Foreign Policy Magazine - ''What Ails America?'' An FP Special Report (November 2011)

AN FP SPECIAL REPORT

WHAT AILS AMERICA? IAN BURUMA, THOMAS FRIEDMAN, MICHAEL MANDELBAUM & STEPHEN WALT WEIGH IN HILLARY CLINTON

OUR PACIFIC CENTURY JAMES TRAUB

THE ELEPHANTS IN THE 2012 ROOM NOVEMBER 2011 ForeignPolicy.com

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

S

ixteen years ago, when another secretary of state sat down to write for Foreign Policy, the world looked like a starkly different place to a top American official—a post-Cold War mix of opportunities and threats, bound together not so much by anything except the promise of American leadership. Indeed, said Warren Christopher, “The simple fact is that if we do not lead, no one else will.” It was an age—and one that now seems quaintly outdated—of America the indispensable nation. Fast-forward to today, and the struggle by the United States to assert its continued leadership in the world—or even its commitment to remaining there. In her exclusive piece for this issue of Foreign Policy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton does her best to convince us that America is not retreating from the world. Or at least that it should not. “Beyond our borders,” she writes, many are now questioning “America’s intentions—our willingness to remain engaged and to lead. In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay, whether we are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether we can make—and keep—credible economic and strategic commitments, and whether we can back those commitments with action.” Clinton’s answer is a resounding yes, but the questions themselves are revealing, extraordinary even, coming from a sitting secretary of state, and the context is clear: These are angst-ridden times to be an unabashed advocate of America’s role in the world, when everyone from Tea Partiers at home to financial markets abroad is wondering about the staying power of this humbled superpower. The rest of fp’s special section on America at this time of troubles is dedicated to diagnosing what ails the country. We started by asking that question to a standout collection of foreign writers and thinkers, from Chinese market guru Fan Gang to Canadian environmental scientist Vaclav Smil and Dutch writer Ian Buruma. Their provocative and pointed contributions, starting on page 64, remind us what an uncomfortable position this is for a United States that is more used to sitting in judgment on other countries than receiving the world’s criticism. A rousing debate follows, pitting fp’s in-house provocateur, Harvard University professor/blogger Steve Walt, versus New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and his book-writing partner Michael Mandelbaum, on the question of whether America is really all that exceptional. And fp contributing editor James Traub, a weekly columnist on our website as well as a regular New York Times Magazine author, weighs in with a thoughtful and engaging look at a troubling phenomenon: the insistence by pretty much the entire field of 2012 Republican presidential candidates on running away from the world rather than telling us what they think about it. His piece, “The Elephants in the Room,” starting on page 79, is an early must-read from a campaign off to a depressing start. These may be tough times for an America beset by debt and self-doubt, but of course it’s still an extraordinary island of privilege too—as we’re reminded by some of the other powerful pieces in this issue. In fp’s In Box section, Cuban dissident Yoani Sánchez takes us inside the remnants of Castro’s daddy state, now that Papá Fidel is just the patient-in-chief, while “Think Again: Nuclear Power,” by Charles Ferguson, head of the Federation of American Scientists, offers a sobering look at the fallout from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster. Finally, there’s a unique close to this edition of the magazine—our first-ever visual In Other Words, dedicated to making sense of the revolutionary graffiti of this year of global upheaval. From the crude racism in portrayals of doomed Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi to New York-style scrawl on a Palestinian wall, these are images you just can’t stop looking at. —Susan Glasser

November 2011

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CONTENTS N ov emb e r

2011

AN FP SPECIAL SECTION

THE AMERICA ISSUE 56 America’s Pacific Century

71 An FP Debate: Just How Special Is America Anyway?

The future of geopolitics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States should be right at the center of the action. By Hillary Clinton

American exceptionalism is a myth. By Stephen M. Walt We really were that great (but that doesn’t mean we are now). By Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum

79 The Elephants in the Room Barack Obama’s Republican challengers are trying hard not to talk about the rest of the world. It shows. By James Traub plus: The fp Survey: Is there a gop foreign policy?

D E PA RT M E N T S

12 LETTERS The Numbers Game ■ Love and Robots ■ Sea Change ■ Duchy of Hazard ■ The Jihad Deficit

23 IN BOX The List: Checkbook Diplomacy By Peter Van Buren ■ The Things They Carried: The Afghan Policewoman ■ Ideas By Joshua E. Keating ■ Epiphanies from Nandan Nilekani ■

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Foreign Policy

The Optimist: Haiti Doesn’t Need Your Old T-Shirt By Charles Kenny ■ “Responsibility to Protect”: A short history By Charles Homans ■ Letter from Havana: Country for Old Men By Yoani Sánchez

86 IN OTHER WORDS:

GRAFFITI EDITION

A special photo essay, with captions by Roger Gastman.

Revolution in a Can: Graffiti is as American as apple pie, but much easier to export. ■

By Blake Gopnik

49 THINK AGAIN: NUCLEAR POWER

war. By Paul Salopek

Japan melted down, but that doesn’t mean the end of the atomic age. By Charles D. Ferguson

COVER AND THIS SPREAD: Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman for FP

■

Conflict Graffiti: The art of

64 WHAT AILS AMERICA? We went around the world to ask about the problems of the one global superpower.

Imperial Hubris By Ian Buruma ■ The Presidency By Sunil Khilnani ■ Gluttony By Vaclav Smil ■ The Fed By Heleen Mees ■ The Dollar By Fan Gang ■ Education By Mishaal Al Gergawi

96 America at Dusk fp asked a distinguished international panel to tell us what the United States is doing wrong. We got an earful.

November 2011

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FOREIGNPOLICY.com

Decline Watch

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ack in fp’s January/February issue, Gideon Rachman’s cover story “Think Again: American Decline: This Time It’s for Real” captured the national mood, with Americans increasingly looking over their shoulders at a rising China. Nearly a year later, this fretting has turned into an obsession. ForeignPolicy.com is charting the scaremongers and soothsayers of the American Apocalypse in real time, grading the claims and prognostications.

1

NR: At this point there is serious risk of a double-dip recession in the U.S. and most other advanced economies.

3

STAY CALM AND CARRY ON.

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5

NR: The fundamental problem is not the individuals. It’s that in most advanced economies, they have weak governments. In the U.S., we have divided government.

USA! USA!

2recalls Advantage: World Eliot Spitzer fondly when the United States used to

3testDumb and Dumber U.S. college acceptance scores are slipping, but do lower

dominate men’s tennis. What if Novak Djokovic’s ascendancy really does foretell a coming Serbian superpower?

reading scores actually mean that things are so bad Americans can’t even speak their own language anymore?

SAT

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Is this the second coming of the global economic meltdown? Nouriel Roubini, perhaps better known as “Dr. Doom” for having predicted the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and Ian Bremmer, head of the Eurasia Group political-risk analysis firm and moderator of The Call blog on ForeignPolicy.com, took sides in a spirited debate over the grim news:

IB: The biggest danger is … the Chinese are kicking a bigger can farther down the road than anyone else.

Bremmer

@DougSaunders The phrase Berlusconi shouted at Merkel in a phone convo was “culona inchiavabile.” Not quite the English translation but VERY rude.

ForeignPolicy.com’s acclaimed channels dive deep into two of the world’s newsiest areas, with the AfPak Channel—a National Magazine Award finalist—dedicated to the latest thinking, writing, and reporting from the war for South Asia and the Middle East Channel riding the year’s historic wave of revolution and counterrevolution around the region. We’ve relaunched both channels to make them more up-to-date and accessible than ever. The new format makes it easier to share the channels’ great coverage, see what the top story is each day, and pull together insight and analysis from our many correspondents. Check them out—and be sure to sign up for the popular AfPak and Middle East email newsletters for the daily headlines from the region, delivered each morning to your inbox.

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contributors

Roger Gastman became America’s leading expert on graffiti the old-fashioned way—by scrawling the name clear on subway trains and rail yards around Bethesda, Maryland. After “sort of” getting arrested as a teenager, he says, he became a graffiti historian, authoring a number of books, including The History of American Graffiti, and serving as an associate curator for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Art in the Streets” exhibit this year. In this issue, he takes his eye for this classic American form international. It’s not the polished, New York-style street art he’s used to writing about, Gastman says, but “I’m just glad to see people are going out and writing on walls. It shows you that it’s an important medium.” | 86 Career U.S. Foreign Service officer Peter Van Buren, an East Asia specialist with little experience in Middle East policy, found himself in Iraq in 2009 for no good reason beyond the attraction of hazard pay and a fair amount of bureaucratic pressure. Once there, he was shocked by the amount of money being wasted on dubious projects, which he describes in this issue and his new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. “Why were we able to hand $5,000 to Iraqis we barely knew to start a small business, when the same option wasn’t available to a guy in Cleveland?” he remembers asking. | 24 Yoani Sánchez, a 36-year-old magazine editor, webmaster, and blogger at Generation Y, has become the Cuban dissident movement’s de facto international spokesperson, as well as a textbook example of the Internet’s power to frustrate authoritarian regimes. But life as a famous blogger—this year, she conducted an email interview with U.S. President Barack Obama—in the Castro brothers’ Cuba has its challenges. “Cameras film me; there are microphones in my house; people listen on my telephone; I am harassed from official websites and on national television,” she says. For this issue, she looks ahead to a post-Castro future. | 36

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Foreign Policy

Gastman

Fan Gang, one of China’s top economists and head of its National Economic Research Institute, is known today as a prominent advocate for free market reforms. But as a student in the 1980s, his economic education was dominated by China’s then-rigid “Soviet-type Marxism,” as he remembers it. Fan has been writing about the dramatic rise of the Chinese economy for years, but he says it was not until about 2005, when “China’s growth exerted some real impacts on global commodity prices,” that the rest of the world finally snapped to attention. In this issue, he warns of the dollar’s inevitable decline: “Even the world’s banker can’t put off the reckoning any longer,” he writes. | 69

Van Buren

Sánchez

Fan

clinTon: MARK WilSon/AFP/GeTTy iMAGeS; FAn: PieRRe VeRDy/AFP/GeTTy iMAGeS; All oTheRS: couRTeSy oF conTRibuToRS

During her tenure as U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton has logged more than 612,000 miles traveling to 87 countries, while keeping a steady hand in Foggy Bottom during a tumultuous period that has included the U.S. drawdown from Iraq, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Arab Spring, and the leaking of thousands of secret diplomatic cables. For this issue, she previews the future of American foreign policy—which promises to look much different from that of the last few decades. The next 100 years won’t be about the Middle East, she says. Instead, the Asia-Pacific region is “where much of the history of the 21st century will be written.” | 56

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I N T E R N A T I O N A L

M O N E T A R Y

F U N D

LETTERS

Yes, we humans will be forming emotional attachments with machines, falling in love with them, having sex with them, and marrying them, thereby contributing significantly to a worldwide reduction in loneliness. david levy on the future ➔ Page 13

from

around the web

the numbers Game

C

DaviD Rieff (“Millions May Die … Or Not,” September/October 2011) really be serious in accusing international aid agencies—and myself—of using hyperbole to get donor-fatigued countries to loosen their purse strings and come to the assistance of not-really-sobadly-off people? Rieff goes even further, suggesting that some (the Hutus who fled the massacre in Rwanda in 1994, for instance) might not be worthy of any assistance at all. I’m not so sure. an

One thing I do know: In January 2010, when I tried to convey the magnitude of the destruction wrought by the Haiti earthquake before a crowd of journalists at the United Nations in Geneva, I was myself one of the walking wounded, at least emotionally. This was not only an earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people, left more than a million homeless, and just about completely wiped

out that country’s infrastructure. It also killed 102 U.N. staff—more than any other single event in history—including many of my friends and colleagues. I was hearing the nightmarish stories directly relayed to me by friends who had survived, including one of a colleague who was found wandering, shoeless and disoriented, days after the quake, searching for his family only to find that his children had been crushed to death under the rubble. So no, I don’t think my statement at the time that “This is a historic disaster. We have never been confronted with such a disaster in the U.N. memory. It is like no other” was hyperbole, as Rieff suggests. It was a cri de coeur. Donor fatigue is something we have to combat every day and something I can understand. What I cannot understand are the people who think we should simply give up trying to convey the real extent and impact of the many humanitarian disasters and emergencies all over the world.

“For every area of philanthropy I have worked in, I made the best argument I possibly could for the need for funding. Did I ever cross the line into exaggeration and overestimation? If I did, I never realized it or thought about it in a conscious way. Does that mean I never did it unconsciously? Not necessarily.” —Tara STeinmeTz, www.tarasteinmetz. com “Everybody is aware of this ‘problem-inflation syndrome,’ yet it continues to exist.” —Fiorenzo ConTe, badcure.wordpress. com

ELISABETH BYRS Spokesperson U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Geneva, Switzerland

Foreign Policy welcomes letters to the editor. Readers should address their comments to [email protected]. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. For more debate and discussion of our stories, go to ForeignPolicy.com.

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Foreign Policy

David Rieff replies: Can Elisabeth Byrs be serious? As she knows perfectly well, but disingenuously fails to acknowledge, the view that aid should have been withdrawn from the camps in eastern Congo because they were controlled by the same groups that had orchestrated and carried out the Rwandan genocide is hardly controversial—except, it seems, at the U.N. Many mainline relief NGOs withdrew from the camps for this reason. As for Haiti, while I can sympathize with Byrs’s shock and sense of loss over what happened in Haiti, the truth—are we still interested in the truth or only in mobilizing people?—is just as I stated it: It may have been the worst disaster in history for the U.N., but this is not the message Byrs was understood by her listeners as conveying. To the contrary, she was understood to be speaking of the people of Haiti. I entirely agree with her when she says that it is essential that the real extent and impact of humanitarian disasters around the world be conveyed. My point is that by indulging in hyperbole—and the U.N.’s public statements on the current Somali famine show that no lessons have been learned in this regard—U.N. and NGO officials do a disservice to the truth and, by so doing, actually foment the increasing cynicism and disbelief with which their statements are now greeted.

to fear, “or perhaps also artificially intelligent software programs.” I would answer both, and their threat to just about every facet of our lives will be awesome. In the case of robots built for love and sex, one aspect of what we have to fear from cyberhackers is encountering robots that play with our emotions because their software has been hacked to make them do so. The warped thinking that encourages hackers to wreak havoc with computer systems just for the “fun” of it is likely to instigate, for example, a type of virus that manipulates human emotions sufficiently to make someone fall in love, and then dash their bliss by dumping them. This and other emo-

Love and Robots

In their lucid and convincing piece, Ayesha and Parag Khanna (“Technology Will Take on a Life of Its Own,” September/October 2011) use the example of a young man in Japan who recently married a video-game character, pointing to a future in which human-robot marriages will be commonplace. Yes, we humans will be forming emotional attachments with machines, falling in love with them, having sex with them, and marrying them, thereby contributing significantly to a worldwide reduction in loneliness and the unhappiness that the lack of a loved one so often brings. But there are dangers as well. The article also touches on what will be one of humankind’s greatest challenges in the future—cyberhacking. The Khannas ask whether it is only human cyberhackers whom we have

tional “games” will have the potential to cause misery to the point of making some who love robots suffer extreme psychological trauma. We need Alvin Toffler-like thinking to prepare us for these threats and point the way for dealing with them.

DAVID LEVY CEO, Intelligent Toys Ltd. Author, Love and Sex With Robots London, England

Ayesha and Parag Khanna reply: We welcome David Levy’s insight, based on his own intellectually stimulating research. He rightly points to the unintended consequences of our growing emotional attachment to machines. While some

FROM

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM When I read Future Shock, I was struck by its ambivalence as much as its insight. Yes, the future is exciting, but there’s a larger downside than feeling bewildered by it all. Other prognosticators have offered darker visions, which we are now seeing in developing tech, particularly with respect to extending authoritarian controls over citizenry and the technology of war-fighting. —URGELT Whoever has read Future Shock and The Third Wave would distinctly remember the awe those two books aroused. They have remained an important milestone for the students of futurism. —ENERGY2CWORTH

maladies such as loneliness are addressed, other vulnerabilities are created. As pervasive networks expand—whether among humans or among machines and humans—there is a window or lag time in which users can be manipulated. Hybrid Reality Institute fellow Marc Goodman has conjured very specific scenarios around the possibility of financial algorithms’ gaining the autonomous capacity to divert capital toward shell companies, effectively stealing from the markets. Stanford University’s Jeremy Bailenson, an expert on virtual-human interactions, predicts that eventually anti-malware software will be developed that alerts us to the kinds of intrusions Levy rightly fears will transpire. But with the stakes and potential profits from online emotional extortion rising (just witness the many fraudulent schemes that have pervaded Second Life), cyberhackers will no doubt persist in their efforts to penetrate not just individual consumers, but en masse. In a related vein, recent reports have documented the rise of “virtual slavery” in which Chinese prison inmates are forced to play online games for up to 12 hours per day (in addition to hard manual labor) in order to “gold-farm”—build stockpiles of virtual currencies that prison guards then spend. We know all too well how regulations and education frequently lag one or more steps behind such crafty and malicious purveyors of cyberexploitation. It is therefore a task of foresight to anticipate these possibilities.

November 2011

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LETTERS

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Sea Change

Robert D. Kaplan’s often incisive analysis of the current and prospective geostrategic rivalry in the South China Sea (“The South China Sea Is the Future of Conflict,” September/October 2011) suffers from three deficiencies. First, Kaplan says surprisingly little about how such East Asian powers as Japan and South Korea are likely to respond to the looming prospect of a Chinese bid for hegemony. A second deficiency is his comparison of China’s projection of power in the South China Sea today to the United States’ drive to make the Caribbean a U.S. lake in the early 20th century. The United States had no credible competitors in the Western Hemisphere capable of thwarting its ambitions. China faces a more challenging environment. Japan and India are credible competitors, and Indonesia has the potential to achieve that status. The third problem is Kaplan’s prescription for the United States. His conclusion that the optimal situation is a U.S. air and naval presence at approximately the current level creates an incentive structure that inhibits the development of an East Asian balance of power. Countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan woefully underinvest in their own defenses because they believe that they can rely indefinitely on U.S. protection. Given America’s own fiscal woes and its excessive commitments in other regions, their expectation may prove to be more illusion than substance in the coming decades. If Washington wants to complicate Beijing’s strategic calculations in the South China Sea and elsewhere, it needs to change the incentive structure so that China’s logical competitors realize that they must put forth more serious efforts. Kaplan’s insistence on preserving the current oversized U.S. military presence in the Western Pacific would encourage the continuation of an unhealthy security dependence.

An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

TED galEn carpEnTEr Senior Fellow The Cato Institute Washington, D.C.

Robert D. Kaplan replies: It is a pleasure to be engaged by Ted Galen Carpenter, whose own incisive analyses about subjects as diverse as Mexico and East Asia I read regularly. Carpenter asks a serious question: If wealthy countries such as South Korea and Japan do not do more in their own military defense, why should American taxpayers pick up the burden? I am in agreement that hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved from our defense budget through various means, but I do not agree that this should be done by reducing the presence of carrier strike groups in the Western Pacific. It is an exaggeration to say that East Asian nations are simply not rising to the challenge that China’s military poses. I write these lines from Vietnam, where I can tell you that, as the Australian analyst Desmond Ball writes, East Asia is in the midst of an “action-reaction” arms race, rather than a more benign general defense buildup. South China Sea nations are enlarging their submarine fleets, even as South Korea and Japan continue to modernize their own navies in reaction to what China is doing. Carpenter seems willing to bet that if we do less, East Asian countries will do more. But that may not be the case,

since all these countries have no choice but to accept China as their biggest trading partner. It is the very combination of China’s economic might, rising military strength, demographic heft, and geographical proximity that could force a form of Finlandization on countries of East Asia were the United States to reduce its naval and air presence. I am all for leveraging like-minded others to do more in their own defense so as to reduce our own burden; but it cannot be done by forcing an either-or decision on them. It is precisely our willingness to keep our own forces at adequate strength that is encouraging smaller countries of the region to enlarge or at least modernize their own militaries. On another matter, while the differences between the South China Sea and the Caribbean are real, it is the similarities that are fascinating and therefore worth recording.

Duchy of Hazard

Eric Pape (“The Lap of Luxembourgery,” September/October 2011)

describes Luxembourg as a country rotten to the core. We write not to question the article’s style or humor, but to get some facts straight. Among the numerous inaccuracies in this article is the myth of the gdp per capita figure. This figure is relatively meaningless when applied to Luxembourg and cannot be used to demonstrate the country’s wealth. Luxembourg’s gdp is generated not only by the local workforce but, as Pape admits, by a large number of cross-border commuters. These represent some 150,000 out of a total working population of just 340,000. With foreign workers added to the head count, Luxembourg’s per capita gdp falls by around 45 percent. Pape writes that Luxembourg’s per capita external debt (some $3.76 million per person) is 84 times that of the debt-ridden United States. According to Eurostat statistics, the global level of Luxembourg public debt in 2010 was €7.66 billion (around €15,200 per capita.) Hence

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LETTERS the external debt cannot be several trillion euros. In addition to relying on inaccurate statistics, Pape’s article also displays a poor understanding of politics. He says that democracy in Luxembourg is a joke because the ruling family is hereditary and appoints certain members of parliament. This is not true. Moreover, parliamentary monarchy is a widespread model, which democracies including Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden have adopted. Luxembourgers do not suffer from a sense-of-humor failure, but we expect articles about our country to be wellresearched and constructively argued. Given that Foreign Policy is an opinion leader in its field, poorly crafted texts can mislead readers and raise questions about the credibility of a distinguished publication.

FERNAND GRULMS Chief Executive Officer Luxembourg for Finance Luxembourg

Eric Pape replies: I was willing to risk my well-being when FOREIGN POLICY sent me, its intrepid reporter, into the bowels of Luxembourg to write an irony-laden dispatch that mocks myself and parachute journalism in general, but I try my best to relegate my banking and debt analysis as a journalist to my own banking and debts. So, for the most sensitive numbers— those suggesting that Luxembourg has an outlandish external debt (which is not to be confused with the country’s honorably low public debt)—I sought out “experts.” One was the genial (and sadly recently deceased) parliamentarian and banking-world expert Lucien Thiel. Thiel readily acknowledged the famously high external debt data that I brought up with him, and he contextualized it as the natural extension of the tiny country’s unparalleled success with in-

vestment funds, among other things. In his telling, Luxembourg’s external debt is a sign that it is economically creative, and thriving. Interestingly, Luxembourgian folk wrote to explain away pretty much all the data brought up in my dispatch. Could it be that Luxembourgers are so dejected that the only statistics that they have faith in involve good news: the puny public debt, low unemployment, and projections for vibrant economic growth? Maybe they are right about that. (As for the country’s dismal score on the happiness ranking, I welcome travel donations so that I can visit similarly unhappy peoples and rank them myself.) If Luxembourg really is the dark, corrupted heart of Europe, then one thing is clear to me: Evil sure picked a pleasant place to live.

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DEPT. OF IRONY Eric Pape’s dispatch from Luxembourg (“The Lap of Luxembourgery,” September/October 2011) was an experiment in irony—an attempt to poke fun at the type of parachute journalism that leads Western journalists to make sweeping generalizations about the countries they visit based on brief discussions with cab drivers and hotel clerks. We thought that over-the-top phrases such as the “armpit of the European Union” and descriptions of a “young revolutionary in the making, forced into exile for his creative vision” would tip people off that we weren’t quite serious. Judging by the comments the piece generated online, some folks don’t seem to have gotten the joke. “How can you get the essence of a country with such a short visit and by talking to largely unrepresentative persons? I’ve lived there for more than 13 years, and it’s nowhere near what you are picturing,” fumed OLIVIER101. “I am a teacher in Luxembourg, and one of my students brought in this article to know if it was really as uninformed as it appeared to her. I was flabbergasted by the terrible quality of the journalism. The sources Pape cites are poor representations of the country,” complains MIKEYMANNON. SUPERJHEMP called the article, “Typical bullshit … to fool the American John Doe, who still thinks that the U.S. is the only legal country on Earth and all others are either evil communist leftovers or some lost spots undermined by Islam.” Pape found himself compared to Hitler and called a cancer on American journalism by angry Luxembourgers. His hard work was dismissed as the “ramblings of a jealous Parisian.” (Sorry, Eric!) A few folks got it, though. MARTEILLE sighed, “For a moment, I thought the author was being serious here. Kind of wish I was born in Luxembourg. Oh well.”

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LETTERS

The Jihad Deficit

Charles Kurzman’s essay (“Why Is It So Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These Days?” September/October 2011) probes an important question and offers a balanced, intelligent answer. Kurzman fleshes out a significant structural weakness within the jihadi movement: its inability to draw as many recruits as it would like (and as many as some fear). His conclusion is undoubtedly correct that the terrorist attacks we may see in the near term “do not threaten our way of life, unless we let them.” A great tragedy of the past decade is the way the blundering U.S. response to the very real threat of terrorism has often strengthened the enemy’s hand. But though his overarching argument is astute, I fear Kurzman’s analysis understates the risks we’ll face in the coming decade. Although he points to a decline in recruits entering terrorist training camps, militants have also flocked to live battlefields in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen. Real combat

experience is one of the best drivers of the enemy’s ingenuThink what our world would ity. The era of ausbe like if as many people died terity we’re entering from terrorism (13,191 in 2010) as die further ensures that each year from nutritional deficiencies fewer resources will be devoted to polic(approximately 418,000 per year). ing efforts to contain Charles Kurzman replies: the threat. I thank Daveed Gartenstein-Ross for his Moreover, Kurzman appears overly sobering reminder that recruits continue to dismissive when he writes the National get live battle training in numerous conflict Counterterrorism Center “calculates zones. Fortunately, the number of militants in that Islamist terrorism claims fewer than these areas, as estimated by U.S. government 50 lives per day.” Fifty lives a day adds officials, continues to run much lower than up to a considerable total over the course the numbers trained in Afghanistan during the of a year. It’s even more significant when Taliban era and far lower than the numbers one considers militant groups’ ability that many experts predicted after 9/11. to set in motion retaliatory violence, as I agree that the death toll from terrorism is a terrible human tragedy—how fortunate we they did in Iraq, or exacerbate humaniare that it is not higher! Think what our world tarian crises, as al-Shabab has in Somawould be like if as many people died from lia. But these differences in threat assessterrorism (13,191 in 2010, according to the ment aside, I commend Kurzman for his National Counterterrorism Center) as die each thoughtful essay.

