July 04, 2005
China's War Odds and Negotiation Theory, or the Battle of the BATMA
Brad DeLong's latest lunge at the "China hawks" hints at a point that deserves to be said out loud. If China's leaders were to go to war, it wouldn't be because war was fated, but because war seemed to them like a better choice than peace. So the easiest way to prevent war with China may be simply to keep China's leaders confident in the political payoffs of a China at peace.
As Daniel Nexon points out, wars are a horrible waste. Just as most contract disputes are better settled out of court, there's almost always some peaceful (if deeply uncomfortable) agreement that would leave each country better off than the likely result of going to war. Brad DeLong replies correctly that a lot of preindustrial wars were justified for the rulers, even if they were horrid for the people, because wars can make leaders stronger even when their people can only suffer by it. Unfortunately, that kind of political war still occurs even today: Argentina's junta opened war with Britain over the purely symbolic Falkland Islands in 1982, Sadat led Egypt to attack Israel with no expectation of winning in 1973, and China sent its divisions to clash with the USSR's border forces just to prove a point in 1969. In the past and today, national leaders sometimes go to war for political advantage, even when they know it won't materially help or may even ruin their citizens.
We've noted before that China in particular has a record of making war as a political gesture. So why wouldn't China's leaders repeat this pattern? What can we do to head off a future where China's Politburo decides to invade Taiwan so that China's leaders can make themselves look like heroes?
Brad DeLong's answer seems to be: help China's leaders become heroes through peace instead, by bringing their citizens economic growth. After all, there's a comon theme to the "political wars" of the 20th century: they've been started by leaders who're trying to take their people's minds off a record of economic failure. Sadat in 1973 Egypt, the junta in 1982 Argentina, even the German Parliamentary leaders cutting the deal that gave Hitler the chancellorship in 1933: all were leaders who gave power to a belligerent platform after (and only after) economic decline had eaten away their authority. So as long as China's citizens are getting rich, perhaps China's leaders will see more glory for themselves in keeping economic growth going than in turning to war.
Of course, Germany in 1914 chose war despite a prospering economy. But by then "war for glory" was an established tradition, even a custom, for German leaders: under the Prussian kings and under Bismarck, the Prussian/German state had expanded and secured itself over and over through deliberately chosen wars. By contrast, China has no tradition of "glorious" war: war is just a tool of statecraft for traditional Chinese foreign policy, and a second-class tool at that -- right now China's leaders tend to see America as much more war-prone than themselves. So if China's leaders can continue to hold power by giving their people rising incomes, they have no reason, and no tradition, to pull them toward war.
Negotiation theorists like to talk about each side's "best alternative to a negotiated agreement," or BATNA. For China's leaders, perhaps we should talk about their "best alternative to a military approach," or BATMA. As long as China's leaders have a strong BATMA -- as long as "let's give our people economic growth" seems like a workable way to stay in power -- they're unlikely to seek a politically convenient war. So we should do our best to make it easy, not hard, for China's leaders to deliver economic growth to their people.
Conversely, the time to worry about China risking war with America is when the leaders' BATMA has collapsed -- when an economic crisis (and there will be one, sooner or later) has sapped their authority, and led them to think of desperate measures.
Let's hope that when that crisis comes, the "desperate measure" the Chinese Politburo thinks of is holding elections -- not waging war.
Now, if we could figure out a way to make holding free elections an attractive and not merely desperate option for China's leaders, that would be a BATMA worth smiling about.
Posted by danielstarr at 05:36 AM | Send Email | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 29, 2005
Bureaucracy Versus Modernity, in China and the rest of the Third World
Bureaucracy exists to prevent surprises; that's why bureaucracy doesn't cooperate with economic growth. One of the world's most interesting riddles is how China, the world-historical champion of big fat bureaucracies, ended up with a government that's comparatively lean and mean and growth-friendly where the governments of India and most of Latin America and Africa are complex and bloated and growth-hindering.
There's little evidence that Chinese officials are less corrupt compared to other developing-country officials, and in fact in many Chinese provinces it seems you can't get any business done without paying off the local Communist Party boss. The difference is that China doing business in China requires fewer officials to be placated, evaded or bribed. Buy off the party boss, and you can get down to business without any more legal niceties. Indian business visitors to China sometimes cite this "what the party boss says, goes" authoritarian environment as a feature that's very convenient for business, but very creepy to Indian (and Western) mindsets of individual rights and business regulation. China's "one-stop shopping" approach to bribing the local government seems to be a sordid but significant part of what makes China an attractive place to develop new business. And it's new business investment, more than anything, that's driven China's economic growth.
But all this leaves me wondering at the underlying question: how did China, of all places, end up with less bureaucracy than India, Peru, and Nigeria?
Posted by danielstarr at 05:39 AM | Send Email | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 22, 2005
In China, the Best Elections Money Can Buy
The Washington Post reports on how in one Chinese village the Communist Party candidate nakedly bought and bribed votes to win the village election. At first glance that sounds like familiar bad news -- corrupt elections in China, how predictable, what a shame! But a closer look at the article shows up several points that say real democracy in China may be closer than we think.
Number one, the Communist Party candidate had to buy his votes, and couldn't just order or declare himself a victory. Even American elections were often bought during the corresponding period of early American industrialization -- just look up the stories of Tammany Hall. Number two, the Communist candidate victory followed repeated Communist defeats, in which the other candidate won and held office, just like in a real democracy. Number three, the vote-buying in the village was noticed and condemned not just locally, but by officials from higher levels of government in the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
All this points to a big Number Four: however weak China may be in democratic practice, the idea of democracy is very strong in today's China. In the words of the rival candidate for village leader on his various successes against the Party:
"They could not stop it," Zhang said. "Everyone knows the power of democracy."
Remarks like that tell us something about China's future. At the end of the Cold War, Russia flirted with democracy and free markets before turning back under Putin to old-fashioned dictatorship, while countries like Poland and Hungary have become basically successful capitalist democracies. A big part of the difference is that ordinary Russians had very little living memory of democracy or free markets, while many Eastern Europeans had a lot more "buried experience" of democracy and market economics. China today is openly a market economy ruled by Communist oligarchs. But below the surface, there's growing experience in and enormous respect for democracy. That suggests that if and when a crisis shakes the Communist dictatorship, the answer won't be chaos -- it'll be elections.
It may not even take a big crisis to turn China democratic. Zeng Qinghong, Jiang Zemin's sometime hatchet man and arguably the second most powerful person in today's China, has a record of pushing for experiments with "inner party democracy," that is, holding free elections for more of the positions within the Communist Party. Even though the Communists' dictatorship seems secure, the value of democracy has been idealized more thoroughly in Chinese politics than in almost any other of the planet's remaining dictatorships. Right now, China has few free elections above the village level. Yet today's Chinese people have more mental commitment to the ideals of democracy than most people in Russia -- or Iraq. It's not certain, but it's possible that democracy will steadily filter up through Chinese government until the country is truly democratic -- without anyone ever declaring a revolution.
Posted by danielstarr at 03:26 AM | Send Email | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 21, 2005
The Face of Future War: Brainy Missiles Versus Tiny Guns
Guns and missiles are trading their historic roles on the battlefield. It used to be that attackers relied for their breakthroughs on masses of big guns, whether the particular guns were used for the naval broadsides of 18th-century sea combat, the artillery barrages of World War I, or the tank spearheads of World War II. Meanwhile, the first serious military rockets and missiles got their value as a handy tactical defense against an attacker's superior guns, as when Egyptian Sagger antitank missiles surprised and blunted the assaults of Israeli armored forces in the 1973 October War. But these days, most heavy attack missions are being taken over by big and brainy missiles. And on the tactical defense, it looks like our best new tools are very, very small guns.
In naval warfare, guns are already well out of the picture, with the last American battleships scheduled for retirement. The last major use of battleships was for naval bombardment of enemies on land; now, cruise missiles do that mission so well that it's possible to argue that even aircraft carriers should be replaced by missile barges. The same passage to missiles is now happening in land warfare. The new Crusader tube artillery system got canceled as not useful enough for the cost, even as the artillery's Multiple Rocket Launcher Sytem is getting a GPS-guided upgrade. The newest infantry weapon is a long-ranged smart grenade launcher that comes as close as you can get to pocket-sized missiles without putting little rockets in every rifleman's backpack. And what about tanks? The most powerful tank gun isn't a gun anymore, it's a missile: the LOSAT (Line Of Sight Anti-Tank) missile, which can approximately be described as a sharpened telephone pole with a rocket engine on the back. It's fired out of a Humvee-mounted tube as sort of a hypermodern ballista, and it goes through even our own Abrams tanks like, well, a rocket-propelled spear through butter. The guns we still have are very useful, but the writing is on the wall: all the new big guns aren't. Aren't guns, that is. They're missiles.
