The multipolar moment has arrived -- and it's nothing like Americans imagined.
BY PARAG KHANNA | DECEMBER 2010
Looking for a sign of when the multipolar moment suddenly seemed real? You could do worse than mark the day when Brazil and Turkey -- two of the world's most avidly internationalist emerging powers -- joined together this May to announce they had stepped in to broker a nuclear-fuel swap deal with Iran that potentially -- though sadly not actually -- paved the way toward a peaceful solution to the standoff. Turkey and Brazil aren't superpowers, nor are they permanent U.N. Security Council members. But just as U.S. President Barack Obama came into office preaching a renewed focus on multilateralism, rising powers are reminding us that respect for hierarchy is no longer on anyone's agenda.
What a difference a couple of decades makes. A little over 20 years ago, then U.S. President George H.W. Bush -- who had just witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and saw the Soviet Union disintegrating before his very eyes -- stood at the granite podium of the U.N. General Assembly in New York and proclaimed a "new world order," a U.S.-dominated international system "where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle." Two decades later, the "new new world order" we are in fact living looks almost nothing like what Bush -- and most Americans -- imagined or hoped.
COMMENTS (26)
SHARE:
Twitter
Reddit
Buzz
More... The United States still has the world's most powerful military, of course, but its utility is diminishing as the capacity to deter and resist spreads. Just look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Military might and political influence no longer necessarily go together, and too much of the former can even undermine the latter. More fundamentally, the world has quickly become multipolar, with the European Union a larger economic player than the United States while China rises quickly on all measures of hard and soft power. Obama couldn't give the "New World Order" speech today; he'd have to negotiate it first with his peers in Brussels and Beijing. And as for democracy: Meet authoritarian state capitalism, a new entry into our lexicon that underscores the non-Western options every state can pursue today. Nobody's talking about the Washington Consensus anymore -- instead the Beijing Consensus, the Mumbai Consensus, and even something only half-jokingly called the Canuck Consensus are competing for the hearts and minds of global elites.
Rather than a world of alliances, it's a world of multi-alignment. Globalization means never having to choose sides. Look at the Persian Gulf states. They make big-ticket arms deals with Washington, buying weapons to recycle their petrodollars and deter Iran; sign huge trade agreements with China, where ever more of their oil flows; and negotiate currency arrangements with the European Union. If there is any doubt as to the general lack of foresight that governs international relations today, just consider how America has ceased certain joint weapons production with Israel as punishment for Israel's selling sensitive technology to China, which in turn sells missile technologies to Iran, whose leadership wishes to eradicate Israel from the map. Everyone is playing everyone else in what seem like endless single-iteration prisoner's dilemma games.
Bush Sr. chose to give the speech at the United Nations for a reason: America was the preeminent power, but he was a multilateralist. Paralyzed during the Cold War, the United Nations now had a chance toplay the central role as arbiter of global governance for which it was envisioned. But rather than personify multilateralism itself, the United Nations is proving to be at best just one manifestation of it. Free-standing functional agencies like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund -- which has only become more important in the wake of the financial crisis -- are our only effective global bodies, and they are solely economic in nature. But the G-20 has hardly lived up to its billing as the new "steering committee for the world." Before the most recent Seoul summit, world leaders described U.S. proposals for harmonizing current account surpluses and deficits as "clueless." The Security Council has long ceased to be legitimate or effective, with little prospect for reform in sight. As we learned so painfully this year, the United Nations can't forge a global climate deal and can't make the world meet the Millennium Development Goals. For every issue there are now several specialized agencies, like the World Food Program and Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, that mostly secure their own funding contributions and are evolving at their own pace.
The closest thing we have to multilateral governance happens on a regional level, and it is far more promising, whether the deeply entrenched and supranational European Union, the rejuvenated Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or the nascent African Union. Each is building a regional order tailored to its members' priorities and level of development. On Sudan and Somalia, it's Uganda leading the new diplomatic and peacekeeping push. For Palestine, the Arab League is considering a peacekeeping force. And on Iran, Turkey is now in the lead.
The world of 1990 was expected to remain fundamentally international. Yet instead its very structure has changed as globalization has empowered legions of transnational nonstate actors from corporations to NGOs to religious groups. As a result, today's world features overlapping and competing claims to authority and legitimacy. The Gates Foundation gives away more money each year than any European country. Villagers in Nigeria expect Shell to deliver the goods, not their government. And Oxfam shapes the British development agency's priorities more than the reverse.
Neither the United States nor the United Nations can put the genie back in the bottle. With each passing year, deal-making at Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative become more important than the glacial advance of empty declarations at international summits. These and other venues are the places where the "new new world order" is being built. And it's happening from the bottom up rather than the top down.
ADRIANO MACHADO/AFP/Getty Images
Parag Khanna isa senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of the forthcoming How to Run theWorld: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance and The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-First Century.
01/12 The Fourth Wave
Can the world avoid a fresh crisis?
BY IAN BREMMER | DECEMBER 2010
The global economy looks to be headed toward what Mohamed El-Erian has called a "new normal" after the market meltdown and financial upheaval of the last two years. But along the way, we're in for a bumpy ride.
So far, the crisis has come in the form of waves repeatedly testing the ability and willingness of the world's established powers and rising stars to build a cooperative approach to our largest transnational problems. The bad news is that the men and women who gathered to save the world in Washington in late 2008 and London in 2009 have turned their attention to pressing problems at home. The worse news is that some of those problems have now given rise to a third wave, one which will ensure a new round of conflict in the international arena.
COMMENTS (1)
SHARE:
Twitter
Reddit
Buzz
More... The first wave began with Lehman Brothers' collapse in September 2008 and continued through the meetings of the G-20 in London in April 2009, when political leaders in both the developed and developing worlds, persuaded that the global financial system was in mortal danger, came together to take action. They proved that something like international consensus is possible, at least on those rare occasions when everyone seems to face the same threat at the same time. World leaders and their governments moved into high gear with stimulus spending, austerity plans, and assorted other drastic remedies, while heads of state gathered to work toward global agreements. For once, the need for some form of collective action was clear, and the major powers sang from the same choir book as they seemed to open up to the rising powers clamoring for an enhanced role in the new G-20 era.
The second wave arguably began with the December 2009 declaration from White House economic advisor Larry Summers that America's recession was over. Technically, he was right: The U.S. economy had resumed growing, albeit slowly. But politically, he created something like a "Mission Accomplished" moment for President Barack Obama's administration, a problem exacerbated by his comment that "most professional forecasters are now looking for a return to job growth by spring" of 2010. His announcement soothed the fears of those who were listening to the dire predictions from my friend, economist Nouriel Roubini, and others who warned -- and are still warning -- that the recession might not yet have hit bottom. The easing of fears, however, reduced the need for unity on the international stage.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 2010: The Global Thinkers Issue This year, when it became clear that developed economies were not going to bounce back quickly, voters began turning on their leaders. The Japanese electorate, which dismissed the Liberal Democratic Party in 2009 after more than a half-century of nearly uninterrupted rule, began punishing the party that took its place. Emergency steps by the European Union and International Monetary Fund pulled Greece, Spain, and other shaky European economies back from the brink of insolvency, but at a high political cost: In May, the British electorate dispensed with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and voters in Germany's most populous state defeated Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. In the United States, Democrats, who control the White House and held large majorities in both houses of Congress, faced a tsunami of public anger in this year's midterm elections.
At the same time, emerging markets rebounded, further scrambling the world's political order. China is leading the way, but a relatively sunny economic outlook in India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and other new heavyweights has contributed to the sense that the balance of power in international politics has shifted away from the old G-7 countries. That doesn't mean the G-20 will emerge as an uncontested new center of global governance; if anything, it has become clearer this year that consensus might now be even more elusive.
Differences within the expanded group over the proper role for government in an economy have come to the fore with American pundits like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pushing for new stimulus as Europeans commit themselves to weather the political storms following their austerity measures and China, Russia, and the Persian Gulf's Arab monarchies forge ahead with a state-directed form of capitalism. World leaders have seen their interests diverge as different countries emerge from the crisis at different speeds and with different tools. One big result is that proposals to address transnational problems like climate change and the need to create a new international financial architecture are now as dead as the Doha global trade round, stuck in limbo since 2001.
The third wave of the crisis hit this fall when IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn used the fund's annual meeting to sound the alarm that governments are beginning to deploy their currencies as weapons, while World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned that a self-defeating round of tit-for-tat protectionism could return the world to the misery of the 1930s. U.S. and European leaders have begun pressing the Chinese leadership on the value of China's currency, and Beijing has responded with the diplomatic equivalent of "mind your own (failing) business." Although the risk might be overstated, economists like Raghuram Rajan are right to caution of the dangers of a currency war, as exporters compete to undercut overseas competition with lower currency values. And El-Erian is surely correct that we're headed for a "new normal" in the United States, not a return to the heady days of the 1990s. Whether we're in for the "lost decade" that he and others have warned about remains to be seen.
What does the latest wave herald? To start, it's a sign of how far we've come from the initial emergency, when political leaders in both the developed and the developing worlds shared an interest in crafting a coherent emergency response. The last year has shown how temporary a moment that was. Now the international arena is becoming a conflict zone as competing interests pit one state against another, complicating efforts to build the sort of international consensus called for by Oxford University economist Paul Collier and others as a safeguard against precisely the sort of international strife we're already starting to see.
It's hard to overstate the importance of this latest shift. For better and for worse, globalization -- all the various processes by which ideas, information, people, money, goods, and services now cross international borders at unprecedented speed -- has been the primary geopolitical and economic trend of the past several decades. But the financial crisis and its aftermath have proven that no one has forgotten how walls are built, and this moment is in many ways more dangerous for the global economy's future than anything we experienced during the Cold War, threats of nuclear war notwithstanding. That's because of globalization's very success up until now; this level of global economic interdependence did not exist when the planet was divided into opposing ideological camps. A bad day over there is still a bad day over there. But now it's a bad day over here, too.
A return to the economic crisis, political polarization, and resulting violence of the 1930s is mercifully unlikely. Too many emerging players have too much to lose. These governments hope to profit from the global economy, not destroy it. But we are seeing the beginnings of increasingly nationalist, state-driven capital and trade policies from the world's largest economies. Along with them, expect a sharp spike in national security tensions, state-driven industrial espionage, and a more confrontational approach on all sorts of issues from climate change to currency policy to weapons proliferation.
So it's time for the big powers to step up. If they can't succeed in solving some of these conflicts, expect a fourth wave even worse than the ones we've already ridden.
ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images
Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and author of The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
BY IAN BREMMER | DECEMBER 2010
The global economy looks to be headed toward what Mohamed El-Erian has called a "new normal" after the market meltdown and financial upheaval of the last two years. But along the way, we're in for a bumpy ride.
So far, the crisis has come in the form of waves repeatedly testing the ability and willingness of the world's established powers and rising stars to build a cooperative approach to our largest transnational problems. The bad news is that the men and women who gathered to save the world in Washington in late 2008 and London in 2009 have turned their attention to pressing problems at home. The worse news is that some of those problems have now given rise to a third wave, one which will ensure a new round of conflict in the international arena.
COMMENTS (1)
SHARE:
Buzz
More... The first wave began with Lehman Brothers' collapse in September 2008 and continued through the meetings of the G-20 in London in April 2009, when political leaders in both the developed and developing worlds, persuaded that the global financial system was in mortal danger, came together to take action. They proved that something like international consensus is possible, at least on those rare occasions when everyone seems to face the same threat at the same time. World leaders and their governments moved into high gear with stimulus spending, austerity plans, and assorted other drastic remedies, while heads of state gathered to work toward global agreements. For once, the need for some form of collective action was clear, and the major powers sang from the same choir book as they seemed to open up to the rising powers clamoring for an enhanced role in the new G-20 era.
