What's the Matter with Michigan?

December 14, 2012:

It seems that no matter what I do, I can’t beat my colleague here at TAI, Walter Russell Mead, into print on any significant news story. Walter does it fast and, almost invariably, does it very well. He did it again yesterday, early in the day too, on the news that the Michigan state legislature had passed two so-called right-to-work laws.

Like Walter, my sense is that this is a big deal—a turning point in our national odyssey.  Like Walter, too, I see the basic facts in the same way. But unlike Walter, my sensibilities about this are bit different, possibly owing to the fact that he is the son of an Episcopalian clergyman, and I am the son of a rare Jewish member of the Teamsters union. Walter does say that, “Labor needs representation and many of the values that drew millions of working Americans into the labor movement endure.” I would go a bit further than that: Collective bargaining is all that keeps large numbers of Americans at least clingingly in the middle class at a time when globalization and automation are undermining a hard-achieved, broadly egalitarian U.S. social structure. What Republicans in Michigan have done is to attack the viability of collective bargaining. If companies can hire as many non-union laborers as they like, it is obvious that union bargaining power will essentially collapse.

Were that to happen, and were it to spread from Michigan to the rest of the nation, it might help some American businesses to keep their costs down and so better compete worldwide. That, arguably, might produce more jobs—if not necessarily more decently paying jobs. But at the same time, whether that happens or not, it will certainly produce more inequality and the social frictions that ultimately go with it, exacerbating a trend at least a quarter-century now in the making.

When I read the news from Lansing, I immediately began to think of another key turning point in the history of the American labor movement. Since few Americans today know much about that history, let me tell you a little something about it. No doubt you will see many parallels with current circumstances even before I have the opportunity to point them out.

Back around the turn of the last century, you’ll probably be surprised to learn, Paterson, New Jersey, was one of the fastest-growing and economically thriving towns in the United States. It was so because of the Totowa Falls, which supplied almost limitless power to a large number of mills specializing in making silk. By the 1890s, something like 30 percent of all the silk made in America came from Paterson. The mills attracted large numbers of immigrants––Irish, Italian, Jews, Poles and many others. Working conditions were not so good. Days were long, pay was modest, and health issues abounded, whether from the effects of the dyes or of lint dust getting into workers’ lungs.

Some of the immigrant workers were socialists, carrying within their bosoms still the hopes of the failed revolutions of 1848. Way back in 1828 the first industrial strike in American history occurred in Paterson, but in the late 19^th century and again in 1902 there were more strikes as labor unrest grew. These strikes never got anywhere, however, because they were not general enough. They targeted particular mills, but since there were so many other mills, the targeted owners could not give in to striker demands or they would go broke for being at a competitive disadvantage.

But then, in February 1913, the mother of all strikes hit Paterson’s 350 silk mills. One of the reasons was a technological change, something rather reminiscent of automation. At the turn of the century, the basic ratio of loom to worker was one to one. But as the machines became more sophisticated, the owners turned to a ratio of one worker to two machines. By early 1913 rumors had begun to spread among the workers that the two to one ratio might soon become a four to one ratio. As the workers, some 25,000 strong, saw it, they were working harder than ever for the same pay while the owners made twice, and prospectively four times, the profits. They wanted an eight-hour day, not the 12–14 hour days they were working. They wanted a ban on child labor, defined as anyone younger than 14. And they wanted more money.

The owners said no. And with that there descended upon Paterson, New Jersey, in all of their force and color, the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies. Big Bill Haywood himself came to town. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn came, too, both at the invitation of the small and tottering IWW Local #152. Later on John Reed even showed up, though he of the pure “red” did not necessarily see eye to eye with the blacker syndicalist/anarchist Wobbly creed. The strike was effective in that it was general, aimed at all the hundreds of silk factories in town. Picket lines were set up, relief societies for striking workers were establishes, and lots and lots and lots of speeches were made. Most important, the mills were forced to shut down.

The owners declared a lockout. They also detested the radical rhetoric that set them up as capitalists opposed to the workers, because the truth was that a great number of the owners had started out as the lowest of the low laborers in the same mills. They did not think of themselves as capitalists; they thought of themselves as hard-working successes.  They tried to hire scabs to do the labor, but they were only moderately successful at that. They were eventually far more successful, however, at sending work to mills in southeastern Pennsylvania, to places like Easton and Allentown, where refugees from the anthracite coal mines were willing to work for even less than the silk workers of Paterson. In other words, the owners outsourced. A waiting game of chicken ensued, until finally the strike collapsed. Workers went back to their jobs without winning a single concession from the owners. The Wobblies were finished.

