After all, the Libyan leader had professed his “love” for the American secretary of state. “I support my darling black African woman,” Colonel Qaddafi told the network Al Jazeera last year. “I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders.”
He continued: “Yes, Leezza, Leezza, Leezza... I love her very much.”
That's kind of creepy. But I think we should replace "Condi" with "Leezza."
My favorite part of the speech was McCain’s take on coping with the global economy. It contained his only concrete proposal (reforming unemployment insurance) while also emphasizing their different takes on the global economy (Obama: protect old industries; McCain: prepare citizens for new industries). If my vote was based only on foreign economic policy, I’d be voting for McCain and it wouldn’t be a close call.A lot of people on the right (like Drezner) seem to think Obama is a protectionist. A lot of people on the left think he's a free-trader. Likely, he's somewhere in between - he will try to "protect old industries," but not through subsidies, but through somewhat slightly stronger labor and environmental protections in free trade agreements. Also, I feel like Obama emphasizes creating new jobs in new industries as much as McCain does.
The agenda is war and the threat of war - including what would be an end to cooperation with Russia on securing loose nuclear materials and sharing terror intelligence, in favor of a new cold war in defense of ... Moldova and Azerbaijan. I'm sure McCain would like to have his Russian cooperation, while demonizing and attacking them on the world stage, but in the actual world, he cannot. Putin and Medvedev are not agreeable figures, and I do not mean in any way to excuse their bullying. But this is global politics, guys, and these are the cold, hard choices facing American policy makers.And in this telling op-ed Lieberman and Graham simply do not even confront them. It's all about a moral posture, with no practical grappling with the consequences. It's the mindset that gave you the Iraq war - but multiplied.
John McCain is making it quite clear what his foreign policy will be like: tilting sharply away from the greater realism of Bush's second term toward the abstract moralism, fear-mongering and aggression of the first. Not just four more years - but four more years like Bush's first term. If the Democrats cannot adequately warn Americans of the dangers of a hotheaded temperament and uber-neo-con mindset in the White House for another four years, they deserve to lose. If Americans decide they want a president who will be more aggressive and less diplomatic than the current one, then they should at least brace for the consequences - for their economy and their security.
What is troubling about Pollack’s view, which is fairly representative of his fellow liberal interventionists, who are likely to be in power soon, is its lack of clarity. Can’t we just admit that American support for Israel is strategically burdensome and is driven by the passion of several domestic constituencies rather than cold cost-benefit geopolitics?Clearly, Max Rodenbeck is an anti-Semitic terrorist appeaser. In all seriousness, can't we admit this? I should add that I think there are additional good reasons to support Israel, namely that "abandoning" them would severly harm American credibility, and that, in general, we should try to protect democracies.
I've noticed this sort of "Democratic Georgia vs Autocratic Russia" formulation occurring with some frequency. To the degree it's meant to actually describe a motivation for the conflict, the democracy/autocracy point is a category error. The Russian invasion of Georgia has absolutely nothing to do with a conflict over methods of political organization. I admit to a rather deep ignorance over Georgia/Russia issues, but the conflict is rather obviously over coincentric spheres of influence -- Georgia claims South Ossetia; Russia claims protectorate status over South Ossetia and, in a nontrivial way, also claims Georgia. These claims have deep historical roots and would hold even if Georgia subscribed to the Juche ideology of North Korea and Russia became an Islamic Emirate. To graft an ideological component to the current conflict is to guarantee misunderstanding it -- or, more cynically, to try to manipulatively rope the U.S. into it.
Pirates are increasingly marauding on the high seas, a Rand report finds, but the dreaded (and terrifying-sounding) “terrorism-piracy nexus” won’t emerge anytime soon. Pirate attacks increased drastically between 2000 and 2006, to an average of more than 350 per year. In part, pirates just have more targets because of the huge boom in global maritime shipments. But they also take advantage of the shipping industry’s growing dependence on a few dangerous “chokepoints” like the Strait of Malacca, as well as widespread government corruption and lax port security. Most conditions advantageous to piracy would seem to benefit terrorists as well, and rumors of extremists hijacking ships to train for a “9/11 at sea” have led to worries that terrorists might start subcontracting their work to buccaneers. But the author argues that such a partnership is highly improbable. For one thing, terrorism in remote stretches of the ocean is unlikely to generate spectacular news footage. And no single attack would be likely to have wide-ranging economic consequences (for all their plundering, pirates cause at most $16 billion in losses a year—in an industry that handled upward of $7 trillion worth of goods in 2005). Perhaps most important, while jihadists would presumably aim for the destruction of the maritime economy, pirates depend on it for their livelihood.
