Grand Strategy for a Divided America

[cupper]

New WSJ / NBC Polls have an interesting picture of why the senate races in key states are so close.

http://player.theplatform.com/p/2E2eJC/nbcNewsOffsite?guid=mtp_chuck_screen_141026

 

[a_majoor]

This piece by WRM tracks with the idea I have that current institutions and policies simply do not reflect the changing economic, technologic and demographic changes at work in the United States and the World. The American electorate is seeking a new equilibrium, but their political class is lacking the ideas and desire for change (the incentives for the political and bureaucratic classes are biased towards the status quo, and they will fight to the last taxpayer to retain their power and privilage, even if they are resorting to more and more unattractive means to do so. See the unearthed videos of Obamacare's architect openly boasting about how the law was written to confuse and obfusticate what was really happening, or the "John Doe" investigations and Lawfare unleashed against Governor Scott Walker).

As WRM points out as well, many of the ideas that *could* lead us to the future are in their infancy, and require a lot of evolution and tweaking before they are fully effective and understood:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/11/08/blue-twilight-and-red-dawn/

Blue Twilight and Red Dawn?Walter Russell Mead

Elections can’t and don’t tell us who will win the next one, no matter how much pundits like to claim otherwise. But elections can be very informative about the state of the nation, and about where the country wants to go.

Elections tell us less both less and more about the future than we think. Nothing, for examine, is more common in punditry than to overestimate the effect of a bad midterm on a president’s political relevance. In 1946 pundits wrote off Harry Truman after the record setting Republican wave of that year, but almost all of Truman’s historic foreign policy accomplishments came after that shellacking. Dwight Eisenhower didn’t fade away after his midterm losses in 1954 and 1958; Bill Clinton came back from 1994 and so it goes. President Obama may or may not fade into premature lame duckhood, but history strongly suggests that the political obituaries we have been reading lately are at best premature.

Presidents have constitutional powers; midterm elections don’t take those away. Pundits keep forgetting this; they shouldn’t. President Obama’s political relevance will be shaped less by this (crushing) midterm defeat than by the interplay of uncontrollable outside factors, his political skills, the political skills and ambitions of his legislative opponents and the blind luck or fate that often plays a controlling role in human events. It is all very much in play, and at this point it remains the case that only Obama can make Obama irrelevant.

Elections don’t even tell us all that much about the future of elections. Pundits and political analysts, who play a similar role in American culture to that of the Roman priests who checked the behavior of sacred chickens and the entrails of sacrificed animals to predict future events, are busy inspecting the entrails of the 2014 election results to predict 2016. It is a harmless pastime but when it comes to party politics, even blowouts don’t tell us much about the future. The Democrats got a thumpin’ in the 2014 midterms, but they got another one in 2010, and President Obama sailed to re-election. 2016 won’t depend much on the midterm just past; it will depend on the skills of the two parties, the attractiveness of the candidates they select, and the hand of God as revealed in the unpredictable events that will shape public perceptions two years from now.

Misreading election returns is as American as apple pie. In 1964, pundits proclaimed the permanent collapse of the Republican Party as Barry Goldwater went down to a landslide defeat. Four years later Richard Nixon (an irrelevant has-been in 1964) was elected and inaugurated a period from 1968 until 1988 when Republicans won five out of six presidential contests. People used to talk about the permanent GOP presidential majority, featuring a Republican lock on the arch-red state of California.  Then came 2008 and the pundits quickly hailed the inexorable rise of a permanent new Democratic coalition. We shall see.

Election results are so often misleading in part because many young and emerging American political writers are brash, ambitious and over excitable people with short historical memories (I was one once, and know whereof I speak); more importantly, they are misleading because American politics is a dynamic and competitive arena. Things change in American life, and the two parties hustle to change with them. The GOP got killed among Hispanic and Asian voters in 2012; this time, GOP candidates and campaigners made significant gains. Expect those efforts to continue as these two groups grow in importance.

But if one election won’t tell us who will win the next one, elections can be very informative about the state of the nation, and about where the country wants to go.  This election in particular, in which Republicans did exceptionally well at the state level suggests that while the Democratic Party may well innovate and adjust, the core tenets of the blue model as a basic governing philosophy are in much deeper trouble than many of the operatives and thinkers of the Democratic Party are prepared to admit.

The survival of Sam Brownback in Kansas and Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and the equally striking election of Tom Tiflis in North Carolina tell us that in some states at least relatively radical “Red Dawn” governance, even when it runs into serious policy and political trouble, doesn’t necessarily translate into political defeat. At the same time, the stunning losses of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in states like Massachusetts, Illinois and Maryland tells us that blue model governance as usual is no longer good enough to keep voters loyal.

Election results in New York underline this point. In one of the bluest states in the country, Republicans gained control of the state Senate, a clear message that even New Yorkers don’t want to give leftie Democrats the keys to the car. New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio, a self-avowed ‘progressive’ who rejects what he considers the soulless centrism of Democrats like (re-elected) Andrew Cuomo is not the wave of the future in New York State politics.

The United States overall remains in its unhappy equilibrium. Voters like and even pine for the stability and general prosperity of the far away times when the blue model worked. But they are increasingly losing confidence that it still works, and the economic decline of states like Illinois, the decline of the middle class in states like New York and California, and the inability of blue model economies to generate the revenue that blue model government requires continue to erode voter faith.

Yet, as the mixed results of GOP governance experiments in “Red Dawn” states like Kansas and North Carolina illustrates, we still don’t know what “new model” governance and economics will look like. Tax cuts alone aren’t the answer, and while initiatives like school choice offer promise, Republicans aren’t yet in the business of selling a social model that obviously works and that people like.

What people want is isn’t the blue model in its current decadent state or the inchoate mix of policies that “red dawn” states like Kansas and North Carolina have unevenly introduced. What they—we—want is a set of policies and ideas that harness the wealth creating productivity enhancements of the information revolution in ways that reduce the cost and enhance the quality of essential services (health, education, governance) while providing economic opportunity, middle class living standards and rising living standards to the American middle class. This ought to be possible and one day it will be, but at the moment we are still stumbling around in the early stages of one of the most disruptive changes the human race has ever known.

In the meantime, American politics feels stuck. We try the right for a while, and turn to the left in disgust—until the left fails as well and we turn wearily back toward the right. There’s a tendency to blame this on the caliber of our politicians, the influence of money in politics or on a whole host of other scapegoats. There are certainly issues there, and in particular nobody is going to remember the present era as a time of towering intellects and stunning probity in American politics, but the real causes of our problems are outside politics. We instinctively understand that the higher productivity of the information revolution ought to transform the daily lives of ordinary people in a host of beneficial ways, and that a richer and more productive society ought to mean wealthier and more secure middle class families, but we don’t yet understand the mix of political policies, economic techniques, social values and individual habits and choices that can make the revolution pay off. We see an explosive rise in great fortunes, and we see glittering towers of corporate and individual success, but we don’t see that prosperity spreading out the way we’d like it to. In the meantime, the insidious consequences of the rise of super-empowered fortunes and individuals with hundreds of millions to throw into political and social campaigns make us uneasy, and rightly so.

The Obamacare debate is an example of the way that our inability to master the new potential of the tech revolution leads to frustration and a dysfunctional political debate. Obamacare proponents were and are right to say that the old system was increasingly dysfunctional. Premiums were rising for the insured at a rate that ate up the country’s wage gains. The uninsured faced increasingly ruinous bills for the simplest medical procedures. The system was out of control, and skyrocketing costs made its problems more serious every year. In all this, the Democratic supporters of Obamacare were absolutely correct; something had to be done.

Yet the something that they did was well short of the kind of successful reform that we need. America’s health care system is too big and too complicated for anybody expect perhaps a small handful of super dedicated wonks to fully understand; the interest groups who have entrenched themselves in it are too powerful for a sweeping congressional reform effort to address many of the system’s most serious problems.

We need health care reform but we don’t seem able to do it very well: this is the kind of governance problem that helps turn our politics so sour. Republicans have some good ideas on health care, but they are well short of a serious approach that, in a reasonable timeframe, could make healthcare cheaper, better and more accessible.

This won’t always be true. 50 years from now the country’s health care system won’t look very much like Obamacare, and it won’t look very much like the system we had pre-Obamacare. It will be significantly cheaper as a percentage of GDP and the outcomes will be measurably better than the ones we know get. Not only will there be new treatments and new drugs; there will be new ways of delivering health care services that will be radical improvements over the systems we know today. Our need for this kind of system gets more urgent every year, but we are groping our way towards it. For what it’s worth, I think that some of the market based and experimental approaches suggested among ‘reform conservatives’ are the most useful suggestions around today, but it’s going to take a lot of trial and error to get this right.

In the meantime, we are stuck with frustrated voters choosing between unsatisfactory political alternatives: Democrats too wedded to preserving an old and increasingly broken system, and Republicans more confident that they don’t like the status quo than knowledgeable about what to do next. Under the circumstances, the public preference for divided government, and the frequent switches we see between left leaning and right leaning election outcomes seems rational rather than dysfunctional. The American people by and large understand where things stand and while they will invest some hope in a charismatic, friendly politician who talks about hope and change, they will see through the hype soon enough.

Over time, we are going to make our way through this. American society’s supreme competitive edge is its ability to innovate and adjust. We figured out the industrial revolution and we will get the information revolution right as well. The “new model” when it comes won’t be blue–but it won’t be totally red either. Many of the values that blue model partisans are trying to defend, including the economic dignity and well being of those at the low end of the labor market, will ultimately be better secured in the new model than they are now. That is what progress is all about; as society reaches higher levels of economic and social development, we are able to do more for the needy at a diminishing burden to the rest of the country. When health care is both better and cheaper than it is today, providing some form of universal health care will be cheaper, easier and less bureaucratic than taking on such a task is today.