DAVEED GARTENSTEIN-ROSS Senior Fellow Foundation for Defense of Democracies Washington, D.C.

year from nutritional deficiencies (approximately 418,000 per year, according to World Health Organization estimates). Global concern need not be calibrated solely with fatalities, but even well-informed people may be unaware of these disparities in scale.

eufocus in Foreign Policy

A M E S S A G E F R O M A M B A S S A D O R J O Ã O VA L E D E A L M E I D A

HEAD OF DELEGATION European Union Delegation to the United States Te $4.28 trillion partnership between the EU and the United States represents the largest and most integrated economic relationship in the world. Transatlantic trade in goods alone is worth more than a billion dollars a day, and the transatlantic economy provides jobs for an estimated 15 million workers on both sides of the Atlantic. Every day, our closely interconnected relationship in the areas of trade, foreign investment, and foreign affiliates creates and sustains jobs for Europeans and Americans alike. However, as the economic and financial crisis has demonstrated, we cannot afford to rest on our laurels. Instead, we must build on our relationship and our achievements to date to support the growth of the transatlantic economy and the employment it provides. Tis requires removing regulatory barriers, liberalizing new segments of the transatlantic marketplace, and investing in future-oriented fields like clean energy and emerging technologies. I invite you to learn more about transatlantic efforts to create jobs in the current issue of EU Focus.

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EU Focus In-depth treatment of important European issues and the transatlantic relationship

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This Issue Transatlantic Job Creation

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www.eurunion.org

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November 2011

Transatlantic Job Creation “Trade is an engine for global growth. It contributes to long-term jobs in the EU and around the world.” EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht

Jobs are the lifeblood of the modern economy, creating income that is spent at businesses, saved in banks, and gathered as tax revenue. Without jobs, growth grinds to a halt, economic confidence falters, and the economy contracts—bad news for all concerned. Te recession has taken a comparable toll on employment on both the United States and the European Union. Yet, in spite of the economic downturn, the size and interconnected nature of the transatlantic economic relationship continues to create and sustain jobs—close to 15 million of them, divided more or less equally between the EU and the U.S. Tese jobs result from transatlantic trade in goods and services, foreign investment, and the activities of foreign affiliates in each other’s economies. Jobs and Transatlantic Trade. Trade in goods and services leads to economic growth and spawns jobs. Te EU and the United States are one another’s main trading partners, together accounting for about onethird of global trade and half of global GDP. In 2010, the EU continued to be the top destination for U.S. merchandise exports, and ranked second only after China as a source of U.S. imports. Likewise, the United States was the top destination for EU exports of goods in 2010 and ranked second afer China as a source of EU imports. Te most recent figures indicate that trade in goods between the transatlantic partners is on the rise in 2011.

inside 2 Keeping Transatlantic Commerce Moving, Business Booming, and Jobs Blooming 3 Creating Jobs at Home: the EU Strategy 4 Help for Redundant, Unemployed, or Underemployed Workers in the European Union

Jobs and Foreign Direct Investment. However, trade alone is not responsible for the highly integrated nature of the EU-U.S. economic relationship. Te unrivaled amount of two-way foreign direct investment and affiliate activities are at the core of this connection and contribute to growth and jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. Transatlantic scholars consistently emphasize that foreign investment is the tie that binds together the U.S. and EU economies. According to Dan Hamilton and Joseph Quinlan of Johns Hopkins University, “a relationship that rests on the foundation of foreign investment is one in which both parties are extensively embedded and entrenched in each other’s economies. Such a relationship is more job-creating, income-producing, and wealth-generating for both partners than

Transatlantic Foreign Affiliates: An Impact Assessment “Most American foreign affiliates in Europe are indistinguishable from local German, British, or Dutch firms, while European affiliates operating in the United States are barely distinguishable to U.S. consumers who enjoy European goods and services on a daily basis without much thought. Ubiquitous brands such as Trader Joe’s, Jenny Craig, Sunglass Hut, Lenscrafers, AC Nielsen, Glidden Paint, Skippy Peanut Butter, and Budweiser beer—all are as American as apple pie and all are European-owned companies. Moreover, these affiliates invest in local communities. European affiliates in the United States employ millions of American workers and are the largest source of onshored jobs in America.” Dan Hamilton and Joseph Quinlan, “Te Transatlantic Economy 2011,” SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University

one based solely on trade. Te transatlantic economy epitomizes this type of economic integration.” Te EU and the U.S. count more than $3 trillion in mutual investment stocks between them. Total U.S. investment in the EU is more than triple what the U.S. invests in all of Asia, and EU investment in the U.S. is more than eight times what the EU invests in both India and China. Jobs and Foreign Affiliates. Increasingly, industrialized economies deliver goods and services through foreign affiliates and subsidiaries rather than through exports, and establishing a corporate presence abroad creates both direct and indirect jobs in the host country. For example, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, German automaker BMW invested $5 billion in its first full manufacturing facility outside of Germany, creating more than 7,000 jobs. Swedish retailer Ikea has not only established nearly 40 stores in the United States, but it has also opened its first U.S. furniture manufacturing factory in Danville, Virginia, bringing hundreds of jobs to the region. Te U.S.-based research, manufacturing, and distribution operations of French pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis are responsible for 11,400 jobs in the United States.

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Keeping Transatlantic Commerce Moving, Business Booming, and Jobs Blooming “Te direct [air] connection between Memphis and Amsterdam has a $120 million impact on Tennessee’s economy and supports more than 2,200 local jobs. American Airlines now flies direct to Madrid, a connection that has a $100 million annual impact on the Dallas-Forth Worth economy. Now before Open Skies Agreements, these routes simply did not exist….these agreements may not create headlines, but they do create jobs.” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton

Removing Regulatory Barriers: the Transatlantic Economic Council. With such a high level of transatlantic economic integration, tariffs—which average 2 to 3 percent—are no longer the major barrier to trade between the U.S. and the EU. Instead, regulatory differences represent one of the most serious obstacles to EU-U.S. commerce. In 2007, the EU and the U.S. established the Transatlantic Economic Council—the TEC—to advance transatlantic economic integration by bringing together governments, the business community, and consumers to work on key areas where greater regulatory convergence and understanding can foster economic growth and jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. Multinational firms collectively spend billions to run parallel supply lines to tailor products to both European and American specifications. Transatlantic regulatory convergence involves developing common standards for, or at least common recognition of, legal requirements, testing and certification procedures, and enforcement mechanisms. As EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht explains, “Tere are compelling reasons to engage in this regulatory cooperation. Studies have shown that

efficiency, and financial markets. It is advised by representatives of transatlantic dialogues representing business, legislators, and consumers. One such group, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue, brings corporate leaders from the EU and U.S. together to help establish a barrier-free transatlantic market which will serve as a catalyst for global trade liberalization and prosperity. Unified markets are needed to create a business environment conducive to innovation, economic growth, increased investment, and job creation. Unleashing Transatlantic Aviation: Open Skies. Te airline industry is vital to the global economy, generating $3.5 trillion in economic activity annually and creating jobs for 32 million people. Together, the EU and U.S. aviation markets represent around 60 percent of global aviation. A landmark two-stage EU-U.S. air transport agreement, known as Open Skies, has ushered in unprecedented liberalization of the EU-U.S. airline market by removing restrictions on routes, prices, and number of flights. Stage one of the accord, launched in 2008, triggered an increase in services in previously restricted parts of the transatlantic market. In 2010, the second stage of the agreement expanded the benefits of the agreement to include additional investment and market access opportunities. Both stages of Open Skies strengthen the cooperative framework in regulatory areas such as safety, security, and the environment. Estimates of the potential benefits from removing regulatory obstacles to the EU-U.S. transatlantic aviation market include up to 80,000 new jobs. Investing in the Future: Green Collar Jobs. Overall, foreign investment is directly responsible for more than five million American jobs, including two million in manufacturing; the bulk of these jobs come from European investment, including affiliate operations.

we can generate impressive savings—more than 200 billion dollars—by reducing non-tariff measures and by aligning regulatory divergences. And even if we only tackle a number of specific areas, the gains are huge because of the sheer size of transatlantic trade. So, the formula of the TEC is to tackle regulatory issues at an early stage, before the actual regulation is in place,” resulting in cost savings for both producers and consumers. Te TEC provides a high-level forum to address complex topics ranging from chemicals, intellectual property rights, and secure trade, to electric vehicles, energy

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Green collar jobs—those involved with renewable energy technologies—are expanding, particularly in places like Colorado, which now boasts nearly 20,000 renewable energy and research jobs, making it a national leader in new energy employment. Danish company Vestas, a global leader in the production of high-tech wind power systems, has invested over $1 billion at its various wind turbine production plants throughout Colorado and directly created more than 2,400 jobs, including more than 1,000 highly skilled manufacturing positions. Iberdrola Renewables, Inc., the U.S. division of Spain’s number one energy group, Iberdrola, S.A., is already helping to generate power from more than 40 renewable

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supporting jobs in industries and communities across the country. German-owned Siemens AG is a $19.9 billion company that provides a broad range of products and services and employs 60,000 people in nearly 800 locations throughout the U.S. Siemens Energy, a subsidiary, has made a remarkable difference in the American towns where it has set up wind power manufacturing facilities. In 2008, Siemens helped energize a community with a high unemployment rate by creating more than 300 jobs when it began construction in 2008 on Windy Flats in Washington state, one of the largest wind farms in the U.S. Two years later, the company created approximately 400 green collar jobs when it opened a plant to manufacture wind turbine parts in Hutchinson, Kansas, which had witnessed a steady flight of industry from the region. energy projects for customers in the U.S. Te company directly employs more than 850 people in the United States, and has created thousands of additional

American companies also create jobs in the EU. For example, General Electric’s GE Wind Energy has production facilities in Germany and Spain and employs 980 at its Salzbergen, Germany headquarters alone.

Creating Jobs at Home: the EU Strategy To create sustainable growth and jobs in its 27 Member States, the EU promotes a knowledge-based society underpinned by innovation within businesses and investment in people. Europe 2020 is the EU’s strategy to emerge stronger from the economic and financial crisis and prepare the EU economy for the next decade. It identifies three key drivers for growth—smart growth (fostering knowledge, innovation, and digital society), sustainable growth (making EU production greener and more resource-efficient while boosting competitiveness), and inclusive growth (enhancing labor market participation, skills acquisition, and the fight against poverty).

According to the Europe 2020 strategy, by 2020: n

75 percent of the EU population between the ages of 20 and 64 should be employed.

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3 percent of the EU’s GDP should be invested in research and development.

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Previously established targets for reduced greenhouse gases, increased renewable energy production, and improved energy efficiency should be met.

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Te share of school drop-outs should be below 10 percent and at least 40 percent of the population between 30 and 34 should have a degree or diploma.

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20 million fewer people should be living below the poverty line.

“Te Europe 2020 strategy is built around the ambitious goal of inclusive, sustainable, and smart growth, based on social fairness, environmental protection, and investment in technological advancement.” László Andor, EU Commissioner responsible for Employment, Social Affairs, and Inclusion

The EU’s €7 Billion Boost for Research and Innovation In July 2011, the EU launched a €7 billion ($9.3 billion) call for proposals for research on today’s most challenging problems, ranging from climate change to energy to food security to aging populations. Funded by the EU’s 7th Framework Program for Research and Technological Development, projects will focus on bridging the gap between research and the marketplace and demonstrating that new technologies have commercial potential or can work on a large enough scale to be industrially viable.

“Competition for this money will raise standards across the board and bring the best talent in Europe and beyond together to work on everything from curing cancer to electric cars.”

Te funding is expected to create an estimated 174,000 jobs in the short term, and nearly half a million jobs and an increase in GDP of nearly €80 billion ($106 billion) over the next 15 years.

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation, and Science

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Help for Redundant, Unemployed, or Underemployed Workers in the European Union On the Web n

Trade and Jobs http://ec.europa.eu/trade/ trade-growth-and-jobs

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Europe 2020 http://ec.europa.eu/ europe2020

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European Employment Strategy http://ec.europa.eu/social/ main.jsp?catId=101

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Te Transatlantic Economy Series: SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University http://transatlantic.sais-jhu.edu/ transatlantic-topics/transatlanticeconomy-series.htm

Because stronger growth requires a shif of resources toward the best-performing sectors, some sectors may experience job losses. Te EU equips its citizens to adapt to such changes through funding including its Globalization Adjustment Fund and European Social Fund.

EU’s member countries and regions, focusing particularly on areas where economic development is less advanced. Te European Social Fund will distribute €75 billion ($99.4 billion) to EU Member States and regions between 2007 and 2013.

European Globalization Adjustment Fund. Te EU aids workers who have lost their jobs as a result of globalization through its €500 million ($662.9 million) a year European Globalization Adjustment Fund which aims to help “redundant workers” find new jobs as quickly as possible. Key elements include:

EU Focus is published bi-monthly by the Delegation of the European Union to the United States. Silvia Kofler Head of Press & Public Diplomacy Editor-in-Chief Stacy Hope Editor Melinda Stevenson Writer/Assistant Editor ISSN: 1830-5067 Catalogue No.: IQ-AA-11-06-EN-C Delegation of the European Union to the United States 2175 K Street, NW Washington, DC 20037 202.862.9500 www.eurunion.org www.facebook.com/EUintheUS www.twitter.com/EUintheUS email:[email protected]

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Job-search assistance and occupational guidance; tailor-made training, re-training, and certification programs; outplacement assistance and entrepreneurship promotion; and aid for self-employment.

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Limited-time allowances for expenses related to finding a job or participating in educational or training programs.

European Social Fund. Te European Social Fund promotes employment and anticipates and manages occupational changes in order to better equip Member States, their citizens, and their companies to face new, global challenges. Funding is spread through the

Foreign Direct Investment, 2010 Historical-Cost Basis U.S. investment in the EU27:

$1.95 trillion

EU27 investment in the U.S.:

$1.48 trillion

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis

Tell us what you think about EU Focus! Log on to: www.eurunion.org/eufocus between October 15 and December 30 to take our online survey.

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ENRIQUE DE LA OSA / REUTERS

IN BOX

EPIPHANIES WITH NANDAN NILEKANI

“The intersection of what is possible with today’s technology and the age-old challenges of developing countries—that, to me, is a very exciting point.” | 29

With the Castros getting old, whither Cuba’s daddy state? Leading dissident Yoani Sánchez reports. | 36

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

AN AFGHAN POLICEWOMAN CARRIES NAIL CLIPPERS, A BLACKBERRY, AND SALT IN HER PURSE. | 26

What did the State Department really spend money on in Iraq? French pastry chefs and unused bicycles. | 24 ANTHROPOLOGY OF AN IDEA

JUST WHAT IS A JUST WAR? | 34

November 2011

23

IN BOX the list | by pet er van bu r en

Checkbook Diplomacy In shopping for hearts and minds in Iraq, the State Department made some bizarre impulse purchases. n 2009, the State Department sent me to Iraq for a year as part of the civilian surge deployed to backstop the more muscular military one. At the head of a six-person Provincial Reconstruction Team (prt), I was assigned to spend U.S. government money creating projects that would lift the local economy and lure young men away from the dead-end opportunities of al Qaeda. I was to empower women, turning them into entrepreneurs and handing them a future instead of a suicide vest. This was newfangled hearts and minds, as practiced with a lavish checkbook and supervised by a skittish embassy looking for “victory” anywhere it could be found. We really did believe money could buy us love and win the war. The work was done by amateurs like me, sent to Iraq on one-year tours without guidance or training, and eager to create photogenic success stories that would get us all

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promoted. No idea was too bizarre, too gimmicky, or too pointless for us hearts-and-minders: We actually preferred handing out croissants and children’s calendars to tackling tough issues like health care or civic services. One month it might be guaranteed-to-fail small businesses like car washes and brake repair shops in an economy struggling just to take a breath; the next, an Arabic translation of Macbeth, with some of Saddam Hussein’s henchmen in bad-guy roles. As one Iraqi told me at a U.S.-funded art show in Dora, one of the most violent suburbs of Baghdad, “It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.” Here are some of the wacky ideas we came up with to rebuild Iraq, and remember: These are the wacky ones that actually got U.S. taxpayer funding.

French Pastry classes

Cost: $9,797

Peter Van Buren, who served in the U.S. Foreign Service for more than two decades, is author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. The views expressed here are solely the author’s and do not in any way represent the views of the U.S. government. illustrations by ward sutton for fp 24

Foreign Policy

In the hands of one prt in southern Baghdad, our instructions to help female entrepreneurs translated into pastry classes for disadvantaged Iraqi women who presumably could then go open cute little French cafes in their city’s bombed-out streets. In the funding request, the prt stipulated that “a French Chef with experience in both baking pastries and in teaching pastry classes internationally” would volunteer to teach. So, you may ask, if the French chef was volunteering le time, what was the $9,797 spent on? Well, some was certainly spent on paying students to attend. It was almost impossible to get Iraqis to show up for these things (as they had to, if you wanted your photos of the event to look good) without offering a free lunch, taxi fare, and a stipend. Needless to say, I never heard of any pâtisseries sprouting up on the road to Baghdad’s airport.

For the same reason, Gen. David Petraeus sponsored a million-dollar Baghdad water park, unusable ever since the water pumps broke down. At the zoo, the now-defunct website’s chat room and Skype-like features devolved into a series of absurd internal discussions among the vets: Issues included whether to keep providing alcohol to the bears (it kept them docile) and whether to continue the daily throwing of live donkeys into the lions’ cage.

baghDaD yellow Pages

Cost: $7,000

Play about Donkeys

MuscleMen Mural

How to convince the Iraqis to abandon several thousand years of ethnic and religious sectarian hatred? One Baghdad prt’s solution was to pay the local Iraqi artists’ syndicate to produce a play, Under the Donkey’s Shade. “The play focuses on an uproariously funny legal dispute that splits the people of a town into two groups,” the description in the funding report boasts. “The matter in dispute is the value of shade cast by a donkey. The message is clear: Don’t quarrel over minor differences. Those who see the play will get the message that political reconciliation is critical as we head into national election season.” The production was staged at least once to my knowledge, with some coerced locals in reluctant attendance; political reconciliation did not spontaneously flower.

One prt hired a local artist to paint a mural on the side of a gym near Sadr City. The purpose was to “provide an aesthetically pleasing sight upon entry, helping to bring a sense of normalcy for the citizens in the area and for those passing through.” What we ended up with instead was a group of oiled, homoerotic Steve Reeves musclemen.

Cost: $22,500

roaD to nowhere

Cost: Unknown

In 2009, the U.S. Army hired a contractor to pave a short stretch of dirt road near the city of Salman Pak, with the idea of increasing commerce between two nearby neighborhoods. The contractor, however, took the money and laid down only gravel—which made the road just passable enough that insurgents started to use it as a transit route. The local residents appealed to the police, who set up barricades, ending what little commerce the original dirt road had sustained.

Cost: $22,180

chilDren’s art calenDar

Cost: $18,375

Tasked with community-building on Baghdad’s outskirts, my prt decided to publish a calendar illustrated with Iraqi children’s art. First, a local women’s association was paid to conduct an art contest for the area’s children. Refreshments were served, and the 12 best works were printed on the 1,000 calendars made and distributed—some within the neighborhood, but most to other State Department officials. I left mine behind in Baghdad.

Vets for the baghDaD Zoo

Cost: Unknown

As part of a joint effort with the Army and the U.S. Agriculture Department to revitalize Baghdad’s zoo, the State Department paid for computers and Internet service, ostensibly so that the zoo’s veterinarians could establish online relationships with vets in the United States but also so that people could be shown on tv going to the zoo, sending a message that life was returning to normal.

In a country with few land-line phones and a seriously toxic business environment, some Green Zone genius decided that economic success hinged on producing the first-ever Baghdad Yellow Pages. Even under pressure, we could come up with only 250 businesses that had permanent phone numbers in a city of several million people. My prt was saddled with hundreds of copies of the finished product. We could not safely go door-to-door and so hired a local contractor, at seven bucks a copy, to give the books away. He dropped off a few copies here and there and likely dumped the rest behind some abandoned building.

bikes for tykes

Cost: $24,750

At one point the State Department bought 225 children’s bicycles from a Jordanian middleman, some with training wheels, to give away near Sadr City, an impoverished Shiite area of Baghdad. The idea was to replace streets filled with trash, pockmarked with shell craters, and ruled by wild dog packs with kids biking to each other’s houses, a sort of Mayberry on the Tigris. But it was quickly clear that riding the bikes would be impossible on the destroyed and dangerous roads. Later, I saw some wheels from the bikes being used on wheelchairs for injured Iraqi kids.

IN BOX T HE T HI NGS THEY CA RRIED

The Afghan Policewoman

S

HOPIRAI SHIRZAI, ONE of 35 female police officers

in Afghanistan’s Balkh province, joined the force more than two decades ago, when she was just 14 and newly married. “My husband was a

police officer and I wanted to spend time with him,” she explains. Shirzai, who worked as a prison guard under the Taliban, is now stationed at a checkpoint

care of the youngest of her six children, a 9-month-old

protecting the entrance to the city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

boy. Shirzai took a break from her work searching other

She works the morning shift; in the evening, she takes

people’s bags to show FOREIGN POLICY what’s in hers.

Cell phones: Shirzai carries two, a Nokia and a cheap BlackBerry knockoff—one to take and make calls, and one to record conversations with suspects. “Otherwise later they always change their story.”

Salt: Shirzai does not carry a weapon, but she does carry a halfliter of salt in an empty water bottle. Once, when the driver of a car she was searching refused to cooperate, she threw a handful of salt in his face and then overpowered him while he was rubbing his eyes. It turned out he was carrying more than 110 pounds of opium. “I’m told the government burned it,” she says.

Purse: It is Shirzai’s only purse, bought in Mazar a year and a half ago for about $10. Its plastic decoration, the word “Daren,” broke months ago. Shirzai has no idea who or what Daren is, but she likes the way the purse looks.

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Foreign Policy

Police ID card: Policewomen, like all officers in Afghanistan, are given ID cards that read, “This is an acknowledgment that [name], son of [name], has attended Module One Provincial Training Program.” They also are issued men’s uniforms, which Shirzai refuses to wear, bringing clothes from home instead, because “I need a skirt.” (She does not wear a burqa, though she did under the Taliban.)

Scissors and knives: To cut open suspicious bags and parcels. That large opium shipment, for example, was hidden in burlap sacks stuffed mostly with coal.

Nail clippers: To keep her nails short. She likes them that way.

INTERVIEW BY ANNA BADKHEN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY THORNE ANDERSON

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IN BOX ideas BY JOSHUA E. KEATING

strange trade

Free trade advocates say it’s an engine of economic growth; opponents think it perpetuates global inequality. But the unintended effects of all that cross-border traffic—which has nearly quadrupled around the world since 1990—may be even more interesting. Here’s a look at some of the most surprising conclusions from recent research on trade.

1. Trade makes countries shrink.

I

How the West was won–in the Middle Ages.

t’s one of the best-known but least understood of historical trends: Until the 13th century, the Middle East and North Africa were far more scientifically and economically advanced than medieval Europe. But while the European Renaissance was followed by the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, the Arab world stagnated for centuries. What happened? The traditional view, held by early 20th-century theorists like Max Weber and modern historians like Bernard Lewis, is that cultural factors—Islam’s conservative nature, the “Protestant work ethic”—were the reason. But in a recent paper published in The Economic Journal, economist Jared Rubin pinpoints a more specific and potentially far more decisive factor: the Western ability to loan money at interest. Both Islam and early forms of Christianity ban usury, defined as the charging of interest on a loan. In both cultures, businesses developed methods to get around the prohibition. A popular stratagem in early Islamic finance was the mukhatara, or “double-sell.” For example, a debtor might sell a creditor something for $100 and then immediately buy it back for $110 to be paid at a later date, the $10 becoming in effect a form of interest on the $100 loan. Today, schemes like mukhatara remain the only legal way to charge interest in much of the Muslim world. But secularizing governments in the West gradually did away with the ban on usury during the 14th and 15th centuries, allowing them to develop the sophisticated banking services needed to generate capital for, say, building factories or funding massive construction projects, Rubin says. The split might have come, Rubin points out, because Islam evolved as a binding social code, intimately entwined with the political systems it dominated and absorbed throughout the Ottoman Empire, whereas Christianity developed as a dissident movement separate from the political institutions of the Roman Empire. So how, then, to account for today’s booming Islamic economies in the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia and billions of dollars invested in so-called “sharia-compliant” financial services? Rubin considers these new methods just variants on the age-old workarounds, but not enough to propel Islamic economies past Western gdps. If you get left behind in the Middle Ages, it takes more than a few shortcuts to catch up to the future.

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2. Trade is less important than marriage. Facing a shortage of available wives, Chinese families are increasing their savings rates to increase their sons’ competitiveness in the marriage market. This drives down China’s exchange rate, contributing to a global trade imbalance. –Qingyuan Du and Shang-Jin Wei, National Bureau of Economic Research

3. Trade built the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica. “Far from being isolated developmentally, [the cacao trade] integrally tied populations in the American Southwest to the socio-political and economic activities of Mesoamerican states.” –Dorothy K. Washburn, William N. Washburn, and Petia A. Shipkova, Journal of Archaeological Science

4. Trade doesn’t turn low-tech countries into high-tech ones. Despite hopes that globalization would allow developing countries to innovate themselves into prosperity, 30 years of increased trade has only brought steeper and more intransigent gaps between low-tech and high-tech countries, with the high-tech countries maintaining their edge through specialization that can take years to match. –Thomas Kemeny, Journal of Economic Geography

5. Trade can improve your basketball game. An increase in the number of foreigners playing in domestic basketball leagues correlates with improved performance for the national team, even if it’s composed only of domestic players. –J. Alvarez, D. Forrest, I. Sanz, and J.D. Tena, Labour Economics

IlluSTrATIon By STepHen SAvAge For Fp

Money MarkeT

Increased international trade lowers a country’s birth rate, in part because it exposes countries to gender norms that bring women out of the home and into the workplace. –John A. Doces, International Interactions

epiph a nie s | i n t ervi ew by c h ar l e s h o ma n s

Nandan Nilekani large units in the public sector, or they were family companies. The notion of a firstgeneration set of entrepreneurs creating a very different kind of company was like a breath of fresh air in the 1980s.

all the forces that friedman and i talked about—globalization, technology, the leveling of the playing field—are as valid as ever. The transmission of information and capital globally and instantaneously that is happening thanks to the cloud, tablets, and social networking are all manifestations of that concept. That hyperconnected world is both a source of opportunity and a challenge.

what we’re doing [in the indian government] is leapfrogging paper and going straight to online IDs, which is actually a big idea: People who

“Seattle has Bill,” Thomas Friedman once wrote. “Bangalore has Nandan.” The co-founder of Infosys—the Indian company that made “outsourcing” a household word—famously gave Friedman the central conceit for The World Is Flat when he said that global commerce’s “playing field is being leveled” by communications technology. Now tasked with providing digital IDs to 1.2 billion Indians, Nandan Nilekani is trying to finish the job he started in the private sector: bringing a country that never entirely left the 19th century all the way into the 21st.

