raise kids and how that costs is growing. Plus stay at home moms are giving up income. And it is impossible to recapture that economic loss since kids don’t work on farms anymore. That cost is pushing down FR and on top of that education inequality between women and men is hurting marriage and fertility rates. (Our own version of unmarriagable men like China.)

Chapter Eight: The Cost of Aging

-- Life expectancy has gone because of the decline in infant mortality.
-- In 1900, 1 our of ten kids dies before age 1. Today it is one of 140 in the US. Thus life expectancy has increased by 30 years in past century.
-- Since 1950, LE for 65 year olds has increased just 3.45 years and that rate is slowing
-- CDC says medicine has contributed 2 of 7 years of added life expectancy since 1950. Better living and working conditions more important.
-- People would be better off with preventative medicine
-- Rand study showing people with high deductable spend 40 percent less on health care than those with full coverage and were just as healthy. Why? Behavior is more important.
-- Medical attention to the young more crucial than to the old. Will lead to healthier kids who later turn to healthier adults.-- Decline of marriage rates and no-walking, isolating urban sprawl is also bad for health.
Chapter Nine: The Slowing Pace of Progress

-- Famous Robert Gordon study on productivity and how it is overstated.
-- Too much techno-optimism
-- Today’s homes are not radically different from Ozzie and Harriet homes in 1950, while those homes are much different than homes in 1950. Slowing pace of technological change. Plus we are working harder and longer.
-- Service jobs less subject to automation.
-- Link between aging and innovation. Countries with more retired people start fewer businesses.
-- Older societies may be less adverse and not want to deploy capital overseas, especially in developing world which deal even worse with aging and religious fanaticism.
-- Less population growth less innovation since necessity is the mother of invention.
-- Need to focus on human capital for progress.

Chapter Ten: Home Economics

-- Again, people capture little of the economic return for raising al this human capital.

-- Anti-natalism of the Left like Betty Freidan and those who think having kids is no different than having pets.

Chapter Eleven: Freedom and Fertility

-- Since SS and Medicare will be unsustainable, thrift and more saving may return, along with more healthy lifestyles.

-- War over reproduction in the early 1900s was between people like T Roosevelt who want the wealthy to have more kids and Sanger who want to weed out the weak and poor.. But how have a form of Positive eugenics today where secular are encouraged to have more kids amidst the pressure of feminism and a market economy.

Chapter Twelve: Work and Family

-- Why are the big problems here 1) Entitlement program let non-parents and those with one kids to free rise the system even though they depend on human capital; 2) Declining effectiveness of healthcare in a society where people don’t take care of themselves; 3) Globalization and mass production means family is no longer focus of economy. People leave the home, plus parents can’t capture retuns on their investment in kids.

-- Solutions: 1) Cut SS taxes on parents; a third for kid, two-thirds for two kids and zippo for three or more. Alis, index SS to inflation not wages.2) Reduce incentive to auo-depdendent sprawl like higher auto taxes. Reduce social isolation and increase walking. Encourage an improved diet; 3) Return work to the home. This would allow more time with kids and allow parents to care for grandparents in a return to 3-generation households. Homes in the future may provide own power and food thanks to TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS. Also, new urbanist kinds of city planning concepts; 4) Separate health-care from busness; 5) Start investment accounts for kids when born. UK is trying some like this. 6) Return to more bartering like in South America.

My summation: Get government off our backs!

RESOURCE WARS by Michael Klare

2004-12-15T13:44:00.000-08:00

Klare, Michael T. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict - Book Review
Naval War College Review,

5

Michael Klare agues that most wars of the future, like many of those of the past and present, will be caused by conflicts over natural resources, especially oil and water. As a consequence, he suggests that American national security policy focus "on oil field protection, the defense of maritime trade routes, and other aspects of resource security." This position represents a reaffirmation of the industrial and economic dimensions of U.S. national security. In effect, if Flare is right, we are witnessing a resurgence of a materialist strand of American strategic thought that has been prominent at least since Alfred Thayer Mahan. For strategists, neither the clash of civilizations, the tragedies of identity politics, nor the long-buried animosities of religion or ethnicity are sufficient motivations for the major sources of conflict in the modern world. Rather, conflicts and national security policies are about the struggle for natural resources.

Lest anyone think that this is a purely American phenomenon, Flare suggests that the "economization" of international security affairs holds not just for the United States but also for most countries, including China, Japan, and Russia. Insatiable consumption coupled with finite, poorly distributed resources, as well as with a propensity to use armed force, leads to a conflict-ridden future.

Much of Klare's argument reads as if it were inspired by the tumultuous events of the 1970s, specifically after the first global oil shock helped to alert the world to upcoming neo-Malthusian dilemmas. The 1973-74 oil crisis, among other events, forced the United States and the world to face the reality that petroleum supplies are finite, poorly distributed across the globe, and vulnerable to rogue states. Academics and policy entrepreneurs then spent much of the decade cataloguing the vast number of critically important natural resources that were in short supply or projected to be, given consumption trends and demographic growth. Klare continues to assume that resource shortages lie in wait for humanity as a whole and for specific societies in particular.

Unfortunately, Klare barely pauses to consider the possibility that diplomatic, economic, and political developments might ease potential resource conflicts before they escalate into armed conflicts. After all, countries fighting over access to water or oil could simply negotiate arrangements or allow market forces to dictate outcomes; the author himself notes examples and cases where diplomatic solutions have succeeded in the past. In fact, the absence of economic reasoning in this book is startling. After all, economists from cranks to countless mainstream professionals have demonstrated how market forces can help manage the worst aspects of resource shortages. Thus energy shortages that lead to price increases in turn encourage consumers to conserve; consumption is reduced, as well as overall dependence. Hence, despite tremendous economic growth, Western Europe, Japan, and even the United States have become much more energy efficient since the oil shock of the 1970s. Substitution effects are also possible, although perhaps not for a resource as fundamental and elemental as water.

This book is less than persuasive on the topic of politics. In its final section, which describes alternatives to war, Klare sets up a straw man, arguing that "it seems reasonable to ask whether a resource-acquisition strategy based on global cooperation rather than recurring conflict might not prove more effective than guaranteeing access to critical supply over the long run." He then answers his own question by claiming that "such a strategy would call for the equitable distribution of the world's existing resource stockpiles in times of acute scarcity." In short, Klare suggests a utopian solution to a deeply practical set of problems. It is more likely that many, if not most, of the various potential resource "wars" outlined here will be settled short of war (or at least of a major war) by various methods of muddling through. Grand bargains over potentially equitable distributions of various resources seem unlikely given the present state of international politics.