We are not there today, but the race for answers is on. Democrats and Republicans are in a competition to come up with the ideas and the policies that can make the information revolution work better for more people. Over the long run, success in policy innovation is going to drive politics more than demographic trends and opinion polls. If the latest midterm tells us anything at all, it is that the American future is still up for grabs. Neither party has a lock on the ideas that will shape the next generation, and an increasingly impatient public is looking for answers.

 

[cupper]

I think the problem is that the lawmakers have lost perspective and focus. You have a system which requires members of congress to be constantly campaigning for reelection. So you become risk adverse. You play it safe by not supporting anything that would cause you to not be reelected. It was a huge driving factor for the GOP in the spring, with threats of being primaried. The Dems refused to bring legislation forward in the senate for fear of Dems in Red States having to explain controversial votes.

Add to that the need to be constantly raising money for the next campaign. The majority of their time seems to be spent on the phones looking to meet quotas for campaign fundraising. And with the somewhat misguided Supreme Court decision that deemed campaign donations are equivalent to free speech, and that corporations are considered people and have the right of free speech, which cannot be limited, and thus corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money to further a political cause.

So as a result of the risk adverse nature of politicians not wanting to lose constituent support, and big money donations, become locked into the status quo. No one is willing to make the bold moves and initiatives that are hard to swallow, but are necessary to put the country back onto a positive track and bring to reality the concept of "American Exceptionalism".

I think the first step for a grand strategy is to get money out of the political system. Record sums of money were spent in each of the past two national races that have taken place since the Supreme Court decision. And what did the electorate get for that. More of the same. Partisan gridlock, ineffectual legislative and executive branches, and nothing done to haul the country out of a hole that had been dug so deep that it was difficult to see a way out.

Amend the election laws to eliminate non federal funding for election campaigns. Amend the election laws at all levels to make the election commissions independent of the political parties. Create more evenly distributed districts, so that the politicians actually have to work for votes, rather than the gerrymandered traveshamockery that now exists to ensure every district is now safe for the incumbent and the favoring the party in power. Require networks to provide commercial air time free or at minimal cost, during certain hours of the day, ensuring that people other than monied individuals can afford to get involved in the political process. Install term limits for all elected legislative positions, that allow new blood to come in, yet still allow for some institutional memory to continue.

Maybe if the elected spent more time governing rather than raising money and tying to get reelected, things would get done, and America would be exceptional (in a good way).

 

[Brad Sallows]

Incumbency advantage is a significant problem in the US.

How is government campaign funding to be distributed fairly - meaning to not give advantage to any candidate?

How are "independent" election commissions to become any more free of partisan meddling than, say, the IRS or the JD?

What happens when rigorous counter-gerrymandering has adverse "disparate impact" on certain racial/cultural sub-groups?

How are term limits which result in lame ducks who are either neutered placeholders or people with nothing to lose an improvement?

The problem - the vital ground - is that there is too much political power at stake.  Diminish the value of controlling the offices, and much of the partisanship and brinksmanship goes away.

 

[cupper]

Incumbency advantage is a significant problem in the US.

This is always the case and really cannot be corrected, or should it. Incumbents always have an advantage over challengers, unless they have pissed off the voters enough to get themselves turfed out. To quote Edwin Edwards, former Democratic Governor of Louisiana "There only way I can lose this election, is if they find me in bed with a dead girl, or a live boy."

How is government campaign funding to be distributed fairly - meaning to not give advantage to any candidate?

Institute limits on total spending by individual campaigns. And close the loopholes that have been exploited under the tax laws that allow political action committees to call themselves social welfare organizations and fall outside the regulations. 

How are "independent" election commissions to become any more free of partisan meddling than, say, the IRS or the JD?

First off, they need to be truly independent, and outside the influence of the political system, like the model of Elections Canada. But almost anything would be better than the current systems that are used in the states to direct how elections are run. Namely, the party in power usually controls the oversight bodies. When a member of the party in power has final authority in how laws are applied, adjudicates disputes, and determines electoral boundaries, you have a system that rivals third world dictatorships for the ability to be corrupted.

What happens when rigorous counter-gerrymandering has adverse "disparate impact" on certain racial/cultural sub-groups?

By having an independent commission drawing the lines, no side will be intentionally favored or advantaged. Therefore the counter gerrymandering would not come into play. Boundaries can be drawn to take racial or cultural groups into account, without providing an advantage to any individual party. And the gerrymandering can work both ways. Either pack a specific racial or cultural group in one district to create one seat that will be sacrificial, while at the same time creating several new districts that are devoid of that group which will now be firmly on your side of the legislature. Or the opposite can occur, by diluting one groups voting record by splitting them up over several districts where they lose their influence on the final outcome. Austin, Texas is a prime example of this. A liberal Democratic stronghold was split into 4 conservative GOP districts extending up to 300 miles away from Austin, ensuring that there was no chance for a Democrat to win in. The state of Maryland would be the Democratic equivalent.

How are term limits which result in lame ducks who are either neutered placeholders or people with nothing to lose an improvement?

Term limits do not create lame duck situations. Ineffective politicians do. You simply are reiterating the point I was making, that the current system essentially favors the status quo, and no one wants to take a risk of not getting reelected by making bold policies. Because a politician is facing a term limit and having nothing to lose takes that fear away, and perhaps free them up to make the bold moves that may be necessary to get things done, and the hard choices made. Beats what we have now where they either play an ongoing game of brinksmanship, or continue to kick the can down the road.

The problem - the vital ground - is that there is too much political power at stake.  Diminish the value of controlling the offices, and much of the partisanship and brinksmanship goes away.

And you don't think that term limits would be a step to resolving that? Or pulling out the influence of outside money from vested interests?

Again, the point is that the politicians have lost sight of what they are supposed to be doing, which is governing, not pandering to get reelected.

 

[Brad Sallows]

My main point is that gutting the concentration of power is the key to reducing the involvement of money and shenanigans and allowing people to get on with governance rather than manoeuvring for power.  Going after the money and misbehaviour and electioneering is cart before horse.

 

[Kirkhill]

....

First off, they need to be truly independent, and outside the influence of the political system, like the model of Elections Canada. But almost anything would be better than the current systems that are used in the states to direct how elections are run. Namely, the party in power usually controls the oversight bodies. When a member of the party in power has final authority in how laws are applied, adjudicates disputes, and determines electoral boundaries, you have a system that rivals third world dictatorships for the ability to be corrupted.


.....

There is no such thing as truly independent .... unless you bring in a Martian.

Everybody goes to the same bars, the same clubs, the same gyms, joins the same charities, goes to the same schools, believes the same things and ultimately believes themselves to be the epitome of moderation. I venture to say that is equally true for you and Brad. 

Elections Canada is not an independent entity anymore than the Bank of Canada and the Civil Service are.  They are of a view. Not the right view.  The right view is my view and the rest of you are entitled to be wrong.

Even the Martian solution is not without its faults.  Samuel Champlain took about a day and a half to choose up sides and start slaughtering the other.  The Brits in India were successful in getting all sides to detest them equally.

Back to my 1516  :cheers:

 

[Edward Campbell]

I'm not sure that the political problem in America is as much political, about politicians, as it is social, about Americans, themselves.

My sense of the situation, which may well be inadequately informed, is that, unlike Canada, America has evolved, socially, so that the "moderate middle," the former independents and moderates in both the Democratic and Republican parties has shrunk.

In the 1950s and into the '60s both America and Canada looked the same:

hard left --- left --- ------- moderate middle ------- --- right --- hard right
              15%                              70%                                15%

Now, I think Canada has changed, too, and the 70% in the "moderate middle" has shrunk to, at a guess, 40% and the extremes have doubled in size.

But, in America I think we see something more like this:

hard left --- left --- ------- moderate middle ------- --- right --- hard right
    5%          35%                        20%                        35%          5%

But I think that problem, the polarization of socio-political attitudes, is exacerbated by the fact, and I believe it is a fact, that the "moderates" vote in very, very low numbers while the left and right vote in very high numbers because each wing is voting FOR something in which they really believe. (I suspect that neither the hard left nor the hard right vote all that much, being disenchanted with democracy in both cases.) In other words, we have, in voting, an inverse bell curve:

As William Butler Yeats said,

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

I have some, largely unformed and certainly untested ideas about why America has changed and why Canada seems to have changed less. I think the polarization began in the mid 1960s, mostly on US college campuses and mostly in reaction to the Vietnam War which was, strangely enough, escalated by John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and their cohort against the advice of e.g. "old Democrats" like Dean Acheson and Republicans like former President Eisenhower. The Kennedy regime thought it knew better and, as David Halberstam suggested in 'The Best and The Brightest', the Kennedys were fascinated by the exercise of power, and nothing exercises power like a war. Anyway, the US government never "sold" the war to the USA. In fact the anti-war movement - students, the arts, blacks, women, the clergy - formed an anti-war and anti-government majority. That put many, many Americans on a left of centre trajectory which, consequently, led to a conservative revival that balanced the polarization of America.

Going back to the theme of the thread: I think America is deeply divided and I see nothiong anf no one likely to heal those divisions.

 

[cupper]

So, ERC, if I read what you are saying correctly, the only real solution is to make the United States the 4th Canadian territory, and if the comport themselves properly over the next half century or so, we can consider giving them full provincial status.

I would agree, but not before we do the same for the Turks and Cacos. ;D

 

[Brad Sallows]

>I'm not sure that the political problem in America is as much political, about politicians, as it is social, about Americans, themselves.

A short while back an animated chart popped up based on some long-term polling of American political attitudes.  (I think the data were from Pew, but my confidence in that recollection is low.)  It was useful in that it illustrated clearly how there was a period in the recent past where median attitudes of identified Democrats and Republicans were both moving leftward (politically), but then they (medians) began to diverge as the Republican median move rightward back to its original position and the Democratic one continued moving leftward.

I suspect the widespread belief that Republicans have become more extreme is an artifact of those shifts.  Their absolute position is more or less back where it was, but the relative distance between the median positions is greater because of the absolute Democratic shift away from the initial centre point.

