Hey, You’re Truly Unlimited: Didn’t You Know?

It’s both satisfying and terrifying to finish a book. It’s satisfying because it’s a little like finally getting a Haystacks Calhoun clone to remove himself from your prone chest cavity. It’s terrifying not so much because of what others may think of it—though that’s not an entirely negligible concern—but because of the fear that the book might have been lots better if you’d worked harder or had more time.  Sometimes the best sentences finally form and key data points only become available after you’ve closed up shop, and that fear tends to be sharper the more expansive and open-ended the book’s topic.

That’s certainly how I feel about my new ebook, Broken: American Political Dysfunction and What To Do About It. I’m gratified that at least some people have already expressed appreciation for what I try to do in that book—and that includes Thomas Friedman’s generous call-out in this past Sunday’s New York Times, under the somewhat improbable title “Lose-Lose vs. Win-Win-Win-Win-Win.” But I’m finding it hard to let go of the subject despite having let go of the subject (if you know what I mean), because everywhere I look, it seems, I see more grist for my recently shuttered mill.

Thank heaven, therefore, for this blog—where I have the opportunity to supplement Broken on an ad hoc basis on those occasions when I can’t bear not to, and I can do it here without leaking footnotes all over the place.

That’s exactly what I’m about to do now, but in all fairness, especially to readers who have helped me with this project along the way as it rolled out in pieces here starting last year, take a warning: Below you will encounter a long, somewhat esoteric discussion in political theory/sociology that only eventually reaches a conclusion you might (or might not) care about. That conclusion takes as its prooftext, so to speak, the new Sprint advertising campaign that most of you resident in the USA will have noticed by now: “Be Truly Unlimited.”

My argument is that “Be Truly Unlimited” is not just an ad campaign, although it obviously is that, too. Sprint is trying to sell unlimited minutes for some carefully calculated market price, and the deal appeal resides largely in its simplicity: No more counting minutes or wondering about budget thresholds breeched, no more fuss with rollovers and so on. (I’m not in a position to comment on the commercial proposition, since I’ve never owned or paid for my own cell phone.) But I think the marketing team is aiming to leverage a strengthening American meme the larger consequences of which are somewhere between capacious and portentous, depending on one’s point of view. To see that, however, you must be able to decode the glitz and glitter of our crowded semiotic environment to find the core attitudes and assumptions, some we’re self-aware of and some we’re not, beneath. So if you’re ready, warnings be damned, let’s turn over some symbolic rocks and get started.

*  *  *

It in the introduction to Broken: American Political Dysfunction and What To Do About It, I take some pains to explain why I choose a middling level of analysis, a Goldilocks level that’s neither too superficial nor too deep. I offer a teaser pointed toward deeper explanatory templates for our current difficulties, but soon leave off from them. The reason, as I explain in the book, is that deeper cultural explanations, however interesting and even true they may be, have close to zero chance to gain policy traction. They don’t speak wonk.

That said, there are a few verities about political life that simply cannot be ignored despite their falling outside the ambit of practical policy analysis. The first and most important of these is that most societies, most of the time, tend to govern themselves to one extent or another without much help from formal political structures. The glue, metaphorically speaking, that enables societies to do this is referred to as social trust, or sometimes as social capital.

All this really means—and in the book I refer to this key concept on several occasions—is that people in their communities establish over time certain reciprocal standards and expectations of conduct. These standards and expectations may be the result of a religious culture whose institutions tutor young people during their socialization to conform to behavior that is understood to be commanded from outside the human world. In such cases, moral behavior is ratified by the theotropic inclinations of human nature, in other words, by the sacred. Presumably, other forms of social authority, fully intrinsic to the community, can accomplish the same ends. Sometimes, usually in fact, both occur simultaneously, bringing about a merger encouraged by the fact that as people mature they learn to appreciate the virtues of civility, integrity, honesty, politeness and other social-guidance systems through which people reassure one another that we are allies-in-common by virtue of sharing a basic interest in the safety, security, prosperity and beauty of our surroundings. Government can encourage and structure the formation of such benign attitudes, but it usually cannot create them de novo.

The point here is that healthy societies create networks of expectations that work thanks to the magic of reciprocity, not because agents of a state constantly enforce them. Reciprocity amounts to sets of implicitly matched or parallel promises of future behavior, and it is the cumulative consequence of making and keeping such promises that is the font of any moral order. (This is something Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt well understood, but that most modern moral philosophers have managed somehow to miss, possibly because the insight  has been tarnished in their eyes by association with Abrahamic theologies.) I don’t steal your backpack and you don’t steal my wallet not just or mainly because of a worry about the police catching us in or after the act, but because we know it’s wrong, and we know at one level or another that if everyone did wrong we’d all be in a total mess, police or no.