IllustratIon by Joe CIardIello for fp

My father was a Middle Manager in a textile mill in Bangalore and ran into hard times. He had to move on and look for other jobs. My parents were concerned that I would not get good schooling, so they put me up in my uncle’s house in Dharwad, and I spent about six years there. So at a very young age, I was away from my parents. I developed an amount of independence and learned to stand on my own feet.

infosys was going to be a different type of company. It was going to be very ethically run, meritocratic, quality-conscious, transparent. People didn’t confuse the personal with the corporate. In those days in India, companies were either large multinationals, or they were

had no idea what ids were, which is many Indians, are now going to jump from that to an online digital id that works on the Internet or the mobile phone. Then you can start designing services in the online world: a new way to deliver banking services, food entitlements, whatever. The intersection of what is possible with today’s technology and the ageold challenges of developing countries—that, to me, is a very exciting point.

when western developMent happened in the 19th and 20th centuries, it took many decades and it went through the evolution of many technologies: the steam engine, the automobile, the airplane, electricity, the telegraph. Today, countries like India that are experiencing 7 or 8 percent growth and have this population that is impatient for change have to look at a fundamentally different model.

india is fulfilling its proMise. it has the largest pool of young people anywhere in the world. And it’s a country that’s fully exposed because of its openness to the most modern technology. It’s a society in transition, where this huge, young, aspirational population is working in a system that is still older and slower. It’s a very exciting time. Nandan Nilekani is chairman of India’s Unique Identification Authority and author of Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation.

November 2011

29

IN BOX zambia

the optim i st | by c h a r l e s ken n y

Haiti Doesn’t Need Your Old T-Shirt

T

he Green Bay Packers this year beat the Pittsburgh Steelers to win Super Bowl xlv in Arlington, Texas. In parts of the developing world, however, an alternate reality exists: “Pittsburgh Steelers: Super Bowl xlv Champions” appears emblazoned on T-shirts from Nicaragua to Zambia. The shirt wearers, of course, are not an international cadre of Steelers die-hards, but recipients of the many thousands of excess shirts the National Football League produced to anticipate the post-game merchandising frenzy. Each year, the nfl donates the losing team’s shirts to the charity World Vision, which then ships them off to developing countries to be handed out for free. Everyone wins, right? The nfl offloads 100,000 shirts (and hats and sweatshirts) that can’t be sold—and takes the donation as a tax break. World Vision gets clothes to distribute at no cost. And some Nicaraguans and Zambians get a free shirt. What’s not to like?

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Foreign Policy

Quite a lot, as it happens—so much so that there’s even a Twitter hashtag, #swedow, for “Stuff We Don’t Want,” to track such developed-world offloading, whether it’s knit teddy bears for kids in refugee camps, handmade puppets for orphans, yoga mats for Haiti, or dresses made out of pillowcases for African children. The blog Tales from the Hood, run by an anonymous aid worker, even set up a swedow prize, won by Knickers 4 Africa, a (thankfully now defunct) British ngo set up a couple of years ago to send panties south of the Sahara. Here’s the trouble with dumping stuff we don’t want on people in need: What they need is rarely the stuff we don’t want. And even when they do need that kind of stuff, there are much better ways for them to get it than for a Western ngo to gather donations at a suburban warehouse, ship everything off to Africa or South America, and then try to distribute it to remote areas. World Vision, for example, spends 58 cents per shirt on

Leah Missbach Day/worLD vision

The West can (and should) stop dumping its hand-me-downs on the developing world.

FINBARR O’REILLY/REUTERS; PHILIPPE DESMAZES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; ANTHONY BELIZAIRE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

shipping, warehousing, and distributing them, according to data reported by the blog Aid Watch—well within the range of what a secondhand shirt costs in a developing country. Bringing in shirts from outside also hurts the local economy: Garth Frazer of the University of Toronto estimates that increased used-clothing imports accounted for about half of the decline in apparel industry employment in Africa between 1981 and 2000. Want to really help a Zambian? Give him a shirt made in Zambia. The mother of all swedow is the $2 billion-plus U.S. food aid program, a Perhaps boondoggle that lingers on only because the most of the lobbying muscle of agricultural conembarrassing glomerates. (Perhaps the most embarrassing moment was when the United States moment was airdropped 2.4 million Pop-Tarts on Af- when the ghanistan in January 2002.) Harvard Uni- United States versity’s Nathan Nunn and Yale Universiairdropped ty’s Nancy Qian have shown that the scale of U.S. food aid isn’t strongly tied to how 2.4 million much recipient countries actually require Pop-Tarts on it—but it does rise after a bumper crop in Afghanistan. the American heartland, suggesting that food aid is far more about dumping American leftovers than about sending help where help’s needed. And just like secondhand clothing, castoff food exports can hurt local economies. Between the 1980s and today, subsidized rice exports from the United States to Haiti wiped out thousands of local farmers and helped reduce the proportion of locally produced rice consumed in the country from 47 to 15 percent. Former President Bill Clinton concluded that the food aid program “may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked.… I had to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did.”

SENEGAL

Bottom line: Donations of cash are nearly always more effective. Even if there are good reasons to give stuff rather than money, in most cases the stuff can be bought locally. Economist Amartya Sen, for example, has conclusively shown that people rarely die of starvation or malnutrition because of a lack of food in the neighborhood or the country. Rather, it is because they can’t afford to buy the food that’s available. Yet, as Connie Veillette of the Center for Global Development reports, shipping U.S. food abroad in response to humanitarian disasters is so cumbersome it takes four to six months to get there after the crisis begins. Buying food locally, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has found, would be 25 percent cheaper and considerably faster, too. In some cases, if there really is a local shortage and the goods really are needed urgently, the short-term good done by clothing or food aid may well outweigh any long-term costs in terms of local development. But if people donate swedow, they may be less likely to give much-needed cash. A study by Aradhna Krishna of the University of Michigan, for example, suggests that charitable giving may be lower among consumers who buy cause-related products because they feel they’ve already done their part. Philanthrocapitalism may be chic: The company Toms Shoes has met with considerable commercial success selling cheap footwear with the added hook that for each pair you buy, the company gives a pair to a kid in the developing world (it’s sold more than a million pairs to date). But what if consumers are buying Toms instead of donating to charity, as some surely are? Much better to stop giving them the stuff we don’t want—and start giving them the money they do. Charles Kenny, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More.

HAITI

KENYA IVORY COAST

November 2011

31

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IN BOX

T

Just What Is a Just War?

he first French missiles that streaked over Benghazi in March were more than the beginning of the end for Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi—they were also the first real-world test of the international community’s new rules for humanitarian intervention. The conflict made an instant catchphrase out of “responsibility to protect”— and its inevitable clunky acronym, r2p—a doctrine adopted by the United Nations in 2005 and invoked for the first time

to justify the bombing. r2p was intended to be the first piece in a new international legal framework for stopping war crimes after a century of ad hoc humanitarianism. But did the removal of Qaddafi’s pariah regime—while similar atrocities were allowed to continue in Syria and elsewhere—mark the dawn of a new era, or the same old inconsistent approach debated in a new vocabulary? —Charles Homans

1940s-1960s

HMS BLACK JOKE FIRING ON THE SPANISH SLAVER EL ALMIRANTE

1807 Britain bans the slave trade. At the urging of abolitionists, British naval vessels patrolling the Atlantic begin interdicting other countries’ slave ships—the first example of a country enforcing human rights beyond its shores. 1933 Polish Jewish legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, appalled by the slaughter of more than a million ethnic Armenians by the Ottomans during World War I and by Hitler’s rise, begins a crusade for international legal protection from ethnically motivated mass killings. He is rebuffed by the League of Nations, where one delegate objects that such crimes occur “too seldom to legislate.” That same year, the first concentration camps open in Germany. 1946 Twenty-four Nazis are put on trial at Nuremberg by the Allies for atrocities committed during World War II; 19 are convicted. The legal proceedings, however, focus on war crimes and so do not fully establish a precedent for prosecuting “genocide” (a term coined two years earlier by Lemkin, who lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust).

1948 Lemkin lobbies the three-year-old United Nations relentlessly for legal protections against genocide, and on Dec. 9 the U.N. General Assembly votes unanimously to adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (though the United States doesn’t ratify it until 1988).

European colonialism ends with the liberation of 57 countries in Asia and Africa. State sovereignty is an important and sensitive issue for the countries recently freed from the yoke of Western rule and one that will be used for decades to come as an argument against humanitarian intervention.

1971 India intervenes in a bloody civil war between Pakistan and East Pakistan, which declares independence as Bangladesh. Seven years later Vietnam invades Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and in 1979 Tanzania deposes dictator Idi Amin in neighboring Uganda. All three wars are fought under the banner of national interest, but as each also aimed to avert the mass slaughter of civilians, international-law scholars later look to them as precursors—however faint—of the humanitarian interventions to come.

1991 The Soviet Union collapses. The next decade’s conflicts don’t carry the lofty geopolitical stakes of the Cold War and are more likely to happen within countries’ own borders, complicating the prospect of outside forces stepping in.

1994 Ethnic Hutus begin killing Tutsis in Rwanda. Susan Rice, then an aide on U.S. President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, says of the crisis, “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November election?” The United States does nothing, and by July, 800,000 Rwandans are dead.

1995 Bosnian Serb forces massacre more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica, while Dutch U.N. peacekeepers look on helplessly.

1996 Brookings Institution scholar Francis Deng, later the U.N.’s special advisor for the prevention of genocide, co-authors Sovereignty as Responsibility. The influential treatise argues that sovereign states are defined not by the inviolability of their borders—the assumption of the post-colonial era—but by their obligation to protect their citizens.

NICHOLAS MATTHEWS CONDY VIA ROYAL NAVAL MUSEUM; U.S. ARMY; MICHIEL JANSZ VAN MIEREVELT VIA WIKIMEDIA; AFP/GETTY IMAGES; SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

1625 In On the Law of War and Peace, Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius, below, argues that intervening to help a people resist tyranny constitutes a just war.

A NTH ROPOLOGY OF AN I D E A | “ R E SPO N SI BI L I T Y TO PROT ECT ”

“Reiterating the responsibility of the Libyan authorities to protect the Libyan population and reaffirming that parties to armed conflicts bear the primary responsibility to take all feasible steps to ensure the protection of civilians...” U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 1973

2005

JOEL ROBINE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; ADAM DEAN/REUTERS; MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; JOEL SAGET/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; MARK VON HOLDEN/GETTY IMAGES FOR HBO; FRANCISCO LEONG/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

1998 The United States and NATO seek U.N. Security Council approval to intervene in Serbia’s persecution of ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo. China and Russia veto it, but NATO, eager to avoid a repeat of its mid-1990s failures, starts bombing anyway. The action—broadly supported, successful, and illegal—sets an uneasy precedent.

1999 Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan complains that “‘human rights taking precedence over sovereignty’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ seem to be in vogue these days,” threatening to “wreak havoc” on international relations.

2000 With the U.N.’s backing, Canada convenes the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, a blue-ribbon panel co-chaired by Australian politician Gareth Evans and charged with drawing up guidelines for humanitarian intervention. The panel’s report, “The Responsibility to Protect,” released in December 2001, puts the term on paper for the first time.

At its World Summit, the U.N. unanimously adopts “responsibility to protect” as a guiding principle for the prevention of “atrocity crimes.” “It cannot be right,” SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan declares, “when the international community is faced with genocide or massive human rights abuses, for the United Nations to stand by and let them unfold to the end.”

2008 When Cyclone Nargis strikes a hapless Burma, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner argues that the “responsibility to protect” obligates the international community to step in. Writing in Britain’s Guardian, Archbishop Desmond Tutu similarly invokes the principle in calling for a nonmilitary intervention in Zimbabwe. Neither persuades the Security Council.

2009 U.S. President Barack Obama takes office. His foreign-policy team includes two prominent anti-genocide advocates: U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who is haunted by the U.S. failure in Rwanda, and special assistant Samantha Power, who reported on the Srebrenica massacre as a journalist and later wrote A Problem from Hell, an influential critique of the U.S. government’s response to genocide.

2011: LIBYA February 15: The Arab Spring arrives in Libya. After several days of protests in major cities, fighting breaks out between protesters and security forces in Benghazi. On Feb. 22, Muammar al-Qaddafi orders a violent crackdown, vowing to go “house by house” to find and kill the rebels. March 17: As Libyan tanks threaten Benghazi, the Security Council passes Resolution 1973, for the first time invoking the “responsibility to protect” to condemn Qaddafi and impose a no-fly zone over his country. Two days later, a French fighter jet fires the first shots in the coalition forces’ strike on Libya. March-April: As NATO bombs, debate reopens over the legitimacy and limits of the R2P doctrine. Evans argues in a March 24 Sydney Morning Herald editorial that a military action intended to kill or unseat Qaddafi or to otherwise support a rebel victory “is simply not permissible under the explicit legal terms of UN resolution 1973. Nor is it permissible under the moral first principles of the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine.” And though a European official warns in April that the Libya intervention should be “a warning sign” to regimes undertaking bloody crackdowns in U.S. allies Bahrain and Yemen as well as Syria, the U.N. takes no action. August 20: Backed by NATO air power, Libyan rebels end Qaddafi’s four-decade rule. The expansion of the allies’ U.N.-sanctioned involvement, from enforcing a no-fly zone to unequivocally helping the rebels win the war, prompts Indian U.N. Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri to remark, “Libya has given R2P a bad name.” But New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, among others, argues, “The intervention has been done right”—that after the disgraces of Rwanda and Bosnia and the overreach of Iraq, an atrocity has finally been stopped, in time and for the right reasons. “[T]he idea that the West must at times be prepared to fight for its values against barbarism,” he writes, “is the best hope for a 21st century less cruel than the 20th.”

“Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.” INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION ON INTERVENTION AND STATE SOVEREIGNTY

Thanks

y c i l o P n g i e r o F XX to Lloyd Axworthy of the University of Winnipeg, Kyle Matthews of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Joshua Muravchik of Johns Hopkins University, and David Scheffer of Northwestern University.

IN BOX

le t ter f rom havana | by yoA n i sÁ n c h ez

Country for Old Men

A

t the end of his July 31, 2006, broadcast, the visibly nervous anchor on Cuban Television News announced that there would be a proclamation from Fidel Castro. This was hardly uncommon, and many Cubans no doubt turned off their tvs in anticipation of yet another diatribe from the comandante en jefe accusing the United States of committing some fresh evil against the island. But those of us who stayed tuned that evening saw, instead, a red-faced Carlos Valenciaga, Fidel’s personal secretary, appear before the cameras and read, voice trembling, from a document as remarkable as it was brief. In a few short sentences, the invincible guerrilla of old confessed that he was very ill and doled out government responsibilities to his nearest associates. Most notably, his brother Raúl was charged

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with assuming Fidel’s duties as first secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, commander in chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and president of the Council of State. The dynastic succession had begun. It was a miracle that the old telephone exchanges, with their 1930s-vintage equipment, didn’t collapse that night as callers rushed to share the news, in a code that was secret to no one: “He kicked the bucket.” “El Caballo”—the Horse— “is gone.” “The One is terminal.” I picked up the receiver and called my mother, who was born in 1957, on the eve of Castro’s revolution; neither of us had known any other president. “He’s not here anymore, Mom,” I said, almost whispering. “He’s not here anymore.” On the other end of the line she began to cry.

DesmonD Boylan/reuters

A dissident reports from the ruins of the daddy state, where Papá Fidel is now just the patient-in-chief.

afp/getty images

It was the little things that changed at first. Rum sales increased. The streets of central Havana were oddly empty. In the absence of the prolific orator who was fond of cutting into tv shows to address his public, homemakers were surprised to see their Brazilian soap operas air at their scheduled times. Public events began to dwindle, among them the so-called “antiimperialism” rallies held regularly throughout the country to rail against the northern enemy. But the fundamental change happened within people, within the three generations of Cubans who had known only a single prime minister, a single first secretary of the Communist Party, a single commander in chief. With the sudden prospect of abandonment by the papá estado—“daddy state”—that Fidel had built, Cubans faced a kind of orphanhood, though one that brought more hope than pain. Five years later, we have entered a new phase in our relationship with our government, one that is less personal but still deeply worshipful of a man some people now call the “patient in chief.” Fidel lives on, and Raúl—whose power, as everyone knows, comes from his genes rather than his political gifts— has ruled since his ultimate accession in February 2008 without even the formality of the ballot box, prompting a dark joke often told in the streets of Havana: This is not a bloody dictatorship, but a dictatorship by blood. Pepito, the mischievous boy who stars in our popular jokes, calls Raúl “Castro Version 1.5” because he is no longer No. 2, but still isn’t allowed to be the One. When the comandante—now barely a shadow of his former self—appeared at the final session of the Communist Party’s sixth congress this April, he grabbed his brother’s arm and raised it, to a standing ovation. The gesture was intended to consecrate the transfer of power, but to many of us the two old men seemed to be joining hands in search of mutual support, not in celebration of victory. Raúl’s much-discussed reforms followed the supposed handover of power, but in reality, they have been less steps forward than attempts to redress the legal absurdities of the past. One of these was the lifting of the tourist apartheid that prevented Cubans from enjoying their own country’s hotel facilities. For years, to connect to the Internet, I had to disguise myself as a foreigner and mumble a few brief sentences in English or German to buy a web-access card in the lobby of some hotel. The sale of computers was finally authorized in March 2008, though by that time many younger Cubans had assembled their own computers with pieces bought on the black market. The prohibition on Cubans having cell-phone contracts was also repealed, ending the sad spectacle of people begging foreigners to help them establish accounts for prepaid phones. Restrictions on agriculture were loosened, allowing farmers to lease government land on 10-year terms. The liberalization brought to light the sad fact that the state had allowed much of the country’s land (70 percent of it was in state hands) to become overgrown with invasive weeds. While officially still socialist, the government has also pushed for an expansion of so-called self-employment, masked with the euphemism of “nonstate forms of production.” It is, in reality, a private sector emerging in fits and starts. In less than a year, the number of self-employed grew from 148,000 to 330,000, and there is now a flowering of textile production,

food kiosks, and the sale of cds and dvds. But heavy taxes, the lack of a wholesale market, and the inability to import raw materials independent of the state act as a brake on the inventiveness of these entrepreneurs, as does memory: The late 1990s, when the return to centralization and nationalization swept away the private endeavors that had surged in the Cuban economy after the fall of the Berlin Wall, were not so long ago. So for now, the effects of the highly publicized reforms are barely noticeable on our plates or in our pockets. The country continues to import 80 percent of what we consume, at a cost of more than $1.5 billion. In the hard-currency stores, the cans of corn say “Made in the usa”; the sugar provided through the ration book travels from Brazil; and in the Varadero tourist hotels, a good part of the fruit comes from the Dominican

The prohibition on Cubans having cell-phone contracts was repealed, ending the sad spectacle of people begging foreigners to help them establish accounts for prepaid phones.

Republic, while the flowers and coffee travel from Colombia. In 2010, 38,165 Cubans left the island for good. My impatient friends declare they are not going to stay “to turn off the light in El Morro”—the lighthouse at the entrance to Havana Bay— “after everyone else leaves.” The new president understands all too well that transformations that are too deep could cause him to lose control. Cubans jokingly compare their political system to one of the dilapidated houses in Old Havana: The hurricanes don’t bring it down and the rains don’t bring it down, but one day someone tries to change the lock on the front door and the whole edifice collapses. And so the government’s most practiced ploy is the pur-

November 2011

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IN BOX chase of time with proclamations of supposed trail. Cuba’s major cities are now filled with Over the last reforms that, once implemented, fail to achieve surveillance cameras that capture both those five years the the promised effects. who smuggle cigars and those of us who carry But this can only continue for so long. Before government has only our rebellious thoughts. the end of December, Raúl Castro will have to But over the last five years the government fulfill his promise to legalize home sales, which undeniably and has undeniably and irreversibly lost control have been illegal since 1959, a move that will irreversibly lost of the dissemination of information. Hidden inevitably result in the redistribution of people in water tanks and behind sheets hanging on in cities according to their purchasing power. control of the clotheslines, illegal satellite dishes bring people One of the most enduring bastions of revolu- dissemination the news that is banned or censored in the nationary imagery—working-class Cubans living tional media. The emergence of bloggers who in the palatial homes of the bygone elite—could of information. are critical of the system, the maturation of incollapse with the establishment of such marked dependent journalism, and the rise of autonoeconomic differences between neighborhoods. mous spaces for the arts have all eroded the And yet the old Cuba persists in subtle, state’s monopoly on power. sinister forms. Raúl works more quietly than Fidel, and Fidel, meanwhile, has faded away. He appears rarely and only from the shadows. He has increased the number of politiin photos, always dressed in the tracksuit of an aging mafioso, cal police and equipped them with advanced technology to and we begin to forget the fatigues-clad fighting man who inmonitor the lives of his critics, myself among them. I learned truded on nearly every minute of our existence for half a century. long ago that the best way to fool the “security” is to make Just a year ago, my 8-year-old niece was watching television and, public everything I think, to hide nothing, and in so doing seeing the desiccated face of the old commander in chief, shouted perhaps I can reduce the national resources spent on underto her father, “Daddy, who is this gentleman?” cover agents, the pricey gas for the cars in which they move, and the long shifts searching the Internet for our divergent Yoani Sánchez is the Havana-based author of the blog opinions. Still, we hear of brief detentions that include heavy Generation Y and the recently published book Havana Real. This article was translated by Mary Jo Porter. doses of physical and verbal violence while leaving no legal

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INAUGURAL ISSUE

now D An Economy on the Rise D Tourists ‘Go Green’

D Winning The Nobel Peace Prize

A Resilient Nation It’s a new day for Timor-Leste. Ten years after a long conflict for its independence, this small, young and determined Southeast Asian country has emerged from the ashes of war armed with big dreams, a renewed sense of purpose and an agenda to match.

Leading g7+

ECONOMY

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imor-Leste has transformed from a country in conflict to one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Average annual growth has exceeded 10 percent, prompting noted development economist Jeffrey Sachs to predict that, “between 2010 and 2020 Timor-Leste will grow faster than China.” Petroleum continues to be the leading industry in the economy with receipts in 2010 reaching $2.1 billion.

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Between 2010 and 2020 Timor-Leste will grow faster than China.

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Jeffrey Sachs, economist

The banking sector also shows signs of growth: the largest increase in private sector credit flowed to the tourism and service sectors. Government spending picked up rapidly in the second half of 2010, and other indicators, such as electricity consumption, also point to strong demand in the economy.

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NE NDO

Timor-Leste is investing in human capital, infrastructure and vital sectors of the economy, such as oil, gas and agriculture. Since Timor-Leste emerged from conflict, health, literacy and education have been on the rise. Planned spending in 2010 increased from $660 million to $838 million. Much of the increase was spent on infrastructure, food security, social payments for vulnerable groups, and agriculture. Poverty levels are on the decline, falling nearly 10 percent since 2007. In addition, four of 13 districts have been declared free of illiteracy. Preliminary census results show a sharp increase in enrollment rates for basic education, reaching almost 90 percent in 2010. Timor-Leste has surpassed the Millennium Development Goals target for 2015 for both the under 5 mortality rate and the infant mortality rate. Challenges clearly remain, but Timor-Leste has become an example of a country that has an ambitious strategy for growth and is focusing its resources to meet its goals. a

DILI KDILI LIQUIÇÁ BOBONARO

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ormer United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Timor-Leste for its leadership in promoting governance and accountability at a recent conference in Dili.

Blair was on hand for a regional conference on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The initiative, which Blair founded in 2002, sets a standard for transparency in oil, gas and mining. The process promotes accountability in the energy and resource sectors and compliant countries are required to disclose their financial transactions to the public. Not every country is automatically accepted into the EITI group – Timor-Leste is the first nation in the Asia Pacific region and third country in the world accepted into the initiative. Timor-Leste has become a recognized leader in best practice innovations in resource management. There are now 10 other countries in the group.

Fast Facts

BAUCAU

LAUTÉM

MANATUTO

F Portuguese, Tetum, English and Indonesian are the official and working languages of Timor-Leste.

AILEU

Timor-Leste AINARO

OECUSSI (ENCLAVE)

Blair commends TimorLeste for transparency initiative

Wetar Strait

SIA

S avu S ea

© ZIPI/epa/Corbis

Economic Prospects Look Strong for Timor-Leste

VIQUEQUE

Tim or S ea

MANUFAHI

F Dili, the capital and largest city, is 13 hours ahead of EST. F The current population is 1.1 million.

PALAU

COVA LIMA

F The official currency: U.S. dollars.

PHILIPPINES BRUNEI

M A L A Y S I A SINGAPORE

Sumatra

Borneo

MOLUCCAS

I N D O N E S I A

New Britain

PA P U A N E W G U I N E A Java

Wetar

Bali

TimorLeste

A U S T R A L I A

2 TIMOR-LESTE

F Upon its independence, Timor-Leste became one of two predominantly Roman Catholic countries in Asia. The other is the Philippines.

Q&A

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Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão speaks on the effects of war, the challenges of reconstruction and hopes for tomorrow What do you want the world to know about Timor-Leste? We are in a process of building the state. The international community can trust that we will fulfill these expectations. We believe in our commitment. How would you characterize your relationship with the United States? We have a very good relationship with the United States.We face big challenges, and I believe the fact that we are open to each other will increase our closeness. If we go step-by-step, we believe we will succeed.

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We have to be transparent and create the right conditions for the private sector.

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A Poet, Political Prisoner & People’s Leader path because, from the beginning, we did things in the proper way. What do you see as the role of government in the lives of citizens? The government has to look after the people because these people created the state. We put in everything to achieve this goal: we have to be transparent and create the right conditions for the private sector.We have to prepare, educate and provide jobs for our youth. We owe it to the sons and daughters of this country to help them achieve their dreams when they have sacrificed so much. What do you think is the greatest challenge facing Timor-Leste? The first is how we can best utilize our human resources.The second is how we can manage our wealth. We don’t want to waste these opportunities.

What do you believe is TimorLeste’s contribution to the world? Our contribution is to make sure we help other countries like Timor-Leste. We are on the right

Why was it so important to quickly start reconciliation with Indonesia after the conflict? It was for our survival. We have to work with all people for our stability and peace.

What have you learned in your struggles? Whatever happened in the past has happened. We cannot forget about the capacity to forgive. Forgiveness gives us our freedom, and we have to be free in every aspect. When you were in solitary confinement, you used that time to focus on Timor-Leste. You said you often reflected on your comrades and considered their suffering and struggles. What have their sacrifices meant? It means everything -everything. People accepted their sacrifices for another life. And, now, we are building the nation. We remember the lives [lost] and conditions they were in. When we talk about providing funding for veterans and the elderly, it is because they need everything. We are independent through the sum of their sacrifices. When you talk about gratitude, what are some of the experiences that come to mind? There are so many occasions when somebody saved my life. a

Xanana Gusmão has spent his life in service to TimorLeste – first as the commander of the resistance movement, then as the first president and now as the prime minister.

“During the war, we learned so much... We learned to understand that, wherever one is placed, human beings have the same feelings, the same desires, the same ideals, the same will, to build a world without war, without oppression, without frontiers.” Excerpt from a letter written by Xanana Gusmão and published in Sara Niner’s book, Xanana

TIMOR-LESTE 3

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

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Government leaders convene in August for budgetary hearings that were also broadcast for the first time on Timorese national television as part of a transparency initiative.