Even if one accepts Klare's dire assumptions about the possibility of shortages and conflicts, his list is very traditional. Oil and water conflicts are old news. He does not mention the possibility of new competitions, for resources like satellite "parking spaces" or access to ocean fisheries, that might lead to clashes among great powers. Nor does he explore in great detail demographic realities that underlie competition for water and energy. For many of the water conflicts, for example, the key variable is tremendous population growth, which makes old agreements obsolete and intensifies bargaining over future resources.

Criticisms aside, Resource Wars offers readers a great deal. Klare provides thumbnail summaries of numerous conflicts great and small, from the South China Sea to the headwaters of the Nile. He represents each case with grace and economy. He reminds us of the oft-forgotten histories and details of geography that matter greatly in resource wars. More importantly, Klare provides a useful corrective to the ideational, historical, and political explanations of international behavior so popular today. Even the Arab-Israeli conflict is linked to competition for land and water in ways that some who focus on the religious conflicts, the shadow of the past, and the various weaknesses of the Israeli-Palestinian and other Arab authority structures forget. In short, academics, policy makers, and military officers should pay close attention to those regions that have the greatest potential for armed conflict based on the relative scarce supplies of critical resources.

PETER DOMBROWSKI

Naval War College

THE EMPTY CRADLE by Phillip Longman

2004-12-11T05:47:00.000-08:00

Bookshelf: The Population Implosion

By Nicholas Eberstadt
933 words
28 April 2004
The Wall Street Journal
D12
English
(Copyright (c) 2004, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

THE EMPTY CRADLE

By Phillip Longman

(Basic Books, 240 pages, $26)

There are simply too many human beings -- at least that is the view of the anti-natal activists, who cry alarm from various American foundations, United Nations programs, foreign aid agencies and activist organizations. They preach an apocalyptic secular gospel, warning a wayward world of the dangers of unchecked population growth and foretelling of the terrible judgment that the all-powerful "population explosion" will visit on an unchastened planet if their two-child-family message is not heeded. Though still treated respectfully at CNN and other media outlets, such doomsayers are ever more glaringly out of touch with the facts on the ground.

Both Europe and Japan, for example, entered into "sub-replacement" childbearing patterns over a generation ago and are poised for prolonged depopulation. In most developing countries, birth rates are plummeting. China's fertility is now at sub-replacement levels, partly because of Beijing's anti-birth programs. Other Third World countries without coercive population policies are veering toward sub-replacement, too -- Brazil and Iran, for example.

Elsewhere, "population explosion" stereotypes are fading. Among Arab societies -- supposed "holdouts" for high-birth norms -- Tunisia and Lebanon have already fallen to replacement fertility, or below. And while Paul Ehrlich may have used a taxi ride through teeming Delhi to illustrate his theme in "The Population Bomb" (1968), today's New Delhi, like most other big cities in India, no longer generates enough local births to sustain its current population numbers over the long term.

With world fertility levels down by nearly half since the early 1950s -- and no end to the drop in sight -- the 21st century may turn out to be an era of population decline. Curiously enough, few scholars or writers have contemplated the prospect. Now, however, Phillip Longman offers us a view of the depopulationist future -- and he is alarmed by what he sees.

"The global fall in fertility," he warns in "The Empty Cradle," "is creating a world for which few individuals, and no nations, are prepared. Simply stated, this is because population growth and the human capital it creates are part of the foundation upon which modern economies, as well as modern welfare states, are built." It is true, he notes, that "the engine that created today's affluent societies" might work without population growth. But making that happen "will require thorough reengineering, and not just of the formal economy, but of the family as well."

Mr. Longman begins with a detailed review of international population trends -- in Europe, Japan, Russia, China, Latin America and the Mideast. In each region, he finds, demographics are undermining the social and economic arrangements that conduce to prosperity. But it is to the situation in America that he devotes most of his attention -- and for which he reserves most of his exasperation. In his telling, the American populace -- aging, self-indulgent and ever less disposed to produce and raise offspring -- has set itself on a dangerous and unsustainable course.

Core changes in the American way of life -- "falling wages, high divorce rates, rising expectations of what it means to be a `responsible' parent, rising educational standards, rising taxes, and the loss of grandparents as a significant source of childcare" -- are making children ever less affordable for prospective parents, Mr. Longman contends. But with fewer children today, there will be fewer taxpayers tomorrow, even though the costs (public and private) of maintaining a graying population are set to skyrocket.

Most Americans, Mr. Longman suspects, will expect some combination of productivity breakthroughs and medical miracles to solve their looming demographic problems. Unfortunately, he argues, technological fixes are unlikely to do the trick. We need to concentrate instead on the human factor -- "adequate fertility rates, strong families, lifelong education, and more productive aging."

"The Empty Cradle" offers a plethora of proposals for rescuing America from a grim future. His boldest (in his view) is an exemption from Social Security taxes for married parents of three or more children. (The tax resumes when the youngest kid turns 18, and the exemption holds only if they all complete high school.) Other ideas range from the sensible ("portable" health insurance policies for workers who change jobs) to the eccentric ($200-a-month bonuses for welfare recipients who lose enough weight) to the cranky ("pay cyclists for the number of miles they've pedaled").

Despite its idiosyncracies, "The Empty Cradle" is an intelligent, well-researched and compelling read, if not always a persuasive one. Like the late Christopher Lasch and his communitarian devotees, Mr. Longman seeks to revitalize the family in America without recourse to patriotism or religious values. A challenging task indeed -- and one that timid, temporary tax credits and nanny scolds about the benefits of eating less and walking more are unlikely to pull off.

At the end of the day, there are some promising answers to the economic questions posed by population decline and population aging: an extension of working life, a dismantling of regulations and other barriers to economic efficiency, and a shrinking of the state's financial obligations from generation to generation -- not to mention medically abetted "healthy aging." For the most part, as tomorrow's American taxpayers might say, these are "places" where Mr. Longman "just doesn't want to go." But he has started an important conversation -- it's now up to others to continue it.