Generally speaking, the better a society can maintain social order on its own dime, the less government, and the less coercion, is required to keep civic life clear of Hobbesean nastiness, brutishness and brevity. This observation is the source of anarchism as a political philosophy, just in case anyone is interested. At its essence, the idea is that if people can refine their behaviors sufficiently through some form or other of enlightenment, then, very much pace Hobbes, the need for government can be dispensed with altogether. I confess to a youthful infatuation with anarchism. Some decades ago I read and sometimes thrilled to Bakunin, Krapotkin, Emma Goldmann, and, closer to our own time, the irrepressible Murray Bookchin (1921-2006).

Anarchism is based on a very optimistic view of human nature, or rather of human social nature, which is why it tends to appeal to youth. It was Don Marquis who had his cockroach hero Archie say, to Mehitabel the Cat I think it was, that “an optimist is a guy without much experience.” There is nevertheless a case for such a view beyond youth, and a recent case well made is that of James C. Scott (Two Cheers for Anarchism, Princeton University Press, 2012)—recommended for young and old alike.

That said, I do not know of any large-scale human civilization that has not needed at least some government to establish the basic parameters for justice and economic activity, as well as for collective defense—the first and historically the most compelling and popular reason for government. But clearly, some societies are much better at creating their own internal stabilities than others. Some societies need and want less government than others. To generalize boldly (and perhaps foolishly), high-trust societies needing less government tend to be more homogeneous with respect to language, ethnicity, work profile and religious culture. In theory anyway, these are enabling but not necessarily limiting factors. Low-trust societies needing more government tend to be more diverse, more urban, more functionally specialized and complex—in a word, more modern.

In a sense, this general observation parallels that of Edmund Burke when he observed that the less discipline a person exerts on himself from within, the more discipline will need be imposed from without. What is true of individuals may also be true of entire societies. It may well be, too, as John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Translation from 18^th century to 21^st century vernaculars: A limited government devoted to liberty can only work if society’s own high-functioning moral order allows it to work by keeping expressions of liberty within certain bounds.  Or put in more common if analytically vaguer language, self-government requires civic virtue.

If that is so, it follows that even a complex and specialized modern society—if it cherishes liberty—should strive for maximum feasible anarchism, even if that ends up being far short of the utopian outcome anarchist theorists have sought. It should strive to be as much of a self-regulating social system as possible, the basis of which is, in my view, the Jeffersonian principle of subsidiarity (to which I also make reference in the book). The best way to reduce the demand for both government and coercion is to layer government, building in as best we can protective buffers between them—just as the natural world builds buffers into interdependency to reduce the dangers of systemic contamination and collapse. The fastest, most economical and most sustainable ways to solve most problems are to solve them as close to their points of origin as possible. What neighbors can handle neighbors should handle.  What local communities can handle local communities should handle. What smaller jurisdictions can handle, smaller jurisdictions should handle, and so on. That is how a federal system should work. Any so-called federal system that congenitally drives decisions up and toward the center is a federal system that is malfunctioning, just as any non-governmental organizational form that gratuitously overloads leadership is a form that is inefficient by definition.

Obviously, some standards do cry out for a one-size-fits-all, nationalized (so to speak) solution. In the book I specify a few even as I debunk presumptions to others. There are also cases where centralized economies of scale work well in organizational life, and they may be important ones. As many as there once were of such cases, they are becoming scarcer at a time when distributed systems are the bellwethers of efficiency.  All the more reason not to clutter the channels with marginal issues better handled at lower levels of governmental or social responsibility.

But again, all this depends on people being able to learn and apply standards to conduct over a wide range of interactive domains, from business to sexual proprieties to recreation to rules of the automotive road. To do that, people have always gleaned the harvest of face-to-face interactions by reading not just words but expressions and body language. The moral ballast of any society starts at the capillary level, when any two people interact. At the other end of the spectrum, therefore, as we consider a nation as a whole, we can say that no society can be more refined than the mean of individuals and families that compose it.

*   *   * 

What also follows from this is a second verity of political life, namely that the political institutions of any society emerge from that society far more than the other way around. The United States is a democracy because its founding society was egalitarian-minded, not the other way around. All of the American Founders and all of their tutors, from Locke to Montesquieu to even the great bad-boy of the time, Rousseau, understood this. The idea that a governmental form could remold or create a society after its desired image earned the derisive label “talismanic” at the hands of William Taylor Coleridge. Yes, sometimes the bully pulpit can make a difference, as the mid-20^th century American experience with desegregation shows; but even here, I think, a changing society for the most part led the government, not the other way around.