The second wave arguably began with the December 2009 declaration from White House economic advisor Larry Summers that America's recession was over. Technically, he was right: The U.S. economy had resumed growing, albeit slowly. But politically, he created something like a "Mission Accomplished" moment for President Barack Obama's administration, a problem exacerbated by his comment that "most professional forecasters are now looking for a return to job growth by spring" of 2010. His announcement soothed the fears of those who were listening to the dire predictions from my friend, economist Nouriel Roubini, and others who warned -- and are still warning -- that the recession might not yet have hit bottom. The easing of fears, however, reduced the need for unity on the international stage.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 2010: The Global Thinkers Issue This year, when it became clear that developed economies were not going to bounce back quickly, voters began turning on their leaders. The Japanese electorate, which dismissed the Liberal Democratic Party in 2009 after more than a half-century of nearly uninterrupted rule, began punishing the party that took its place. Emergency steps by the European Union and International Monetary Fund pulled Greece, Spain, and other shaky European economies back from the brink of insolvency, but at a high political cost: In May, the British electorate dispensed with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and voters in Germany's most populous state defeated Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. In the United States, Democrats, who control the White House and held large majorities in both houses of Congress, faced a tsunami of public anger in this year's midterm elections.
At the same time, emerging markets rebounded, further scrambling the world's political order. China is leading the way, but a relatively sunny economic outlook in India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and other new heavyweights has contributed to the sense that the balance of power in international politics has shifted away from the old G-7 countries. That doesn't mean the G-20 will emerge as an uncontested new center of global governance; if anything, it has become clearer this year that consensus might now be even more elusive.
Differences within the expanded group over the proper role for government in an economy have come to the fore with American pundits like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pushing for new stimulus as Europeans commit themselves to weather the political storms following their austerity measures and China, Russia, and the Persian Gulf's Arab monarchies forge ahead with a state-directed form of capitalism. World leaders have seen their interests diverge as different countries emerge from the crisis at different speeds and with different tools. One big result is that proposals to address transnational problems like climate change and the need to create a new international financial architecture are now as dead as the Doha global trade round, stuck in limbo since 2001.
The third wave of the crisis hit this fall when IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn used the fund's annual meeting to sound the alarm that governments are beginning to deploy their currencies as weapons, while World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned that a self-defeating round of tit-for-tat protectionism could return the world to the misery of the 1930s. U.S. and European leaders have begun pressing the Chinese leadership on the value of China's currency, and Beijing has responded with the diplomatic equivalent of "mind your own (failing) business." Although the risk might be overstated, economists like Raghuram Rajan are right to caution of the dangers of a currency war, as exporters compete to undercut overseas competition with lower currency values. And El-Erian is surely correct that we're headed for a "new normal" in the United States, not a return to the heady days of the 1990s. Whether we're in for the "lost decade" that he and others have warned about remains to be seen.
What does the latest wave herald? To start, it's a sign of how far we've come from the initial emergency, when political leaders in both the developed and the developing worlds shared an interest in crafting a coherent emergency response. The last year has shown how temporary a moment that was. Now the international arena is becoming a conflict zone as competing interests pit one state against another, complicating efforts to build the sort of international consensus called for by Oxford University economist Paul Collier and others as a safeguard against precisely the sort of international strife we're already starting to see.
It's hard to overstate the importance of this latest shift. For better and for worse, globalization -- all the various processes by which ideas, information, people, money, goods, and services now cross international borders at unprecedented speed -- has been the primary geopolitical and economic trend of the past several decades. But the financial crisis and its aftermath have proven that no one has forgotten how walls are built, and this moment is in many ways more dangerous for the global economy's future than anything we experienced during the Cold War, threats of nuclear war notwithstanding. That's because of globalization's very success up until now; this level of global economic interdependence did not exist when the planet was divided into opposing ideological camps. A bad day over there is still a bad day over there. But now it's a bad day over here, too.
A return to the economic crisis, political polarization, and resulting violence of the 1930s is mercifully unlikely. Too many emerging players have too much to lose. These governments hope to profit from the global economy, not destroy it. But we are seeing the beginnings of increasingly nationalist, state-driven capital and trade policies from the world's largest economies. Along with them, expect a sharp spike in national security tensions, state-driven industrial espionage, and a more confrontational approach on all sorts of issues from climate change to currency policy to weapons proliferation.
So it's time for the big powers to step up. If they can't succeed in solving some of these conflicts, expect a fourth wave even worse than the ones we've already ridden.
ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images
Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and author of The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
01/12 The End of the 'Peaceful Rise'?
Even China's elites don't know where it's headed.
BY ELIZABETH ECONOMY | DECEMBER 2010
For all the breathless headlines, there is no real clarity as to what kind of global power China will become over the next critical decade. But if the international community is in the dark about China's 21st-century trajectory, it is likely because there is no real consensus among the Chinese themselves.
Throughout the first decades of the reform era, China under Deng Xiaoping quietly and gradually sought to join a wide range of international organizations and regimes. Top policy advisors such as economist Wu Jinglian -- who eventually earned the moniker "Mr. Market" -- openly favored market reform and integration with the global economy. At the same time, Deng retained earlier elements of Chinese strategy, such as the "Four Modernizations" (agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology) aimed at transforming China into a self-reliant power by the early 21st century; and military strategists like Adm. Liu Huaqing, who led the Chinese navy during the 1980s, were laying out a vision for a seafaring force that would be the equal of the United States by the mid-21st century.
COMMENTS (39)
SHARE:
Twitter
Reddit
Buzz
More... The result of Deng's blending of old and new was the emergence of a global power that nonetheless maintained a low political and military profile. Chinese foreign policy hewed closely to one of Deng's guiding principles -- "hide brightness and cherish obscurity."
Yet the consensus of the Deng era began to fray over the past decade. As China's economy continued to grow and the country's presence overseas expanded deep into Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, Deng's dictum became out of sync with reality. With some outsiders beginning to envision a newly empowered China posing a threat to the West, senior Communist Party official Zheng Bijian sought to explain China's growing power and influence to the rest of the world. Arriving at the notion of "peaceful rise," which he started using in 2003 and popularized in a 2005 Foreign Affairs article, Zheng argued that unlike other former great powers, China's rise would not be based on the exploitation of others. Rather, the theory -- some might say marketing slogan -- stressed that China's rise would benefit the Chinese people and the rest of the world.
Most of China's top leaders quickly came out in support of the motto. But the debate over it was instructive: Some Chinese scholars worried that the word "rise" was too provocative for foreigners, while others didn't like the word "peace," arguing it wouldn't allow for China to be aggressive if the need arose, for instance should Taiwan suddenly declare independence. As Yan Xuetong, a professor at Tsinghua University, argued at the time, "All peace strategies that would prevent China's rise must be excluded." In official circles, the term soon morphed into the more soporific "peaceful development."
Today, without Beijing's clear guidance, a great debate has arisen among China's intelligentsia over the country's role in the world. Some are clearly ready to see China assert itself as a global power. At the height of the financial crisis, for example, China's central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan suggested the time was ripe for the world to move away from the dollar as the reserve currency. International relations scholars such as Fudan University's Shen Dingli openly tout China's right to establish military bases to protect its overseas interests. But other Chinese officials and thinkers just as clearly sense danger in such boldness. "I don't think China should become another U.S. in global politics, and it couldn't even if it wanted to," scholar Wang Jisi has opined.
This debate about how China can advance its interests in the world is not simply a choice between seizing the moment and staying the course. Some Chinese officials have called on their government to shoulder more international responsibilities. Premier Wen Jiabao, for example, said in an April speech that China would step up its contributions to international efforts in such areas as education, medical care, and debt reduction because it is "the aspiration of the international community and in China's own interest, too." Others, such as reporter Wang Di, have written of the need for large Chinese companies operating abroad to consider corporate social responsibility, lest they be labeled forces of "arrogant capital expansion."
Perhaps the most profound challenge, as several Chinese thinkers now articulate, is not any external threat, but rather the changing political culture inside China. "Three decades of reform have led to a rapid increase of wealth in China, and this in turn has also made the Chinese people arrogant," Ye Hailin, research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote in a stinging critique of current Chinese sensibilities. "The Chinese people are no longer tolerant of criticisms."
How this debate will shape China's future remains an open question. But perhaps the most important point is that it is taking place at all -- not simply behind the famously closed doors of Zhongnanhai, but before the Chinese people and the rest of the world.
Save big when you subscribe to FP. PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images
Elizabeth Economy is C.V. Starr senior fellow and director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
BY ELIZABETH ECONOMY | DECEMBER 2010
For all the breathless headlines, there is no real clarity as to what kind of global power China will become over the next critical decade. But if the international community is in the dark about China's 21st-century trajectory, it is likely because there is no real consensus among the Chinese themselves.
Throughout the first decades of the reform era, China under Deng Xiaoping quietly and gradually sought to join a wide range of international organizations and regimes. Top policy advisors such as economist Wu Jinglian -- who eventually earned the moniker "Mr. Market" -- openly favored market reform and integration with the global economy. At the same time, Deng retained earlier elements of Chinese strategy, such as the "Four Modernizations" (agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology) aimed at transforming China into a self-reliant power by the early 21st century; and military strategists like Adm. Liu Huaqing, who led the Chinese navy during the 1980s, were laying out a vision for a seafaring force that would be the equal of the United States by the mid-21st century.
COMMENTS (39)
SHARE:
Buzz
More... The result of Deng's blending of old and new was the emergence of a global power that nonetheless maintained a low political and military profile. Chinese foreign policy hewed closely to one of Deng's guiding principles -- "hide brightness and cherish obscurity."
Yet the consensus of the Deng era began to fray over the past decade. As China's economy continued to grow and the country's presence overseas expanded deep into Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, Deng's dictum became out of sync with reality. With some outsiders beginning to envision a newly empowered China posing a threat to the West, senior Communist Party official Zheng Bijian sought to explain China's growing power and influence to the rest of the world. Arriving at the notion of "peaceful rise," which he started using in 2003 and popularized in a 2005 Foreign Affairs article, Zheng argued that unlike other former great powers, China's rise would not be based on the exploitation of others. Rather, the theory -- some might say marketing slogan -- stressed that China's rise would benefit the Chinese people and the rest of the world.
Most of China's top leaders quickly came out in support of the motto. But the debate over it was instructive: Some Chinese scholars worried that the word "rise" was too provocative for foreigners, while others didn't like the word "peace," arguing it wouldn't allow for China to be aggressive if the need arose, for instance should Taiwan suddenly declare independence. As Yan Xuetong, a professor at Tsinghua University, argued at the time, "All peace strategies that would prevent China's rise must be excluded." In official circles, the term soon morphed into the more soporific "peaceful development."
Today, without Beijing's clear guidance, a great debate has arisen among China's intelligentsia over the country's role in the world. Some are clearly ready to see China assert itself as a global power. At the height of the financial crisis, for example, China's central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan suggested the time was ripe for the world to move away from the dollar as the reserve currency. International relations scholars such as Fudan University's Shen Dingli openly tout China's right to establish military bases to protect its overseas interests. But other Chinese officials and thinkers just as clearly sense danger in such boldness. "I don't think China should become another U.S. in global politics, and it couldn't even if it wanted to," scholar Wang Jisi has opined.
This debate about how China can advance its interests in the world is not simply a choice between seizing the moment and staying the course. Some Chinese officials have called on their government to shoulder more international responsibilities. Premier Wen Jiabao, for example, said in an April speech that China would step up its contributions to international efforts in such areas as education, medical care, and debt reduction because it is "the aspiration of the international community and in China's own interest, too." Others, such as reporter Wang Di, have written of the need for large Chinese companies operating abroad to consider corporate social responsibility, lest they be labeled forces of "arrogant capital expansion."
Perhaps the most profound challenge, as several Chinese thinkers now articulate, is not any external threat, but rather the changing political culture inside China. "Three decades of reform have led to a rapid increase of wealth in China, and this in turn has also made the Chinese people arrogant," Ye Hailin, research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote in a stinging critique of current Chinese sensibilities. "The Chinese people are no longer tolerant of criticisms."
How this debate will shape China's future remains an open question. But perhaps the most important point is that it is taking place at all -- not simply behind the famously closed doors of Zhongnanhai, but before the Chinese people and the rest of the world.
Save big when you subscribe to FP. PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images
Elizabeth Economy is C.V. Starr senior fellow and director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
20/10 Who's the rogue superpower?
Who's the rogue superpower?
