HI ALL, it's a technology correspondent, sneaking over to the American politics blog. I couldn't help but overhear your conversation about WikiLeaks, and I feel like I have to jump in and say something.

The internet is not magic.

Many of the posts I've read about WikiLeaks, here and elsewhere, have expressed a certain technological fatalism. For example, Andrew Sullivan writes that the "culprit" is the internet; downloads can be shifted among servers, distributing responsibility. David Frum believes that WikiLeaks is a kind of digital IED, requiring nothing more than "servers and a thumb drive". My colleague W.W. points out that technology compresses data, making it easier to make off with. While I agree that technology and the internet make information sharing easier, I think we are placing too much emphasis on this aspect of WikiLeaks's operation.

There is an assumption that you can put data on the internet and whoosh, it's everywhere. Just plug the thumb drive into the computer, evidently, and the rest happens by itself. It all has to do with servers or something. But thumb drives have been around for a long time, as has the internet, so why didn't WikiLeaks happen ten years ago? Just because WikiLeaks uses servers and encrypts its internal communications doesn't mean that it's a "cyber" organisation, or that it's particularly innovative in its use of technology. Many organisations, including this paper, use servers and have virtual private networks. Julian Assange, though he is technically brilliant, is not a technological innovator. He is a legal innovator.

We are not quite sure where WikiLeaks has its servers. We can deduce, from what Mr Assange has said, that they are in Sweden, Iceland, Belgium and New York state. Mr Assange, in his obsession with revealing secrets, has compiled a list of countries with generous whistleblower-protection laws. WikiLeaks' multiple servers aren't there to back each other up; they're there to gather legal protections. Every server is subject to the laws of the state where it's plugged in, so WikiLeaks routes every submission in a clever pattern to move it through each of these locations. You can, if you don't have access to a computer, arrange with WikiLeaks a physical drop of your leaked material; they will digitise it and send it on the same multinational path. (For a fuller explanation, see what we wrote about Iceland's proposed media law on this blog earlier this year.)

It's telling that Mr Assange hasn't placed his servers in some technically capable autocracy with a desire to thumb its nose at the world, say Iran or Venezuela. He needs liberal democracies. Their laws guarantee the safety of his information. And when trying to solve what looks like a digital problem, the best path is to consider where the problem is physically vulnerable. Anti-spammers, for example, have finally notched up some successes in the last two years by going after server locations; spammers need servers in places like America, which has reliable networks and vast fields of vulnerable personal computers. But America also has laws, and ways to enforce them.

My gripe against Mr Assange is that he takes advantage of the protections of liberal democracies, but refuses to submit himself to them. If he wants to use the libel protections guaranteed by New York State, then he should live in New York, and commit himself to all of the safety and consequences of America's constitution. If he wants to use Sweden's whistleblower laws, then he should return to Sweden and let its justice system take its course. This, as we've written in the paper, is what distinguishes Mr Assange from Daniel Ellsberg. Mr Ellsberg did not flee America after releasing the Pentagon Papers; he stayed here and stood trial. Regardless of what you think about Mr Ellsberg's motives, he followed the basic tenets of civil disobedience: break a law, then publicly accept the consequences. Mr Assange just protects himself. 

Julian Assange has created a legal structure that allows him to answer only to his own conscience. This is an extraordinarily clever hack of the world's legal systems. But it makes his pretense at moral authority a little hard to take seriously. And it also points toward a solution. If America feels threatened by WikiLeaks, then it should lean on its allies—Sweden, Iceland and Belgium—to strip the organisation of the protections it so carefully gathers as it shifts its information around the world. Mr Assange has suggested that he might be hounded all the way to Russia or Cuba. If he has to take all of his servers with him, it wil be harder for him to act so boldly.