Meanwhile, the new trend in defense is not to settle for shooting your enemy, but also to shoot your enemy's shells, rockets or missiles before they can hit you. And how do we do shoot down enemy projectiles? Why, with guns! Robotically-aimed guns firing tiny bullets will shoot down the enemy's explosive before it can hit you! It sounds very Rube Goldberg, and it arguably is very Rube Goldberg, but it seems to work. We're now protecting tanks from RPGs with tiny grenade launchers; we're protecting troops from enemy artillery with a robotic Gatling Gun nicknamed R2-D2; and the Army hopes eventually to be able to protect Future Combat Systems units with Active Protection Systems that can fire an intercepting explosively formed projectile to neutralize an incoming enemy tank shell in flight. Everywhere you turn, the innovations in weapons for the tactical defense aren't missiles anymore: they're guns.
The hidden story here is that combat is being changed by precision. Guns are good when you have to fire lots of shots to hit the enemy. Missiles are better when the enemy's easy to aim at and the important thing is to make each shot count. Precision guidance has meant that any land vehicle is easy to aim at (unless your electronics are spoofed, which is another discussion), which leads to missiles on the offense. But that same precision now makes it possible -- for computers, at least -- to begin to aim at the missiles themselves in flight. It's still damn hard to aim at a flying rocket; you'd like multiple chances to scratch the target. That's why ballistic missile defense (where you only get one or two shots) is so difficult, and why outside of knocking out incoming nukes, you don't see anyone even trying "to hit a missile with a missile." But technology really has come to the point where you can sometimes hit a missile with a bullet.
We're gettng closer to a tactical future where the fundamental "soldier" in high-intensity battle is the missile or unmanned drone itself, and the humans who launch them are just the terrain the missiles are fighting each other to conquer. But the irony is that even as "real" war becomes less human than ever before, more and more of America's real wars are very human, personal, low-tech affairs, where our ability to train police is more important to victory than our ability to blow up enemy tank shells in midflight. Because we're so good at high-tech war that only a desperate fool would oppose us, we instead end up in low-tech wars, in countries that have been made so miserable that they're just full of desperate fools.
The irony shouldn't really surprise us. You can logically prove that no matter how good you are at war, nonetheless your wars will never be predictable. After all, no rational person fights wars where the outcome is a predictable loss. So if you get into a war, either the outcome isn't predictable, or at least one side isn't rational. And if one side is irrational, then even if the outcome is a foregone conclusion, the way irrational people fight their way to defeat is anything but predictable. You can take your pick which of these options -- or all of them -- is on display today in Iraq.
Posted by danielstarr at 03:13 AM | Send Email | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 17, 2005
China Condemns Millions of Americans to Die From Bird Flu
...I'm not happy with the CCP today: it turns out that they've made the Asian bird flu virus resistant to the best antiviral drug we would have relied on to tame the next outbreak of avian-based flu in humans. They ignored the advice of the World Health Organization and had farmers drug their chickens with antivirals instead of vaccinating them. In effect, they evolved the virus strains for drug resistance. Now the antiviral is useless against the bird flu -- useless not just to poultry, but to humans.
When the bird flu epidemic comes, we'll have to use the second-best drug. Millions in the developing world may not be able to afford any drug (this one was the cheapest), and will no doubt pass on the flu to more victims, possibly more American victims.
Thank you so much, China! Such wonderful brilliance could only be brought to the world by the insightful, open-minded, selfless men of the Chinese Communist Party.
If the EU and the USA were in the habit of cooperating on China issues instead of undermining each other, we could teach China a lesson about not endangering the world community.
But we won't. China will get away with having done something that has endangered millions of lives. Congratulations to the almighty CCP!
Posted by danielstarr at 10:40 PM | Send Email | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 14, 2005
In Iraq, Watch the Militias, not the Insurgents
Today we learn that Kurdish security forces are snatching up ethnic enemies (Arabs and Turkmen) off the streets of Kirkuk. This follows up earlier accusations that the Shiites' Badr Brigades have killed prominent Sunnis. This is the real story to watch in Iraq, folks. Not the insurgency, not the daily death toll of Americans -- watch the militias.
We've talked before about the power of paramilitary militias to save or ruin a country facing insurgency. If the Kurdish and Shiite militias really do turn into "ethnic cleansing" forces, then Iraq is headed for a hell that makes the past two years seem like a walk in the park.
Now, if the militias could be corralled to protect the government without targeting ordinary civilians, then the insurgents would to be totally outnumbered without any American troops required. But at the moment, that looks too optimistic. Iraq will have to rely on the Iraqi official government troops. And for all their defects, the new Iraqi soldiers seem to be doing a tolerably good job in places like the mean streets of Baghdad.
As far as Iraqi soldiers go, Thomas Friedman writes today that "training is overrated" when it comes to Iraqi pro-government forces: motivation matters, he says, not training. As usual for Friedman, that's half brilliant and half idiotic. The idiotic half of that: training doesn't matter? Training itself creates confidence and motivation -- ask any United States Marine fresh out of the Crucible. Training also multiplies the impact of motivation: our soldiers from Delta Force and the Ranger Regiment in Mogadishu in 1993 killed about fifty enemy militia for every American death, despite being cut off and surrounded by plenty of well-motivated Somali militamen with largely comparable equipment (although the Somalis' body armor was "human shields", not Kevlar): training, by itself, made the Americans fifty times stronger man for man.
But Friedman is right about this much: if any substantial number of ordinary Sunnis could be motivated to fight for this government the way that the Shiites and Kurds are fighting for (their piece of) it, the insurgency would be over. That's actually what's happened in Afghanistan: most of the Pashtuns (the former Taliban recruitment base) have been sold on the new government being better than the Taliban. That's not true in Iraq. Most of the Sunnis can't trust the new government to be better than Saddam Hussein.
That's a pretty lousy thing to have to admit.
So, what now? Praktike is right that we have to dismiss Daalder's false choice between "do exactly what we're doing right now" and "set up an excuse to pull out." The Administration has, unfortunately, handled post-Saddam Iraq awkwardly from the start, and there's still a lot of things we should be doing differently in Iraq.
Number one, we need to bribe the Sunnis. By any means possible. If we have any especially clueful reconstruction contractors, we ought to concentrate them in some particular Sunni city and prove, by example, that the new regime can deliver a better life for Sunnis than the old one. If we could actually get a few Sunni sheiks to raise a militia that would fight against rather than with the insurgency, that'd be wonderful -- for propaganda to fellow Sunnis as much as for anti-insurgent value. Literal bribes would help, too. Saddam's government ran as much on handouts to local leaders as on fear and terror. It's too late for us to be shy. If boxes of cash in Fallujah and Ramadi can get a whispering campaign going against the insurgency, then we should deploy boxes of cash in Fallujah and Ramadi. If they need good jobs in Anbar province, let's just go ahead and give every town council in al-Anbar authority to hire ten thousand Iraqis on America's payroll for whatever job the town suggests. It doesn't matter how we do it: bribe the Sunnis.
Number two, we still need to put more energy and more creativity into the training of Iraqi government forces. You can find plenty of sources to warn about slow progress, but slow progress is a lot better than no progress. Even if only one out of three units trained is immediately ready to fight, the cost of training Iraqis is far lower than the cost of fighting with Americans.
Number three, if the goal is to reduce American casualties, we can, at some risk to Iraq's long-term outcome, pull Americans back from independent patrols, and restrict American involvement to training, co-patrolling and reinforcing Iraqi government troops. America's most important role in Iraq has never been as a police force, but as a "stand-over" force to keep the Iraqi government forces honest. That doesn't actually require American troops to patrol Iraqi streets -- although Iraq won't get better until someone competent is patrolling most Iraqi streets.
And above all, number four: don't let the militias start ethnic cleansing.
[E1] See also Belgravia Dispatch for some considerations on how to make Iraq's government more attractive to the Sunnis, or more worth defending for the Shiites and Kurds.
[E2] Mudville OPL.
Posted by danielstarr at 09:19 PM | Send Email | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 13, 2005
Do We Cure Wars with Democracy or with Alliances?