Social authoritarianism, which exists in both soft and hard, leftist and rightist versions, denies this, or at the least wants to overturn it through the force of a supposed vanguard will. Social authoritarians believe that the state can and should shape society. They want to raise our consciousness. They want to make us unselfish, or pious, or prim, or whatever the virtue d’jour happens to be. They want to squeeze our egos until they bleed compliance. Above all, they want us to conform to explicit standards regardless of any expectation of natural reciprocity. Moral obligations in this kind of command-morality world resemble Kantian categorical imperatives. Whether they want us to worship Karl Marx or the god of John Calvin makes little difference in this respect. Whether they want us to abjure private property or stigmatize tobacco smoking makes little difference, too. They want to create community, whatever its standards may be, by fiat.

Anarchism and statism are thus opposites, even though both have made and may yet again make use of similar radical methods. Anarchists want the least amount of government and the least amount of politics, while statist authoritarians want the most government and the most politics (as long as they control its vicissitudes). The utopianism of anarchism depends on human nature overcoming the distortions and barriers and bad faith accumulated in a history once described by Hegel as “a butcher’s block.” The utopianism of socialist statism depends on changing human nature from a “fallen” state to a pure one. Anarchists see true toleration, as against mere forbearance, as natural; statists do not. If you like the extension of a polarity from Western religion, anarchism is a Hebraic extremism, statism a Pauline one.

All the same, both have in common the idea that for human beings to live fulfilled lives, they must do so together, in communities. The difference between them is this: For anarchists, social trust develops naturally and organically as long as artificial hierarchies can be prevented from perverting and diminishing it; for socialists, social trust has to be imposed from the top down along explicitly devised lines. Both fear too much individualism untethered to the social commons. Both see hubris as the sin that turns the wondrous gift of individual human creativity into that which boomerangs to harm the community that ultimately nurtures us all.

*  *  *

So now, finally, let’s talk about contemporary America, and about Sprint’s new advertising campaign.  Let me continue by quoting a bit from Broken—from the aforementioned tease.

Recent widespread commercial applications of information technology extend broader trends toward the individuation of American society. The gossamer stuff from which the American dream has been spun is all about maximizing individual freedom, and about giving substance to that freedom by maximizing individual efficacy. We have willed our individualist myth into reality, for, as an old professor of mine, Erving Goffman, once put it, “Social life takes up and freezes into itself the conceptions we have of it.” Individuals in cybernetically advanced America today are autonomously powerful as never before, with worlds of information, education, training, products, social exchange and means of expression at their fingertips. But they are also apparently lonelier, less happy and more anxious as the interpersonal glue that ratifies our corner of humanity as a social species dissolves. . . . I suspect a Goethe moment at hand: We have got what we wished for as a youthful civilization, but now that we are older we are not sure what to do with a society made up of Protean individuals, or even why we wanted it in the first place.

Some few of us, anyway, are unsure. Most Americans, and most young Americans in particular, are downright enthusiastic about the I-am-an-island power they have at their disposal these days. They overwhelmingly see the upsides of the new technology insofar as education is concerned, for example, and are mostly oblivious to the tradeoffs. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean they have made a conscious choice to care less about community, or friends, or about the natural pleasures of face-to-face relations. (Thank God for sex, or the prospect of it anyway.) We are so early in this new era of mass cybernetic connectivity that no one knows how social-trust friendly or social-trust unfriendly the gadgets will ultimately turn out to be.  Look hard enough and you can see signs pointing both ways. But the fact that Sprint has chosen to mount the individuating, Protean meme and ride it all the way to the bank suggests that a tendency, at least, may already be discernable.

Why should we be concerned about this? Because if the individuating tendencies inherent in the technology are not offset by creative balances that can restock social trust, or social capital, in America, it means that we will drift ever further from an organic social equilibrium to a kind of order that needs ever more government to make it work. We will have to face what David Brooks has called “brutality cascades”, a kind of positional arms race to the bottom that ensues when it becomes difficult to impossible for standards of behavior to form out of interpersonal relationships.

Similarly and closely related, it also may mean that the social authority signals that flow from a naturally evolved social equilibrium will weaken, flattening a bit (or more than a bit) too much the bell curve of moral conformity. If that happens it will erode the constraints against extreme views and behaviors that are in every society the guardrails of civilization itself. One at least has to wonder whether that flattening hasn’t already contributed something to episodes like Buskerud, Norway, Aurora, Colorado and even Newtown, Connecticut.