(Photo credit: AFP)

MY COLLEAGUE (along with Andrew Sullivan) is right, of course, that to focus too closely on Julian Assange in analysing the fall-out from the latest WikiLeaks document dump is to miss the larger story, which is that if Mr Assange were to be neutralised tomorrow—an eventuality some conservatives (and apparently the attorney general of the United States) have begun to fantasise about—he would quickly be replaced by some other anarchistic commando. That’s because technology makes it exponentially easier to publicise information than it once was, when everyone from admirable whistle-blowers to far-left anti-liberal subversives like Mr Assange, faced the considerable obstacle of stealing large numbers of physical documents from organisations to back up their claims. Today nearly anyone with access to private files and armed with a flash drive can easily make off with gigabytes of information attached to a keychain in the front pocket of their jeans.

My fellow blogger and Mr Sullivan are also right to treat this development as a fait accompli. It is indeed "our new reality", as Mr Sullivan says. But could we please pause for a moment amidst all of our technological triumphalism to reflect on the potential downside to all of this antinomian empowerment of the individual? The libertarian imagination, amply furnished with metaphors of invisible hands and spontaneously generated order, is thrilled by such technological empowerment. What could be better than giving every human being on the planet the capacity to subvert all established authorities and institutions, private or public, tyrannical or meritocratic? What would be better, I submit, is lucid self-awareness about how much our liberty depends on the existence of stable, functioning institutions to protect it against those who long to extinguish it in the name of sundry anti-liberal theological and ideological projects.

Let us also note that technology tends to reward demagoguery, as political entertainers use television, radio, the internet, and various forms of social networking to vie with one another for title of national Celebrity-in-Chief. Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are not anomalies. They are glimpses of our political future—a future in which technology has laid low the intermediary institutions (political parties, non-partisan journalism) that once moderated, filtered, and ennobled popular discontents, leaving in their place only the technologically empowered American masses and their sycophantic, publicity-mongering leaders.

It’s one thing to say that technology, with its power to level institutions, organise enormous numbers of people, and reward flatterers with fame, is our new reality. But it is quite another to treat this reality as an unambiguous social and political good.

DAVID FRUM's latest column for The Week is in part a reply to my recent post on the DREAM Act. I'm not impressed. Mr Frum is either ill-informed about the proposed law or is seeking to provoke opposition by spreading falsehoods about the policy.

Mr Frum presents several "nightmare" scenarios he says the DREAM Act would make possible. First, Mr Frum says an undocumented immigrant not covered by the provisions of the law could apply anyway using forged documents, which, even if detected, could impede the process of running the scofflaw out of the country. I can't make any sense of this. Here's what Mr Frum says:

Even if the fraud is detected and your application is refused, you simply revert to your previous status. In the process, however, you have gained a new legal advantage: DREAM forbids the Department of Homeland Security from using any information in a DREAM application in deportation proceedings.

Where's the "new legal advantage"? If you're in the country illegally and don't qualify for DREAM, how does DHS's inability to use bunk info in your DREAM application keep them from deporting you exactly as they would had you not filed some crooked papers? Is Mr Frum's problem with DREAM really that an undocumented immigrant can't get booted extra hard for the additional offense of lying about qualifying for legal status under DREAM?

Continue reading "Debunking DREAM Act disinformation" >>

WHY are pubs in London better than bars in New York, which are better than bars in Washington, DC? I've given a good deal of thought to this question recently, though the quality of said thought has been somewhat impaired by the very high quality of the pubs in London. But Matthew Yglesias is still thinking clearly, and an interesting report by Sarah Laskow on liquor licences in the East Village gets him wondering about the natural tendency of businesses to cluster, and the suboptimal result of over-regulation.

Street noise is a very real issue in large swathes of Manhattan and I think it's perfectly understandable that people prefer not to have lively nightlife scenes located directly outside their windows... (But) basically the East Village really "wants" to be full of nightlife establishments just like Qiaotou, China wants button factories. Restricting the creation of new button factories in Qiatou will help incumbent button makers (and alleviate neighborhood concerns about factory smoot) but it's hard to call a bar scene into existence that way. Similarly, making it hard to open a new bar in the East Village isn't going to create a button factory. It's going to create an underutilized space.

Ryan Avent brings in the London-to-Washington comparison, and makes the key point that such restrictions actually tend to make the pubs themselves less pleasant.