Ikenberry at TPMCafe complains that the President is trusting too much in the peace-making power of democracy and not investing enough in developing new pro-American international institutions. The cute answer is that governments find it easy to turn down American institutional proposals, but find it harder to turn down democracy.
But where do modern wars and terrorism really come from? Do leaders really turn to violence to win concessions from foreigners? Or do they fight foreigners to make themselves seem strong and effective in the eyes of their fellow citizens?
If wars are about practical international issues, then Ikenberry has a point: countries and movements will stay at peace if the international climate makes war seem expensive and unnecessary. Good international alliance/ dispute-resolution organizations make peace more practical than war. A world of lots of alliances and organizations makes aggression expensive (you may have to fight lots of countries at once) but also because they make war seem less necessary (you can get lots of "concessions" by peaceful means). You could argue that both the World Trade Organization and NATO probably have prevented wars just by existing. When it comes to preventing "practical" wars, the degree of democracy underpinning governments probably matters less than the quality of communications and agreements between governments.
But if wars and terrorism come out of domestic politics, then all the international agreements in the world won't help, because the leaders are looking for a fight whether or not it's useful for their country. Iran's mullahs don't agitate against Israel because they think they'd win an Iranian-Israeli war, but because it proves how manly and Islamic they are. Promoting war against Israel gives Iranian leaders political legitimacy they badly need, even if an actual war would be ruinous for their country. Likewise, Osama bin Laden never depended that much on the United States, the "far enemy," giving him what he wanted; his big concern was starting a political uproar in his home kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Warmongers whose goal is domestic politics can't be deterred by the international climate, because they aren't out to influence foreign governments nearly so much as their fellow citizens.
Democracy, on the other hand, is a tolerably good cure for "political warmongers." In a working democracy, even a successful war will only keep you in office a little while longer, while a losing war will get you thrown out. And if you're not in office, forming a political party is a much easier way to get your voice heard than going out and blowing up foreigners. Democracies' internal terrorists have either been mere branch outposts of foreign organizations (like the Soviet-backed Red Brigades of Cold War Italy, or the European Al-Qaeda cells of today), or fringe cult groups with more tabloid impact than real power (like the Weathermen in the USA, or Aum Shirikyo in Japan).
We'd like both, of course -- both a peaceful, "institutionalized" international climate, and as many countries as possible being working democracies. But in the context of the War on Terror, it's hard to blame the Bush Administration for focusing on promoting democracy. With the possible exception of the Palestinians trying to bomb their way to independence from Israel, most terrorist groups today are political, not practical. When terrorism is rooted in domestic politics, democracy is a better answer than international institutions.
Posted by danielstarr at 04:14 PM | Send Email | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 10, 2005
We Could Have Had Turkey
The Duck of Minerva is another international-relations blog that you IR fans should be reading, especially since one of its writers is Daniel Nexon, and we all know that the best foreign policy bloggers are always named Daniel, right? Anyway, Daniel-not-Drezner-not-Starr-but-Nexon observes a few weak points in a recent post from yet another good new IR blog, the foreign-affairs blog at TPMCafe, which features various accredited folk dishing out a steady supply of thoughtful if melancholy commentary on our President's foreign policy.
Basically I agree with Mr.Nexon's point: the "unilateralism" charge is harder to make convincing than a lot of people (including Mr.Daalder at TPMCafe) seem to think. On the other hand, I will happily pick a nit with my fellow Daniel on what happened between America and Turkey in the runup to our war in Iraq.
Daniel Nexon suggests that Turkey, like France and Germany, may have been determined all along to not cooperate with America on Iraq. But I think Turkey's cooperation was a winnable bit of diplomacy, and the Bush Administration has to take the blame for not getting Turkish cooperation.
Turkey, incidentally, has been one of the few recent cases where an American diplomatic failure cost us an obvious painful price. Because Turkey wouldn't let our troops pass through into northern Iraq, we took much longer to get heavy forces into the Sunni Triangle. By the time we did, Saddam's friends had gone to ground. Secretary Rumsfeld has declared that failure gave a key early boost to today's insurgency.
So, was Turkey winnable? You can never prove "what would have happened." But we know four things that should make us strongly suspect that a more diplomatic Administration could have gotten Turkish approval to pass troops through.
First, Turkish Islamists had strong reasons to want credit for seeing Iraqi Muslims free of Saddam Hussein, while Turkish nationalists had strong reasons to want to give Turkey leverage to veto any would-be Kurdish state. Turkey could not simply stand by and be uninvolved the way "Old Europe" could. Turkey stood to lose much more than France and Germany if the Iraq war happened without it and was a big American success.
Second, the Iraq war was no more unpopular among Turks than our war in Kosovo was among Greeks. And America was less popular in Greece than in Turkey. Yet during Clinton's Administration, the Greeks were persuaded to sign on to Kosovo.
Third, America never brought out the diplomatic heavy hitters for Turkey: no Cabinet official visited during the months of negotiation, and Bush himself had never been to Turkey at all. In the prior Administration, Clinton visited Turkey in person, more than once. So it's fair to say the Bush Administration left a lot of personal-prestige ammunition unused.
Fourth and most importantly, the key Turkish parliamentary vote was extraordinarily close. A 4-vote shift out of over 500 present members would have given approval for troop passage. Are we supposed to believe that better salesmanship couldn't have gotten us even one percent more?
You can always find a way to blame any cause you like (divine humor, Muslim solidarity, the French, Bill Clinton) for why the past happened one way and not another. But by far the simplest explanation of our failure to get Turkish cooperation on Iraq is that this Administration made mistakes in its diplomacy with Turkey.
But let me finish by more or less siding with Mr.Nexon and arguing with Mr.Daalder again: I think unilateralism is a straw man. The problem isn't our unilateral goals, it's our clumsy and hasty negotiating approach that knocks us into unilateral outcomes. President Reagan went after plenty of things that allied populations or else allied leaders didn't like in the least -- putting intermediate-range nuclear missiles on West German soil, skirmishing with Libya, pushing South Korea and the Philippines' dictators toward democracy. But Reagan's team was only rarely blindsided by lack of allied cooperation: either we got them to go along with us or we knew not to try in the first place. Yet Bush's team keeps publically backing projects only to be rejected by surprise. See, for example, our latest South American democracy-promotion initiative, going down in smoke.
If we were going it alone because we knew we had to, that might just be an educated choice. But when we can't even see the rejections coming, that tells us that Bush's diplomatic team is simply less competent than Reagan's.
Which is a pity, because our goals today -- democracy promotion, antiterrorism cooperation, antiproliferation -- require a lot more sustained diplomacy than Reagan's.
Posted by danielstarr at 04:06 AM | Send Email | Comments (4) | TrackBack
June 09, 2005
"Swarming" Tactics: Brought to You by Iraqis, Mongols, and RAND
There's an excellent new RAND-sponsored dissertation by Sean Edwards on "swarming" tactics. These are the "come out of seemingly nowhere, tear 'em to pieces from an unfair position, and disappear" tactics used against clueless medieval Europeans by Mongols in the 1200s, against American infantry by Iraqis today (and, more famously, by Somalis against our troops in Mogadishu in 1993), and against Russians by Chechens in Grozny. It's the favorite current approach of improvised enemy forces defending against Americans and other industrialized armies, which already makes it interesting. But more than that, "swarming" quite possibly represents the tactics of choice we ourselves will use ten years from now.
If you're a military-analysis geek, go read it for yourself. (Or a military history geek: he has a great list of cases of historical swarm tactics in the appendices.)
I want to read over it again first, but in a couple days I'll put up a short summary of Edwards' excellent look at the history of swarm tactics, plus what thoughts I can offer you on the really interesting angle of swarming: where it's going next, both for our enemies and for us.
[E1] Mudville OPL.
Posted by danielstarr at 06:58 AM | Send Email | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 06, 2005
Science to the Rescue: Vaccines for Ebola and Marburg
The New Scientist passes on a report of successful vaccines for Ebola and Marburg, two of the scariest diseases on the planet. See also this report and an NYT article. The scientists have tested it in monkeys, and they expect success in humans:
"The data would suggest that instead of 100 percent chance of dying, they would have an 80 percent chance of survival," Jones told reporters.
It's almost impossible to express how horrible these viruses are. Ebola and Marburg each convert "virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles". Along the way, whatever part of you isn't virus slime bleeds: your skin itself pours out your blood through its pores, and finally you die. And anybody who touches your blood-dripping body gets infected. And everybody who gets infected, dies.