Again in 1924, about 20,000 silk workers tried to stop the four-loom system, which by then had become technically feasible. They failed again, but their disruption persuaded a number of Paterson’s silk manufacturers to leave town. By 1935, there were only about 4,000 workers in the silk industry left, and with the advent of synthetic fabrics the industry subsequently diminished to the point of near nothingness. Patterson did make a comeback as a fabric dyeing industry town, but those operations, too, eventually moved elsewhere to both domestic and foreign production platforms offering lower-wage costs.

What’s the moral of this story? There’s not just one.

First, changes in technology drive changes in the relationship between capital and labor. They always have, and they always will. If it hadn’t been for advancing technology that made the looms more efficient, the labor disruptions in Paterson might not even have occurred. Technology also accounted later on for the problems owners faced when silk was largely displaced by synthetics. Some owners managed to make the transition, and they were far better placed to adjust than workers. But technology challenged everyone in due course, capitalists and workers alike. It is still doing so, whether we notice or not.

Second, union power depends on a variety of circumstances. One of those circumstances is the relative immobility and absence of porosity in labor markets. If the owners couldn’t send work to eastern Pennsylvania, the strike might have ended differently. At the same time, competition is real; workers get no ultimate benefit from driving their employers into bankruptcy. Owners recognize and deal fairly with unions only under two conditions: when the circumstances of competition make that economically viable, and when they acknowledge the dignity and humanity of their labor force. This latter is a very important point, often neglected in narrowly economic analyses—which I will return to in just a moment.

American industrial and trade unions today (and I deliberately exclude from this discussion public service unions because, as I have written before, they are of a qualitatively different nature) face both rapid technological change and the availability of lower-wage platforms that ownership can seek out and employ. It is no wonder, therefore, that the clout of labor unions has so dramatically diminished over the past three decades. It is true, as Walter said, that the leadership of American unions has not been particularly sagacious or effective in recent years. Indeed, union bosses have consistently done stupid, counterproductive things that have harmed everyone, including ultimately themselves. But I’m not sure it would have mattered very much. The ground simply disappeared from beneath the feet of American trade and industrial unions, and it is still doing so today.

What can be done about this? Logically, there are only two ways to restore the power of labor and protect the leverage afforded by collective bargaining. One way is to close down the economy with a wall of protectionism. The country would be poorer as a whole, just as the theory of comparative advantage holds, but we would be more equal among ourselves.

That is a tradeoff some would make and some would reject. Personally, am I willing to pay more for a good or a service if I know that doing so helps a fellow American to get and keep a decent job and helps stabilize entire deteriorating communities? Damn right I am. To me, that is part and parcel of what being a patriot means, and so I “buy American” when I can. Aren’t I concerned at all about the foreigners whose low-paying but still critical jobs would be eliminated as a result if lots of people did what I do? Yes, but I care more about the well-being of other Americans than I do about foreigners. I know that view is not fashionable among the anti-nationalist Left, but I am not a member of the anti-nationalist Left.

The other way is to transform a race to the bottom into a race to the top by exporting, so to speak, trade unionism to other countries. If labor in other countries were more powerful, and wages therefore higher, the competitive disadvantage of American labor would diminish. This is what the international division of the AFL-CIO used to do back in the Cold War, when Lane Kirkland was around. We have not seen his like for many years. I believe that industrial and trade unionism is the best pedagogue for a budding democracy. I would take an effort to create a genuine union abroad over a marquee election any day. Unfortunately, our government doesn’t see things this way anymore, and that includes Democratic administrations as well as Republican ones. Over at the State Department there is a Bureau called DRL for short. The acronym stands for democracy, human rights and labor. Again unfortunately, no one seems to remember anything about the “L.”

Let me not leave you in any doubt: Neither one of these alternatives is remotely practical these days. We are not going to close down our economy behind a protectionist wall, and we are not going to be successful in seeding vast numbers of new labor unions in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Niger, Bosnia, and so on.