Posted By Stephen M. Walt
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - 12:45 PM
Here's something that probably won't shock you: I tend to agree with Paul Krugman more than I disagree with him. But not always. Case in point is his column last Sunday, which condemned China's hardline response to Japan's seizure of a Chinese trawler that had violated Japanese waters, and especially its decision to pressure Japan by cutting off the export of rare earth materials. He went on to criticize some other Chinese actions (including its chronically devalued currency), and said this added up to a picture of China as a "rogue economic superpower, unwilling to play by the rules."
I agree that China's overheated response to the trawler incident was foolish, if only because it will reinforce Asian concerns about China's rising power and make it more likely that other states will start taking concerted action to resist its influence. It's normal for great powers to throw their weight around -- if you don't believe me, just read a good history of U.S. relations with Latin America -- but doing so before one's power position is fully consolidated is a bad idea.
By the way, with the exception of the War of 1812, avoiding stupid quarrels with powerful countries was one of the smartest things that the United States did in its rise to superpower status. Not only did it avoid tangling with other major powers until after it had created the world's largest and most advanced economy, it also let the Eurasian powers bloody each other in ruinous wars, jumping in only when the balance of power was in jeopardy and leaving itself in a dominant position after both world wars (and especially WWII). This wasn't a perfect strategy, or even a noble one, but it was supremely self-interested approach that ensured U.S. primacy for decades.
If China's leaders are really smart, they'd act in a similar fashion today. They'd let the United States run itself to exhaustion in the Middle East, Central Asia, and elsewhere, while they stayed out of trouble, cultivated profitable relations with everyone, and made sure that their long-term development plans didn't get derailed. Picking fights with neighbors over minor issues is pointless, especially now, and on this point Krugman and I are in synch.
Where I part company is his characterization of China as a "rogue economic power," and his conclusion that "China's response to the trawler incident is… further evidence that the world's newest economic superpower isn't prepared to assume the responsibilities that go with that status."
For starters, this view assumes that China (or any other great power) has "responsibilities" to the global community. U.S. leaders like to proclaim that we have enormous "responsibilities" and "obligations" to the rest of the world, but this is usually just a phrase our leaders use to justify actions taken for our own (supposed) benefit. The leaders of any country are primarily responsible to their own citizens, which is why international cooperation is often elusive and why conflicts of interest routinely arise between sovereign states.
Moreover, the declaration that China is a rogue power that isn't "playing by the rules" neglects to mention that 1) many of these rules were devised by the United States and its allies and not by China, and 2) the United States has been all too willing to ignore the rules when it suited us. We went to war against Serbia in 1999 and against Iraq in 2003 without authorization from the U.N. Security Council, for example, even though we helped write the U.N. Charter that says such actions are illegal. Similarly, the US played the leading role in devising the Bretton Woods economic system after World War II, but it abandoned the gold standard in 1971 when this arrangement was no longer convenient for us.
The real lesson of the trawler/rare earth incident is that great powers can ignore the rules when they think they have to, and they can often get away with it. We should therefore expect China's leaders to pursue whatever policies they believe are in their interests, whether or not those policies are good for us, good for the planet as a whole, or consistent with some prior set of norms or rules.
Here's a penetrating leap into the obvious: sometimes China's interests will converge with ours; at other times, they will diverge sharply. Sometimes China's leaders will calculate their interests carefully and adopt smart policies for achieving them; at other times they will make costly blunders. Ditto their counterparts in Washington: sometimes U.S. leaders will act with insight and foresight and sometimes they will stumble headlong into disaster. Welcome to the real world. The bottom line is that it's neither illuminating nor helpful to hold China to a standard of "responsible" behavior that we fall short of ourselves. I mean, which country is currently detaining foreigners without trial in Guantanamo, and firing drone missiles into any country where it thinks al Qaeda might be lurking?
Posted By Stephen M. Walt
Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - 12:45 PM
Here's something that probably won't shock you: I tend to agree with Paul Krugman more than I disagree with him. But not always. Case in point is his column last Sunday, which condemned China's hardline response to Japan's seizure of a Chinese trawler that had violated Japanese waters, and especially its decision to pressure Japan by cutting off the export of rare earth materials. He went on to criticize some other Chinese actions (including its chronically devalued currency), and said this added up to a picture of China as a "rogue economic superpower, unwilling to play by the rules."
I agree that China's overheated response to the trawler incident was foolish, if only because it will reinforce Asian concerns about China's rising power and make it more likely that other states will start taking concerted action to resist its influence. It's normal for great powers to throw their weight around -- if you don't believe me, just read a good history of U.S. relations with Latin America -- but doing so before one's power position is fully consolidated is a bad idea.
By the way, with the exception of the War of 1812, avoiding stupid quarrels with powerful countries was one of the smartest things that the United States did in its rise to superpower status. Not only did it avoid tangling with other major powers until after it had created the world's largest and most advanced economy, it also let the Eurasian powers bloody each other in ruinous wars, jumping in only when the balance of power was in jeopardy and leaving itself in a dominant position after both world wars (and especially WWII). This wasn't a perfect strategy, or even a noble one, but it was supremely self-interested approach that ensured U.S. primacy for decades.
If China's leaders are really smart, they'd act in a similar fashion today. They'd let the United States run itself to exhaustion in the Middle East, Central Asia, and elsewhere, while they stayed out of trouble, cultivated profitable relations with everyone, and made sure that their long-term development plans didn't get derailed. Picking fights with neighbors over minor issues is pointless, especially now, and on this point Krugman and I are in synch.
Where I part company is his characterization of China as a "rogue economic power," and his conclusion that "China's response to the trawler incident is… further evidence that the world's newest economic superpower isn't prepared to assume the responsibilities that go with that status."
For starters, this view assumes that China (or any other great power) has "responsibilities" to the global community. U.S. leaders like to proclaim that we have enormous "responsibilities" and "obligations" to the rest of the world, but this is usually just a phrase our leaders use to justify actions taken for our own (supposed) benefit. The leaders of any country are primarily responsible to their own citizens, which is why international cooperation is often elusive and why conflicts of interest routinely arise between sovereign states.
Moreover, the declaration that China is a rogue power that isn't "playing by the rules" neglects to mention that 1) many of these rules were devised by the United States and its allies and not by China, and 2) the United States has been all too willing to ignore the rules when it suited us. We went to war against Serbia in 1999 and against Iraq in 2003 without authorization from the U.N. Security Council, for example, even though we helped write the U.N. Charter that says such actions are illegal. Similarly, the US played the leading role in devising the Bretton Woods economic system after World War II, but it abandoned the gold standard in 1971 when this arrangement was no longer convenient for us.
The real lesson of the trawler/rare earth incident is that great powers can ignore the rules when they think they have to, and they can often get away with it. We should therefore expect China's leaders to pursue whatever policies they believe are in their interests, whether or not those policies are good for us, good for the planet as a whole, or consistent with some prior set of norms or rules.
Here's a penetrating leap into the obvious: sometimes China's interests will converge with ours; at other times, they will diverge sharply. Sometimes China's leaders will calculate their interests carefully and adopt smart policies for achieving them; at other times they will make costly blunders. Ditto their counterparts in Washington: sometimes U.S. leaders will act with insight and foresight and sometimes they will stumble headlong into disaster. Welcome to the real world. The bottom line is that it's neither illuminating nor helpful to hold China to a standard of "responsible" behavior that we fall short of ourselves. I mean, which country is currently detaining foreigners without trial in Guantanamo, and firing drone missiles into any country where it thinks al Qaeda might be lurking?
01/12 Clinton on 'reassurance tour' in Central Asia in wake of WikiLeaks
Posted By P.J. Aroon Wednesday, December 1, 2010 - 4:25 PM
Secretary Clinton is in Astana, Kazakhstan, today, attending the summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, where she has been doing a "reassurance tour" (read: awkward conversations!) after WikiLeaks' recent disclosure of candid State Department cables. In a news conference today with Kazakh Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev, she said that no country has decided not to work with the United States any longer or have discussions with it. Implying that her damage-control work is going well, Clinton said in her remarks:
Of course, there's a big difference between not continuing to work with the United States at all and simply being more restrained and less forthcoming.
Meanwhile, Saudabayev seemed cool as a cucumber in his remarks and displayed an "it's no big deal" attitude toward the WikiLeaks revelations, even though some cables were not so flattering about Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev (seen at left greeting Clinton). Saudabayev said:
Something tells me this nonchalant tone is all a facade. Everybody now has documentation of how diplomats really speak.
Secretary Clinton is in Astana, Kazakhstan, today, attending the summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, where she has been doing a "reassurance tour" (read: awkward conversations!) after WikiLeaks' recent disclosure of candid State Department cables. In a news conference today with Kazakh Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev, she said that no country has decided not to work with the United States any longer or have discussions with it. Implying that her damage-control work is going well, Clinton said in her remarks:
I have had the opportunity to meet with many leaders here at the summit in Astana.… I have certainly raised the issue of the leaks in order to assure our colleagues that it will not in any way interfere with American diplomacy or our commitment to continuing important work that is ongoing. I have not had any concerns expressed about whether any nation will not continue to work with and discuss matters of importance to us both, going forward.…
And I anticipate that there will be a lot of questions that people have every right
and reason to ask, and we stand ready to discuss them at any time with our counterparts around the world.
Of course, there's a big difference between not continuing to work with the United States at all and simply being more restrained and less forthcoming.
Meanwhile, Saudabayev seemed cool as a cucumber in his remarks and displayed an "it's no big deal" attitude toward the WikiLeaks revelations, even though some cables were not so flattering about Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev (seen at left greeting Clinton). Saudabayev said:
I believe that what has happened is part of a normal cost, or a normal price, that one has occasionally to pay while we lead our work. That is why we will be able to live through this incident, as we have through others. And, as head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in my country, now declare that this will have no effect for our strategic partnership between the United States and Kazakhstan.
Something tells me this nonchalant tone is all a facade. Everybody now has documentation of how diplomats really speak.
01/12 Gates: Saudis want to fight Iran to the last American
Posted By Marc Lynch Wednesday, December 1, 2010 - 8:10 AM
"The Saudis always want to fight Iranians to the last American" and it is "time for them to get in the game," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tells the French foreign minister in a newly released cable from February 2010. This captures perfectly the point I made yesterday about how to read the reporting in these cables about the private hawkishness of Arab leaders. The question of Arabs and Iran was never an information problem -- it's an analysis problem. The antipathy which many of these leaders feel for Iran has long been well known. But so has their reluctance to do anything about it. And so have the internal divisions within Arab governments and Gulf ruling families, and their deep fears of either Iranian retaliation or popular upheaval, and their bottomless hunger for U.S. weapons systems, and their hopes that the U.S. would magically solve their problems for them, and the disconnect between the palaces and the public.
Iran hawks have been gloating that the quotes from a few Arab leaders in the initial cable release vindicate their analysis and discredit skeptics of military action against Iran. It doesn't. Gates' comment about the Saudis needing to "get into the game" came almost two years after King Abdullah's now-famous "cut off the head of the snake" comment. And another cable from January 2008 shows Abdullah telling Sarkozy that Saudi Arabia "does not want to inflame the situation," recommends "continued international engagement" with Iran and "is not yet ready to take any action besides diplomacy." Maybe, just maybe, those private remarks weren't actually a very reliable guide to what the Saudis will really do in public?
The way the Iran hawks have been leaping at a few juicy quotes while ignoring the entire well-known context only shows the ongoing poverty of their analysis. I would expect better from the serious analysts on the hawkish side, but, well, there you are.
(Note: updated to include the Sarkozy-Abdullah cable)
"The Saudis always want to fight Iranians to the last American" and it is "time for them to get in the game," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tells the French foreign minister in a newly released cable from February 2010. This captures perfectly the point I made yesterday about how to read the reporting in these cables about the private hawkishness of Arab leaders. The question of Arabs and Iran was never an information problem -- it's an analysis problem. The antipathy which many of these leaders feel for Iran has long been well known. But so has their reluctance to do anything about it. And so have the internal divisions within Arab governments and Gulf ruling families, and their deep fears of either Iranian retaliation or popular upheaval, and their bottomless hunger for U.S. weapons systems, and their hopes that the U.S. would magically solve their problems for them, and the disconnect between the palaces and the public.