A New Vision for the Future Timor-Leste heads the g7+ to focus on reconstruction in post-conflict societies ore than 1.5 billion people live in conflict-affected and fragile countries, and Timor-Leste knows first-hand that moving from conflict to stability is a long and demanding political process. Spurred by the lessons drawn from its own experiences, Timor-Leste is leading the g7+, a consortium that represents 350 million people from 17 of these fragile states. The g7+ is the first time in history that fragile and conflictaffected countries have formed a shared voice to review their common challenges and opportunities on a global stage. Minister of Finance Her Excellency Emilia Pires is the inaugural chair and represents Timor-Leste. She assumed leadership of the g7+ last year and helped lead the group to agree on the Dili Declaration. Signed in April 2010, the Declaration outlines a bold new vision for creating specific peace building and state building processes and improves the efficiency of international assistance. The value of sharing these experiences is clear: 43% of countries moving out of conflict slide back into war within five years. Basic government transformations can take any-

where from 20 to 40 years. The g7+ provides a mechanism to prevent countries from slipping back into conflict. During the g7+ conference in May in Monrovia, Liberia with leaders from states including Afghanistan, South Sudan and Ivory Coast, Pires encouraged members to leverage their collective experiences and apply them toward common goals, such as eradicating poverty.“We have a duty to share best practices and learn from each other,” Pires said. “Our problems are very similar.” Accountability is a key part of the g7+ group – both for member countries and international donors – and Timor-Leste leads by example. In March, Timor-Leste launched a ground-breaking transparency portal that provides the public with specific information on government expenditures. This user-friendly portal, available in Tetum, English and Portuguese, tracks government expenses and revenues and includes important information regarding budget laws. Timor-Leste’s example is gaining worldwide attention. World Bank Group Managing Director Sri Mulyani Indrawati recently praised

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We have a duty to share best practices and learn from each other.

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H.E. Emilia Pires, Minister of Finance

4 TIMOR-LESTE

© Wu Jingdan/XinHua/Xinhua Press/Corbis

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Timor-Leste, as a nation, is building strength and economic resilience and has demonstrated how much can be won in a short space of time.

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Sri Mulyani Indrawati, World Bank Group Managing Director

Timor-Leste for its leadership, fast-growing economy and political stability during a conference in Dili in August. “Timor-Leste, as a nation, is building strength and economic resilience and has demonstrated how much can be won in a short space of time,” Indrawati said.a The g7+ meets several times a year; the next conference is scheduled for November 29-December 1 in Busan, South Korea. For more information on the transparency portal and the g7+, go to www.transparency.gov.tl/english.html and www.g7plus.org.

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Minister for Foreign Affairs Zacarias da Costa was appointed to his position in 2007. He previously served as a member of Parliament and leader of the Social Democratic Party bench at the Parliament.

A Place in the

World Timor-Leste celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2012. How have you seen this country change? It is very different.This was a country that was completely devastated. It was 80-to-90 percent destroyed.When I returned in 1999, it was not the same country that it is today. We have done tremendous work building the country, but this is still a post-conflict nation. This is the message that I tell the world.

How have the memories of the conflict influenced Timor-Leste’s interactions with other countries? As foreign minister, I believe we need to put the past behind us and focus on the future.We need to ensure this for future generations. The best justice we can make is to have a different Timor-Leste.

I believe we need to put the past behind us and focus on the future. We need to ensure this for future generations.

What are your key priorities? It is important to ensure that Timor has excellent engagement with Indonesia and Australia. We need to live together and ensure that all aspects of our relations are excellent.

How would you describe the U.S.-Timorese relationship? We are promoting a close relationship with the U.S. to balance the growing influence of China. Many challenges remain, but we will continue to have a close relationship. This is the first priority. The second, of course, is regional integration. We are a new country and need to find our place in the world. What do you think it would mean for Timor-Leste to be part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)? We are a small country. If we close ourselves, we will not survive in the future. Joining ASEAN will benefit us and our membership will help ASEAN by adding another democratic voice. a

A ‘Permanent Partnership’

American Ambassador Fergin discusses the U.S.-Timor-Leste relationship

both share values and interests around the world.We collaborate on human rights and democracy in other countries -- ways that Timor-Leste has consistently tried to make its contribution on the world stage.

Before President Obama named her as U.S. Ambassador to Timor-Leste, Amb. Judith R. Fergin previously served in Indonesia and Singapore. What do you see as the future of U.S-Timor-Leste relations? We have coined a phrase, which we think describes the U.STimor-Leste relationship.We call it a ‘permanent partnership.’ We

What are some of the priorities you have established as Ambassador for Timor-Leste that you hope will strengthen bilateral relations? The first and foremost is working together with the government to help sustain the peace and security Timor-Leste needs to progress.We believe that a healthy, well-educated population with rising incomes and hopes for a better future for their children builds the kind of environment that will meet all of America’s needs and interests.

How have you seen this region change over the last several years? I first came to Timor-Leste in 1990 when it was still part of Indonesia. I think the biggest change is that of an independent Timor-Leste. What do you think are some of the major challenges facing Timor-Leste with respect to its regional integration? Are you optimistic about Timor-Leste’s entry into ASEAN? Timor-Leste has already made its decision that it wants to be part of Southeast Asia. It wants to integrate into ASEAN. The challenge for Timor-Leste is to work through its membership application with ASEAN. We are not a member of ASEAN, and we don’t have vote on the matter;

but, we do think that a natural progression for Timor-Leste is to join the group.

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In a world where many countries seem to be going in the wrong direction, you can take Timor-Leste as one of the lessons on how you can arrest the instability.

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What should Americans know about Timor-Leste? In a world where many countries seem to be going in the wrong direction, you can take Timor-Leste as one of the lessons on how you arrest the instability. As every month goes by, it’s another month of success and stability. a TIMOR-LESTE 5

PROFILES

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Searching for an adventure, finding a second-home Three young, professional Americans find opportunity in Dili Steve Catt, 26, has been an English teacher to young Timorese in Dili for the last year.While his peers don suits, Catt instructs in a short-sleeved shirt, shorts, flip flops and a straw hat that hides his medium-length hair. The son of diplomats, he became interested in Timor-Leste for its history and heart. When he studied at the University of Hawaii, he learned about the conflict from the personal perspective of his Timorese friends.The reconciliation efforts that Timor-Leste initiated with Indonesia inspired him to journey to Dili on his own. “I respect the way they handled the conflict,” he said.

Building a better future More than three-quarters of the population in TimorLeste is under 30 -- making it one of the most youthful countries in the world

6 TIMOR-LESTE

New Yorker Gabe Schickel, 30, had just graduated from City College of New York and needed a job. He taught in Bangkok and wanted to return to the region. It was at that time that Timor-Leste needed someone with his language, administrative and analytical skills. He arrived in Timor-Leste several months ago and immersed himself in the challenges facing the government. He took on more and more responsibilities, worked long days and learned about governance in a post-conflict society. He says working in Timor-Leste inspired him to continue building his career in Southeast Asia. “The work they are doing is interesting,” he said.

Eurfrazia Amaral Menezes, 23, lost her uncle during the conflict and knows about the toll of war first-hand. As her family mourned, she was forced to stay home and could rarely venture out of her home. These days, she is a mathematics student at the National University of TimorLeste and aspires to teach young people math to prepare them for jobs. She doesn’t mourn the lost time. “You can always look back,” she said. “We need to move forward. For me, personally, (my goal) is to be a better woman to serve my family, my society and my country.”

Joel Sellereit wanted to do something different with his summer. The 28-year-old sandy blond from Seattle was studying international business at the University of California-San Diego when he set his sights on Southeast Asia. He learned about Timor-Leste after hearing a presentation from a visiting government leader. When the Ministry of Finance offered him a summer internship that would utilize his political and economic policy acumen, he packed his suitcases for Timor-Leste. Over the summer, he worked with high-ranking government officials from the Ministry, gaining valuable exposure to the budgetary process in a post-conflict society. He found time to play, too. He traveled to different cities, including Baucau, the second largest city, and made the most of the beaches. “They appreciate having you here,” Sellereit said. a

Fernando Baptista Xavier, 27, has a simple aim: To return to the village where he was born and give back to the people and community that raised him. He studies agriculture at University of Timor-Leste. “My people are in farming,” he said. “We need to value the lifestyle we have developed.” The days of the conflict are past, he says, and the future for Timor-Leste is bright. “I’m optimistic that this country is moving forward to the future.” Eva Tavares, 22, grew up around farmers and wants to help them improve their yields, and, ultimately, their livelihoods. She studies agriculture at the University of Timor-Leste and hopes to stay in Timor-Leste, working with rural farmers and technology. “The majority of people are in agriculture,” she said. “That is what pushed me to study it.”

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I want the international community to know about the resilience of our people and our commitment to peace – it’s enduring and very profound.

Resilience Pays Off His Excellency Agio Pereira was a student when he heard the call to serve

H.E. Agio Pereira is the Secretary of State for the Council of Ministers. A musician by training and career public servant, he is committed to a democratic Timor-Leste, reminding himself of the Buddhist saying in his office, “Too pure water has no fish -- the courage to be imperfect is our greatest lesson.”

You have previously said, “If you want peace, forget justice.” What did you mean by that? It’s strategic. Justice is fairness. For us, it’s better to forgive.We’re in a David vs. Goliath situation. This is a strategy. When the Prime Minister spoke to a group of veterans, he said, “‘From today onwards, there are no more traitors and heroes. We need people who can transform ideas into realities to benefit our nation and heroes.’” What do you see as the greatest challenge facing Timor-Leste? Managing expectations. The ultimate responsibility of the leaders is to manage expectations. The expectations of the people are very high. None of us were ever in the government. Liberal democracy can become very nasty. Like Frank Sinatra, (we’re) doing it our way.

Timor-Leste is one of the youngest countries in the world. How have you seen Timor-Leste change over the years? It’s been very special for me to watch. It was a war that lasted a quarter of a century. When I was in Lisbon, I was a young man and Indonesia had invaded East Timor from the border. People came together and told us to fight for our country. It took a whole lifetime. I made it back in July 1999 – after 25 years in exile. It was my country, but I could not recognize it.

Poverty reduction is something to which you have devoted so much of your life. You were behind the campaign to bring electricity to the remotest parts of the world. What else needs to be done to further improve the livelihoods of the poor? There is no shortcut. We need to build institutions of the state. We have to do it together.

How do you think Timor-Leste has progressed from a UN-administered territory to its own country? Our people voted to determine our future. We decided on a liberal democracy. We wanted a liberal constitution.

When you were a student, you studied music. When you were a young man, what made you switch to a life in public service? My conscience forced me into it. When I was young, I was very ignorant of politics. When people spoke of the revolution, I didn’t

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understand. But, I understood that unless we stand up we may lose our country and identity forever. It was a long struggle. We understood that if we don’t fight for the country, then who will? We may die, but we’ll die standing. We must keep going. In the end, we won. We won. What do you think is Timor-Leste’s contribution to global affairs? We have so much to offer in terms of postconflict war rebuilding. What do you want the international community to know about Timor-Leste? I want the international community to know about the resilience of our people and our commitment to peace – it’s enduring and very profound.We want the world to know we have a determination to succeed at all costs. a TIMOR-LESTE 7

PLACES

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Respecting the Earth Eco-tourism takes shape in TimorLeste and attracts a global clientele

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arry’s Place, a sprawling collection of earthy bungalows that sits across the stunning Timor Sea in Atauro Island, isn’t your average profit-driven lodge. And, that’s the point, says co-founder and operator Barry Hinton. Barry’s Place is part of a small but growing trend of eco-tourism destinations in TimorLeste. Ecotourism aims to minimize the

negative impacts of tourism for local communities and environments. Like many other eco-tourism initiatives that feature environmentally-friendly practices, this modest but popular location caters to tourists who demur the fancy hotels in favor of bungalows with natural lighting, compost bathrooms, vegetarian cuisine and an authentic cultural experience. At Barry’s Place, just north of the pier on Atauro Island, there are nine rooms across five huts with different bedding arrangements.-- For example, one bungalow that rents for $105 per night can accommodate as many as four adults or two adults and two children. Single travelers and backpackers can also find accommodations for $30. Travelers can also pitch a tent or have one provided for a fee of $25. Meals are included. “We are not here for the money,” Hinton said. Honoring the local culture Hinton’s love affair with Timor-Leste began about a decade ago when he left his native Australia to teach English to Timorese youth. He married a woman from Timor-Leste and 8 TIMOR-LESTE

Barry Hinton (center) left the city life to start his own eco-lodge on Atauro Island.

decided to stay.After his first wife died in childbirth, he remarried and his in-laws gave him a block of land on the Atauro Island along the edges of the pristine Timor Sea. He and his family built the lodge using local materials and have been living there since 2005 with their two children. On most weeks, the lodge averages 25 guests. Hinton is quick to point out an irony of eco-tourism: He has a successful business, but he wants to keep it small to stay environmentally responsible and respectful of the local culture. Atauro, he says, is an unspoiled island, where “time is nothing” and “money doesn’t matter.” He prefers to spend his days chatting with the guests and locals and reading. “If you look at Australia or America, every-

one is worried about money,” Hinton says.“It’s very freeing not to have that problem.” Barry’s Place has attracted visitors from across the world who understand and appreciate the lodge’s mission of stewardship. Another attraction: Inexpensive snorkeling. Barry’s Place offers snorkeling for $10. Robyn Dusting arrived from Victoria, Australia, with her retired husband, who works on the grounds. They believe in environmentally-responsible vacations. “Eco-tourism is something that should be embraced by more people in the world,” Dusting said. The visit was their second to Timor-Leste, and Dusting says she is open to returning to Timor-Leste but is content to spend her days reading, lounging along the coast and snorkeling. “It’s a wonderful place,” Dusting said.“I’m spoiled.” a For more information on Barry's Place, go to: www.timorleste-hotels.com/ Barry_s_Place_on_Atauro.

RESOURCES

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© Micheline Pelletier/Sygma/Corbis

Ceremony Speech, Presentation Speech by Francis Sejersted, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee at the ceremony:

Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo (left) and José Manuel Ramos-Horta were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for their commitment to peace.

A Day in History 1996 Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Bishop Carolos Filipe Ximenes Belo, Jose Ramos-Horta

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he Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to José Ramos-Horta and Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo for their “work towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor.” An edited version of the 1996 Award

Tips for the busy traveler Getting There: Travelers en route to Dili can arrive from three cities, Singapore, Darwin, Australia and Bali, Indonesia. From Singapore, Singapore Airways offers several flights a week. Through Darwin, Air North through Darwin also flies several times a week to Dili. More flights are expected to be added. Daily flights are offered through Merpati Nusantara Airlines in Bali. Visas: Americans traveling to Timor-Leste may apply for a visa at the Dili International Airport or Dili Sea Port. A fee of $30 to $40 USD applies. If you arrive by land, remember to apply for a visa in advance. Travelers must also hold a passport with an expiration date not less than 6 months from the date of entry. Visas for tourism, family visits and business visits expire after 90 days, but extensions are available for an added fee. Source: Government of Timor-Leste

José Ramos-Horta: Mediator & Diplomat The conflict in East Timor has been called “the forgotten conflict.” It has not, however, been completely forgotten, having figured on the international agenda, with varying degrees of prominence, throughout those twenty years. But it has so to speak never caught on. There have been so many other interests and regards to attend to, and East Timor is so small. Ramos-Horta was a leader, one of the moderates whose ideal was social democracy. During the so-called civil war, he was out of the country; and, on his return, he tried to reconcile the parties. He has lived abroad, unceasingly and with great personal sacrifice collecting and communicating information on the repression, torture and killing in his home country and acting as East Timor’s principal international spokesman. At the same time, he has successfully kept up his efforts to unite the various East Timorese groups in a single national front, while constantly seeking opportunities for a peaceful solution to the conflict.

No serious negotiations aimed at resolving the conflict are conceivable today without the participation of Ramos-Horta or one of his aides. Bishop Carolos Filipe Ximenes Belo: Healer & Representative Bishop Belo was appointed Apostolic Administrator for the Roman Catholic Church in East Timor in 1983. Again and again, in the midst of everyday terror and suffering, he has intervened, trying to reconcile and mediate and lessen confrontation, and in doing so he has saved many lives. Intervening in a violent conflict entails a risk of being crushed between the antagonists. But Bishop Belo has become much more than a mediator: this man of peace has also become a rallying point for his sorely tried people, a representative of their hope for a better future. The love his people feel for this mediator springs from certain fundamental principles he has adhered to. Show the people respect. Give them freedom to develop their humanity to the full.You do not gain respect if you do not show respect. This year’s two Peace Prize Laureates have labored tirelessly, and with great personal sacrifice, for their people. a

Good Books Geoffrey Robinson’s If you leave us here, we will die is a harrowing description of the genocide and the role of the international community in stabilizing Timor-Leste. Noted author Luis Cardosa’s The Crossing: A Story of East Timor is a memoir of the author’s coming of age in TimorLeste. Sara Niner’s biography, Xanana, provides a detailed account of Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão’s life. Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage, which was short-listed for the 1991 Booker Prize, is a novel based on the conflict in Timor-Leste. Andrea Katalin Molnar’s ebook, Timor-Leste: Politics, History, and Culture, published last year and is a comprehensive book on Timor-Leste with a particular emphasis on the historical roots of the country’s challenges.

Helpful websites on Timor-Leste for planning a stay Discover Dili, www.discoverdili.com, provides some information on Timor-Leste’s largest city. Lonely Planet, www.lonelyplanet.com, offers information on Timor-Leste. Key in Timor Leste for travel tips You have to special order the book, however. The Government of Timor-Leste, http://timor-leste.gov.tl provides a short history, description of the political system and information on the country. Friends of Timor, www.friendsoftimor.com, is run by non-Timorese and includes information on things to do. World Bank Country Report on Timor-Leste, has strong data concerning youth, civil society and development. Go to http://web.worldbank.org and key in Timor-Leste in the search box. East Timor Law & Justice Bulletin, http://easttimorlegal.blogspot.com, provides up-to-date information regarding legal and governmental actions. TIMOR-LESTE 9

GALLERY

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

Life in Timor-Leste

Timor-Leste is a scenic country with plenty to see and experience. (Top row from left to right) Members of the military guard hoisting the flag in front of the main government building; A young Timorese girl on the beach. (Center row from left to right) Handmade masks created by artisans from Atauro Island; Timor-Leste’s iconic image: A statue of Jesus sits atop a summit; Fishing boats docked along the beach at sunset. (Bottom row) Children running along the White Sands Beach in Dili.

Look for the next issue of Timor-Leste Now in the December issue of Foreign Policy magazine! Editor in Chief: Sheila B. Lalwani Designer: Lisa Pampillonia Photographer: Katie Cesaro Contact Amer Yaqub, Publisher at 202.728.7310 or [email protected], for any comments or questions about these reports. For additional information on FP’s nation branding capabilities, please visit www.foreignpolicy.com/advertising/ mag_nation.php

10 TIMOR-LESTE

think again: nuclear power

Japan Melted down, But that doesn’t Mean the end of the atoMic age by charles d. ferguson

think again: nuclear power

“Fukushima Killed the Nuclear Renaissance.” no. At first it looked like a natural disaster of epic proportions: shock waves rippling outward from a 9.0-magnitude earthquake off northeast Japan followed by a 30-foot tsunami, a one-two punch that all but obliterated the coastal city of Sendai and its environs. Then the electricity went off at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, and a random act of natural destruction became a parable of technological society run amok. Stories of tsunami-leveled villages gave way to harrowing accounts of nuclear engineers trying, and failing, to stop the meltdown of first one, then a second, and finally a third reactor at Fukushima. We’d seen this movie twice before, of course: first in 1979, when inexperienced operators allowed a reactor to overheat and melt down at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and most apocalyptically in 1986, when the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents of what is now Ukraine and Belarus and all but finished off the Soviet economy. And in the wake of the March 11 Fukushima meltdown, commentators predicted the end of an industry that seemed to have finally escaped the shadows of its two earlier disasters. “All nuclear operators,” Moody’s Investors Service warned in an early April report, “will suffer the consequences that emerge from a post-Fukushima environment.” Indeed, in Japan, where support for nuclear power predictably, and understandably, fell from two-thirds of the public to one-third after the meltdown, plans for 14 reactors slated for construction by 2030 were soon scrapped. Fukushima also tipped the scales in Switzerland’s decision to phase out nuclear power by 2034 and contributed to more than 94 percent of Italian voters rejecting Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s June referendum on renewing nuclear power. But these were the exceptions rather than the rule; Japan, in fact, was the only formerly pro-nuclear country to experience a change of heart after the accident. The United States is reviewing its safety procedures for nuclear power, but not changing course on it; overall support for the energy source among Americans has hovered around 50 percent since the early 1990s. In France, which gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, President Nicolas Sarkozy said shutting down reactors was “out of the question.” And as for China, India, and South Korea—countries with a growing appetite for nuclear power that account for the bulk of active plant construction—only the first has put any of its nuclear plans on pause, and that’s just pending a safety review. India and South Korea have vowed to tighten safety standards, but have otherwise forged ahead with plans for nuclear expansion.

Outside Japan, it was Germany that reacted most emphatically to Fukushima, with hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets and Chancellor Angela Merkel declaring a phaseout of the country’s nine existing nuclear plants. But most Germans were already staunchly against nuclear power before 2011—a legacy not of Fukushima, but of Chernobyl, whose 1986 meltdown rained down contamination 850 miles away in Bavaria. And though Merkel’s political coalition was battered in subsequent elections by Germany’s antinuclear Greens, the erosion of her popularity had in fact begun months earlier. Nor was Merkel’s phaseout decision an entirely new direction; Germany had committed more than a decade ago not to build new plants.

“Nuclear Power Is an Accident Waiting to Happen.” not necessarily. In half a century of operation, the global nuclear power industry has suffered three catastrophic accidents, all dire enough to make the plant names—Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima—synonymous with industrial disaster. But each was a failure of organizational culture as much as technology, and the lessons learned have helped keep their specific mistakes from being repeated. Shortly after the meltdown at Three Mile Island, the U.S. nuclear industry began an ambitious overhaul of its safety practices. The commercial sector hired nuclear experts from the U.S. Navy, which has the world’s longest and least blemished track record for nuclear safety, to overhaul safety standards and create a peer-review inspection body, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. The United States hasn’t had a meltdown since at any of its more than 100 reactors. The Chernobyl accident seven years later was an outlier, inextricable from the pathologies of the late-Soviet-era system in which it took place: an antiquated, kludged-together reactor design without any containment structure to safeguard against worst-case scenarios and hubristic engineers who believed that nothing could go wrong, even as they drove the plant into the danger zone (ironically enough, by dragging out a safety test). Still, the disaster led to a worldwide transformation of safety standards similar to what the United States underwent after Three Mile Island, most notably with the creation of the World Association of Nuclear Operators, which has since inspected almost all 432 commercial reactors in the world. Most recently, the Fukushima disaster was equal parts freakish bad luck (an earthquake of a huge magnitude, followed by an equally extraordinary tsunami of a size not seen in the region for hundreds of years) and a management cul-

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previous page: KyoKo Hamada/gallery stocK

Japan, in fact, was the only formerly pro-nuclear country to experience a change of heart after the accident.

The Fukushima disaster was partly freakish bad luck—an earthquake of huge magnitude, followed by an equally extraordinary tsunami.

ture that kept problems at the plant from being addressed prior to the accident. Fukushima’s reactors were 32 to 40 years old, and concerns had been raised about their integrity for nearly as long as they had been up and running. Tokyo Electric Power Company’s management covered up such concerns and safety violations for years, executives admitted after the accident. Japan also lacked a strong regulatory agency, as well as the independent nuclear expertise that would have been necessary to staff one. As in the previous disasters, lessons have already been learned from Fukushima; South Korea’s government has ordered the establishment of a strong regulatory agency to avoid a repeat of its neighbor’s catastrophe. It would, of course, be best not to make these enormous mistakes in the first place, but we can take some comfort in the fact that so far, we have avoided repeating any of them.

“Nuclear Power Is Too Expensive.” James WhitloW Delano/ReDux

yes and no. In fact, nuclear power plants are relatively cheap to operate. Averaging the costs over the life of the operation, a safely run plant can even be a cash cow, generating power at as low as 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable to a coalfired power plant. The problem is getting them built. A large reactor can cost several billion dollars, and construction delays—as well as slowdowns forced by inevitable legal

challenges—have been known to drive up construction costs by $1 million a day. This problem is nothing new; it has plagued the industry since the 1970s. Years before the Three Mile Island disaster turned public opinion against the atom, the U.S. nuclear sector was already in trouble on account of legal and bureaucratic changes enacted under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter that made new plants easier to stop with lawsuits—usually filed by environmental and citizens’ groups—and regulations more unpredictable. That spooked investors, who in turn raised interest rates on borrowing for plant developers. The then-ongoing recession, which depressed energy demand, didn’t help; neither did the plummeting price of oil and deregulation of natural gas that followed in the 1980s. Today, the industry argues that plant construction can only happen with the help of tens of billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees, which transfer financial risks onto taxpayers. But the fact is that nuclear power has never succeeded anywhere without enormous government backing. Until 2004, the French government wholly owned Électricité de France, the utility that operates all French nuclear power plants, and the government still controls more than 80 percent of it today. The Chinese government also largely or wholly owns China’s nuclear-power utilities. And nuclear is hardly the only energy source that hasn’t stood up in the free market once you factor in the external costs. Consider how much of the Pentagon’s $550 billion-a-year budget goes to-

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think again: nuclear power ward securing oil supplies. For a country like Japan or South Korea, with virtually no domestic energy supplies, nuclear power may be worth the upfront costs if it allows for a measure of energy security. As for the rest of us, nuclear power may also come to seem a good deal, once you factor in the risks of climate change.

“More Nuclear Power Means More Nuclear Proliferation.” maybe.