The larger the gap, the less common ground or flexibility to compromise.

 

[a_majoor]

A long but interesting article from "The American Interest". The question of "How" to restore Western and American credibility will be very complex, given the huge financial restraints caused by the debt crisis and the various cultural issues people in the West have when trying to promote or defend traditional Western values and concepts like free markets, equality before the law, property rights and individual freedom:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/11/18/salami-slicing-and-deterrence/

The Revisionists
“Salami Slicing” and DeterrenceA. Wess Mitchell & Jakub Grygiel

The question for NATO leaders is not only how to shore up the deterrence that remains, but how to restore the deterrence that has been lost.


Deterrence can fail in two ways. The first is catastrophic: a large eruption of violence that shakes the existing geopolitical order. The status quo, which existed because of the effectiveness of deterrence, is challenged in a dramatic and violent way, but the outcome of the conflict is always in doubt. War is not a mathematically determined reality—a neat correlation of forces in which the side with more shells, planes, and men wins. It is the realm of chance and imponderable forces often defined as “will.” Because of this, it is rare that a strategic actor willfully seeks a dramatic end to a relationship of deterrence, even if it is has revisionist aspirations and a deep-seated hostility toward its rival. Rather, the catastrophic failure of deterrence is the result of miscalculations, unforeseen escalations, and sometimes even accidents. It is not willed; it is surprising to all parties involved. A case in point is World War I, when great power competition, particularly between Great Britain and Germany, turned violent through a series of unexpected turns of event.

The second way deterrence can fail is gradual, through a chipping-away at the credibility of the leading power in the system. This is not mutually exclusive of catastrophic failure, in that gradual collapse can degenerate into a large-scale war, with the unforeseeable outcomes such a conflict brings. The difference lies in the fact that one of the parties is intentionally seeking to readjust the status quo undergirded by deterrence by means of a gradual alteration of expectations and credibility. The revisionist side wants to engender a gradual failure of deterrence because it considers the existing geopolitical order not to be attuned to its interests or prestige. But it also does not want to jump into a large conflict with the power or powers that underwrite the status quo because it may be the weaker side, or simply because war is dangerous business. The objective is to alter in a steady and almost stealthy way the expectations of future behavior that keep deterrence alive. That is, the revisionist power wants to make all parties involved—the rival as well as his allies—believe present promises of behavior will not be honored in the future. Once such a belief sets in, the options for the targeted powers are limited to accepting the new geopolitical reality or restoring the status quo ante. In either case, deterrence has failed—not violently, but in the realm of perceptions and expectations.

America’s international rivals today are seeking to cause the failure of U.S. extended deterrence using this latter method. Aware of their weaknesses against the United States and its allies and cognizant of the incalculability of engaging in direct confrontation with the world’s most powerful nation, they are engaged instead in a cautious game of “salami-slicing.” Their strategy is to break deterrence bit by bit, through repeated demonstrations of its insolvency in small, hard-to-counter crises. As Bernard Brodie wrote, “Governments, like men generally, usually have been aware of the hazards involved in provoking powerful neighbors, and have governed themselves accordingly.”1 America’s rivals are aware of the dangers of provoking the world’s most powerful nation. But this doesn’t mean that they have reconciled themselves to the U.S.-led system in the 21st century; rather, they are challenging it subtly, at the regional level, in ways that avoid an outright war but subject the foundations of the system to recurrent and ultimately cumulative stress tests.

Russia’s recent actions should be seen in this light: as small steps aimed at revising the geopolitical reality in its region—a reality that had been supported by a certain set of expectations of behavior (for example, no violent territorial adjustments). These expectations were created by U.S. extended deterrence: respect the status quo or there will be punishments. By altering some of these expectations, Russia has whittled away portions of deterrence. The danger of such a gradual breakdown of deterrence is that it is easy not to perceive it as being diminished. After all, it is clear to all parties that NATO and the United States behind it continue to maintain a vigorous deterrent against a full-scale attack, ranging from conventional to nuclear, on any of its members. But it is less clear what has been lost, because that loss has occurred only at the geographic and conceptual edges of deterrence. The geographic edges are evident in that Ukraine is not part of NATO or the EU, but some sort of guarantees were extended to it through the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. The maintenance of a politically independent and territorially intact Ukraine was part of the late 20th-century geopolitical order. Moreover, Russia’s modus operandi—a limited war operation conducted by “little green men,” offering deniability and falling below the threshold of a full-out conflict—is aimed at that zone of conceptual uncertainty where it is unclear whether a tripwire has been crossed or not. In any case, there is no 21st-century Great War in Europe, which would have been a clear sign of a catastrophic failure of deterrence. But a slice of deterrence—perhaps small, perhaps insignificant on its own—has undeniably been carved away.

The question for U.S. and allied leaders to ponder in the face of salami-slicing tactics is not only how to shore up existing deterrence, but how to restore the deterrence that has been lost. The former task has received the most attention, and is generally held to involve restating with greater vigor security commitments tying the United States to its allies, repositioning troops and military assets to troubled frontier states like Poland, rewriting contingency plans, and enhancing military training and joint exercises. All of this is done to convey clearly and forcefully that, if the revisionist power (in this case Russia, though similar steps have been made with China) were to decide to take the next big step in challenging deterrence (a move against a NATO state), the retaliatory response would be immediate and effective.

But this is not enough. The focus on shoring up deterrence, important as this may be, overlooks the fact that a good deal of deterrence has already been lost. The expectations of behavior that undergirded the pre-Ukraine war status quo have already been altered: Russia has demonstrated its will and capability to use force to redraw the map of the region. The credibility of the West has also been altered and, to be precise, diminished: It has clearly demonstrated its unwillingness to meet force with force, even if by Ukrainian proxy. Europe at the end of 2014 is not the Europe of 2013, exactly because the geopolitical order has been challenged and altered by Russia—because, in other words, the deterrence that sustained the previous order has been weakened by Moscow’s actions.

To keep the deterrence that is left is certainly easier than to restore the slice of it that has been lost. Once the original set of expectations underlying deterrence has been invalidated by the violent behavior of one side, how does one restore it? This is really two separate questions: Can one restore lost deterrence at all and, if so, is the West willing to take the steps necessary to do so?

The answer to the first question is yes: a gradual salami-slicing of deterrence can be arrested and reversed, at least in theory. To restore lost deterrence, visible pain needs to be imposed on the aggressor. One way to do so, much discussed but not attempted, would be to arm Ukraine so as to deny Russia its objective of territorial adjustment by military means. By turning what Moscow had hoped would be a quick limited war into a prolonged war of attrition, it would be clear that revising the existing order by force is not cost-effective. The salami-slicing, so to speak, would be halted and the hand holding the knife rapped across the knuckles.

But the ultimate way to restore lost deterrence would be to take actions that inflict an injury on the attacker that is somehow proportionate to the assault. Sanctions, whether they succeed or not (and despite the falling ruble and fleeing investments, it does not appear that Russia’s attack on Ukraine can be reverted), are not proportionate: It’s like leaving a burglar in a home invasion in possession of the victim’s bedroom. Proportionality would be something that established our ability to do to Russia what it has done to the third party. It would be an old-fashioned lex talionis imposing a penalty commensurate to the crime. In no-holds-barred geopolitics, NATO could establish proportionality through, for instance, working to foment internal problems in Russia’s more troublesome regions. The guiding principle that Putin has used against Ukraine—promoting an ethnic minority within a larger politic for power reasons—could be used as an offensive tool against Russia. The Achilles’ heel of Russia its multi-ethnic composition. While it’s not as pronounced as it was in the larger Soviet Empire, it isn’t insignificant and is certainly a continuing source of preoccupation for the Kremlin. This is just a single example; one can think of several other cost-imposing strategies to exploit Moscow’s weaknesses and fears.

The challenge isn’t to come up with such an attack but to implement it. And here there are two self-reinforcing problems. First, the general challenge of restoring deterrence: Once it has failed, even if only partially, it is not easy to rebuild. It’s not like refilling a glass that has been emptied; rather, the glass has been cracked or broken and requires greater skill and effort to hold together, even if refilled. It requires retaliation to restore a status quo ante, and the more time that passes without retaliation, the more difficult it becomes. That is why, after a failure of deterrence, the new order is rarely ever the same again.

The second difficulty is more peculiar to the current case. The Western alliance does not appear to have the will to escalate the relationship with Russia. In part, this is because of the nature of the Russian challenge: the geographically peripheral target (distant and eastern) and conceptually “gray” methods (limited war, “hybrid” threat) do not create a sense of immediate threat uniformly shared by the allies. But in part the Western reluctance to rebuild lost deterrence seems to stem from a worldview that sees forceful challenges to the regional and global order based on norms of non-violence and rules of commercial interdependence as inherently self-defeating, thereby not requiring immediate policy adjustments and responses.

In brief, a portion of the relationship of deterrence that characterized Russia and Europe is lost and is unlikely to be restored. Whether Russia will continue to seek a gradual failure of deterrence in order to reassert its own influence over parts of Europe remains to be seen, but it is to be expected—if only because its success so far may increase its desire to challenge the existing order. Putin may leave Brisbane early, but he isn’t leaving eastern Ukraine anytime soon.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Some thoughts on America's strategy, or lack of same, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from The Times Literary Supplement:

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1488107.ece

K of the Castle
    Henry Kissinger
    WORLD ORDER
    432pp. Allen Lane. £25.
    978 0 241 00426 5

NIALL FERGUSON

Published: 26 November 2014

Thirteen years ago, just three months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Henry Kissinger published a book with the provocative title Does America Need a Foreign Policy? His new book, World Order, might justly have been subtitled: “Does America have a foreign policy?” It is no longer controversial (as it once was) to point out that President Barack Obama is no master strategist. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just eight months after his inauguration as President, he has been responsible for a succession of foreign policy debacles, including the “reset” of relations with Russia and the “pivot” from the Middle East to East Asia. Then there is the woeful incoherence of his administration’s policy towards Egypt, lending support first to a revolution against its ally Hosni Mubarak, then to a Muslim Brotherhood government, and finally to the bloody military coup that overthrew that government. Consider, too, the President’s abject failure to enforce his own “red line” over the use of chemical weapons in Syria, justified with the declaration in September last year: “America is not the world’s policeman”. Or reflect on the hubris of his breathtaking statement in an interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick last January: “I don’t really even need George Kennan right now”. Nemesis struck just two months later, in the form of the Russian annexation of Crimea.