---

Mr. Eberstadt's most recent book is "Health and the Income Inequality Hypothesis: A Doctrine in Search of Data," with Sally Satel (AEI Press).

P

Great summary of "The Pentagon's New Map"

2004-12-10T10:53:00.000-08:00

BOOK REVIEW
Closing the globalization 'Gap'
The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas P M Barnett.

Reviewed by Yoel Sano

As US President George W Bush prepares for a global redeployment of military forces, he and his defense planners may well be advised to read The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas P M Barnett, a senior strategic researcher at the US Naval War College.

Ever since the Cold War ended, political scientists, politicians, and journalists have been rushing to put forward a new "big idea" - a single, unifying concept that explains everything that has happened in the world, post-1989. So far, we have had Francis Fukuyama's End of History, George H W Bush's "New World Order", Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, Robert D Kaplan's Coming Anarchy, Thomas Friedman's Lexus and Olive Tree, John J Mearsheimer's Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Michael T Klare's Resource Wars, and, of course, George W Bush's "war on terror".

Now Barnett, who has also worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as well as on projects for Wall Street broker-dealer firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has presented his own new global paradigm: the principal division in the world is that between the "functioning Core" and the "non-integrating Gap", or simply, the "Core" and the "Gap".

The Core consists of the world's richest and most developed countries and regions - the United States and Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia - plus newly emerging economies such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Russia, China and India. Together, they comprise roughly 4 billion of the world's 6 billion population. The Gap consists of the rest of the world - namely Central America and the Caribbean, Andean Latin America, virtually all of Africa except South Africa, the entire Middle East plus Turkey and the Balkans, Central Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. In essence, the Gap is made up of those parts of the world that are failing to benefit from globalization; it is, in Barnett's words, globalization's "ozone hole".

According to Barnett, it is precisely this "disconnectedness" between the Core and the Gap that is the principal security threat to the US in particular, and the rest of the Core in general. He sees the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as the strongest manifestation of the widening gulf between the global haves and have-nots, and stresses that the Core ignores the Gap at its peril. In essence, he interprets the terrorists' message as being, "If I cannot enjoy your good life, then neither will you" (p 298). The real enemy is therefore not militant Islam, nor the Middle East, but rather the condition of disconnectedness.

Consequently, Barnett believes that the primary mission of the US - and therefore the US military - is to extend connectivity between the Core and Gap as far as possible, so that the latter can benefit from the third wave of globalization (Globalization III), which began around 1980. Barnett notes that virtually all post-Cold War US military interventions - in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq - have been in the Gap. For the Core to be safe, the Gap has to become safe too.

Furthermore, closing the Gap does not distract from Bush's "war on terror" at all, since the main opponent in both Bush's war and Barnett's mission are anti-globalization forces - represented in their most virulent form by al-Qaeda. Barnett suggests that the US should start equating the idea of "national defense" and "homeland defense" with the notion of "Core security". Ultimately, the author argues, a global "war on terrorism" must create a happy ending for the whole world, and not just the US or the West. "Until the Bush administration describes [that] future worth creating in terms ordinary people and the rest of the world can understand, we will continue to lose support at home and abroad for the great task that lies ahead" (p 169).

At stake is nothing less than the future of globalization itself. Indeed, by way of example, Barnett notes that in 1917 the world lost Russia to the forces of disconnectedness and had to spend the rest of the 20th century paying the price. With this in mind, Barnett rails against internal Pentagon thinking that has sought to prepare the US military for a conventional conflict with a near peer competitor - ie, China - at some future date. Indeed, he sees China as the greatest opportunity on earth, rather than as a strategic threat. For Barnett, the worst thing that could happen is for the Core to become split between the "old Core" (US, Europe and Japan) and the "new Core" (China, India, Brazil). From this point of view, if US intervention in the Gap alienates the rest of the Core, thereby cementing a new division, then the cure becomes worse than the disease.

Barnett acknowledges the gargantuan task ahead in closing the Gap. Many groups or individuals reject the idea of joining the Core, fearing that the adoption of Western norms - which define the Core's norms - will mean the loss of their traditional way of life. He recognizes that globalization's advance will trigger more nationalism, not less, noting that what we are seeing is "not anti-Americanism per se, but a fear of a lost identity ... Globalization empowers the individual at the expense of the collective, and that very American transformation of culture is quite scary for traditional societies" (p 123). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the gender aspect of globalization - often overlooked by commentators. Barnett notes that precisely because connectivity empowers women relative to men, it will be opposed on that basis by most men in traditional societies.

Based on his work at Cantor Fitzgerald, where Barnett conducted "economic security workshops" discussing how security and finance work with one another, the author lists a set of "10 commandments of globalization":

1. Look for resources, and ye shall find.
2. No stability, no markets.
3 . No growth, no stability.
4. No resources, no growth.
5. No infrastructure, no growth.
6. No money, no infrastructure.
7. No rules, no money.
8. No security, no rules.
9. No Leviathan (US superpower), no security.
10. No will, no Leviathan. (pages 199-205)

The reference to "Leviathan" brings us to the author's ambitious plans to transform the US military entirely. In order to reconfigure the US armed forces for his new mission of promoting global connectedness, Barnett proposes bifurcating it into what he calls a "Leviathan Force" and a "System Administrator". The former will be geared almost entirely for conventional combat, go to war, and then leave once military objectives have been achieved. The latter force will move in after the Leviathan has left and essentially act as peacekeepers and providers of humanitarian and social aid in the aftermath of a conflict.

From Barnett's point of view, the new definition of a "just war" would be one that "leaves affected societies more connected than when we found them, with the potential for self-driven connectivity either restored or left intact" (p 326). As such, he supported the US war on Iraq on the grounds that it was aimed at reconnecting Iraq to the global economy. Weapons of mass destruction were therefore not the real issue. Furthermore, the author hoped, the 2003 Iraq war was supposed to be the trigger for a "Big Bang" that would force the leaders of Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia to open up their societies to the global economy.