The only hope, therefore, is that American corporations will gain comparative advantage through the scientific and technological innovations we have always been so good at, and that they in turn will have the competitive elbow room to recognize their labor forces with the proper sense of dignity workers deserve. Collective bargaining expresses basic fairness; companies by their very nature as partnerships concert their negotiating assets, so labor should be able to do the same. (Some fool once tried to persuade me that unions never had any moral purpose or standing, but were just ethnic gangs organized to keep outsiders from certain job categories…how pathetic.) Collective bargaining is also good for corporations, and intelligent corporate leadership looking out for the long-term success of their enterprises knows that. Corporations should want workers with high morale and loyalty, because that boosts productivity more than any other factor. So-called right-to-work laws that undermine unions will produce precisely the opposite.

Let me close with reference to the Bible. (“Say what?” I hear you ask. Please, bear with me a moment.)

The Hebrew Bible evinces a particular attitude toward this general question. Most people reading the text of the Torah in English may be excused for thinking that slavery is okay according to the law. But this misreads the text. Remember that the text of the early parts of the Hebrew Bible at least, the Torah, is predicated on a tribal division of the land in an agricultural and animal husbandry context (later books and later laws, including a few retrojected into earlier texts, reflect a far more specialized economic environment). In those days, tribes leading down to clans leading down to extended families owned agricultural and pasture land. People worked together in family groups, with elders usually calling the shots. The notion that a person would work in a subordinate role for wages for someone to whom he was not related was strange, something akin to an unnatural act.

Nevertheless, such things happened, and provision for them is made (I won’t go through the specific verses; you can find them for yourself if you’re interested). But these relationships did not describe a condition of slavery. They describe a condition of what we would call at most indentured servitude—and temporarily so at that, given the laws related to jubilee years. There are different laws pertaining to war captives, whose situation more closely resembles that of a slave. But the idea that one Israelite would literally enslave another is quite foreign to the sense of the text.

It is easy for modern readers to miss this distinction, promoted by clumsy translations, since so many of us work for other people to whom we are not related. What in biblical times was thought very unnatural we take to be utterly natural. If we work for others as trade or industrial workers, we are involved in what Marx once called wage slavery. Obviously, in civilized countries what goes on nowadays does not deserve such a brutal descriptor. Nevertheless, we would be wise to ponder the fact that the structure of modern industrial economies is based on inherently unequal relationships between those who have capital and those who work for those who have capital. The reason this matters ultimately is that it contradicts the egalitarian democratic mythos we live by. We say, and to our credit we mostly believe, that all men are created equal; but for all practical purposes the very structure of our economy says otherwise.

Barring some very improbable mass return to a more egalitarian and self-sufficient pastoral life, or a leap forward to a comparable situation where people in much greater numbers work for themselves, there is nothing to be done about this. It just is what it is. (Attempts to eradicate the problem by having the state play the role of capitalists, whether in “soft” Left socialist or “hard” Left communist terms, haven’t worked out so well, and indeed they didn’t even solve the basic problem.) A work contract within any for-profit enterprise, even in America today, is still essentially a form of indentured servitude, though for the vast majority of us it is so very mild a form that the term doesn’t feel right: We can quit and seek work elsewhere on pretty short notice or no notice, we can get severance pay, we have certain rights of redress, we can get government unemployment benefits if one party or the other breaks the contract, and so on and so forth. All the same, no one who does not work for himself or within an integral family unit is truly free and “at liberty” the same way that someone who does work for himself is.

This is so simple and obvious a point that it is rarely made explicit or recognized at all these days. But it is important precisely because in the absence of the radical liberty afforded by self-employment the only thing that makes this condition morally tolerable is the extension by an employer to an employee of the unambiguous acknowledgment of workers’ inalienable dignity. Yes, the very act of employing someone instrumentalizes that person; the employer cares more about what a person can do than who a person is. That is natural, and the larger the enterprise and workforce, the more natural it is. But that is not a sufficient basis for a stable and mutually beneficial relationship. What that means, among other things, is that understanding capital-labor relationships, and understanding the role of unions as well, requires more than economics.

And that, finally, is what is really disturbing about what the Republicans in the Michigan state legislature have done. Whatever their thinking or their actual motives—and I’m not thereby giving them the benefit of the doubt—they are instrumentalizing people. They are in effect enabling the withdrawal or the diminishment of the acknowledgment of workers’ dignity. They are encouraging the breaking of a bond far more important and precious to a society than a mere labor contract. They have done something that is both wrong and ultimately foolish.