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“Nuclear Power Can Help the World’s Poorest Get on the Grid.” not really. The two great energy challenges of the immediate future will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and meeting the moral obligation of helping developing countries gain access to the kind of reliable energy supply that allows for transformative improvements in health, education, and overall quality of life. Expanding nuclear power, which currently provides about 14 percent of the world’s electricity, may appear to offer the best means of addressing each challenge without exacerbating the other. Eight African countries, in addition to already-nuclear South Africa, are exploring plant construction. Environmental scientist James Lovelock has asserted that nuclear energy “will give civilization the chance to survive through the difficult time soon to come.” The problem is that most of the world’s new electricity demand is in the developing world, and about 85 percent of today’s nuclear power is limited to the most economically advanced countries. The reasons for this are easy enough to grasp: Nuclear power’s start-up costs are enormous, and large plants require a robust electrical grid—prerequisites that are by definition out of reach for the estimated 1.6 billion of the Earth’s 7 billion people who have little or no reliable access to electricity. Niger may be the world’s fifth-largest uranium producer, but the cost of building a reactor to make use of it would take up more than half the country’s gdp. In recent years, many in the nuclear energy industry have touted small reactors as the solution to this problem— modular units about one-fiftieth to one-third the size of the behemoths used in today’s nuclear-powered countries and that can be scaled up gradually at far lower cost. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who says he is a “big fan” of the tech-

BORIS HORVAT/AFP/GeTTy ImAGeS

It’s true that the nuclear enrichment and reprocessing facilities used to produce fuel for peaceful reactors can just as easily be used to make fissile material for bombs. For now, however, this threat starts and ends with Iran. Most of the 30 countries that use nuclear power don’t build their own enrichment or reprocessing facilities, instead buying fuel for their nuclear power plants from external suppliers. The only countries with enrichment facilities that don’t have nuclear weapons as well are Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Iran, Japan, and the Netherlands—and only one of those six keeps nonproliferation hawks up at night. The rest of the world has been willing by and large to abide by arrangements like the 2009 deal between the United States and the United Arab Emirates (uae). Under its terms, the uae passed a national law banning the construction of enrichment and reprocessing facilities in exchange for access to a reliable source of nuclear fuel. Such agreements could maintain the status quo as long as the same standard is enforced across the board. Unfortunately, U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration is in the process of eroding this precedent in deals it is pursuing with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, which could impose less strict terms—and possibly lead the uae to rethink its self-imposed moratorium. In April, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously passed a resolution backing legislation to make terms like those in the uae deal the norm, but it has yet to become law. The bad news is that the threat of peaceful nukes begetting the destructive kind is going to get worse before it gets better, thanks to technological advances. Global Laser Enrichment, a North Carolina-based firm, appears to be on the verge of commercializing a process that would use laser technology to enrich uranium. A laser enrichment facility would take up relatively little space—it could be hidden in a single nondescript warehouse in an otherwise benign industrial park—and emit few overt signs of activity, making it far more difficult to detect than conventional centrifuge enrichment. Successful commercialization could trigger the spread of the technology despite the company’s and the United States’ efforts to keep it safe. The “secret” of the nuclear bomb, after all, only lasted a few years.

nology, has urged Obama to ask Congress for $39 million to jump-start its development in the United States. But small reactors cost more per kilowatt-hour than their bigger siblings to keep up and running, and they still present most of the challenges that make nuclear power logistically difficult: the need for highly trained personnel to run them safely, procedures and facilities for safely storing nuclear waste, and protection against attacks, theft of radioactive materials, and sabotage. All of this means that for people without electricity, renewable power sources such as wind and solar will continue to provide a better hope for plugging in quickly and cleanly, as will innovations in electricity storage, whether hydrogenrun fuel cells or some innovation yet to be produced.

they faced significant opposition from a public that was skittish about nuclear power. But government and industry alike took the opposite tack from that of the United States, ensuring that stakeholders ranging from Greenpeace to citizens’ groups to the nuclear industry were included in discussions. Many locations were up for scientific investigation and public debate, and the process of choosing one was transparent and based on the best geological information. The storage facility is planned to be fully operational in 2020 and expected to last for 100,000 years. It’s the lesson of the meltdowns all over again: The biggest risks posed by nuclear power come not from the technology, but from the human institutions that govern how we use it.

“Radioactive Waste Is the Achilles’ Heel of Nuclear Power.”

“Windmills Can Replace Reactors.”

wrong. Nuclear waste is a solvable problem, as long as you get the technology and the politics right—and in that order. Radioactive materials can be kept from contaminating land and water supplies for tens of thousands of years if you bury them in the right geological formation, such as stable granite rock, or for at least a century if you put them in dry storage casks (a course that presumably offers enough time for scientists to figure out a more permanent solution). Germany’s Morsleben facility, in a former rock-salt mine, has housed nuclear waste safely for three decades; at the Surry Power Station in Virginia, the cask method has worked without incident for a quarter-century. When storage plans have gone badly, it’s been because politics have trumped technical concerns and have been handled poorly. Perhaps the most notorious example is the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, a planned containment complex in the Nevada desert that would have cost more than $50 billion but was scrapped amid controversy in 2009. The site was chosen in the 1980s not because it was geologically ideal for containing nuclear waste—it wasn’t—but because Nevada’s representatives in Washington were comparatively weak and were outmaneuvered by states that would have provided more and better storage locations, such as Texas. After more than $12 billion spent on the Yucca Mountain project, the Obama administration pulled the plug in a hasty, politically motivated manner that could cost taxpayers billions of dollars more and delay by at least 20 years the development of an alternative, according to an April 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office. In contrast, consider Sweden’s experience with the Forsmark nuclear power plant. When the Swedes set about planning their nuclear waste storage facility three decades ago,

not for decades to come. In an ideal world, our energy supply wouldn’t come with the asterisks of planet-imperiling climate change on one hand or waste that stays hazardous for thousands of years on the other—and this, of course, is the promise of renewable energy. It’s true that renewable technologies have made great strides in recent years; in fact, they’re the fastest-growing energy sector, with solar photovoltaic capacity expanding an average of 40 percent a year since 2000 and wind power growing an average of 27 percent annually since 2004. But context matters. These are still strictly niche sources, and even today they still account for only 3 percent of the world’s electricity portfolio. Solar energy still requires major government subsidies to reach cheaper prices and greater economies of scale; $535 million in U.S. Energy Department grants wasn’t enough to save solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, which declared bankruptcy in August. Until smart-grid technologies and energy storage systems improve and spread widely, wind and solar energy will be too intermittent to provide anything like the reliable base-load power offered by nuclear and fossil fuels. Hydropower plays a significant role in the energy mix of the United States and several other countries, but environmental concerns about the damage caused by dams have severely limited its growth. In short, all energy supplies come with drawbacks—not least nuclear, which since its inception has been haunted by its early boosters’ starry-eyed projections of incredibly cheap and abundant energy that have yet to come to pass. As we look at all of the energy sources available to us, we need to understand and face these costs and risks honestly. Doing so is the first step toward realizing that we can no longer demand more and more energy without being willing to pay the price.

The biggest risks posed by nuclear power come not from the technology, but from the human institutions that govern how we use it.

Charles D. Ferguson is president of the Federation of American Scientists and author of Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know.

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56 AMERICA’S PACIFIC CENTURY

The future of geopolitics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States should be right at the center of the action. BY HILLARY CLINTON

64 WHAT AILS AMERICA?

We went around the world to ask about the problems of the one global superpower. Imperial Hubris By Ian Buruma • The Presidency By Sunil Khilnani • Gluttony By Vaclav Smil • The Fed By Heleen Mees • The Dollar By Fan Gang • Education By Mishaal Al Gergawi

BAY MINETTE, ALABAMA. MAY 2010 BY CAROL M. HIGHSMITH/ GEORGE F. LANDEGGER COLLECTION OF ALABAMA PHOTOGRAPHS/ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAÉN BENAVIDES

THEAMERICAISSUE

71 an fp debate

Just How special is america anyway? • American exceptionalism is a myth. By Stephen M. Walt

• We really were that great (but that doesn’t mean we are now). By thoMaS l. FriedMan and Michael MandelBauM

79 tHe elepHants in tHe room

Barack Obama’s Republican challengers are trying hard not to talk about the rest of the world. It shows. By jaMeS trauB

tHe fp survey:

Is there a gop foreign policy?

THE AMERICA ISSUE

AMERICA’S PACIFIC CENTURY THE FUTURE OF GEOPOLITICS WILL BE DECIDED IN ASIA, NOT IN AFGHANISTAN OR IRAQ, AND THE UNITED STATES SHOULD BE RIGHT AT THE CENTER OF THE ACTION.

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s the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment—diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region. The Asia-Pacific has become a key driver of global politics. Stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western

shores of the Americas, the region spans two oceans—the Pacific and the Indian—that are increasingly linked by shipping and strategy. It boasts almost half the world’s population. It includes many of the key engines of the global economy, as well as the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. It is home to several of our key allies and important emerging powers like China, India, and Indonesia. At a time when the region is building a more mature security and economic architecture to promote stability and prosperity, U.S. commitment there is essential. It will help build that architecture and pay dividends for continued American leadership well into this century, just as our post-World War ii commitment to building a comprehensive and lasting transatlantic network of institutions and relationships has paid off many times over—and continues to do so. The time has come for the United States to make similar investments as a Pacific power, a strategic course set by President Barack Obama from the outset of his administration and one that is already yielding benefits. With Iraq and Afghanistan still in transition and serious economic challenges in our own country, there are those on the American political scene who are calling for us not to reposition, but to come home. They seek a downsizing of our foreign engagement in favor of our pressing domestic priorities. These impulses are understandable, but they are misguided. Those who say that we can no longer afford to engage with the world have it exactly backward—we cannot afford not to. From opening new markets for American businesses to curbing nuclear proliferation to keeping the sea lanes free for commerce and navigation, our work abroad holds the key to our prosperity and security at home. For more than six decades, the United States has resisted the gravitational pull of these “come home” debates and the implicit zero-sum logic of these arguments. We must do so again. Beyond our borders, people are also wondering about America’s intentions—our willingness to remain engaged and to lead. In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay, whether we are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether we can make—and keep—credible economic and strategic commitments, and whether we can back those commitments with action. The answer is: We can, and we will. Harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests and a key priority for President Obama. Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology. Our economic recovery at home will depend on exports and the ability of American firms to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia. Strategically, maintaining peace and security across the Asia-Pacific is increasingly crucial to global progress, whether through defending freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, countering the proliferation efforts of North Korea, or ensuring transparency in the military activities of the region’s key players. Just as Asia is critical to America’s future, an engaged America

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the america issue is vital to Asia’s future. The region is eager for our leadership and our business—perhaps more so than at any time in modern history. We are the only power with a network of strong alliances in the region, no territorial ambitions, and a long record of providing for the common good. Along with our allies, we have underwritten regional security for decades—patrolling Asia’s sea lanes and preserving stability—and that in turn has helped create the conditions for growth. We have helped integrate billions of people across the region into the global economy by spurring economic productivity, social empowerment, and greater people-to-people links. We are a major trade and investment partner, a source of innovation that benefits workers and businesses on both sides of the Pacific, a host to 350,000 Asian students every year, a champion of open markets, and an advocate for universal human rights. President Obama has led a multifaceted and persistent effort to embrace fully our irreplaceable role in the Pacific, spanning the entire U.S. government. It has often been a quiet effort. A lot of our work has not been on the front pages, both because of its nature—long-term investment is less exciting than immediate crises—and because of competing headlines in other parts of the world. As secretary of state, I broke with tradition and embarked on my first official overseas trip to Asia. In my seven trips since, I have had the privilege to see firsthand the rapid transformations taking place in the region, underscoring how much the future of the United States is intimately intertwined with the future of the Asia-Pacific. A strategic turn to the region fits logically into our overall global effort to secure and sustain America’s global leadership. The success of this turn requires maintaining and advancing a bipartisan consensus on the importance of the Asia-Pacific to our national interests; we seek to build upon a strong tradition of engagement by presidents and secretaries of state of both parties across many decades. It also requires smart execution of a coherent regional strategy that accounts for the global implications of our choices.

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hat does that regional strategy look like? For starters, it calls for a sustained commitment to what I have called “forward-deployed” diplomacy. That means continuing to dispatch the full range of our diplomatic assets— including our highest-ranking officials, our development experts, our interagency teams, and our permanent assets—to every country and corner of the Asia-Pacific region. Our strategy will have to keep accounting for and adapting to the rapid and dramatic shifts playing out across Asia. With this in mind, our work will proceed along six key lines of action: strengthening bilateral security alliances; deepening our working relationships with emerging powers, including with China; engaging with regional multilateral institutions; expanding trade and investment; forging a broad-based mili-

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tary presence; and advancing democracy and human rights. By virtue of our unique geography, the United States is both an Atlantic and a Pacific power. We are proud of our European partnerships and all that they deliver. Our challenge now is to build a web of partnerships and institutions across the Pacific that is as durable and as consistent with American interests and values as the web we have built across the Atlantic. That is the touchstone of our efforts in all these areas. Our treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand are the fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific. They have underwritten regional peace and security for more than half a century, shaping the environment for the region’s remarkable economic ascent. They leverage our regional presence and enhance our regional leadership at a time of evolving security challenges. As successful as these alliances have been, we can’t afford simply to sustain them—we need to update them for a changing world. In this effort, the Obama administration is guided by three core principles. First, we have to maintain political consensus on the core objectives of our alliances. Second, we have to ensure that our alliances are nimble and adaptive so that they can successfully address new challenges and seize new opportunities. Third, we have to guarantee that the defense capabilities and communications infrastructure of our alliances are operationally and materially capable of deterring provocation from the full spectrum of state and nonstate actors. The alliance with Japan, the cornerstone of peace and stability in the region, demonstrates how the Obama administration is giving these principles life. We share a common vision of a stable regional order with clear rules of the road—from freedom of navigation to open markets and fair competition. We have agreed to a new arrangement, including a contribution from the Japanese government of more than $5 billion, to ensure the continued enduring presence of American forces in Japan, while expanding joint intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities to deter and react quickly to regional security challenges, as well as information sharing to address cyberthreats. We have concluded an Open Skies agreement that will enhance access for businesses and people-to-people ties, launched a strategic dialogue on the Asia-Pacific, and been working hand in hand as the two largest donor countries in Afghanistan. Similarly, our alliance with South Korea has become stronger and more operationally integrated, and we continue to develop our combined capabilities to deter and respond to North Korean provocations. We have agreed on a plan to ensure successful transition of operational control during wartime and anticipate successful passage of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. And our alliance has gone global, through our work together in the G-20 and the Nuclear Security Summit and through our common efforts in Haiti and Afghanistan.

Clinton, Chinese state CounCilor Dai Bingguo, anD u.s. assistant seCretary of state for east asian anD PaCifiC affairs Kurt CamPBell.

We are also expanding our alliance with Australia from a Pacific partnership to an Indo-Pacific one, and indeed a global partnership. From cybersecurity to Afghanistan to the Arab Awakening to strengthening regional architecture in the Asia-Pacific, Australia’s counsel and commitment have been indispensable. And in Southeast Asia, we are renewing and strengthening our alliances with the Philippines and Thailand, increasing, for example, the number of ship visits to the Philippines and working to ensure the successful training of Filipino counterterrorism forces through our Joint Special Operations Task Force in Mindanao. In Thailand—our oldest treaty partner in Asia—we are working to establish a hub of regional humanitarian and disaster relief efforts in the region.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/GEtty ImAGES

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s we update our alliances for new demands, we are also building new partnerships to help solve shared problems. Our outreach to China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Mongolia, Vietnam, Brunei, and the Pacific Island countries is all part of a broader effort to ensure a more comprehensive approach to American strategy and engagement in the region. We are asking these emerging partners to join us in shaping and participating in a rules-based regional and global order. One of the most prominent of these emerging partners is, of course, China. Like so many other countries before it, China has prospered as part of the open and rules-based system that the United States helped to build and works to sustain. And today, China represents one of the most challenging and consequential bilateral relationships the United States has ever had to manage. This calls for careful, steady, dynamic stewardship,

an approach to China on our part that is grounded in reality, focused on results, and true to our principles and interests. We all know that fears and misperceptions linger on both sides of the Pacific. Some in our country see China’s progress as a threat to the United States; some in China worry that America seeks to constrain China’s growth. We reject both those views. The fact is that a thriving America is good for China and a thriving China is good for America. We both have much more to gain from cooperation than from conflict. But you cannot build a relationship on aspirations alone. It is up to both of us to more consistently translate positive words into effective cooperation—and, crucially, to meet our respective global responsibilities and obligations. These are the things that will determine whether our relationship delivers on its potential in the years to come. We also have to be honest about our differences. We will address them firmly and decisively as we pursue the urgent work we have to do together. And we have to avoid unrealistic expectations. Over the last two-and-a-half years, one of my top priorities has been to identify and expand areas of common interest, to work with China to build mutual trust, and to encourage China’s active efforts in global problem-solving. This is why Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and I launched the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the most intensive and expansive talks ever between our governments, bringing together dozens of agencies from both sides to discuss our most pressing bilateral issues, from security to energy to human rights. We are also working to increase transparency and reduce the risk of miscalculation or miscues between our militaries. The United States and the international community have watched

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the america issue China’s efforts to modernize and expand its military, and we have sought clarity as to its intentions. Both sides would benefit from sustained and substantive military-to-military engagement that increases transparency. So we look to Beijing to overcome its reluctance at times and join us in forging a durable militaryto-military dialogue. And we need to work together to strengthen the Strategic Security Dialogue, which brings together military and civilian leaders to discuss sensitive issues like maritime security and cybersecurity. As we build trust together, we are committed to working with China to address critical regional and global security issues. This is why I have met so frequently—often in informal settings—with my Chinese counterparts, State Councilor Dai Bingguo and Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, for candid discussions about important challenges like North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and developments in the South China Sea. On the economic front, the United States and China need to work together to ensure strong, sustained, and balanced future global growth. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the United States and China worked effectively through the G-20 to help pull the global economy back from the brink. We have to build on that cooperation. U.S. firms want fair opportunities to export to China’s growing markets, which can be important sources of jobs here in the United States, as well as assurances that the $50 billion of American capital invested in China will create a strong foundation for new market and investment opportunities that will support global competitiveness. At the same time, Chinese firms want to be able to buy more high-tech products from the United States, make more investments here, and be accorded the same terms of access that market economies enjoy. We can work together on these objectives, but China still needs to take important steps toward reform. In particular, we are working with China to end unfair discrimination against U.S. and other foreign companies or against their innovative technologies, remove preferences for domestic firms, and end measures that disadvantage or appropriate foreign intellectual property. And we look to China to take steps to allow its currency to appreciate more rapidly, both against the dollar and against the currencies of its other major trading partners. Such reforms, we believe, would not only benefit both our countries (indeed, they would support the goals of China’s own five-year plan, which calls for more domestic-led growth), but also contribute to global economic balance, predictability, and broader prosperity. Of course, we have made very clear, publicly and privately, our serious concerns about human rights. And when we see reports of public-interest lawyers, writers, artists, and others who are detained or disappeared, the United States speaks up, both publicly and privately, with our concerns about human rights. We make the case to our Chinese colleagues that a deep respect for international law and a more open politi-

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cal system would provide China with a foundation for far greater stability and growth—and increase the confidence of China’s partners. Without them, China is placing unnecessary limitations on its own development. At the end of the day, there is no handbook for the evolving U.S.-China relationship. But the stakes are much too high for us to fail. As we proceed, we will continue to embed our relationship with China in a broader regional framework of security alliances, economic networks, and social connections. Among key emerging powers with which we will work closely are India and Indonesia, two of the most dynamic and significant democratic powers of Asia, and both countries with which the Obama administration has pursued broader, deeper, and more purposeful relationships. The stretch of sea from the Indian Ocean through the Strait of Malacca to the Pacific contains the world’s most vibrant trade and energy routes. Together, India and Indonesia already account for almost a quarter of the world’s population. They are key drivers of the global economy, important partners for the United States, and increasingly central contributors to peace and security in the region. And their importance is likely to grow in the years ahead. President Obama told the Indian parliament last year that the relationship between India and America will be one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century, rooted in common values and interests. There are still obstacles to overcome and questions to answer on both sides, but the United States is making a strategic bet on India’s future—that India’s greater role on the world stage will enhance peace and security, that opening India’s markets to the world will pave the way to greater regional and global prosperity, that Indian advances in science and technology will improve lives and advance human knowledge everywhere, and that India’s vibrant, pluralistic democracy will produce measurable results and improvements for its citizens and inspire others to follow a similar path of openness and tolerance. So the Obama administration has expanded our bilateral partnership; actively supported India’s Look East efforts, including through a new trilateral dialogue with India and Japan; and outlined a new vision for a more economically integrated and politically stable South and Central Asia, with India as a linchpin. We are also forging a new partnership with Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and a member of the G-20. We have resumed joint training of Indonesian special forces units and signed a number of agreements on health, educational exchanges, science and technology, and defense. And this year, at the invitation of the Indonesian government, President Obama will inaugurate American participation in the East Asia Summit. But there is still some distance to travel—we have to work together to overcome bureaucratic impediments, lingering

U.S.S. John S. Mccain at tien Sa port in VietnaM

historical suspicions, and some gaps in understanding each other’s perspectives and interests.

HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/Getty IMAGes

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ven as we strengthen these bilateral relationships, we have emphasized the importance of multilateral cooperation, for we believe that addressing complex transnational challenges of the sort now faced by Asia requires a set of institutions capable of mustering collective action. And a more robust and coherent regional architecture in Asia would reinforce the system of rules and responsibilities, from protecting intellectual property to ensuring freedom of navigation, that form the basis of an effective international order. In multilateral settings, responsible behavior is rewarded with legitimacy and respect, and we can work together to hold accountable those who undermine peace, stability, and prosperity. So the United States has moved to fully engage the region’s multilateral institutions, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (asean) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (apec) forum, mindful that our work with regional institutions supplements and does not supplant our bilateral ties. There is a demand from the region that America play an active role in the agenda-setting of these institutions—and it is in our interests as well that they be effective and responsive. That is why President Obama will participate in the East Asia Summit for the first time in November. To pave the way, the United States has opened a new U.S. Mission to asean in Jakarta and signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation with asean. Our focus on developing a more results-oriented agenda has been instrumental in efforts to address disputes in the South China Sea. In 2010, at the asean Regional Forum in Hanoi, the United States helped shape a regionwide effort

to protect unfettered access to and passage through the South China Sea, and to uphold the key international rules for defining territorial claims in the South China Sea’s waters. Given that half the world’s merchant tonnage flows through this body of water, this was a consequential undertaking. And over the past year, we have made strides in protecting our vital interests in stability and freedom of navigation and have paved the way for sustained multilateral diplomacy among the many parties with claims in the South China Sea, seeking to ensure disputes are settled peacefully and in accordance with established principles of international law. We have also worked to strengthen apec as a serious leaderslevel institution focused on advancing economic integration and trade linkages across the Pacific. After last year’s bold call by the group for a free trade area of the Asia-Pacific, President Obama will host the 2011 apec Leaders’ Meeting in Hawaii this November. We are committed to cementing apec as the Asia-Pacific’s premier regional economic institution, setting the economic agenda in a way that brings together advanced and emerging economies to promote open trade and investment, as well as to build capacity and enhance regulatory regimes. apec and its work help expand U.S. exports and create and support high-quality jobs in the United States, while fostering growth throughout the region. apec also provides a key vehicle to drive a broad agenda to unlock the economic growth potential that women represent. In this regard, the United States is committed to working with our partners on ambitious steps to accelerate the arrival of the Participation Age, where every individual, regardless of gender or other characteristics, is a contributing and valued member of the global marketplace. In addition to our commitment to these broader multilateral

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the america issue institutions, we have worked hard to create and launch a number of “minilateral” meetings, small groupings of interested states to tackle specific challenges, such as the Lower Mekong Initiative we launched to support education, health, and environmental programs in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, and the Pacific Islands Forum, where we are working to support its members as they confront challenges from climate change to overfishing to freedom of navigation. We are also starting to pursue new trilateral opportunities with countries as diverse as Mongolia, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, and South Korea. And we are setting our sights as well on enhancing coordination and engagement among the three giants of the AsiaPacific: China, India, and the United States. In all these different ways, we are seeking to shape and participate in a responsive, flexible, and effective regional architecture—and ensure it connects to a broader global architecture that not only protects international stability and commerce but also advances our values.

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ur emphasis on the economic work of apec is in keeping with our broader commitment to elevate economic statecraft as a pillar of American foreign policy. Increasingly, economic progress depends on strong diplomatic ties, and diplomatic progress depends on strong economic ties. And naturally, a focus on promoting American prosperity means a greater focus on trade and economic openness in the Asia-Pacific. The region already generates more than half of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to meet President Obama’s goal of doubling exports by 2015, we are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia. Last year, American exports to the Pacific Rim totaled $320 billion, supporting 850,000 American jobs. So there is much that favors us as we think through this repositioning. When I talk to my Asian counterparts, one theme consistently stands out: They still want America to be an engaged and creative partner in the region’s flourishing trade and financial interactions. And as I talk with business leaders across our own nation, I hear how important it is for the United States to expand our exports and our investment opportunities in Asia’s dynamic markets. Last March in apec meetings in Washington, and again in Hong Kong in July, I laid out four attributes that I believe characterize healthy economic competition: open, free, transparent, and fair. Through our engagement in the AsiaPacific, we are helping to give shape to these principles and showing the world their value. We are pursuing new cutting-edge trade deals that raise the standards for fair competition even as they open new markets. For instance, the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement will eliminate tariffs on 95 percent of U.S. consumer and industrial exports within five years and support an estimated 70,000 American jobs. Its tariff reductions alone could in-

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crease exports of American goods by more than $10 billion and help South Korea’s economy grow by 6 percent. It will level the playing field for U.S. auto companies and workers. So, whether you are an American manufacturer of machinery or a South Korean chemicals exporter, this deal lowers the barriers that keep you from reaching new customers. We are also making progress on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (tpp), which will bring together economies from across the Pacific—developed and developing alike—into a single trading community. Our goal is to create not just more growth, but better growth. We believe trade agreements need to include strong protections for workers, the environment, intellectual property, and innovation. They should also promote the free flow of information technology and the spread of green technology, as well as the coherence of our regulatory system and the efficiency of supply chains. Ultimately, our progress will be measured by the quality of people’s lives—whether men and women can work in dignity, earn a decent wage, raise healthy families, educate their children, and take hold of the opportunities to improve their own and the next generation’s fortunes. Our hope is that a tpp agreement with high standards can serve as a benchmark for future agreements—and grow to serve as a platform for broader regional interaction and eventually a free trade area of the Asia-Pacific. Achieving balance in our trade relationships requires a twoway commitment. That’s the nature of balance—it can’t be unilaterally imposed. So we are working through apec, the G-20, and our bilateral relationships to advocate for more open markets, fewer restrictions on exports, more transparency, and an overall commitment to fairness. American businesses and workers need to have confidence that they are operating on a level playing field, with predictable rules on everything from intellectual property to indigenous innovation.