The nadir has been the President’s U-turn over Iraq and Syria in response to the atrocities perpetrated by the self-styled “Islamic State” (IS), notably the beheadings of American and British hostages. Having won election in 2008 as the man who had not supported the invasion of Iraq, and having pledged to end the American occupation there and in Afghanistan as quickly as possible, Obama now finds himself using American air power against a Sunni organization that had previously been fighting against the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad – whose downfall he himself has repeatedly advocated. The American and European Left heaped opprobrium on George W. Bush for his invasion of Iraq. But at least Bush had a strategy. President Obama told reporters on September 4 that “We don’t have a strategy yet” , referring to the specific challenge posed by IS. Those words may yet prove to be the epitaph of his presidency.

Henry Kissinger does not dwell in detail on Obama’s record of strategic incoherence in this magisterial meditation on the international system. Yet it is not too difficult to read between the lines that this book has been inspired at least partly by dismay at the amateurism of the past six years and dread of the risks inherent in the strategy-less approach. In an arresting passage, Kissinger asks: “Where, in a world of ubiquitous social networks, does the individual find the space to develop the fortitude to make decisions that, by definition, cannot be based on a consensus?” With “presidential campaigns . . . on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet”, he writes, there is a danger that “the candidates’ main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a ‘big data’ research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices?” It is unlikely that these two questions were prompted by the campaigns of either John McCain or Mitt Romney, presidential candidates who took foreign policy positions with scant regard for focus groups. In their 2012 debate on foreign policy, Obama mocked Romney with the carefully crafted line: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back”. The foreign policy of the 1980s might, for one thing, offer rather more effective ways of dealing with Vladimir Putin.

Kissinger’s starting point is that we are living through the end of an American world order that reached its zenith in that decade – “an inexorably expanding cooperative order of states observing common rules and norms, embracing liberal economic systems, forswearing territorial conquest, respecting national sovereignty, and adopting participatory and democratic systems of governance”. Not only have Americans lost their faith (or interest) in such a definition of world order. Three other ideal types are now competing with it: a post-Westphalian European order (the allusion here is to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia), which Kissinger defines as “a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power”; an Islamic order based on the ideal of “one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world” (in the words of the fifteenth-century Sultan Mehmed II); and a Chinese order with its roots in the imperial tradition of “harmony under heaven”.

Or, rather, these were once alternative concepts of world order. The real trouble is that the Europeans, the Muslims and the Chinese of today, like their American counterparts, have embraced corrupted versions of their own traditions. Whereas Americans are almost paralysed by a false dichotomy between “idealism” and “realism” – a “congenital ambivalence”, in Kissinger’s striking phrase – Europeans have “set out to depart from the [Westphalian] state system . . . and to transcend it through a concept of pooled sovereignty . . . [while] consciously and severely limit[ing] the element of power in [their] new institutions”, thereby mistakenly “identifying its internal construction with its ultimate geopolitical purpose”. At the same time, “jihadists on both sides of the Sunni–Shia divide tear at societies and dismantle states in quest of visions of global revolution based on the fundamentalist version of their religion”. As for the Chinese – and East Asians generally – they have jettisoned earlier conceptions (the Middle Kingdom and its tributaries) in favour of a kind of hyper-Westphalian system of aggressively competing nation states, a model Kissinger regards as fundamentally inapplicable to Asia.

This is not a benign conjuncture. It would have been challenging enough if, as a result of the demographic and economic advance of the non-Western world, the four competing ideals of world order had collided in their pristine forms. The fact that all four are in various states of degeneration increases the likelihood of conflict between them. An alternative and perhaps more accurate title for this book would have been “World Disorder”.

Kissinger the statesman – the man who served two successive Republican presidents as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State – will always have his critics. Here, however, we have Kissinger the academic: the theorist of international relations or, perhaps more accurately, the grand old man of applied history, who would still be worth reading even if he had never set foot inside the White House. For World Order provides a compelling reminder of what it is that distinguishes Kissinger from all his contemporaries and successors in the field of foreign affairs. He may have spent his entire Harvard career, from undergraduate to tenured professor, in the Government Department. But he is and always has been, first and foremost, a historical thinker.

Kissinger poses a fundamental question: “Is there a single concept and mechanism logically uniting all things, in a way that can be discovered and explicated . . . or is the world too complicated and humanity too diverse to approach these questions through logic alone, requiring a kind of intuition and an almost esoteric element of statecraft?” Here, as throughout his career, he favours the second view. In his eyes, the more abstract models of the international system are of next to no value because they cannot account for the crucial fact that each player in the great game of foreign policy takes decisions on the basis of a historical self-understanding that can be understood only through deep study of the past. In Kissinger’s phrase, “For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings”. Regression analysis can never capture this.

Many of the historical themes of World Order have their origins in Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation, published in 1957 as A World Restored: Castlereagh, Metternich, and the restoration of peace, 1812–1822. Indeed, the first two chapters at times read like a recapitulation of arguments Kissinger made more than half a century ago. “The Westphalian concept”, he writes, “took multiplicity as its starting point and drew a variety of societies, each accepted as a reality, into a common search for order . . . . Until the outbreak of World War I, England acted as the balancer of the equilibrium.” He remains as fascinated today as he was as a graduate student by the European order that emerged after the defeat of France in 1815, contrasting as it did with the disorder that followed the defeat of Germany in 1918. The following passage is from his new book; it might equally well be a quotation from his PhD:

“The vitality of an international order is reflected in the balance it strikes between legitimacy and power and the relative emphasis given to each. Neither aspect is intended to arrest change; rather, in combination they seek to ensure that it occurs as a matter of evolution, not a raw contest of wills. If the balance between power and legitimacy is properly managed, actions will acquire a degree of spontaneity. Demonstrations of power will be peripheral and largely symbolic; because the configuration of forces will be generally understood, no side will feel the need to call forth its full reserves. When that balance is destroyed, restraints disappear, and the field is open to the most expansive claims and the most implacable actors; chaos follows until a new system of order is established.”

Kissinger originally intended to write two sequels to A World Restored: one covering the era of Bismarck, and one on the origins of the First World War. These volumes never materialized, but he has often sketched the argument they would have contained. Here, again, we see how the order established at the Congress of Vienna broke down in the wake of German Unification, because “with Germany unified and France a fixed adversary, the system lost its flexibility”. This more rigid pentarchy (to use Leopold von Ranke’s term), of Britain, France, Russia and Austria-Hungary, depended on the virtuoso diplomat Bismarck to keep it in equilibrium. After he had gone, the system “aggravated” rather than “buffered” disputes. Over time, “political leaders lost control over their own tactics . . . . In the end, the military planning ran away with diplomacy”.

From his historical analysis, working in a way that the great Oxford philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood would have admired, Kissinger proceeds to arguments by analogy about the present and possible futures. “Is the world moving toward regional blocs that perform the role of states in the Westphalian system?” he asks. “If so, will balance follow, or will this reduce the number of key players to so few that rigidity becomes inevitable and the perils of the early twentieth century return, with inflexibly constructed blocs attempting to face one another down?” This is one of many hints in his recent work (compare, for example, the concluding section of On China, 2011) that Kissinger fears another 1914. Citing Graham Allison’s recent work on “the Thucydides Trap”, he notes darkly that, in a clear majority of all the historical cases when a rising power encountered an established power, the result was war.

There is much here, then, that is familiar to those who know Kissinger’s previous writings; but there is also much that is new. There is a chapter on nuclear proliferation, cyber warfare and the role of electronic networks that reminds the reader of the ease with which the young Kissinger got to grips with the technicalities of the nuclear arms race. (His first bestseller was not A World Restored, but Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, 1957.) Not surprisingly, he does not regard the technological innovations of our own time as increasing international stability.

The chapter in World Order on Islam also represents a new departure. Never previously has Kissinger engaged so deeply with the problem that, from its very inception, Islam has been “at once a religion, a multiethnic superstate, and a new world order”. Never has he so explicitly criticized both Obama and his predecessor for, in their different ways, naively equating the democratization of the Middle East with its pacification. And never, to my knowledge, has he been so publicly critical of the Saudi Arabian government. “Is every demonstration democratic by definition?” Kissinger asks, with the fate of Egypt clearly in mind. “Is Saudi Arabia an ally only until public demonstrations develop on its territory?” Yet he also acknowledges that “the great strategic error of the Saudi dynasty” has been:

“to suppose . . . that it could support and even manipulate radical Islamism abroad without threatening its own position at home . . . . By financing madrassas . . . preaching the austere Wahhabist creed throughout the world, the Saudis have . . . taken a defensive measure by making its advocates act as missionaries abroad rather than within the kingdom. The project has had the unintended consequence of nurturing a jihadist fervor that would eventually menace the Saudi state itself and its allies.”

As Kissinger makes clear, the most pressing threat to world order today is the descent of the Middle East into a region-wide sectarian conflict. Even as the Sunni monarchies struggle to defend themselves against a rapidly metastasizing jihadist “cancer” that is in large measure their own creation, Shia Iran edges steadily closer to being a nuclear-armed power.