Iran hawks have been gloating that the quotes from a few Arab leaders in the initial cable release vindicate their analysis and discredit skeptics of military action against Iran. It doesn't. Gates' comment about the Saudis needing to "get into the game" came almost two years after King Abdullah's now-famous "cut off the head of the snake" comment. And another cable from January 2008 shows Abdullah telling Sarkozy that Saudi Arabia "does not want to inflame the situation," recommends "continued international engagement" with Iran and "is not yet ready to take any action besides diplomacy." Maybe, just maybe, those private remarks weren't actually a very reliable guide to what the Saudis will really do in public?
The way the Iran hawks have been leaping at a few juicy quotes while ignoring the entire well-known context only shows the ongoing poverty of their analysis. I would expect better from the serious analysts on the hawkish side, but, well, there you are.
(Note: updated to include the Sarkozy-Abdullah cable)
01/12 Why Can't Arabs and Iranians Just Get Along?
The 14 centuries of bad blood behind the WikiLeaks cables.
BY JOHN LIMBERT | DECEMBER 1, 2010
If we believe the recently leaked U.S. State Department messages, some leaders of Arab states harbor unkind thoughts about their Iranian neighbors. In addition to describing them in terms like "liar" and "snake," they have expressed a wish to American visitors that this troublesome neighbor would somehow go away. For his part, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stung by these harsh epithets, claims that the entire WikiLeaks affair is a foreign conspiracy to sow discord between Iranians and Arabs and to strengthen the Americans' claim that Iran has become a diplomatic polecat in its own region.
Arab-Iranian hostility is not uniform. Iranians enjoy correct if not warm relations with their Qatari and Omani neighbors. Relations with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are icy, with the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait falling somewhere in the middle. When pushed to the wall, both sides have been capable of putting aside old prejudices and grievances (real and imagined) and can act in their own interest and maintain cordial state-to-state ties. Nevertheless, the big picture is negative, as the cables dramatically show.
What is going on here? What is behind this intra-Islamic and intraregional strife? Are those Arabs denouncing the Iranians speaking just for themselves or for a broader segment of public opinion? Why do Iranians beat their chests for Palestine, an Arab cause? And despite what they say, do the Saudis and others really want the Americans -- and perhaps the Israelis by extension -- to attack Iran?
Much Contact, Little Understanding
COMMENTS (16)
SHARE:
Twitter
Reddit
Buzz
More... It belabors the obvious to say Arab-Iranian relations are complicated. Whatever their relations, these two peoples do not suffer from a lack of contact. Where the Iranian and Arab worlds meet -- along both shores of the Persian Gulf, in southwestern Iran, and in Iraq -- there is frequent intermarriage, migration, bilingualism, and commerce. A majority of Arab Bahrainis and Iraqis share the Shiite Islam of the Iranians; millions of Khuzestani Iranians speak Arabic as a mother tongue; an Iranian people (the Kurds) comprise about 20 percent of Iraq's population; and many prominent families of the Arab Gulf states trace their origins to southern Iran.
All this contact, however, has not brought understanding. On both sides, there is mistrust and little appreciation for the "others" and how they view the world. Some of this suspicion comes from religious differences. On the Arab side, the ruling Sunni families (in Bahrain, for example) are wary of their own Shiite communities. Extreme religious ideologues on both sides view the others as heretics and outside the community of believers. Both sides continue to fight the sectarian battles of the seventh century. An Arab visitor to Iran once complained to me that he was frequently asked, "Sir, are you a Muslim or a Sunni?"
Also in the mix is extreme ethnic and national pride. Iranians are justly proud of their imperial history and of maintaining a distinct identity for more than 2,500 years through an often tragic history of invasions and defeats. Iranians are proud of their national language, their literature, and their achievements in science, scholarship, and the arts. Arabs have a similar pride in their ancient civilization, their traditions, and, in particular, their remarkable language.
Too often, however, this pride has become chauvinism and has made each side look down on the other and denigrate its achievements and civilization. To many Arabs, the Iranians were arrogant, luxury-loving fire-worshippers and pagans until the Arabs brought them the enlightened message of Islam. To many Iranians, the Arabs were uncultured nomads who destroyed the great Iranian civilization of the ancient Near East. Such stereotypes fly in the face of reality, but they persist and continue to exercise their power.
Mutual ignorance compounds the hostility. Despite centuries of interaction and contact, neither side knows much about the other. What do Arabs and Iranians know of each other's art, literature, history, politics, and traditions? Very little. Perhaps a close parallel is the relations between Mexicans and Americans. As Americans we appreciate Mexican food (or a variety of it) and Mexican music. But what do most of us know of Mexico's culture and history? Very little indeed. So in this mutual ignorance it is easier to dismiss the others as "liars," "snakes," and "heretics" than make the effort required for understanding.
Arab Monarchs: Endangered Species
Topping all these layers of religious and ethnic difference lie harsh political realities. The Arab states of the Persian Gulf are traditional monarchies dominated by ruling families; the Islamic Republic of Iran is a revolutionary, populist state with republican forms resting on a theocratic base. And the last 60 years have not been kind to monarchies. The score card of crashed thrones is dramatic: Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958), Libya (1969), Ethiopia (1974), Afghanistan (1973), and Iran (1979). Who is next? Who can blame Persian Gulf rulers for feeling like an endangered species when their large non-Arab neighbor to the north -- born in a revolution that overthrew an Iranian king of kings -- not only follows what they see as heresy in religion, but espouses a political ideology that rejects the very idea of monarchy? Although the Islamic Republic has never been very good at diplomatic niceties, even those niceties it does practice cannot hide the fact that it rejects monarchs as illegitimate.
Adding to this venomous blend is Iran's own diplomatic ineptitude, which has long fed its neighbors' suspicions. For 30 years the Islamic Republic has shown an ability to make gratuitous enemies both near (e.g., Kuwait) and far (e.g., Argentina). Tehran's charm offensives have been shortlived and too often have degenerated into crude threats and old territorial claims. Deep-seated Iranian prejudices against Arabs may be too strong to suppress for very long.
Iran No Friend of Ours
Perhaps to distract its population from obvious economic and political failures at home, the Islamic Republic has beaten the drum for Arab causes and shown itself more Arab than the Arabs in shouting for oppressed Palestinians at, for example, "Quds Day," which the Iranians tacked into Ramadan. Such action -- seen as an attempt to alienate neighboring governments from their populations -- has not won Iran many friends in Arab capitals. These campaigns from Tehran have raised suspicions that the Iranians' true motive is not to help oppressed Arabs, but to embarrass Arab governments -- which might be more amenable to working with the Israelis than their publics -- and ultimately to re-create the Islamic Revolution on neighboring soil. Under these conditions, it should come as no surprise that rulers in Riyadh and elsewhere might hope someone will "do something" about their troublesome neighbor.
Do the Arabs really want a war with Iran? Probably not, given the potentially disastrous economic and political consequences of such a conflict. But with all their pent-up grievances, both ancient and recent, they are not above sharing frustration, particularly with those American visitors who might -- for very different reasons -- share their feelings of hostility.
BY JOHN LIMBERT | DECEMBER 1, 2010
If we believe the recently leaked U.S. State Department messages, some leaders of Arab states harbor unkind thoughts about their Iranian neighbors. In addition to describing them in terms like "liar" and "snake," they have expressed a wish to American visitors that this troublesome neighbor would somehow go away. For his part, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stung by these harsh epithets, claims that the entire WikiLeaks affair is a foreign conspiracy to sow discord between Iranians and Arabs and to strengthen the Americans' claim that Iran has become a diplomatic polecat in its own region.
Arab-Iranian hostility is not uniform. Iranians enjoy correct if not warm relations with their Qatari and Omani neighbors. Relations with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are icy, with the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait falling somewhere in the middle. When pushed to the wall, both sides have been capable of putting aside old prejudices and grievances (real and imagined) and can act in their own interest and maintain cordial state-to-state ties. Nevertheless, the big picture is negative, as the cables dramatically show.
What is going on here? What is behind this intra-Islamic and intraregional strife? Are those Arabs denouncing the Iranians speaking just for themselves or for a broader segment of public opinion? Why do Iranians beat their chests for Palestine, an Arab cause? And despite what they say, do the Saudis and others really want the Americans -- and perhaps the Israelis by extension -- to attack Iran?
Much Contact, Little Understanding
COMMENTS (16)
SHARE:
Buzz
More... It belabors the obvious to say Arab-Iranian relations are complicated. Whatever their relations, these two peoples do not suffer from a lack of contact. Where the Iranian and Arab worlds meet -- along both shores of the Persian Gulf, in southwestern Iran, and in Iraq -- there is frequent intermarriage, migration, bilingualism, and commerce. A majority of Arab Bahrainis and Iraqis share the Shiite Islam of the Iranians; millions of Khuzestani Iranians speak Arabic as a mother tongue; an Iranian people (the Kurds) comprise about 20 percent of Iraq's population; and many prominent families of the Arab Gulf states trace their origins to southern Iran.
All this contact, however, has not brought understanding. On both sides, there is mistrust and little appreciation for the "others" and how they view the world. Some of this suspicion comes from religious differences. On the Arab side, the ruling Sunni families (in Bahrain, for example) are wary of their own Shiite communities. Extreme religious ideologues on both sides view the others as heretics and outside the community of believers. Both sides continue to fight the sectarian battles of the seventh century. An Arab visitor to Iran once complained to me that he was frequently asked, "Sir, are you a Muslim or a Sunni?"
Also in the mix is extreme ethnic and national pride. Iranians are justly proud of their imperial history and of maintaining a distinct identity for more than 2,500 years through an often tragic history of invasions and defeats. Iranians are proud of their national language, their literature, and their achievements in science, scholarship, and the arts. Arabs have a similar pride in their ancient civilization, their traditions, and, in particular, their remarkable language.
Too often, however, this pride has become chauvinism and has made each side look down on the other and denigrate its achievements and civilization. To many Arabs, the Iranians were arrogant, luxury-loving fire-worshippers and pagans until the Arabs brought them the enlightened message of Islam. To many Iranians, the Arabs were uncultured nomads who destroyed the great Iranian civilization of the ancient Near East. Such stereotypes fly in the face of reality, but they persist and continue to exercise their power.
Mutual ignorance compounds the hostility. Despite centuries of interaction and contact, neither side knows much about the other. What do Arabs and Iranians know of each other's art, literature, history, politics, and traditions? Very little. Perhaps a close parallel is the relations between Mexicans and Americans. As Americans we appreciate Mexican food (or a variety of it) and Mexican music. But what do most of us know of Mexico's culture and history? Very little indeed. So in this mutual ignorance it is easier to dismiss the others as "liars," "snakes," and "heretics" than make the effort required for understanding.
Arab Monarchs: Endangered Species
Topping all these layers of religious and ethnic difference lie harsh political realities. The Arab states of the Persian Gulf are traditional monarchies dominated by ruling families; the Islamic Republic of Iran is a revolutionary, populist state with republican forms resting on a theocratic base. And the last 60 years have not been kind to monarchies. The score card of crashed thrones is dramatic: Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958), Libya (1969), Ethiopia (1974), Afghanistan (1973), and Iran (1979). Who is next? Who can blame Persian Gulf rulers for feeling like an endangered species when their large non-Arab neighbor to the north -- born in a revolution that overthrew an Iranian king of kings -- not only follows what they see as heresy in religion, but espouses a political ideology that rejects the very idea of monarchy? Although the Islamic Republic has never been very good at diplomatic niceties, even those niceties it does practice cannot hide the fact that it rejects monarchs as illegitimate.
Adding to this venomous blend is Iran's own diplomatic ineptitude, which has long fed its neighbors' suspicions. For 30 years the Islamic Republic has shown an ability to make gratuitous enemies both near (e.g., Kuwait) and far (e.g., Argentina). Tehran's charm offensives have been shortlived and too often have degenerated into crude threats and old territorial claims. Deep-seated Iranian prejudices against Arabs may be too strong to suppress for very long.