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sia’s remarkable economic growth over the past decade and its potential for continued growth in the future depend on the security and stability that has long been guaranteed by the U.S. military, including more than 50,000 American servicemen and servicewomen serving in Japan and South Korea. The challenges of today’s rapidly changing region—from territorial and maritime disputes to new threats to freedom of navigation to the heightened impact of natural disasters—require that the United States pursue a more geographically distributed, operationally resilient, and politically sustainable force posture. We are modernizing our basing arrangements with traditional allies in Northeast Asia—and our commitment on this is rock solid—while enhancing our presence in Southeast Asia and into the Indian Ocean. For example, the United States will be deploying littoral combat ships to Singapore, and we are examining other ways to increase opportunities for our two militaries to train and operate together. And

the United States and Australia agreed this year to explore a greater American military presence in Australia to enhance opportunities for more joint training and exercises. We are also looking at how we can increase our operational access in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region and deepen our contacts with allies and partners. How we translate the growing connection between the Indian and Pacific oceans into an operational concept is a question that we need to answer if we are to adapt to new challenges in the region. Against this backdrop, a more broadly distributed military presence across the region will provide vital advantages. The United States will be better positioned to support humanitarian missions; equally important, working with more allies and partners will provide a more robust bulwark against threats or efforts to undermine regional peace and stability. But even more than our military might or the size of our economy, our most potent asset as a nation is the power of our values—in particular, our steadfast support for democracy and human rights. This speaks to our deepest national character and is at the heart of our foreign policy, including our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific region. As we deepen our engagement with partners with whom we disagree on these issues, we will continue to urge them to embrace reforms that would improve governance, protect human rights, and advance political freedoms. We have made it clear, for example, to Vietnam that our ambition to develop a strategic partnership requires that it take steps to further protect human rights and advance political freedoms. Or consider Burma, where we are determined to seek accountability for human rights violations. We are closely following developments in Nay Pyi Taw and the increasing interactions between Aung San Suu Kyi and the government leadership. We have underscored to the government that it must release political prisoners, advance political freedoms and human rights, and break from the policies of the past. As for North Korea, the regime in Pyongyang has shown persistent disregard for the rights of its people, and we continue to speak out forcefully against the threats it poses to the region and beyond. We cannot and do not aspire to impose our system on other countries, but we do believe that certain values are universal—that people in every nation in the world, including in Asia, cherish them—and that they are intrinsic to stable, peaceful, and prosperous countries. Ultimately, it is up to the people of Asia to pursue their own rights and aspirations, just as we have seen people do all over the world.

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n the last decade, our foreign policy has transitioned from dealing with the post-Cold War peace dividend to demanding commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. As those wars wind down, we will need to accelerate efforts to pivot to new global realities. We know that these new realities require us to innovate, to

compete, and to lead in new ways. Rather than pull back from the world, we need to press forward and renew our leadership. In a time of scarce resources, there’s no question that we need to invest them wisely where they will yield the biggest returns, which is why the Asia-Pacific represents such a real 21st-century opportunity for us. Other regions remain vitally important, of course. Europe, home to most of our traditional allies, is still a partner of first resort, working alongside the United States on nearly every urgent global challenge, and we are investing in updating the structures of our alliance. The people of the Middle East and North Africa are charting a new path that is already having profound global consequences, and the United States is committed to active and sustained partnerships as the region transforms. Africa holds enormous untapped potential for economic and political development in the years ahead. And our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere are not just our biggest export partners; they are also playing a growing role in global political and economic affairs. Each of these regions demands American engagement and leadership. And we are prepared to lead. Now, I’m well aware that there are those who question our staying power around the world. We’ve heard this talk before. At the end of the Vietnam War, there was a thriving industry of global commentators promoting the idea that America was in retreat, and it is a theme that repeats itself every few decades. But whenever the United States has experienced setbacks, we’ve overcome them through reinvention and innovation. Our capacity to come back stronger is unmatched in modern history. It flows from our model of free democracy and free enterprise, a model that remains the most powerful source of prosperity and progress known to humankind. I hear everywhere I go that the world still looks to the United States for leadership. Our military is by far the strongest, and our economy is by far the largest in the world. Our workers are the most productive. Our universities are renowned the world over. So there should be no doubt that America has the capacity to secure and sustain our global leadership in this century as we did in the last. As we move forward to set the stage for engagement in the Asia-Pacific over the next 60 years, we are mindful of the bipartisan legacy that has shaped our engagement for the past 60. And we are focused on the steps we have to take at home—increasing our savings, reforming our financial systems, relying less on borrowing, overcoming partisan division—to secure and sustain our leadership abroad. This kind of pivot is not easy, but we have paved the way for it over the past two-and-a-half years, and we are committed to seeing it through as among the most important diplomatic efforts of our time. Hillary Clinton is U.S. secretary of state.

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the america issue

what ails america?

We Went around the World to ask about the problems of the one global superpoWer.

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imperial hubris BY IAN BURUMA

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oo much power is not good for a person, or for a nation. It leads to hubris, to the childish illusion of omnipotence, and, even when driven by good intentions, to abuse. In the case of the United States, the illusion of being exceptional, the idea that the “Greatest Nation in the History of the World” can do anything, is doubtless fed by the manner of the country’s inception. France and the United States are the only Western democracies born from revolutions. Like France, the American republic likes to claim that it represents not only the hopes of humankind, but universal values. The American way is the global way, or it jolly well should be. What the French call la mission civilisatrice has also been a driving force for Americans. The national destiny is to civilize the benighted world. To believers in this mission—who are not always in the mainstream of U.S. politics, but have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in the decade since the 9/11 attacks—it is not sufficient for the United States to be an example to the world. It is incumbent on the republic to export freedom and democracy, by force if necessary. This is the Napoleonic side of U.S. foreign policy. As was true of France, the Napoleonic urge is rooted in the Christian tradition. French and American democracies may be secular, but the missionary zeal and the claims of universality surely owe something to the countries’ religious past. Still, the illusion of American omnipotence was held in check by other powers, notably by the British Empire, and later by the Soviet Union, for much of America’s history. This is not to extol the virtues of the Soviet system, which were limited, to say the least. But Moscow at a minimum played the role of keeping things in perspective. After 1989, there was ostensibly nothing to stop the American dream of shaping the world to its liking. You might say it was America’s Palmerstonian moment, when it acted like Victorian England’s Lord Palmerston, who believed that Britain’s duty was to use its might to reorder other nations, from Belgium to Afghanistan to China. Bush the Elder was still too cautious to fully embrace Palmerston’s liberal interventionism. His son was not. It was 9/11 that released American hubris in full force. “We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do: We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.…” These were the words of a popular music-hall ditty in London in the 1870s, but they might have been sung in the streets of Washington around 2003. But this American hubris, mixed with an atmosphere of paranoia, has brought disastrous results for others, and for the United States itself. Unnecessary wars, sometimes undertaken with true missionary zeal, are bleeding the country’s treasury and costing countless lives. Not all the costs are direct. The gradual militarization of American society—the ritual genuflections to “our men and women in uniform,” the bloated military budgets, the fawning attitude to generals—has resulted in something more often associated with tin-pot dictatorships in the developing world:

crumbling bridges, potholed roads, rotten schools, and an overbearing military loaded with all the best and latest hardware. This is clearly not good for most Americans. But it isn’t good for U.S. allies, either. Sick of waging wars, for excellent reasons, Europeans and the Japanese have become like spoiled adolescents, almost totally dependent for their security on the big American father. Too indolent, or scared, to take more responsibility for their own protection, they express the humiliation of their dependency in fits of anti-American pique. In East Asia, Pax Americana still rules, not only because the Japanese can’t make up their minds about whether to change their (American-written) pacifist constitution, but also because China, too, has long preferred the status quo. The alternative to being ringed by U.S. bases, after all, is to see the Japanese take over. There are some signs that Europeans are beginning to wean themselves from the American parent. Yet the form this takes seems to be flattery through imitation. Just a few years ago, British Prime Minister Tony Blair still believed that it was Britain’s role to be an obedient, even zealous junior partner in the U.S. military mission to spread light unto the world. The latest venture in Libya, however, showed a more independent European spirit, led, unsurprisingly, by the French. It was as if President Nicolas Sarkozy, cheered on by some prominent French chauvinists, wanted to hitch the tricolor once more to its own mission civilisatrice. This time, the United States, exhausted by too many recent failures, took a back seat. Nonetheless, even this Franco-British mission could never have had any success without the wherewithal of U.S. power. There is much talk, none of it very new, of the decline of the West, and of the United States in particular. China, so people claim, and in the long run perhaps India too, will assume the mantle of world power, just as Washington once took over from London. Perhaps this will come to pass. All great powers come to an end. Yet neither China nor India, nor any other country, is likely to dominate the world soon in the way the United States has done. China’s ambition does not stretch beyond its Asian periphery, and India is still too poor and too battered by domestic rebellions to control its own territory successfully, let alone anywhere beyond Kashmir. American decline might still be a lengthy process. Failures in some sectors of the economy are partly made up for by successes in others: For all the Detroit plant closures, there’s a Google, a Microsoft, a Facebook. And whatever people might say to criticize America, many still wish to bask a bit longer in the security it claims to provide. But if history offers any indication, Napoleonic, or even Palmerstonian, politics always end up in mental and physical exhaustion. There is little doubt in my mind that the illusion of omnipotence, rather than lengthening the days of Pax Americana, has speeded up its eventual demise. Dutch writer Ian Buruma, currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, is author, most recently, of Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.

illustrations by Javier Jaén Benavides for fp November 2011

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THE PRESIDENCY s the U.S. president struggles to assert his will and break a long season of political frustration and national impasse, both his enemies and his erstwhile supporters remain overly focused on him and his role in America’s new age of gridlock. Those on Barack Obama’s right see him as a hard-driven ideologue trying to frog-march Americans into an imagined socialist dystopia. Those to his left view him as pusillanimous, compromising and conceding his liberal beliefs to appeal to the mushy middle. But what ails the United States has less to do with the personality traits and defects that Obama’s critics, on the left and right, are so ready to identify, and more to do with the compulsions of the country’s democratic routines. It’s not Obama who is the problem; it’s America’s broken political system. Those routines no sooner deliver a new leader into office than he is required immediately to begin a new campaign for reelection. In an age of heightened media scrutiny, where any mistake has the potential to go viral and can in hours destroy political ambitions, timidity and trimming invariably become the order of the day for even the most visionary leaders. One can enter office clear-eyed about how to tackle America’s irrational energy consumption or its massive debt overhang, but policy fogs up fast when one is trying to keep potential funders and voters happy. So U.S. presidents spend their days waking to the prospect of bland compromise and turn in having abjectly sold out. Americans pride themselves on their democracy— by any standard an extraordinary achievement (though sometimes they wish it upon the rest of us a little too pressingly). But perhaps Americans need to reflect more self-critically on some of the basic premises of their own democracy, in a way more in line with the general spirit of self-improvement and experimentation that pervades American society.

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Is it really such a great idea to require presidential leaders to spend so much of their first four years in office fixated on securing another four years in the same office? Each first-term presidency becomes in effect an election campaign in which presidents are condemned to making themselves likable rather than solving the country’s problems—forget about pushing through hard choices. Over the next few decades, much as its economy will have to be reimagined, America’s democracy—one of the most successfully adaptive political systems of the modern age—is going to have to reinvent itself, too. To get things started, how about doing away with the two-term presidency? Instead, establish one six-year term. (And here Americans shouldn’t be put off by the lousy examples of countries that currently have six-year presidential terms, which include Russia and Mexico. It won’t take much American ingenuity to make their own version work infinitely better.) The U.S. political system has, thanks to its founders, enough checks and balances, divided and countervailing powers, to minimize any damage that a six-year presidential term might produce. And fortunately, unlike my country of India, the United States has a deep bench of idealistic women and men who are willing to enter politics and who believe in government as a way of trying to improve their country. Let them, then, have one long shot at writing themselves into the history books—and at altering their country’s path. Give them six years to focus on the job in hand, rather than on dialing for dollars and desperately avoiding anything that might alienate voters. A little less fascination with the individual officeholder, remarkable as the current one is, and a bit more attention to fixing the system might allow the next remarkable president to actually accomplish something. Sunil Khilnani is a professor of politics and director of the King’s India Institute at King’s College London.

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

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BY SUNIL KHILNANI

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Automobiles are even worse. Incredibly, the THE PROBLEMS THAT AIL the U.S. economy and American society are one and the same: Both overall efficiency of America’s cars, vans, and SUVs consume too much and refuse to make badly didn’t budge between 1986 and 2006, and subseneeded changes. This is true above all in the realm quent improvements have been risible compared of energy. The United States doesn’t need exotic with the doubling of efficiency that the country’s biofuels or balloon-borne wind turbines. Its real automotive fleet managed between 1975 and problems are wasteful private energy use and the 1985. If that trend had continued—which was near-total absence of effective, down-to-earth, well within the realm of technical possibility—the BY VACLAV SMIL average American would be driving a 50 mileslong-term policies. Energy use is merely a means to many per-gallon vehicle now rather than today’s 30 mpg rewarding ends: economic security, education, clunker. And that’s nothing next to what could have health. The United States consumes nearly twice as much energy been saved had the United States finally joined the 20th century per capita as the richest countries of the European Union, which and built rapid trains on par with France’s trains à grande vitesse to raises the question: What has it gotten in return? Are Americans serve high-population-density regions such as the corridor between twice as rich as the French? Are they twice as educated as the Boston and Washington. (Amtrak’s Acela? Please.) Germans? Do they live twice as long as the Swedes? Are they twice The parallels with America’s great public-health epidemic of as happy as the Danes or twice as safe as the Dutch? The obviobesity are inescapable. Even after throwing away some 40 percent ous answer for all of the above is no; indeed, many of America’s of its abundant food supply, the United States still has the industriquality-of-life indicators—including infant mortality, longevity, and alized world’s most overweight population. America similarly proeducational achievement—do not even rank among the world’s duces more energy per capita than any other major rich economy— top 10! so much so that if the United States were to consume that energy It’s not as though Americans don’t know better. U.S. indusat a rate comparable to Germany or France, it would be a massive tries from steel-making to plastics synthesis are among the world’s energy exporter. Instead, America imports more than 25 percent most energy-efficient; American agriculture is highly productive, of its energy, paying more than $2 trillion for the privilege over the as are America’s railroads. But for decades, Americans themselves past decade—and still ends up with little to show for it. The United have been living beyond their means, wasting energy in their States now faces the choice of curbing its energy appetite with dehouses and cars and amassing energy-intensive throwaway prodliberation, commitment, and foresight, or waiting for the unraveling ucts on credit. The size of the average American house has more economy to put it on a painful crash diet. than doubled since the 1950s, and they are more often than not poorly insulated, inefficiently heated in the winter, and cooled to Vaclav Smil is distinguished professor in the University of Maninear-arctic temperatures in the summer. toba’s department of environment and geography.

GLUTTONY

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THE AMERICA ISSUE

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THE FED ocumentaries like Inside Job and books like Michael Lewis’s The Big Short have spun a narrative of America’s economic crisis that stars Wall Street bankers and credit-rating agencies as the ultimate villains. But despite popular belief, subprime mortgages with exotic features had little to do with the housing bubble and the current debt overload weighing down U.S. households. They accounted for a mere 5 percent of mortgages at the time. The story line is just wrong. The real culprit was the Federal Reserve. With its ultraloose monetary policy in the early 2000s, the Fed single-handedly created the refinancing boom and ushered in the housing bubble. The record-low interest rates not only fed the boom that had to go bust, but also favored that sector of the U.S. economy that

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is predominantly financed with debt, i.e., the financial sector, at the expense of sectors that are more reliant on risk capital, such as manufacturing. That might explain why, by the mid-2000s, bank profits accounted for 30 percent of all profits reported by S&P 500 companies. In other words, Americans stopped making stuff and relied on paper earnings instead. Yet the only prescription being applied to the depressed U.S. economy today is basically what it was a decade ago: cutting interest rates in an attempt to inflate prices for assets like houses and stocks and boost consumption. Because the federal funds rate is already close to zero, the Fed has been buying up bonds with a longer maturity to drive down long-term interest rates. Although the latest bond-buying program—nicknamed qe2—ended in June, its effect on interest rates will continue

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BY HELEEN MEES

as long as the Fed holds onto the bonds. A third round of what economists call “quantitative easing” is imminent. But if consumption, the very hallmark of American culture, did not save the day in the 2000s, why would it do so today? It was China, not the United States, that prospered from Americans’ spending binge as hundreds of millions of Chinese were lifted out of poverty. In this year’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama invoked the idea of a “Sputnik moment” for this generation, implying that the United States was besieged by China as it had been half a century before by the Soviet Union. According to Obama, the country needed historic new levels of research and development akin to the massive investment that fueled the space race with the Soviets in the 1960s. But instead of backing up his vision with money, as President John F. Kennedy had, Obama announced a spending freeze, boasting that it would bring discretionary spending down to levels not seen since President Dwight Eisenhower. It’s hard to miss the irony here. And lower interest rates won’t do the trick, as they won’t bring down the cost of risk capital. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, any decrease in interest rates was mirrored by a similar drop in the cost of risk capital, spurring innovation. Since 2000, however, the cost of risk capital has gone up in spite of dramatically falling interest rates. The expected yield is now more than three times the yield on 10-year Treasurys. The mechanism behind this is quite simple. U.S. consumption spurs economic growth and savings in China. But China’s savings are mainly invested in risk-free assets, perhaps because the Chinese are culturally risk-averse, but also because the financial markets in China are still underdeveloped and not fully liberalized. Whatever the reason, it’s now clear that monetary policy is not an effective way to promote innovation. China and Germany both have a tradition of promoting new investment and innovation through state subsidies. The German government’s subsidies for research, development, and innovation are four times as high as Britain’s, and the Chinese government is luring investors with free land and other subsidies up to 40 percent of capital cost. It should not come as a surprise that the economies of China and Germany have been thriving. Economic growth in China this year has been close to 10 percent, and it might have been even higher were it not for the People’s Bank of China’s successful attempts to cool down the economy. And even though economic growth in Germany somewhat disappointed in this year’s second quarter, the unemployment rate hit a historic low. No jobless recovery there. Thirty years ago, Chinese leaders realized that for China to become relevant, it had to look more like the United States. Now it’s time for Americans to realize that to stay relevant, the United States will have to look more like China. Heleen Mees is assistant professor in economics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

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THE HONOR OF PRINTING the world’s reserve currency did not come accidentally, or easily, to the United States; the dollar’s post-World War II ascent to global primacy would not have happened had America not demonstrated the unriBY FAN GANG valed economic, military, and technological power to back it up. But being the world’s banker comes with benefits as well as obligations—and first among them is that the whole world wants to make sure you don’t default on your debt. If you are in a position to repay your obligations by just printing more money, you might never default. What is a blessing in the short run, however, could turn out to be a curse in the long run. A country that controls the international currency runs less financial risk when it borrows, but is thus likely to be less alert to the risk of financial bubbles. Costs can be underestimated, and problems undiscovered, for a long time. The United States is now learning this lesson in a very big way. For many countries, such as Argentina and Vietnam, a budget deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP or a 5 percent current account deficit has been enough to plunge them into a financial crisis. The United States, by contrast, maintained about the same figures on its balance sheet for a decade while enjoying a period of economic expansion. The result was overconfidence and a flawed vision of limitless potential growth, as if Americans could keep spending without saving to no one’s detriment. Some economists even claimed this was a result of the “super-efficiency” of the U.S. economy. You can see the logical consequences of this illusion in today’s overleveraged, debt-plagued U.S. economy, the major cause of both the 2008 global financial crisis and the current concerns over U.S. government debt. The lesson is clear: The United States may enjoy a greater line of credit than everyone else in exchange for providing the dollar, but even the most forgiving balance sheet in the world has its limits. America’s long experiment with ballooning debt and an everexpanding financial sector has left the country with other problems, too. Wall Street’s disproportionate size in comparison with “real” sectors of the U.S. economy such as manufacturing has resulted in deteriorating industrial competitiveness, growing trade deficits, and unemployment. We cannot and should not attribute all of America’s current problems to the dollar’s special status and the illusions that come with it. But without it, we cannot explain why the United States did not make the hard economic choices that less-privileged countries would have had to make, and long ago. Today, even the world’s banker can’t put off the reckoning any longer.

THE DOLLAR

Fan Gang is a Peking University economics professor, director of China's National Economic Research Institute, and chairman of the China Reform Foundation.

THE AMERICA ISSUE

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EDUCATION merica today is akin to the Ottoman Empire at the end of its days. Immensely important, commanding huge global influence, badly run under mounting debt, it is not the leader of the world, but the sick man of it. At the root of America’s problems today is one that Americans themselves created: the knowledge economy. That economy and its associated technological advances, from outsourcing to Internet telephony, has displaced many Americans from work even as it has made firms like Apple among the world’s richest and most admired companies. The three-year-old economic crisis has only accelerated that process, but in no way started it. As in Europe’s transition from an agrarian economy to an urban powerhouse during the Industrial Revolution, there will be many whose skill sets just won’t be needed in this new age. But the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google put together cannot employ the people laid off by Ford and General Motors. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the manufacturing industry’s employment numbers went from 17.6 million in 1998 to 13.4 million in 2008; they are projected to decrease to 12.2 million by 2018. The it industry’s employment numbers are projected to grow to only 3.1 million by the same year. Designing more Facebook clones and iPad apps won’t close this gap. And that’s at least in part because, for all the incredible quality of U.S. discourse, the American education system is in an abysmal state. Its universities are still the envy of the world, but the United States has a 30 percent high-school dropout rate and recently ranked 31st of 65 countries in math proficiency in a ranking compiled by the oecd. What will those people do? How will they live? No wonder America’s Ph.D. students, especially in science and engineering, come increasingly from overseas. If the United States continues to look to the tech sector to lead it out of recession while maintaining unemployment close to 10 percent, it may well have nothing more than a feudal recovery, one in which those who have the immediate skills or the wealth to take part in it do so and those who don’t remain unemployed—a techno-aristocracy of sorts. I recently asked an American businessman what many unemployed Americans will do if they can’t find new jobs comparable to their old ones. “Go back to farming,” he said. And it didn’t entirely sound like a joke. Mishaal Al Gergawi is an Emirati political commentator.

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CASS TECH HIGH SCHOOL, DETROIT 2010 BY ERIC KLOOCK/VISARG.COM

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BY MISHAAL AL GERGAWI

an fp debate

just how special is america anyway? stephen m. walt

american exceptionalism is a myth

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thomas l. friedman and michael mandelbaum

we really were that great (but that doesn’t mean we are now)

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of american exceptionalism by stephen m. walt

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ver the last two centuries, prominent Americans have described the United States as an “empire of liberty,” a “shining city on a hill,” the “last best hope of Earth,” the “leader of the free world,” and the “indispensable nation.” These enduring tropes explain why all presidential candidates feel compelled to offer ritualistic paeans to America’s greatness and why President Barack Obama landed in hot water for saying that while he believed in “American exceptionalism,” it was no different from “British exceptionalism,” “Greek exceptionalism,” or any other country’s brand of patriotic chest-thumping. Most statements of “American exceptionalism” presume that America’s values, political system, and history are unique and worthy of universal admiration. They also imply that the United States is both destined and entitled to play a distinct and positive role on the world stage. The only thing wrong with this self-congratulatory por-

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trait of America’s global role is that it is mostly a myth. Although the United States possesses certain unique qualities—from high levels of religiosity to a political culture that privileges individual freedom—the conduct of U.S. foreign policy has been determined primarily by its relative power and by the inherently competitive nature of international politics. By focusing on their supposedly exceptional qualities, Americans blind themselves to the ways that they are a lot like everyone else. This unchallenged faith in American exceptionalism makes it harder for Americans to understand why others are less enthusiastic about U.S. dominance, often alarmed by U.S. policies, and frequently irritated by what they see as U.S. hypocrisy, whether the subject is possession of nuclear weapons, conformity with international law, or America’s tendency to condemn the conduct of others while ignoring its own failings. Ironically, U.S. foreign policy would probably be more effective if Americans were less convinced of their own unique virtues and less eager to proclaim them. What we need, in short, is a more realistic and critical assessment of America’s true character and contributions. In that spirit, I offer here the Top 5 Myths about American Exceptionalism.

Myth 1 There Is Something Exceptional About American Exceptionalism. Whenever American leaders refer to the “unique” responsibilities of the United States, they are saying that it is different from other powers and that these differences require them to take on special burdens. Yet there is nothing unusual about such lofty declarations; indeed, those who make them are treading a well-worn path. Most great powers have considered themselves superior to their rivals and have believed that they were advancing some greater good when they imposed their preferences on others. The British thought they were bearing the “white man’s burden,” while French colonialists invoked la mission civilisatrice to justify their empire. Portugal, whose imperial activities were hardly distinguished, believed it was promoting a certain missão civilizadora. Even many of the officials of the former Soviet Union genuinely believed they were leading the world toward a socialist utopia despite the many cruelties that communist rule inflicted. Of course, the United States has by far the better claim to virtue than Stalin or his successors, but Obama was right to remind us that all countries prize their own particular qualities. So when Americans proclaim they are exceptional and indispensable, they are simply the latest nation to sing a familiar old song. Among great powers, thinking you’re special is the norm, not the exception.

previous page: Matt Cohen/southCreek global/ZuMapress.CoM; right: tiMe-life piCtures via getty iMages

the america issue

Tokyo burning after an allied bombing raid.

Myth 2 The United States Behaves Better Than Other Nations Do.

“If the U.S. lost the war, we would be prosecuted as war criminals.” Gen. Curtis LeMay

Declarations of American exceptionalism rest on the belief that the United States is a uniquely virtuous nation, one that loves peace, nurtures liberty, respects human rights, and embraces the rule of law. Americans like to think their country behaves much better than other states do, and certainly better than other great powers. If only it were true. The United States may not have been as brutal as the worst states in world history, but a dispassionate look at the historical record belies most claims about America’s moral superiority. For starters, the United States has been one of the most expansionist powers in modern history. It began as 13 small colonies clinging to the Eastern Seaboard, but eventually expanded across North America, seizing Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California from Mexico in 1846. Along the way, it eliminated most of the native population and confined the survivors to impoverished reservations. By the mid-19th century, it had pushed Britain out of the Pacific Northwest and consolidated its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. The United States has fought numerous wars since then— starting several of them—and its wartime conduct has hardly been a model of restraint. The 1899-1902 conquest of the Philippines killed some 200,000 to 400,000 Filipinos, most of them civilians, and the United States and its allies did not hesitate to dispatch some 305,000 German and 330,000 Japanese civilians through aerial bombing during World War ii, mostly through deliberate campaigns against enemy cities. No wonder Gen. Curtis LeMay, who directed the bombing campaign against Japan, told an aide, “If the U.S. lost the war, we would be prosecuted as war criminals.” The United States dropped more than 6 million tons of bombs during the Indochina war, including tons of napalm and lethal defoliants like Agent Orange, and it is directly responsible for the deaths of many of the roughly 1 million civilians who died in that war. More recently, the U.S.-backed Contra war in Nicaragua killed some 30,000 Nicaraguans, a percentage of their population equivalent to 2 million dead Americans. U.S. military action has led directly or indirectly to the deaths of 250,000 Muslims over the past three decades (and that’s a low-end estimate, not counting the deaths resulting from the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s), including the more than 100,000 people who died following the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. U.S. drones and Special Forces are going after suspected terrorists in at least five countries at present and have killed an unknown number of innocent civilians in the process. Some of these actions may have been necessary

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The United States talks a good game on human rights but has been too willing to cozy up to dictators.