In his interview with the New Yorker, President Obama offered an almost embarrassingly ingenuous analysis. “It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other”, he explained. “And although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion . . . you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran . . .”. Moreover, he continued, if only the “the Palestinian issue” could be “unwound”, then another “new equilibrium” could be created, allowing Israel to “enter into even an informal alliance with at least normalized diplomatic relations” with the Sunni states. The trouble with his analysis is that it does not explain why any of the interested parties should sign up for such a balancing act when regional hegemony might be attainable for any one of them. As Kissinger explains (in a passage surely directed at the White House):

“Even were such a constellation to come to pass, it could only be sustained by an active American foreign policy. For the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux. The United States would be needed as a balancer for the foreseeable future. The role of balancer is best carried out if America is closer to each of the contending forces than they are to each other . . . . America can fulfill that role only on the basis of involvement, not of withdrawal.”

Kissinger makes a similar argument about Asia. “Under contemporary conditions”, he argues, “essentially two balances of power are emerging: one in South Asia, the other in East Asia. Neither possesses the characteristic integral to the European balance of power: a balancer, a country capable of establishing an equilibrium by shifting its weight to the weaker side.” Superficially, no doubt, there appears to be a way to balance the rise of China. Presumably that was why President Obama’s “Asia Trip” last April took him to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines, but conspicuously not to China. Yet Kissinger has long doubted that a strategy of containment – of the sort Kennan recommended for dealing with the Soviet Union at the outset of the Cold War – could work as a response to the rise of China in our time.

End of Part 1

 

[Edward Campbell]

Part 2 of 2

So what is the correct strategy for the United States in East Asia? The answer Kissinger gave in On China was noticeably imprecise: “co-evolution”, not containment. Here, he clarifies the point with another historical analogy. As he notes, “the United States is an ally of Japan and a proclaimed partner of China – a situation comparable to Bismarck’s when he made an alliance with Austria balanced by a treaty with Russia”. Only those well versed in nineteenth-century diplomatic history will get the allusion to the Secret Reinsurance Treaty that Bismarck signed with the Russian Foreign Minister, Nikolay Girs, in June 1887. Under its terms, Germany and Russia agreed to observe neutrality should the other be involved in a war with a third country, unless Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary. This committed Germany to neutrality if Russia sought to assert control over the Black Sea Straits. But the real point was to discourage the Russians from seeking a mutual defence treaty with France, which was exactly what happened after Bismarck’s fall from power led to the non-renewal of the Secret Reinsurance Treaty. “Paradoxically”, writes Kissinger, “it was precisely that ambiguity which preserved the flexibility of the European equilibrium. And its abandonment – in the name of transparency – started a sequence of increasing confrontations, culminating in World War I.”

Is it conceivable that the United States could enter into such a secret treaty with China, allowing it to minimize the causes for conflict between Washington and Beijing, without negating the former’s long-standing commitment to the defence of Japan? The answer to that question depends, in Kissinger’s account, on how far the US can free itself from the pernicious legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who bequeathed to Americans “an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics”. It was Wilson who, with his idea of collective security, encouraged Americans to believe they could continue to steer clear of binding overseas commitments. And yet:

“Collective security . . . is a legal construct addressed to no specific contingency. It defines no particular obligations except joint action of some kind when the rules of peaceful international order are violated. In practice, action must be negotiated from case to case . . . . The idea that in such situations countries will identify violations of peace identically and be prepared to act in common against them is belied by the experience of history . . . . An alliance [by contrast] comes about as an agreement on specific facts or expectations. It creates a formal obligation to act in a precise way in defined contingencies. It brings about a strategic obligation fulfillable in an agreed manner. It arises out of a consciousness of shared interests, and the more parallel those interests are, the more cohesive the alliance will be.”

To Kissinger, it always seemed strange that Richard Nixon insisted on hanging a portrait of Wilson in his office, when in so many respects Nixon was the most consistent believer in the balance of power to occupy the White House since Theodore Roosevelt, presented here as Wilson’s antithesis. Or was it?

In her review of World Order for the Washington Post, another former Secretary of State – Hillary Clinton – observed that “the famous realist sounds surprisingly idealistic”. This should not be so surprising. From his earliest engagement as an undergraduate with Immanuel Kant’s essay, “Perpetual Peace”, Kissinger has been philosophically much more of an idealist in the sense Kant meant in this context than a realist in the sense of Machiavelli. Those who have not read A World Restored or the essay on Bismarck in 1968 make the mistake of thinking that Kissinger admired and later sought to imitate Metternich and Bismarck. On the contrary: he found fault with both of them. A recurrent theme of Kissinger’s entire oeuvre is that mere realpolitik rarely suffices. The statesman requires something more than pragmatism to guide his decision-making under the normal conditions of extreme uncertainty (another old theme is “the conjectural element of foreign policy – the need to gear actions to an assessment that cannot be proved when it is made”).

“The American . . . debate”, Kissinger writes, “is frequently described as a contest between idealism and realism. It may turn out . . . that if America cannot act in both modes, it will not be able to fulfill either . . . . As a general rule, the most sustainable course will involve a blend of the realism and idealism too often held out in the American debate as incompatible opposites.” This, he argues, is the real lesson of US foreign policy since 1945. It was only when presidents achieved “an amalgam of American idealism and traditional concepts of balance of power” that there was anything resembling world order:

“Calculations of power without a moral dimension will turn every disagreement into a test of strength; ambition will know no resting place; countries will be propelled into unsustainable tours de force of elusive calculations regarding the shifting configuration of power. Moral proscriptions without concern for equilibrium, on the other hand, tend toward either crusades or an impotent policy tempting challenges; either extreme risks endangering the coherence of the international order itself [my italics].”

The bloodiest failures of the “pax Americana” – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – arose primarily from elevating the moral dimension above the balance of power; the domestic backlash, in each case, came after the strategic error. But a narrow realpolitik might have been no better.

The idea of a Secret Reinsurance Treaty with China is only one of several concrete proposals derived from the author’s trove of historical analogies. He suggests, for example, that Afghanistan cannot be stabilized merely by the United States, whether through counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism. What is needed is something more like the Treaty of 1839 that guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium. A comparable agreement today would commit all of Afghanistan’s neighbours to preserving it from again falling under the control of the jihadists.

But these are operational proposals that only make sense in the context of a broader strategy that is both realistic, in the sense that a balance of power is aimed at, and idealistic, in the sense that the avoidance of a third world war remains a moral imperative as noble as (and perhaps more urgent than) the avoidance of climate change. While Kissinger’s dream remains “a modernization of the Westphalian system informed by contemporary realities”, his fundamental question for the next American President is: “What is the nature of the values that we seek to advance?” In his conclusion, Kissinger poses four other questions, to be sure:

    “1. What do we seek to prevent, no matter how it happens, and if necessary alone?
    2. What do we seek to achieve, even if not supported by any multilateral effort?
    3. What do we seek to achieve, or prevent, only if supported by an alliance?
    4. What should we not engage in, even if urged by a multilateral group or an alliance?”

But these are once again operational questions. Strange though it may seem to his critics, it is the question of values that is definitive. Until there is a clear answer to that question – as there generally was for much of the Cold War – the United States will continue to lack a coherent foreign policy, and the chances of a peaceful world order will dwindle towards zero.

We should pay attention to both Henry Kissinger and Niall Ferguson's analysis of what he says.

I think we cannot doubt that:

    1. America is strategically adrift;

    2. A simple change of party in the White House is unlikely to help because the drift is now part of the political process; and

    3. The solution to America's problems is in the hands, exclusively, of the American people ... and some might wonder if they are, in the 21st century, up to the task any more.

 

[GAP]

The solution to America's problems is in the hands, exclusively, of the American people ... and some might wonder if they are, in the 21st century, up to the task any more.

I think you are exactly right, and no, I don't think the American People are up to the task any more, as they have bought into the rhetoric as much as the politicians have.....

 

[a_majoor]

perhaps the pendulum has swung all the way over, and as it comes back towards the centre, we can see effective action by the American people and their public and private institutions again:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/12/19/next-up-in-america-the-liberal-retreat/

Next Up in America: The Liberal Retreat
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

The Obama administration may represent “Peak Left” in American politics. As a result, what we are getting from the left these days is a mix of bewilderment and anger as it realizes that this is as good as it gets.

As the United States staggers toward the seventh year of Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House, a growing disquiet permeates the ranks of the American left. After six years of the most liberal President since Jimmy Carter, the nation doesn’t seem to be asking for a second helping. Even though the multiyear rollout of Obamacare was carefully crafted to put all the popular features up front, delaying less popular changes into the far future, the program remains unpopular. Trust in the fairness and competence of government is pushing toward new lows in the polls, even though the government is now in the hands of forward-looking, progressive Democrats rather than antediluvian Gopers.

For liberals, these are bleak times of hollow victories (Obamacare) and tipping points that don’t tip. For examples of the latter, think of Sandy Hook, the horrific massacre in Connecticut that Democrats and liberals everywhere believed would finally push the American public toward gun control. Two years later, polls show more Americans than ever before think it’s more important to protect gun access than to promote gun control.

Sandy Hook isn’t the only example. There was the latest 2014 IPCC report on climate change that was going to end the debate once and for all. The chances for legislative action on climate change in the new Congress: zero or less. There was Ferguson and the Garner videotape showing the fatal chokehold, both of which set off a wave of protests but seem unlikely to change public attitudes about the police. There was the Senate Intelligence Committee “torture report” that was going to settle the issue of treatment of detainees. Again, the polls are rolling in suggesting that the public remains exactly where it was: supportive of “torture” under certain circumstances. And of course there was the blockbuster Rolling Stone article on campus rape at UVA, the story that, before it abruptly collapsed, was going to cement public support for the Obama administration’s aggressive attempt to federalize the treatment of sexual harassment on campuses around the country.

