The rise of the rest

After reading the synopsis, I read Fareed Zakaria’s book, The Post-American World.  It’s good, but it’s typical of a certain modern type of book that read like forced expansions of the original magazine article.  He goes into more depth, but not that much more; the major chapters are on China, India, America, and America.  I wish he’d gone into more depth on South Africa, Brazil, and other rising powers.

He’s obviously well connected, but this isn’t always a virtue, especially when it comes to history.  It’s nice that he can get an interview with Lee Kwan Yew, but sometimes the argument seems to be based on a few brisk interviews and visits to burgeoning cities rather than on broader academic research.  (This can be felt especially in his discussion of Chinese and Indian mentality.  It sounds reasonable enough, but no nation can really be reduced to its mentality.  E.g. is Japan an isolated despotism as in 1830, a rising power as in 1910, a grandiose empire as in 1940, or a pacifist economic powerhouse as in 1980?  Even if all of these could be related to some theory of the Japanese soul, they can hardly predict what Japan will be in 2050.)

Still, he has a good story to tell.  He makes a good case that the rise of China and India means a lot for the world, and is essentially a Good Thing for most everyone.  Neither power is likely to repeat the trouble caused by (say) the rise of Germany or Japan– so long as the US doesn’t act like an imperial hegemon.  Our own economic power isn’t going to go away anytime soon.  He makes some illuminating comparisons with imperial Britain, which enjoyed a long period of political dominance (say 1815 to 1945) but only a short period of economic dominance (from about 1845, when its industrial output surpassed France’s, to the 1880s, when it was surpassed by the US).  The US has been much spottier as a political leader, only rarely finding a good balance between isolation and arrogance.  In some ways we do best when we shut up and let our values (democracy and economic opportunity) do their magic.

Zakaria has a strange relationship to the Bush administration and the Republicans in general.  Most of what he has to say is highly critical, but he bows in their direction a few times, as if they’re, you know, just a little misinformed and could be set straight by some pointed reminders.  He was also a supporter of the Iraq war.  The book was written before the election, but more recent columns show that he’s hugely relieved that we now have a president who acts much more in accordance with his views.

Perhaps because of his own experience as an immigrant who’s made good, he’s essentially an optimist– a rare thing these days.  He’s excited by the huge reduction in the world’s poverty, by the vibrancy of newly energized economies, by the fact that the prevailing models are essentially variations of Anglo-American liberal capitalism.  He mentions the many ways we could fall off the rails (global warming, Taiwan, nuclear weapons), but his mind just doesn’t dwell on them.

I tend to be an optimist too; I think we can solve our problems if we want to.  But that’s a huge if.  The next century could look like the 19th– a time of generally rising prosperity and globalism– or like the 20th, when that global order collapsed into war and brutality.  Zakaria himself points out that perhaps the US’s worst failing is our political quagmire.  Britain seemed to do OK whether Liberals or Conservatives were in charge.  We have to fear the disasters that another Republican interlude could bring.

 

Ask Zompist: Nuclear Iran

What do you take of this hoopla over the Iranian nuclear program? More specifically, what do you make of the opinions that Iran is secretly, or intending to, enrich weapons-grade uranium has any merit, or is a response to some US insecurity? (Notwithstanding the Bush administration’s attempt to garner a free pass to make a “pre-emptive” strike against Iran with nuclear weapons.)

—Nikolai

After Iraq, any such speculation needs a huge damn disclaimer: EXPERT OPINION MAY BE TALKING OUT OF ITS ASS.  Hussein was just as cagey as the Iranians about international inspections, well past the point where he was obviously undermining his own survival— all to protect, in fact, nothing.  It seems irrational, but not so much if we consider that a) he couldn’t be seen as weak domestically, as would happen if he showed that his nuclear threat was nonexistent; and b) dictators and enemies of the US hate the idea of UN inspectors running all over their territory.

So, if the experts don’t know for sure, I sure don’t, sitting here in my living room.

