The state's oldest rival

As I wend my rather leisurely way through Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order, the author's wide-angle view of the social imperatives and pressures that shape governments adds a useful lens to some contemporary struggles.

One very broad thesis, which may in fact be a near-consensus view among Fukuyama's sources, is that the history of the state is in large part the history of the sovereign power's struggle to neutralize powerful subjects' (or citizens') biological imperative to pass their advantages on to their children  -- that is, to neutralize the force of kinship ties, which are the means of building rival power centers. Hence Chinese emperors  periodically decimated the aristocracy and installed merit-based bureaucracy, while the aristocracy in turn would in periods of dynastic weakness find ways to game the system and win back inheritable offices and privileges; the Mamluk and Ottoman empires kidnapped or drafted promising youths from outlying areas and trained them as an elite slave class that either could not marry or could not pass on wealth or position to their offspring; the French and Spanish kings, desperate for cash to fight endless wars, colluded with an entrenched and tax-exempt aristocracy to extract wealth from everyone else .A handful of fortunate lands developed strong central governments willing to be held accountable  in exchange for diverse elites' consent to be taxed. In all cases, however, the gravitational pull is toward elites' irrepressible will to to pass their elite status to their children.

In this light, current battles in the U.S. over the estate tax, marked by bitter denunciations of the "death tax,"  seem especially visceral.  Also touching a deep nerve are struggles to equalize educational opportunity. Witness this complaint and response by Megan McArdle and E.D. Kain:

Wolf Munch Rock Award

Andrew Sullivan has announced the winners of his dyspeptic annual "awards," designed for the most part to highlight the dogmatism, intellectual dishonesty, mindless aggression, and self-promoting pretensions of our punditocracy.

As an antacid, let me introduce the first annual Wolf-Munch-Rock Award. Named for Financial Times columnists Martin Wolf, Wolfgang Munchau and Gideon Rachman, mainstays of that oasis of dispassionate analysis the FT Comment page, this award goes to an observer of world news and trends whose writings exhibit deep (if understated) expertise, fact- and evidence-based exposition, wide-angle perspective on large-scale trends, and theses based more on observation and analysis than ideology.

First year winners by decree: Martin Wolf, Wolfgang Munchau, Gideon Rachman. As an example of the way these guys deploy facts in support of a thesis --or plow through facts as they replay their search for a thesis - take Gideon Rachman's recent Five events that have defined 2007.

Rachman begins with a disarmingly modest, seemingly pedestrian justification for the 'exercise':

If you want to make sense of world affairs, it is useful to identify the most significant events. Also, I like making lists. So here goes.

Rachman's choices: 1) The surge, 2) Putin's Munich speech (accusing the Americans of "an almost uncontained hyper use of force ... that is plunging the world into an abyss of conflicts"), 3) the credit crunch, 4) Petrochina becoming the world's most valuable company (for a while), and 5) Musharrraf's 'mini-coup' in Pakistan. An odd mix of the military, the political, and the financial. Random? Bound only by his love of list-making? Not quite:

Is there a common theme linking these five events? Clearly. The link is the growing strain on the world's sole superpower. America is locked into a draining and demoralising war. Russia, an old adversary, is becoming more assertive. China, a new rival, is on the rise. Pakistan, a vital ally, threatens to fall apart. The US economy is under more strain than for years. Happy new year.

Surprise! A general unifying theory, delivered, again, with a modesty that implicitly acknowledges the complexity of events and the provisional nature of such judgments (as does the use of the perfect tense in the headline). This is not "the decline of the west," not a Jeremiad against American hubris, not a trump of doom - just a clear-headed look across disparate theaters at a "growing strain."

Wolf Munch Rock Award Part II is here
Part III is here

Parsi, Sick, and Cohen lament in concert as U.S. spurns fuel deal

As the drama of Iran's election and post-election resistance movement unfolded last year, I came to appreciate the blogs of Gary Sick and Scott Lucas - the latter, Enduring America. deploying an array of Iranian and Iranian-American voices and other analysts along with Lucas. * Both blogs did a good job mapping out the extent to which the Revolutionary Guard, in concert with (or in increasing control of) religious hardliners, had effected a militarist takeover of key ministries and industries during the Ahmadinejad era.   Both, at the same time, offered long-term perspective on the missed opportunities between the U.S. and Iranian governments, whose interests potentially converged on several fronts over the last two decades.  The New York Times' Roger Cohen, while perhaps somewhat too credulous about the benign intentions of the Iranian government prior to the stolen election of last June, basically shared these perspectives.