Conservative Principles of World Order

December 13, 2012

The 2012 election season is over, but, unfortunately, the country is none the wiser for having endured it. We live at a time when consultants and pollsters all but forbid their principals from saying anything that might smack of intelligent speech. Those aspirants to high political office who ignored this counsel this time around, Ambassador Jon Huntsman, for example, got nowhere fast.

Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney seriously addressed questions of strategy during the campaign. We can infer from the past four years something about the Obama Administration’s approach to such matters. Most of what the Administration did, and is likely to do over the next four years, can be encapsulated in four simple statements:

(1) foreign and national security policy is less important than domestic policy, so the main emphasis should be to end inherited shooting wars, to avoid news ones in which we take the lead, and, insofar as it is possible, to avoid all intense or protracted crises that distract and detract from the domestic agenda;

(2) the Administration’s default drive in all non-presidential-level judgments is a form of liberal internationalism that credits the legitimacy of international law and institutions, and sees them as benign limiting influences on American unilateralism;

(3) the President’s inclination on those matters that reach his desk remains para-realist in the sense that, despite the sobering experience of the first term’s early “engagement” emphasis, he believes a deal is available with all interlocutors, democratic and non-democratic alike, if only the United States and/or its allies are willing to make the necessary concessions; and

(4) because of financial constraints and the so-far intellectually unsupported shift of military emphasis away from Europe and the Middle East to Asia, the United States is moving de facto away from its post-World War II forward-presence grand strategy to one of offshore balancing, as epitomized by the new Air-Sea Battle doctrine.

But what about the Republicans? What sort of basic orientation would a Romney Administration have adopted? What sort of basic strategic viewpoint will the GOP display in another four years of opposition? No one really knows. Romney dropped hints but never got specific, and the hints reflected the diverse views of his principal advisers. As for the Republican Party looking ahead, it has no single view either. Some rhetoric suggests a new isolationism, some a painful Cold War hangover that sees Russia as still the main bogeyman, and some neo-neo-conservatives remain fixated on jihadi terrorism. No senior Republican figure has addressed the issue of national strategy directly.

This is unfortunate. If the Democratic orientation to strategy (if one can call it that) is deficient, then it behooves the Republicans to articulate something better. You can’t beat something with nothing, as the Republicans should have learned from their recent experience in domestic politics. Just as taking the obstacular “just-say-no” approach to domestic policy backfired, so a negative approach to strategy is liable to backfire as well.  So what should that Republican strategic framework be?

Not that anyone asked me, and not that I am or have ever been a registered Republican, but here, in less an a thousand words, is what I, of a philosophically conservative temperament, wish the Republicans would adopt as a strategic vision.

Three Basic Principles

A U.S. foreign policy strategy that seeks to build and maintain a world order consonant with U.S. interests and principles can be summarized as consisting of three parts.

American liberty as the measure of all things: First, the constellation of global power must not compel us to alter the basic principles of our free society, as described in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This means that any external threat or combination of threats that tempts us to forsake our way of life, even well short of a literal threat to the American homeland, is intolerable.

International security through strengthened sovereignty: Second, U.S. policy should strengthen the concept and the reality of effective state sovereignty, so that no habitable area on earth is exploited by violent sub-state actors. Sovereignty is also the irreducible basis on which increasingly necessary international cooperation to deal with transnational issues must be built, for sovereignty is the only mechanism available that can ensure democratic accountability both within and among nations.

Live and let live: Third, U.S. policy should respect and encourage the dignity of difference. It should practice genuine global multiculturalism, which means accepting that the American understanding of Enlightenment universalism is not readily exportable to other cultures. Efforts to evangelize American political values, which arise from parochial Western and American experiences and are not in fact of universal validity, are often seen abroad—especially in the Muslim world—as a form of religious proselytizing. Such American efforts almost invariably, if inadvertently, affront the dignity and threaten the corporate identity of other peoples, exacerbating tensions with them. With Asian cultures rising on the world stage, the wisdom of restraining America’s innocent cultural chauvinism could hardly be clearer.

Four Basic Insights

These principles of order do not imply a bias toward stasis or any absence of optimism about world politics. They are consistent with aspirations for world peace and progress, and with American global leadership. But they rule out a strategy of “forcing the end”—of pushing history faster than it is capable of moving.

Of all people, conservatives should know that slow and steady wins the race. Liberal internationalists suffer not from the worthiness of their objectives but from their impatience, and from their hubris over the efficacy of institutional solutions to dissolve culturally engrained differences. A temperamental conservative knows that perfection in social relations is not possible, but that progress is possible if one grasps four basic insights of historical wisdom:

(1) It is much harder to create than to destroy something fine.