Of course, where there’s smoke, there is sometimes fire— North Korea, Pakistan, and India, despite years of denial, really were developing nukes.  In some ways the question is why the Iranians haven’t got them yet— are they having trouble with the differential equations or something?

What do we do about it?  There’s an old philosophical maxim that no argument can turn an is into a should.  We might add, no amount of punditry can turn a should into a will.  Take this article by Lee Smith at Slate, for instance, which warns that nothing less than American hegemony over Arabian oil is at stake.  Fine, Lee, what should we do?  He warns against leaving it to Israel on the grounds that “there are some things that need to be done by the alpha dog”, but he neglects to say what those things are.

Few things are more pathetic that bellicosity without follow-through.  The Right always wants us to be a badass, but the days are over when this could be done by landing a couple thousand Marines.  Maybe negotiation will work; it’s worth a try.  Let’s be honest: the alternative is going to war with Iran.  Is the country ready to do that?  (Quick factoid: Iran is double the population and four times the size of Iraq.  Do we have the few hundred thousand troops on hand that would be needed?  Since we’re still far from having stable allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, what makes us think we’d have one in Iran?)

If we’re not going to go to war, there’s precious little deterrence gained by threatening to do it.  It’s not like the Iranians can’t figure this out.

What about letting Israel do it?  It’s mounted such attacks before, on Iraq and Syria, with astonishing impunity.  The Iranians know this too, and it probably has more deterrence effect than the disapproval of the West.  But it’s a huge gamble as it could easily set off a larger war.  Iran’s obvious counter-move would be to attack not Israel but us, in Iraq.

Could we deal with Iran having the bomb?  Probably.  Nukes are better defensive than offensive weapons— actually using them means that someone will use them back at you, and the Iranians don’t want to lose Tehran, or Qom, or their oil fields.  Especially after the Iraq war, nukes add security to rogue states.   No one is more convinced by Kim Jong-il’s rhetoric than before he had them, but he’s that much more safe from invasion.

The irony here is that inside Iran, much more than inside Iraq, there’s an ally waiting to be born.  The Iranians have had a generation to get thoroughly tired of Islamic fundamentalism, and many have bravely taken to the streets to defy it.  It’s hard to say how we could encourage this domestic opposition; but I think it’s clear that trying to be a badass is the best way to strengthen the regime.  We might have learned that from our own experience after 9/11, or from our asinine Cuba policy: nothing helps authoritarians more against their internal enemies than an external threat.

 

Russia 1, Georgia 0, Bush -1

What a difference a quagmire makes.  Just five years ago the Bushies were happy imperialists, eager to project limitless American might around the world.  Now Bush is reduced to squealing petulantly while Russia invades Georgia.  Saakashvili undoubtedly hoped the first-term Bush was still in power; he didn’t pursue NATO membership and send troops to Iraq just to get sympathetic words.  But that’s all he got.  Even a Cold War style proxy war seems beyond Bush’s power right now.

Bush’s supporters have always wanted him to be judged on his principles rather than policies.  But if you don’t act on them, principles do no good– indeed, they actually do harm.  If Saakashvili hadn’t thought he had American support, he would have acted less provocatively in South Ossetia.  And since Bush doesn’t think his non-invasion policy applies to the US or Israel, the rest of the world just considers him a hypocrite.

Taking a longer view, the war is another depressing episode in the US mismanagement of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a saga that goes back twenty years and is as much Clinton’s fault as the Bushes’.  Americans believe in their system and have trouble understanding why everybody else doesn’t rush to adopt it (or something tolerably close, such as whatever they do over in Europe).  But again, good intentions do harm if you don’t stand behind them.  Democracy and capitalism don’t succeed immediately by magic, and if a country tries them without success, they react against them and we’re worse off than before.