In view of the need to connect the Middle East to the Core, Barnett criticizes those who call for the West to develop alternative sources of energy for the sole purpose of ending the Core's dependency on - and therefore political involvement in - the Middle East. He warns that such an outcome would further disconnect the region from the Core and risk turning it into another Central Africa. Indeed, he cites Africa as an example where the West's departure, post-colonial era, has left it more disconnected and troubled than ever before. Should the Core abandon the Middle East, it would risk turning the region into a "giant Taliban-like 'paradise' that keeps the West out, the women down, and our narcotics flowing".

In his concluding remarks, Barnett issues another series of commandments toward closing the Gap:

1. Re-creating and reconnecting Iraq to the global economy.
2. Removing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and reunifying Korea.
3. The overthrow of the Iranian clerical leadership by 2010.
4. The establishment of the Free Trade Area of the Americas by 2015.
5. The transformation of the Middle East through the rehabilitation of Iraq.
6. The emergence of China as a peer of the United States.
7. An Asian counterpart to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by 2020.
8. The amalgamation of the Asian NATO with the original NATO and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) to create a Core-wide security alliance.
9. The admission of as many as a dozen new states into the US, initially from the Western Hemisphere, by 2050.
10. The rehabilitation of Africa into the world economy.

A summary of "The Pentagon's New Map"

2004-12-10T10:15:00.000-08:00

From TB's Esquire article:

Since the end of the cold war, the United States has been trying to come up with an operating theory of the world—and a military strategy to accompany it. Now there’s a leading contender. It involves identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them. Since September 11, 2001, the author, a professor of warfare analysis, has been advising the Office of the Secretary of Defense and giving this briefing continually at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community. Now he gives it to you.

LET ME TELL YOU why military engagement with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad is not only necessary and inevitable, but good.

When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point—the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.

That is why the public debate about this war has been so important: It forces Americans to come to terms with I believe is the new security paradigm that shapes this age, namely, Disconnectedness defines danger. Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence.

The problem with most discussion of globalization is that too many experts treat it as a binary outcome: Either it is great and sweeping the planet, or it is horrid and failing humanity everywhere. Neither view really works, because globalization as a historical process is simply too big and too complex for such summary judgments. Instead, this new world must be defined by where globalization has truly taken root and where it has not.

Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

Globalization’s “ozone hole” may have been out of sight and out of mind prior to September 11, 2001, but it has been hard to miss ever since. And measuring the reach of globalization is not an academic exercise to an eighteen-year-old marine sinking tent poles on its far side. So where do we schedule the U.S. military’s next round of away games? The pattern that has emerged since the end of the cold war suggests a simple answer: in the Gap.

The reason I support going to war in Iraq is not simply that Saddam is a cutthroat Stalinist willing to kill anyone to stay in power, nor because that regime has clearly supported terrorist networks over the years. The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment.

FOR MOST COUNTRIES, accommodating the emerging global rule set of democracy, transparency, and free trade is no mean feat, which is something most Americans find hard to understand. We tend to forget just how hard it has been to keep the United States together all these years, harmonizing our own, competing internal rule sets along the way—through a Civil War, a Great Depression, and the long struggles for racial and sexual equality that continue to this day. As far as most states are concerned, we are quite unrealistic in our expectation that they should adapt themselves quickly to globalization’s very American-looking rule set.

But you have to be careful with that Darwinian pessimism, because it is a short jump from apologizing for globalization-as-forced-Americanization to insinuating—along racial or civilization lines—that “those people will simply never be like us.” Just ten years ago, most experts were willing to write off poor Russia, declaring Slavs, in effect, genetically unfit for democracy and capitalism. Similar arguments resonated in most China-bashing during the 1990’s, and you hear them today in the debates about the feasibility of imposing democracy on a post-Saddam Iraq—a sort of Muslims-are-from-Mars argument.

So how do we distinguish between who is really making it in globalization’s Core and who remains trapped in the Gap? And how permanent is this dividing line?

Understanding that the line between the Core and Gap is constantly shifting, let me suggest that the direction of change is more critical than the degree. So, yes, Beijing is still ruled by a “Communist party” whose ideological formula is 30 percent Marxist-Leninist and 70 percent Sopranos, but China just signed on to the World Trade Organization, and over the long run, that is far more important in securing the country’s permanent Core status. Why? Because it forces China to harmonize its internal rule set with that of globalization—banking, tariffs, copyright protection, environmental standards. Of course, working to adjust your internal rule sets to globalization’s evolving rule set offers no guarantee of success. As Argentina and Brazil have recently found out, following the rules (in Argentina’s case, sort of following) does not mean you are panicproof, or bubbleproof, or even recessionproof. Trying to adapt to globalization does not mean bad things will never happen to you. Nor does it mean all your poor will immediately morph into stable middle class. It just means your standard of living gets better over time.

In sum, it is always possible to fall off this bandwagon called globalization. And when you do, bloodshed will follow. If you are lucky, so will American troops.

DISCONNECTEDNESS DEFINES DANGER Problem areas requiring American attention (outlined) are, in the author's analysis, called the Gap. Shrinking the Gap is possible only by stopping the ability of terrorist networks to access the Core via the "seam states" that lie along the Gap's bloody boundaries. In this war on terrorism, the U.S. will place a special emphasis on cooperation with these states. What are the classic seam states? Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Phillipines, Indonesia.

SO WHAT PARTS OF THE WORLD can be considered functioning right now? North America, much of South America, the European Union, Putin’s Russia, Japan and Asia’s emerging economies (most notably China and India), Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa, which accounts for roughly four billion out of a global population of six billion.

Whom does that leave in the Gap? It would be easy to say “everyone else,” but I want to offer you more proof than that and, by doing so, argue why I think the Gap is a long-term threat to more than just your pocketbook or conscience.

If we map out U.S. military responses since the end of the cold war, (see below), we find an overwhelming concentration of activity in the regions of the world that are excluded from globalization’s growing Core—namely the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. That is roughly the remaining two billion of the world’s population. Most have demographics skewed very young, and most are labeled, “low income” or “low middle income” by the World Bank (i.e., less than $3,000 annual per capita).

If we draw a line around the majority of those military interventions, we have basically mapped the Non-Integrating Gap. Obviously, there are outliers excluded geographically by this simple approach, such as an Israel isolated in the Gap, a North Korea adrift within the Core, or a Philippines straddling the line. But looking at the data, it is hard to deny the essential logic of the picture: If a country is either losing out to globalization or rejecting much of the content flows associated with its advance, there is a far greater chance that the U.S. will end up sending forces at some point. Conversely, if a country is largely functioning within globalization, we tend not to have to send our forces there to restore order to eradicate threats.