There's no cure. And, until now, no immunity. Just a 90 to 100 percent of dying, once you get it.
Everybody's nightmare has been an airborne (instead of just contact-borne) strain of Ebola or Marburg, with deaths in the millions. (And not just in Africa; if one infected person got on an airplane to America or Europe, it'd be epidemic time for us all.)
But now, there's a vaccine, at least one that works for monkeys (our close cousins, and I trust close enough for the vaccine to carry over, although that's not guaranteed). The vaccine was developed by genetically altering another, less dangerous, virus so that it expressed some of the distinctive proteins of Ebola or Marburg, giving the body a "fingerprint" matching the deadly viruses for the immune system to watch out for. If the vaccine carries over to humans, two of our worst nightmares will vanish off the charts, thanks to a few scientists (and their government funding!) in Canada, France and the United States.
I love the twenty-first century.
Posted by danielstarr at 05:38 AM | Send Email | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 02, 2005
Now I Believe Our Military Really Is Overstretched
They're cutting flying time for Air Force pilots. That's flying time, as in "training time," as in "make sure our pilots can do their job and help our guys and not get killed time."
That's pretty damn serious.
What the heck is going on with our budget process?
Posted by danielstarr at 05:00 AM | Send Email | Comments (0) | TrackBack
No Crisis + No Confidence = No European Constitution
Here in America, our first "constitution," the Articles of Confederation, was a miserable botch. The United States Constitution as we know it only took hold because the AoC system was so bad. Even then it took nine of the thirteen colonies being ready to unite and leave the others behind for everybody to sign on to the Constitution.
So it's not surprising that the French and Dutch population have turned down the constitution that would have pulled them so much closer to the "United States of Europe". Unlike in 1700's America, Europeans today have no great crisis requiring them to act as one. What's more, the European leaders who were selling the EU constitution were already national failures. France, Germany and several other European countries are suffering from low economic growth and miserably high unemployment, plus a looming pension crisis that makes America's Social Security reform debate seem like pocket change. If France's leaders can't handle France's economy, why should the French, much less the Dutch, trust France's leaders with a rewrite of the whole system of government?
Democracy's dirty little secret is that we mostly judge leaders' proposals by our confidence in the leaders. There are plenty of Republicans who will support any policy President Bush backs simply because they trust him, and plenty of Democrats who have vowed never to trust anything Bush suggests, no matter how reasonable it sounds. A booming France would have supported the EU Constitution; this France, troubled, struggling, did not.
But while it's fun to see the "let's make trouble for America" French leaders fail, we shouldn't gloat over the failure of the European Constitution. On most global issues, a united Europe would make a better partner for the United States.
Outside Japan, the Europeans are the only other really powerful group of believers in peace and democracy. We could get a lot more out of China, Iran, North Korea and the rest if the Europeans had the unity to put real pressure of their own on those countries. And while France and Germany as individual countries are never going to take over our burden of being "the world's policeman," a united Europe would be a lot more likely to step in and put out some of the brushfires that we don't have time for.
I don't have much good to say about the European Constitution that just got rejected, or the European politicians whose failure led to that voter rejection. But if a united Europe is the price of getting Europeans to take a bigger role in keeping peace in the world, then sooner or later, a united Europe will be in America's interest.
Posted by danielstarr at 04:59 AM | Send Email | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 28, 2005
The Problem with Being a "Liberal Hawk"
Yglesias, Praktike, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and others are ruminating on "liberal hawks" and the Iraq War. But there are really only three basic American stances on the Iraq War, and they go something like this:
1. Invading Iraq was a good idea, the casualties and setbacks have mostly been either inevitable or unforseeable, and Bush deserves credit for a good decision well executed.
2. Invading Iraq was a good idea, but poor choices by Bush Administration officials have led to a whole lot of casualties and setbacks that needn't have happened. Bush deserves credit for a good decision, but also blame for terrible execution.
3. Invading Iraq was a bad idea, and Bush deserves blame for a bad decision as well as terrible execution.
Most Republicans believe #1 (good decision, good execution); most Democrats believe #3 (bad decision, bad execution). Most of the "liberal hawks" are just Democrats who believe #2 (good decision, bad execution). And they're screwed, because neither side trusts them.
"Liberal hawks" are doomed to seem disloyal and untrustworthy to other Democrats, because saying invading Iraq "was the right decision, just with the wrong execution" sounds much too close to most Democrats to saying "Bush was right, and the problems aren't his fault". Now, it's not true that liberal hawks don't think the problems are Bush's fault; they just think that what he's to blame for is how he handled war with Iraq, not that he went to war in the first place. But that's just too close to an excuse for most Democrats to accept.
And that's a pity, because the Bush Administration's most damaging foreign policy errors have indeed tended to be failures of execution, not failures of concept. Bush has coopted traditional Democratic idealism in his speeches. Democrats are going to have a hard time fighting Republicans on foreign policy on principle alone; they really need to learn to fight as well on the practice. "They're messing up and not delivering" is a simple enough sentence. You'd think a Democrat could campaign on it.
I'd really, really like to have two parties in the ring on foreign policy. But as long as the Democrats are fissured this way, the Republicans will be the only game in town -- and it's hard for either party to do a good job without the pressure of competition.
Posted by danielstarr at 02:40 AM | Send Email | Comments (5) | TrackBack
May 27, 2005
The Latest Scorecard in Our Twelve-Front War
Usually "grand strategy" is something that happens over decades, but America's new grand strategy of spreading democracy seems to be going at tenfold time for both good and bad news. In just the last few weeks we've seen major good and bad news for democracy in a double handful of significant countries. Which should please you whether you're a Bush booster or a Bush critic, since in a twelve-front war, you're bound to always be winning somewhere and losing somewhere else. Here's just some of the biggest events of just this last month:
- Uzbekistan had soldiers and police kill several hundred unarmed protesters along with a few armed rebels;
- Egypt had pro-government thugs beat up protesters of the planned rigging of the upcoming presidential election;
- Kuwait gave women the vote;
- Lebanon is holding its first elections in decades without Syrian occupation;
- Iran's Guardian Council, out of over 1,000 candidates who wanted to run for Iranian President, disqualified all but six, of whom the least hardline is two-term former "let's nuke Israel!" President Rafsanjani;
- The terrorist-fundamentalist-reformist Palestinian organization of Hamas is turning ever so slightly away from terrorism, as its representatives, having been elected in Gaza to municipal office, are experimenting with currying favor with Palestinians by cleaning up sewage instead of blowing up Israelis.
And I'm leaving out the parliamentary crisis in Jordan, the besieged government of Bolivia, and more.
I think at this point it's hard to argue against the reality of the "domino effect" of the Bush Administration's aggressiveness in Iraq and Afghanistan and its loudly pro-democracy stance. On the other hand, I think it's also clear that the dominoes were ready to fall as soon as a hard push came, whether that push involved Iraq or not. And it's clear that while the "soft autocracies" like Kuwait are democratizing, the "hard autocracies", the secret-police bastions like Egypt and Uzbekistan, are fighting hard to stay dictatorial. Serious tyrants tend to succeed in crushing change.
But as John Lewis Gaddis observes in this brilliant (if possibly overoptimistic) speech on the Bush Administration's grand strategy, the overall odds are pretty heavily stacked in favor of more democracies in the world ten years from now.
Or, at this pace, ten months from now.
Posted by danielstarr at 03:32 AM | Send Email | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 26, 2005
What's Wrong with Democracy and Capitalism?
Simon asks: is there any hope for the transnational progressivists and the world's remaining communists, the folk who hope that Fukuyama is wrong when he says there will never be a system better than the combination of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism? Well, there is a little hope for the revolutionaries. We know a few well-established weak points for standard capitalism and standard democracy. Identifying those weak points isn't the same as coming up with a superior system, but if you want to make an effective complaint about capitalism or democracy, here's some things you can talk about -- the hidden problems with our system that are too deep for a simple change in business regulations or ruling political party to fix.
Improving on capitalism: standard free-market capitalism, as any economist will tell you, is reliably effective only when certain conditions are met. Mostly those conditions are things like "no stealing allowed", conditions that we can mostly rely on. But a couple of the key conditions break down fairly often in the modern world -- increasingly often, as technology accelerates.
Perhaps the most important capitalism condition under siege is "diminishing returns to increasing investments." "Diminishing returns" means that companies operate near equilibrium, in an environment of what engineers would call "negative feedback," an environment where step-by-step changes are more efficient than grand leaps. Increasing returns, where they occur, represent positive feedback, change that feeds on itself, instability -- and classical capitalism breaks down in that environment.