 

Back to a normal world

William F. Buckley described conservatives as riding atop history calling “Stop!”  Today’s conservatives are more likely to be saying “This isn’t happening.  This isn’t happening.  This isn’t happening…”

They’re in denial about a lot of things— global warming, oil dependence, evolution, the destructiveness of plutocracy— but the most tragicomic of these is the newly multipolar world.  I’ve written about this before, and Fareed Zakaria has a new book on it:

http://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/the-four-poles/

http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/newsweek/051208.html

As Zakaria puts it, it’s not that America is declining, but that the rest of the world is rising.  Americans got used to the world of the 1950s, when the US dominated the world not only by its own size and power, but because everyone else was broken.  We’re heading back to a more normal world, where we’re only one of a number of Great Powers.

Britain went through this process half a century ago, losing its empire and suffering through an extended depression.  Its own conservatives by no means accepted their new status; they railed against Labour and implied that they would have done nothing of the sort— though when they were actually in power they accomplished nothing more than bungling the Suez crisis and keeping hold of Africa for a few more years.  To actually retain the empire would have required fighting a dozen Vietnams around the world, something postwar Britain was incapable of.

US conservatives began the 2000s crowing about the American Empire, eager to project our might at anyone who opposed or even annoyed us.  There’s no sign that McCain has learned anything; he’s still talking about victory and permanent occupation in Iraq and ramping up in Afghanistan, all while lowering taxes and balancing the budget.  Before the Iraq war this merely seemed unlikely; now it’s complete fantasy.  The US can’t reverse the multipolar world, but it sure can cause a lot of trouble along the way.

If only the fantasy could be kept in books and movies— as British conservativism expressed its revanchist dreams through James Bond.  Though even that doesn’t seem as harmless as it used to, now that it turns out that the Bush administration’s embrace of torture and shredding of Constitutional liberties is based on imitating Jack Bauer.

 

Ask Zompist: Obama and Israel

As a Canadian, and therefore as a subject of the American Empire, I’ve
been following the U.S. election season pretty closely. I agree with
you, in general, about Obama; he seems like the best hope we in the
rest of the world have for an America that might largely leave us
alone. However, I was quite worried by his behaviour with AIPAC. He
seems to have set himself to genuflect to them further than any
previous American politician. His remark that Jerusalem can never be
divided was particularly troubling. If it was a ploy to neutralize
AIPAC’s opposition, and he has no intention of following up on his
words, it’s a pretty big whopper even by the standards of campaign
promises. If it’s what he truly believes and intends to act on, it
amounts to renouncing any commitment to peace in the region. Either
way, it strikes me that he’s probably thrown away what credibility
America had left with the Arab world. What is your take on this?

–Nicholas Welch

I don’t think that line is anything to get excited about. It’s not that he’s insincere; but a political speech to the pro-Israel lobby shouldn’t be taken as the terms of a treaty. As his supporter Robert Wexler put it, he considers the final status of Jerusalem something for Israel and the Palestinians to decide. So if Israel accepted a division of Jerusalem, he would certainly accept it. (And he didn’t go farther than other US presidents; this “undivided” stuff has been a staple of US policy for decades, though the Clinton administration is I think an exception.)

I’d be more criticial of his optimism. I’m not sure that there’s a peace process to revive at this point. Realistically, as president, he’d have his hands full dealing with Iraq for a couple of years. Perhaps he could try a peace conference… but who’s he going to talk to? Hamas doesn’t want to negotiate peace and Fatah can hardly do it on its own.

On the other hand, if he’s elected we might get a grace period of good will, and it would probably be foolish not to act on that, and at least try to press negotiations. Presidencies have to hit the ground running, because they tend to get major things done only in their first few years.

 

In the nutosphere

Again via Agto– an amazing tale of wingnut scurrility. 

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/9609.html

Briefly: Obama mentioned an uncle who helped liberate part of Auschwitz.  A full lard load of chickenhawk wingnuts were convinced that he’d made up this uncle, so they wrtote to a veterans’ organization for confirmation and received, as Sadly No put it, “the greatest bitch slap in history.” 