Now, that may seem like a tautology—in effect defining any place that has not attracted U.S. military intervention in the last decade or so as “functioning within globalization” (and vice versa). But think about this larger point: Ever since the end of World War II, this country has assumed that the real threats to its security resided in countries of roughly similar size, development, and wealth—in other words, other great powers like ourselves. During the cold war, that other great power was the Soviet Union. When the big Red machine evaporated in the early 1990’s, we flirted with concerns about a united Europe, a powerhouse Japan, and—most recently—a rising China.

What was interesting about all those scenarios is the assumption that only an advanced state can truly threaten us. The rest of the world? Those less-developed parts of the world have long been referred to in military plans as the “Lesser Includeds,” meaning that if we built a military capable of handling a great power’s military threat, it would always be sufficient for any minor scenarios we might have to engage in the less advanced world.

That assumption was shattered by September 11. After all, we were not attacked by a nation or even an army but by a group of—in Thomas Friedman’s vernacular—Super Empowered Individuals willing to die for their cause. September 11 triggered a system perturbation that continues to reshape our government (the new Department of Homeland Security), our economy (the de facto security tax we all pay), and even our society (Wave to the camera!). Moreover, it launched the global war on terrorism, the prism through which our government now views every bilateral security relationship we have across the world.

In many ways, the September 11 attacks did the U.S. national-security establishment a huge favor by pulling us back from the abstract planning of future high-tech wars against “near peers” into the here-and-now threats to global order. By doing so, the dividing lines between Core and Gap were highlighted, and more important, the nature of the threat environment was thrown into stark relief.

Think about it: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are pure products of the Gap—in effect, its most violent feedback to the Core. They tell us how we are doing in exporting security to these lawless areas (not very well) and which states they would like to take “off line” from globalization and return to some seventh-century definition of the good life (any Gap state with a sizable Muslim population, especially Saudi Arabia).

If you take this message from Osama and combine it with our military-intervention record of the last decade, a simple security rule set emerges: A country’s potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity. There is a good reason why Al Qaeda was based first in Sudan and then later in Afghanistan: These are two of the most disconnected countries in the world. Look at the other places U.S. Special Operations Forces have recently zeroed in on: northwestern Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen. We are talking about the ends of the earth as far as globalization is concerned.

But just as important as “getting them where they live” is stopping the ability of these terrorist networks to access the Core via the “seam states” that lie along the Gap’s bloody boundaries. It is along this seam that the Core will seek to suppress bad things coming out of the Gap. Which are some of these classic seam states? Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia come readily to mind. But the U.S. will not be the only Core state working this issue. For example, Russia has its own war on terrorism in the Caucasus, China is working its western border with more vigor, and Australia was recently energized (or was it cowed?) by the Bali bombing.

IF WE STEP BACK for a minute and consider the broader implications of this new global map, then U.S. national-security strategy would seem to be: 1) Increase the Core’s immune system capabilities for responding to September 11-like system perturbations; 2) Work the seam states to firewall the Core from the Gap’s worst exports, such as terror, drugs, and pandemics; and, most important, 3) Shrink the Gap. Notice I did not just say Mind the Gap. The knee-jerk reaction of many Americans to September 11 is to say, “Let’s get off our dependency on foreign oil, and then we won’t have to deal with those people.” The most naïve assumption underlying that dream is that reducing what little connectivity the Gap has with the Core will render it less dangerous to us over the long haul. Turning the Middle East into Central Africa will not build a better world for my kids. We cannot simply will those people away.

The Middle East is the perfect place to start. Diplomacy cannot work in a region where the biggest sources of insecurity lie not between states but within them. What is most wrong about the Middle East is the lack of personal freedom and how that translates into dead-end lives for most of the population—especially for the young. Some states like Qatar and Jordan are ripe for perestroika-like leaps into better political futures, thanks to younger leaders who see the inevitability of such change. Iran is likewise waiting for the right Gorbachev to come along—if he has not already.

What stands in the path of this change? Fear. Fear of tradition unraveling. Fear of the mullah’s disapproval. Fear of being labeled a “bad” or “traitorous” Muslim state. Fear of becoming a target of radical groups and terrorist networks. But most of all, fear of being attacked from all sides for being different—the fear of becoming Israel.

The Middle East has long been a neighborhood of bullies eager to pick on the weak. Israel is still around because it has become—sadly—one of the toughest bullies on the block. The only thing that will change that nasty environment and open the floodgates for change is if some external power steps in and plays Leviathan full-time. Taking down Saddam, the region’s bully-in-chief, will force the U.S. into playing that role far more fully than it has over the past several decades, primarily because Iraq is the Yugoslavia of the Middle East—a crossroads of civilizations that has historically required a dictatorship to keep the peace. As baby-sitting jobs go, this one will be a doozy, making our lengthy efforts in postwar Germany and Japan look simple in retrospect.

But it is the right thing to do, and now is the right time to do it, and we are the only country that can. Freedom cannot blossom in the Middle East without security, and security is this country’s most influential public-sector export. By that I do not mean arms exports, but basically the attention paid by our military forces to any region’s potential for mass violence. We are the only nation on earth capable of exporting security in a sustained fashion, and we have a very good track record of doing it.

Show me a part of the world that is secure in its peace and I will show you strong or growing ties between local militaries and the U.S. military. Show me regions where major war is inconceivable and I will show you permanent U.S. military bases and long-term security alliances. Show me the strongest investment relationships in the global economy and I will show you two postwar military occupations that remade Europe and Japan following World War II.

This country has successfully exported security to globalization’s Old Core (Western Europe, Northeast Asia) for half a century and to its emerging New Core (Developing Asia) for a solid quarter century following our mishandling of Vietnam. But our efforts in the Middle Ease have been inconsistent—in Africa, almost nonexistent. Until we begin the systematic, long-term export of security to the Gap, it will increasingly export its pain to the Core in the form of terrorism and other instabilities.

Naturally, it will take a whole lot more than the U.S. exporting security to shrink the Gap. Africa, for example, will need far more aid than the Core has offered in the past, and the integration of the Gap will ultimately depend more on private investment than anything the Core’s public sector can offer. But it all has to begin with security, because free markets and democracy cannot flourish amid chronic conflict.