Iran No Friend of Ours
Perhaps to distract its population from obvious economic and political failures at home, the Islamic Republic has beaten the drum for Arab causes and shown itself more Arab than the Arabs in shouting for oppressed Palestinians at, for example, "Quds Day," which the Iranians tacked into Ramadan. Such action -- seen as an attempt to alienate neighboring governments from their populations -- has not won Iran many friends in Arab capitals. These campaigns from Tehran have raised suspicions that the Iranians' true motive is not to help oppressed Arabs, but to embarrass Arab governments -- which might be more amenable to working with the Israelis than their publics -- and ultimately to re-create the Islamic Revolution on neighboring soil. Under these conditions, it should come as no surprise that rulers in Riyadh and elsewhere might hope someone will "do something" about their troublesome neighbor.
Do the Arabs really want a war with Iran? Probably not, given the potentially disastrous economic and political consequences of such a conflict. But with all their pent-up grievances, both ancient and recent, they are not above sharing frustration, particularly with those American visitors who might -- for very different reasons -- share their feelings of hostility.
01/12 The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers
Foreign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2010's global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them.
DECEMBER 2010
1. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates
for stepping up as the world's states falter.
Chairman, Berkshire Hathaway | Omaha, Neb.
Co-chair, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation | Seattle
If you were one of the 1,011 billionaires in the world, what would you do with all that money? Famed investor Warren Buffett (net worth: an estimated $47 billion) and Microsoft founder Bill Gates ($54 billion) have an idea: Give at least half of it away.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FP's Second Annual Top 100 Global Thinkers The two billionaires have been traveling the world -- first to China and soon to India, as well as around the United States -- on a mission to create a global club of "Great Givers" who will transform philanthropy from a pastime of the wealthy into a calling for everyone who is rich. Since 2006, when Buffett pledged to give 99 percent of his assets away to charity -- much of it to Gates's foundation, which spends more than $2 billion yearly on programs to improve public health and development -- the two have emerged as an unlikely and formidable pairing of wealthy evangelists, preaching a breathtakingly ambitious new gospel of how capitalist riches can solve global problems. That became clear this year when Gates joined up with Buffett's project to convince the wealthiest elite from Silicon Valley to Shanghai to donate half their wealth, a challenge that, if answered by all America's billionaires, let alone the world's, could bring an estimated $600 billion to needy and deserving causes. So far, 40 billionaires have signed up.
As the world has lost confidence in the ability of countries and institutions like the United Nations to solve global problems, Gates offers an attractive alternative vision: that the business community's relentless drive to innovate can help with our biggest challenges, from malaria to food scarcity to illiteracy. And he has the money to prove it. At a recent conference on HIV/AIDS, Gates pledged more than the government of either Norway or Australia, and almost as much as the entire European Commission. His foundation's funding for research into microbicides -- gels that would prevent HIV transmission -- helped lead to the first real breakthrough this July, when a candidate gel showed 39 percent effectiveness. Whether it's a green revolution for Africa or a vaccine for malaria, Gates's agenda is now the global agenda -- and he and Buffett won't stop until they see it through.
Mark Peterson/Redux
DECEMBER 2010
1. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates
for stepping up as the world's states falter.
Chairman, Berkshire Hathaway | Omaha, Neb.
Co-chair, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation | Seattle
If you were one of the 1,011 billionaires in the world, what would you do with all that money? Famed investor Warren Buffett (net worth: an estimated $47 billion) and Microsoft founder Bill Gates ($54 billion) have an idea: Give at least half of it away.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FP's Second Annual Top 100 Global Thinkers The two billionaires have been traveling the world -- first to China and soon to India, as well as around the United States -- on a mission to create a global club of "Great Givers" who will transform philanthropy from a pastime of the wealthy into a calling for everyone who is rich. Since 2006, when Buffett pledged to give 99 percent of his assets away to charity -- much of it to Gates's foundation, which spends more than $2 billion yearly on programs to improve public health and development -- the two have emerged as an unlikely and formidable pairing of wealthy evangelists, preaching a breathtakingly ambitious new gospel of how capitalist riches can solve global problems. That became clear this year when Gates joined up with Buffett's project to convince the wealthiest elite from Silicon Valley to Shanghai to donate half their wealth, a challenge that, if answered by all America's billionaires, let alone the world's, could bring an estimated $600 billion to needy and deserving causes. So far, 40 billionaires have signed up.
As the world has lost confidence in the ability of countries and institutions like the United Nations to solve global problems, Gates offers an attractive alternative vision: that the business community's relentless drive to innovate can help with our biggest challenges, from malaria to food scarcity to illiteracy. And he has the money to prove it. At a recent conference on HIV/AIDS, Gates pledged more than the government of either Norway or Australia, and almost as much as the entire European Commission. His foundation's funding for research into microbicides -- gels that would prevent HIV transmission -- helped lead to the first real breakthrough this July, when a candidate gel showed 39 percent effectiveness. Whether it's a green revolution for Africa or a vaccine for malaria, Gates's agenda is now the global agenda -- and he and Buffett won't stop until they see it through.
Mark Peterson/Redux
03/12 Spain on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
European leaders need to stop whinging and start solving their debt crisis for real.
BY EDWARD HUGH | DECEMBER 3, 2010
Europe's debt crisis continues to spread -- Greece and Ireland have already had to seek shelter from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, while bond spreads in Portugal and Spain are giving strong indication they might meet the same fate in the not-too-distant future. And as the crisis develops, far from sending a much-needed signal of confidence and self-assurance, the rhetorical register we're seeing from Europe's leaders is becoming increasingly nerve-racked and even at times apocalyptic. In a typically troubling example, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy warned recently that the eurozone, and even the European Union itself, were in the process of fighting for their lives, telling the astonished audience at a Brussels think-tank conference, "We're in a survival crisis."
COMMENTS (4)
SHARE:
Twitter
Reddit
Buzz
More... Only a few days later, another top EU official, European Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia, stunned market observers with a statement that was widely interpreted as suggesting there might be something behind the rumors that Spain's banking and government debt statistics were not as reliable as they should be. "There are no doubts that there is doubt [about Spain]," he said in an interview with a Spanish radio station, doubts that are connected with the possibility that Spain could "have something more than what it has already put on the table."
Then, Olli Rehn, the European Union's commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, tactlessly chose a day of extreme market tension to tell the world that in his considered opinion, the Spanish government was in danger of not complying with its 2011 deficit target of 6 percent. The result was predictable, and the next day yields on both Spanish and Italian bonds hit euro-era highs. The situation was brought under control only thanks to substantial intervention on the part of the European Central Bank (ECB), as well as bank President Jean-Claude Trichet's promise of a major change in policy at the next meeting. As American economist Barry Eichengreen recently put it: "You can say one thing for the European Commission, the ECB and the German government: they never miss an opportunity to make things worse."
Far from serving as a call to arms, comments like these, especially at such a sensitive moment in the latest round of the crisis, merely leave the people who make them looking ridiculous and trivialize the institutions they represent. The European Union itself is not in any kind of survival crisis. Indeed, the risk that the union will actually break up is so small as to be virtually nonexistent -- and even though doubts remain about the long-term survival of the euro in its present form, this is not the immediate problem. The only meaningful way to ensure that the common currency survives in the long run is to find ways to adequately resolve Europe's present problems. Wandering from the script, as Van Rompuy is wont to do, simply doesn't help.
The problem Europe faces, as seen by the markets, is that it has half-emerged from one economic crisis only to be engulfed by another: the challenge of maintaining under reformed pension and health-care systems in the face of the most rapid population aging in human history, with very sharp increases in the elderly dependency ratio looming over the next 10 years. Add to this challenge the doubts about who is actually going to be responsible for whom: Will Irish citizens pay through taxes the losses incurred by Irish banks in the property bubble, or will the German government recapitalize the German banks that were irresponsible enough to lend the Irish the money to have the bubble in the first place? And at the heart of this sovereign-debt crisis is another tricky question: Whose sovereign goes with whose debt?
We are now into the third wave of the present crisis. The first tremors were effectively noticed around the turn of the year, when Abu Dhabi announced it was not going to take responsibility for all the excesses of its poorer but more reckless neighbor, Dubai. This news turned all eyes toward Greece and the issue of who was going to foot the bill for all that under-the-table deficit spending that had been going on since the euro was introduced.
Then in May came the second wave, when doubts about how the Greek crisis was being handled increasingly led investors to ask how many more countries on Europe's periphery might be engaging in reckless deficit spending without credible plans to rein them in. The elephant in the room was Spain because while it is evident that Ireland's and Portugal's problems are more serious in the short term, Spain is without a doubt the most dangerous threat due to its size and the level of its private sector's external indebtedness.
Last spring, a combination of well-timed crisis measures and good public relations were able to take the heat off Spain. What then followed could be called the long cool summer, as Spanish leaders grew increasingly relaxed and even almost nonchalant about their troubles. As Finance Minister Elena Salgado put it at the time, "I don't have nightmares anymore."
But the worst wasn't over, and the sleepless nights must now be coming back because at the start of November a third wave broke out. Although most of the focus was initially on Ireland and Portugal, Spain and then Italy became increasingly drawn in via a process that financial analysts aptly call "contagion."
But if the second wave was characterized by an obsession with the need for fiscal austerity -- ruthlessly cutting budgets -- this time the issue has broadened, with investors asking themselves and Europe's leaders the awkward question as to how, amid all this austerity, these countries are ever going to be able to return their economies to growth. What worries investors is not the size of this year's deficit, but the level of debt that will eventually exist and the extent to which this will be payable. To pay their debt (whether in the public or private sector), these countries need economic growth, and it is exactly here that Greece has come back to haunt everyone. Despite the sterling efforts the Greek government is making to keep to its fiscal-deficit targets, the economy is contracting so fast there that the level of debt (as a percentage of GDP) is simply rising and rising.
So the Spanish government finds itself trapped. All it can do to please the markets is keep to its existing targets. But it is here we find a Catch-22 double bind because keeping to target means watching the economy continue to contract, which means that the level of debt will continue to rise. Worse, if there is no return to growth, then Spain's 20 percent-plus unemployment rate will not come down, which means more nonperforming loans and eventually more bank bailouts. Spain is caught in a self-perpetuating loop, and investors know it.
Although it might be hard to believe given all those hair-raising quotes, what Europe's leaders at the EU and national levels are in theory focusing their strategy on is maintaining confidence on the part of both investors and consumers.
Consumer confidence is much easier to count on if consumers know what is happening. Confidence-building exercises of the "together we can do it" kind don't work if the man and woman on the street are continually being told by their government that the worst is over and that the country is on the verge of recovery. ("Let's wait a few weeks and we will see them [the green shoots of economic recovery]," Salgado told journalists outside the Spanish parliament at the height of the May crisis.)
Spanish leaders have consistently failed to prepare the public to accept the difficult sacrifices that will be required to really break out of the crisis, so it is hardly surprising if some workers decide to go on strike when told they will now need to continue to work until they are 67, rather than stopping at the current retirement age of 65.
And the same goes for investors, and it is here that the problem has become particularly tricky. When Europe's leaders are not busying themselves denouncing the very people they need to borrow money from as "speculators," they seem to be giving them replies to questions they aren't asking. Most savvy investors now understand that EU countries are involved in collective fiscal-adjustment programs to reduce their deficit level. Measures like extensions in the working life, reductions in government salaries, and increases in consumer taxes are now commonplace.
What investors have now moved on to ask is precisely how these programs are going to be able to stabilize debt-to-GDP levels if the most severely affected economies, such as Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain, don't return to sustainable GDP growth. They are worried less about fiscal adjustment in the short term and more about sustainability in the long term. But rather than taking this long-term view, EU governments are insisting on trying to restore confidence simply by convincing investors of their willingness to make painful sacrifices. What investors are interested in is getting their money back, with interest, rather than seeing their debtors pained and humiliated.
All this reminds me of a powerful scene from the recent box-office hit Buried, in which the poor victim of a gang of unscrupulous kidnappers, having been nailed into an underground coffin somewhere in the middle of an Iraqi desert, is persuaded to cut off his own finger, on camera and linked to the world via a mobile-phone connection, just before the roof falls in on him and he is finally entombed in sand.