In all of these cases, liberals got what, from a liberal perspective, appeared to be conclusive evidence that long cherished liberal policy ideas were as correct as liberals have always thought they were. In all of these cases the establishment media conformed to the liberal narrative, inundating the airwaves and flooding the cyberverse with the liberal line. Some of the stories, like the UVA rape story, collapsed. Some, like the Ferguson story, became so complex and nuanced that some of their initial political salience diminished. But even when, as with Ferguson, other follow-up stories seem to reinforce the initial liberal take (the Garner case, for example), the public still doesn’t seem to accept the liberal line or draw the inferences that liberals want it to draw. It’s becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that many Americans will continue to disagree with many liberal policy prescriptions no matter what.

Shell-shocked liberals are beginning to grasp some inconvenient truths. No gun massacre is horrible enough to change Americans’ ideas about gun control. No UN Climate Report will get a climate treaty through the U.S. Senate. No combination of anecdotal and statistical evidence will persuade Americans to end their longtime practice of giving police officers extremely wide discretion in the use of force. No “name and shame” report, however graphic, from the Senate Intelligence Committee staff will change the minds of the consistent majority of Americans who tell pollsters that they believe that torture is justifiable under at least some circumstances. No feminist campaign will convince enough voters that the presumption of innocence should not apply to those accused of rape.

These are not the only issues in which, from a left Democratic point of view, the country is overrun with zombies and vampires: policy ideas that Democrats thought had been killed but still restlessly roam the earth. The finale of the George W. Bush presidency was, for many Democrats, conclusive evidence that conservative ideas just don’t work. The post 9/11 Bush foreign policy led to two long and unhappy wars. America had lost the trust of its allies without defeating its enemies. At home, the Bush tax cuts led to an exploding deficit, and the orgy of deregulation (admittedly, much of it dating from the Clinton years) led to the greatest financial crash since World War II and the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression.

“Could a set of political ideas be more discredited?” liberals ask. The foreign policy failures of the Bush years, they believe, should have killed conservative ideology about America’s role in the world, and the financial crisis, they are certain, should have driven a stake through the heart of conservative economic doctrine. Yet: Here we are, six years into the Age of Obama, and the Tea Party is alive and Occupy is dead.  The Republicans swept the midterm elections both nationally and at the state level—and Hillary Clinton appears more interested in conciliating Wall Street than in fighting it, and more interested in building bridges to conservative foreign policy thinkers than in continuing the Obama foreign policy. (And with even Jimmy Carter lambasting Obama’s Middle East policy as too weak, and the President committing to new troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s not clear that even President Obama wants to stay the course.)

The liberal rout at the level of state and local politics is even more alarming. A wave of Republican Governors in blue Midwestern states (Walker in Wisconsin, Snyder in Michigan, plus the Dem-crushing Kasich in purple Ohio) and large GOP gains in state legislatures across the country point to a widespread reaction against liberal ideas, and lend credence to the idea that, even accounting for the GOP-skewed electorate in off-year elections, the country as a whole is drifting to the right.

For some, the response is to turn on Obama. He’s not a real liberal at all, some disillusioned liberals say: he’s a technocrat, a trimmer, an elitist, and an inept politician. Some of that is true; President Obama is a limousine liberal, not a lunch-bucket populist. And, despite all those comparisons to Lincoln that swooning liberals made back in 2008, he’s neither a particularly persuasive speaker nor an effective political operative. He is more professor than politician, and more of a natural legislator than a gifted executive.

But to blame Obama for the crisis of the liberal left is unpersuasive. It was the liberal left who fell hardest for him, who praised him to the skies and who stuck with him longer than anybody else. Even today, Obama’s strongest backing comes from two of the most liberal ingredients in the American melting pot: blacks and Jews. And, from a practical point of view, it is almost inconceivable, despite the cries of “Run, Elizabeth, Run!” emanating from the gentry left, that someone more liberal than President Obama will be sent to the Oval Office anytime soon. It took the unique circumstances of two wars and a financial crash to open a path to the White House for Barack Obama; absent similar circumstances, successful candidates are likely to come from his right for the foreseeable future.

In that sense the Obama administration may represent “Peak Left” in American politics, and what we are getting from the left these days is a mix of bewilderment and anger as it realizes that this is as good as it gets. America is unlikely to go farther to the left than it went in the wake of the Iraq War and the financial crash, and while that wasn’t anywhere near enough of a shift for left-leaning Democrats, the country has already moved on.

 

[a_majoor]

More from WRM on the idea that the "Progressives" have peaked. Indeed the idea of the Progressives being trapped inside their own cocoon and having less and less influence in the outer world has a counterpart in Canada: the split between "Old Canada" east of the Ottawa river and the "New Canada" that encompasses the western part of our nation. The book "The Big Shift" covers the slipping of power from the hands of the "Laurentian Elite" in more detail.

This also fits into my thesis that the old institutions which are the bastions of Progressive power and privilege as described by Mead have been left behind by demographic, economic and social changes. They are unable to grasp the environment outside their doors anymore and so have no relevant solutions to today's problems.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/12/21/living-large-in-a-shrinking-cocoon/

Living Large in a Shrinking Cocoon
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
Never have liberal ideas been so firmly entrenched within America’s core elite institutions. Never have those institutions been so weak and uninfluential.

These are frustrating times for the American left. Legislative power has slipped from its hands; the states are more Republican than at just about any time in living memory, and as President Obama nears the end of his term, it seems far more likely than otherwise that, Republican or Democrat, his successor will stand well to the right of the incumbent. As I noted in the first essay in the series, the foreign policy disasters and the financial crash of the George W. Bush administration opened a path to the White House for the most liberal President in history and gave Democrats overwhelming majorities in the Senate and the House back in 2008. Jubilant liberals believed that a new era had dawned, and when they weren’t comparing Obama to Lincoln, they were calling him the “Democratic Reagan” who would reset politics for the left just as Reagan once did for the right.

Six years later, the dream is looking shopworn. President Obama is deeply unpopular, the Democratic majorities are gone with the wind, and poll after poll after poll demonstrates that Obamacare, the Democrats’ signature legislative accomplishment in the Age of Obama, is more of an albatross around the party’s neck than a star in its crown.

Some of this could change. The slow but persistent improvement in economic conditions has finally begun to register with voters; consumer confidence is up and, if the economy continues to improve through 2016, President Obama’s poll numbers should strengthen. The racial polarization that so tragically spiked in the last three months could gradually fade away. And the concatenation of foreign policy and security disasters from the Libyan anarchy to the series of Syria and Iraq fiascoes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine could look less frightening and less like an implosion of America’s world position in two year’s time. The lame duck could still swagger off the stage in the end.

But right now that doesn’t look probable, even to liberals. Eric Alterman, one of the left’s most articulate advocates, summarizes the situation with his customary frankness in the Nation:

The Obama presidency has been a devil’s bargain for Democrats. Despite the considerable policy accomplishments to its credit, the administration’s political impact has been virtually catastrophic. Since Obama’s victory in 2008, Democrats are down seventy seats in the House and fifteen in the Senate, giving an increasingly reactionary Republican Party the power to stymie most if not all of the Democrats’ agenda. But this actually understates the damage. Democrats are now the minority in over two-thirds of the nation’s partisan state legislative chambers, their worst showing in history. In twenty-three of these, Republicans will control the governor’s office, too. (The corresponding number for Democrats is just seven.)

Alterman cites two core reasons for the disaster. On the one hand, Democrats haven’t recognized that many of the policies they like on “good government” grounds are political poison. In particular, Obamacare and the immigration amnesty are alienating voters:

The Affordable Care Act and the executive order expanding the rights of undocumented immigrants were certainly the right thing to do from the perspective of Democratic values, but both are politically poisonous at present. Obamacare undermines a key Democratic constituency badly in need of help: labor unions. The immigration order fires up anti-immigrant passion among working-class voters while benefiting an ethnic group—Latinos—whose voter-participation levels remain anemic, even allowing for the restrictive election laws passed by Republicans.

Beyond that, Alterman argues, the Democrats’ turn to social rather than economic issues (gentry liberalism vs. populism) hasn’t been helpful. Focusing on “immigration, reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, gun control, etc.” at a time when real wages are stagnant or declining for most Americans is a recipe for political failure.

But this analysis, cogent as it is, raises another question: why were liberals so feckless in power? Why did they blow the historic opportunity that the Bush implosion gave them?

What liberals are struggling to come to grips with today is the enormous gap between the dominant ideas and discourse in the liberal worlds of journalism, the foundations, and the academy on the one hand, and the wider realities of American life on the other. Within the magic circle, liberal ideas have never been more firmly entrenched and less contested. Increasingly, liberals live in a world in which certain ideas are becoming ever more axiomatic and unquestioned even if, outside the walls, those same ideas often seem outlandish.

Modern American liberalism does its best to suppress dissent and critique (except from the left) at the institutions and milieus that it controls. Dissent is not only misguided; it is morally wrong. Bad thoughts create bad actions, and so the heretics must be silenced or expelled. “Hurtful” speech is not allowed, and so the eccentricities of conventional liberal piety pile up into ever more improbable, ever more unsustainable forms.

To openly support “torture”, for example, is close to unthinkable in the academy or in the world of serious journalism. For a university professor or a New Yorker writer to say that torture is acceptable under any circumstances is to court marginalization. A great many liberals don’t know anybody who openly supports torture, and a great many liberals are convinced that the concept of torture is so heinous that simply to name and document incidents will lead an aroused public to rally against the practice—and against the political party that allowed it.

Thus a group of journalists, human rights activists, and others relentlessly pursued allegations of CIA use of torture, not only as an important moral duty but also as an effective political strategy. It flopped. As we’ve seen, the revelations about CIA methods left most Americans still telling pollsters that they favor torture when national security is in question. “Torture” may be unthinkable to well meaning academics and human rights activists, but the argument hasn’t been won—hasn’t really even been engaged—among the broader public. The left silenced and banished critics; it didn’t convert or refute them. The net result of the liberal campaign to “hold the CIA accountable” wasn’t to discredit the Bush administration; the campaign simply undercut claims by liberals that the left can safely be entrusted with security policy. A group of liberal journalists and politicos worked very hard to make Dick Cheney’s day.