Making this effort means reshaping our military establishment to mirror-image the challenge that we face. Think about it. Global war is not in the offing, primarily because our huge nuclear stockpile renders such war unthinkable—for anyone. Meanwhile, classic state-on-state wars are becoming fairly rare. So if the United States is in the process of “transforming” its military to meet the threats of tomorrow, what should it end up looking like? In my mind, we fight fire with fire. If we live in a world increasingly populated by Super-Empowered Individuals, we field a military of Super-Empowered-Individuals.

This may sound like additional responsibility for an already overburdened military, but that is the wrong way of looking at it, for what we are dealing with here are problems of success—not failure. It is America’s continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that allows us to stick our noses into the far more difficult subnational conflicts and the dangerous transnational actors they spawn. I know most Americans do not want to hear this, but the real battlegrounds in the global war on terrorism are still over there. If gated communities and rent-a-cops were enough, September 11 never would have happened.

History is full of turning points like that terrible day, but no turning-back-points. We ignore the Gap’s existence at our own peril, because it will not go away until we as a nation respond to the challenge of making globalization truly global.

		click map for larger image			click map for larger image
Western Hemisphere Map			Eastern Hemisphere Map

click map for larger image
of combined Global Map

HANDICAPPING THE GAP

My list of real trouble for the world in the 1990s, today,
and tomorrow, starting in our own backyard:

1) HAITI Efforts to build a nation in 1990s were disappointing • We have been going into Haiti for about a century, and we will go back when boat people start flowing in during the next crisis—without fail.

2) COLOMBIA Country is broken into several lawless chunks, with private armies, rebels, narcos, and legit government all working the place over. • Drugs still flow. • Ties between drug cartels and rebels grew over decade, and now we know of links to international terror, too. • We get involved, keep promising more, and keep getting nowhere. Piecemeal, incremental approach is clearly not working.

3) BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA Both on the bubble between the Gap and the Functioning Core. Both played the globalization game to hilt in nineties and both feel abused now. The danger of falling off the wagon and going self-destructively leftist or rightist is very real. • No military threats to speak of, except against their own democracies (the return of the generals). • South American alliance MERCOSUR tries to carve out its own reality while Washington pushes Free Trade of Americas, but we may have to settle for agreements with Chile or for pulling only Chile into bigger NAFTA. Will Brazil and Argentina force themselves to be left out and then resent it? • Amazon a large ungovernable area for Brazil, plus all that environmental damage continues to pile up. Will the world eventually care enough to step in?

4) FORMER YUGOSLAVIA For most of the past decade, served as shorthand for Europe's inability to get its act together even in its own backyard. • Will be long-term baby-sitting job for the West.

5) CONGO AND RWANDA/BURUNDI Two to three million dead in central Africa from all the fighting across the decade. How much worse can it get before we try to do something, anything? Three million more dead? • Congo is a carrion state—not quite dead or alive, and everyone is feeding off it. • And then there's AIDS.

6) ANGOLA Never really has solved its ongoing civil war (1.5 million dead in past quarter century). • Basically at conflict with self since mid-seventies, when Portuguese "empire" fell. • Life expectancy right now is under forty!

7) SOUTH AFRICA The only functioning Core country in Africa, but it's on the bubble. Lots of concerns that South Africa is a gateway country for terror networks trying to access Core through back door. • Endemic crime is biggest security threat. • And then there's AIDS.

8) ISRAEL-PALESTINE Terror will not abate—there is no next generation in the West Bank that wants anything but more violence. • Wall going up right now will be the Berlin Wall of twenty-first century. Eventually, outside powers will end up providing security to keep the two sides apart (this divorce is going to be very painful). • There is always the chance of somebody (Saddam in desperation?) trying to light up Israel with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and triggering the counterpunch we all fear Israel is capable of.

9) SAUDI ARABIA The let-them-eat-cake mentality of royal mafia will eventually trigger violent instability from within. • Paying terrorists protection money to stay away will likewise eventually fail, so danger will come from outside, too. • Huge young population with little prospects for future, and a ruling elite whose main source of income is a declining long-term asset. And yet the oil will matter to enough of the world far enough into the future that the United States will never let this place really tank, no matter what it takes.

10) IRAQ Question of when and how, not if. • Then there's the huge rehab job. We will have to build a security regime for the whole region.

11) SOMALIA Chronic lack of governance. • Chronic food problems. • Chronic problem of terrorist-network infiltration. • We went in with Marines and Special Forces and left disillusioned—a poor man's Vietnam for the 1990s. Will be hard-pressed not to return.

12) IRAN Counterrevolution has already begun: This time the students want to throw the mullahs out. • Iran wants to be friends with U.S., but resurgence of fundamentalists may be the price we pay to invade Iraq. • The mullahs support terror, and their push for WMD is real: Does this make them inevitable target once Iraq and North Korea are settled?

13) AFGHANISTAN Lawless, violent place even before the Taliban stepped onstage and started pulling it back toward seventh century (short trip) • Government sold to Al Qaeda for pennies on the dollar. • Big source of narcotics (heroin). • Now U.S. stuck there for long haul, rooting out hardcore terrorists/rebels who've chosen to stay.

14) PAKISTAN There is always the real danger of their having the bomb and using it out of weakness in conflict with India (very close call with December 13, 2001, New Delhi bombing). • Out of fear that Pakistan may fall to radical Muslims, we end up backing hard-line military types we don't really trust. • Clearly infested with Al Qaeda. • Was on its way to being declared a rogue state by U.S. until September 11 forced us to cooperate again. Simply put, Pakistan doesn't seem to control much of its own territory.

15) NORTH KOREA Marching toward WMD. • Bizarre recent behavior of Pyongyang (admitting kidnappings, breaking promises on nukes, shipping weapons to places we disapprove of and getting caught, signing agreements with Japan that seem to signal new era, talking up new economic zone next to China) suggests it is intent (like some mental patient) on provoking crises. • We live in fear of Kim's Götterdämmerung scenario (he is nuts). • Population deteriorating—how much more can they stand? • After Iraq, may be next.