London, like cities and towns across the British Isles, is filled with pubs. They vary in type, quality, and clientele. I was very lucky this time around to find a near-perfect gastropub just a five minute walk from my flat. It was quiet and well-maintained with a great menu, and while there were always people there, there was also always a free seat. Kids were welcome during the day, as were dogs. Every time I went I thought to myself how great it would be to have such a place close by back in Washington. And every time I thought that, I immediately reminded myself that such a place, back in Washington, would be perpetually packed and fairly unpleasant. In the Washington area, you can’t have a place that’s both really good and quiet in a neighborhood-y sort of way.

That’s largely because it’s very difficult to open new bars. And the result is a pernicious feedback loop. With too few bars around, most good bars are typically crowded. This crowdedness alienates neighbors, and it also has a selecting effect on the types of people who choose to go to bars — those interested in a loud, rowdy environment, who will often tend to be loud and rowdy. This alienates neighbors even more, leading to tighter restrictions still and exacerbating the problem.

Megan McArdle agrees, with a caveat:

London has a sizeable population of obnoxious drunks, many of whom decide to get into fistfights outside their local pub. (An editor at the Economist who had recently moved to the United States was asked how he had enjoyed his first New Year's in New York. "It made me quite homesick," he replied.  "All those drunks throwing up in the subway were like a breath of London.") But it is true that London also has more quiet pubs than New York—and New York, in turn, has more of them (outside of the East Village) than DC does.

I think these observations are all apt, but I'm also wondering why a comparison of pub quality in these three places would focus primarily on regulatory or economic issues rather than that diffuse and confusing beast we call culture. I can think of two reasons why people tend to write disproportionately about economic and regulatory reasons for these kinds of problems. First, they're concrete. You can investigate the regulatory issues surrounding licensing businesses in your area pretty easily, and those rules are discrete and public and clear. Then you can analyze the expected results. Second, problems with regulatory and eocnomic origins are amenable to solution. Change the regulations and you might in principle have solved the problem, even if in this case nobody can figure out quite how to do that.

Continue reading "Pub culture and pub economy" >>

MY FREEDOM-LOVING colleague is absolutely right to defend the institution of WikiLeaks, and in case my earlier post was unclear, let me re-emphasise that I think we're all better off having an institution where leakers can anonymously submit important information, have it verified and get it published if it checks out. I certainly don't think Julian Assange should be prosecuted for doing this (his alleged personal behaviour is a separate and irrelevant issue). But I think the current dump of diplomatic cables is basically a poor editorial decision. I think the format of "document dumps" is an attempt to evade the very idea that the organisation is making editorial decisions, to make it merely a neutral throughput for leaked information. But I don't think that works. I think it's clear that the institution of WikiLeaks needs to recognise that it is making editorial decisions, and that those decisions need to take place in a fashion at least as transparent as WikiLeaks would like corporate and governing institutions to be. Basically, I think WikiLeaks needs an ethical review board.

Before getting more deeply into this, let me note a couple of concerns floating around today about WikiLeaks. Matthew Yglesias makes the trenchant point that when Peter King, the representative from New York, absurdly suggests WikiLeaks be labeled a "terrorist organisation", he's demonstrating that this situation has the potential to upset current protections of freedom of the press: "Currently the rule is that it’s illegal to be the guy with legal access to classified information who passes it on to outsiders, but once you receive the leak you’re free to do what you want with it." If Mr Assange is going to be prosecuted or put on an extra-legal enemies list for doing the same thing the New York Times did with the Pentagon Papers, we're in real trouble.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum notes that while he instinctively found the dumping of diplomatic cables troubling, he had no such immediate qualms about WikiLeaks' forthcoming dump of the internal communications of a major bank. This, in turn, troubles him about his own instincts: what justifies the difference in attitude? One could obviously hazard that markets should theoretically be most efficient if everyone has access to perfect information while no such rule holds true for international relations. But I'm interested to see how Mr Drum thinks this issue out.