Similarly, the liberal hothouses that so many university campuses are today encourage students to adopt approaches to real life problems that, to say the least, are counterproductive. Take, for example, the recent attempts by law students at Harvard, Georgetown, and Columbia to have their exams postponed due to the stress they suffered as a result of the Ferguson controversy. “This is more than a personal emergency. This is a national emergency,” said the anguished Harvardians asking for an extension. Said the fragile and delicate souls from Georgetown,“We, students of color, cannot breathe…. We charge you to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter.”

One thinks of the school beneath the sea in Alice in Wonderland, where students were taught “reeling, writhing, and fainting in coils.”

Fortunately for us all, liberalism didn’t use to be such a pallid and shrinking thing. People like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King were, thank goodness, made of sterner stuff than the frail flowers of the contemporary Ivy League. The people who actually helped black people in American history down through the centuries faced more injustice, brutality, and casual public racism than our delicately and tenderly raised hothouse elites could imagine in their wildest dreams. Serious people understand that the existence of injustice is a reason to get tougher and work harder, not a reason to whine to the dean about your emotional turmoil. Truth, Douglass, Marshall, King, and tens of thousands of others knew that the people who want to change the world need to be tougher, smarter, harder working, and stronger than the people who don’t care. This may not be fair, but having emotional meltdowns over it won’t help you or anybody else.

Are these shrinking violets and sensitive souls really preparing for careers in the law? If you are a lawyer and a grand jury returns an unjust indictment against your client, are you going to come down with a disabling attack of the vapors that keeps you from concentrating on your legal work as you struggle with the unfairness of it all? If so, the legal profession is not for you. You need another and less challenging profession, perhaps involving the preparation of fair trade herbal teas for elderly Quakers in a quiet suburb somewhere.

But liberals today face more problems than cocooning. They face the problem that, even as the ideas in liberal institutions become ever more elaborate, intricate, and unsuited to the actual political world, liberal institutions are losing more of their power to shape public opinion and national debate. Forty years ago, the key liberal institutions were both less distanced from the rest of American society and significantly more able to drive the national agenda. The essentially likeminded, mainstream liberals who wrote and produced the major network news shows more or less controlled the outlets from which a majority of Americans got the news. There was no Drudge Report or Fox News in those days, much less an army of pesky fact checkers on the internet. When liberal media types decided that something was news, it was news.

If the Sandy Hook massacre had taken place in 1975, it’s likely that the liberal take on gun violence would not have been challenged. But these days, an army of bloggers and a counter-establishment of policy wonks in right leaning think tanks are ready to respond to extreme events like Sandy Hook. After the 2014 midterm, Gaffy Gifford’s old congressional seat will be filled by a pro-gun rights Republican, and polls show support for “gun rights” at historic highs. Liberal strategies don’t work anymore in part because liberal institutions are losing their power.

Meanwhile, many liberals are in a tough emotional spot. They live in liberal cocoons, read cocooning news sources, and work in professions and milieus where liberal ideas are as prevalent and as uncontroversial as oxygen. They are certain that these ideas are necessary, important and just—and they can’t imagine that people have solid reasons for disagreeing with them. Yet these ideas are much less well accepted outside the bubble—and the bubbles seem to be shrinking. After the horrors of the George W. Bush administration, liberals believed that the nightmare of conservative governance had vanished, never to return. Aided by the immigration amnesty, an irresistible army of minority voters would enshrine liberal ideas into law and give Democrats a permanent lock on the machinery of an ever more powerful state.

That no longer looks likely; we can all look forward to eloquent laments, wringing of hands, impassioned statements of faith as the realization sinks in. There will be reeling, there will be writhing, and there will be fainting in coils. In the end, we can hope that liberalism will purge itself of the excesses and indulgences that come from life in the cocoon. The country needs a forward looking and level headed left; right now what we have is a mess.

 

[a_majoor]

A long article from the American Interest, which goes a long way to explaining "why" Americans seem so stupid in their strategic choices; they simply fail to understand who they are dealing with. In many cases this really makes no difference, since the United States simply dwarfs the vast majority of other nations in economic, military and social (soft) power, but once we rise to the level of "civilizations" in the Samuel Huntington sense, then the mismatch isn't nearly as great, and *we* are now dealing with entities that take generations or more to change. Ancient history tells us that things really don't change that much:
Part 1

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/01/23/know-thy-enemy/

ANCIENT WISDOM
Know Thy Enemy
JAKUB GRYGIEL
The modern Western penchant for trusting in the equal rationality of all is strategic folly. Aeschylus understood this well.

Good strategy requires a sound understanding of one’s rivals. A rival in any walk of life is, in a sense, an interlocutor. To engage him effectively in debate one must understand his speech and reasoning patterns. Without that knowledge, conversation is at best pointless, at worst self-defeating. So it is in strategy. It is futile to engage in competition with a rival power without having at least an inkling about his thoughts, fears, and desires.

The modern Western penchant for trusting in the equal rationality of all suggests otherwise. According to this conceit, there is no reason to plumb the nature of an enemy’s thinking because it is no different in essence from one’s own. But this is wrong. A rival’s response to one’s strategy is not predictable as a simply rational and universal reaction that can be generalized and grasped with relative ease. Rival states or groups respond to similar actions in different ways based on their culture, worldview, history, and the proclivities of their leaders. Good strategy, as Bernard Brodie once put it, “presupposes good anthropology and good sociology.”

One of the earliest examples we have of “good anthropology”—or rather, of being able to put oneself in the mind of the enemy—is in a 5th-century BCE Greek tragedy, The Persians, written by Aeschylus. (The translation used here is from the 2008 Loeb edition.) This drama recounts the moment when the Persian court and queen learn of Emperor Xerxes’s defeat by the Greeks in the 480 BCE naval battle near Salamis. (For an excellent description and analysis of the battle, see Barry Strauss’s The Battle of Salamis.) It ends with the arrival of the Persian king himself, in rags and with few men left, lamenting his enormous loss “in triple banks of oars”—a reference to the fearsome Greek triremes. The genius of the tragedy resides in part from the fact that it is told from the Persian perspective, with no Greek characters present. It thus stands as a Greek assessment of the Persian enemy’s mindset and political regime, and a brilliant one at that.

The Greeks defeated the Persians because of Aeschylus. I do not mean, of course, that Aeschylus alone clobbered the “barbarians” coming from the east. But he was certainly an active participant in the wars that pitted the vast and wealthy Persian empire against a collection of motley Greek city-states. He fought at Marathon in 490 BCE as a foot soldier opposing the armies of Darius I. The battle stopped the Persian onslaught in a lopsided victory for the Athenians (according to Herodotus, about 200 Athenians, among then Aeschylus’ brother, were killed while more than 6,000 Persians perished). As a middle aged and by then famous poet, Aeschylus is also likely to have fought at Salamis, probably waiting on shore to finish off Persian sailors seeking safety from their sunken ships.

Aeschylus’s material contributions to the war effort were likely on par with those of thousands of other Greeks. But his real martial input was different. In The Persians he shows a unique ability to put himself inside the Persian court, describing the wishes and fears of those powerful eastern “barbarians”, as well as sensing the dangers that arose for them from their defeat in Greece. Besides the haunting beauty of the tragedy, The Persians is an exercise in playing “red team”, assessing the enemy from one’s own perspective and surmising what is impossible to know for certain even with the best intelligence: the fears and dreams, the despair and hope, of the rival.

After all, an appraisal of material capabilities can only quantify the tangible assets of an enemy, but not his mind. No high-level spy or communication intercept can figure out an enemy’s thinking either; “signals intelligence” is always vulnerable to distortion and manipulation. Even when trustworthy it requires proper interpretation and analysis. It is not surprising, therefore, that we often fall back on measuring the enemy’s armies, economies, and populations as indicators of what he may achieve. In such an assessment of material variables, the implicit logic is: If the enemy can, he will; and if he cannot, he won’t. In modern academic parlance, we use capabilities as proxies of intentions.

This is a weak foundation to rest upon nowadays, as it was 2,500 years ago. The Persians did exactly that with the Greeks, and they lost. As the messenger bringing the bad news of the defeat to the Persian court puts it, “so far as numbers are concerned, the fleet of the barbarians would have prevailed.” As we know, despite their calculations, the barbarians did not prevail. On the other hand, Aeschylus indicates that the Greeks, or at least some Greeks such as the Athenian leader Themistocles, evaluated their enemies according to different metrics and, above all, were capable of understanding the Persian mindset. The Greek advantage was not material but intellectual.

The proof that the Greeks had assessed the Persians better than the other way around was the Battle of Salamis itself. Obviously, the outcome was a stunning Greek success, but a martial victory can be attributed to a whole host of reasons, including luck, rather than exclusively to a better anthropological understanding of the enemy. It is the Greeks’ deception of Xerxes before the battle that shows their intellectual advantage over him. As Aeschylus recounts through the words of the Persian messenger who arrived at court, the night before the battle a Greek from the Athenian fleet came to the Persian camp and said that the Greeks would try to escape with their ships before dawn. Both Herodotus and later on Plutarch recount a similar story. Herodotus adds that the Greek messenger was Sicinnus, a slave of the Athenian leader Themistocles, sent to deceive the Persians but also, by encouraging the Persian fleet to surround the Greek ships, to commit the multilateral and perhaps fraying alliance of the Greeks to battle.

In any case, the Greek deception of their enemy succeeded because Xerxes, and perhaps the Persians in general, thought that an alliance of semi-equals, such as the one the Greek city states put together, had little chance of maintaining unity in the face of Persian might. The Persians ruled over their subordinate groups, while the Greeks had to negotiate with each other. Xerxes naturally thought that his way of diplomatic management, based on autocratic rule, was superior, and so he was easily convinced by Sicinnus that the Greeks were a motley rabble of competing cities, eager to save their own skin at the expense of their neighbors. After all, he knew that without the iron fist of Persian power the Egyptian, Ionian, and Phoenician contingents would perhaps have withdrawn to their own lands. The Ionians had revolted a few years before, supported in part by Greek cities. Xerxes, projecting these thoughts to the other side, thought a similar dynamic must have been at work in the Greek coalition, which lacked the god-like rule of an emperor. Autocrats typically doubt that unity is possible without the fear of imperial command.