Myth 3 America’s Success Is Due to Its Special Genius. The United States has enjoyed remarkable success, and Americans tend to portray their rise to world power as a direct result of the political foresight of the Founding Fathers, the virtues of the U.S. Constitution, the priority placed on individual liberty, and the creativity and hard work of the American people. In this narrative, the United States enjoys an exceptional global position today because it is, well, exceptional. There is more than a grain of truth to this version of American history. It’s not an accident that immigrants came to America in droves in search of economic opportunity, and the “melting pot” myth facilitated the assimilation of each wave of new Americans. America’s scientific and technological achievements are fully deserving of praise and owe something to the openness and vitality of the American political order. But America’s past success is due as much to good luck as to any uniquely American virtues. The new nation was lucky that the continent was lavishly endowed with natural resources and traversed by navigable rivers. It was lucky to have been founded far from the other great powers and even

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luckier that the native population was less advanced and highly susceptible to European diseases. Americans were fortunate that the European great powers were at war for much of the republic’s early history, which greatly facilitated its expansion across the continent, and its global primacy was ensured after the other great powers fought two devastating world wars. This account of America’s rise does not deny that the United States did many things right, but it also acknowledges that America’s present position owes as much to good fortune as to any special genius or “manifest destiny.”

Myth 4 The United States Is Responsible for Most of the Good in the World. Americans are fond of giving themselves credit for positive international developments. President Bill Clinton believed the United States was “indispensable to the forging of stable political relations,” and the late Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington thought U.S. primacy was central “to the future of freedom, democracy, open economies, and international order in the world.” Journalist Michael Hirsh has gone even further, writing in his book At War With Ourselves that America’s global role is “the greatest gift the world has received in many, many centuries, possibly all of recorded history.” Scholarly works such as Tony Smith’s America’s Mission and G. John Ikenberry’s Liberal Leviathan emphasize America’s contribution to the spread of democracy and its promotion of a supposedly liberal world order. Given all the high-fives American leaders have given themselves, it is hardly surprising that most Americans see their country as an overwhelmingly positive force in world affairs. Once again, there is something to this line of argument, just not enough to make it entirely accurate. The United States has made undeniable contributions to peace and stability in the world over the past century, including the Marshall Plan, the creation and management of the Bretton Woods system, its rhetorical support for the core principles of democracy and human rights, and its mostly stabilizing military presence in Europe and the Far East. But the belief that all good things flow from Washington’s wisdom overstates the U.S. contribution by a wide margin. For starters, though Americans watching Saving Private Ryan or Patton may conclude that the United States played the central role in vanquishing Nazi Germany, most of the fighting was in Eastern Europe and the main burden of defeating Hitler’s war machine was borne by the Soviet Union. Similarly, though the Marshall Plan and nato played important roles in Europe’s post-World War ii success, Europeans deserve at least as much credit for rebuilding their economies, construct-

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to make Americans more prosperous and secure. But while Americans would undoubtedly regard such acts as indefensible if some foreign country were doing them to us, hardly any U.S. politicians have questioned these policies. Instead, Americans still wonder, “Why do they hate us?” The United States talks a good game on human rights and international law, but it has refused to sign most human rights treaties, is not a party to the International Criminal Court, and has been all too willing to cozy up to dictators—remember our friend Hosni Mubarak?—with abysmal human rights records. If that were not enough, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the George W. Bush administration’s reliance on waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, and preventive detention should shake America’s belief that it consistently acts in a morally superior fashion. Obama’s decision to retain many of these policies suggests they were not a temporary aberration. The United States never conquered a vast overseas empire or caused millions to die through tyrannical blunders like China’s Great Leap Forward or Stalin’s forced collectivization. And given the vast power at its disposal for much of the past century, Washington could certainly have done much worse. But the record is clear: U.S. leaders have done what they thought they had to do when confronted by external dangers, and they paid scant attention to moral principles along the way. The idea that the United States is uniquely virtuous may be comforting to Americans; too bad it’s not true.

The United States has been the major producer of greenhouse gases and thus a principal cause of the adverse changes that are altering the global environment. ing a novel economic and political union, and moving beyond four centuries of sometimes bitter rivalry. Americans also tend to think they won the Cold War all by themselves, a view that ignores the contributions of other anti-Soviet adversaries and the courageous dissidents whose resistance to communist rule produced the “velvet revolutions” of 1989. Moreover, as Godfrey Hodgson recently noted in his sympathetic but clear-eyed book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, the spread of liberal ideals is a global phenomenon with roots in the Enlightenment, and European philosophers and political leaders did much to advance the democratic ideal. Similarly, the abolition of slavery and the long effort to improve the status of women owe more to Britain and other democracies than to the United States, where progress in both areas trailed many other countries. Nor can the United States claim a global leadership role today on gay rights, criminal justice, or economic equality—Europe’s got those areas covered. Finally, any honest accounting of the past half-century must acknowledge the downside of American primacy. The United States has been the major producer of greenhouse gases for most of the last hundred years and thus a principal cause of the adverse changes that are altering the global environment. The United States stood on the wrong side of the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa and backed plenty of unsavory dictatorships—including Saddam Hussein’s—when short-term strategic interests dictated. Americans may be justly proud of their role in creating and defending Israel and in combating global anti-Semitism, but its one-sided policies have also prolonged Palestinian statelessness and sustained Israel’s brutal occupation. Bottom line: Americans take too much credit for global progress and accept too little blame for areas where U.S. policy has in fact been counterproductive. Americans are blind to their weak spots, and in ways that have real-world consequences. Remember when Pentagon planners thought U.S. troops would be greeted in Baghdad with flowers and parades? They mostly got rpgs and ieds instead.

J.D. Pooley/Getty ImaGes

Myth 5 God Is on Our Side. A crucial component of American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States has a divinely ordained mission to lead the rest of the world. Ronald Reagan told audiences that there was “some divine plan” that had placed America here, and once quoted Pope Pius xii saying, “Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.” Bush offered a similar view in 2004, saying, “We have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.” The same idea was expressed, albeit less nobly, in Otto von Bismarck’s alleged quip that “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States.”

Confidence is a valuable commodity for any country. But when a nation starts to think it enjoys the mandate of heaven and becomes convinced that it cannot fail or be led astray by scoundrels or incompetents, then reality is likely to deliver a swift rebuke. Ancient Athens, Napoleonic France, imperial Japan, and countless other countries have succumbed to this sort of hubris, and nearly always with catastrophic results. Despite America’s many successes, the country is hardly immune from setbacks, follies, and boneheaded blunders. If you have any doubts about that, just reflect on how a decade of ill-advised tax cuts, two costly and unsuccessful wars, and a financial meltdown driven mostly by greed and corruption have managed to squander the privileged position the United States enjoyed at the end of the 20th century. Instead of assuming that God is on their side, perhaps Americans should heed Abraham Lincoln’s admonition that our greatest concern should be “whether we are on God’s side.”

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iven the many challenges Americans now face, from persistent unemployment to the burden of winding down two deadly wars, it’s unsurprising that they find the idea of their own exceptionalism comforting—and that their aspiring political leaders have been proclaiming it with increasing fervor. Such patriotism has its benefits, but not when it leads to a basic misunderstanding of America’s role in the world. This is exactly how bad decisions get made. America has its own special qualities, as all countries do, but it is still a state embedded in a competitive global system. It is far stronger and richer than most, and its geopolitical position is remarkably favorable. These advantages give the United States a wider range of choice in its conduct of foreign affairs, but they don’t ensure that its choices will be good ones. Far from being a unique state whose behavior is radically different from that of other great powers, the United States has behaved like all the rest, pursuing its own self-interest first and foremost, seeking to improve its relative position over time, and devoting relatively little blood or treasure to purely idealistic pursuits. Yet, just like past great powers, it has convinced itself that it is different, and better, than everyone else. International politics is a contact sport, and even powerful states must compromise their political principles for the sake of security and prosperity. Nationalism is also a powerful force, and it inevitably highlights the country’s virtues and sugarcoats its less savory aspects. But if Americans want to be truly exceptional, they might start by viewing the whole idea of “American exceptionalism” with a much more skeptical eye. Stephen M. Walt, an fp contributing editor, is Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He blogs at walt. foreignpolicy.com.

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THE AMERICA ISSUE

AMERICA REALLY WAS THAT GREAT (BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN WE ARE NOW)

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s America still exceptional? The question has become a contentious issue in American politics over the last few years. But the answer has implications that go well beyond the political fortunes of Republicans and Democrats in the United States. It affects the stability and prosperity of the entire world. President Barack Obama’s Republican critics now routinely accuse him of denying America’s history as an “exceptional” country because, when asked about the concept in 2009, he replied, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” (He then went on to list some of the features that, in his view, make America exceptional.) But the idea of American exceptionalism does have real intellectual grounding. As used by scholars, it refers to the

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ways the United States has differed historically from the older countries of Europe: the fact that it was founded on a set of ideas; that it lacked a hierarchical social order with a hereditary aristocracy at the top; that the Europeans who settled North America did so in a huge, sparsely populated territory; and that it attracted immigrants from all over the world. In American politics, the term has come to have a celebratory as well as an analytical meaning. It refers to what makes America special: its wealth, its power, the economic opportunity it has provided for its citizens, and the expansive role it has played in the world, including the example of liberty and prosperity that it has set. The fuss over exceptionalism represents, in one sense, politics as usual in the United States, with one side accusing the other of being out of touch with the country’s deepest values. It also, however, taps into the national current of un-

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BY THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN AND MICHAEL MANDELBAUM

Detail from “Liberty Brings to the Earth Justice and Peace” c. 1863-64

ease about the country and its future, an unease that is, alas, all too justified. No American politician will publicly question his or her country’s exceptional status, but it is worth asking whether America really is still exceptional, especially because so many Americans are beginning to worry privately —and some publicly—that it is not. The question reminds us of a story attributed to Abraham Lincoln. He asked, “If you call a horse’s tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have?” He then responded, “The answer is four, because calling a horse’s tail a leg doesn’t make it one.” Similarly, declaring that America is exceptional—that is, exceptionally wealthy, powerful, and dynamic—doesn’t make it so. Exceptionalism is not a distinction that is bestowed and then lasts forever, like an honorary degree from a university; nor is it an entitlement like Social Security or Medicare—something all Americans automatically get to

enjoy at a certain age. It has to be earned continually, like a baseball player’s batting average. And today, as so many Americans fear, it is not being earned. America’s exceptionalism is now in play. To remain exceptional, America must respond effectively to its four great 21st-century challenges: the ones posed by globalization, the revolution in information technology, the country’s huge and growing deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption. America does not now have in place the policies needed to master them. The United States has not adapted its educational system to prepare Americans for well-paying jobs in a world economy shaped by globalization and the revolution in information technology. It has not mustered the political will to bring the deficits of its federal government and many of its state and local governments under control. It has not taken effective steps to jump-start the long transition away from heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Underlying these specific failures is a national failure even to pose the questions that must be answered as the starting point for all public policies: What world are we living in, and what do we need to do to thrive in it? The stakes are exceptionally high. For Americans, whether the United States is able to answer these questions successfully will determine the country’s future rate of economic growth, and that growth rate will in turn determine how much Americans will be able to maintain the best features of their society: opportunity, mobility, and social harmony. For the rest of the world, the stakes are perhaps even higher. Since 1945, and especially since the end of the Cold War, the United States has provided to the world many of the services that governments generally furnish to the societies they govern. While maintaining the world’s major currency, the dollar, it has served as a market for the exports that have fueled remarkable economic growth in Asia and elsewhere. America’s Navy safeguards the sea lanes along which much of the world’s trade passes, and its military deployments in Europe and East Asia underwrite security in those regions. The U.S. military also guarantees the world’s access to the oil of the Persian Gulf, and American intelligence assets, diplomatic muscle, and occasionally military force resist the most dangerous trend in contemporary international politics: the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The global governance the United States has provided, from which the rest of the world has derived enormous benefit, has rested on a vibrant economy and the national unity and confidence that have arisen from it. In 2011, a robust American global role continues to be vital. With the Arab world in upheaval; with Europe’s common currency, the euro, in crisis and the future of the European Union itself in doubt; and with China, the world’s fastest-growing economy and fastest-rising power, having

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the america issue all but exhausted the possibilities of its model for economic growth based on an undervalued currency and ever-rising exports, a dynamic American economy and a stabilizing, reassuring American global presence are as important now as they have ever been, if not more so. Sustaining them, though, depends on America’s rising to meet its major challenges, and doing so immediately. Somehow it has fallen slightly out of fashion to talk about “American power.” Those on the left often do not fully understand its constructive uses, concentrating instead on the occasional abuses that always attend the exercise of power. Those on the right often do not fully understand its sources—that American power is not simply a matter of will but of means, and those means need to be constantly renewed and refreshed. In the second decade of the 21st century, that depends on successfully meeting the country’s four major domestic challenges. Can America respond to them in appropriate fashion? We are optimistic that it can. While the country is paralyzed at the top—the political system is stuck and is not generating the necessary public policies—it remains extraordinarily vibrant at the grassroots. If one were to design a country ideally suited to flourish in the 21st century, it would look more like the United States than any other. In a world in which individual creativity is becoming ever more important, America supports individual achievement and celebrates the quirky. In a world in which technological change takes place at warp speed, requiring maximal economic flexibility, the American economy is as flexible as any on the planet. In a world in which transparent, reliable institutions, and especially the rule of law, are more important than ever for risk-taking and innovation, the United States has an outstanding legal environment. In a world in which even the cleverest inventors and entrepreneurs have to try and fail before succeeding, American business culture understands that failure is often the necessary condition for success. None of these traits has gone away during the current crisis. Over the course of its history, the United States has rarely failed to meet its major challenges. It is in fact the current failure to do so that is unusual—one might even say “exceptional.” When tested, from the days of the revolution in the 18th century to the drawn-out Cold War struggle in the 20th, America and Americans have found ways to excel. To continue to do so, the country would do well to learn from the experience of one of its iconic companies, ibm, which is celebrating its centennial this year. ibm essentially invented the personal computer, but didn’t fully understand the implications of its own creation. The company, like too many Americans, came to think of its exceptional status as self-perpetuating and permanent. This led to complacency and strategic mistakes that almost proved fatal. How did ibm lose sight of the world it invented? Listen care-

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fully to the answer of Samuel Palmisano, ibm’s current chairman and ceo, when we asked him that question: “You spend more time arguing amongst yourselves over a shrinking pie than looking to the future,” he said, and so “you miss the big turn” that you have entered, even a turn that your own company invented. When you mistakenly start thinking of other departments and colleagues in your own company as the opposition—rather than the other companies against which you must compete—you have lost touch with the world in which you are operating. This can be as lethal for countries as it is for companies. America’s political parties today have strayed off course, Palmisano told us, “because they have focused on themselves” more than on the priorities of the country as a whole. ibm got back on track, under new leadership, by focusing on and coming to understand the new environment in which it was operating and then mobilizing and inspiring the whole company to master the next big change in technology, networked computing. America needs to do something similar. It is obvious what its core competency is in the 21st century. The United States has greater potential than any other country to thrive in the future by becoming the world’s most attractive launching pad— the place where everyone wants to come to work, invent, collaborate, or start something up to get the most out of our new hyperconnected world. And they will want to come to America because it has the best infrastructure, the most dynamic schools, the most open economy, the most inviting immigration policies, the most efficient and stable markets, the most governmentfunded research, and the best rules to promote risk-taking and prevent recklessness. That is how America remains as “exceptional” in this century as it was in the last two—not by launching another moon shot but by becoming the world’s favorite launching pad for millions of moon shots. American power and prosperity, and global stability and prosperity, are all riding on the country’s success in meeting its challenges. A world influenced by a United States powerful enough to provide political, economic, and moral leadership will not be a perfect world, but it will be a better world than any alternative we can envision. That means that the status of American exceptionalism is more than an academic controversy or a partisan political squabble in the United States. Everyone, everywhere, has an interest in America taking the steps necessary to remain an exceptional country. Thomas L. Friedman is foreign-affairs columnist for the New York Times. Michael Mandelbaum is Christian A. Herter professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. This essay is adapted from their book, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.

THE ELEPHANTS

IN THE ROOM BARACK OBAMA’S REPUBLICAN CHALLENGERS ARE TRYING HARD NOT TO TALK ABOUT THE REST OF THE WORLD. IT SHOWS. BY JAMES TRAUB

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n June, Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty delivered a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. Speaking before the council or writing an essay in its house organ, Foreign Affairs, had for decades offered candidates a means of proving their foreignpolicy gravitas. And the former Minnesota governor was running his campaign by a traditional script. But in a gop field where contempt for the foreign-policy establishment has become the norm, Pawlenty’s aspiration for its imprimatur seemed almost touching. Pawlenty presented himself as a champion of the Arab Spring and a voice for “moral clarity.” “What is wrong,” he bluntly warned, “is for the Republican Party to shrink from the challenges of American leadership in the world.” Pawlenty quickly became the darling of conservative foreign-policy experts. And then his candidacy sank like a stone. By August, after a dismal showing in the Ames straw poll in Iowa, he withdrew. “He probably spent too much time on foreign policy,” one rueful conservative activist told me. The world beyond America’s borders just doesn’t figure in the 2012 campaign. In the 2008 Republican debates, candidates regularly crossed swords on the war in Iraq, the nuclear showdown with Iran, and the proper conduct of the war on terror. At this year’s first real debate, held in Manchester, New Hampshire, the rest of the world wasn’t even mentioned until more than 90 minutes into the two-hour event. “Given the focus on economic issues, it’s difficult to get the candidates interested in foreign policy,” laments Jamie Fly, head of the Foreign Policy Initiative, which acts as a transmission belt between conservative intellectuals and politicians. Audiences seem similarly apathetic. The heartiest applause often goes to libertarian Rep. Ron Paul when he calls for as little foreign policy as possible, as he did recently in Iowa during a discussion of the Middle East. His prescription: “Stay out of their internal business. Don’t get involved in these wars. And just bring our troops home.” This is precisely the disengagement of which Pawlenty was warning. Sometimes, of course, foreign policy really is politically salient. Strange though it sounds today, for much of the 2008 campaign Barack Obama thought that his worldview would be the campaign’s defining issue. He was the candidate who would eliminate nuclear weapons, stop browbeating America’s allies, bring the troops back from Iraq, and end the “color-coded politics of fear.” In the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton attacked him for his lack of foreignpolicy experience (remember the 3 a.m. phone call ad?), and the two had a genuinely telling difference of opinion about whether a policy of “engagement” should extend to talking with tyrants without preconditions. Then the economic crisis hit. Although Obama and Republican nominee John McCain dueled over Iraq, foreign

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policy quickly receded from center stage. As president, Obama has disappointed many of his liberal supporters, but also blunted Republican lines of attack on his foreign policy by pursuing the war on terror much as George W. Bush did and adding 30,000-plus troops to Afghanistan; by killing Osama bin Laden, he has strengthened his hand with voters across the political spectrum. But Obama is also terribly exposed on jobs and the faltering economy, issues on which the gop candidates have good reason to believe that they can ride national dissatisfaction to the White House. So it’s no surprise that foreign affairs has gotten so little attention. Even in less navel-gazing moments, foreign policy is a marginal topic for most presidential contenders. We talk about their “views,” but many barely have views. Few candidates, and especially the former governors who have occupied the White House for 28 of the past 50 years, have had to think in very specific terms about America’s place in the world. So candidates ask themselves, in effect, “What kind of foreign policy would a person like me have?” This is not necessarily a useful guide to their later behavior. Bill Clinton thought he was a human rights-driven idealist until he found out how hard it is to do the right thing; Bush thought he was a hardheaded realist until the 9/11 attacks turned him into a true-believing democracy promoter. Who they are probably matters more than what they think, or what they think they think. As Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative ex-aide to Bush and Ronald Reagan, says, “What really matters in the end is character.” Some of the 2012 candidates mimic McCain’s muscular idealism, but their hearts don’t seem to be in it. Pawlenty was a McCain acolyte who traveled abroad with him and absorbed much of his worldview; he warned the Council on Foreign Relations about the “isolationist sentiments” newly ascendant in the gop. But the rise of the Tea Party in recent years has reshaped Republican politics entirely, not only on domestic policy but also on foreign policy. The Tea Party is the faction of Less— less spending, less government, and, generally, less engagement abroad. And all the Republicans aspiring to win the 2012 nomination have responded to this powerful new voice in one way or another. None of the candidates save Paul can genuinely be called isolationist—and perhaps not even he. But Rep. Michele Bachmann shares the Tea Party’s suspicion of foreign interventions and foreign countries more generally; former Utah governor Jon Huntsman has called for “nation-building at home” rather than “nation-building in Afghanistan” or elsewhere; and Texas Gov. Rick Perry has warned vaguely of “military adventurism.” Rick Santorum, a fringe candidate like Paul, anchors the opposite end of the foreign-policy spectrum, the pole of bristling aggression and furious denunciation (both of Obama and of Paul). And Mitt Romney falls somewhere in the middle, which seems to be where he falls whenever he is dropped.

previous page: illustration by matt dorfman for fp

the america issue

JON HUNTSMAN “The time has come for us to get out of Afghanistan. We don’t need 100,000 troops in Afghanistan nation-building at a time when this nation needs to be built.”

MITT ROMNEY “It’s time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can, consistent with the word that comes from our generals.”

RICK PERRY MICHELE BACHMANN “As happened in Iran in 1979, as these [Arab] tyrannies are toppled, the populist forces most prevalent today harbor radical, illiberal values and interests that are antithetical to America’s values and interests.”

WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

O

n foreign affairs, as on domestic policy, Romney serves as a faithful gauge of party orthodoxy, as well as of shifts in that orthodoxy. In 2008, the former Massachusetts governor sought to distinguish himself from the other Bush epigones by proposing the use of soft power as well as hard power in the Middle East by the United States and its allies: “We as great nations,” he said in a debate in January 2008, “need to help them have the rule of law, have good schools that are not Wahhabi schools, strengthen their economies.” Four years later, Romney no longer talks about reforming madrassas. He has made modest adjustments in his views to conform to the Republican Party’s current ideological line, which one former official in the Bush White House described to me as “free trade, strong defense, skepticism about China, a robust view of the war on terror.” Romney has relatively little to say about Iraq or Afghanistan and does not share Pawlenty’s enthusiasm for spreading America’s values abroad. The core of his foreign-policy message is that America is threatened in ways that Obama cannot or will not recognize. His latest book, last year’s No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, sets forth a formulation of these threats that, one conservative policy figure told me, Romney developed on his own and of which he is quite proud. In the book and his speeches, Romney argues, “There are four competing nations or groups of nations … that are vying to lead the world before the end of this century”: China, Russia, jihadists, and, of course, us, the democracies. Only if

“We cannot concede the moral authority of our nation to multilateral debating societies.”

America wins this existential battle, Romney warns, “will freedom endure.” Never mind that “jihadism” is not a geographical or even organizational entity, and that Russia is not a potential threat to U.S. security on a par with China; these are not the kinds of distinctions that make their way into presidential debate. America, in short, faces the same threat it has faced since 9/11, and several new ones too. The country thus must rearm itself, even though the historic increases in defense spending during the Bush years mean that the Pentagon’s budget is now greater, in real terms, than at any time since World War ii. Here Romney, to his credit, has been specific: Pentagon spending, excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, must be “at least 4 percent of gdp.” This would increase annual defense spending to $600 billion or more, and overall military spending to about $720 billion—though how he would do this while balancing the budget is anyone’s guess. But it’s not always clear quite how ardently Romney himself embraces the party’s orthodoxy. He has, to put it gently, an acute sense of what the market will bear, which makes him almost as useful a barometer of the misgivings of gop primary voters as he is of elite opinion. Asked about Afghanistan during the Manchester debate, he said, “It’s time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can”—the standard critique of Obama policy from the left— “consistent with the word that comes from our generals,” an allusion to the critique from the right that Obama adopted a schedule of withdrawal quicker than the one proposed by

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the america issue David Petraeus, then his commanding general. It is hard to recognize the spirit of Reagan, or McCain for that matter, in this artful waffle; Danielle Pletka of the conservative American Enterprise Institute called him “a little bit of a weather vane.” Romney used the next debate to clarify his views— i.e., rectify his mistake—by repeating the second half of the formulation without the first. But Romney’s sense of the weather may be quite accurate—and his ambivalent answer may well reflect his ambivalent party. One of the underlying realities of 2011 is that the gop rank and file has less taste for gung-ho internationalism than party elites do. A January poll of self-described conservatives, for example, found that two-thirds thought that the United States should either reduce troop levels in Afghanistan or leave right away—presumably no matter what the generals say. Even Romney’s pet cause of defense spending, a classic Republican litmus-test issue, has become an embattled subject. Many small-government conservatives, like anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, have accepted the logic of defense cuts as part of an overall reduction in the size of the state. Others, like Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, a strong Tea Party advocate, have joined liberal Democrats in calling for a rapid drawdown of troops from Afghanistan—the sentiment to which Romney briefly catered before thinking better of it. Fly, of the Foreign Policy Initiative, says that he worries about the potency of the argument that “our real problems are at home, not abroad.”

T

his raises the intriguing question of whether it is possible to hang onto one’s claims of presidential mettle while catering to the do-less-abroad wing of the Republican Party. Not long ago, this territory belonged exclusively to Paul, who in 2007 was a lonely voice on the Republican stage when he had the temerity to argue that the United States should withdraw from Iraq. Now Paul has company in the form, remarkably, of Huntsman, the only representative in the race of oldfashioned moderate Republicanism—a vestige, it would seem, of a vanished view. Huntsman has called for reducing America’s troop strength in Europe and Asia and for pulling all but 15,000 soldiers out of Afghanistan. C. Boyden Gray, one of Huntsman’s foreign-policy advisors, says that the former ambassador to China thinks that defense spending should “not be off-limits” in budget talks. Daniel Senor, a former Bush official who advises Romney, retorts that Huntsman is simply beyond the pale: “He would take the country and the party in a really bad direction.” The dispute speaks to a striking realignment within the Republican Party’s ranks. The Republican establishment has long been defined by non-ideological moderates and “realists” like Brent Scowcroft, Richard Armitage, and Richard Haass.

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These are the figures, associated more with the first than the second President Bush, whom Huntsman has been consulting and whose views he largely represents. And yet he, and they, are now considered beyond the pale. A new conservative elite has by now almost wholly supplanted the graybeards within the gop’s ranks, and has gravitated to Romney and Perry. The graybeards support the New start nuclear arms deal with Russia negotiated by Obama and ratified this year; the gop candidates and most of their advisors do not. The old elite supports engagement with China; the new ones regard China as a military threat. In short, today’s conservatives see the world as fundamentally more threatening than do the old-school pragmatists. The split is hardly new, but it has become much more pronounced in the last few years. And this is in part because the realists themselves have moved. No less a pillar of the old establishment than Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote a piece in Time titled “Bringing Our Foreign Policy Home” in which he argues that at this moment of economic desperation, the United States needs to adopt a policy he somewhat euphemistically calls “restoration,” whose goal would be to “rebalance the resources devoted to domestic challenges, as opposed to international ones, in favor of the former.” This means fewer “wars of choice,” like Libya, and a swift withdrawal from Afghanistan. Haass’s predecessor at the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, has long made this argument; Huntsman has adopted it as his platform. In effect, then, the old center of the gop has joined with the new radicals of the Tea Party in advocating a policy of Less. Perhaps, then, Huntsman is not so misguided for fishing in some of the same waters that Paul does. Realists like Huntsman aren’t isolationists, but the rank and file may be. This is a matter of serious dispute. Robert Kagan, the neoconservative columnist and historian, argues that “all parties in opposition tend to be isolationist” and says that the Republican Party’s alleged “intervention fatigue” has more to do with opposition to Obama than with intervention itself. Kagan is surely right that a candidate can hardly be expected to champion intervention at a time when it’s the other party doing the intervening. But the tendency in today’s debates to reduce interventions to “military adventurism” is not solely a matter of politics. Years of slaughter in Iraq and the demoralizing stalemate in Afghanistan have increasingly convinced Americans of both parties that there is little good the United States can do in the world. Democracy promotion, the keystone in the arch of Bush-era foreign policy, has come to be seen as folly, nation-building as hubris, and intervention as an invitation to disaster. This loss of faith has thickened the ranks of the party of Less. You can see this, above all, in the very tepid reception

Libya

In the five Republican primary debates between June 13 and Sept. 12, 2011, which countries and regions were mentioned the most? Middle East

Iran Iraq THE WORLD ACCORDING TO THE GOP Afghanistan China Japan

India

Pakistan

Mexico

Israel

What do the 2012 Republican candidates have to say about foreign policy?