Continue reading "Releasing, reporting, or dumping?" >>

BRUCE BARTLETT'S latest piece in the Fiscal Times reminds us that today's deficit problems are to a great extent the legacy of the Reagan and second Bush administration's "starve the beast" philosophy: the belief that if you cut taxes, spending will automatically come down. In fact, both administrations revved up spending at the same time they were cutting taxes, in the political equivalent of an overweight person who rewards himself with an extra helping of ice cream because he has just purchased a membership in a gym. And Kevin Drum adds the well-recognised point (on the left, at least) that this is precisely what we should expect:

[B]asic economic principles, of the kind that Republicans are endlessly lecturing the rest of us about, predict the same thing. If you raise taxes to pay for government programs, you're essentially making them expensive. Conversely, if you cut taxes, you're making government spending cheaper. So what does Econ 101 say happens when you reduce the price of something? Answer: demand for it goes up. Cutting taxes makes government spending less expensive for taxpayers, which makes them want more of it. And politicians, obliging creatures that they are, are eager to give the people what they want. Result: lots of spending and lots of deficits.

I think this is true, and both the current moment and the previous moment of deficit-cutting frenzy, in the early Clinton administration, suggest the public tends to develop an openness to tax hikes and spending cuts at the same time. (The hard right, of course, is different: it's never open to tax hikes, but that's another story.) But Mr Drum's way of looking at this (and my own) does contain a hidden assumption. The assumption is that when you raise taxes, people view it as making government spending "expensive", but that when you cut taxes, people don't look at the extra debt you've created, raise their expectations of future taxes needed to repay that debt plus interest, and consider government spending even more expensive. A lot of hard-money conservatives, however, believe that people act in the latter fashion. And this is the same reason why they've been arguing for the past year or two that government fiscal stimulus doesn't work.

The clearest expression of this thesis I've read was in a note written by John Cochrane entitled "Fiscal Stimulus RIP". I'm not an economist, and don't really have any authority to weigh in on a fundamental debate between the very small group of economists, including Mr Cochrane, who believe that fiscal stimulus has a multiplier of zero or less, and the much larger group of economists, including Martin Feldstein, Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Simon Johnson, Christina Romer, John Hall, Martin Eichenbaum and so forth who disagree with this belief. But at this point you sort of have to have an opinion on this question in order to have an opinion on what's been happening in the American economy over the past two years, and on what political responses make sense. My basic opinion on this point is simply derived from the fact that all the economics I'd ever read presented the majoritarian view that fiscal stimulus has some effect. But having read the challenge presented by Mr Cochrane, I had to have some reaction. So here, for what it's worth, is my layman's explanation of why I found Mr Cochrane's challenge unconvincing, beyond the fact that most economists don't seem to agree with him.

Continue reading "Uncertainty and the beast" >>

SO WE have another WikiLeaks release, and this time it's secret diplomatic cables. So far the interesting material is on Arab states' and America's relationships with Iran. It seems all those fervid background-only reports of Arab states urging America to bomb Iran, which I mistrusted at the time, were true. Call me naïve. One observation by an Arab diplomat cited in the cables seems on the ball:

Zeid Rifai, a Jordanian, is quoted as telling a US official: “Bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb. Sanctions, carrots, incentives won’t matter.”

Fair enough, but the same observation might be made to the Arab officials who want the Americans to bomb. If they want America to bomb Iran, they're really going to have to go the very minimal distance and make the request publicly. If they can't be bothered to take the political risk of publicly making the call, they're just going to have to live with that Iranian bomb themselves.

More broadly, though, this release seems to me to mark another step down for the WikiLeaks concept. WikiLeaks's release of the "Collateral Murder" video last April was a pretty scrupulous affair: an objective record of combat activity which American armed forces had refused to release, with careful backing research on what the video showed. What we got was a window into combat reality, through the sights of a helicopter gunship. You could develop different interpretations of that video depending on your understanding of its context, but it was something important that had actually taken place.

Diplomatic cables are something entirely different. It's part of the nature of human communication that one doesn't always say the same thing to every audience. There are perfectly good reasons why you don't always tell the same story to your boss as you do to your spouse. There are things Washington needs to tell Riyadh to explain what it's just told Jerusalem and things Washington needs to tell Jerusalem to explain what it's just told Riyadh, and these cables shouldn't be crossed. There's nothing wrong with this. It's inevitable. And it wouldn't make the world a better place if Washington were unable to say anything to Jerusalem without its being heard by Riyadh, any more than it would if you were unable to tell your spouse anything without its being heard by your boss.