What policymakers sometimes seem to forget is that investors, just like citizens, are stakeholders in the future of the country they invest in. Indeed, the more they invest, the greater the stake they have. In this sense, they are far more realistic than many of Europe's leaders because they are fully aware that not all EU countries are going to be able to pay back everything they owe. What sparked the latest bout of market nervousness in Europe was German Chancellor Angela Merkel making clear that the German taxpayer wasn't willing to keep funding heavily indebted countries indefinitely and that private lenders were going to be asked to share part of the cost by taking their share of the haircuts in any future restructuring process. Fine, the investor might respond, but that bitter pill would be easier to swallow if countries were able to show meaningful signs of being able to kick-start their economies back into sustainable growth and pay a bigger proportion of the currently outstanding debt.
Yet one by one the countries fall. Ireland is already following Greece along the path of accepting an EU-IMF rescue program, and last weekend an 85 billion euro financial-support package was finally agreed on. Portugal is continuing to insist that no support package is coming. Spain is busily denying it is even a candidate for a bailout, and even Belgium's name is starting to be whispered nervously in online forums.
Clearly the European Union's decision to make 85 billion euros available to Ireland is a positive one, whatever issues arise about how the money is to be spent and the draconian nature of some of the measures demanded. The decision will give Ireland and Greece more time to put their houses in order.
On the other hand, the average interest rate charged under the plan (estimated to be around 5.8 percent) only takes Irish five-year interest rates back to where they were on Nov. 2. The financial markets clearly wanted to see Germany give some kind of direct guarantee on Irish bank debt, but what they got was Germany and the European Union lending money to the Irish government so that Ireland could then guarantee the bank debt. This clearly leaves the extent of German commitment to the maintenance of the monetary union a rather open question, even though with the new package now in place, European finance ministers have essentially accepted a potentially enormous fiscal burden on behalf of their electorates. Greece, for example, will need to have all its debts refinanced continuously by its European partners for many years ahead, while the Irish loan is on a seven-and-a-half-year basis from the outset.
Nor does the European Central Bank's policy posture make much sense. Having countries pay 5, 6, 7, or even 8 percent to finance their debt doesn't seem like a credible plan. And simply asking countries to make large fiscal adjustments will only lead to sizable economic contractions (the Greek economy is set to shrink 4.2 percent this year, and with the latest round of cuts that have just been announced the situation will hardly be better in 2011). Standing back and watching one country after another pay such sizable interest charges doesn't seem to be the best way to spark a recovery.
And it is not only the "what" that lies behind Europe's action plan that is disturbing observers. The "how" is also far from convincing. According to one popular metaphor, the eurozone is now like 16 Alpine climbers scaling the Matterhorn who find themselves tightly roped together in appalling weather conditions. One climber -- Greece -- lost his footing and slipped over the edge of a dangerous precipice. As things stand, the other 15 can easily take the strain of holding the Greeks dangling, however uncomfortable it may be for them. But others are starting to slide. Ireland has now slipped over the edge, while Portugal is moving even closer by the day. Just behind comes Spain, and somewhere further back Belgium. If all three finally go over, this will leave 11 countries supporting five, something that the May bailout package only expected as the worst-case scenario, and placing a strain on those remaining that might prove impossible to withstand. Italy in particular comes to mind.
Winning the battle to come will require two things. First, a clear response is needed at the national level, and in particular from the Spanish administration, because in many ways, given its sheer size, the future of Spain will determine the future of the rest.
And it is not only a question of additional measures. To convince financial markets, Spain's leaders must find a credible plan for returning their economy to growth. Presently, growth forecasts for the Spanish economy are being revised down, by the European Union from 0.8 percent to 0.7 percent for next year.
The markets also need evidence from Brussels and Frankfurt that those responsible for decision-making at the highest level fully understand the dimensions of the problem and are willing to do whatever it takes without putting limitations on areas of action in advance.
Letting the European Central Bank buy national bonds in the primary markets and issuing EU bonds would be two possible ways to move forward. Beyond that, Europe's leaders must instill in their citizens the message that we either are all in this together or will surely all hang separately. Rather than another bout of frivolous and inopportune comments from Van Rompuy, what we really need from Europe's leaders is a demonstration of calm and determination coupled with a large dose of courage and imagination.
It looks clear that things are set to get a lot worse before they get better. In fact, such deterioration might be the only thing that will knock the various national heads together because as we can see, the long slow process of developing the policy tools needed to get to grips with the problems took one lurch forward under the impact of last May's surge in sovereign bond yields and the latest round of pressure is producing another one. So despair not. Remedies are there, and they can be applied when the will to do so can be found. Until then, let's just hope the ropes hold.
BY EDWARD HUGH | DECEMBER 3, 2010
Europe's debt crisis continues to spread -- Greece and Ireland have already had to seek shelter from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, while bond spreads in Portugal and Spain are giving strong indication they might meet the same fate in the not-too-distant future. And as the crisis develops, far from sending a much-needed signal of confidence and self-assurance, the rhetorical register we're seeing from Europe's leaders is becoming increasingly nerve-racked and even at times apocalyptic. In a typically troubling example, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy warned recently that the eurozone, and even the European Union itself, were in the process of fighting for their lives, telling the astonished audience at a Brussels think-tank conference, "We're in a survival crisis."
COMMENTS (4)
SHARE:
Buzz
More... Only a few days later, another top EU official, European Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia, stunned market observers with a statement that was widely interpreted as suggesting there might be something behind the rumors that Spain's banking and government debt statistics were not as reliable as they should be. "There are no doubts that there is doubt [about Spain]," he said in an interview with a Spanish radio station, doubts that are connected with the possibility that Spain could "have something more than what it has already put on the table."
Then, Olli Rehn, the European Union's commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, tactlessly chose a day of extreme market tension to tell the world that in his considered opinion, the Spanish government was in danger of not complying with its 2011 deficit target of 6 percent. The result was predictable, and the next day yields on both Spanish and Italian bonds hit euro-era highs. The situation was brought under control only thanks to substantial intervention on the part of the European Central Bank (ECB), as well as bank President Jean-Claude Trichet's promise of a major change in policy at the next meeting. As American economist Barry Eichengreen recently put it: "You can say one thing for the European Commission, the ECB and the German government: they never miss an opportunity to make things worse."
Far from serving as a call to arms, comments like these, especially at such a sensitive moment in the latest round of the crisis, merely leave the people who make them looking ridiculous and trivialize the institutions they represent. The European Union itself is not in any kind of survival crisis. Indeed, the risk that the union will actually break up is so small as to be virtually nonexistent -- and even though doubts remain about the long-term survival of the euro in its present form, this is not the immediate problem. The only meaningful way to ensure that the common currency survives in the long run is to find ways to adequately resolve Europe's present problems. Wandering from the script, as Van Rompuy is wont to do, simply doesn't help.
The problem Europe faces, as seen by the markets, is that it has half-emerged from one economic crisis only to be engulfed by another: the challenge of maintaining under reformed pension and health-care systems in the face of the most rapid population aging in human history, with very sharp increases in the elderly dependency ratio looming over the next 10 years. Add to this challenge the doubts about who is actually going to be responsible for whom: Will Irish citizens pay through taxes the losses incurred by Irish banks in the property bubble, or will the German government recapitalize the German banks that were irresponsible enough to lend the Irish the money to have the bubble in the first place? And at the heart of this sovereign-debt crisis is another tricky question: Whose sovereign goes with whose debt?
We are now into the third wave of the present crisis. The first tremors were effectively noticed around the turn of the year, when Abu Dhabi announced it was not going to take responsibility for all the excesses of its poorer but more reckless neighbor, Dubai. This news turned all eyes toward Greece and the issue of who was going to foot the bill for all that under-the-table deficit spending that had been going on since the euro was introduced.
Then in May came the second wave, when doubts about how the Greek crisis was being handled increasingly led investors to ask how many more countries on Europe's periphery might be engaging in reckless deficit spending without credible plans to rein them in. The elephant in the room was Spain because while it is evident that Ireland's and Portugal's problems are more serious in the short term, Spain is without a doubt the most dangerous threat due to its size and the level of its private sector's external indebtedness.
Last spring, a combination of well-timed crisis measures and good public relations were able to take the heat off Spain. What then followed could be called the long cool summer, as Spanish leaders grew increasingly relaxed and even almost nonchalant about their troubles. As Finance Minister Elena Salgado put it at the time, "I don't have nightmares anymore."
But the worst wasn't over, and the sleepless nights must now be coming back because at the start of November a third wave broke out. Although most of the focus was initially on Ireland and Portugal, Spain and then Italy became increasingly drawn in via a process that financial analysts aptly call "contagion."
But if the second wave was characterized by an obsession with the need for fiscal austerity -- ruthlessly cutting budgets -- this time the issue has broadened, with investors asking themselves and Europe's leaders the awkward question as to how, amid all this austerity, these countries are ever going to be able to return their economies to growth. What worries investors is not the size of this year's deficit, but the level of debt that will eventually exist and the extent to which this will be payable. To pay their debt (whether in the public or private sector), these countries need economic growth, and it is exactly here that Greece has come back to haunt everyone. Despite the sterling efforts the Greek government is making to keep to its fiscal-deficit targets, the economy is contracting so fast there that the level of debt (as a percentage of GDP) is simply rising and rising.
So the Spanish government finds itself trapped. All it can do to please the markets is keep to its existing targets. But it is here we find a Catch-22 double bind because keeping to target means watching the economy continue to contract, which means that the level of debt will continue to rise. Worse, if there is no return to growth, then Spain's 20 percent-plus unemployment rate will not come down, which means more nonperforming loans and eventually more bank bailouts. Spain is caught in a self-perpetuating loop, and investors know it.
Although it might be hard to believe given all those hair-raising quotes, what Europe's leaders at the EU and national levels are in theory focusing their strategy on is maintaining confidence on the part of both investors and consumers.
Consumer confidence is much easier to count on if consumers know what is happening. Confidence-building exercises of the "together we can do it" kind don't work if the man and woman on the street are continually being told by their government that the worst is over and that the country is on the verge of recovery. ("Let's wait a few weeks and we will see them [the green shoots of economic recovery]," Salgado told journalists outside the Spanish parliament at the height of the May crisis.)
Spanish leaders have consistently failed to prepare the public to accept the difficult sacrifices that will be required to really break out of the crisis, so it is hardly surprising if some workers decide to go on strike when told they will now need to continue to work until they are 67, rather than stopping at the current retirement age of 65.
And the same goes for investors, and it is here that the problem has become particularly tricky. When Europe's leaders are not busying themselves denouncing the very people they need to borrow money from as "speculators," they seem to be giving them replies to questions they aren't asking. Most savvy investors now understand that EU countries are involved in collective fiscal-adjustment programs to reduce their deficit level. Measures like extensions in the working life, reductions in government salaries, and increases in consumer taxes are now commonplace.
What investors have now moved on to ask is precisely how these programs are going to be able to stabilize debt-to-GDP levels if the most severely affected economies, such as Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain, don't return to sustainable GDP growth. They are worried less about fiscal adjustment in the short term and more about sustainability in the long term. But rather than taking this long-term view, EU governments are insisting on trying to restore confidence simply by convincing investors of their willingness to make painful sacrifices. What investors are interested in is getting their money back, with interest, rather than seeing their debtors pained and humiliated.
All this reminds me of a powerful scene from the recent box-office hit Buried, in which the poor victim of a gang of unscrupulous kidnappers, having been nailed into an underground coffin somewhere in the middle of an Iraqi desert, is persuaded to cut off his own finger, on camera and linked to the world via a mobile-phone connection, just before the roof falls in on him and he is finally entombed in sand.
What policymakers sometimes seem to forget is that investors, just like citizens, are stakeholders in the future of the country they invest in. Indeed, the more they invest, the greater the stake they have. In this sense, they are far more realistic than many of Europe's leaders because they are fully aware that not all EU countries are going to be able to pay back everything they owe. What sparked the latest bout of market nervousness in Europe was German Chancellor Angela Merkel making clear that the German taxpayer wasn't willing to keep funding heavily indebted countries indefinitely and that private lenders were going to be asked to share part of the cost by taking their share of the haircuts in any future restructuring process. Fine, the investor might respond, but that bitter pill would be easier to swallow if countries were able to show meaningful signs of being able to kick-start their economies back into sustainable growth and pay a bigger proportion of the currently outstanding debt.