The case of "increasing returns" we're all familiar with is monopoly. Monopolies enjoy increasing returns to market share: the closer to 100% of the market a monopooly pushes, the more profitable its entire business becomes. Unsurprisingly, monopolies are inefficient and are hard for capitalism to handle. Fortunately, antitrust regulation exists. Unfortunately, the more important source of increasing returns in the economy is harder to solve: technological change.
Any change in technology produces a temporary period of increasing returns as companies and users climb the "learning curve" of the new equipment. As technology change happens faster, more and more of our economy is operating under increasing-returns rather than diminishing-returns rules, and standard capitalism is further and further from ideal. Of course, it still works pretty well. But we know it to be far from perfect. Brad Delong had a good essay touching some of these issues recently.
The other major endangered condition of capitalism is that goods are "rivalrous and excludable," that is, that if I buy something from a merchant, like a pair of shoes or a haircut, then it takes extra effort for the merchant to give you another pair of shoes or another haircut -- and equally the merchant can prevent you from using his shoes or his haircut without paying for it. Unfortunately, while shoes and haircuts are rivalrous and excludable, information goods are nonrivalrous and often nonexcludable -- and an increasing portion of the economy is information goods. I'm not just talking about MP3's or computer software: if you look at developments in, say, computer chip manufacturing or the emerging business options in nanotechnology, it's clear that information in the form of design patterns forms one of the key production goods of the present and future economy. Standard capitalism generally underproduces goods that are nonrivalrous or nonexcludable -- so the more our economy is dominated by information goods, the more we can expect there's room for improvement under some hypothetical superior system.
So those are some places where there's a large amount of room to improve on standard capitalism.
Improving on democracy: As for standard democracy, it too requires certain assumptions to work well. (This gets treatment in a couple of chapters of Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom, a book you might find interesting anyway since it also has a level-headed discussion of the odds of democracy (or not) in places like the Middle East and China.) Despite its being the best system we have, there are two basic problems with democracy.
First, the goal of a politician is not to enact the best policy, just the policy that most reliably keeps him in office. Second, the goal of a politician is not to enact policies that are good for everyone, just policies that are satisfactory to a majority. In other words, democracy produces inferior policies either (A) when politicians can get away with presenting a mediocre plan as if it were really the best plan, or (B) when politicians can do well for the majority by totally screwing over a minority.
We see examples of "You're not in my majority, so I'll just ruin your life" in every democracy from time to time. It shows up in the less-developed countries as tolerance of anti-minority violence or expropriating legislation, as with anti-Chinese governance in some periods in Indonesia or anti-Muslim governance under the BJP in India. In a country like the United States it shows up in the way liberals and conservatives each make a show of oppressing the poster children of the other side whenever they get into power (conservatives versus gays, liberals versus big business), as well as in the way that billions of dollars are redirected to Republican/Democratic states whenever the Republicans/Democrats take power.
And we can all think of policy areas where the politicians engage in "mediocrity passed off as excellence" -- consider the tax code, or the not-so-impressive reforms of the CIA and the intelligence community, or any recent Congressional bill on health care. Most businesses face lots of competition and have to strive to continually improve their product. But most politicians have the luxury of setting their own agenda, and so don't have to endanger themselves by suggesting new policies until voters are absolutely disgusted with the old ones.
Now, just because democracies do a bad job at this doesn't mean anybody else does a good job. But let's be honest: we accept from politicians a degree of mediocrity we'd never accept from any business we dealt with. Maybe there's no superior way to do things; certainly nobody's demonstrated a superior way to do things. But we should be honest enough to admit that democracy does do a bad job at passing laws that are "the best reasonably possible" as opposed to "not quite a complete failure".
Democracy plus capitalism equals the best system we know. But in some ways that's only because, to borrow from Winston Churchill, democracy plus capitalism represents the worst possible system -- except for all the alternatives.
Posted by danielstarr at 02:47 AM | Send Email | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 24, 2005
Sustaining Democracy: It's the Institutions, Stupid!
The problem with Islamic politicians isn't that they're positioned to take power in elections in the Middle East, it's that they could take power in elections and never allow elections again. Wherever Islamic legislators have had to work in a government of laws and get themselves reelected like anyone else, they've either tamed themselves or been thrown out by disgusted voters. Belgravia Dispatch and Praktike have both flagged this NYT oped making the key point: when Islamic legislators took office in Jordan, Morocco, and Turkey, those countries didn't fall into chaos or tyranny.
Islamist tyranny and terrorism happen only when Islamist leaders take political power and then end all politics: that's what happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban and in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini. We've also learned that supporting "friendly moderate Muslim autocrats" doesn't work too well -- either the autocrat collapses when you're not looking (Iran 1979) or sends money to your worst enemies behind your back (Saudi Arabia until September 11). So we need to get democracy in the Islamic countries, even if Islamist politicians sometimes win. Our real dilemma is how to make sure the elections the Islamists win aren't the last elections those countries ever have.
We should know by now that one election doesn't lock in democracy. Palestinian dictator Yasser Arafat won a basically honest (if not snow-pure) majority in the Palestinian communities' one election under his rule, and his government wasn't "democratic" in any positive sense of that word. Venezuela's charismatic country-wrecking leader Hugo Chavez won his first election honestly too. Genocide poster-boy Milosevic was popular for a long time among the Serbs. Heck, even Adolf Hitler first came to power as part of a legitimate parliamentary coalition. So "took power after a fair election" is a test that lets through some of the world's worst thugs, up to and including Hitler. When we say "America wants democracy," we have to be pushing the world's dictatorships for more than just an occasional honest election.
The secret of working democracies is that politicians' power is limited not just by elections, but by institutions. I'm talking about the rule of law, the separation of branches of government, the limitation of powers to provide checks and balances. We take all this for granted in America. In the United States, the legislators have their own power base and the ability to frustrate the President if he loses their confidence -- as we're now seeing in the fracas over federal judges. Likewise, American judges, American soldiers, and American state and local governments all have strong identities of their own, with both laws and traditions to put sand in the gears of any attempt to turn them against the people or the Constitution. Even President Bush, a wartime President with a majority in Congress and a stated desire to rewrite a long list of American governmental policies, hasn't been able to shrink domestic spending, alter Social Security, deter California from spending money on the stem-cell research he disapproves of, or make a feeding tube be kept in the stomach of one woman in Florida. So much for the power of the Presidency!
What limits Bush on a day-to-day basis is what has made America strong for two hundred years -- we keep a government of laws and institutions. No one person, not even the President, can bribe or order or replace all the critical officers of the government. The most politically tempting government functions -- the Supreme Court, the central bank -- have extra layers of protection to make them hard to tamper with. And no one party, even in an across-the-board majority, can overturn all the government at once by command. The American government at any given moment is not a pure reflection of the current President; it's the sum of hundreds or thousands of elected officials today, plus the laws and appointments of thousands more who preceded them. In America, controversial big changes take time -- time enough for voters to change their mind. American governments add to or shift the work of their predecessors; they don't get to replace the laws of the country by snapping their fingers; the President is strong, but each major government institution, especially the Constitution, is stronger.
But out in the developing world, they have a government of men, not laws: every legislator and judge is a puppet for the leader. In Egypt, judges are paid out of "bonuses" from the central government according to whether President Mubarak's staff approves of the judges' rulings or not. In the Palestinian Authority under Arafat, all the money and real decisionmaking passed through Arafat's cronies, and the legislature could be ignored if it disagreed. In Venezuela, the Constitution gets rewritten to say whatever Chavez wants it to say. In Pakistan, the army is a world of its own, with its own schools and businesses and no need for the generals to obey or even acknowledge the existence of the voters' officials. Is it any wonder that elections in countries like these don't prevent tyranny?
So when we're pressing Egypt for elections, let's also press for more independent salaries for the judges. When we try to encourage good policies in Latin America, let's include more barriers to constitution-tampering as one of those good policies. When we go out and call for democracy, let's make it clear that to Americans, democracy means not just respect for elections, but respect for the election laws, and the government institutions, and the existing constitution of the country.
We can't give countries the kind of internal respect for democratic practices that we've got from two centuries of democracy. But we can push for laws and policies that promote government officers with limited powers, separated powers, and an obligation to follow strict procedures if politicians want to throw out long-standing rules of the country. We can't look into foreign Presidents' hearts. But we surely can track whether they're honoring their own laws.
When Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he had signs in his campaign offices saying, "It's the economy, stupid!" The economy was Clinton's one serious winning issue, and he kept his staff focused on it and they rode that issue all the way until they had trampled past President Bush Senior's uncertain campaign and gotten Clinton into the White House, in a demonstration of (among other things) the value of focus in a complex and confusing task. Today, it seems America is on a campaign to push for lasting progress in countries like Syria and Egypt and China. In that case, there's an obvious candidate for the campaign slogan:
It's the institutions, stupid!
[E1] Mudville OPL.
Posted by danielstarr at 04:07 AM | Send Email | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2005
Outsourcing War: the United Nations Troops Get Some Muscle
Today, United Nations "peacekeepers" in the Congo are rolling through the bush in armored vehicles, hunting down renegade militias who want to carry on that country's murderous civil war. And when the new breed of peacekeepers finds those renegades, they shoot them. If you think of United Nations peacekeepers as useless twerps who meekly stand aside to let genocidal thugs kill civilians, you're out of date. A recent RAND study calls UN peacekeepers more successful than American troops at nationbuilding. Sooner or later, the Pentagon may try to call UN troops a good alternative to Americans for occupation duty somewhere. In the Congo today, UN peacekeepers are simply called heroes.
Today's United Nations troops look a lot less like ceremonial Boy Scouts with guns, and a lot more like the developed world's new Foreign Legion. UN troops are being sent against bad guys in the low-intensity wars that are too dull, too dangerous or just too prolonged for America and Europe to commit their own troops. They're not up to American or German standards, but the UN contingents are skilled and equipped enough to overwhelm thugs with guns, and "thugs with guns" is exactly who fights a lot of these nasty drawn-out wars. UN troops are shaping up to be a useful part of the "arsenal of peace" we'd like to have to keep another terrorist-haven Afghanistan from taking shape. They're getting better. And yes, we may even see UN troops in certain roles in Iraq.
Two big changes have transformed the United Nations "blue helmets" from wimps into fighters. First and foremost, the peacekeepers know they'll be shot at, and are ready to shoot back. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies always tried to at least pretend to respect the United Nations forces -- after all, the USA and the USSR each wanted to protect their reputation. But the Serbian thugs in Yugoslavia's civil war had no reputation to protect when they pushed past United Nations troops to kill Bosnian Muslim men and rape Bosnian Muslim women. Ten years' experience of thugs' wars has retrained the peacekeepers. Today the UN commanders and their sponsors know better: they know the thugs will sometmes shoot, and they have their troops ready to show the thugs the difference between a gang that kills the unarmed and an army that trains to kill gunmen.
But there's also been an important shift in which countries lend their soldiers for the more dangerous "robust peacekeeping" missions. The key contingents no longer come from the developed countries, who aren't comfortable sending their soldiers to actually shoot and possibly die under UN command in some country most of their citizens couldn't find on a map. The troops also don't come as much from nearby ultra-poor countries, who always loved the pay their soldiers got on UN missions, but didn't always have the training to fight. These days, the heart of UN peacekeeping in Congo and elsewhere comes from semi-developed countries like Pakistan and India, where the armies are solidly trained and the governments figure the prestige of helping save the world outweighs the public distaste for sending soldiers into distant lands of dirt and danger. So the UN peacekeepers of today, unlike those of the 90s, have the training and the will to fight and win against the the thugs and near-thugs of the world's "brushfire wars."
The United Nations peacekeeping contingents are still hobbled by one key limit: they're only as committed as the consensus in the United Nations Security Council. That rules them out for anything as big and controversial as Iraq is today. And the UN troops can't do much against a serious national military without backing from American or other high-end forces, which rules out sending a UN force to stop the slaughter of non-Arabs in western Sudan -- the killers there are getting occasional help from government helicopters. Even in the Congo, the UN force has stood aside from stopping Rwandan government interventions -- and let's not even talk about the sex abuse cases. So the United Nations peacekeepers are not an instant answer for all our low-level wars today.
But if what limits United Nations troops today is the absence of consensus among the leading nations, it's equally true that UN troops may become very useful to the United States in future years. It's not impossible to rebuild the sense of common mission among the world leaders. Even Iraq is not as controversial as it looks: no major government wants Iraq to remain an unlimited powder keg. So we may well see more cooperation again between America and Europe and Russia and China. If we do, that will also mean more ability to send UN troops to do the dull and dirty work that so often comes after America's wars. (Or the dull and dirty work of peacekeeping to prevent wars from becoming a problem for us in the first place.) We'll always have to remember that multinational missions mean more room for problems (as in Somalia). But if we do a good job at diplomacy and coordination, America's future tasks of repairing liberated countries could be done by someone else's soldiers, wearing blue United Nations helmets.
[E1] More on this at Belgravia Dispatch and Democracy Arsenal.
[E2] Mudville OPL.
Posted by danielstarr at 03:27 AM | Send Email | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 18, 2005
America, Where Financial Class is Real But Social Class Isn't
Today, rags-to-riches stories are actually more comon in Germany, and far more common in Norway, than in America. Financial social mobility -- the odds that kids born to poor parents will wind up rich themselves -- is higher today in Europe than in America. Of all the leading democracies, America is not only the country where the rich are farthest removed from ordinary citizens in income, but also the country where inherited wealth matters most in determining whether you will become rich.
Yet for all that, America is still far less class-conscious than, say, Britain. In America, a millionaire from a family of millionaires, like our current President, can sincerely think of himself as an ordinary guy, and millions of American voters can accept him as ordinary too. In America, there are rich people who drive beat-up pickup trucks and wear blue jeans, and middle-class people with a sports car or a custom-tailored outfit. I've had British people explain to me how they can tell someone's family status background by the way they speak; here in America, I couldn't even tell my neighbors' current income by the clothes they wear. I suspect Britain and the rest of Europe are becoming a lot less class-conscious (and those Scandanavians, again, seem really egalitarian), but even if American money is increasingly inherited money, we all seem to do an awfully good job of ignoring money when it comes to how we treat each other.
Or do we? That's the trick about social class: how the heck do you measure it? The psychologist Cialdini once did a study where college students were observed in traffic as the car in front of them failed to move when the light changed. Students took much longer to honk at an expensive Cadillac than at a cheap Ford -- despite the fact that these same students, when polled, had declared that, if anything, it would be the cheap car's driver that they'd be more patient with. Consciously, we all hate the idea of treating people better because of their money -- especially because of their inherited money. But unconsciously, are we programmed to respect wealth? If America is becoming a society of more inherited wealth, is that going to make us a society of class-bound idiocies of the kind we've always mocked Old Europe for?
We cherish the image of America as the rags-to-riches country, where a man's father makes no difference to where he himself ends up. Up till about 1900 that was almost the literal truth: America spent its first century as the most opportunity-rich country that history had ever seen. Before industrialization, wealth meant land, and in America land was cheap. Anyone willing to move to the frontier and work themselves ragged could build up enough assets to make their family solidly middle-class by the time they died. While Europe was a land where a poor parent was cursed to pass on his poverty to his kids, America was a country where the poor were always moving up to become the average or the rich.
After 1900, industrialization made America less socially mobile than it had been, and Europe more so. But it's only in the last generation that Europeans have become impressively class-mobile, while America has started to get a little class-stratified.
A big part of the answer seems to be education. No matter how hard you work today, if you're a high school dropout you have to be awfully smart or lucky to make a good living. All the European countries seem to have much more commitment to their public school systems than we do. And those nearly class-free Scandanavian countries have made huge investments in guaranteed childcare and preschool for all their children. I don't necessarily buy Thomas Friedman's ranting of "The Chinese are coming! Quick, teach our kids math!" But it's probably not coincidence that our two most recent big ethnic success stories, Jewish Americans and Asian Americans, both come from cultures that put a fanatical emphasis on the value of education. If Americans today aren't moving up from poverty as much as Europeans are, maybe it reflects that today's wealth is not land, but education -- and while quality farmland in America is easily affordable, good education often isn't.
Of course, you could argue that it doesn't matter, because today being rich or poor means less than it ever has before. Poverty isn't what it used to be, in a world of cheap food, free emergency rooms, synthetic clothing and color television. For that matter, wealth isn't what it used to be. The very rich still have live-in cooks, but lots of people eat at restaurants; the very rich still have live-in maids, but most families have washing machines and dishwashers, not to mention microwave ovens. The number of hours of the day that a middle-class family has to spend on tasks that a rich family gets done for them is smaller than it's ever been in history. Your day-to-day life is just not as affected by your relative income as it was a hundred or even fifty years ago.