Russia’s combination of resource wealth and nuclear weapons makes it a hard country to push around which, in turn, makes it difficult for anyone to stop Moscow from pushing Georgia around. But on the whole, Russia’s clout is still puny compared to what it was back in the day and demographically it continues to be in decline while a large number of countries once subservient to Moscow are growing more prosperous than ever in the western orbit.It's not like Georgia is that important anyway, says Andrew Sullivan:Long story short, the whole “Russia’s Back!” narrative needs to be kept in perspective. There’s a lot of demand out there for “new cold war” scenarios featuring Russia or China or maybe both, but fundamentally that kind of talk is out of step with reality.
After reading quite a bit on this crisis, I've come to the following conclusions:The US will do nothing but diplomacy because there is no vital interest at stake in Georgia, and because the US military is completely absorbed in two wars that make this Georgia-Russia conflict a tea-party. Russia knows this; the US knows this; the EU knows this; and the Georgian leadership was too cocky to absorb it.
So can we quit the hyper-ventilating, please? This is another indicator of how the world is not uni-polar, and how badly this administration has managed American soft and hard power for the last seven years. A stronger, more belligerent Russia is part of the post-Bush picture. And there's not much anyone can do about it now.
If Kristol really thinks we should go to war with Russia, he’s being crazy and irresponsible. If he doesn’t think that, then he has no business busting out these Munich analogies. Nowhere in his column does he propose a single concrete step with any meaningful chance of altering the situation — it’s all dedicated to mocking doves, but utterly lacking in viable alternatives.I linked to this because I think it gets another problem caused by the War in Iraq. If we had no troops in Iraq, we could have still, in theory, come to the aid of Georgia militarily. Would we have done so? Probably not. But it would have served as a deterrent. Right now, the bad actors of the world - Iran, Russia, whoever - have free reign because they know there is nothing the United States is tied up elsewhere and can't do anything to stop them. So Kristol knows he can't call for war with Russia because we have no troops to fight said war, but still wants to make fun of anyone who would be opposed to a theoretical war.
Putin's aggression against Georgia should not be traced only to its NATO aspirations or his pique at Kosovo's independence. It is primarily a response to the "color revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia in 2003 and 2004, when pro-Western governments replaced pro-Russian ones. What the West celebrated as a flowering of democracy the autocratic Putin saw as geopolitical and ideological encirclement.I think Kagan, both here and in his recent (and very good) TNR essay (I haven't read the book version), places too much emphasis on ideological differences between the United States and Russia/China. I don't think the "ideological encirclement" matters as nearly as much as the geopolitical one. If Georgia was a democracy that hated the United States, I don't think Putin would be invading it. To extent that Georgia's form of government matters, it's only to the United States/NATO, where many would believe we have more of a duty to protect a democracy.
And this is something that the next Secretary of State (who will have Robert Gates' backing, as Kristof points out) should tell every member of congress:In short, the United States is hugely overinvesting in military tools and underinvesting in diplomatic tools. The result is a lopsided foreign policy that antagonizes the rest of the world and is ineffective in tackling many modern problems.
- The United States has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats.
- This year alone, the United States Army will add about 7,000 soldiers to its total; that’s more people than in the entire American Foreign Service.
- More than 1,000 American diplomatic positions are vacant because the Foreign Service is so short-staffed, but a myopic Congress is refusing to finance even modest new hiring. Some 1,100 could be hired for the cost of a single C-17 military cargo plane.
A new study from the RAND Corporation examined how 648 terror groups around the world ended between 1968 and 2006. It found that by far the most common way for them to disappear was to be absorbed by the political process. The second most common way was to be defeated by police work. In contrast, in only 7 percent of cases did military force destroy the terrorist group.