At this point, what WikiLeaks is doing seems like tattling: telling Sally what Billy said to Jane. It's sometimes possible that Sally really ought to know what Billy said to Jane, if Billy were engaged in some morally culpable deception. But in general, we frown on gossips. If there's something particularly damning in the diplomatic cables WikiLeaks has gotten a hold of, the organisation should bring together a board of experienced people with different perspectives to review the merits of releasing that particular cable. But simply grabbing as many diplomatic cables as you can get your hands on and making them public is not a socially worthy activity.

There are echoes here of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's famously aggressive position that society is evolving towards more transparency and less privacy (a belief which is certainly convenient for a social-networking site that wants to be able to sell users' data). Maybe it's something about tech geeks, or maybe it's just related to the self-interest of people and organisations whose particular strength lies in an ability to get a hold of other people's information. But it definitely seems like we're learning a lesson here: while information may want to be free, human beings are usually better off when it's on a leash.

(Photo credit: AFP)

MY COLLEAGUE is exactly right that everyone agrees that America has "no good options" for responding to North Korean aggression. But given that everyone agrees America has no good options for deterring further provocations or for moving towards a stable resolution on the Korean peninsula, it's worth broadening the perspective a bit and looking at whether America can use this incident to achieve any of its other geopolitical goals. In fact, from certain perspectives, incidents like yesterday's shelling attack are quite helpful for American diplomacy. Which bears to a certain degree on my colleague's overarching question of whether the United States benefits by acting as a global security guarantor.

One goal of American foreign policy these days is to guarantee that America has options for counterbalancing rising Chinese power in the Far East. American officials would never state such a goal in so many words, as that would be obnoxious and unnecessarily provocative. Officially, we welcome China's rise as a partner in guaranteeing global stability and prosperity, and so forth. But if there were any doubt that the United States were engaged in a competition with China for East Asian sympathies, Hillary Clinton's efforts over the past six months to align America with southeast Asian countries and Japan against Chinese maritime territorial claims should have dispelled them. Incidents like the shelling attack are quite helpful for American diplomacy, because they are blamed partly on China's failure to restrain its psychotic North Korean nephews. The damage to Chinese prestige put the Financial Times's Geoff Dyer in mind of the laments he heard from a Chinese official during Barack Obama's world tour this fall:

As Barack Obama was visiting Asia earlier this month, his friendly reception in country after country provoked a somewhat forlorn response from one Chinese official. “Look around the world, the US has dozens of well-established alliances,” he said. “We only have one.”

That one being...North Korea. Events like the shelling attack on South Korea enhance American relations with South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines, and to some extent Indonesia, India, Thailand, and any other country that worries about how China will behave in its region. In other words, when North Korea goes nuts, American soft power grows. Unfortunately, that kind of American soft power is based on the availability of American hard power. Countries turn to America in the face of North Korean madness because America is the only country that can dispatch a carrier task force into the Yellow Sea.

The question my colleague asks, however, remains: why do we care? What American interests are at stake in the security positions of East Asian states vis-a-vis China? United States Navy officers routinely explain their presence in regional waters as guaranteeing that sea lanes will remain open for trade. But who is threatening to close sea lanes? No country in the world has more interest in open sea lanes than that great export nation, China. Do we really need 11 carrier task forces to protect something nobody is threatening? Wouldn't eight be enough? In other words, it seems to me that America's security presence in east Asia is helpful to the American goal of counterbalancing Chinese geopolitical weight. The question is why we're trying to counterbalance Chinese geopolitical weight, and at the deepest level, that seems like a hard question to answer.

On the other hand, Sarah Palin's proposed Nixon-to-China gambit of switching sides in the Korean conflict has been insufficiently explored. If anybody can pull it off, she can.

I THINK my colleague has been drawing a useful distinction in recent posts between highly unequal societies involving hereditary wealth and class distinctions maintained by law or force, such as tsarist Russia or today's Guatemala, and highly unequal societies where the very rich mainly earn their wealth through success in business, such as today's America or China. But I'm not sure how important this distinction is to debates over inequality within the United States.