Undeterred, they went on to attack these WWII veterans as “Sheehanites” and seized on the fact that the uncle was at Buchenwald rather than Auschwitz to declare, from their Cheeto-dust-covered armchairs, that Buchenwald “was a work camp — and not a death camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka. So one wonders why he was so terribly traumatized”.  Nope, nothing traumatizing there at all. 

General Patton was there; it affected him to hard he had to go throw up.  Dudes, if it makes Patton vomit, it’s bad.  I’d like to know what Patton would do if he heard these Bush-Jugenders describe Buchenwald as “not historically abnormal in a time of war”.

It’s hard to underestimate how low a wingnut will go, but attacking WWII veterans and minimizing Nazi concentration camps is pretty damn low.  I don’t know how they’ll bottom this one, but I’m sure we’ll find out before November.  And hopefully at the same time, the voting public will administer its own bitch slap.

 

More on Chang

Alert reader Raghav Krishnapriyan pointed me to James Surowiecki’s review of Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans:

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_05/2069

Surowiecki (whose “Financial Page” in the New Yorker is a gem) doesn’t defend the neoliberals, but he doesn’t think Chang has made his case.  He brings up some good points— countries that have rejected neoliberalism don’t necessarily prosper; no one has a sure recipe for progress.  He also, I think, misses some of Chang’s historical reasoning; Chang doesn’t maintain that free trade is always bad or that infant industries should be protected forever.  

I think one of Surowiecki’s major criticisms misfires, though: “He simply takes as a given that consumers should be willing to make themselves objectively worse off in the present in the hope that this will translate to greater success in the future, because that’s what’s in the best interests of the nation.”  

That seems like the complaint of someone who just can’t bring himself to question orthodoxy, even in the face of a compelling real-world example– which Chang provides in his narrative of growing up in South Korea.  By following a policy of development rather than free trade, South Korea went in forty years from a per capita income of $84 to one of $13,980.  How is that “making themselves objectively worse off”?  Does he really think Chang’s parents or leaders made the wrong choice?

(He’s on firmer ground noting South Korea’s then dictatorship… but, that also applies to one of Surowiecki’s examples of a successful free trade nation, Singapore, and of course the example of the US and UK shows that a import substitution policy is perfectly compatible with political freedom.)

 

Seeing the Shi`a

Wow. Occasionally I find a book that unwinds my mind and rethreads my head. This is one: The Shia Revival, by Vali Nasr.

By now people often know about the Sunni/Shi`i distinction and even know where each is concentrated.  And you can hardly get your pundit license without knowing that the conflict derives from a 1300-year-old succession dispute: the Shi`ites believe that only descendents of Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali can rightfully rule.

But Nasr makes this come alive.  He starts with the celebration of Ashura in Karbala in 2003, which Americans took as Iraqis celebrating some kind of religious festival Saddam had prohibited, thus a victory for “freedom”.  In fact Ashura is an emotional ritual commemorating the martyrdom of Ali’s son Husayn, and this gathering of two million Shi`i marked the transformation of the Middle East not according to Bush’s neocons, but in the direction of Shi`a revival.

Bush– like many of the leaders Nasr describes, ancient and modern– didn’t know what he was stirring up.  More confusion has reigned in Bush’s support for the Iraqi premier’s attacks on Moqtada al-Sadr in Basra, which has been depicted as a struggle against Iran… although in that fight Iran supported the government.  Similarly McCain’s confusion of al-Qaeda with Iran isn’t just a minor point; it’s a failure to understand what’s going on in the region.

Unwittingly, the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan empowered the Shi`ites, who were oppressed by Saddamn and the Taliban, and has greatly strengthened Iran, which saw two neighboring enemies disappear.  It had no need to meddle to secure influence in Iraq; shared Shi`ite values and relationships gave it that on a platter.  At the same time Iraq created a new Shi`ite hero in Ali al-Sistani, who is more moderate and conservative than the Iranian leadership. 