Confident that the Greeks were indeed trying to escape, Xerxes ordered his fleet to enter the straits near Salamis. The Persians spent the night awake and alert, eager to attack those among the Greeks who were expected to try to run away under cover of night. Dawn found the Persians tired and shocked at the sight of the Greeks ready to fight them in an environment that minimized the numerical advantage of the barbarian fleet. The Persians had been fooled and suffered a massive naval defeat.

No wonder that in The Persians Aeschylus has a poor opinion of Xerxes. Themistocles was able to deceive Xerxes because the latter massively misjudged the Greeks. Themistocles instead understood perfectly the mentality of the Persian, and put it to good use. The Persian emperor was guilty of having committed both a strategic and a tactical mistake that cost him dearly – and both mistakes stemmed from his poor assessment of the enemy. The strategic mistake was to invade Greece in the first place. To make that point, the Greek poet evokes the ghost of Darius I, Xerxes’s father. Darius had suffered his share of defeats, notably in the plain of Marathon. From that disaster he learned that the Greeks appeared divided, weak, and poor but when pushed to the brink were capable of great feats of military valor and political acumen. It was better to let them be. Moreover, when invaded by a large army, Greece fought back “by starving to death a multitude that is too vastly numerous.” Living off the land was not feasible for an enormous army in a relatively confined space of the Greek peninsula. Xerxes, however, was too arrogant to understand this and was eager to demonstrate that he was more than a “stay-at-home warrior” (in the words of his mother, the queen).

 

[a_majoor]

Part 2:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/01/23/know-thy-enemy/

This larger mistake was compounded by the tactical error, a result of Greek deception, to fight a battle at sea under conditions that favored the well-trained Athenian fleet. As the Chorus of the Persian court puts it, “Xerxes handled everything unwisely, he and his sea-boats.”

Aeschylus possessed two additional insights into the Persian mindset. First, he suggests that an autocratic regime, such as the one headed by Xerxes, has limited accountability. This influences its strategy. As the queen mother argues while waiting for news, were her son Xerxes to succeed, “he would be a very much admired man, but were he to fail—well, he is not accountable to the community, and if he comes home safe he remains ruler of this land.” An emperor is the author of victories, but not of defeats, attributed to the meddling of antagonistic gods or the poor performance of incompetent subordinates. Of course, once the news of the rout arrives, neither she nor the ghost of her husband Darius can fully exonerate Xerxes. But Aeschylus has already made the point: Autocrats and despots take risks that leaders accountable to their populations, or even to an elite class, would not. Despots are dangerous because they are unmoored from political constraints, and their advisers are often sycophantic courtiers rather than wise counselors. Perhaps more importantly, the costs of defeat are borne by imperial subjects, as the long list of Persian names presented by Aeschylus (49 in total) shows, not the emperor himself.

The defeated autocrat will, of course, be distraught. The ending of The Persians is a powerful and quick back-and-forth between Xerxes and the Chorus, full of wailing and despairing. But there is little self-examination. The more levelheaded analysis is rather done by Darius’s ghost, who returns to the underground before the arrival of the bedraggled Xerxes. Xerxes can only muster despondency in the face of the fact that he has lost so many of his “defenders” and “escorts.” (The Chorus adds that they were also “friends”, but Xerxes may have understood better that emperors have few friends!) Despair is an act of emoting, not of analysis; nor does it admit of unfulfilled responsibility.

The second insight of Aeschylus concerns the nature of imperial fears. The Persian Empire did not collapse after Salamis; indeed, it outlived Athenian democracy and the relatively brief harmony that the Greeks managed to achieve in facing the barbarian onslaught. But Aeschylus points out that the power of Persia, or for that matter of any empire, was as much in its image of power as in its material capabilities—and that image had been damaged at Salamis. The Chorus observes that after the defeat one ought to expect a fraying of imperial ties.

Not long now will those in the land of Asia
remain under Persian rule,
nor continue to pay tribute
under the compulsion of their lords,
nor fall on their faces to the ground
in awed obeisance; for the strength of the monarchy
has utterly vanished.

The weak spot of a despotic regime or an empire is that it is held together by whatever reservoir of fear it can muster. That fear is a mindset generated by an expectation of retribution rather than by the constant application of power against rebellious subjects. Such an expectation will understandably decrease when imperial forces have taken a hit in some corner of the empire, however distant. That is why the Persian Chorus can claim that the island of Salamis “holds the power of Persia in its blood-soaked soil.”

Aeschylus’s prediction—or, more precisely, the despair of the Persian Chorus—that Persia would fall apart did not come true, even though various regions under Persian rule did rebel. On the contrary, it was Greece that became more divided after the Persian Wars, particularly in the form of a long and bloody war between Athens and Sparta. But Aeschylus was not forecasting history; he was describing the worries of the imperial court and the fears of the Persian enemy. Whether those fears came to be exactly as imagined or not is in many ways irrelevant because people often act on the basis of such fears. Understanding their fears is therefore more important than figuring out whether they are justified. In this case, Aeschylus suggests that a despotic regime is always attuned to its survival and, when defeated, is likely to focus inward to assuage that fear. This may be also a veiled justification for why the Greeks chose not to purse the defeated armies of Xerxes, lest the Persians turned back in a moment of courage out of despair. Pushed too hard, their fear of internal collapse resulting from the loss of reputation may have forced the Persians to remain in Greece.

But it also suggests that the best way to keep the Persians in check was to stoke rebellion within their empire, as the Greeks had done to a degree with the Ionians and later on would do with the Egyptians. The strategic advice implied by Aeschylus was that, unless forced by a hostile army invading their lands, the Greek cities were better off not seeking a direct confrontation with a powerful empire like Persia, but should stoke Persia’s fears that its imperial subordinates may “no longer keep their tongue under guard.”

Aeschylus is not a triumphalist. He does not shy from celebrating, albeit briefly, the Greeks who were eager to fight because their freedom was at stake. They were, after all, “not called slaves or subjects to any man” as the Persians admit. And the Greeks at Salamis fought as one, defending together their liberty from barbarian oppression. (Interestingly, Aeschylus names no individual Greeks, suggesting perhaps that naval victories were products of a well-ordered fleet rather than of individual exploits. A naval defeat results in many individuals dead, with a list of Persians killed, but a naval victory has no hero, with no Greek celebrated.) But, despite this recognition of martial and political superiority, there is little triumphalism in the tragedy.

What is surprising is that, with poetic license but sine ira et studio, he generates enormous sympathy for the Persians. Aeschylus, a member of the victorious army, can summon an astounding capacity to pity the defeated enemy—an enemy that also almost two decades before the production of the tragedy caused the death of his own brother in the fields of Marathon. That capacity to put himself on the Persian side, to imagine and intuit rather than to touch and calculate the deepest emotions of the enemy, is not a symptom of relativism. Nor, as modern academics so often do, is it something to be criticized as a denigration of the “Oriental Other”, full of stereotypes and negative traits ascribed to the “barbarians.” Aeschylus with his Persians is an exemplar of the Greek intellectual capacity to understand their enemy in ways that transcended a simple calculation of the “correlation of forces.” That is what gave the Greeks an advantage. They won because of Aeschylus; that is, they won because of their ability to understand the Persian court and emperor. They beat their enemy’s mind before they engaged his forces.

Another way to put this is that a great power risks defeat when it lacks figures like Aeschylus, poets who can feel the enemy before they face him in battle. Competition and war are not driven by mathematical equations but are a clash of minds and wills, fears and desires, often only loosely connected to the material capabilities at hand. In the geopolitical competitions that we are facing and are likely to face in the future, do we have our own Aeschyluses?

Jakub Grygiel is the George H.W. Bush Senior Associate Professor of International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Another explanation is that America seems stupid in its strategic choices because it is divided.  At least two ways in which this could happen: divided (paralyzed) legislative branch unable to make coherent policy (if the legislative branch is in control); or an imprudent executive branch going its own way without the real consent of much of the nation (if the executive branch is in control).

Going over some de Tocqueville, I compare what he observed (or thought he observed) with what is the case today and conclude that the balance of legislative and executive power in the US has shifted so that the executive is more like the monarchy of his time (powerful).  The legislative branch is divided, but is not the root of policy problems because it is not exercising power (division prevents it from doing so, which effectively leaves the executive branch in charge).  The executive exercises power; factionalism deters the legislative branch from exerting sufficient unified resolve to reassert its constitutional prerogatives.  If the executive channeled the general sense of the nation it might be effective; an executive channeling even what common ground can be found in a divided nation might be effective.  An executive branch charting its own course is unlikely to judge well, is likely to make mistakes born of ideological stubbornness, and is likely to lack more than a minority of real popular support.

Uncharitable summary: the US is f*<ked because the legislative branch is often paralyzed and an uninspired man who takes criticism poorly and can not compromise is in charge doing his own thing.  The first strategy for a divided America should either be to find an outstanding executive leader, or for the legislative branch to reassert itself.  The latter is more likely to find and serve the common interests of the nation; the former is a crap shoot.

 

[tomahawk6]

The founding fathers were wise beyond measure.They had lived their lives under the tyranny of the Crown and did not want that for the new country.Throw off one tyrant for another.The division of powers was pure genius that has stood the test of time.Ulimately the power to elect their represenatives has placed the citizenry in ultimate control of the nation.Obama was elected by a margin of 51% twice.Yet from the outset we had a Republican House and a Democrat Senate which has put a brake on Obama's plan to remake America.An uneasy citizenry has now put the Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress.If Obama wants to accomplish anything then he will have to compromise or not.The final two years should be interesting.