Yet one by one the countries fall. Ireland is already following Greece along the path of accepting an EU-IMF rescue program, and last weekend an 85 billion euro financial-support package was finally agreed on. Portugal is continuing to insist that no support package is coming. Spain is busily denying it is even a candidate for a bailout, and even Belgium's name is starting to be whispered nervously in online forums.
Clearly the European Union's decision to make 85 billion euros available to Ireland is a positive one, whatever issues arise about how the money is to be spent and the draconian nature of some of the measures demanded. The decision will give Ireland and Greece more time to put their houses in order.
On the other hand, the average interest rate charged under the plan (estimated to be around 5.8 percent) only takes Irish five-year interest rates back to where they were on Nov. 2. The financial markets clearly wanted to see Germany give some kind of direct guarantee on Irish bank debt, but what they got was Germany and the European Union lending money to the Irish government so that Ireland could then guarantee the bank debt. This clearly leaves the extent of German commitment to the maintenance of the monetary union a rather open question, even though with the new package now in place, European finance ministers have essentially accepted a potentially enormous fiscal burden on behalf of their electorates. Greece, for example, will need to have all its debts refinanced continuously by its European partners for many years ahead, while the Irish loan is on a seven-and-a-half-year basis from the outset.
Nor does the European Central Bank's policy posture make much sense. Having countries pay 5, 6, 7, or even 8 percent to finance their debt doesn't seem like a credible plan. And simply asking countries to make large fiscal adjustments will only lead to sizable economic contractions (the Greek economy is set to shrink 4.2 percent this year, and with the latest round of cuts that have just been announced the situation will hardly be better in 2011). Standing back and watching one country after another pay such sizable interest charges doesn't seem to be the best way to spark a recovery.
And it is not only the "what" that lies behind Europe's action plan that is disturbing observers. The "how" is also far from convincing. According to one popular metaphor, the eurozone is now like 16 Alpine climbers scaling the Matterhorn who find themselves tightly roped together in appalling weather conditions. One climber -- Greece -- lost his footing and slipped over the edge of a dangerous precipice. As things stand, the other 15 can easily take the strain of holding the Greeks dangling, however uncomfortable it may be for them. But others are starting to slide. Ireland has now slipped over the edge, while Portugal is moving even closer by the day. Just behind comes Spain, and somewhere further back Belgium. If all three finally go over, this will leave 11 countries supporting five, something that the May bailout package only expected as the worst-case scenario, and placing a strain on those remaining that might prove impossible to withstand. Italy in particular comes to mind.
Winning the battle to come will require two things. First, a clear response is needed at the national level, and in particular from the Spanish administration, because in many ways, given its sheer size, the future of Spain will determine the future of the rest.
And it is not only a question of additional measures. To convince financial markets, Spain's leaders must find a credible plan for returning their economy to growth. Presently, growth forecasts for the Spanish economy are being revised down, by the European Union from 0.8 percent to 0.7 percent for next year.
The markets also need evidence from Brussels and Frankfurt that those responsible for decision-making at the highest level fully understand the dimensions of the problem and are willing to do whatever it takes without putting limitations on areas of action in advance.
Letting the European Central Bank buy national bonds in the primary markets and issuing EU bonds would be two possible ways to move forward. Beyond that, Europe's leaders must instill in their citizens the message that we either are all in this together or will surely all hang separately. Rather than another bout of frivolous and inopportune comments from Van Rompuy, what we really need from Europe's leaders is a demonstration of calm and determination coupled with a large dose of courage and imagination.
It looks clear that things are set to get a lot worse before they get better. In fact, such deterioration might be the only thing that will knock the various national heads together because as we can see, the long slow process of developing the policy tools needed to get to grips with the problems took one lurch forward under the impact of last May's surge in sovereign bond yields and the latest round of pressure is producing another one. So despair not. Remedies are there, and they can be applied when the will to do so can be found. Until then, let's just hope the ropes hold.
03/12 With help from billionaire Warren Buffett, U.N. sets up nuclear fuel 'bank'
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 3, 2010; 10:39 PM
After years of debate and a fundraising campaign launched by investor Warren Buffett, the U.N. atomic agency decided Friday to set up a $150 million uranium fuel "bank" aimed at slowing the spread of dangerous nuclear material around the globe.
The idea of such a bank has been floated for decades, but the concept took on new urgency with the development of Iran's nuclear program and the recent explosion of interest in nuclear energy.
The bank would guarantee the sale of fuel for countries' nuclear power plants, theoretically eliminating their need to develop it themselves. The same centrifuges used to prepare uranium for power plants can also be used to enrich it to higher, weapons-grade levels.
President Obama has touted the fuel bank, which will get $50 million from the U.S. government.
"This is a breakthrough in global cooperation to enable peaceful uses of nuclear energy while reducing the risks of proliferation and catastrophic terrorism," said former U.S. senator Sam Nunn, co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private group that played a key role in getting the bank off the ground.
Although more guarded, academic experts said the bank was a positive step at a time of rising fears of nuclear proliferation.
"The bank is not a guarantee against the risk some countries might choose to proliferate," said Lawrence Scheinman of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "But the fewer the countries that have capacity to enrich [uranium] in the first place, the lower the prospect is they will be able to weaponize."
Nations on the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency voted 28-0 to approve the bank, with six abstentions and one country absent.
The fuel bank, in essence, will ensure the sale of uranium for power plants to countries that are in good standing with the U.N. energy watchdog. The new institution is meant to be a backup in case countries face a cutoff from commercial suppliers.
A senior U.S. official said the bank was not likely to prompt Iran to alter its nuclear program, which is widely suspected of being aimed at developing weapons, a charge Tehran denies.
"But it does undercut their argument that they need to have an indigenous [uranium] enrichment program because they can't be confident they can rely on" outside suppliers of fuel, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The fuel bank project got going in 2006 after Nunn approached Buffett with the idea. Buffett pledged $50 million, on the condition that governments kick in $100 million. That total was reached last year, with donations from the United States, the European Union, Kuwait, Norway and the United Arab Emirates.
But the project still had to navigate the tricky road of global nuclear politics.
Under the world's central nuclear pact, the 187-nation Non-Proliferation Treaty, countries are guaranteed the right to nuclear energy as long as they abstain from building atomic bombs. The five original nuclear-armed powers are supposed to gradually give up their nuclear weapons.
Many countries have been wary about giving up any rights to nuclear energy, including the ability to make their own fuel. They were assured the bank doesn't force them to do so.
"Essentially what we're saying to the world is, if you want to be in the peaceful use of nuclear power, you don't have to have those enrichment facilities," Buffett said in an interview. The Nebraska-based investor is a director of the Washington Post Co.
Kazakhstan has offered to host the new bank, although no decision has been made.
Russia recently set up a somewhat similar bank, which provides uranium to countries approved by the IAEA.
Buffett had initially set a deadline of September 2008 for the atomic agency to approve the project. That was extended several times.
"There is joy in Omaha," he said. "It's been over four years, so I feel terrific."
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 3, 2010; 10:39 PM
After years of debate and a fundraising campaign launched by investor Warren Buffett, the U.N. atomic agency decided Friday to set up a $150 million uranium fuel "bank" aimed at slowing the spread of dangerous nuclear material around the globe.
This Story
- With help from billionaire Warren Buffett, U.N. sets up nuclear fuel 'bank'
- Clinton calls for 'good faith' talks on Iran nuclear program
The idea of such a bank has been floated for decades, but the concept took on new urgency with the development of Iran's nuclear program and the recent explosion of interest in nuclear energy.
The bank would guarantee the sale of fuel for countries' nuclear power plants, theoretically eliminating their need to develop it themselves. The same centrifuges used to prepare uranium for power plants can also be used to enrich it to higher, weapons-grade levels.
President Obama has touted the fuel bank, which will get $50 million from the U.S. government.
"This is a breakthrough in global cooperation to enable peaceful uses of nuclear energy while reducing the risks of proliferation and catastrophic terrorism," said former U.S. senator Sam Nunn, co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private group that played a key role in getting the bank off the ground.
Although more guarded, academic experts said the bank was a positive step at a time of rising fears of nuclear proliferation.
"The bank is not a guarantee against the risk some countries might choose to proliferate," said Lawrence Scheinman of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "But the fewer the countries that have capacity to enrich [uranium] in the first place, the lower the prospect is they will be able to weaponize."
Nations on the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency voted 28-0 to approve the bank, with six abstentions and one country absent.
The fuel bank, in essence, will ensure the sale of uranium for power plants to countries that are in good standing with the U.N. energy watchdog. The new institution is meant to be a backup in case countries face a cutoff from commercial suppliers.
A senior U.S. official said the bank was not likely to prompt Iran to alter its nuclear program, which is widely suspected of being aimed at developing weapons, a charge Tehran denies.
"But it does undercut their argument that they need to have an indigenous [uranium] enrichment program because they can't be confident they can rely on" outside suppliers of fuel, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The fuel bank project got going in 2006 after Nunn approached Buffett with the idea. Buffett pledged $50 million, on the condition that governments kick in $100 million. That total was reached last year, with donations from the United States, the European Union, Kuwait, Norway and the United Arab Emirates.
But the project still had to navigate the tricky road of global nuclear politics.
Under the world's central nuclear pact, the 187-nation Non-Proliferation Treaty, countries are guaranteed the right to nuclear energy as long as they abstain from building atomic bombs. The five original nuclear-armed powers are supposed to gradually give up their nuclear weapons.
Many countries have been wary about giving up any rights to nuclear energy, including the ability to make their own fuel. They were assured the bank doesn't force them to do so.
"Essentially what we're saying to the world is, if you want to be in the peaceful use of nuclear power, you don't have to have those enrichment facilities," Buffett said in an interview. The Nebraska-based investor is a director of the Washington Post Co.
Kazakhstan has offered to host the new bank, although no decision has been made.
Russia recently set up a somewhat similar bank, which provides uranium to countries approved by the IAEA.
Buffett had initially set a deadline of September 2008 for the atomic agency to approve the project. That was extended several times.
"There is joy in Omaha," he said. "It's been over four years, so I feel terrific."
03/12 At long last, a free-trade deal with Seoul
Friday, December 3, 2010; 8:54 PM
FRIDAY'S DEAL between trade negotiators representing the Obama administration and the government of South Korea was a long time in coming - but its arrival, however late, is cause for celebration. The way is now clear for submission of the long-delayed U.S.-Korea free-trade agreement to Congress and the National Assembly in Seoul. This is good news for the U.S. and global economies, a boost to the strategic alliance between this country and a democracy that lives in the shadow of potential North Korean aggression - and last but not least an opportunity to show that bipartisan policy success is still possible in Washington.
President George W. Bush's trade negotiators inked a deal with Seoul way back in 2007. The tariff-slashing pact enjoyed the support of most U.S. economic sectors. But the Democratic-controlled Congress never voted on it, mainly because of objections from Ford Motor Co. and the United Auto Workers, which feared further Korean penetration of the U.S. vehicle market. Echoing those concerns, in 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama denounced the pact. To his credit, however, Mr. Obama shifted his position on trade with South Korea this year and began pursuing a modified deal, in keeping with his effort to boost U.S. exports.
In the end, the Koreans accepted two key modifications: more flexibility on safety and environmental standards for U.S. cars coming into their country, and a five-year delay in eliminating the 2.5 percent U.S. tariff on Korean cars, which would have been axed immediately in the original deal. In economic terms, neither change is hugely consequential to either side; fluctuations in exchange rates would probably have more impact on car sales. But if this was the price of moving the deal forward in the political realm, well and good.
All that's left for the Obama administration is to make sure the revised agreement does, indeed, win approval in Congress - along with equally beneficial pacts with Colombia and Panama. This could yet be a difficult fight, given residual anti-trade sentiment in both parties. But it is a fight Mr. Obama is well positioned to wage. The arguments against this deal, which could boost U.S. exports by more than $10 billion per year and help dent an unemployment rate that has reached 9.8 percent, were always weak. Now even those weak arguments have been answered.