As Nasr shows, it’s useless to talk about Islamic fundamentalism… we have to ask instead which Islamic fundamentalism: Sunni or Shi`i.  In recent years the most dangerous variety is the Sunni, which is responsible for 9/11, the insurgency in Iraq (directed as much or more against the Shi`i taking power as against the US), and violence against Shi`i in Pakistan.  Some Sunni clerics have declared that Shi`i are not Muslims and can be attacked with impunity; it’s common to consider them a fifth column supporting either US or Iranian influence, depending on which enemy is more despised at the time.

 At times Nasr seems to hold out the tantalizing possibility of a US-Shi`a alliance.  The interests of the Shi`i are close to ours, in that they benefit from democracy and oppose Sunni terrorism.  This would have to mean some kind of rapprochement with Iran.  Isolating and demonizing its leaders is a losing proposition, and Iraq is likely to fall into chaos without Iran’s help.  On the other hand, being too pro-Shi`a would only intensify the Sunni extremist backlash against both us and the Shi`ites.

On the whole Nasr isn’t very hopeful; he considers that the alliance of convenience with Sunni leaders, for instance, was a mistake, convincing many Iraqi Shi`ites that the US would not protect their interests.  What’s certain, however, is that a whole lot of events in the next few years, from Lebanon to the Gulf states to Saudi Arabia to Iraq to Pakistan, will be determined by the Sunni/Shi`a divide.

 

 

Ask Zompist: If I had godlike redrawing powers

Alert reader Eric McGill has an interesting question:

I’ve been thinking about your blog entry on nationalism, and reading other people’s suggestions for the Middle East, all of which seem to want to give independent ethnic groups their own countries, and I’m left wondering how you would redraw the Middle East. Or, for that matter, Eastern Europe or the Balkans.

 It’s dangerous to ask someone like me to draw maps. Drawing maps, especially interesting alternative maps, is all too addictive…

So I think I’ll rephrase your question in two ways.

1. How should the great powers have redrawn the map when they had the chance?

In much larger units.  Africa and the Middle East have suffered greatly because of arbitrary lines (which divide ethnic groups and thus cause endless trouble) and too-small nations (which have few resources and become geopolitical debits, unable either to form large internal markets or to adequately protect themselves).

There are a few exceptions, of course– mostly small East Asian nations that could easily function as nation-states.  Thailand is a natural nation; Iraq or the Sudan is not. 

Large nations can be problems too– Russia took a lot longer to recover from the fall of communism than smaller, nimbler states like Poland or the Czech Republic.  But the problem isn’t size per se.  Once India and China found ways of unleashing their entrepreneurial spirit, their size became an advantage.  

2. What should small independent states do now, if nationalism isn’t such a great idea?

Pension off their nationalist leaders, then form European-style unions.  The first step is likely to be the hard part.  Unions have been tried before, notably Egypt and Syria.  They don’t work because of the big-fish-in-a-small-pond phenomenon: two or more generalissimos would rather lord it over a small country than unite to form a richer, more powerful nation where at most one of them can be big kahuna. 

It’s hard to imagine even this working in the Middle East.  But hey, in 1946 it was hard to imagine it working in Europe.   

 

Why so Sadr?

As this Time article by Charles Crain makes clear, the clear winner of the recent operation in Basra was Muqtada al-Sadr.  It was supposed to shore up Nouri al-Maliki; now he looks weak.  It was hoped to marginalize Sadr; now his street cred is only increased, without losing his influence over what there is of the central government.

 http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1726763,00.html

I have to ask again– after four years– why the US is at war with al-Sadr.   Sadr is obviously not a terrorist, and we can’t even label him an insurgent– his faction is a major force in the government.  We can’t even say we’re against warlords; we constantly tout our alliance of convenience with Sunni tribal leaders and seek to integrate their militias into the army. 

It’s pretty sad that my post of four years ago could be written today, except that all the names but Sadr’s have to be changed.  Even Bush will be gone soon.  Could a President McCain handle Sadr any better? McCain has opined that Sadr has to be “taken out” without apparently explaining how or why, and seems to think that Maliki’s operation worked.  Do we need four to eight more years of denial?