Here's why. Perhaps you don't think inequality is a problem in America right now, but most people agree that there was an era when inequality in America really was a problem. That era was America's gilded age in the late 19th century, which featured political abuses and imbalances that are generally used to demonstrate the necessity of government regulation and the restriction of money in politics. And who were the robber barons whose untrammeled control of the economy and the political process necessitated the regulatory interventions of trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt and the progressive era? Andrew Carnegie (pictured). Jay Gould. J.P. Morgan. Businessmen, most of them self-made men, providing customers with high-quality steel, railways, and financial services at low prices. Would it be inaccurate to say that such robber barons "controlled" wealth?

Perhaps Nick Kristof should have used the metaphors "gilded age" or "robber barons" rather than the metaphor "banana republic" in the column on inequality to which my colleague was responding. But if you think that this particular distinction invalidates the critique of inequality in America, then I'm not sure what you think was wrong with the American political and social system in the late 19th century. I think an understanding of the injustices produced by savage inequality has to take into account the historical fact that the laissez-faire economic system of late-19th-century America resulted in effective debt peonage for workers who owed their souls to the company store, and near-complete control of the political system by the vastly wealthy, opposed and ultimately broken chiefly by a political force which laissez-faire ideology at the time considered an unlawful restraint on trade: labour unions.

Even more than my colleague, I am far from convinced that inequality in today's America is mainly meritocratic in origin. I think America basically has a two-class system, in which a few members of the upper class (which calls itself the "middle class") are catapulted through luck, talent and hard work to spectacular heights of wealth and end up with disproportionate influence over, well, everything. But even if you did think American inequality were entirely meritocratic in origin, it's not clear what the impact on your attitude towards inequality should be. A meritocracy can be as bitterly divided and unequal a society as any other.

(Photo credit: Library of Congress)

THE American people are in a foul mood. Unemployment is stuck near 10%. Paying off debt is no damn fun. And now government employees have started taking naked pictures of us at the airport while offering the option of a genital rub-down as an alternative form of humiliation.

But really, my fellow Americans, what did you expect? After September 11th, you told the government: Don’t let this happen again! "This" meant the hijacking and weaponisation of loaded airplanes. Everyone understood that if something like "this" did happen again, heads in Washington would roll. That's a pretty good incentive for government agencies to act, and possibly overreact. Which is what they've pretty clearly done with recently instituted airport-security policies. 

But we asked for it! Which makes efforts to describe the anti-TSA outcry as an authentically libertarian reaction against the Nanny State so maddening. Like the 62% of tea-partiers who denounce "government" in the abstract while also telling pollsters that they're perfectly happy with Social Security and Medicare, a large portion of those who claim to favour a rollback of enhanced airport screening would undoubtedly demand blood from politicians and bureaucrats moments after a successful terrorist attack. Americans don’t want a minimal state. They want a minimal state that provides all the protections of a maximal state.

Children have trouble accepting the need for trade-offs among competing goods. But adults—not to mention citizens of a free society—should be more sophisticated. They should be capable of grasping the elementary point that government services and low taxes, like freedom and security, are goods that stand in sharp tension with each other. And yet here we are, witnessing just the latest in a series of public temper-tantrums over the fact that not all good things go together. I’d love to think that this will be the last such outburst. But I wouldn't bet on it.

YESTERDAY I wrote that Republican opposition to ratification of the New START treaty with Russia could be traced to the influence of delusional neoconservative ideas about America’s strength—or rather, its invincibility. Instead of formulating policies suited to "a world governed by economic, budgetary, military, and diplomatic limits", neocons indulge in magical thinking, pretending that America is so exceptional that it need never "sit at a negotiating table, entertain a mutually beneficial compromise, or ratify a treaty with any nation that would dare to pursue interests contrary to our own in any region of the world." This is a fantasy dangerously detached from the reality of a world in which "the United States is very powerful but far from free to do whatever it wants without constraint."