In the past week, as the Obama Administration spurned the fuel swap deal with Iran brokered by Turkey and Brazil -- with U.S. encouragement, they claim -- those who have seen potential in wide-angle negotiations between the U.S. and Iran have writhed in frustration. These include Cohen, Sick and National Iranian American Council president Trita Parsi, whose ABC news was reposted on Enduring America. Their arguments overlap, and mutually reinforce, e.g., that the new agreement preserved the essential features of the original deal (albeit at a point at which Iran has had another eight months to process fuel -- the 1200 kilograms to be removed from Iran now represents 55% rather than 70% of its stock, according to the U.S); that the Administration's chief grounds for rejecting the deal -- Iran's insistence that it would continue to enrich uranium -- was not a condition of the original agreement; and that spurning Brazil and Turkey sets back the new multilateralism that Obama seemed last year to embrace.  Behold their shared agony:

P.S., I love EU: Rachman's startled valentine to the European Union

It's time for another Wolf Munch Rock Award - so named because the truth is often hard to digest.

It's also named for Financial Times columnists Martin Wolf, Wolfgang Munchau and Gideon Rachman, mainstays of that oasis of dispassionate analysis the FT Comment page. It goes to an observer of world news and trends whose writings exhibit deep (if understated) expertise, fact- and evidence-based exposition, wide-angle perspective on large-scale trends, and theses based more on observation and analysis than ideology.

This week's award goes to Gideon Rachman, for a column that exemplifies those virtues, garnished with Rachman's own signature understatement, irony, self-deprecation and contrarianism -- in this case directed against himself. A backhanded tribute to the European Union, the column is also a blackflipped mea culpa: I was wrong because I was right:

I am ready to retire as a eurosceptic. The European Union is in trouble. But rather than smirking – which would be the normal reaction of a sceptic – I am alarmed.

The premise is simple enough. European political union is a pipe dream, and a dangerous one. European economic union, on the other hand, "is the best example we have of international governance," a pillar of stability and prosperity. If protectionist pressures unravel the benefits of the common market, the results could be catastrophic.

What's so very interesting, though, is Rachman's personal journey from loving to hate the EU for its political pretensions to learning to love its now-endangered economic accomplishments. Even more interesting, it's the very weaknesses entailed by incomplete political union than now endanger economic cooperation. Rachman despised the pretensions, recognized the weaknesses and now trembles for the Rube Goldberg contraption that fostered European prosperity and freedom in spite of it all:

In January 2001, I arrived in Brussels with several firm and unfavourable convictions about the EU. I believed that most ordinary Europeans felt far more loyalty to their nation than to Europe. I thought that steadily enlarging the powers of Brussels was undemocratic and dangerous. I reckoned that in a crisis, nationalist instincts would come to the fore. I suspected that the EU’s new currency – the euro – was liable to run into trouble. And I believed that the Brussels-based elite was a “new class” that had confused its own interests with those of the continent of Europe.

Eight years on, I look back at these old prejudices – and smile at my foresight. The past few years have provided a graphic demonstration of the feeble popular support for the European project....The strain of the economic crisis is indeed opening up divisions within the Union. An emergency EU summit was called this weekend to combat protectionism. Several of the new EU members from central Europe are facing banking and financial crises – and the older members have refused to bail them out....

Arguably, all my darkest suspicions about the European project are about to be vindicated. So it is an odd time to renounce euroscepticism.

But it is precisely the threat to the EU that has focused my mind. Plans for a political union in Europe were always crazy. But the four freedoms already established by the EU – free movement of goods, people, services and capital – are huge and tangible achievements. It would be terrible to see them rolled back.

Appreciation for those "huge and tangible achievements" under stress focuses the mind indeed:

If Europe starts rolling back the four freedoms, the implications will stretch well beyond economics. Protectionism and nationalism are close cousins. The principles of consultation, co-operation and open borders within the EU have helped to repress the old, nationalist demons.

Protectionism and nationalism are close cousins. Variations on that warning have been plentiful on the FT comment page. It's the overriding back-to-the-future fear haunting the current crisis. But this phrasing is particularly resonant -- filtered as it is through Rachman's longstanding respect for European nationalist resistance to EU political ambitions.

Rachman closes with a trope that captures the full irony of his turnaround:

Strangely enough, I now feel a certain protective warmth towards the embattled eurocrats in their Brussels skyscrapers. This would have been hard to imagine when I arrived in the city all those years ago. But it has finally happened. I love Big Brother.

"Big Brother," it seems, has turned out to be King Log rather than King Stork.

This column epitomizes what I value in the FT Comment page. FT columnists write "essays" in the original sense -- trials, thought experiments. Often, they visibly think their way through to a conclusion -- and it's not just an empty rhetorical exercise leading us to a false eureka. Rachman, Wolf, Stephens, Munchau et al often take readers through their own uncertainties, ambivalences, fears: they frame policymakers' dilemmas with sensitivity and an appreciation for hard choices. I'm not sure how a crew with such congruent sensibilities was assembled. But in this era of newspaper meltdown, I look at the page with the same anxious don't-know-what-you've-got-till-its-under-siege regard that Rachman casts on the EU.

Obama's wide-angle lens

In post-debate commentary, I heard many versions of the verdict, "this was a draw." On one level that seems the intuitive reaction. Neither candidate made a fool of himself. Neither failed to articulate his core positions on foreign policy. Neither scored the stereotypical knockout punch.