16) INDONESIA Usual fears about breakup and "world's largest Muslim population." • Casualty of Asian economic crisis (really got wiped out). • Hot spot for terror networks, as we have discovered.

New/integrating members of Core I worry may be
lost in coming years:

17) CHINA Running lots of races against itself in terms of reducing the unprofitable state-run enterprises while not triggering too much unemployment, plus dealing with all that growth in energy demand and accompanying pollution, plus coming pension crisis as population ages. • New generation of leaders looks suspiciously like unimaginative technocrats—big question if they are up to task. • If none of those macro pressures trigger internal instability, there is always the fear that the Communist party won't go quietly into the night in terms of allowing more political freedoms and that at some point, economic freedom won't be enough for the masses. Right now the CCP is very corrupt and mostly a parasite on the country, but it still calls the big shots in Beijing. • Army seems to be getting more disassociated from society and reality, focusing ever more myopically on countering U.S. threat to their ability to threaten Taiwan, which remains the one flash point that could matter. • And then there's AIDS.

18) RUSSIA Putin has long way to go in his dictatorship of the law; the mafia and robber barons still have too much power. • Chechnya and the near-abroad in general will drag Moscow into violence, but it will be kept within the federation by and large. • U.S. moving into Central Asia is a testy thing—a relationship that can sour if not handled just right. • Russia has so many internal problems (financial weakness, environmental damage, et cetera) and depends too much on energy exports to feel safe (does bringing Iraq back online after invasion kill their golden goose?). • And then there's AIDS.

THE PENTAGON'S NEW MAP by Thomas Barnett

2004-12-08T19:51:00.000-08:00

As reviewed by Michael Barone:

1) Barnett's new map divides the world into two parts: "the functioning core" and the "nonintegrating gap." The core consists of economically advanced or growing countries that are linked to the global economy and bound to the rule-sets of international trade. The United States, Canada, and Mexico are part of the core; so are Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. All of Europe is in the core except for the Balkans. So is Russia and the western parts of the former Soviet Union. The major nations in East Asia—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China—plus Hong Kong are in the core, as is India. So are South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. There are a couple of anomalies in the map: North Korea is pictured within the core, Singapore and Thailand outside.

The rest of the world is the nonintegrating gap—outside the global economy, not bound to the rule-sets of international trade. In the Western Hemisphere it includes the Caribbean, Central America, Guyana, Venezuela, and the Andean countries plus Paraguay. It includes all of Africa except South Africa. It includes the Balkans, the Middle East, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And it includes the arc of countries from Bangladesh through Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

2) All post-Cold War military conflicts, Barnett argues, have taken place in the nonintegrating gap. The nations of the functioning core, he argues, no longer go to war. They are too interconnected economically with each other, and no rational leader of any of these countries would want to take on the overwhelming military power of the United States.

[Here there is room for some argument, I think. It was confidently predicted in the years before 1914, years of what Barnett called "Globalization I," that none of the great powers would dare go to war with others. Yet Germany, goading her ally Austria-Hungary, did provoke war with France, Russia, and Britain. World War I can also be seen as a refutation of the maxim optimistically laid down since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that democracies do not go to war with one another: Germany and Austria-Hungary had representative assemblies and at least partially democratic governments, and France and Britain were electoral democracies.]

3) China, Barnett asserts, is now so globally interconnected that it will not go to war in the core or anywhere else. He is unmoved by the arguments of those who see China's ambitions in Taiwan or its persistent and rather chauvinistic nationalism or its substantial military buildup as making it a potential war maker. This is a part of his analysis that will strike some in the Pentagon and elsewhere as unconvincing.

4) Let us leave this argument aside, except to note that it leads Barnett to his wider conclusion: that wars occur only in the gap. Certainly, that has been true in the years since 11/9 (Nov. 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell), and certainly it seems likely to be true of the war on terrorism. Wars occur in the gap, Barnett says, because the people there lack interconnectivity with the global economy and because most of the nations there are either led by tyrants or are, to varying degrees, failed states, which are available as launching pads for terrorists. The task of our foreign and military policy, then, must be to "shrink the gap," to link the peoples there to globalization and to provide decent state structures in tyranny-ruled or failed states. Which of course is what George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and other leaders have been trying to do in Afghanistan and Iraq and in less well-known places like Sierra Leone and Haiti.

5) What sort of military forces do we need to do this? To deal with these, Barnett says we need two kinds of military forces. One he calls "leviathan" (Power Point briefs are full of kicky names), a relatively small body of fierce warriors, heavily weighted to special-forces teams—the kind of forces that achieved such speedy victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. And not just speedy victories, also victories won with exceedingly low casualty rates by any historic standard and, thanks to precision weapons, with very low civilian casualty rates as compared with the horrific wars of the 20th century. Leviathan forces will be doing what we did in Iraq between March 19 and May 1, 2003 ... But we need very much larger forces, set apart from the warriors, of what Barnett calls system administrators or sys admins. "The sys admin force will be civil affairs-oriented and network-centric," Barnett writes, "an always-on, always-nearby, always-approachable resource for allies and friends in need." They will be doing most of the things our military forces have been doing or have been trying to do in Iraq since May 1, 2003.

The leviathan force, Barnett predicts, can grow smaller over time, given the advantages it has in precision weapons and high skills; he sides with Rumsfeld and against the retired generals who criticized the relatively small numbers of troops in the advance into Iraq. But the sys admins will have to get more numerous. We have more troops in Iraq now than we did in March and April 2003, and Barnett joins others, like Sen. John McCain and analyst Robert Kagan, who think we should have many more. The result is a transformed military. "Over time, the defense budget's top line will remain relatively flat, growing only with inflation. Within a generation, the sys admin force will command the majority of the defense budget, taking advantage of the continuous transformation that the leviathan force pursues, making this fighting force ever smaller, more lethal, and more decisive in application."