“There is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” the report declares. “Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended.”
More than 6,700 licensed gun dealers have set up shop within a short drive of the 2,000-mile border, from the Gulf Coast of Texas to San Diego -- which amounts to more than three dealers for every mile of border territory. Law enforcement has come to call the region an "iron river of guns...."This GQ piece blames the war on... NAFTA? It actually kind of makes sense:
"Just guarantee me that arms won't enter Mexico," Mexico's public-safety chief, Genaro Garcia Luna, told a radio interviewer recently. Stop the flow of guns from the United States, he said, "and the gasoline for the crimes that we have will run out."
Every day in Juárez, at least 200,000 people get out of bed to pull a shift in the maquiladoras. The exact number varies: Right now roughly 20,000 jobs have vanished as a chill sweeps through world markets; just after the millennium, about 100,000 jobs left the city for mainland China, because as Forbes magazine pointed out, the Mexicans wanted four times the wages of the Chinese. (Those greedy Mexicans were taking home $60, maybe $70 a week in a city where the cost of living is essentially 90 percent that of the United States.) The barrios where these maquiladora workers live are drab, dirty, and largely unvisited by anyone but their inhabitants. Turnover in the grinding maquiladoras runs from 100 to 200 percent a year. The factory managers say this is because of the abundant economic opportunities of the city. And in a sense, they are right: A drug peddler, for example, makes a maquiladora worker’s monthly wage each week. And there’s even more money to be made in other trades: A few years ago, the going rate for professional murders in Juárez was $250 apiece.
But in America, we know nothing of such matters. Officially, Juárez has healthy wages and almost no unemployment. It is a beacon of the global economy that was poised to become a modern city in a Mexico that was to become a modern nation. But when Mexico instead lingered in the shadow of tyranny and poverty, this was ignored by successive American administrations, since a quiet neighbor was and is the best kind of neighbor for a global economic empire. When Mexico persisted in being a trampoline for drugs to bounce from the cocaine belt of South America into the United States, it was the fault of American habit and addiction. Finally, when these habits could not be contained, the North American Free Trade Agreement was ballyhooed as the answer that would bring prosperity and end the violence.
What America got from NAFTA was cheap prices at Wal-Mart, lower wages at home, and an explosion of illegal immigration from the barrios of places like Juárez into the United States. What Juárez got was more drugs and more violence.
The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason poor people in Juárez sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason they go north is to survive.
Remember, both Obama and McCain wanted Georgia to join NATO, and the Bush administration tried to have them admitted at the last meeting in Bucharest. Had it not been for the resistance of several European governments, this small, ugly crisis could have potentially been the trigger for an international disaster that might have dragged in all of Europe and the U.S. I assume that this does not just mean that Georgia won’t be allowed into NATO, but that it also means that eastward NATO expansion in its entirety will halt. Of course, that would make sense. If I know McCain and his obsessive Russophobia, he will take this episode as proof that we must make Georgia a member of NATO and must do it right now.
I don't pretend to know too much about this subject, but Larison's post is the most informative I've read thus far.
The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”Read the whole thing.
[E]xisting agreements stand. This isn’t Smoot-Hawley; it isn’t even the 2002 Bush steel tariff. Life, and trade, will go on.The Economist initially appears to agree:
But no so fast, it continues:You can construct a plausible argument that the collapse of yet another set of talks on the Doha round, which is now coming up to seven years old, is of little importance. While the world’s trade ministers have alternated between talking and not talking to one another about Doha, the world’s businesspeople have carried on regardless: the growth of global commerce has outstripped the hitherto healthy pace of global GDP. Developing countries in particular have continued to open up to imports and foreign investment. You might say that not much was on offer in Geneva anyway: one study put the eventual benefits at maybe $70 billion, a drop in the ocean of the world’s GDP. Global stockmarkets, with so much else on their minds, either didn’t notice or didn’t care. On July 29th, the day the talks broke up, the S&P 500 index rose by 2.3%
The lowish estimates of the economic benefits of the round miss out two things. One is the value of the unpredictable dynamic benefits of more open markets. Access to more customers allows exporters to exploit economies of scale. Competition encourages not only specialisation, the classic result of more open trade, but also increased productivity. The other is what you might call the “option value” of the Doha round. The WTO inhabits a sort of parallel universe in which countries negotiate not on what tariffs and subsidies will actually be, but on maximum (or “bound”) rates and amounts. Although many countries have cut tariffs and farm subsidies—if only, in the latter case, because of rising food prices—too few have turned these cuts into commitments. Tighter binding would cramp their ability to turn back to protection. It would have made up the bulk of a Doha deal.I'm slightly more sympathetic to Krugman's argument - if only because it is based in the short term and is more predictable. However, agricultural subsidies and tariffs do need to be abandoned - the U.S. Farm Bill, for example, was criticized by basically every member of the American public who is not a member of a congress or a farmer. But, despite Obama and Hilary's pandering in the primaries, does anyone really think a new wave of protectionism is going to sweep the globe?