FRIDAY'S DEAL between trade negotiators representing the Obama administration and the government of South Korea was a long time in coming - but its arrival, however late, is cause for celebration. The way is now clear for submission of the long-delayed U.S.-Korea free-trade agreement to Congress and the National Assembly in Seoul. This is good news for the U.S. and global economies, a boost to the strategic alliance between this country and a democracy that lives in the shadow of potential North Korean aggression - and last but not least an opportunity to show that bipartisan policy success is still possible in Washington.
President George W. Bush's trade negotiators inked a deal with Seoul way back in 2007. The tariff-slashing pact enjoyed the support of most U.S. economic sectors. But the Democratic-controlled Congress never voted on it, mainly because of objections from Ford Motor Co. and the United Auto Workers, which feared further Korean penetration of the U.S. vehicle market. Echoing those concerns, in 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama denounced the pact. To his credit, however, Mr. Obama shifted his position on trade with South Korea this year and began pursuing a modified deal, in keeping with his effort to boost U.S. exports.
In the end, the Koreans accepted two key modifications: more flexibility on safety and environmental standards for U.S. cars coming into their country, and a five-year delay in eliminating the 2.5 percent U.S. tariff on Korean cars, which would have been axed immediately in the original deal. In economic terms, neither change is hugely consequential to either side; fluctuations in exchange rates would probably have more impact on car sales. But if this was the price of moving the deal forward in the political realm, well and good.
All that's left for the Obama administration is to make sure the revised agreement does, indeed, win approval in Congress - along with equally beneficial pacts with Colombia and Panama. This could yet be a difficult fight, given residual anti-trade sentiment in both parties. But it is a fight Mr. Obama is well positioned to wage. The arguments against this deal, which could boost U.S. exports by more than $10 billion per year and help dent an unemployment rate that has reached 9.8 percent, were always weak. Now even those weak arguments have been answered.
03/12 My view of Maria Shriver
Friday, December 3, 2010; 9:03 PM
The Nov. 2 Style article about Maria Shriver, "Signing off and moving on," egregiously misquoted me. The reporter used only part of my quote. As a result, the meaning of my comment was turned into the exact opposite of what I said.
The reporter, Manuel Roig-Franzia, wrote: "She 'eats people up and spits them out,' says Shriver's friend, Jillian Manus, a high-octane literary agent and a guiding light of the 'Broad Squad' of successful women."
What I said to Mr. Roig-Franzia was, "There are women who eat people up and spit them out . . . she [Maria Shriver] is not one of them. This is why the Women's Conference is so valuable to women. It is a place where women come together to support and elevate each other."
Not only does the misrepresentation of what I said personally offend me, as I would never speak so disrespectfully of any woman, but it also characterized Maria Shriver as a kind of person she has never been. She is a close friend whom I deeply admire on every level. As first lady of California, she has worked tirelessly to empower women. She is one of the most caring human beings I know, and she treats all people with respect.
I am horrified that my words were manipulated. The experience has caused me great pain and has violated my trust in The Post.
Jillian Manus, Atherton, Calif.
The Nov. 2 Style article about Maria Shriver, "Signing off and moving on," egregiously misquoted me. The reporter used only part of my quote. As a result, the meaning of my comment was turned into the exact opposite of what I said.
The reporter, Manuel Roig-Franzia, wrote: "She 'eats people up and spits them out,' says Shriver's friend, Jillian Manus, a high-octane literary agent and a guiding light of the 'Broad Squad' of successful women."
What I said to Mr. Roig-Franzia was, "There are women who eat people up and spit them out . . . she [Maria Shriver] is not one of them. This is why the Women's Conference is so valuable to women. It is a place where women come together to support and elevate each other."
Not only does the misrepresentation of what I said personally offend me, as I would never speak so disrespectfully of any woman, but it also characterized Maria Shriver as a kind of person she has never been. She is a close friend whom I deeply admire on every level. As first lady of California, she has worked tirelessly to empower women. She is one of the most caring human beings I know, and she treats all people with respect.
I am horrified that my words were manipulated. The experience has caused me great pain and has violated my trust in The Post.
Jillian Manus, Atherton, Calif.
Outlook: Sarah Palin is wrong about John F. Kennedy, religion and politics
About the topic
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend will be online to discuss her Outlook piece, "Sarah Palin is wrong about John F. Kennedy, religion and politics." In it she writes, "Palin fails to understand the genius of our nation. The United States is one of the most vibrant religious countries on Earth precisely because of its religious freedom. When power and faith are entwined, faith loses. Power tends to obfuscate, corrupt and focus on temporal rather than eternal purposes. "
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend will be online to discuss her Outlook piece, "Sarah Palin is wrong about John F. Kennedy, religion and politics." In it she writes, "Palin fails to understand the genius of our nation. The United States is one of the most vibrant religious countries on Earth precisely because of its religious freedom. When power and faith are entwined, faith loses. Power tends to obfuscate, corrupt and focus on temporal rather than eternal purposes. "
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is a former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the author of "Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God With Politics and Losing Their Way."
04/12 Sarah Palin's meanest critics: The conservative elite
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, December 4, 2010;
The recent attacks on Sarah Palin by establishment conservatives make her Democratic opponents seem like wusses. The prospect of a Palin presidential candidacy in 2012 has obviously spooked the GOP elite. But do they have to be so mean?
"What man or mouse with a fully functioning human brain and a resume as thin as Palin's would flirt with a presidential run?" MSNBC "Morning Joe" host and former Florida Republican representative Joe Scarborough fumed in a Politico guest column this week.
" 'A-LASK-ahhhh - I love this state like I love my family.' Except that [Palin] didn't give her family up after governing for two-and-a half years, so that she could get a Fox News contract, and make 100 grand per speech, and write two books in a year, and drag her entire family onto a tacky reality show." That from the conservative Weekly Standard's Matt Labash last week.
"After the 2008 campaign, [Palin] had two things she had to do. She had to go home to Alaska and study, and she had to govern Alaska well. Instead, she quit halfway through her first term and shows up in the audience of 'Dancing with the Stars' and other distinctly non-presidential venues," sneered my Post colleague George F. Will on "ABC This Week with Christiane Amanpour" on Sunday.
Things have reached the point where Foxnews.com contributor John Lott asked in a column, "Why Does the Media Love to Pick on Palin?"
Well, it's not all the media, and the hardest hits are coming from conservatives. They are questioning her judgment, and some think she's, well, low on smarts.
In defending Ronald Reagan against a Palin putdown of the former president as "an actor," Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "The point is not 'He was a great man and you are a nincompoop,' though that is true."
Take that, Saint Sarah of Wasilla.
But are the attacks fair?
I am no fan of Sarah Palin, but not because of her slips of the tongue or gaffes. Palin is a gifted politician. She's gained prominence and political clout, however, by skillfully playing to popular prejudices with wild claims. "Death panels" come to mind. In her political behavior, Palin flirts with demagoguery. That makes her no laughing matter.
But does that account for the harsh treatment she's receiving at the hands of the conservative establishment? Those same conservatives don't seem bothered by her extremism when it's directed toward President Obama and the Democrats.
Their opposition to Palin smacks of something else. Call it what it is: elitism.
Palin, on the cusp of a possible presidential run, now finds herself facing a solid wall of conservatives who believe that, by virtue of their intellect, experience and such distinctive attributes as cultural tastes and social standing, they are her superiors.
They refuse to take her seriously and believe she shouldn't take herself seriously, either.
That opposition, by the way, is insulting, not only to Palin but to her supporters as well.
Palin is no accidental celebrity. Her star power didn't flame out after 2008. She has since earned her place in the sun. In the past two years, she has developed a following that far outnumbers the supporters of those conservative elites who now shun her.
Her 2010 campaigning helped strengthen the Republican Party's grip on Capitol Hill. Sure, some of her midterm endorsements flopped. But Palin-supported candidates won more contests than they lost. And don't forget, many of the 59 million Americans voting for the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008 did so because of her.
Ah, but let's "hope she'll stay there" in Alaska, as former first lady Barbara Bush suggested recently. Or make Palin a talk-show host or "the new Oprah," as the National Review's Mona Charen wrote.
Anything but a bid for the presidency.
I wouldn't want to see Sarah Palin anywhere near the White House, let alone in the Oval Office with a nuclear arsenal at her disposal. That's not a likely scenario anyway, given her low standing among independents and Democrats.
But the notion of a phalanx of conservative elites - Palin called them "blue bloods" - standing between her and the GOP nomination because they perceive her as inferior in intellect and social and political standing is pure snobbery.
At bottom, their real slander is against Palin and her slice of the American electorate, captured in H.L. Mencken's caustic observation: "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
So mean.
kingc@washpost.com
Saturday, December 4, 2010;
The recent attacks on Sarah Palin by establishment conservatives make her Democratic opponents seem like wusses. The prospect of a Palin presidential candidacy in 2012 has obviously spooked the GOP elite. But do they have to be so mean?
"What man or mouse with a fully functioning human brain and a resume as thin as Palin's would flirt with a presidential run?" MSNBC "Morning Joe" host and former Florida Republican representative Joe Scarborough fumed in a Politico guest column this week.
" 'A-LASK-ahhhh - I love this state like I love my family.' Except that [Palin] didn't give her family up after governing for two-and-a half years, so that she could get a Fox News contract, and make 100 grand per speech, and write two books in a year, and drag her entire family onto a tacky reality show." That from the conservative Weekly Standard's Matt Labash last week.
"After the 2008 campaign, [Palin] had two things she had to do. She had to go home to Alaska and study, and she had to govern Alaska well. Instead, she quit halfway through her first term and shows up in the audience of 'Dancing with the Stars' and other distinctly non-presidential venues," sneered my Post colleague George F. Will on "ABC This Week with Christiane Amanpour" on Sunday.
Things have reached the point where Foxnews.com contributor John Lott asked in a column, "Why Does the Media Love to Pick on Palin?"
Well, it's not all the media, and the hardest hits are coming from conservatives. They are questioning her judgment, and some think she's, well, low on smarts.
In defending Ronald Reagan against a Palin putdown of the former president as "an actor," Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "The point is not 'He was a great man and you are a nincompoop,' though that is true."
Take that, Saint Sarah of Wasilla.
But are the attacks fair?
I am no fan of Sarah Palin, but not because of her slips of the tongue or gaffes. Palin is a gifted politician. She's gained prominence and political clout, however, by skillfully playing to popular prejudices with wild claims. "Death panels" come to mind. In her political behavior, Palin flirts with demagoguery. That makes her no laughing matter.
But does that account for the harsh treatment she's receiving at the hands of the conservative establishment? Those same conservatives don't seem bothered by her extremism when it's directed toward President Obama and the Democrats.
Their opposition to Palin smacks of something else. Call it what it is: elitism.
Palin, on the cusp of a possible presidential run, now finds herself facing a solid wall of conservatives who believe that, by virtue of their intellect, experience and such distinctive attributes as cultural tastes and social standing, they are her superiors.
They refuse to take her seriously and believe she shouldn't take herself seriously, either.
That opposition, by the way, is insulting, not only to Palin but to her supporters as well.
Palin is no accidental celebrity. Her star power didn't flame out after 2008. She has since earned her place in the sun. In the past two years, she has developed a following that far outnumbers the supporters of those conservative elites who now shun her.
Her 2010 campaigning helped strengthen the Republican Party's grip on Capitol Hill. Sure, some of her midterm endorsements flopped. But Palin-supported candidates won more contests than they lost. And don't forget, many of the 59 million Americans voting for the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008 did so because of her.
Ah, but let's "hope she'll stay there" in Alaska, as former first lady Barbara Bush suggested recently. Or make Palin a talk-show host or "the new Oprah," as the National Review's Mona Charen wrote.
Anything but a bid for the presidency.
I wouldn't want to see Sarah Palin anywhere near the White House, let alone in the Oval Office with a nuclear arsenal at her disposal. That's not a likely scenario anyway, given her low standing among independents and Democrats.
But the notion of a phalanx of conservative elites - Palin called them "blue bloods" - standing between her and the GOP nomination because they perceive her as inferior in intellect and social and political standing is pure snobbery.
At bottom, their real slander is against Palin and her slice of the American electorate, captured in H.L. Mencken's caustic observation: "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
So mean.
kingc@washpost.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)