Rumsfeld may have drawn much the same conclusion. As Barnett notes (and as Mark Mazzetti reported in a U.S. News cover story last fall), "Within the Persian Gulf itself, the Pentagon has already made subtle, little-noticed shifts, effectively ending our significant military presence in Saudi Arabia, thus relieving that regime of the political complications of having nonbelievers in their sacred lands. . . . [T]he most radical change in our global force posture involves our progressive movement into Africa, although here we are likely to see a sort of 'frontier fort' model. . . . This radical repositioning of U.S. military bases . . . is the surest sign yet that the Pentagon is moving toward an appropriately deep embrace of the new strategic environment signaled by the core-gap divide." He also notes as an "example of good Navy planning is the new concept of flexible fleet response, which speaks to an inside-the-gap, sys admin form of near-continuous ship presence that moves away from the strict rotation of surface combatants in key Cold War-defined 'hubs.'. . . The shifts being pursued in our global basing posture alone tell me that this administration has moved smartly to deal with the potential dangers of 'imperial overstretch' by trading past successes for future challenges."

More evidence has come in since The Pentagon's New Map was published. The invaluable and anonymous Web site belmontclub.blogspot.com notes that Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers on May 12–13 flew into Iraq, unusually, in the same plane, an E-4B, which has communications equipment that allows them to stay in touch with the president. After their visit, Gen. Mark Kimmitt on May 14 announced that the creation on May 15 of two new military commands to replace the current military organization—a Multinational Corps Iraq and a Multinational Force Iraq. As the Armed Forces Press Service announced, "Kimmitt explained that Multinational Corps Iraq will focus on the tactical fight—the day-to-day military operations and the maneuvering of the six multinational divisions on the ground. . . . Meanwhile, Multinational Force Iraq will focus on more strategic aspects of the military presence in Iraq, such as talking with sheiks and political leaders, and on training, equipping, and fielding Iraqi security forces." To me that sounds an awful lot like leviathan and sys admin. And it sounds as if Rumsfeld and Myers, together with Bush, have decided to adopt Barnett's ideas on restructuring our military forces.

The more important question raised by Barnett's analysis, and by the Pentagon's apparent embrace of it, is whether the American people are prepared to continue to support the positioning of admin sys forces throughout large parts of the gap for a period as long as they supporting the positioning of Cold War military forces at the Iron Curtain over the long years of the Cold War. It sounds as if Barnett is nominating America to be the policeman of the world. Of course, September 11 provides a searing lesson of what happens when we aren't. Barnett eschews the policeman label and argues that more rhetorical exhortation is needed. "It is also clear that the Pentagon, and the Bush administration in general, has«stet» not done a good job of explaining all these changes in strategic planning, and that is quite perplexing to me. Americans are smart enough to realize that it is a different world after 9/11, and that our military operations around the gap reflect that new strategic environment."

COMMENTARY:

As for my gripes: I get the usual Norman Angell reference (“But I’m Norman Angell with nukes,” I scream for the one millionth time.) on the potential for intra-Core wars among great powers, but I can live with that. On China per se: I don’t argue that we never worry about China or that we give up deterring any attack on Taiwan. I just don’t believe that it should represent the dominant long-range, force-sizing planning model for the Pentagon. There is so much good to be done in shrinking the Gap between now and 2025 for us to keep our powder dry and wait to go one-on-one with the PLA in the straits.

RATIONAL EXUBERANCE by Michael Mandel

2004-12-08T19:33:00.000-08:00

Review by Robert D. Atkinson is vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute and director of its Technology and New Economy Project. Key points:

1) Mandel accuses most economists of being "capital fundamentalists who believe that savings and investment in physical capital and (sometimes) human capital are the only forces driving growth. [They] generally ignore or minimize the role of technology." Indeed, in a 1995 paper titled "Growth of Nations," Gregory Mankiw -- now chairman of the Bush administration's Council of Economic Advisers -- effectively called technological progress a question too insignificant for economists to even bother thinking about.

2) Indeed, wide swaths of interests are actively opposed to the kind of economic dynamism that exuberant growth entails. Opposition comes from incumbent businesses that are threatened by e-commerce competition or propped up by government subsidies; unions worried about job loss from automation; privacy advocates afraid of everything from Google's email service to new technologies such as radio-frequency identification devices and smart cards; or the Christian right, which is opposed to biotechnology advances, including those derived from stem cell research.

3) But not all is grim. Mandel points to the unflagging entrepreneurial drive of the U.S. economy and our fundamentally strong technology base. He also highlights our innovative capital markets. While Mandel argues that the supply of capital is not a central driver of economic growth, the dynamism of our financial markets is: We instinctively funnel capital to innovative ventures, even though, as we saw in the 1990s, they sometimes fail. That is why Mandel proposes a promising compromise on the issue of expensing stock options. He recognizes that shareholders need better information, but he also sees the importance of options in powering exuberant growth. He proposes a sensible compromise: to have established companies expense options for the top executives, and not for anyone else.

4) Mandel advocates many other sound policy proposals to get us back to exuberant growth. He points out that we need to boost federal investment in research and do more to train workers for high-skilled jobs. Research and development is important, because exuberant growth will depend on the next set of technological breakthroughs. Mandel lists a number of intriguing possibilities for what the next breakthrough technologies might be, including next-generation telecommunications (particularly wireless and broadband); nanotechnology; biotechnology; hydrogen fuel cells, next-generation nuclear power, and solar power; and space-based technology (especially cheap satellites). He might have added advances in robotics and high-speed computing.

5 Mandel doesn't just embrace a "let 'er rip" attitude toward innovation and growth. In fact, he argues that exuberant growth has to be coupled with economic security. If people feel they are working without a safety net, they are less likely to engage in new entrepreneurial endeavors or embrace exuberant growth. One of Mandel's more interesting proposals is to reinstate income averaging, a provision in the tax code that allowed people to pay taxes on their average income over several years. Without that provision, Mandel correctly points out that the tax code penalizes workers who lose their jobs and risk-takers who quit their jobs to start new ventures: A person who makes the same amount of money over three years pays a lower percentage in taxes than someone whose income fluctuates. Mandel argues we should let workers pay taxes based on their three-year average incomes, so that if a worker's income drops significantly one year he may be eligible for a refund on the taxes he paid in prior years.

6) The $64,000 question is: How can we build a coalition for exuberant growth? Mandel's answer is consistent with the New Democrat answer: We should simultaneously spur growth, and protect those hurt by it. The Republican path to growth is an ineffectual one, and it is compounded by the fact the GOP will not work to protect those hurt by growth. If Democrats can go for growth while helping those who are struggling through difficult transitions, they can help themselves regain a political majority and help the country regain its economic exuberance.

Alexandria

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