In fact, almost the only part of life where relative income is still hugely important is in government. For almost all the big domestic policy debates we have in this country right now -- education reform, tax cuts, Medicare, Social Security -- it makes a huge difference whether you're poor or rich. While the rest of our economy makes us all seem close to equal, our government still runs on the principle that the rich pay more and the middle class gets more.
So perhaps the class effect we should most worry about isn't a breakdown of our society, but a breakdown of our government. If no one from the middle class is going to get rich, sooner or later the middle class will vote for huge taxes. Or perhaps we should worry about the rich grabbing all the government offices, and working to sabotage all the expensive government programs that they and their friends pay for without getting any benefit from them.
Every society runs on a "social contract" of some kind; America's has been that it's okay to be rich because it's not too hard to become rich. If that stops being true, things are going to get very uncomfortable over the next few decades. Maybe Tom Friedman is right, and we need to throw massive amounts of money into public education after all -- not just for protection from the Chinese, but for protection from ourselves.
Posted by danielstarr at 02:55 AM | Send Email | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 17, 2005
China is Not a Generic Great Power
"Rising powers always make trouble, so war with China is unavoidable" -- that's the atmosphere of half of all op-eds on China these days, as in this Washington Post column by Robert Kagan and this essay from the American naval hub at Honolulu by Robert Kaplan. The other half of the time you're told, "War among successful nations is stupid and archaic, so war with China is inconceivable," as in this scathing reply by Barnett skewering Kaplan and Kagan. What gets left out of both of these arguments is any discussion of China itself. Different countries behave differently, even when handed the same menu of opportunities to use their power. Some great powers show a taste for confrontation, while others are always the last to pick a fight. China as a leading power won't be a generic cookie-cutter replica of some kind of "average historical great power" or "average 21st-century great power"; it'll have its own distinctive pattern.
Nine nations acted as "Great Powers" for a substantial amount of time in Western history from 1500 to 2000: the Ottoman Empire, Hapsburg Spain, Hapsburg Austria, France, Great Britain, Russia, Prussia/Germany, and (in the later global years) America and Japan.1 Germany and Hapsburg Spain were far more eager than the other seven to get into great-power wars. Each spent nearly all of its history as a leading power as the most belligerent country in Europe; both sought war with great powers even sometimes when there were weaker countries to fight; both ruined themselves more than once with foolishly chosen wars. Less consistently violent were the Ottoman Empire, Japan and Russia: those three were quick to swallow weaker countries as protectorates or conquests, but were much slower than Germany or Spain to wage total war with other great powers. Then come France and Imperial Austria, which went through both aggressive and conservative phases. And the most retiring of the nine were Britain and twentieth-century America, who both tended to "underuse" their potential military power and shy off even moderately challenging fights; they both threw out too-aggressive governments, and were usually among the last powers to get involved in a great-power war.
Now, you can come up with lots of reasons for why each of these countries was comparatively aggressive or peaceful as a great power, but it's impossible to argue they were all somehow the same. Some of them overused their military potential, even by the standards of their time; some of them underused it, even by the standards of our time. Some of them had a habit of making war even when it was obviously stupid, and some of them had a habit of declining war even when it would have been obviously profitable. Their internal histories, their geography, and their forms of government all made a difference. No iron law exists for "what great powers do". Each of modern history's great powers has had its own fairly consistent pattern of behavior. We should think twice before making predictions about China as a great power that ignore all details about China as a nation.
What do we know about China's "national preferences" in foreign policy? We've touched on the influence of China's domestic political factors in this earlier article. I'll talk about China's past and present tendencies in foreign policy later on. But if you want to know what to think about the odds of war with China, study war -- but also study China.
[E1] Yes, I'm leaving out the Italians, the Dutch, and the Swedes.
Posted by danielstarr at 02:24 AM | Send Email | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 12, 2005
Our Last Months In Iraq Begin Now
Three important shifts are taking place in Iraq, only one of which is getting much newspaper attention. That's too bad, since it's the other two changes that will soon fix the shape of future Iraq. The news articles to watch for in Iraq are those tracking the big shifts in (1) Iraqi security forces' progress and (2) Sunni-Shiite ethnic tensions.
The other and much better reported shift (because it involves large explosions) is the increasing role of foreign fighters in insurgent attacks. That's both good and bad news, since the foreigners are more determined and skilled (often from Syrian or Al-Qaeda training), but in the long term can't be as good at recruiting ordinary Iraqis. Grisly proof of the new lack of trust within the insurgency is the number of recent "unintended-suicide" car bombings. That is, the new style of Iraqi car bomb is triggered not by the driver but by remote control, suggesting the ringleaders don't trust the drivers they recruit -- and probably don't tell them what they're really carrying.
But the other two shifts, less reported but more important, are the increasing reliability of Iraqi security forces and the increasing ethnic polarization between Iraq's Sunni Arabs and Shiites. And it's these two phenomena that are probably going to seal the outcome of our efforts in Iraq by the end of the year.
Simply put, if the Iraqi security forces can extend themselves successfully over a critical mass of Iraq's insurgent zones, and if they don't trigger or allow a spiral of ethnic violence, then Iraq will turn decisively better. Americans will stop needing to risk their lives to hold Iraq together once Iraqis can do it themselves. There's at least an even-money chance that by the end of this year American monthly combat casualties in Iraq will be down to a fifth or less of what they are today. Since Iraqi police and paramilitaries can be deployed in much larger numbers than either American occupation troops or Iraqi insurgents, successful Iraqi constabulary forces should spell an end to daily violence in most cities by the end of 2006, and the discrediting of the insurgency long before that. Police success and no ethnic feuding would allow Iraq to become like Afghanistan -- ugly to us, but tolerable and on a path of progress as far as the citizens are concerned.
But if instead ordinary Sunni and Shiite Arabs start getting killed by thugs from the other side, and it happens often enough to start a self-sustaining vicious cycle of ethnic retaliation, then Iraq will quickly turn into a modern version of the 1970s' Northern Ireland or Lebanon -- with the United States cast in the role of Britain or Syria. Iraq's big cities would spend the next ten years in a siege mentality. The actual death toll might not be very high, but half of Iraq's population would be afraid to go out at night, and no other country would look on Iraq as a positive example. And the worst thing about this scenario is that if a spiral of ethnic violence takes hold, the Iraqi security forces that are now suppressing the insurgency would likely become part of the new violence. The forces we're relying on to keep the peace are already provoking ethnic tension. If that gets out of hand, Americans in Iraq, like the British in Northern Ireland, could be faced with occupation duty to sit on would-be killers for years to come.
So if you're watching Iraq these days, take your eyes off the body count. Watch for two things. Number one, are Iraqi forces continuing to take over more of the urban patrol work from Americans? Number two, are tensions between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs (or possibly Kurds) holding at the same uneasy but safe level, or are they getting worse?
Then you'll know whether Americans will be done risking death in Iraq next year, or ten years from now.
[E1] Mudville OPL.
Posted by danielstarr at 03:10 AM | Send Email | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 11, 2005
The Policeman and the Flood Dike: the Conservative-Liberal Difference
Sometimes I think that eighty percent of the difference between conservatism and liberalism comes down to what you want government to worry about.
Should your government worry about the villains who'd deliberately trample on your family and community? Or should it worry about the risks that come without villains, but that would ruin your life all the same?
Conservatism is often about the government as policeman: there are bad people out there who want to interfere with your family, your business and your community. The government should stop those bad actors from trampling on you. Maybe the bad guys are terrorists who want to kill your loved ones. Maybe they're just activists who want to control what you teach your kids. Obviously terrorists are much scarier than activists, but the basic conservative approach is the same. Sometimes there are wrongdoers, interlopers, and if you can't stop them personally the government ought to stop them for you.
When there are no specific villains to stop, then conservatives feel a little uneasy trusting the task to the government. Government is untrustworthy, and should ideally only be trusted as a means to stop those who are even more untrustworthy. In conservatism, government's first job is to stand with your family, business and community against intruders.
Liberalism is about the government building flood dikes. When the river's going to flood, no one's to blame, and there are no bad guys to stop, but all the same someone's got to take responsibility for seeing that the dikes are built up and the towns along the river won't be flooded. Liberals think the role of government is to make sure those dikes get built.