(2) Not all values that are good in themselves are either commensurate with each other or lead in the same direction (consider: freedom/order, liberty/equality, pragmatism/justice, diversity/social cohesion, power/friendship, investment/consumption, creativity/diligence, innovation/continuity, tradition/experimentation.) Those who fail to grasp this elemental point are subject to the derangements of the utopian temptation.

(3) The road to hell is paved by the same contractor who paves all the other roads: Consequences matter more than intentions.

(4) National and ethnic cultures do change, but not easily or readily without risk to identity and stability.

Taken together, these principles and insights imply that the only reliable way to spread Western social and political values is by example. Only when asked by others for assistance in such tasks should we step forward, and then only with patience and humility. U.S. policy with respect to aiding economic development, alleviating poverty and encouraging liberal institutions abroad should be focused on the goal of strengthening state capabilities and state sovereignty, not on spreading democracy as such. Artificially and prematurely imposed democratic forms can weaken states, ethnically heterogeneous ones in particular, undermining both international security and the long-term prospect for the sustainable growth of liberal institutions.

Seven Tests of Policy Prudence

Having established via three principles that conservatives can be optimistic gradualists rather than reactionary nihilists, and that history yields four key insights for thinking about strategy and policy, it remains only to subject any major policy proposal to the conservative test for realism. That test, which both recent Republican and Democratic Administrations have manifestly failed to apply in recent years, consists of seven parts.

First, ask what’s the downside? What “unanticipated consequences” can actually be anticipated, if we try hard enough?

Second, can it be done? Have capabilities been realistically matched against intentions?

Third, is the payoff worth the risks? Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Fourth, what’s the weakest link in the plan, and why? Specifically, what other actors have to support, or at least not oppose, the plan for it to work—and will they?

Fifth, have costs to third parties, and their likely reactions, been realistically estimated? In the longer run, and sometimes the shorter run too, they often matter.

Sixth, where is plan B, just in case? In other words, what do we do if our plan doesn’t work—for at that point we will not be where we started, but someplace else for having exerted ourselves?

Seventh, if anyone says, “we have nothing to lose” or “things cannot get worse”, escort that person from the room: He or she has no business being anywhere near a consequential policy decision.

If Republicans adopt this basic view as a counterpoint to that of the second Obama Administration, it would be good for the country. It makes sense on its own terms and it would encourage a more serious approach to a subject we have lately tended to sleepwalk through. Can Republicans come together around this vision? Please, I hope so.

What A Day

Truth be told, there is very rarely a slow news day in what our government types referred to as the MENA region (MENA standing for Middle East and North Africa). But some days really stand out above the average for action, avarice and atavistic behavior. Yesterday was one of them. The place is really hopping, and I frankly don’t know how typically ambitious American newspaper readers who are not already fortuitously expert in these matters by one means or another can possibly gain a sound understanding without the help of The American Interest.

I shall now proceed to illustrate this bold claim with reference to only three stories that populate the New York Times: those having to do with Iraq/Kurdistan, Egypt and, of course, Syria. I will try to be brief because, after all we’re all busy, this is only a blog, and everybody realizes that the number of people with the ability to read more than a few dozen words on any topic is dropping fast.

There is a town, I’m told (since I’ve never been there), called Tuz Khurmato, which is located in the gray zone between Arab and Kurdish areas in northern Iraq. Apparently, a few days ago Iraqi federal agents tried to arrest a Kurdish man in that place—Heaven knows why—and the attempt resulted in a gun battle between the Iraqis and members of the Kurdish militia, now really an army in all but name, known as the Peshmerga. As of this writing, the military forces of the two sides stand cheek by jowl. No one is giving in, and no one is going home.

Tuz Khurmato isn’t all that far from Kirkuk, a major city surrounded by loads of oil fields that is one of a few major bones of contention between what, for lack of a better phrase, one may call Iraqi nationalism and its very hale and hearty Kurdish counterpart.

Everybody who has ever paid much attention to Iraq, both before the United States fought two wars against it and since, knew this was going to happen sooner or later. It has been nearly a year since the U.S. military presence in Iraq was withdrawn by the Obama Administration, and this crisis is right on time—even if pretty much nothing else in Iraq ever is. If you really want to understand what is going on, and what is likely to happen next in general terms, read this brilliant essay by Ofra Bengio. You wouldn’t do yourself much harm either to read what I had to say about this subject in one of my rareVia Meadia guest posts back in August. The simple truth is that Iraqi Kurdistan exists as an autonomous proto-state, and it is not going to be reabsorbed into the Iraqi state anytime soon, if ever. This region, innocuously called the Kurdistan Regional Government today, is the epicenter for a welling up of regional Kurdish nationalism that is bound to affect Turkey, Iran and Syria—all of which have significant Kurdish populations.

The gist of the insights on Iraq TAI has been publishing since the beginning is this: The modern Iraqi state, having been cobbled together by the British after World War I from three disparate Ottoman provinces, has never been able to cohere as a strategic or even an administrative unit without the sly hand of foreign domination or the iron hand of local tyranny. Iraq is unique among Arab countries in that it is the only major one with a majority Shi’a population (Bahrain isn’t major) that for all of its modern history until 2005 was ruled by a Sunni elite. It is one of only a few Arab countries, too, with a politically salient non-Arab minority (Syria also on account of its Kurds and Sudan still, despite South Sudanese independence, with a variety of non-Arab groups south of Khartoum). This twin heterogeneity, sectarian and ethnic, has always made Iraq a very hard case for the growth of liberal, let alone democratic, institutions and attitudes. So it remains today despite its creaky, made-in-the-USA democratic facade.

I know lots of people in the U.S. government who were involved with the Iraqi reconstruction and democratization effort after the initial fighting stopped back in May 2003. As I have said before, when you are in the government it is your job to make the policy work. That is why, frequently, those who care the most are always the last to know when that policy simply can’t work. Since my job in the government back in 2003 was off to the side of this effort, I was at my ease in playing Team B to my colleagues, teaching them what I knew (and what they usually didn’t) about the history of the country, and suggesting that what they were doing was very unlikely to succeed in the not-so-long run. They told me I was mistaken, but ever since I have been out of government I have maintained my view that the rickety democratic scaffolding we erected in Iraq could not endure long without our presence there to maintain it. It seemed to me like the showy coating of a seedpod in a garden, bound to fall away when the weather turned, leaving the seeds to grow wild according to the only patterns they knew.

No one can be sure just how the collapse of Iraqi democracy will unfold in its specifics, or how long that will take; nor can anyone predict when Kurdish independence will pass from de facto to de jure. But I do know that Iraq is like a three-legged stool between the Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish communities. As long as there are three actors, shifting alliances can keep the play going despite their ambient suspicions, conflicting interests and the occasional body piles. But if one of the legs of the stool falls off (and it really doesn’t matter which one), the two remaining protagonists are bound eventually to look each other square in the eye and begin to make plans. The leg that is falling off, and falling off fast, is the Kurdish leg, leaving the Sunni and Shi’a Arabs to contemplate their respective circumstances. As they do so, they hear a deafening regional echo from their respective counterparts. This will not end like a June Allyson movie. Actually, in a sense, the problem is that it won’t really end at all.

***

Not even Egyptians understand what’s happening in Egypt. From the looks of things, President Morsi took the opportunity of his heightened stature from having helped broker an Israeli-Hamas cease-fire to overreach politically at home, issuing a series of decrees clearly favoring Muslim Brotherhood political prospects. The essence of the decrees was to neuter the Egyptian judiciary, which, it may be reasonably surmised, at its upper echelons functions as a holdover from the Mubarak period dead set on limiting Morsi’s elbow room and, if necessary, breaking his arm outright if it can. So as Morsi and his supporters took the measure of the old regime’s remaining sources of power, the standard Middle Eastern version of the Golden Rule manifested itself once more: Do unto others before they do unto you.

That much is clear, but nothing else is. On the one hand, there is in Egypt a judiciary, and there are lawyers and professional legal associations, and there are academic faculties and scholarship and all that, and the people involved in these walks of life take them very seriously, at least most of the time. And it must be said, the sophistication of these activities has been much greater in Egypt than in most other Arab countries. On the other hand, throughout the period of military bureaucratic rule since July 1952 the judiciary has never really been independent. It has been an arm of the autocracy, which is essentially the army. So when the judiciary rose up in protest last week, seemingly as one at first, against Morsi’s decrees, it was not at all obvious what this meant. Was this an act devoted to safeguarding an honorable and cherished civic institution, which didn’t really function at high levels at all, or was it a political act using the pretense of righteous legal ire as a battle axe?

No doubt, some who rose in protest care deeply about the law, while others, also no doubt, care about ultimately limiting and defeating Muslim Brotherhood power in Egypt. Those who supported the judiciary’s strike out in the streets represent an array of interests, from the twenty- and thirty-somethings who first twittered the Midan al-Tahrir revolution to salafis who are competing with the Brotherhood to, especially, broad strata of Egypt’s urban middle classes who want nothing to do with the Brotherhood’s ever more evident determination to catapult Egyptian society back to the 11^thcentury.

The President’s office has to at least pretend to care about the courts, because Morsi is pretending to be a democratic ruler. But the practical truth is that below the political level the courts have to function or the government’s own administration, let alone the formal private sector, will grind to a halt. For all of its politicization, Egypt, like most Arab countries, is a very litigious place.

If this isn’t confusing enough, it now seems like the judiciary has split, with some prepared to engage with the President’s office and others not. As I say, no one really knows what this means, including Egyptians.

The best way to get at least a feel for this in lieu of an actual understanding is to read what Nancy Okail, formerly of a cage in a Cairo courtroom and now of Freedom House in Washington, haswritten for us. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t hurt to read Ashraf Khalil’s recent post as well, and that by Charles Dunne and David Kramer. My own comments going back now a year or so might help too, and ultimately readers would do well to re-visit Michelle Dunne’sTAI essay from September/October 2008. When the Mubarak regime tumbled into its final crisis, a lot of surprised mainstream media commentators whined that no one had foreseen collapse. Horse crap: Anyone paying attention to the country knew that the end of the Mubarak era was approaching fast and worried that the U.S. government was not prepared properly to deal with it. Ambassador Morton Abramowitz and Mark Lowenthal’s constructive “what-if” analysis of that failure in the January/February 2012 issue is also worth a look. (If mainstream media honchos would actually read serious analyses once in a while, maybe their “surprise quotient” would drop some.)

As confusing as it is, what’s going on in Egypt matters enormously—for the country itself, of course, but also for the region and for U.S. interests in it. Broadly speaking, Egypt faces three alternative futures. The current regime could collapse and the country fall back into the arms of the military bureaucracy. Democratic forms might be retained, as they were before, but very little democratic substance. Or the Muslim Brotherhood regime could eventually consolidate itself, declare a populist-propelled but socially regressive and intolerant “democracy in one country”, and create a regional foreign policy as aggressive and disruptive as was Nasser’s pan-Arabism of a generation ago. Or the country could muddle about, being neither military fish nor Islamist fowl, for rather a long time, with democratic norms (with Egyptian characteristics, of course) being used as a bludgeon by all sides to prevent its rivals from emerging triumphant.

The first outcome would insult our values but not necessarily our interests. The second outcome would insult both our values and our interests. The third outcome would be as indeterminate as the situation itself is indeterminate. We would just draw a psychological fence around the place and hope that it did not contaminate its neighbors, its weakness more or less ruling out aggressive forms of danger. No one can predict at this point which of these three futures will emerge, and the current mass really doesn’t yet point clearly in one direction or another. We need to be patient—something we can certainly learn from Egyptians. Aside from their uncannily wry sense of humor, Egyptians do patience rather well.

***

But the big news concerns Syria. And I do not mean the aspect of the news in which the President of the United States warns the Syrian dictator not to use chemical weapons against his own people. We have warned against this before, and I suppose it was a sensible thing to do, the alternative being a loud, howling nothing. But as feckless as the Obama Administration has been over the past 23 months with regard to Syria, it has not really earned the right to be taken seriously by anyone in the region.

Don’t get me wrong: The Administration had very good reason for taking a modest approach to Syria, and even I have been prepared, at least on alternate Tuesdays, to give it the benefit of the doubt when it came to the apparently supine policy of subcontracting American interests to Russia. About a year ago we actually had some genuine options for a bold policy, options that did not involve American boots on the ground, that could have saved innumerable thousands of innocent lives and turned the crisis toward a resolution favoring our interests. Michael Doran made the case early on in TAI, as did I in some detail in a March 6 post called “The Wisdom of Sheikh Zubar.” But the Administration hesitated, and the opportunity was all but lost as the protraction of the crisis brought to the fore increasingly nasty Islamist elements in Syria. Others acted, however, and we pretended to coordinate and help them. The Turks, Saudis and others provided the wherewithal to eventually tip the tide of battle, and now the regime is losing aircraft to man-portable SAM missiles and shelling its own capital as it struggles to keep its international air links open and its military bases and depots safe from marauding rebels.

The big news, however, concerns Russia. News reports indicate that, for the first time in the crisis, the Russian government is considering backing off its support for President Assad and actively urging him to surrender power. That’s what came out of Vladimir Putin’s recent trip to Ankara. The Russian government is also considering evacuating Russian nationals from Syria, and one of its key interlocutors with the Syrian elite has let slip that President Assad no longer sees much hope for escape. He expects now to lose, and he expects to be killed in the process. Either the opposition will kill him, as the Libyan opposition killed Muammar Qadaffi, or his own Alawi kin will kill him if he tries to skip town, leaving them holding the bag as hordes of vengeful Sunnis try to rip their throats out.

This is a very different tune from the one Assad was singing just a few weeks ago, the Russians told us. So the change in their assessment, at least as it now appears in public, indicates that they are in the process of trying to powder their own asses. They bet on the wrong horse, and now they will certainly try to make it look like they did no such thing, hoping that people have very short memories—which, of course, they do.

From the Obama administration’s point of view, however, this is helpful. No matter that it took the Russians so long (because it took the rebels so long, because it took the Turks, Saudis and others so long…), and no matter that they are therefore complicit in the needless deaths of so many innocents—as if they gave a damn. No matter that there was a better and quicker way. Still, when all this is over and done with and the Alawi-dominated Syrian Ba’athi regime is no more, the Administration may be able to make a plausible argument that its Russocentric, not-really-lead-from-behind tactic actually had some purchase power at the endgame. It will try to powder its ass, too. It may even try to claim disingenuously that it struck a blow regionally against Iran; that would be the ultimate exercise in chutzpah, but as everyone knows, exercise is good for you. It remains to be seen, of course, how much clout the United States has in any multinational effort to assist the reconstruction of Syria. We don’t deserve any, that’s for sure.

We may find out soon, because, if one can believe the news, the end is approaching. Military experts have been saying for months that the rebel forces are too week and too disorganized to actually seize the presidential palace or occupy Damascus. Some months ago in a post I said it, too. I also pointed out, however, that weakness is relative. If the regime’s key supporters and its praetorian guard take a hint from President Assad’s morbid demeanor, and decide to take a hike into the hills, then a troop of badge-seeking Boy Scouts might be capable of bringing down what’s left of the regime. It doesn’t take much power to push against an open door. That is, I suspect, something like what we will see over the next few days or weeks.

We may also see the great bulk of regime-associated Alawis take to the specific hills of the province of Latakia. That’s where they are originally from, and several scholars believe that the Alawis are the progeny of one of the original Canaanite tribes you can read about in the Bible. If they go back there en masse and bring as many weapons and chemicals with them as they can, there is every prospect that, at least for a while, a rump Alawi mini-state can hold out against what passes for the next Syrian government. That mini-state might have some friends, powerful ones at that: elements of the Iranian regime and Hizballah, too. So it is a mistake to think that the collapse of the current regime in Damascus means the end of the civil war. It might, but it more likely would presage a new stage in that war. It ain’t over, they say, until the fat lady sings. In Syria, at least, singing fat ladies are scarce these days.

Let me leave you, for now, with a further suggestion for reading—but not from the pages of The American Interest. If you want to gain a deeper sense of what sectarian warfare in this part of the Levant can involve with regard to attitudes, grisly tactics and self-exculpatory rationalizations, study the murderous mayhem that followed in the wake of Mohammed Ali’s failed attempt to subdue Syria in 1840. In the years that followed his retreat all hell broke lose. Happily, an Englishman was there to take it all in and write it all down. His name was Charles Henry Churchill, a colonel in the British Army and at the time the British Consul in Damascus. The book in question containing the indicated material is Mount Lebanon: A Ten Years’ Residence from 1842 to 1852, describing the Manners, Customs, and Religion of its Inhabitants with a Full and Correct Account of the Druze Religion and Containing Historical Records of the Mountain Tribes from Personal Intercourse with their Chiefs and Other Authentic Sources(three volumes).

Am I suggesting that nothing has changed in the region between the 1840s and today? That would be preposterous. Of course not. Today, nearly everyone has a cell phone.