On Afghanistan STAY THE COURSE “I firmly believe that we are at a point where we’ve got to stay the course, and we’ve got to finish the job.”

On Libya

Perry

—Michele Bachmann GET OUT LATER “I think the best way for us to be able to impact that country is to make a transition to where that country’s military is going to be taking care of their people, bring our young men and women home, and continue to help them build the infrastructure that we need.”

On China

A TRIUMPH “The crumbling of Muammar Qaddafi’s reign—a violent, repressive dictatorship with a history of terrorism—is cause for cautious celebration.”

Paul

HUG THE PANDA “I do not believe it is our place, as members of the U.S. Congress, to dictate internal policy to the Chinese government.” —Ron Paul

—Rick Perry

Romney

Huntsman

(speech opposing bill to honor imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo)

A BLUNDER “The current situation in Libya may be a short-term victory for empire, but it is a Paul loss for our American republic. And, I fear, it may be devastating to the Libyan people.” —Ron Paul Huntsman

FEAR THE DRAGON “With all the money that we owe China, I think you Bachmann might correctly say, Hu’s your daddy.”

“The time has come for us to get out of Afghanistan. We Huntsman don’t need 100,000 troops in Afghanistan nation-building at a time when this nation needs to be built.”

CALIPHATE! The only reports that we have say that there are elements of al Qaeda in North Africa and Hezbollah in the opposition forces. Let me ask you this: What possible benefit is there to the United States by lifting up and creating a toehold for al Qaeda in North Africa to take over Libya?”

STOP STEALING OUR JOBS “I will not stand by while China pursues an economic development policy that relies on the unfair treatment of U.S. companies and the theft of their intellectual property. I have no interest in starting a trade war with China, but I cannot accept our current trade surrender.”

—Jon Huntsman

—Michele Bachmann

—Mitt Romney

Perry

Romney

—Rick Perry Gingrich BRING THE KNIFE

Paul

Worst Slip of the Tongue “Maybe that was an attempt to attract the illegal vote—I mean, the Latino voters.”

Santorum

Flip-Flop “[I would] exercise a no-fly zone this evening.” —March 7

— Michele Bachmann Perry

Retro-Redbaiting “I would not have intervened.”

Newt Gingrich on Libya

—March 23

Bachmann

“If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final leap to socialism.”

COMPILED BY JOSHUA E. KEATING • INFORMATION DESIGN BY LAURA STANTON November 2011

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the america issue within the gop to the nato-assisted war in Libya. Bachmann, Huntsman, Paul, Santorum, Herman Cain, apparently Newt Gingrich, and Romney—sometimes—opposed Obama’s decision to join the bombing campaign there. Perry’s views are unclear, though he did say in a recent speech, “We should only risk shedding American blood and spending American treasure when our vital interests are threatened”—much the same language the others used to oppose the effort. It may be said of all of them that though they share the belief that America is under siege from hostile states and nonstate actors—unlike those who argue that America is more secure today than during the Cold War or right after 9/11—they are much more skeptical than the neocons are of America’s ability to shape good outcomes abroad. Or maybe they just don’t care as much. Beyond Libya, the Arab Spring has posed a vexing problem for many of the Republican candidates, exposing the tension inside the party’s core ideology between its idealistic vision of democracy promotion and dark fears of crusading Islam. Pawlenty endeared himself to Kagan and others of his ilk by wholeheartedly championing all the freedom movements in the Arab world. Of the others, only Bachmann has been equally categorical, though on the other side of the question. Bachmann views the Arab Spring as an outright threat to U.S. national security. “As happened in Iran in 1979,” she has said, “as these tyrannies are toppled, the populist forces most prevalent today harbor radical, illiberal values and interests that are antithetical to America’s values and interests.” Bachmann, who appears to have access to her very own set of facts, warned about giving “al Qaeda in North Africa”—presumably a reference to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—a chance to “take over Libya” and cited a “report out of Libya” that as many as 30,000 civilians had been killed by nato bombing. And for all his bellicosity, Santorum opposed not only the American role in the bombing of Libya, but Obama’s ultimate repudiation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, viewing him as a steady if autocratic ally.

A

s for the current leader in the polls, it has become increasingly difficult to say where Perry locates himself on the Pawlenty-Bachmann spectrum. The Texas governor is widely described as a “hawk internationalist,” a term that foreign-policy conservatives use to connote righteous thinking. Several told me that Perry shares Romney’s views— but really means them. The evidence for this, however, is flimsy. As he was preparing to run, Perry invited a circle of foreign-policy figures, many of them former aides to Bushera Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to come to Texas to brief him on national security issues. I spoke to several peo-

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ple who attended that meeting, at which Perry was largely asking questions rather than making assertions. One made a point of saying that Perry’s own views were well within the gop mainstream and reminded me that in 2008 Perry had supported Rudolph Giuliani, a tough-minded but also secular-minded figure. Perry is a passionate advocate for Israel—you can’t be too pro-Israel in these circles—but unlike Bachmann does not cite his Christian faith as the source of his views. Instead, Perry talks about his experience serving in the U.S. Air Force in the early 1970s, when he got to know Israeli military officials, visited Israel, and came to admire its pioneering spirit. On Afghanistan, I was told, he “doesn’t understand the whole timetable thing”—that is, he believes that if the stakes are high, the United States should stay until it succeeds. But is that so? Perry recently gave a baffling speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in his own backyard of San Antonio in which he vowed never to let America “fall subject to a foreign policy of military adventurism,” a phrase that sounded like it could have been a Democratic critique of Bush. A spokesman further muddied the waters by explaining that Perry had not been making “a specific reference to previous or ongoing military operations.” Presumably Perry was signaling distaste for adventurism of the Democratic variety, especially because he added, “We cannot concede the moral authority of our nation to multilateral debating societies.” Or perhaps Perry has not yet put his foreign-policy clichés in order. Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin commented that Perry’s string of conflicting banalities “suggests a ‘whatever’ attitude toward serious policy issues.” Or perhaps it’s more like “whatever works.” At a September debate, Perry finally came out of the closet on Afghanistan, and not as a hawk internationalist. “I agree with Governor Huntsman,” he said, “when we talk about it’s time to bring our young men and women home and as soon and obviously as safely as we can.… And I think the entire conversation about how do we deliver our aid to those countries, and is it best spent with 100,000 military who have the target on their back in Afghanistan—I don’t think so at this particular point in time.” Perry may have spurs that go jingle, jangle, jingle, but for now his six-guns are staying in their holsters. Maybe we should feel relieved that Perry, who considers Social Security a monstrous hoax and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke a traitor, holds such restrained views of the larger world. Or maybe he hasn’t yet started to pay attention. Heaven protect us if he does. James Traub, a weekly columnist on ForeignPolicy. com, is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a fellow of the Center on International Cooperation.

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IN OTHER

WORDS

W

hen we looked for the words that mattered the most this year, the ones that kept popping up were written on walls: from Syria, where protests erupted after a group of teenagers were jailed for tagging a wall with “The People Want the Regime to End,” to Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, where caustic portraits of tumbling dictators tracked their fall from power. For this In Other Words special graffiti edition, we turned to a prominent expert on the

art on its home turf: Roger Gastman, co-author of The History of American Graffiti and co-curator of the recent Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit, “Art in the Streets.” Over the next pages, he walks us through some of 2011’s most explosive expressions, seen on walls from Tripoli to Cairo to Kabul and beyond.

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PATRICK BAZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

GRAFFITI EDITION

Page 92

Page 94

“It is as though Coca-Cola turned out to be a great nutritional drink.” —Blake Gopnik on America’s most potent visual export

“Behave or We Will Send in the Waiters” —Paul Salopek on the mysteries of graffiti in war zones

Tripoli, Libya, Sept. 1

For me, how I define graffiti is writing your name over and over again for the sake of fame, which started in Philadelphia in the mid-to-late 1960s and in New York City and has continued and spread. When I see those political messages, I call them ‘pedestrian’ graffiti— as in, I want to go write on this wall and put a message there, or I am really pissed off about these taxes or this leader doing x, y, and z or not doing x, y, and z. A lot of times these people might be artists, but they are not necessarily graffiti artists. They just see spray paint or smearing oil on a wall or whatever it is as a medium to get their message across. Often, of course, these messages have a much deeper meaning than just someone’s name. –Roger Gastman

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in other words

roger gastman’s take

▲ “Racism—like this anti-Semitic Qaddafi as moneybags—is not really prevalent in traditional American graffiti. But if everyone’s making jokes about Qaddafi and money, that’s how the artist is going to paint him, because it’ll get a rise out of people. Still, this is beautifully rendered by an artist. To me, this is one of the more traditional graffiti walls that you would see in any city from Paris to London to New York— except it’s in a much crazier, crazier place.” Benghazi, Libya, March 14

▲

“Despite the swastika, I’m guessing this is meant to be humorous. When I say pedestrian graffiti, this is what I’m talking about. It is crude. At the same time, you can tell this person has done graffiti before just by the handwriting.” Benghazi, April 30

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Benjamin Lowy/edit By Getty imaGes; saeed KHan/aFP/Getty imaGes

▲

“This is real graffiti done by someone who knows what they are doing. It’s just put together well. The letters have distinct styles to them, and even the handwriting at the bottom is done in a very good clear graffiti hand style.” House of Imed Trabelsi, nephew of ousted Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali; La Marsa, Tunisia, May 2

These graffiti in Kabul definitely look like they’re done by a traditional graffiti writer. This to me looks like someone who knows what is up with a can of paint. Kabul, March 28

FETHI BELAID/AFP/GETTy ImAGEs; mAssOUD HOssAINI/AFP/GETTy ImAGEs

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in other words

roger gastman’s take ▲ “This is definitely done by kids who are into graffiti. You can tell by the lettering in the name ‘Vince Seven’ on the left side. It looks like three different people painted it. The one on the left is the best one, the most experienced.” Jerusalem, May 15

▲ “This is probably just done with a brush. The lines don’t really look like spray paint. It fits the environment. It is quiet. It’s to the point. You understand what is going on. And it’s probably less likely to get cleaned. The more something blends in with the environment and doesn’t make a stink, the more likely it’s going to stay, probably.” Twama, Libya, July 15

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this page by MaRCO LONgaRi/aFp/getty iMages

▲ “This is just three cans of spray paint, a black, a green, and a white. Just one little ghosted character on the wall that shows the desperation of the place. If they would have buffed the wall and painted something big and bold and pretty, it would have livened the place up, but it wouldn’t fit the surroundings.” Site of the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant; Pripyat, Ukraine, April 4

This is freaking hilarious. Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Jan. 25

SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/GEttY ImAGES; UlEt IFANSAStI/GEttY ImAGES

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in other words

Revolution in a can

Graffiti is as American as apple pie, but much easier to export. BY Blake Gopnik

T

he worst moment in the history of graffiti came during what was also its heyday, in the early 1980s in New York. That was when mainstream culture adopted graffiti as something called “art.” A counterculture medium that had, at least for a bare moment, been about communication and empowerment became saddled with the oldest high-culture clichés. Graffiti came to be about “personal style,” “aesthetic innovation,” and “artistic selfexpression”; about looking good and catching the eye; about stylistic influence and the creation of a self-conscious visual tradition. That left it perfectly positioned to be co-opted by consumerist culture. You could say that the grand murals of graffiti art, known to their makers as “pieces”— short for “masterpieces,” another hoary cliché—were a kind of stand-in for missing advertising billboards, made by artists from neighborhoods that had been left out of Calvin Klein’s underwear ad buy. It was only by chance that those murals had no commodity to sell—until they realized they could sell themselves, as that highend good called art. Then, by way of contrast, think about graffiti as it appears to us around the world today, in places where painting on a wall is about speaking truth to power. The Arab Spring was marked by spraypainted taunts to dictators, and Haiti’s chaos led to impassioned scrawls. A crackdown against anti-regime graffiti in the town of Daraa was even the inspiration this year for Syria’s tank-defying protest movement. In many of these cases,

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CloCkwise from top left: tobruk, libya: patriCk baZ/getty images; benghaZi, libya: saeeD khan/getty images; manama, bahrain: Jonathan saruk/getty images; Cairo, egypt: Chris honDros/getty images; port-au-prinCe, haiti: allison shelley/ getty images; guatemala City, guatemala: Johan orDoneZ/afp/getty images

the artfulness of the graffiti takes a distant second place to what someone is actually trying to say. “Free doom—Get out Hamad,” reads one spray-painted text from Bahrain. During the rebellion in Libya, “Freedom=Aljazeera” written on a wall makes the value of a free press perfectly clear; on another wall, the simple tracing of an ak-47 is enough to invoke an entire ethos of rebellion. In Guatemala City, stenciled portraits of the “disappeared” of Guatemala’s long civil war, with the Spanish words for “Where are they?” written below, stand as eloquent witness to one of the country’s most crucial concerns. (The portrait style is loosely derived from the British street artist Banksy.) In all these cases, graffiti is being used as a true means of communication rather than as purely aesthetic exchange. These 21stcentury scrawls leapfrog back to a prehistory of graffiti, when wall writing was mostly about voicing forbidden thoughts in public. And they take us back to the first years of

cades, and yet their point is not to function as art but to work as carriers of content and opinion. In Managua, the swooping letters developed for New York graffiti spell out the initials of the Sandinista party. In the Palestinian West Bank, a big-eyed figure you’d expect to see decorating a wall in Los Angeles wears a keffiyeh and proclaims a longing for a “free Palestine,” as the text beside him says, in English. It’s not clear whether the use of English in so much of this wall-painting represents a desire to speak to Western eyes or whether English has simply become the standard idiom for political protest, even of the local variety. (It could be that the two are almost the same.) But it does seem clear that the stylistic clichés of graffiti in the West—the huge loopy letters, the exaggerated shadows dropped behind a word—have become an international language that can be read almost transparently, for the content those clichés transmit. Look at New York-style graffiti letters spelling “Free Libya” on a

The most elaborate images from Egypt, Libya, and Haiti today look very much like 1980s paint jobs on New York subway cars.

graffiti in New York, when some members of the underclass declared their incontrovertible presence by “tagging” every square inch of the city as they transgressed the normal boundaries set by class and race. As German scholar Diedrich Diederichsen has written, “graffiti was a form of cultural and artistic production that was illegible from the dominant cultural perspective.” When some of those same taggers realized that they could also make “pieces” that would count as something called “art,” they began quickly buying into the values of the mainstream they’d once confronted. By now, grand graffiti gestures are as tired as could be, at least in the context of the Western art world. But across the rest of the planet, the static language of the American “piece” has moved on to a second life as the visual lingua franca of genuine political speech. The most elaborate images from Egypt, Libya, and Haiti today look very much like the 1980s paint jobs on New York subway cars and warehouse fa-

wall in Benghazi or proclaiming “revolution” in Tahrir Square: Rather than aiming at a new aesthetic effect, they take advantage of an old one that’s so well-known it barely registers. That thing called “art” in the West is essentially an insider’s game, thrilling to play but without much purchase on the larger reality outside. We have to look at societies that are truly in crisis to be reminded that images—even images we have sometimes counted as art—can be used for much more than game-playing. In a strange reversal, the closer graffiti comes to being an empty visual commodity in the West, the better it serves the needs of the rest of the world’s peoples, who eagerly adopt it to speak about their most pressing concerns. It is as though Coca-Cola, as it spread across the globe, turned out to be a great nutritional drink. Blake Gopnik writes about art for Newsweek and its website, TheDailyBeast.com.

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The art of war.

B

BY Paul SaloPek

lue, white, and orange stripes began appearing on roadside boulders in South Africa a few years ago: the jarring tricolor of the old apartheid flag. White extremists, mostly disgruntled Afrikaners, were emboldened enough to paint them at night in the remote north of the country. Government road crews toiled furiously to blot them out. But the masking paint never quite matched the color of the rocks. And so the clumsy erasures only served to draw more attention to each new hateful act of vandalism. In this way—through an obscure little graffiti war—the racial neuroses that still plague South Africa were exposed more vividly than in any news article or tv talk show. In the murky convulsions of the world—regime changes, revolutions, wars, uprisings, crackdowns, contested elections—hasty scrawls on public walls seethe with deeper meanings, counternarratives, revelatory lies, ground truths. Sifting such tangled messaging can be surprisingly tough. The key nuances are often obscured: a partly cracked war-

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ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/GEtty IMAGES

ConfliCt graffiti

time code. Expert graffitiologists, also known as foreign correspondents on deadline, must accept that there is both more and less to a sloppy stencil of “el ché” than meets the eye. Like whether it appears in backwater Chiapas or a swish quarter of Beirut. Often, graffiti breaks a big story pithily. A gigantic boot swings down, as if from heaven, to connect with the upturned rump of a dictator cringing over a hoard of cash. The boot is polished in the hues of an insurgent flag. The toe flashes a tiny smile—the sardonic grin of victory. You know right then the tyrant is doomed. That exuberant street cartoon of a toppled Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi aside, however, I suspect the finest political and wartime graffiti, like most humor, isn’t nearly so universal— it’s never the obvious, apprehensible stuff. “nato nato nato,” stamped across liberated Kosovo, seemed a banal plug for a popular detergent brand. But a jaunty message left near the bodies of an entire family incinerated in their house could stop your breathing: “Behave or We Will Send in the Waiters.” Who were the waiters? A Serbian death squad? Kosovar rebels avenging themselves on collaborators? A macabre joke? That single haiku distilled all the darkness of the Balkan wars. Its sinister absurdity, its very inscrutability, made your skin crawl. Similarly, in authoritarian 1970s Mexico, where I grew up, the adobe walls were often splashed with what seemed like the nonsense verses of Edward Lear. One tag, for example, was a serial exclamation: “¡Eche-birria!” It meant nothing. Then it slow-

ly materialized into the surname of a handpicked president of that time, Luis Echeverría. Finally, a sly gibe emerged from within the letters: It translated, literally, as “Vomit [your] goat stew!” Try squeezing that baroque bank shot into a soundbite. Mexico, in fact, has a venerable history of conflict graffiti. Unlike the young Arab Spring demonstrators, who only recently discovered the overlapping pleasures of adolescent and political rebellion, Mexicans draw on a long and rich tradition of visual protest. (Think of José Posada’s famed posters of skeletons dancing through the gore of the 1910 revolution.) Indeed, Mexico’s latest addition to the lexicon of public defacement and defiance is even recyclable: narcomantas, or “narco-banners.” Drug cartels have taken to hanging cotton, plastic, or paper sheets above busy intersections to get their messages across. This creepy innovation may stretch the boundaries of traditional graffiti—the yawp of the scofflaw or the rebel. But it remains, like all genuine graffiti, transgressive. Ruthlessly so. In July, for instance, in Ciudad Juárez, that narcotized Mogadishu on the northern border, two large streamers appeared one morning that threatened any U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spooks operating in the city with death and dismemberment. Police quickly tore the warnings down. Mexico’s narco-banners can be snappy, if a bit retro. Laser-printed, punched with neat wind holes, the fanciest ones look like car dealership advertisements or the sort of signs that civic clubs carry in parades. Here, it isn’t the words that are dadaesque. It’s the format that’s in-joke surreal. The drug lords intentionally mimic the campaign clutter of Mexican political parties. Their tone is weirdly formal. “mister president calderón,” read one of a series of banners fluttering recently above the state of Sinaloa, a cartel stronghold, “do you want

The first book to trace the genesis of modern business in Western antiquity

to finish with the violence? then remove your support from chapo guzmán in sinaloa. that’s the solution.” Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera is Mexico’s most powerful drug kingpin. Apparently, the polite advice emanated from rival mafias. We’ll never know. Narco-banners may now be an inescapable feature of the front lines of the country’s bloody cartel wars (death toll: more than 35,000 and counting since 2006). But like all serious war graffiti, they are anonymous, barring some brazen exceptions. Footage available on YouTube shows a group of sicarios—cartel assassins—coolly filming themselves as they erect a banner in Chihuahua City. It’s a sunny morning. Rush hour. The gunmen, waving ak-47s and wearing balaclavas, direct traffic like jaded policemen. They possibly were policemen. Mexican journalists assigned to the drug war have a tendency to get murdered. So more than other colleagues, they must rely on simply reporting the graffiti. Toting up the proliferation of narco-banners is a metric of cartel control. Which brings up a truism of wartime graffiti: You can generally guess who’s winning not just by the volume of their spray paint, but by the quality of their exhortations. Last year, I drove far into Mexico to say a final goodbye to an old friend. His cancer had metastasized after a family member, a niece who was a schoolteacher, had been kidnapped, raped, and axed to death, seemingly for sport, by a gang of cartel goons. As I negotiated Mexican Army checkpoints and sped south along highways thinned of traffic by the relentless drug violence, I spotted faded government billboards—official graffiti—looming beside the roads. They urged whoever still bothered to read them: “Di no a las Drogas,” or “Just say no to Drugs.” With apologies to Nancy Reagan, who I’m certain meant well: The government was screwed. Paul Salopek, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, is currently at work on The Mule Diaries, a book about wandering. FOREIGN POLICY (ISSN 0015-7228) November 2011, issue number 189. Published 7 times a year in January, March, May, July, September, November, and December by the Slate Group, a division of The Washington Post Company, at 1899 L Street NW, Suite #550, Washington, DC 20036. Subscriptions: U.S., $24.95 per year; Canada, $36.95; other countries, $42.95. Periodicals postage paid in Washington, D.C., and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send U.S. address changes to FOREIGN POLICY, P.O. Box 283, Congers, NY 10920-0283. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: P.O. Box 503, RPO West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6. Printed in the USA.

“A lively story, worth thinking and wondering about. I recommend it warmly.” — William H.McNeill, author of The Rise of the West, recipient of the National Humanities Medal “By placing his story within changing political, social, and cultural settings and by presenting it in a fascinating, well-written way, [Roberts] opens a new field in the discipline of business history.” — Alfred D. Chandler, Harvard Business School, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize

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November 2011

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THE

THE FP SURVEY

AMERICA AT DUSK

FP asked a panel of writers from around the world

to tell us what the United States is doing wrong. We got an earful.

THE UNITED STATES IS … world.

—SADANAND DHUME

peans love to hate.

Not the promised land anymore.

• In decline.

—HELEEN MEES

— LJUBICA GROZDANOVSKA DIMISHKOVSKA

• Lovesick, broke, and driftin’.

—CONOR O’CLERY

• A sick superpower, but still a superpower.

forget it from time to time). hold.

—ALEX MASSIE

—BEPPE SEVERGNINI

—MISHAAL AL GERGAWI

—VACLAV SMIL

ALEX MASSIE

• Not enjoying the (Tea) Party.

—CONOR O’CLERY

• Too rich on rhetoric, very poor on action. by the huge American security apparatus. • Wasting his sublime leadership gifts. U.S. FOREIGN POLICY IS …

the world.

—JOSEF JOFFE

cal it was worse).

—ANDREW MWENDA

—IMTIAZ GUL

—WEN LIAO

—MISHAAL AL GERGAWI

—JOSEF JOFFE

• Still a wonder to be-

• Among the finest American

• Acting as a determined one-term presi-

—GEORGE B.N. AYITTEY

• An amateur.

• Better in theory than in practice.

—SADANAND DHUME

• Not Hillary Clinton.

• Struggling between ideal and reality.

• A refreshing figure in world politics.

• A decent president in indecent times.

—FAN GANG

—

—HELEEN MEES

• Handicapped

—LJUBICA GROZDANOVSKA DIMISHKOVSKA —BEPPE SEVERGNINI

Inept. The bully has turned into a teddy bear, and both have damaged America’s clout in

• Better off without George W. Bush.

—BEPPE SEVERGNINI

to a broken political system. —ANDREW MWENDA

• Not up to the task.

• In danger of heading toward electoral defeat.

—VACLAV SMIL

—MOSHARRAF ZAIDI

BARACK OBAMA IS … The poster boy for “overpromise and underdeliver.”

dent.

• Still a great country (but Americans tend to

• At its best when it lives up to the ideals and principles

of its founders and its Constitution—both for itself and for other countries.”

—MOSHARRAF ZAIDI

• The country Euro-

• Its own worst enemy because it

• Facing a long spell of painful adjustments.

• A great but waning power.

political talents in generations.

—ISSANDR EL AMRANI

—FAN GANG

—WEN LIAO

refuses to recognize its most severe flaws and then address them.

• A force for good in the

• Inconsistent.

—ISSANDR EL AMRANI

—HELEEN MEES

—MISHAAL AL GERGAWI

• Often naive (but when it pretended to be cyni-

• Incoherent and indecisive.

• Hopelessly muddled.

—SADANAND DHUME

• Hamstrung by its own inevitable, necessary contradictions.

—ALEX MASSIE

Confused, vacillatory, and contradictory—especially in Africa and the Middle East.

—VACLAV SMIL

• Hostage

• Too focused on the short term. • Anti-American.

—GEORGE B.N. AYITTEY

—CONOR O’CLERY

•

• As mistake-prone

as any other country’s. But because the U.S. is the most powerful country in the world, the imprints of its mistakes are deeper and longer-lasting.

—MOSHARRAF ZAIDI

THE UNITED STATES IS UNPOPULAR AROUND THE WORLD BECAUSE … Of all that comes with being No.1. SMIL

• Of ignorance or even denial of other people’s circumstances.

ent.

—GADI TAUB

• It wants to lead but never listens.

—FAN GANG

—ISSANDR EL AMRANI

• It fails to see that others may be truly differ-

• It’s morally inconsistent.

Mr. Big, both in terms of raw power (push) and cultural attraction (pull).

—JOSEF JOFFE

press. —SADANAND DHUME • Who says the U.S. is unpopular in the world?

—VACLAV

—MISHAAL AL GERGAWI

• It is

• Too many people read the American

—LJUBICA GROZDANOVSKA DIMISHKOVSKA

THE COMPLETE

WHAT AILS AMERICA PACKAGE • 64

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