Liberals look at the world and see lots of risks that are too big for one person to protect their family against. Some risks can be too big even for a whole city to protect itself against. And plenty of those risks don't come with villains. Mass layoffs, earthquakes, bank defaults, new diseases -- a liberal doesn't see why people should live in fear of those things just because they can't go to the store and buy layoff repellent or disease immunity the way they can buy a new car. Liberals see government's first job as protecting people from the injuries of unearned or excessive risk.
Republicans get the most liberal support when they're relieving people from their immediate fears. Democrats get the most conservative support when they're supporting citizens or communities against obvious villains. Issues that provoke outrage but not fear tend to be supported more on the right. Issues that provoke fear but not outrage tend to be supported more on the left. If a villain has appeared but isn't immediately doing visible harm, the Republicans will move first; if bad things are happening but it's not clear whose fault it is, the Democrats will move first. Conservatives see equality of opportunity as something that will continue naturally if government just defends it from deliberate attack. Liberals see equality of opportunity as something that will break down unless government invests to secure people from outside risks that undermine their fair chance.
Of course these are oversimplifications. Lots of conservatives want government to support various traditions that have nothing to do with stopping bad guys. Sometimes liberals want government to act generously even to people whose problems don't come from outside risks. And lots of politicians do things just to look good or protect themselves. But a lot of the how-can-they-think-that-way comes down to those two images, the policeman and the flood dike.
Posted by danielstarr at 03:05 AM | Send Email | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 08, 2005
North Korea Disarmament In Four Cold-Blooded Steps
There are things we can do about North Korea. And if North Korea is on the verge of testing a nuclear weapon, we'd better start doing them. When the history books talk about Afghanistan, they'll make Clinton sound like a total failure and Bush like a successful leader. But when the subject is North Korea it looks like it'll be the other way around, unless Bush changes his policy fast.
Under Clinton, North Korea had its reactors frozen, its missile tests on hold, and its plutonium locked up under the eyes of inspectors. Under Bush, North Korea is firing off missiles again, it's harvested six warheads' worth of plutonium now, and it's set to grab another five warheads' worth out of their reactors soon. It's true that Clinton's policy was powered by annual bribes to North Korea, and it's true that North Korea was still trying to secretly enrich uranium. (See this Naval War College Review piece and this Foreign Affairs piece for a fair look at the successes and failures of the Clinton-era deal.) But the fact remains that our current "yell loudly, but do nothing" policy toward North Korea is a miserable failure.
So how do we tame North Korea?
1. Focus at first on Iran.
2. Make America's demands firm but limited.
3. Put a long series of small carrots on the table.
4. When it's time for force, boil the frog slowly.
1. Focus at first on Iran.
North Korea already has nuclear weapons capability. Iran doesn't. Getting a country to freeze a weapons research program is easier than getting it to give up actual weapons. And Iranian leaders are much more likely than the North Koreans to be tempted into using nuclear weapons, if they do get them, to shield war or terrorism. We shouldn't trust Kim Jong-Il with nukes, but we can deal with North Korea more slowly than Iran.
Just as importantly, once we've succeeded with Iran we'll have more leverage for North Korea. If we pull off a peaceful deal with Iran, that gives us credibility and experience for making a deal with North Korea. If we use some level of force on Iran, that gives us credibility and experience for using force on North Korea. We've never had problems quite like Iran and North Korea before, and it'd be nice to learn from the easy case before we go into the home stretch on the hard one. And while our ordinary diplomats can work both countries at once, realistically the President is only going to focus serious American power on one at a time. If we get Iran right, North Korea will become much easier.
2. Make America's demands firm but limited.
Bush's biggest mistake was not that he scrapped the Clinton deal, but that he made it look like he wasn't going to accept any deal at all that left North Korea's dictator in power. That's fine if you want to keep America's hands pure, but not so fine if you want to tame North Korea without open war. If we can make deals with Egypt and Uzbekistan, and justify them on the grounds that eventually our influence in those countries is going to improve their behavior, we can do the same in North Korea.
We weren't responsible for Kim Jong-Il's mass-murdering mass-enslaving regime. Making a deal that leaves him in power doesn't suddenly make us responsible, unless we had a cheap way to remove him, which we don't. Our responsibility is just to make sure that making a deal with him leads to better things than standing back and yelling at him. And standing back and yelling at him hasn't worked at all.
If leaving Kim in power can be consistent with improving human rights there and ending the nuclear weapons program, then that's just fine. America's goal is not to feel good about having scolded a dictator; it's to feel good about how we've changed North Korea. If we can work with Musharraf in Pakistan and Hu Jintao in China -- if we can improve human rights over time even in countries that do have nuclear weapons, using the leverage of economic ties -- why can't we do that in North Korea?
So while we shouldn't settle for a fake agreement, we need to make North Korea believe that we're serious about letting Kim stay in power -- as long as he's willing to trade nukes and prison camps for other means of having money and safety.
3. Put a long series of small carrots on the table.
America and North Korea don't trust each other, and peoples that don't trust each other don't voluntarily keep the terms of "grand bargains." (Just ask the Israelis and Palestinians how well their 1993 and 1995 Oslo agreements were carried out.) But even during the height of the Cold War, America and the Soviet Union built up successful informal and formal agreements that made both countries breathe easier. America and North Korea can build up bargains the same stepwise way. If America keeps its eyes on its ultimate goals, those agreements can step up all the way to the disarmament, and maybe even the human rights reform, that we want to see.
North Korea's government wants two things: money and safety. The United States has the power to provide or destroy both. From North Korea the United States wants two things: nuclear disarmament, and the right of emigration for the masses of pseudo-political prisoners. Both of those are in North Korea's power, and even in its interest -- if only it really believes it can give those up yet keep or improve its money and safety.
In other words, there's room for a deal. North Korea does the things we hate for the pragmatic reasons of money and safety; we can give it better ways to get the money and safety the government wants. The reason there is no overall agreement is because neither side trusts each other. The reason there is no progress toward an overall agreement because neither side is offering a sweetener or a punishment to motivate the other side to test whether it can be trusted.
Right now, the United States' policy toward North Korea isn't "Big Carrot" like the Europeans' policy has been toward Serbia or Turkey; it isn't "Big Stick" like the United States' current policy toward Syria. Our current North Korea policy is "No Carrot, No Stick, Lots of Whining." North Korea's never responded to whining. But it's listened just fine to carrots. We may need the stick, too -- we'll talk about that in a moment. But let's begin with a small carrot.
The United States can ask for something small, verifiable, and symbolic, like the return of inspectors to Yongbyon or another previously inspected nuclear site. We can offer a bribe that's meaningful but reversible, like a three-month resumption of the fuel oil shipments made under the Clinton deal. And we can quietly let North Korea know that if it doesn't comply, we'll do something limited but nasty, like mining one North Korean harbor.
Then one of two things will happen: North Korea takes the small deal, or it doesn't. Suppose they do take the small deal. Then we ask for the next step, and offer to continue or mildly increase the bribe. And we keep adding on little sweeteners in trade for little requests, step by step, until we've bought what we want.
Take a moment and look towards our ultimate goal: how much would it cost to buy North Korean nuclear disarmament? A lot less than we've spent on the war in Iraq, or even on the war in Afghanistan. The ultimate outcome is if the United States makes North Korea another Egypt, a dictatorship we permanently subsidize in return for them being a good neighbor and slowly improving their human rights records. If we remember to be serious this time about insisting on the steady human rights improvement, I think spending $2 billion a year to bribe North Korea is at least as worthwhile as spending $2 billion a year to bribe Egypt. In fact, it doesn't even have to cost that much, since we can probably hold up South Korea and Japan for most of the bribes.
Now suppose North Korea doesn't take the deal -- the first deal, or the tenth, or the twentieth. Then what? We don't panic. We don't go to all-out war either. We just do one definite, reversible, escalatable thing to them.
Maybe we mine one harbor for a month.
And if that doesn't work? Then we escalate -- slowly.
4. When it's time for force, boil the frog slowly.
Saying "there are no good military options for North Korea" is as misleading as saying "there were no good military options in the Cuban missile crisis." In 1962, there was indeed no good outcome to opening the gates to war in Cuba or elsewhere. But there were ways, like the blockade that Kennedy ordered, to use military power effectively to force Russia to change its ways without making a war look like Russia's best option. There was a good way to use force against Cuba. And there are good ways to use force against North Korea.
Just as any serious war with the Soviet Union would have meant the destruction of Europe, any serious war against North Korea would mean the deaths of hundreds of thousands of South Koreans.