Third, it’s worth noting that both sides of this debate exist within the Democratic Party. The G.O.P. is largely irrelevant. If you look at Barack Obama’s education proposals — especially his emphasis on early childhood — you see that they flow naturally and persuasively from this research. (It probably helps that Obama and Heckman are nearly neighbors in Chicago). McCain’s policies seem largely oblivious to these findings. There’s some vague talk about school choice, but Republicans are inept when talking about human capital policies.Unlike every other blogger on the planet, I have not read Grand New Party (What? I'm a poor college student and books are freaking expensive), but that seems a very GNP-ish argument to me.
[The] new administration, Democratic or Republican, would immediately offer the Europeans the "leadership" and "partnership" they so often say they desire. Between the sinking housing market and the soaring price of food, the high price of fuel and low growth, the new president is going to have so much on his plate that a group of Europeans who appear from across the Atlantic announcing, say, a plan to fix southern Afghanistan would be welcomed with open arms. In fact, I'll wager I could find a dozen future members of either administration who would roll out the red carpet and greet them like envoys of a fellow superpower if the Europeans so desired.Yet at the same time, I'd also wager that I could not find a dozen current members of any European government who have even thought about coming up with any ideas at all. This is the hour of Europe—but do the Europeans even know it?
Judging by the press and the popular reaction to Barack Obama's visit there last week, they don't. Just about every account of the speech noted the dearth of applause for its single line encouraging European participation in world events. "America cannot do this alone. … The Afghan people need our troops and your troops" was not a crowd pleaser. Neither was "We can join in a new and global partnership" to fight terrorism. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, meanwhile, spoke tartly of "the limits" of Germany's contributions to the Afghan cause, making it clear she didn't favor such upbeat talk, while another senior German official worried that his colleagues "will have trouble meeting [Obama's] demand to assume more common responsibility."
And:
And as the election gets closer, the anxiety will grow. In a strange sense, Bush's catastrophic diplomacy was a gift to Europe's politicians. "Bush allowed them to explain away radical Islam as an understandable, even legitimate, response to the hypocrisies and iniquities of American policy," wrote one British columnist this week. Bush also allowed them to blame American "unilateralism" for their own lack of initiative, to use bad American diplomacy as an excuse for doing nothing.
This reminds me of old posts by Megan Mcardle and Matt Yglesias over whether when people say "someone should do something about (Darfur, Burma, etc.)," if that 'someone' inherently has to be the United States.
But I'm not sure if this is right. Megan says that Britain, Australia, and Israel could also single-handedly intervene in a conflict (but Israel, in particular, is loath to do so). That may be true.
But without know much about the respective strengths of various world militaries, would it not be possible for an alliance of say, Spain, Portugal, and Italy to intervene in Darfur? Or for Canada to join hands with Norway to keep the peace in the Congo?
In other words, I think Europe could have a much larger military (and political) role in world affairs, but have gotten so used to American leadership, that they have sort of entered an intellectual malaise. It's almost like they are saying: "We can't intervene in Sudan. That's America's job."
But it shouldn't be. And for all the complaining of American hegemony, I don't see Europe all that eager to work with the United States to solve any problem that requires military force or real confrontation.
But that's the point: McCain would place a higher priority on finding new enemies than on cultivating new friends.The entire thing is very good. Klein does his usual good job of blending policy and politics into a coherent analysis - something a lot of journalists struggle with.