But this debate was no draw. Throughout, Obama displayed a broader strategic vision, the ability to put his position on a particular issue in the context of his broader goals. Above all, he returned over and over to the misallocation of our resources in Iraq, and how it's fixated and distorted and enervated our engagement with the world. Near the end, he summed up masterfully the full extent of this strategic disaster (as he's done repeatedly since March, but few have been listening), and in the process he also summed up McCain:

Look, over the last eight years, this administration, along with Senator McCain, have been solely focused on Iraq. That has been their priority. That has been where all our resources have gone.

In the meantime, bin Laden is still out there. He is not captured. He is not killed. Al Qaeda is resurgent.

In the meantime, we've got challenges, for example, with China, where we are borrowing billions of dollars. They now hold a trillion dollars' worth of our debt. And they are active in countries like -- in regions like Latin America, and Asia, and Africa. They are -- the conspicuousness of their presence is only matched by our absence, because we've been focused on Iraq.

We have weakened our capacity to project power around the world because we have viewed everything through this single lens, not to mention, look at our economy. We are now spending $10 billion or more every month.

And that means we can't provide health care to people who need it. We can't invest in science and technology, which will determine whether or not we are going to be competitive in the long term.

There has never been a country on Earth that saw its economy decline and yet maintained its military superiority. So this is a national security issue.

We haven't adequately funded veterans' care. I sit on the Veterans Affairs Committee, and we've got -- I meet veterans all across the country who are trying to figure out, "How can I get disability payments? I've got post-traumatic stress disorder, and yet I can't get treatment."

So we have put all chips in, right there, and nobody is talking about losing this war. What we are talking about is recognizing that the next president has to have a broader strategic vision about all the challenges that we face.

That's been missing over the last eight years. That sense is something that I want to restore.

We have viewed everything through this single lens. That is McCain in a nutshell. In fact, it's McCain at his best, because if he still believes in anything but his own right to power, it's that we must win in Iraq. In that coda above, though Obama didn't personalize the diagnosis, he was literally describing the McCain we had just seen, the McCain who reiterated and reiterated:

This strategy has succeeded. And we are winning in Iraq. And we will come home with victory and with honor. And that withdrawal is the result of every counterinsurgency that succeeds.

And I want to tell you that now that we will succeed and our troops will come home, and not in defeat, that we will see a stable ally in the region and a fledgling democracy.

The consequences of defeat would have been increased Iranian influence. It would have been increase in sectarian violence. It would have been a wider war, which the United States of America might have had to come back.

So there was a lot at stake there. And thanks to this great general, David Petraeus, and the troops who serve under him, they have succeeded. And we are winning in Iraq, and we will come home. And we will come home as we have when we have won other wars and not in defeat.

This is not to say that McCain was not right about the surge, or about the terrible price of leaving total chaos in Iraq. But the reason he was right on that point is embedded in a world view that led us headlong in the disaster of invading the wrong enemy -- a one-size-fits-all Churchillian pose for every foreign policy challenge we face. McCain is more invested than anyone except Bush in the monomania of our Iraq entanglement. His insistence that a 100-year presence in Iraq would be acceptable was an almost poetic expression of the extent of his own investment. It's as if the possibility of victory there is so sweet that it encompasses his vision of the United States' place in the world.

Throughout the debate, Obama showed that he has a wider lens, a fuller grasp of the interconnection between economics and energy and security and America's place in the community of nations. He was in command of his facts, he was in command of his emotions, he was in command of the terms of the debate. I think polls will show that for a significant segment of independent voters, tonight he crossed the commander-in-chief threshold.

p.s. One caveat: since McCain kept insisting that Obama was bent on failure in Iraq, Obama might have mentioned that the Iraqi government has basically endorsed his timetable, and even Bush has essentially acceded to it.

Question for Obama: Why is arming a "moderate" Syrian opposition no longer a "fantasy"?

Back in January Obama suggested to David Remnick that trying to arm and shape a "moderate" opposition to Assad was futile:

... I asked Obama if he was haunted by Syria, and, though the mask of his equipoise rarely slips, an indignant expression crossed his face. “I am haunted by what’s happened,” he said. “I am not haunted by my decision not to engage in another Middle Eastern war. It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which our involvement in Syria would have led to a better outcome, short of us being willing to undertake an effort in size and scope similar to what we did in Iraq. And when I hear people suggesting that somehow if we had just financed and armed the opposition earlier, that somehow Assad would be gone by now and we’d have a peaceful transition, it’s magical thinking.

“It’s not as if we didn’t discuss this extensively down in the Situation Room. It’s not as if we did not solicit—and continue to solicit—opinions from a wide range of folks. Very early in this process, I actually asked the C.I.A. to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with much. We have looked at this from every angle. 

More recently, he told members of Congress that the notion that the U.S. could have conjured an effective moderate opposition was "a fantasy."  Now, though, as he told Chuck Todd in an interview airing today, his nascent strategy in Syria depends on building such an opposition. When Todd challenged him as to how ISIS could be defeated in Syria without U.S. troops, here was his response: