Last week I attended a meeting here in Washington convened to discuss the future of the U.S. alliance system out to 2025. The convener will remain anonymous, as will the U.S. government agency sponsor. We had a very good discussion, but I thought its level failed to match the goal of the meeting. Here, below, is how I expressed it to the chairman--for what it's worth.
The easiest way to think about U.S. alliances, but not the most useful in my view, is to chart which associates still add to U.S. strength and which do not, and which potential allies might provide more value-added. Obviously, as my TAI colleague Walter Russell Mead pointed out in his blog the very day after this meeting, the “trilateral” U.S./Europe/Japan approach of the Nixon Doctrine was the substitute for an unnatural and declining U.S. preeminence after World War II; it led, somewhat surprisingly to many, not to multipolarity but to a new period of U.S. preeminence. Now that this preeminence in turn may be eroding thanks to an accumulating U.S. domestic policy paralysis and the rise of China and the BRICs, we recognize that the power of Europe and Japan is not what it was (though many exaggerate their relative decline: demographic weakness and GDP stasis are not nearly as important in a pinch as human capital, social trust and institutional coherence). If Europe and Japan cannot make up for what we lack to muster a plurality if not a majority of international influence, India and maybe Brazil and others might do on a global scale what the old trilateral arrangement did in Europe and East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. This is the way a baseball general manager thinks: How can I substitute into the roster better players than the ones I have now?
There's nothing wrong with this, but it is inadequate as intellectual flooring for the building we should want to build. It is also just too obvious to warrant much discussion; any professional for whom the content of the foregoing paragraph is a revelation is probably in the wrong business. The key questions with which to begin, rather, are: “What do we want our allies to do for, and with, us?”, and, as important; “Has the typology or the relative weight of our needs shifted as the world has changed since our legacy alliance system developed during and after WWII?”
A third question follows logically, I think: If there has been a shift, even a subtle one, and if we anticipate further movement away from the way things worked 50 years ago, then how does the nexus between function and structure look? In other words, aside from deciding which allies we seek for which purposes, we need to ask: "How we should design our interactions with them, and how might we want them to interact with each other?"
Until we think through these three questions, we can have no framework to assess our circumstances or set coherent goals. We can also not get far in properly analyzing second- and third-order policy questions such as what overseas basing footprint we should desire, or what kinds of military acquisition (and export market) strategies we should pursue. In my view, approaches that do not set out these questions as guideposts may be adequate for dealing with present policy questions, and for planning out a year or three. But they cannot match up against a request to look out to 2025 and beyond.
What We Want Allies to Do
A typology of alliance utility might look something like this:
First, we want allies who can (and will) fight with us in interstate wars (and hence help to deter them).
Second, we want allies, local and external, who can (and will) fight with us in insurgencies (intrastate contingencies).
Third, we want allies who can perform pre- and post-conflict stabilization, reconstruction and peacekeeping missions—allies, in other words, with full-array or selected civilian expeditionary capabilities.
Fourth, we want allies who can lend legitimacy to U.S. policies and principles simply by virtue of their symbolic presence at our side.
Fifth, we want allies in order to prevent potential rivals from allying with or wooing other states away from us into potentially hostile coalitions.
Sixth, we want allies in order to promote commercial relationships (within a generally liberal global trading regime) that may become strategic.
Seventh, we want allies to vindicate past investments and sacrifices so that the American public will incline to support a responsible internationalist foreign policy.
Some allies can do all seven of these things for us, others only a few or perhaps just one. How we invest in allied capacities ought to be a function of how deep and diverse allied help can be, it being understood that by building up of allied capacities we invariably augment the autonomy of their decision-making processes.
Has the mix of these seven utilities changed with the evolution of international politics over the past half century? I would say it has. Our need for allies to fight interstate wars has declined, but our need for local allies to aid us in intrastate wars (and external allies to aid us in stabilization, reconstruction and peacekeeping efforts) has risen. I would say that our need for allies for purposes of legitimacy has risen as the global normative climate has changed (become more democratized), but our need to keep neutrals from allying with rivals has declined (with the end of the Cold War). I would say, too, that our need for allies to advance commercial relationships has risen as the world economy has become more complex and integrated, but our need for allies to vindicate past investments and sacrifices for domestic purposes has declined with distance from World War II and Vietnam.
I think that a recognition of these changes should inform U.S. diplomacy and military planning across a wide range of issues. I do not have space or time to detail all these now, but one example may illustrate the general principle.
Most historians now agree that the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War was a blunder, saddling the United States with a possession it could not readily defend. Even TR came fairly quickly to this conclusion, and he was right; that possession helped cause the Pacific War with Japan.
In 1898 we went to the Philippines; now the problems of indefensibility and access are coming to us, in a manner of speaking, thanks to new military technologies. We have assumed in recent decades a very permissive environment when it comes to getting to and operating from U.S. bases in allied territory. If this permissive environment is compromised, it ought to force a rethinking of how we are deployed abroad, for what purposes and with what broader implications. Thus, for example, there is nothing that U.S. forces inside the Gulf, in Bahrain, Qatar and elsewhere, can usefully do that an over-the-horizon posture cannot also do at lower political cost. All those U.S. facilities and personnel do is create a rich target set for Iran; they are potential hostages in a war, our having brought Pearl Harbor close to them (to continue the Philippines analogue). We do not need bases inside the Gulf of that size and nature; we do need local allies to lend legitimacy to an informal anti-Iranian alliance, but our military presence in such numbers probably on balance reduces our ability to do that because, again on balance, it delegitimizes the authority of the regimes in the eyes of local populations. We cannot defend those regimes against resolute intrastate challenges, and of course that is not what U.S. forces in the Gulf are for anyway. But we are stupid to act out of habit in ways that make such challenges more likely.
Structure and Function
The legacy alliance system we have is segmented. We have a series of bilateral alliances and “special” relationships (like major non-NATO allies whose relationships with us have not been ratified by the Senate), and we have two (or two and a half) cases of multilateral alliances (NATO, ANZUS and the Rio Treaty). We have relations with all these allies and alliance systems, which arose and tend to be useful as agents in regional problematics. But in an age when more problems and opportunities are transregional in nature, we do not have an alliance system in which partners can interact with each other except in ad hoc ways.
If it were possible politically today (it is not….., but it was in 1990-92 when this idea first entered my head, and may be again), it would be wise to diminish the segmentation of our legacy alliance structure. This would better align U.S. policy goals with the means to achieve them. A more integrated, institutionalized alliance system (with a permanent secretariat and a real budget) would give us modular options that would produce gains in flexibility, burden-sharing and also legitimacy enhancement and domestic staying power if the basis of the integrated system rested on shared liberal democratic principles.
Since the members of such an alliance, with the United States at the hub, would compose the richest, technologically most advanced and most politically stable nations on earth, it would put us in a better position to align diplomatic, economic and political elements of statecraft to create an incentive structure for powerful autocracies to avoid irritating us, and for some petty ones to make domestic political adjustments so as ultimately to join us. The latter dynamic might work a little like the acquis communautaire of the European Union, and we would be wise to study that method carefully as a model that has worked well.
Specifically with regard to Third World autocracies, having an integrated global alliance system would enable us to say to impoverished autocracies that we will only help you economically if you help yourselves politically, because the ultimate source of your economic penury is your political dysfunction. An MCC-like concept would replace entirely the present USAID concept of relating to these countries. Its ultimate purpose would be to strengthen other legitimate sovereignties, the better to prevent failed states and “gray zones” that breed political violence, transnational crime and terrorism. This should be the opportunity-purpose of such an alliance: to shape the social milieu of developing societies in an historical period of great disruption, lest many of them collapse or lose so much governance capacity as to amount to more or less the same thing. Our current, segmented legacy alliance structure is incapable of achieving such a goal, and we certainly cannot achieve it by ourselves.
It would be coy not to admit that this alliance structure is meant in some respects to displace the functional aspirations of the United Nations. The UN is hopeless, and will always be hopeless for inherent structural reasons, in doing anything of real positive significance. For political reasons it would be unwise for the United States to withdraw from the UN or its functional agencies, but it is in the U.S. national interest that many of the functions the UN claims to be able to do but cannot do still get done. We need an alternative venue that actually works by properly arraying incentive structures and backing them with real power and appeal. That is what a new and improved U.S. alliance system design can do.
As suggested above, it takes a special molten time in international politics and real American leadership to get anything as bold as this accomplished. Truman, Acheson and Marshall seized their opportunity and built the institutions of the West world that today form the basis for the even broader concert of nations sketched here. Alas, today we have no such leadership and the times are not so molten. More is the pity, for no matter which states we switch in or out of our alliance system in coming years, even out to 2025, that system will remain less than the sum of its parts instead of more so long as its basic design remains unchanged.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Europe and Citizens United
It has been nearly a month since I have visited this space; too bad, but the day-job comes first. I don't know how daily bloggers find time to read or think. Maybe they don't find time, which would, I suppose, explain the quality of much of the blogosphere. But never mind that.
I have been thinking of many things, and reading and learning as I go. But I have generated as many questions as I have answers. Let me summarize them with reference to three events.
The European Crisis. What has been going on in Europe, centered around Greece, in the past few weeks has been extraordinary. As luck would have it, The American Interest is coming out in a few weeks with a major cluster called "What Happened to `Europe'?". This is just dumb luck--Joe Joffe suggested doing something like this before the Greek crisis burst open--but I'll take it. The main question is, has the EU and the European "model" hit the wall of reality, and the wall won, or are we just witnessing growing pains that will leave the experiment stronger for the challenge?
I suspect the former, but who knows? The $1 trillion bailout seems impressive, but it is not enough to save the euro. The idea of having one currency and one central bank, but zero political center and 27 separate tax and fiscal policies is crazy. To support a single currency requires a federal arrangement that harmonizes countercyclical processes region-wide. So I have been saying for 15 years. If the Europeans jump to that, they may pull off a great advance. This was always the plan: Do something that won't work unless you do something else, and so on and on, jumping ahead from crisis to crisis. That's a nutty way to run a railroad or build a federal union, but the juggernaut has stayed on track more or less until now because of the shield provided by American military and economic power. Now that, for various reasons, that shield is no longer what it was, we--that is, the Europeans--are in serious trouble.
So what has the EU done? It has not proposed, yet at least, building the federal structures that can support a common currency. Instead, it has faced the problem of financial overextension--too much debt--by extending further--by taking on more debt. And in the process it has cast moral hazard to the howling wind. That is not all. It has allowed the whole wager, all $1 trillion of it, to depend on the prospect of fundamentally altering the nature of Greek government and society. The Greeks (of all people)! This would be funny if it were not so serious, and serious not just for Europeans but for Americans, too. Greeks have been evading taxes since Ottoman times. No one is going to change their sport anytime soon.
Capitalism, Democracy & Law. That's the other main cluster in the forthcoming July/August issue of TAI. And here, two questions have assailed me.
First, all three of my authors writing about Citizens United have focused entirely on the supply side of the problem: how to get money to politicians in ways that do not abet corruption and unfairness. Not one of them has given so much as a single thought to the demand side. The average cost of election campaigns, in constant dollars, has nearly quadrupled in the past quarter century. Why I keep asking; no one knows for sure. I think it has a lot to doing with the cost of TV ads, and rising passions in the culture wars, but there are many, academics as well as shills for corporations, who say no, it's not so. Maybe the issues in the relevant elections brought out more corporate money than ever before, and maybe the financial sector --a.k.a. Wall Street--led the way. But it has to have some explanation; what is it, then? We don't have that explanation because, as best I can tell, no one pays any attention to the demand side, and I think this is a form of intellectual madness.
Second, I wish someone would spend more time clarifying the relationship between capitalism and democracy. We all know the convenient and comforting myth which claims that markets and democracy always support and reinforce each other. Michael Novak has written a lot about that, as have many others. But this is only a partial truth. Yes, there are elements of a market system that build morals; I agree with that. Markets are not evil. But capitalism, because of the inherent inequality of talent and virtue, as Jefferson once put it to Adams (or was it the other way around?) necessarily generates inequality. But political democracy aims to guarantee equality in terms of citizenship. So rightthere you have an inherent and eternal tension: One-man, one-vote clashes with the fact that any one man will be more or less able to influence political discourse through money than another. Economic inequality does not rest easily with political equality.
At the extremes, it follows logically that there will be times when democracy must be protected against capitalism (like now), and other times when capitalism must be protected against democracy, by which I means surges of irrational, idealistic populism (as between 1907 and 1913). There is never a stable equipoise between the two. Yet we want both and need both. Managing the balance is what American politics is really about. The idea that there is no problem, that capitalism can never menace democracy and democracy can never menace capitalism are twin forms of utopianism, the former of the Right, the latter of the Left. I don't understand how anyone cannot see this. But this, I guess, is my problem.
Well, that's enough for now.
I have been thinking of many things, and reading and learning as I go. But I have generated as many questions as I have answers. Let me summarize them with reference to three events.
The European Crisis. What has been going on in Europe, centered around Greece, in the past few weeks has been extraordinary. As luck would have it, The American Interest is coming out in a few weeks with a major cluster called "What Happened to `Europe'?". This is just dumb luck--Joe Joffe suggested doing something like this before the Greek crisis burst open--but I'll take it. The main question is, has the EU and the European "model" hit the wall of reality, and the wall won, or are we just witnessing growing pains that will leave the experiment stronger for the challenge?
I suspect the former, but who knows? The $1 trillion bailout seems impressive, but it is not enough to save the euro. The idea of having one currency and one central bank, but zero political center and 27 separate tax and fiscal policies is crazy. To support a single currency requires a federal arrangement that harmonizes countercyclical processes region-wide. So I have been saying for 15 years. If the Europeans jump to that, they may pull off a great advance. This was always the plan: Do something that won't work unless you do something else, and so on and on, jumping ahead from crisis to crisis. That's a nutty way to run a railroad or build a federal union, but the juggernaut has stayed on track more or less until now because of the shield provided by American military and economic power. Now that, for various reasons, that shield is no longer what it was, we--that is, the Europeans--are in serious trouble.
So what has the EU done? It has not proposed, yet at least, building the federal structures that can support a common currency. Instead, it has faced the problem of financial overextension--too much debt--by extending further--by taking on more debt. And in the process it has cast moral hazard to the howling wind. That is not all. It has allowed the whole wager, all $1 trillion of it, to depend on the prospect of fundamentally altering the nature of Greek government and society. The Greeks (of all people)! This would be funny if it were not so serious, and serious not just for Europeans but for Americans, too. Greeks have been evading taxes since Ottoman times. No one is going to change their sport anytime soon.
Capitalism, Democracy & Law. That's the other main cluster in the forthcoming July/August issue of TAI. And here, two questions have assailed me.
First, all three of my authors writing about Citizens United have focused entirely on the supply side of the problem: how to get money to politicians in ways that do not abet corruption and unfairness. Not one of them has given so much as a single thought to the demand side. The average cost of election campaigns, in constant dollars, has nearly quadrupled in the past quarter century. Why I keep asking; no one knows for sure. I think it has a lot to doing with the cost of TV ads, and rising passions in the culture wars, but there are many, academics as well as shills for corporations, who say no, it's not so. Maybe the issues in the relevant elections brought out more corporate money than ever before, and maybe the financial sector --a.k.a. Wall Street--led the way. But it has to have some explanation; what is it, then? We don't have that explanation because, as best I can tell, no one pays any attention to the demand side, and I think this is a form of intellectual madness.
Second, I wish someone would spend more time clarifying the relationship between capitalism and democracy. We all know the convenient and comforting myth which claims that markets and democracy always support and reinforce each other. Michael Novak has written a lot about that, as have many others. But this is only a partial truth. Yes, there are elements of a market system that build morals; I agree with that. Markets are not evil. But capitalism, because of the inherent inequality of talent and virtue, as Jefferson once put it to Adams (or was it the other way around?) necessarily generates inequality. But political democracy aims to guarantee equality in terms of citizenship. So rightthere you have an inherent and eternal tension: One-man, one-vote clashes with the fact that any one man will be more or less able to influence political discourse through money than another. Economic inequality does not rest easily with political equality.
At the extremes, it follows logically that there will be times when democracy must be protected against capitalism (like now), and other times when capitalism must be protected against democracy, by which I means surges of irrational, idealistic populism (as between 1907 and 1913). There is never a stable equipoise between the two. Yet we want both and need both. Managing the balance is what American politics is really about. The idea that there is no problem, that capitalism can never menace democracy and democracy can never menace capitalism are twin forms of utopianism, the former of the Right, the latter of the Left. I don't understand how anyone cannot see this. But this, I guess, is my problem.
Well, that's enough for now.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Reclaimed Powers
There is plenty to say about the President these days, including about the Nuclear Summit, so-called. But I will resist such comments for now. Instead I want to offer an extended book review on a topic not directly related to goings on in Washington--only indirectly related. Stick with this blog post and you'll see why I say that.
Back in 1987 David Gutmann, a professor of psychiatry and education at Northwestern, published Reclaimed Powers, with a subtitle "Toward a New Psychology of Men and Women in Later Life." It was published by Basic Books, a pretty big, commercial house. The book was not widely reviewed, however, and never attained the status of a must-read classic even in its own field--gerontology--let alone social science in general. I think that's too bad.
Even though its subject matter was hardly in my own field, I read it anyway because I have long believed that one has to balance depth and width in one's reading about human society and culture if one is not to make foolish mistakes of narrowness and myopia. I read it probably in 1988 or 1989, when I had not yet turned 40 years old. Now I am on the other side of 59; and I read it again just this month. What a difference twenty years can make when it comes to understanding and appreciating a book, particularly when it is this book. When I read it the first time, I understood it intellectually, in my head, but I failed to feel it. I was too young. When I was 38, my three children were 8, 4 and 2, and my wife was still capable of bearing children. As you will see, this matters.
So what, basically, did Gutmann argue? He argued that, contrary to common conceptions, when people reach a post-parental age they do not hurtle toward decline and death in a catastrophic spiral, but rather acquire new capacities to discern and act. There is developmental growth in the third third of life just as there is in the first and second thirds. He argues further that this is not culture-bound, but universal. It is organic, biological in the individual because the social character of the species has made it so through the slow but steady and inexorable exertions of evolution. These powers of the third third of life are functional in evolutionary terms, in other words; that's why they exist: They have been selected for.
Gutmann apparently understood a long time ago that the infamous nature-nurture debate is a sterile, misleading miasma of ignorance. When one is dealing with an inherently social species, like all primate species, it is not an either/or proposition. Nurture, via culture, is not separate from "nature" but co-dependent with it. Human societies perform certain functions via cultural constructs that are species-functional, and over time these functions shape societies' individual members. Groups of early humans who did not manage to create culture--shared, idealized understandings of forces acknowledged to be loose in the world--were at a severe survival disadvantage and in fact did not survive or did so only at the margins. Hence the recent argument by Nicholas Wade, for example, that religion exists today because it was species functional: By advancing culture it advanced cooperation and morale, hence providing advantages to the groups that developed it to higher levels than other groups. Anyway.....back to Gutmann.
Now what, specifically, is the evolutionary purpose of third-third of life developmentalism? It has to do with parenting. Gutmann argues that humans make a basic trade-off: Because our babies are born stupid and helpless, parenting (what Gutmann calls the parental emergency) takes longer and requires more sacrifice than it does in other species. But it pays off because, over the long run, relying on the development of the neocortex to produce new learning is much more effective an evolutionary strategy than relying on habitual, instinctual old learning, as in most animals.
Gutmann argues that effective human parenting is inherently difficult, however, for it must provide not only physical but also emotional security for the psychologically malleable child. Parents need help in coping with their protracted burdens, and with the personal sacrifices they must made to meet them. They get this help, he argues, in two ways: women get the help they need via the extended family in traditional folk cultures, and men get the help they need through the vehicle of culture.
The extended family helps women to sublimate their capacity for aggression, and culture helps men sublimate their longing for autonomy. Key to both are grandparents, or what Gutmann calls emeritus parents. Grandparents not only teach their own children how to be parents when instruction is required, but they reinforce the larger structures--extended family and culture (mainly religion)--that help buffer the extraordinary demands of parenting. This transgenerational conception of parenting animals who depend on the new learning of the neocortex allows Gutmann to state: "We do not have elders because we have a human gift and modern capacity for keeping people alive; instead, we are human because we have elders."
More than that, Gutmann argues, psychiatrist that he is, male and female children are socialized differently as they practice up, so to speak, for their roles as mothers and fathers. This development, like all human development, goes through three stages: surgent, active and sculpted. Girls lose their "tom-boy" aggressiveness, their future-oriented instrumental capacities and turn inward to hearth and home. They become gentle and more docile. Boys learn to live at the perimeter, the dangerous outskirts of the village; they become aggressive protectors of the inside. As parents, they continue these roles in active and then sculpted, institutionalized ways that, while they vary in appearance from culture to culture, are universal in the critical function they perform. Females becoming nurturing mothers, fathers warrior protectors of their wives and children.
Ah, but when kids grow up and leave the nest and the post-parental phase of life dawns, these tendencies are reversed. Men gradually become more withdrawn, gentle and passive, more present than future oriented. They regain the part of themselves they muffled during the parental emergency. Woman, on the other hand, because more assertive, more aggressive, more outward- and future-looking, also regaining the part of themselves they muffled during the parental emergency. In a sense, in older life men and women exchange roles, but as they do they gain, or regain, abilities to see and understand that make them ideal grandparents and pillars of the larger society.
Reclaimed Powers is a serious, social science book, with field-work-derived data explained in it. It most likely won't serve you well as a beach book in the weeks and months ahead. If you want to understand the data Gutmann draws on and how he draws on it, and if you want to go beyond the bare summary of his argument I provide here, you'll have to read the book. But you must know that in describing the new developmental capacities of the third third of life Gutmann also draws on ethnography and folklore in a most charming and illuminating way. Just about every culture, he points out, tells stories of strong older women--whether as scary witches and demons in the afterlife, or as priestesses, sexy nymphs and the like. There are also universal folk tropes that describe the occult, mystical powers of "strange" old men. Gutmann doesn't quite make this point explicit, but I will make it for him: Young men are creatures of the spacial frontier, out on the perimeter protecting the village or raiding other villages. Old men are also out on the frontier, but the frontier of time, not space. Gutmann beautifully describes the pre-literate mind as being all about boundaries, and of course this is confirmed brilliantly in the work of the late Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger, 1966, in particular).
The universality of these cultural representations, Gutmann says, proves how deep these tacit social understandings go, and shows that they are species-wide and evolutionarily driven. It can't be just coincidence that so many pre-literate cultures with no contact among them all hatch images of old men and old women that are discernibly, typologically so similar. How can it be that just about every traditional society, for example, has the figure of the matriarch, the assertive older woman, who owns the key to the pantry and acts through her eldest son--and terrorizes his wife, her daughter-in-law--to wield social power? This is no coincidence, though I suspect someone intimately familiar with endogamous Pashtun or Arab societies would have an easier time recognizing these idealized characters than most modern Westerners.
The most interesting part of the book is in some ways the least developed. But this is not Gutmann's fault. He had to present his methodology and his data, as all social scientists must, and like a good social scientist he was reluctant to go too far beyond where his data allowed. Speculation is fine, to a point; yet I find Gutmann's end-of-book speculations ripe for further thought and development. (So I asked him, now 85 years old, to do that, and he has agreed to do it in The American Interest; I look forward to this.) So let me characterize these speculations.
First, since Gutmann insists that the capacities of the third-third of life are species-engrained, he wants to know what happens when those surgent urges no longer have the psychosocial "space" of the traditional folk society in which to play out. What happens when there is no village housing the extended family, so that the surgent may become active and then sculpted within the social matrix? What happens when the historically natural kin-contiguity of the three-generational family falls to the nuclear family and the community-sundering mobility of modern societies? What happens when religion is no longer at the center of culture? What happens in secular cities to the active developmentalism of the third third of life? Does it still get sculpted into institutional form, or does it wither, become displaced or distorted?
Without going into detail, Gutmann argues that in those circumstances--most characteristically defined by secular cities--in which there is no outlet, no psychosocial space for the role of emeritus parents, older people, especially men, tend to lose a sense of purpose, to lose their sense of dignity and, rather too often, their sanity. Gutmann, it is fair to say (though he is not explicit on the point), sees dementia as a more complex ailment than does a conventional gerontologist--as a social condition of the soul as much as an individual condition of the body. But he goes further: He argues that in societies where elders cannot play the role for which evolution has shaped them, children suffer too--indeed, everybody suffers. Here it is worth quoting Gutmann at some length:
What Gutmann is doing here is establishing the links between the role of male gerontocracy, religion and the capacity for culture in a society. No old men in positions of respect and religious dignity, he essentially says, no culture--no shared sense of social origins and understandings. Culture has to be sacralized, one way or another, to be effective. He goes on:
What happens in secular cities? We see examples not, says Gutmann, of changed cultures but of no, or less, culture. There are fewer shared understandings. There is no sacralized means of producing common ideals except--Heaven forbid--politics. Modernization and urbanization, for various reasons the book explains, erode the conditions under which gerontocracy can perform its age-old functions for society. We are deculturized. Despite the psychiatric language, you will get the idea:
In other words, the phrase "urban jungle" is not just a metaphor. Despite the apparent thickness of civilization in an urban environment, in a deculturized city individuals are limited by fewer, not more, social constraints.
Deculturation has broad social implications. Gutmann argues that the egalitarian ideal can eventually bring about consequences that destroy the founding culture--and here Gutmann echoes somewhat some of the arguments of Daniel Bell and others in describing the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The impulse to equality, he says, which first aimed to end restrictions on ordinary human rights, "ends by politicizing the complaint against existential restrictions." The result is that values are no longer thought of as objective, or as having a validity outside of the moment. "In recent times," said Gutmann,
Gutmann then describes the congealing potential of strong culture--where a great deal is shared among members of a society--and contrasts it with those not of a different but of a weak culture. Under conditions of deculturation,
In short, more "progressive", individualist "culture" actually sets the stage for a far less liberal society. Of course we already know that the postmodernist emphasis on "narratives" in which only women can understand women, whites whites, blacks blacks, gays gays and so on resembles nothing more than the racial "essences" theory of fascism. So Gutmann's observation should not surprise us. Indeed, we should be able to see that the relativization and democratization of value production has not led to a more tolerant society; it has led rather to a more atomized one. We have not replaced an intolerant, narrowly defined culture with a wider, more tolerant one; we have replaced it with less culture altogether. We have reduced what we hold in common, and so forced ourselves back onto narrower bands of consanguinity. We are thus almost all now hyphenated Americans as a result. That is how people speak and think in these recent decades, especially in our cities, and now you can see why. Still don't believe it? Walk though any American center city area with your eyes wide open, and you will believe.
Gutmann also is able to explain why the dethronement of the elders leads to a rash of social maladies far beyond the pale of gerontology:
The aged suffer particularly from this as they lose their special developmental milieus, their special bases for self-esteem, and their traditional character as hero, taking on their modern character, as victim, instead. But it is not only the aged who suffer. The revolution against gerontocracy, Gutmann points out,
I think there may be implications to Gutmann's analysis that he himself does not cite. For example, many scholars have argued that the inability of modern secular and highly urbanized societies to reproduce themselves, and so fall into demographic crisis, is related to the economics of raising children, about which William McNeill has written so brilliantly. But the freakonomics fad notwithstanding, economics is not, as usual, capable of fashioning a whole explanation for any broadly social phenomenon: Parenting in current circumstances in the secular West is not only expensive, it is very difficult and even dangerous when attempted by the socially and culturally unbuffered nuclear family. And so Gutmann is able to conclude, "When the elders are diminished, much of our common life is eventually diminished with them. And as undisguised narcissism tends increasingly to become the coinage of social relations, all unproductive, dependent cohorts--children, the handicapped, the aged--are put at risk. . . . Geronticide and infanticide, elder abuse and child abuse, predict to each other across societies."
Of course they do; and humans have tended not to like either form of murder, which may well be one reason our distant ancestors favored farming villages over hunter-gatherer existence, because the former did not require abandoning the very old, the very young and the weak. And now we can understand better why Abraham Joshua Heschel used to insist that one judge any society by how it treats its very old and its very young, because he too realized that these were inextricably linked.
Let's end now with one last remark from Gutmann, after which he will have earned a well-deserved rest from speaking:
Again, I think the potential to speculate beyond Gutmann's last sentence back in 1989 is irresistible. What, specifically, might the signs of a culture brought down be?
Why do we have a society in America that undervalues thrift and savings, and a set of financial and economic elites prone to generate chaos because they have forgotten the difference between getting rich and producing wealth?
Why do we have such astronomically high divorce rates and populations of single-dwellers? Why more broadly do affluence and loneliness walk hand in hand, giving rise as they go to our substance abuse contagion? Why do so many people, again primarily urban dwellers, seem unable to delay the gratification of any desire and so give rise to legions of otherwise decent people who can imagine abortion as a form of casual birth control?
Why can we not, in an age that claims to be environmentally aware, take inter-generational responsibility seriously--just look at the deficit and national debt? Why can we not resist the urge to marketize any gadget or gimmick no matter how little we have thought about the consequences?
Could it be that we have shattered the transmission belt by which basic values are passed down in sharable form in our society, severed that gossamer thread of memory which preserves what we have learned over the generations? Indeed, have we fallen big time for the biggest con there is--indulgence masquerading in the garb of personal "liberation"? Have the baby-boomers perhaps failed ever to grow up? Are they stalled in a kind of permanent adolescence, the most selfish and clueless generation in American history?
I am still a big Dylan fan, but I have to note that we were once told that "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and also not to trust anyone over 30. Well, the times have indeed changed, and now we can hardly trust anyone at all. Go find a sad old man and do something to make him happy, to respect his dignity. You'll feel better, too.
Back in 1987 David Gutmann, a professor of psychiatry and education at Northwestern, published Reclaimed Powers, with a subtitle "Toward a New Psychology of Men and Women in Later Life." It was published by Basic Books, a pretty big, commercial house. The book was not widely reviewed, however, and never attained the status of a must-read classic even in its own field--gerontology--let alone social science in general. I think that's too bad.
Even though its subject matter was hardly in my own field, I read it anyway because I have long believed that one has to balance depth and width in one's reading about human society and culture if one is not to make foolish mistakes of narrowness and myopia. I read it probably in 1988 or 1989, when I had not yet turned 40 years old. Now I am on the other side of 59; and I read it again just this month. What a difference twenty years can make when it comes to understanding and appreciating a book, particularly when it is this book. When I read it the first time, I understood it intellectually, in my head, but I failed to feel it. I was too young. When I was 38, my three children were 8, 4 and 2, and my wife was still capable of bearing children. As you will see, this matters.
So what, basically, did Gutmann argue? He argued that, contrary to common conceptions, when people reach a post-parental age they do not hurtle toward decline and death in a catastrophic spiral, but rather acquire new capacities to discern and act. There is developmental growth in the third third of life just as there is in the first and second thirds. He argues further that this is not culture-bound, but universal. It is organic, biological in the individual because the social character of the species has made it so through the slow but steady and inexorable exertions of evolution. These powers of the third third of life are functional in evolutionary terms, in other words; that's why they exist: They have been selected for.
Gutmann apparently understood a long time ago that the infamous nature-nurture debate is a sterile, misleading miasma of ignorance. When one is dealing with an inherently social species, like all primate species, it is not an either/or proposition. Nurture, via culture, is not separate from "nature" but co-dependent with it. Human societies perform certain functions via cultural constructs that are species-functional, and over time these functions shape societies' individual members. Groups of early humans who did not manage to create culture--shared, idealized understandings of forces acknowledged to be loose in the world--were at a severe survival disadvantage and in fact did not survive or did so only at the margins. Hence the recent argument by Nicholas Wade, for example, that religion exists today because it was species functional: By advancing culture it advanced cooperation and morale, hence providing advantages to the groups that developed it to higher levels than other groups. Anyway.....back to Gutmann.
Now what, specifically, is the evolutionary purpose of third-third of life developmentalism? It has to do with parenting. Gutmann argues that humans make a basic trade-off: Because our babies are born stupid and helpless, parenting (what Gutmann calls the parental emergency) takes longer and requires more sacrifice than it does in other species. But it pays off because, over the long run, relying on the development of the neocortex to produce new learning is much more effective an evolutionary strategy than relying on habitual, instinctual old learning, as in most animals.
Gutmann argues that effective human parenting is inherently difficult, however, for it must provide not only physical but also emotional security for the psychologically malleable child. Parents need help in coping with their protracted burdens, and with the personal sacrifices they must made to meet them. They get this help, he argues, in two ways: women get the help they need via the extended family in traditional folk cultures, and men get the help they need through the vehicle of culture.
The extended family helps women to sublimate their capacity for aggression, and culture helps men sublimate their longing for autonomy. Key to both are grandparents, or what Gutmann calls emeritus parents. Grandparents not only teach their own children how to be parents when instruction is required, but they reinforce the larger structures--extended family and culture (mainly religion)--that help buffer the extraordinary demands of parenting. This transgenerational conception of parenting animals who depend on the new learning of the neocortex allows Gutmann to state: "We do not have elders because we have a human gift and modern capacity for keeping people alive; instead, we are human because we have elders."
More than that, Gutmann argues, psychiatrist that he is, male and female children are socialized differently as they practice up, so to speak, for their roles as mothers and fathers. This development, like all human development, goes through three stages: surgent, active and sculpted. Girls lose their "tom-boy" aggressiveness, their future-oriented instrumental capacities and turn inward to hearth and home. They become gentle and more docile. Boys learn to live at the perimeter, the dangerous outskirts of the village; they become aggressive protectors of the inside. As parents, they continue these roles in active and then sculpted, institutionalized ways that, while they vary in appearance from culture to culture, are universal in the critical function they perform. Females becoming nurturing mothers, fathers warrior protectors of their wives and children.
Ah, but when kids grow up and leave the nest and the post-parental phase of life dawns, these tendencies are reversed. Men gradually become more withdrawn, gentle and passive, more present than future oriented. They regain the part of themselves they muffled during the parental emergency. Woman, on the other hand, because more assertive, more aggressive, more outward- and future-looking, also regaining the part of themselves they muffled during the parental emergency. In a sense, in older life men and women exchange roles, but as they do they gain, or regain, abilities to see and understand that make them ideal grandparents and pillars of the larger society.
Reclaimed Powers is a serious, social science book, with field-work-derived data explained in it. It most likely won't serve you well as a beach book in the weeks and months ahead. If you want to understand the data Gutmann draws on and how he draws on it, and if you want to go beyond the bare summary of his argument I provide here, you'll have to read the book. But you must know that in describing the new developmental capacities of the third third of life Gutmann also draws on ethnography and folklore in a most charming and illuminating way. Just about every culture, he points out, tells stories of strong older women--whether as scary witches and demons in the afterlife, or as priestesses, sexy nymphs and the like. There are also universal folk tropes that describe the occult, mystical powers of "strange" old men. Gutmann doesn't quite make this point explicit, but I will make it for him: Young men are creatures of the spacial frontier, out on the perimeter protecting the village or raiding other villages. Old men are also out on the frontier, but the frontier of time, not space. Gutmann beautifully describes the pre-literate mind as being all about boundaries, and of course this is confirmed brilliantly in the work of the late Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger, 1966, in particular).
The universality of these cultural representations, Gutmann says, proves how deep these tacit social understandings go, and shows that they are species-wide and evolutionarily driven. It can't be just coincidence that so many pre-literate cultures with no contact among them all hatch images of old men and old women that are discernibly, typologically so similar. How can it be that just about every traditional society, for example, has the figure of the matriarch, the assertive older woman, who owns the key to the pantry and acts through her eldest son--and terrorizes his wife, her daughter-in-law--to wield social power? This is no coincidence, though I suspect someone intimately familiar with endogamous Pashtun or Arab societies would have an easier time recognizing these idealized characters than most modern Westerners.
The most interesting part of the book is in some ways the least developed. But this is not Gutmann's fault. He had to present his methodology and his data, as all social scientists must, and like a good social scientist he was reluctant to go too far beyond where his data allowed. Speculation is fine, to a point; yet I find Gutmann's end-of-book speculations ripe for further thought and development. (So I asked him, now 85 years old, to do that, and he has agreed to do it in The American Interest; I look forward to this.) So let me characterize these speculations.
First, since Gutmann insists that the capacities of the third-third of life are species-engrained, he wants to know what happens when those surgent urges no longer have the psychosocial "space" of the traditional folk society in which to play out. What happens when there is no village housing the extended family, so that the surgent may become active and then sculpted within the social matrix? What happens when the historically natural kin-contiguity of the three-generational family falls to the nuclear family and the community-sundering mobility of modern societies? What happens when religion is no longer at the center of culture? What happens in secular cities to the active developmentalism of the third third of life? Does it still get sculpted into institutional form, or does it wither, become displaced or distorted?
Without going into detail, Gutmann argues that in those circumstances--most characteristically defined by secular cities--in which there is no outlet, no psychosocial space for the role of emeritus parents, older people, especially men, tend to lose a sense of purpose, to lose their sense of dignity and, rather too often, their sanity. Gutmann, it is fair to say (though he is not explicit on the point), sees dementia as a more complex ailment than does a conventional gerontologist--as a social condition of the soul as much as an individual condition of the body. But he goes further: He argues that in societies where elders cannot play the role for which evolution has shaped them, children suffer too--indeed, everybody suffers. Here it is worth quoting Gutmann at some length:
...the "natural" form of human governance. . . is gerontocracy: matriarchy for the extended family, elder patriarchy for the more public and ritual side of traditional folk life. . . . [C]ulture is a system of shared understandings: of what is good and bad, possible and impossible, thinkable and unthinkable. . . . A culture is a system of idealized understandings. Ultimately, culture is what you will die for, or what you will willingly send your sons to die for. It is this idealized and enduring aspect of culture that older men represent, making it real for themselves and their people. More specifically, older men are best equipped to identify themselves with the founding or origin myths of their culture.. . .Culture is the unique meaning of an otherwise ordinary society.
What Gutmann is doing here is establishing the links between the role of male gerontocracy, religion and the capacity for culture in a society. No old men in positions of respect and religious dignity, he essentially says, no culture--no shared sense of social origins and understandings. Culture has to be sacralized, one way or another, to be effective. He goes on:
Via the elders, the mythic past and the mundane present are interpenetrated, and the climate of mythic origins is brought forward, into the here and now. . . .The traditional older man, by tending culture, serves society as much as he is served by it. He preserves culture by making its mythic armatures real and available for the larger group. Older men thereby help to provoke the experiences upon which social bonds are based: experiences of automatic familiarity, of common membership in a unique collectivity. For when separate individuals hold the same ideas, they become familiars to each other, automatic comrades, even though they are not directly known to each other.
What happens in secular cities? We see examples not, says Gutmann, of changed cultures but of no, or less, culture. There are fewer shared understandings. There is no sacralized means of producing common ideals except--Heaven forbid--politics. Modernization and urbanization, for various reasons the book explains, erode the conditions under which gerontocracy can perform its age-old functions for society. We are deculturized. Despite the psychiatric language, you will get the idea:
When urban culture loses its power to bind and transform narcissism in all age groups to the collective weal, egocentricity increasingly becomes the general coinage of social relations. The aged, who depend on the goodwill and the inner control of younger, stronger individuals, as well as on external controls that are maintained by a strong cultural consensus, suffer accordingly.
In other words, the phrase "urban jungle" is not just a metaphor. Despite the apparent thickness of civilization in an urban environment, in a deculturized city individuals are limited by fewer, not more, social constraints.
Deculturation has broad social implications. Gutmann argues that the egalitarian ideal can eventually bring about consequences that destroy the founding culture--and here Gutmann echoes somewhat some of the arguments of Daniel Bell and others in describing the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The impulse to equality, he says, which first aimed to end restrictions on ordinary human rights, "ends by politicizing the complaint against existential restrictions." The result is that values are no longer thought of as objective, or as having a validity outside of the moment. "In recent times," said Gutmann,
the process of value formation has been democratized, taken out of the institutional province and given over to the individual. Moving thus, from the social to the personal sphere, values lose their shared and objective character, to become private and subjective. In effect, we have democratized and relativized the process of value formation to the point where each citizen is conceded the right to decide personally what values should be and by what standards the individual should be judged. Outside of a courtroom, the assertion 'I'm just doing my own thing,' comes to be the ultimate justification for any kind of behavior.
Gutmann then describes the congealing potential of strong culture--where a great deal is shared among members of a society--and contrasts it with those not of a different but of a weak culture. Under conditions of deculturation,
narcissistic preference dictates lines of affiliation. I can extent the awareness of familiarity and selfness only to those who are like me in the most concrete, asocial, immediately sensible respects; those who share my skin color, the same body conformation, the same genitalia, the same sexual appetites, and the same age group as myself. In effect, with deculturation, the principles of association are no longer based on shared standards but instead become racist, ageist, sexist and homoerotic.
In short, more "progressive", individualist "culture" actually sets the stage for a far less liberal society. Of course we already know that the postmodernist emphasis on "narratives" in which only women can understand women, whites whites, blacks blacks, gays gays and so on resembles nothing more than the racial "essences" theory of fascism. So Gutmann's observation should not surprise us. Indeed, we should be able to see that the relativization and democratization of value production has not led to a more tolerant society; it has led rather to a more atomized one. We have not replaced an intolerant, narrowly defined culture with a wider, more tolerant one; we have replaced it with less culture altogether. We have reduced what we hold in common, and so forced ourselves back onto narrower bands of consanguinity. We are thus almost all now hyphenated Americans as a result. That is how people speak and think in these recent decades, especially in our cities, and now you can see why. Still don't believe it? Walk though any American center city area with your eyes wide open, and you will believe.
Gutmann also is able to explain why the dethronement of the elders leads to a rash of social maladies far beyond the pale of gerontology:
Because they are no longer legitimated by some sacred principle, cultural rules themselves come to be regarded as restrictions, as arbitrary games, rather than as routes to power, personal significance, and self-esteem. Soon enough it becomes apparent, particularly to the young, that honor and conformity are incompatible, and that power is to be gained through antisocial rather than prosocial acts. As the rebel and psychopath acquire glamour, the social order, which depends on automatic trust among strangers, is increasingly compromised.
The aged suffer particularly from this as they lose their special developmental milieus, their special bases for self-esteem, and their traditional character as hero, taking on their modern character, as victim, instead. But it is not only the aged who suffer. The revolution against gerontocracy, Gutmann points out,
intended to liberate the young, ends by putting children at risk. The two great social structures, extended family and culture, that protect and generate strong elders, are precisely those that protect human parenting and underwrite healthy children. By providing meanings that compensate for deprivation, culture helps make the human family and adequate human parenting possible. Given a strong culture, young adults will routinely, even cheerfully, enter into the chronic emergency of parenthood. . . . But as culture loses the capacity to endow deprivation with significance, children . . .are among the first to suffer from the primary narcissism and aggression, released by deculturation, that the elders once helped hold in check. . . . [T]he unsupported, isolate nuclear family no longer remains a staging ground for child development, but instead too often becomes the setting for child abuse, physical as well as emotional.
I think there may be implications to Gutmann's analysis that he himself does not cite. For example, many scholars have argued that the inability of modern secular and highly urbanized societies to reproduce themselves, and so fall into demographic crisis, is related to the economics of raising children, about which William McNeill has written so brilliantly. But the freakonomics fad notwithstanding, economics is not, as usual, capable of fashioning a whole explanation for any broadly social phenomenon: Parenting in current circumstances in the secular West is not only expensive, it is very difficult and even dangerous when attempted by the socially and culturally unbuffered nuclear family. And so Gutmann is able to conclude, "When the elders are diminished, much of our common life is eventually diminished with them. And as undisguised narcissism tends increasingly to become the coinage of social relations, all unproductive, dependent cohorts--children, the handicapped, the aged--are put at risk. . . . Geronticide and infanticide, elder abuse and child abuse, predict to each other across societies."
Of course they do; and humans have tended not to like either form of murder, which may well be one reason our distant ancestors favored farming villages over hunter-gatherer existence, because the former did not require abandoning the very old, the very young and the weak. And now we can understand better why Abraham Joshua Heschel used to insist that one judge any society by how it treats its very old and its very young, because he too realized that these were inextricably linked.
Let's end now with one last remark from Gutmann, after which he will have earned a well-deserved rest from speaking:
Ultimately, children are the major victims of the indulgent, revisionist, relativistic games that we play with our culture. . . . In our haste to be modern, in our revolutionary rage against tradition and gerontocracy, we have brought down the fathers and humbled the aged. In so doing, we are also bringing down the culture that sustains us all.
Again, I think the potential to speculate beyond Gutmann's last sentence back in 1989 is irresistible. What, specifically, might the signs of a culture brought down be?
Why do we have a society in America that undervalues thrift and savings, and a set of financial and economic elites prone to generate chaos because they have forgotten the difference between getting rich and producing wealth?
Why do we have such astronomically high divorce rates and populations of single-dwellers? Why more broadly do affluence and loneliness walk hand in hand, giving rise as they go to our substance abuse contagion? Why do so many people, again primarily urban dwellers, seem unable to delay the gratification of any desire and so give rise to legions of otherwise decent people who can imagine abortion as a form of casual birth control?
Why can we not, in an age that claims to be environmentally aware, take inter-generational responsibility seriously--just look at the deficit and national debt? Why can we not resist the urge to marketize any gadget or gimmick no matter how little we have thought about the consequences?
Could it be that we have shattered the transmission belt by which basic values are passed down in sharable form in our society, severed that gossamer thread of memory which preserves what we have learned over the generations? Indeed, have we fallen big time for the biggest con there is--indulgence masquerading in the garb of personal "liberation"? Have the baby-boomers perhaps failed ever to grow up? Are they stalled in a kind of permanent adolescence, the most selfish and clueless generation in American history?
I am still a big Dylan fan, but I have to note that we were once told that "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and also not to trust anyone over 30. Well, the times have indeed changed, and now we can hardly trust anyone at all. Go find a sad old man and do something to make him happy, to respect his dignity. You'll feel better, too.
Monday, March 29, 2010
An Eroding Benefit of the Doubt
As those who have been reading this blog since it debuted about 14 months ago know, I sort of like President Obama, saw some positive qualities in him, have wished him and his Administration well, and given him the benefit of the doubt from starters' blues and other pratfalls of a Presidential first year. I still wish him well, but the benefit of my doubt is fast eroding. My sense overall now is that this is a smart man who nonetheless doesn't know very much and so repeatedly makes bad judgments. I see a pattern here, and I don't like it.
Before listing the main examples of his poor judgment so far, I want to take a moment to explain what judgment is in politics. The way I see it, there are four stages in the policy process. People who've never been in the government seem to think they all amount to more or less the same thing, but that's just not so.
The first stage is analysis: How does one define a problem and how does one understand it.
The second stage is prioritization: Based on the analysis of what's wrong, what needs fixing first, second, and so on. You can't do everything at once even if politics lets you, and it rarely lets you, so you have to choose.
The third stage is policy formulation: Once you know what you want to do, you have to plot a way to do it. This is NOT the same at all as stage two, and this is what outsiders to government tend most often to misunderstand. Once you have defined a goal, you have to assign the task, organize it, and budget for it. This will almost always involve a fair number of people in different parts of government. Anyone who thinks this sort of thing somehow just takes care of itself is very naive.
The fourth stage is policy implementation. Once you have all the people organized and pointed in the same direction, you have to actually do what you plan to do until the outcome you seek is achieved. Again, this does not happen automatically because reality can be recalcitrant. Stuff happens. Others react, and you have to adjust, push, pull, bend and otherwise see your policy through. (This is what the Bush Administration was especially bad at.)
In my view, the Obama Administration seems to be messing up at very basic stages one and two. Here are a few examples, and I will keep it brief, since I intend to elaborate in future posts.
First, let's talk about health care and domestic policy.
The first major policy initiative the Administration should have taken on was not about health care. Health care was going to be hard from the start. It is large, it is encrusted with lobbies and special interests, it is very complex and people disagree sharply about it. That was obvious a year ago and more. The Administration should have focused on energy. Today there is less disagreement on energy policy than there used to be; whether one is a conservationist, a politicized environmentalist, a national security expert or whatever, everyone wants to do more or less the same things in energy policy. It would have been wise to have had an energy bill before Copenhagen. It would have been wise to start with something on which a victory would not have taken more than a year, just to get these newbies' feet wet. It would have conduced to a more bipartisan atmosphere, too. But no: These guys made the same mistake the Clinton Administration made (also with health care), and the Carter Administration (with energy, ironically) before them: Starting out with the hardest thing, failing to do it right, and losing political momentum and capital instead of gaining it as a result.
If anyone had asked me, I'd have said, "Start with energy, and focus on innovation and job-creation within that area." Of course the Administration had to focus on the economy, and it did; but it did not stay focused. Financial reform has lagged and its creative swath has been diminished over time by lobbies because the White House was obsessed with health care. Is this an example of blindness caused by ideology? The ideology of redistributive justice for the poor? Could be.
Ah, but you say, Obama succeeded with health care in the end, did he not? No, he didn't. He got a bill passed, yes, but it is simply wrong to call it a health care bill. It is not about health care; it does not even address the reasons for the rising costs, inefficiencies and perverse incentives in the health care system. The bill that passed is only about the insurance aspect of the system. And it is a bad bill, and a disingenuous one as it has been "explained" to the nation. I am glad it passed anyway, or which more in a moment, but, as I have said, this bill does nothing about the real issues: the for-profit structure of most of the system; the technological dynamism that is the main reason for rising costs; the twin monsters of tort disfigurement and defensive medicine that spends wildly disproportionate sums on old people who are not going to get well; the costs of medical education and re-education; and I could go on. All this bill does is make larger an inefficient system. I don't care what the CBO says: This bill will not prove budget friendly or even budget neutral, not least because most of the things that have to happen to make it budget friendly are extremely unlikely to happen--and every honest person knows that. And certainly private expenditures on medical care will rise as long as nothing is done to cap the real causes of cost increases, and that means insurance costs will rise all around too. The bill also makes doing business more expensive for the insurance companies (whether justifiably or not is not the issue for the moment), and anyone who believes that they will not find some way to pass along those costs to consumers is a nitwit. And those who think the bill is just great because it taxes tanning salons and obligates employers to make room for nursing mothers and forces fast-food joints to reveal the contents of the crap they serve--well, that's all very nice but it doesn't amount to hill of turds in the larger scope of things.
So the Administration chose the wrong issue to start with, and it chose the wrong part of health care to start with as well. I think this was bad judgment based on bad analysis.
As I said, I am still glad the bill passed -- and now I will detour to explain why.
It is because, for one thing, in this country we pretty much never solve any problem with one bill. Now we've shaken things up at least a little, and maybe five bills and a decade from now we'll have made some progress. Maybe. A good sign is that the Republicans are not saying they want the status quo ante but something better. That's a good sign.
As important, there is an ideological and dare I say it, moral aspect, to this issue--and here I share the President's view--if I'm right about what it is.
We have a still-undeveloped social idea in the United States, a legacy of how the nation formed from immigrants on a large continent. But that social idea has been growing, little by little, and of course the civil rights movement was the big event in that regard in the second half of the past century. We as a nation increasingly care about basic fairness for all American citizens, and that's a good thing; that's the sound of our social idea building. And now, finally, for reasons I won't go into for reasons of space, the concept of fairness has been applied to health care.
How did this happen? Partly it has been a matter of spectacle. There has long been something profoundly unjust, as well as inefficient, about the availability of decent health care in this country, especially for children. But what changed is that the insurance companies have been especially stupid lately in their sheer venality and cruelty. No one in the political class in this country, or almost no one, really cares about poor people. But the insurance companies were stupid enough to fuck with middle class people who know how to make a racket, i.e., who are not silenced by the collective action problem. The complaints and outrages of a couple dozen middle class cases made more difference politically than the continuous shafting of genuinely disadvantages people. And the companies did not plan on Barack Obama being elected President. Unlike Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he actually cares about poor people and about basic fairness.
Americans are not born on a level playing field still. That's just the way it is, and Obama knows this. In my view, government's job in a truly liberal vision (not leftist vision) is to create a level playing field for basics -- education, health/nutrition, public safety. It is not to tilt the field toward anyone, whether toward the poor as a form of reparations, or toward the rich in all the entitlements and corporate subsidies we put up with. This is the now-obsolete liberal vision of Teddy Roosevelt and William Allen White, the way "liberal" was defined between around the end of the 19th century through to the New Deal. It is the kind of domestic policy liberal I am. I think that as an effort to level the playing field in basic health care, the bill helps to build our social idea. It tells our poor that society does care about them; that they are part of this nation, too, and deserve to be treated fairly.
And I have to say it: The Tea Party types who are shouting "socialist" at this White House are really saying, rather a lot of them anyway, that we don't give a shit about poor people, they are not part of "my" America, not part of "my" in-group. A lot of this is just ethno-chauvinist selfishness, adorned with not a little bigotry.
Of course, not all of them see things this way. In their simple-minded world, they think there IS a level playing field because, as true Enlightenment-deluded Americans, they believe in primordial individualism. If someone is poor and can't afford health insurance for themselves and their children, it's because, the Tea Partiers believe, they don't have good values: no work ethic, no sense of provenance, no ability to delay gratification, no sense of inter-generational responsibility. From a strictly sociological point of view, a lot of poor people in fact do lack these values, but it's not because they're morally inferior to those who have them. It's because, for the most part, they have been born into social matrices that have made it hard to impossible to acquire them. There's no level playing field in the critical, defining social context of family, extended family and community. And blindness of this among those who are railing against the Administration and this bill is what, in my view, a Republican makes. This is why I have never been and can never be a Republican, though I have worked on the foreign policy side of a Republican Administration. Their basic analysis of what is wrong, is wrong. The President's basic analysis of what is wrong in this regard is right; it's just that, unfortunately, all his other judgments are wrong. He is not, I think, a level-playing field liberal like me. He is a tilt-the-playing field, de facto pro-reparations left-liberal, all dressed up in a pettyfoggery of legalisms. I think he is, anyway. Not my cup of meat, as I have tried to make clear, but still better than a Tea-Party Republican.
Now let's look at bad judgments in foreign policy. There is so much to discuss; one hardly knows where to start. So let's start with the Jews.
Obama shows every sign of being Jewcentric. He seems to think that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to all issues in the region, and the Palestinian issue the center of the center. He believes in linkage (as does, it seems, Jim Jones, his NSA). And he is mainly wrong; his analysis is in error, and so his priorities are wrong. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not the center of the universe, or even of the Middle East. Most Arabs who are not Palestinians do not give a practical shit, only an abstract one, about the Palestinians, whom they have taken turns abusing for the past half century. And the idea that Israeli settlements are at the center of the center of the center is also wrong.
So what does Obama do, with the help of his Jewcentric Jewish friends Emanuel and Axelrod, he goes blundering into the Palestinian morass without understanding how it works, and gets burned. He makes things worse, throws things backwards. That we are even using the phrase proximity talks just shows how backwards this all is.
I thought they had learned a lesson, but apparently not: With the Biden trip affair, they did the same dumb thing again, and made it all worse again. They are now back to where they were: bashing the Jews, holding out engagement to the Iranians, and, as a result, scaring the feces out of the Saudis, Jordanians, Gulfies, Egyptians and so on. And over what? A housing project in East Jerusalem that, even by Palestinian standards, isn't a big deal. Everyone knows this neighborhood will remain part of Israel if there is ever a settlement.
The analysis here, of linkage, is wrong, and the priorities assigned, are as well. Iran and its weapons programs are the problem, and the regional audience is watching, knowing full well that great powers are essentially in the protection business. If you bash your friends and propitiate your enemies, whether in Iran or Syria or Lebanon, you will make your enemies bolder and your friends search for alternative cover. This is not a country-club tennis court kind of competition; this is the Middle East.
How on earth can an urban politician, from Chicago of all places, not understand this? Ideology perhaps, like the kind that seems to have persuaded Obama that the only justification for Israel is the Holocaust? What this man does not know about the Middle East seems pretty extensive.
Or let's take, finally, Russia and arms control. The problem we have with Russia is pretty complicated, to be sure. A lot of it happens to be our fault.
The Russians are in a surly historical mood. They lost an empire, and blame us for taking advantage of them. They don't think they lost the Cold War; they think, not without some justification, that they got rid of their damned Communists mostly themselves. They accepted a territorial settlement to the Cold War that put them in borders from back around the time of Catherine the Great. They were reconciled to losing Eastern Europe. Many if not most were even OK with losing the non-Russian Soviet space, but only so long as the West did not inhabit it de facto in an aggressive manner. So what did we do? We expanded NATO in their face, not once but three times, pushed the Partnership for Peace into Kazakhstan and promoted, the Russians think, anti-Russian color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. We kept telling the Russians that none of this was directed against them, when all our local partners made it only too clear by their body language, at the least, that oh yes it was.
What is at stake really is whether the Russian government accepts, or can be persuaded to accept explicitly, the post-Cold War territorial settlement of 1991. It is very much in the American interest that it does, and we are stupid to do things that lead them to want to overthrow it. Not all the Russians' surliness is caused by Western, and U.S. policy, of course. They are capable of being thuggish without our help. But why help them?! We, with our EU friends, have a choice to make: We can privilege the maintenance of the 1991 territorial settlement with Russia, or we can privilege a political crusade in former Soviet space that will jeopardize that settlement. There is an argument to be made for both options; but as a realist, I prefer the former. But I at least know it's a choice.
The Obama Administration, I hope, sees things the same way, and I have some reason to think it does--though with Joe Biden aboard, a man who seemed to want to invite Georgia into NATO while Russians troops were invading it, one doesn't know what to think. But to use arms control as a vanguard issue here makes no sense to me. That does not link to anything, and linkage is what we need. The grand deal with Russia right now is pretty clear: You help with Iran (in a serious way, not just words) and in Afghanistan, and also agree no more violence against Georgia and subversion in Ukraine, whether over Crimea or anything else, and we'll back off from around your periphery. We will not militarize our pledges to the new NATO allies, and we will not interfere in the Caucasus or with your energy pipeline plans. If you want something serious from the Russians, you have to put up a serious stake to get it. We seem to want and want and want, but not ever understand what it is that's important to them. So sure they're going to fuck with us every chance they get. Why not? I really don't blame them in a way, even though, of course, I wish they wouldn't do it.
Mr. President: It's energy and the economy, not health care; it's technology and organization, not insurance, within health care; it's Iran and company, not Israelis and Palestinians, and within the latter it's philosophical rejectionism and incitement, not settlements; it's the post-Cold War territorial settlement with Russia, not arms control rituals; and, by the way, it's the real future of the WMD programs in Iran and North Korea, not the mostly pointless NPT Review conference in May; and so on and on and on. The analysis is wrong at each and every point, so the judgments about priorities and policies are wrong, too. Sorry Barack; it's just too much accumulating evidence now; the pattern is too clear. No more benefit of the doubt. My good wishes have now to be earned. Please don't let me down.
Before listing the main examples of his poor judgment so far, I want to take a moment to explain what judgment is in politics. The way I see it, there are four stages in the policy process. People who've never been in the government seem to think they all amount to more or less the same thing, but that's just not so.
The first stage is analysis: How does one define a problem and how does one understand it.
The second stage is prioritization: Based on the analysis of what's wrong, what needs fixing first, second, and so on. You can't do everything at once even if politics lets you, and it rarely lets you, so you have to choose.
The third stage is policy formulation: Once you know what you want to do, you have to plot a way to do it. This is NOT the same at all as stage two, and this is what outsiders to government tend most often to misunderstand. Once you have defined a goal, you have to assign the task, organize it, and budget for it. This will almost always involve a fair number of people in different parts of government. Anyone who thinks this sort of thing somehow just takes care of itself is very naive.
The fourth stage is policy implementation. Once you have all the people organized and pointed in the same direction, you have to actually do what you plan to do until the outcome you seek is achieved. Again, this does not happen automatically because reality can be recalcitrant. Stuff happens. Others react, and you have to adjust, push, pull, bend and otherwise see your policy through. (This is what the Bush Administration was especially bad at.)
In my view, the Obama Administration seems to be messing up at very basic stages one and two. Here are a few examples, and I will keep it brief, since I intend to elaborate in future posts.
First, let's talk about health care and domestic policy.
The first major policy initiative the Administration should have taken on was not about health care. Health care was going to be hard from the start. It is large, it is encrusted with lobbies and special interests, it is very complex and people disagree sharply about it. That was obvious a year ago and more. The Administration should have focused on energy. Today there is less disagreement on energy policy than there used to be; whether one is a conservationist, a politicized environmentalist, a national security expert or whatever, everyone wants to do more or less the same things in energy policy. It would have been wise to have had an energy bill before Copenhagen. It would have been wise to start with something on which a victory would not have taken more than a year, just to get these newbies' feet wet. It would have conduced to a more bipartisan atmosphere, too. But no: These guys made the same mistake the Clinton Administration made (also with health care), and the Carter Administration (with energy, ironically) before them: Starting out with the hardest thing, failing to do it right, and losing political momentum and capital instead of gaining it as a result.
If anyone had asked me, I'd have said, "Start with energy, and focus on innovation and job-creation within that area." Of course the Administration had to focus on the economy, and it did; but it did not stay focused. Financial reform has lagged and its creative swath has been diminished over time by lobbies because the White House was obsessed with health care. Is this an example of blindness caused by ideology? The ideology of redistributive justice for the poor? Could be.
Ah, but you say, Obama succeeded with health care in the end, did he not? No, he didn't. He got a bill passed, yes, but it is simply wrong to call it a health care bill. It is not about health care; it does not even address the reasons for the rising costs, inefficiencies and perverse incentives in the health care system. The bill that passed is only about the insurance aspect of the system. And it is a bad bill, and a disingenuous one as it has been "explained" to the nation. I am glad it passed anyway, or which more in a moment, but, as I have said, this bill does nothing about the real issues: the for-profit structure of most of the system; the technological dynamism that is the main reason for rising costs; the twin monsters of tort disfigurement and defensive medicine that spends wildly disproportionate sums on old people who are not going to get well; the costs of medical education and re-education; and I could go on. All this bill does is make larger an inefficient system. I don't care what the CBO says: This bill will not prove budget friendly or even budget neutral, not least because most of the things that have to happen to make it budget friendly are extremely unlikely to happen--and every honest person knows that. And certainly private expenditures on medical care will rise as long as nothing is done to cap the real causes of cost increases, and that means insurance costs will rise all around too. The bill also makes doing business more expensive for the insurance companies (whether justifiably or not is not the issue for the moment), and anyone who believes that they will not find some way to pass along those costs to consumers is a nitwit. And those who think the bill is just great because it taxes tanning salons and obligates employers to make room for nursing mothers and forces fast-food joints to reveal the contents of the crap they serve--well, that's all very nice but it doesn't amount to hill of turds in the larger scope of things.
So the Administration chose the wrong issue to start with, and it chose the wrong part of health care to start with as well. I think this was bad judgment based on bad analysis.
As I said, I am still glad the bill passed -- and now I will detour to explain why.
It is because, for one thing, in this country we pretty much never solve any problem with one bill. Now we've shaken things up at least a little, and maybe five bills and a decade from now we'll have made some progress. Maybe. A good sign is that the Republicans are not saying they want the status quo ante but something better. That's a good sign.
As important, there is an ideological and dare I say it, moral aspect, to this issue--and here I share the President's view--if I'm right about what it is.
We have a still-undeveloped social idea in the United States, a legacy of how the nation formed from immigrants on a large continent. But that social idea has been growing, little by little, and of course the civil rights movement was the big event in that regard in the second half of the past century. We as a nation increasingly care about basic fairness for all American citizens, and that's a good thing; that's the sound of our social idea building. And now, finally, for reasons I won't go into for reasons of space, the concept of fairness has been applied to health care.
How did this happen? Partly it has been a matter of spectacle. There has long been something profoundly unjust, as well as inefficient, about the availability of decent health care in this country, especially for children. But what changed is that the insurance companies have been especially stupid lately in their sheer venality and cruelty. No one in the political class in this country, or almost no one, really cares about poor people. But the insurance companies were stupid enough to fuck with middle class people who know how to make a racket, i.e., who are not silenced by the collective action problem. The complaints and outrages of a couple dozen middle class cases made more difference politically than the continuous shafting of genuinely disadvantages people. And the companies did not plan on Barack Obama being elected President. Unlike Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he actually cares about poor people and about basic fairness.
Americans are not born on a level playing field still. That's just the way it is, and Obama knows this. In my view, government's job in a truly liberal vision (not leftist vision) is to create a level playing field for basics -- education, health/nutrition, public safety. It is not to tilt the field toward anyone, whether toward the poor as a form of reparations, or toward the rich in all the entitlements and corporate subsidies we put up with. This is the now-obsolete liberal vision of Teddy Roosevelt and William Allen White, the way "liberal" was defined between around the end of the 19th century through to the New Deal. It is the kind of domestic policy liberal I am. I think that as an effort to level the playing field in basic health care, the bill helps to build our social idea. It tells our poor that society does care about them; that they are part of this nation, too, and deserve to be treated fairly.
And I have to say it: The Tea Party types who are shouting "socialist" at this White House are really saying, rather a lot of them anyway, that we don't give a shit about poor people, they are not part of "my" America, not part of "my" in-group. A lot of this is just ethno-chauvinist selfishness, adorned with not a little bigotry.
Of course, not all of them see things this way. In their simple-minded world, they think there IS a level playing field because, as true Enlightenment-deluded Americans, they believe in primordial individualism. If someone is poor and can't afford health insurance for themselves and their children, it's because, the Tea Partiers believe, they don't have good values: no work ethic, no sense of provenance, no ability to delay gratification, no sense of inter-generational responsibility. From a strictly sociological point of view, a lot of poor people in fact do lack these values, but it's not because they're morally inferior to those who have them. It's because, for the most part, they have been born into social matrices that have made it hard to impossible to acquire them. There's no level playing field in the critical, defining social context of family, extended family and community. And blindness of this among those who are railing against the Administration and this bill is what, in my view, a Republican makes. This is why I have never been and can never be a Republican, though I have worked on the foreign policy side of a Republican Administration. Their basic analysis of what is wrong, is wrong. The President's basic analysis of what is wrong in this regard is right; it's just that, unfortunately, all his other judgments are wrong. He is not, I think, a level-playing field liberal like me. He is a tilt-the-playing field, de facto pro-reparations left-liberal, all dressed up in a pettyfoggery of legalisms. I think he is, anyway. Not my cup of meat, as I have tried to make clear, but still better than a Tea-Party Republican.
Now let's look at bad judgments in foreign policy. There is so much to discuss; one hardly knows where to start. So let's start with the Jews.
Obama shows every sign of being Jewcentric. He seems to think that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to all issues in the region, and the Palestinian issue the center of the center. He believes in linkage (as does, it seems, Jim Jones, his NSA). And he is mainly wrong; his analysis is in error, and so his priorities are wrong. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not the center of the universe, or even of the Middle East. Most Arabs who are not Palestinians do not give a practical shit, only an abstract one, about the Palestinians, whom they have taken turns abusing for the past half century. And the idea that Israeli settlements are at the center of the center of the center is also wrong.
So what does Obama do, with the help of his Jewcentric Jewish friends Emanuel and Axelrod, he goes blundering into the Palestinian morass without understanding how it works, and gets burned. He makes things worse, throws things backwards. That we are even using the phrase proximity talks just shows how backwards this all is.
I thought they had learned a lesson, but apparently not: With the Biden trip affair, they did the same dumb thing again, and made it all worse again. They are now back to where they were: bashing the Jews, holding out engagement to the Iranians, and, as a result, scaring the feces out of the Saudis, Jordanians, Gulfies, Egyptians and so on. And over what? A housing project in East Jerusalem that, even by Palestinian standards, isn't a big deal. Everyone knows this neighborhood will remain part of Israel if there is ever a settlement.
The analysis here, of linkage, is wrong, and the priorities assigned, are as well. Iran and its weapons programs are the problem, and the regional audience is watching, knowing full well that great powers are essentially in the protection business. If you bash your friends and propitiate your enemies, whether in Iran or Syria or Lebanon, you will make your enemies bolder and your friends search for alternative cover. This is not a country-club tennis court kind of competition; this is the Middle East.
How on earth can an urban politician, from Chicago of all places, not understand this? Ideology perhaps, like the kind that seems to have persuaded Obama that the only justification for Israel is the Holocaust? What this man does not know about the Middle East seems pretty extensive.
Or let's take, finally, Russia and arms control. The problem we have with Russia is pretty complicated, to be sure. A lot of it happens to be our fault.
The Russians are in a surly historical mood. They lost an empire, and blame us for taking advantage of them. They don't think they lost the Cold War; they think, not without some justification, that they got rid of their damned Communists mostly themselves. They accepted a territorial settlement to the Cold War that put them in borders from back around the time of Catherine the Great. They were reconciled to losing Eastern Europe. Many if not most were even OK with losing the non-Russian Soviet space, but only so long as the West did not inhabit it de facto in an aggressive manner. So what did we do? We expanded NATO in their face, not once but three times, pushed the Partnership for Peace into Kazakhstan and promoted, the Russians think, anti-Russian color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. We kept telling the Russians that none of this was directed against them, when all our local partners made it only too clear by their body language, at the least, that oh yes it was.
What is at stake really is whether the Russian government accepts, or can be persuaded to accept explicitly, the post-Cold War territorial settlement of 1991. It is very much in the American interest that it does, and we are stupid to do things that lead them to want to overthrow it. Not all the Russians' surliness is caused by Western, and U.S. policy, of course. They are capable of being thuggish without our help. But why help them?! We, with our EU friends, have a choice to make: We can privilege the maintenance of the 1991 territorial settlement with Russia, or we can privilege a political crusade in former Soviet space that will jeopardize that settlement. There is an argument to be made for both options; but as a realist, I prefer the former. But I at least know it's a choice.
The Obama Administration, I hope, sees things the same way, and I have some reason to think it does--though with Joe Biden aboard, a man who seemed to want to invite Georgia into NATO while Russians troops were invading it, one doesn't know what to think. But to use arms control as a vanguard issue here makes no sense to me. That does not link to anything, and linkage is what we need. The grand deal with Russia right now is pretty clear: You help with Iran (in a serious way, not just words) and in Afghanistan, and also agree no more violence against Georgia and subversion in Ukraine, whether over Crimea or anything else, and we'll back off from around your periphery. We will not militarize our pledges to the new NATO allies, and we will not interfere in the Caucasus or with your energy pipeline plans. If you want something serious from the Russians, you have to put up a serious stake to get it. We seem to want and want and want, but not ever understand what it is that's important to them. So sure they're going to fuck with us every chance they get. Why not? I really don't blame them in a way, even though, of course, I wish they wouldn't do it.
Mr. President: It's energy and the economy, not health care; it's technology and organization, not insurance, within health care; it's Iran and company, not Israelis and Palestinians, and within the latter it's philosophical rejectionism and incitement, not settlements; it's the post-Cold War territorial settlement with Russia, not arms control rituals; and, by the way, it's the real future of the WMD programs in Iran and North Korea, not the mostly pointless NPT Review conference in May; and so on and on and on. The analysis is wrong at each and every point, so the judgments about priorities and policies are wrong, too. Sorry Barack; it's just too much accumulating evidence now; the pattern is too clear. No more benefit of the doubt. My good wishes have now to be earned. Please don't let me down.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Arms Control Returns as Farce
On Thursday, March 25, the newspapers announced on their front pages a U.S.-Russian nuclear arms agreement. A slow news day, maybe, I thought. This sort of thing would have deserved front page coverage before 1991; now it may still, but that's not so evident. During the Cold War, strategic arms control was bound up with a very serious and dangerous competition. Now it isn't. That's why, too, since politics always trumps hardware in subjects like this, we could only have real arms control when it was politically marginal, and when it was not politically marginal we couldn't have it. The way the Cold War ended proved this, but a lot of people do not seem interested in that proof. They prefer their earlier illusions about arms control. Some habits die hard, and America's leading journalists apparently have not got the message, or learned the lesson. That seems to apply, too, to the Obama Administration.
The Washington Post's coverage was noteworthy for its balmy idiocy. The writers, in this case someones named Mary Beth Sheridan and Philip P. Pan, wrote, inter alia, that: "The pact appeared to represent President Obama's first victory in his ambitious agenda toward a nuclear-free world." It is no such thing. If the editor told the reporters to go find something to praise Obama for, to help save his otherwise disastrous foreign policy, OK, one can understand that. But to link this agreement to this nutty, bumper-sticker slogan of a non-policy is just silly.
The actual reporting also made, just by the way, no sense. The article went on, "Each side will reduce its most dangerous nuclear weapons--those deployed for long-range missiles--from a ceiling of 2,200 to between 1,500 and 1,675. And the two militaries will make relatively small cuts in the number of jets and land- or submarine-based missiles that carry nuclear warheads and bombs." No number was given.
This sentence is so screwed up that it will take me several sentences so show how.
First of all, nuclear weapons are not dangerous unless they go off--i.e., are detonated, and it's not at all likely that any U.S. or Russian weapons will be detonated, now or probably ever. It's just as sensible, more so really, to describe a nuclear weapon as potent as it is to describe one as dangerous. Ms. Sheridan driving her car while talking on her cell phone is actually more dangerous than a nuclear weapon for any practical purpose.
Next, a weapon is not more dangerous because it is long-range. If a tac-nuke goes off near someone, they are going to be very dead, just as dead as if they were hit by something bigger from farther away. Long-range weapons may be more strategically consequential in some respects (and not in others), but that is quite a different matter. The nukes most likely ever to be used are tactical nuclear weapons, of which the Russians still have a whole damned lot in Europe. These are arguably more dangerous precisely because they are more apt to be used. The treaty does not cover them, at all.
And the language used!! Er, "warheads deployed for long-range missiles. . ."?! How about "deployed on" maybe? Jets? I think some of our bombers actually make their way across the sky with propellers. The Russians have been concerned with nukes on an F-18?
Next, the statement makes it seem as though what has been agreed is mainly a reduction of warheads, not launchers. It's sure news to me if these negotiations have done that. It is not possible to verify warhead reductions. These sorts of negotiations, going back 40 years, have always been about numbers of warheads married to deployed delivery vehicles. So what is this article even talking about?
It also makes it seem that more weapons will be taken down than launchers. Though I have not yet seen the treaty text, that is not my understanding of the agreement or, as you'll see in a moment, that of the New York Times. I think deployed weapons are down to 1,550 or thereabouts, and launchers down to 800. The latter is not "a relatively small cut." It is significant.
There is also an intimation here that a warhead and bomb are two different things. They are not. Yes, some warheads can be independently guided even after leaving their delivery vehicles. But they are still just bombs; they fall, because they have no engines.
It is hard not to conclude that Ms. Sheridan and Mr. Pan do not know what they are talking about, and neither does their editor. Shame on the Washington Post for getting a front page, top-of-the-fold story so messed up.
Compare the New York Times. The NYT describes the agreement this way: ". . .the two sides agreed to lower the limits on deployed strategic warheads by more than one-quarter and launchers by half. . ." Now, since there can be more than one warhead per launcher, this makes sense. Compare it to the Washington Post's language, above, which, as I have said, makes no sense. But the NYT, true to form, this time under the bi-line of Peter Baker and Ellen Barry, claims that the deal represents "perhaps the most concrete foreign policy accomplishment for Mr. Obama since he took office 14 months ago and the most significant result of his effort to `reset' the troubled relationship with Russia."
Wow, what an editorial.
First, it's not really a foreign policy achievement; if it's anything, it's a national security policy achievement. Except that it isn't, because the agreement is almost meaningless. The Administration thinks it will help the upcoming NPT Review Conference achieve something practical, but it won't because the Review Conference itself can't achieve anything practical, not at a time when real proliferation threats are being left unaddressed in practice. It's nice to have the deal done before the NPT Review Conference, yes; not to have it done would be embarrassing, like not having an energy bill before Copenhagen, for example.
But we'll have to wait to see what the Administration had to pay for that accomplishment. Just agreeing to negotiate these reductions with the Russians, and letting the Russians know we needed it done before a date certain (in May), gave Moscow free leverage over the terms, and they have dragged it out for many months just to screw with us and take advantage at the margins. The fact that the Russians announced the deal and the White House was taken by surprise is also a little worrisome; it suggests that perhaps this was another Russian pressure ploy to get their way on a few remaining details at the last minute. The Russians cannot resist this kind of gamesmanship against a weak and clueless White House. I think it may even be genetic. Well, we'll see how the story plays out; maybe I am being cynical, but maybe not. Stay tuned to to this blog.
The real problem here is the Administration's decision to privilege arms control in the relationship with Russia. I can see a reason for this, of course; it makes the Russians feel our equal, for this is the only area in which they are, more or less, our equal. It salves their wounded imperial pride. The idea seems to have been, OK, we play nice with them here and they'll be more agreeable in other areas. I think the Administration believed that finishing the deal would be quick and easy, since there wasn't really that much to do, and the new atmospherics would pay off in other areas. This makes at least theoretical sense.
Ah, but the NSC lead man on Russia, Michael McFaul, said recently that the Administration refuses to play the linkage game, even though the Russian leadership wants to. Well, this U.S. use of arms control in the Russia reset business seems sort of contradictory, then: What is it, if not a version of linkage? Maybe they're only saying this now because the deal took much longer and was much harder to do than they thought. In any event, if the promotion of arms control to the top of the U.S.-Russia agenda was meant to cause pliancy in Moscow, where is that pliancy? Where have the Russians been agreeable at all? With regard to Iran? Georgia? Search me. McFaul is right; there's no linkage, at least not in our direction.
I would rather have made reductions in the U.S. arsenal unilaterally, and invited the Russians to undertake a parallel unilateral action. We are capable of deciding how many of these weapons we need without all the pomp and circumstance of formal negotiations, and we know that Russian numbers are going to come down anyway for financial and technical reasons. There was no reason to negotiate any of this, except for symbolic purposes. Indeed, the numbers I would have chosen aren't too far off from 1,550 deployed warheads and 800 launchers. For reasons I'd rather not write about in public, I'd say 1,200/700 would be OK, but 1,550/800 is close, so let's not be picky. Too much lower than that and we might tempt third parties we would be foolish to tempt, and hence, by the way, one aspect of the foolishness of the nuclear-free world stuff, and one more reason why this agreement is NOT a step in that direction. (If the deal had taken both sides down to, say, 500/300, that would have been such a step and that would have been dangerously bad.)
The Administration is also claiming a major advance in verification protocols. We'll see if that turns out to be true once the text is available for public inspection. Even if it is true, that could have been negotiated separately from the numbers.
So let's for a moment credit, just for the sake of argument, the NYT view that this post-START II deal is the Obama Administration's most important achievement in foreign policy. Now what does that say? A superfluous agreement whose manner of negotiation negated the diplomatic impact it was supposed to have on Russian behavior is the most important foreign policy achievement of the Administration? Yikes. And gosh, maybe it is!
The Washington Post's coverage was noteworthy for its balmy idiocy. The writers, in this case someones named Mary Beth Sheridan and Philip P. Pan, wrote, inter alia, that: "The pact appeared to represent President Obama's first victory in his ambitious agenda toward a nuclear-free world." It is no such thing. If the editor told the reporters to go find something to praise Obama for, to help save his otherwise disastrous foreign policy, OK, one can understand that. But to link this agreement to this nutty, bumper-sticker slogan of a non-policy is just silly.
The actual reporting also made, just by the way, no sense. The article went on, "Each side will reduce its most dangerous nuclear weapons--those deployed for long-range missiles--from a ceiling of 2,200 to between 1,500 and 1,675. And the two militaries will make relatively small cuts in the number of jets and land- or submarine-based missiles that carry nuclear warheads and bombs." No number was given.
This sentence is so screwed up that it will take me several sentences so show how.
First of all, nuclear weapons are not dangerous unless they go off--i.e., are detonated, and it's not at all likely that any U.S. or Russian weapons will be detonated, now or probably ever. It's just as sensible, more so really, to describe a nuclear weapon as potent as it is to describe one as dangerous. Ms. Sheridan driving her car while talking on her cell phone is actually more dangerous than a nuclear weapon for any practical purpose.
Next, a weapon is not more dangerous because it is long-range. If a tac-nuke goes off near someone, they are going to be very dead, just as dead as if they were hit by something bigger from farther away. Long-range weapons may be more strategically consequential in some respects (and not in others), but that is quite a different matter. The nukes most likely ever to be used are tactical nuclear weapons, of which the Russians still have a whole damned lot in Europe. These are arguably more dangerous precisely because they are more apt to be used. The treaty does not cover them, at all.
And the language used!! Er, "warheads deployed for long-range missiles. . ."?! How about "deployed on" maybe? Jets? I think some of our bombers actually make their way across the sky with propellers. The Russians have been concerned with nukes on an F-18?
Next, the statement makes it seem as though what has been agreed is mainly a reduction of warheads, not launchers. It's sure news to me if these negotiations have done that. It is not possible to verify warhead reductions. These sorts of negotiations, going back 40 years, have always been about numbers of warheads married to deployed delivery vehicles. So what is this article even talking about?
It also makes it seem that more weapons will be taken down than launchers. Though I have not yet seen the treaty text, that is not my understanding of the agreement or, as you'll see in a moment, that of the New York Times. I think deployed weapons are down to 1,550 or thereabouts, and launchers down to 800. The latter is not "a relatively small cut." It is significant.
There is also an intimation here that a warhead and bomb are two different things. They are not. Yes, some warheads can be independently guided even after leaving their delivery vehicles. But they are still just bombs; they fall, because they have no engines.
It is hard not to conclude that Ms. Sheridan and Mr. Pan do not know what they are talking about, and neither does their editor. Shame on the Washington Post for getting a front page, top-of-the-fold story so messed up.
Compare the New York Times. The NYT describes the agreement this way: ". . .the two sides agreed to lower the limits on deployed strategic warheads by more than one-quarter and launchers by half. . ." Now, since there can be more than one warhead per launcher, this makes sense. Compare it to the Washington Post's language, above, which, as I have said, makes no sense. But the NYT, true to form, this time under the bi-line of Peter Baker and Ellen Barry, claims that the deal represents "perhaps the most concrete foreign policy accomplishment for Mr. Obama since he took office 14 months ago and the most significant result of his effort to `reset' the troubled relationship with Russia."
Wow, what an editorial.
First, it's not really a foreign policy achievement; if it's anything, it's a national security policy achievement. Except that it isn't, because the agreement is almost meaningless. The Administration thinks it will help the upcoming NPT Review Conference achieve something practical, but it won't because the Review Conference itself can't achieve anything practical, not at a time when real proliferation threats are being left unaddressed in practice. It's nice to have the deal done before the NPT Review Conference, yes; not to have it done would be embarrassing, like not having an energy bill before Copenhagen, for example.
But we'll have to wait to see what the Administration had to pay for that accomplishment. Just agreeing to negotiate these reductions with the Russians, and letting the Russians know we needed it done before a date certain (in May), gave Moscow free leverage over the terms, and they have dragged it out for many months just to screw with us and take advantage at the margins. The fact that the Russians announced the deal and the White House was taken by surprise is also a little worrisome; it suggests that perhaps this was another Russian pressure ploy to get their way on a few remaining details at the last minute. The Russians cannot resist this kind of gamesmanship against a weak and clueless White House. I think it may even be genetic. Well, we'll see how the story plays out; maybe I am being cynical, but maybe not. Stay tuned to to this blog.
The real problem here is the Administration's decision to privilege arms control in the relationship with Russia. I can see a reason for this, of course; it makes the Russians feel our equal, for this is the only area in which they are, more or less, our equal. It salves their wounded imperial pride. The idea seems to have been, OK, we play nice with them here and they'll be more agreeable in other areas. I think the Administration believed that finishing the deal would be quick and easy, since there wasn't really that much to do, and the new atmospherics would pay off in other areas. This makes at least theoretical sense.
Ah, but the NSC lead man on Russia, Michael McFaul, said recently that the Administration refuses to play the linkage game, even though the Russian leadership wants to. Well, this U.S. use of arms control in the Russia reset business seems sort of contradictory, then: What is it, if not a version of linkage? Maybe they're only saying this now because the deal took much longer and was much harder to do than they thought. In any event, if the promotion of arms control to the top of the U.S.-Russia agenda was meant to cause pliancy in Moscow, where is that pliancy? Where have the Russians been agreeable at all? With regard to Iran? Georgia? Search me. McFaul is right; there's no linkage, at least not in our direction.
I would rather have made reductions in the U.S. arsenal unilaterally, and invited the Russians to undertake a parallel unilateral action. We are capable of deciding how many of these weapons we need without all the pomp and circumstance of formal negotiations, and we know that Russian numbers are going to come down anyway for financial and technical reasons. There was no reason to negotiate any of this, except for symbolic purposes. Indeed, the numbers I would have chosen aren't too far off from 1,550 deployed warheads and 800 launchers. For reasons I'd rather not write about in public, I'd say 1,200/700 would be OK, but 1,550/800 is close, so let's not be picky. Too much lower than that and we might tempt third parties we would be foolish to tempt, and hence, by the way, one aspect of the foolishness of the nuclear-free world stuff, and one more reason why this agreement is NOT a step in that direction. (If the deal had taken both sides down to, say, 500/300, that would have been such a step and that would have been dangerously bad.)
The Administration is also claiming a major advance in verification protocols. We'll see if that turns out to be true once the text is available for public inspection. Even if it is true, that could have been negotiated separately from the numbers.
So let's for a moment credit, just for the sake of argument, the NYT view that this post-START II deal is the Obama Administration's most important achievement in foreign policy. Now what does that say? A superfluous agreement whose manner of negotiation negated the diplomatic impact it was supposed to have on Russian behavior is the most important foreign policy achievement of the Administration? Yikes. And gosh, maybe it is!
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Who's Who, Who's That?
As promised, I am about to list some of the names (perhaps about half of them) in the American Almanac's day calendar for 1879. I am listing all the names I could not identify for sure; some I had some vague notions about, but I held myself to a fairly rigorous standard.
Before giving the list, I only would point out that in order to fill up 356 days there is likely to have been a little stretching going on. The editors needed one name or event per day, no more and no less. So we can't say for sure that this list represents a complete idea of famous persons or events of the time. But it's not entirely random either, as becomes clear when you ask yourself how you would put together such a feature item today. You would not choose an obscure event or person over a better known one, would you? I sure wouldn't.
So, the list is good enough to get a broad picture of what fame meant to Americans, or at least to Americans in Boston, during the Hayes Administration. I have also listed the year date of death or birth. If I list both, that means the name appeared twice in the calander. I did not, of course, list "Rachel" -- see earlier post on her which led to this post.
David Garrick, b.1716; d. 1779
William H. Prescott, d. 1859
John Rogers, d. 1555
Reverdy Johnson, d. 1876
Dr. E. K. Kane, d. 1857
Henry R. Schoolcraft, b. 1793
William Ellery Channing, b. 1780
Donizetti, d. 1848
Thomas Wentworth Strafford, b. 1593
John L Motley, b. 1819
Sir John Franklin, b. 1786
Thomas Hood, d. 1845
Daniel O'Connell, d. 1847
Marie Edgeworth, d. 1849
Edward Livingstone, d. 1835
Louis Agassiz, b. 1807
Sarah Siddons, b. 1755
Houdon, d. 1828
Paul Delaroche, b. 1797
John Sterling, b. 1806
Benjamin Silliman, b. 1779
J.V. Moreau, b. 1763
C. Malte-Brun, b. 1775
Cuvier, b. 1769
Buffon, b. 1707
Lord Brougham, b. 1779
Madame Malibran, d. 1836
Louis Rene Rohan, b. 1734
Thomas Clarkson, d. 1849
Canova, d. 1822
Theophile Gautier, d. 1872
Rhinehart, d. 1874
John Leech, d. 1864
John B. McCulloch, d. 1864
Johann L. Uhland, d. 1862
Pierre Bayle, b. 1647
Madame de Maintenon, b. 1635
Emmerich Vattel, d. 1767
Thomas Gray, b. 1716
Juan Prim, d. 1870
Jules Simon, b. 1814
If you take the time to find out who these people were, you'll discover that fame in the middle of 19th century America leaned heavily toward Brits and French, besides Americans. Heavily toward the arts and sciences, with a good smattering of religious types. The political, of course, too. There are some women, more than I thought there would be.
I confess to having been embarrassed to not know some of these names, because finding out who they were instantly reminded me that I had heard of them before. Did you take the test? How many did you know? I suppose that some of the ones I did know and thus did not list above, many people would not know. But I was too lazy to list them all......there are nearly a hundred. Example: Max Muller. I did not list Max Muller, because I have a special reason for knowing who he was. Do you? How about John Henry Newman? Helps to be a Catholic on that one.
Seriously, it is interesting to reflect on what makes for fame in any given era, and what that tells us about the era. And what makes fame so fleeting, and what that tells us about human nature and society. Alas, as to the latter, we would do worse than to remember what S.J. Perelman once wrote about immortality -- that it is left to the whim of the yet unborn. Lucky, then, are most of us, who don't have to worry about the matter at all.
Before giving the list, I only would point out that in order to fill up 356 days there is likely to have been a little stretching going on. The editors needed one name or event per day, no more and no less. So we can't say for sure that this list represents a complete idea of famous persons or events of the time. But it's not entirely random either, as becomes clear when you ask yourself how you would put together such a feature item today. You would not choose an obscure event or person over a better known one, would you? I sure wouldn't.
So, the list is good enough to get a broad picture of what fame meant to Americans, or at least to Americans in Boston, during the Hayes Administration. I have also listed the year date of death or birth. If I list both, that means the name appeared twice in the calander. I did not, of course, list "Rachel" -- see earlier post on her which led to this post.
David Garrick, b.1716; d. 1779
William H. Prescott, d. 1859
John Rogers, d. 1555
Reverdy Johnson, d. 1876
Dr. E. K. Kane, d. 1857
Henry R. Schoolcraft, b. 1793
William Ellery Channing, b. 1780
Donizetti, d. 1848
Thomas Wentworth Strafford, b. 1593
John L Motley, b. 1819
Sir John Franklin, b. 1786
Thomas Hood, d. 1845
Daniel O'Connell, d. 1847
Marie Edgeworth, d. 1849
Edward Livingstone, d. 1835
Louis Agassiz, b. 1807
Sarah Siddons, b. 1755
Houdon, d. 1828
Paul Delaroche, b. 1797
John Sterling, b. 1806
Benjamin Silliman, b. 1779
J.V. Moreau, b. 1763
C. Malte-Brun, b. 1775
Cuvier, b. 1769
Buffon, b. 1707
Lord Brougham, b. 1779
Madame Malibran, d. 1836
Louis Rene Rohan, b. 1734
Thomas Clarkson, d. 1849
Canova, d. 1822
Theophile Gautier, d. 1872
Rhinehart, d. 1874
John Leech, d. 1864
John B. McCulloch, d. 1864
Johann L. Uhland, d. 1862
Pierre Bayle, b. 1647
Madame de Maintenon, b. 1635
Emmerich Vattel, d. 1767
Thomas Gray, b. 1716
Juan Prim, d. 1870
Jules Simon, b. 1814
If you take the time to find out who these people were, you'll discover that fame in the middle of 19th century America leaned heavily toward Brits and French, besides Americans. Heavily toward the arts and sciences, with a good smattering of religious types. The political, of course, too. There are some women, more than I thought there would be.
I confess to having been embarrassed to not know some of these names, because finding out who they were instantly reminded me that I had heard of them before. Did you take the test? How many did you know? I suppose that some of the ones I did know and thus did not list above, many people would not know. But I was too lazy to list them all......there are nearly a hundred. Example: Max Muller. I did not list Max Muller, because I have a special reason for knowing who he was. Do you? How about John Henry Newman? Helps to be a Catholic on that one.
Seriously, it is interesting to reflect on what makes for fame in any given era, and what that tells us about the era. And what makes fame so fleeting, and what that tells us about human nature and society. Alas, as to the latter, we would do worse than to remember what S.J. Perelman once wrote about immortality -- that it is left to the whim of the yet unborn. Lucky, then, are most of us, who don't have to worry about the matter at all.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Alexander M. Haig. Jr.
It is appropriate, I think, to pause and reflect when another person's death finally brackets a part of one's own life. I briefly worked for Alexander Haig back in 1979-80, just before he became Secretary of State. I was a junior aide only, and he did not invite me, fresh out of graduate school as I was at the time, to go with him to Washington, as he did my friend and mentor Harvey Sicherman, six years my senior. I did not press the matter. Indeed, I neither asked nor even hinted, perhaps because I felt myself less than entitled: I was not a Republican, after all, and had not voted for Ronald Reagan in November 1980.
Nor did I have any other claim on his loyalty. I was never in the Army, or on Haig's staff when he was Supreme Allied Commander of U.S. forces in Europe (SACEUR), bivouacked in Brussels. And certainly I did not know him when he was Richard Nixon's White House chief-of-staff in the early 1970s--I was a just an undergraduate college student at the time. All I knew of the Haig family came some years before that, with my occasional encounter with a younger Alex and his sister Barbara at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia. Their father and mother I never met at the time.
I saw Al Haig fairly regularly only in 1979-80, during the time between his retirement from the Army and his appointment as Secretary of State by President Reagan. During those 18 or so months he was president of United Technologies and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, where I was working at the time. This was also a time when he had triple-bypass surgery, and I remember being deeply impressed by the difference between how he looked and acted before the operation and after. Before, Haig had almost preternaturally sparkling steel blue eyes, and he looked right at you with them. Afterwards, the twinkle was dulled, and I never saw it fully return, though he did otherwise recover his energy and most of the spring in his step before very long.
I did not do a great deal for him in those days; I was, as I have said, just a junior aide. I helped him write an essay for a magazine called Strategic Review. (Actually, I wrote it; he read it, approved it, made a few minor changes.) I did up a few research memoranda he asked for on various topics. Most of all, and most memorable of all for me, I helped coach him through his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the matter of the SALT II Treaty.
As it happened, I had been seconded from Philadelphia to Washington at the time (for a second time; I'd gone before in 1977 for a little while) to help Senator Henry Jackson and, with him, Senator John Tower to interrogate that draft treaty. It was the habit, directed by Senators Jackson and Tower, and implemented by their staffers Richard Perle and Bud MacFarlane, to help prepare friendly witnesses for their testimonies when they came to town. I was instructed to help Haig.
He needed my help, too, through no fault of his own. He had nearly been blown up by terrorists on his way back from Brussels. He had arrived stateside only about 48 hours before his testimony, and had not had time to actually read the treaty carefully, let alone fully study it. It was a complicated business, too. I will say this: Haig was a very quick study, a superb gamesman with the Senators (not least a young fellow named Joe Biden.....), and generally a lot of fun to hang around with. I sat behind him in the Senate Caucus room during his testimony, passed him notes in tight spots a few times, and just generally hung around, trying to be helpful if needed. During a break, and this is something I could not forget even if I tried, John Stennis came up to me and complimented my "slick wrist action" in passing those notes. And he actually winked at me. So much for the gentleman from Mississippi; that's the first and last conversation we ever had.
All through the testimony and after Haig was ever gracious, appreciative and altogether personable. At the age of 28, I guess you could say I found the whole deal very entertaining, and even a bit gratifying.
For a certain part of this period Haig was testing out his own bid for President, which never got too far, but which touched off what I thought then and still think of now as some pretty hilarious episodes. Some of these episodes intersected with my time with Haig in Washington; others took place in Philly. I may sit down and relate these onto paper at some point or other, just for the record, and to get them off my chest in the sheer fun of story-telling. But for now, I will note only one in brief, in passing, so to speak.
One afternoon I was designated as a driver to take Haig and a man named, I think, Dixie Walker (not the old Brooklyn Dodger baseball player and not the former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, but a third person) from the offices of the Foreign Policy Research Institute near Penn in West Philly out to the Philadelphia International Airport. Mr. Walker was an associate of Adolph Coors, and Haig was clearly trying to raise some money for his campaign from Coors. I put the two of them in the back seat of the only car I owned at the time, a 1952 Cadillac -- a Fleetwood, so thankfully a 4-door -- which I had owned for about a year. It takes about a half hour, maybe a little less depending on traffic, to drive from 36th and Market Streets out to the airport, and during that time driving Haig and Walker were talking politics and campaigns and money. They got on pretty well, it seemed to me. Their assumption, or their choice of a proper assumption for purposes of that discussion (not at all the same thing, of course), was that "when Reagan faltered", that was the exact language they both used, Haig would be "well positioned to make his move."
I said nothing, of course. I just drove.
When we got to the airport, I drove out -- you could in those days -- to the private area where the Lear jets were waiting. One was fueled up, waiting to take the two of them to Houston for a fundraiser. Walker was sitting behind me on the left side of the back seat; Haig on the right. I remember this because when I shut off the Caddy's engine and got out, I opened the door for Walker. I was too slow to get around the back to open the right rear door for Haig. He opened it himself, got out, and slammed the door closed a little too hard, sending the window glass off its track and down inside the body of the door with a loud clunk. Thank God, it did not break.
Haig seemed alarmed, however. "I'm sorry, Adam," he said.
"Oh never mind, sir," I answered, "It does that sometimes; no big deal." I got their luggage out of the trunk, shook Haig's hand and said, "Have a good trip, sir."
In fact, the window had never done that before, and has never done it again since. I still have the car.
I saw Haig from time to time in the years that followed his short stint as Secretary of State. He was always friendly and cordial to me. The last time I saw him was already some time ago, in the fall of 2002, I think it was. It was at the annual dinner of The National Interest magazine, which I was editing at the time. Haig was to my right at the table, and to his right his old boss Henry Kissinger. The other two or three people at our table I do not recall. We talked about this and that, though given the layout of the table I mostly listened to the crosstalk. But I remember toward the end of the evening Haig turned and asked me, "Hey, Adam, you still have that old Cadillac?" And I answered, "Yep, and it runs just fine, and the rear-right window is fine, too, even though you once tried to break it." "Yes indeed," he answered, "and I tried and failed to get some money out of that guy in Colorado, too"--all accompanied by a friendly chuckle.
And that is how I remember Al Haig -- quick with a smile, easy with an assuring hand on the shoulder. Rest in peace, sir.
Nor did I have any other claim on his loyalty. I was never in the Army, or on Haig's staff when he was Supreme Allied Commander of U.S. forces in Europe (SACEUR), bivouacked in Brussels. And certainly I did not know him when he was Richard Nixon's White House chief-of-staff in the early 1970s--I was a just an undergraduate college student at the time. All I knew of the Haig family came some years before that, with my occasional encounter with a younger Alex and his sister Barbara at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia. Their father and mother I never met at the time.
I saw Al Haig fairly regularly only in 1979-80, during the time between his retirement from the Army and his appointment as Secretary of State by President Reagan. During those 18 or so months he was president of United Technologies and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, where I was working at the time. This was also a time when he had triple-bypass surgery, and I remember being deeply impressed by the difference between how he looked and acted before the operation and after. Before, Haig had almost preternaturally sparkling steel blue eyes, and he looked right at you with them. Afterwards, the twinkle was dulled, and I never saw it fully return, though he did otherwise recover his energy and most of the spring in his step before very long.
I did not do a great deal for him in those days; I was, as I have said, just a junior aide. I helped him write an essay for a magazine called Strategic Review. (Actually, I wrote it; he read it, approved it, made a few minor changes.) I did up a few research memoranda he asked for on various topics. Most of all, and most memorable of all for me, I helped coach him through his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the matter of the SALT II Treaty.
As it happened, I had been seconded from Philadelphia to Washington at the time (for a second time; I'd gone before in 1977 for a little while) to help Senator Henry Jackson and, with him, Senator John Tower to interrogate that draft treaty. It was the habit, directed by Senators Jackson and Tower, and implemented by their staffers Richard Perle and Bud MacFarlane, to help prepare friendly witnesses for their testimonies when they came to town. I was instructed to help Haig.
He needed my help, too, through no fault of his own. He had nearly been blown up by terrorists on his way back from Brussels. He had arrived stateside only about 48 hours before his testimony, and had not had time to actually read the treaty carefully, let alone fully study it. It was a complicated business, too. I will say this: Haig was a very quick study, a superb gamesman with the Senators (not least a young fellow named Joe Biden.....), and generally a lot of fun to hang around with. I sat behind him in the Senate Caucus room during his testimony, passed him notes in tight spots a few times, and just generally hung around, trying to be helpful if needed. During a break, and this is something I could not forget even if I tried, John Stennis came up to me and complimented my "slick wrist action" in passing those notes. And he actually winked at me. So much for the gentleman from Mississippi; that's the first and last conversation we ever had.
All through the testimony and after Haig was ever gracious, appreciative and altogether personable. At the age of 28, I guess you could say I found the whole deal very entertaining, and even a bit gratifying.
For a certain part of this period Haig was testing out his own bid for President, which never got too far, but which touched off what I thought then and still think of now as some pretty hilarious episodes. Some of these episodes intersected with my time with Haig in Washington; others took place in Philly. I may sit down and relate these onto paper at some point or other, just for the record, and to get them off my chest in the sheer fun of story-telling. But for now, I will note only one in brief, in passing, so to speak.
One afternoon I was designated as a driver to take Haig and a man named, I think, Dixie Walker (not the old Brooklyn Dodger baseball player and not the former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, but a third person) from the offices of the Foreign Policy Research Institute near Penn in West Philly out to the Philadelphia International Airport. Mr. Walker was an associate of Adolph Coors, and Haig was clearly trying to raise some money for his campaign from Coors. I put the two of them in the back seat of the only car I owned at the time, a 1952 Cadillac -- a Fleetwood, so thankfully a 4-door -- which I had owned for about a year. It takes about a half hour, maybe a little less depending on traffic, to drive from 36th and Market Streets out to the airport, and during that time driving Haig and Walker were talking politics and campaigns and money. They got on pretty well, it seemed to me. Their assumption, or their choice of a proper assumption for purposes of that discussion (not at all the same thing, of course), was that "when Reagan faltered", that was the exact language they both used, Haig would be "well positioned to make his move."
I said nothing, of course. I just drove.
When we got to the airport, I drove out -- you could in those days -- to the private area where the Lear jets were waiting. One was fueled up, waiting to take the two of them to Houston for a fundraiser. Walker was sitting behind me on the left side of the back seat; Haig on the right. I remember this because when I shut off the Caddy's engine and got out, I opened the door for Walker. I was too slow to get around the back to open the right rear door for Haig. He opened it himself, got out, and slammed the door closed a little too hard, sending the window glass off its track and down inside the body of the door with a loud clunk. Thank God, it did not break.
Haig seemed alarmed, however. "I'm sorry, Adam," he said.
"Oh never mind, sir," I answered, "It does that sometimes; no big deal." I got their luggage out of the trunk, shook Haig's hand and said, "Have a good trip, sir."
In fact, the window had never done that before, and has never done it again since. I still have the car.
I saw Haig from time to time in the years that followed his short stint as Secretary of State. He was always friendly and cordial to me. The last time I saw him was already some time ago, in the fall of 2002, I think it was. It was at the annual dinner of The National Interest magazine, which I was editing at the time. Haig was to my right at the table, and to his right his old boss Henry Kissinger. The other two or three people at our table I do not recall. We talked about this and that, though given the layout of the table I mostly listened to the crosstalk. But I remember toward the end of the evening Haig turned and asked me, "Hey, Adam, you still have that old Cadillac?" And I answered, "Yep, and it runs just fine, and the rear-right window is fine, too, even though you once tried to break it." "Yes indeed," he answered, "and I tried and failed to get some money out of that guy in Colorado, too"--all accompanied by a friendly chuckle.
And that is how I remember Al Haig -- quick with a smile, easy with an assuring hand on the shoulder. Rest in peace, sir.
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