Shortly after my post appeared, Stephen Walt wrote a post at Foreign Policy that made something close to the opposite argument. According to Mr Walt, Republicans are opposing ratification not because they believe America is more powerful than it is; they are opposing ratification because America is in fact more powerful than it should be. The US is, in Mr Walt's words, "too secure for its own good." Facing no serious external threat, being "as secure as any state could ever expect to be", America has grown reckless, permitting "politicians to use foreign policy as a partisan political football, and to indulge special interests and other ideological fixations." The problem isn't delusional ideas, in other words, but rather the practical consequences of the country's status as a hyperpower.

Mr Walt is surely right, up to a point. The international context—and above all America’s enormous military and economic might within that context—is a necessary condition for explaining Republican opposition to the New START treaty. But it is far from sufficient. To go further, we must take ideas more seriously than Mr Walt and his fellow realists typically do. We need to ask why neoconservative ideas about the proper exercise of American power have won out among Republicans over the far more sober and sensible ideas of realists like Richard Luger, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and, yes, Stephen Walt.

Continue reading "Power and ideas" >>

THIS is a very bad moment in the United States for thoughtfulness on foreign affairs—at least in the popular press and in the halls of Congress. Exhibit A: The ongoing fight over ratification of the New START treaty with Russia. Over the past two decades, a series of arms-control agreements have led to negotiated reductions in nuclear weapons from roughly 12,000 to the current level of around 2,000. New START would bring that number down a bit further, to 1,550, while also strengthening verification and transparency for monitoring treaty compliance. That's what's usually called a no-brainer.

And yet key Republicans in Congress—most recently and damagingly Jon Kyl, a senator from Arizona—have repeatedly acted to delay a ratification vote, even though doing so might scuttle the treaty. These senators are supported by a number of right-wing foreign-policy thinkers (including John Bolton, Eric Edelman, Jim Woolsey, and John Yoo) who strongly oppose ratification. But the Obama administration has pushed back hard, responding to most of the specific questions put forth by sceptics of the pact. On Saturday Robert Gates singled out concerns that the agreement might inhibit development of missile-defence programmes, saying, "Anything that we have in mind now or in the years to come that we haven't even thought of is not prohibited." The administration has also put forward $85 billion over the next ten years to modernise America's nuclear infrastructure, the state of which seems to be the primary concern of Mr Kyl. Even hawks such as Robert Kagan and Max Boot have found the treaty worthy of passage, if not perfect. And an impressive group of Republican former officials who negotiated earlier (and much more drastic) cuts in America's nuclear stockpile have lined up behind the agreement.

So Republican opposition is difficult to comprehend, but perhaps a recent blog post from Commentary’s John Podhoretz can help us understand the mindset of the treaty's naysayers. Brushing by the arguments of Mr Kagan and Mr Boot, Mr Podhoretz finally settles on the following as the "worst thing" about the agreement: New START creates "a parallelism between American strength and Russian strength that is a very, very bad precedent in terms of how we ourselves think about American power."

"How we ourselves think about American power." That is the withered remnant of neoconservative thinking about foreign policy—a remnant that today, through Fox News and the other organs of right-wing opinion-formation, increasingly dominates the Republican Party. It has no interest in understanding the complicated world beyond American shores—a world filled with nations we cannot simply manipulate and control for our own ends, a world in which the United States is very powerful but far from free to do whatever it wants without constraint. Instead of realistically reflecting on the challenges confronting America in the emerging multi-polar world, Mr Podhoretz and his ideological compatriots are interested only in us—in bucking up our will and resolve, in inoculating us against self-doubt, in leading an endless pep rally in our own honour during which we are repeatedly told how exceptional we are in both power and virtue. So exceptional, in fact, that we will not deign to sit at a negotiating table, entertain a mutually beneficial compromise, or ratify a treaty with any nation that would dare to pursue interests contrary to our own in any region of the world.

But indulging in the fantasy of American invincibility will not make it so. It is a form of magical thinking dangerously disconnected from the world we actually inhabit, a world governed by economic, budgetary, military, and diplomatic limits, even for the United States. That should be an obvious point. Alas, in America today it is not.

(Photo credit: AFP)