Don’t misunderstand, please: I love liberty as much as the next American, and perhaps more than most. I am well aware that the concept of individualism that infuses the American ethos is the essence of Enlightenment modernity, and that it explains why both Hobbes and Locke, whatever their differences, were similarly the avatars of modern political life. I can find in my heart little enthusiasm for earlier ages suffused by superstition, smothering conformity, racist and misogynist hierarchies, stultifying fatalism and more besides. But a refined social order is nevertheless the indispensable base for individual fulfillment and dignity, no less than an infant’s willingness to roam and explore is a function of propinquity to parental security.

As Edmund Burke understood so well, tradition is not the mere accretion of habit; it is the wisdom of the ages hard accumulated, often a wisdom difficult to articulate but no less essential to basic civil order for so being. The yawning extent and accelerating trajectory of our individuation, I fear, threatens that order, threatens the natural moral balances in American society and, in their absence, lures many of us, at least, into seeking governmental solutions for everything that may displease us. (Yes, you guessed it: I suspect that American society, as more a creedal or covenantal nationalism than the bloodline forms of European nationalisms, is particularly vulnerable to the depredations of excessive individuation.) Our obsession with self-gratification, self-expression, self-fulfillment—in short with the “imperial me”—and the concomitant rejection of the old virtues (patience, humility, thrift, inter-generational responsibility) as quaint enough for museums but not much good for anything else, has made our country increasingly in need of government and at the same time increasingly ungovernable (other reasons for the latter are explored in the book).

So here I go beyond the book: Yes, globalization and automation have upset some very effective and fairly longstanding arrangements and elements of our political institutional dysfunction have made it much harder to adjust. Corruption is running rampant in a third historical wave of plutocratic assault, and it mixes in myriad ways with the dislocations of our political economy and the frailties of our political culture, making everything worse.

Above all, perhaps, never have plutocrats had it so easy, since countervailing collective action has become more difficult in an age of individuation. Where are the 21^st century populists or progressives? Where is the outrage? Do we see so little extra-parliamentary activity because things are simply not so bad (yet)? Or is it rather that the natural social platforms that serve as the basis for such political mobilization have been eviscerated by our headlong individuation? Sure, Facebook and Instant Messaging can facilitate 20-something bar-mobbing, and Twitter can help crowds gather in Midan al-Tahrir, but today’s American social environment arguably offers up to small groups of the specially interested a door flung more widely open than ever when it comes to looting the treasury of the public weal. The logic of collective action has never been less limited.

What I am suggesting is that our crisis of governance, which is reflected but only partly expressed by the mess our political class has made in Washington, is ultimately anchored in a cultural shift that is both a source for and a consequence of revolutionary technological change. Increasing numbers of young and well-educated Americans love the gadgets that help isolate them from one another because they do not wish to be obligated by civilities, do not wish to be constrained by responsibilities to others, do not wish to be limited in any way.  We are witnessing the eternal temptation to self-indulgence raised to both principle and art.

The marketeers at Sprint are clever folks; five will get you ten that they know all this. If we want to be radically free, autonomously powerful, they are eager to pose as our helpers. If we want to escape social gravity, to propel ourselves into orbit around our own egos, we can sign that cell phone contract. And, ironically enough, in all this we are encouraged because everyone else seems to be doing the same thing. This is pseudo-individualism, narcissistic faux non-conformity in a crowd.

Where will this lead, if it keeps up? Well, there’s a very old story, let me suggest, that succinctly speaks to this. It is about a certain tower in a place called Babel. Are you confused?

All I can say is that I liked Sprint’s older, Beatles-inflected advertising slogan better: “All. Together. Now.”

The Minimum Wage Explained

March 3, 2013

There is a rare gem in Sunday’s New York Times in the business section.  Former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Dr. Christina Romer, has provided a balanced, honest, accurate and concise summary of the arguments concerning the minimum wage. Given that a significant rise in the minimum wage was one of President Obama’s main initiatives in his recent State of the Union Address, this brief analysis should command a wide audience.

Two qualities of this essay particularly commend it.

First, as Dr. Romer identifies the several economic effects of the minimum wage, she takes care to estimate their relative magnitude. Yes, a rise in the minimum wage will produce unemployment, it will produce higher prices as business businesses pass higher labor costs on to consumers, and it will therefore conduce to inflation—but how much, compared to the redistributional benefits it may bring?

And second, Romer points out that there are other ways, better because more precisely targeted ways, to produce the same benefits as the minimum wage. So she puts the issue in its proper context.

If you want a quick lesson on an important, complex and often politically distorted issue, here’s your chance.

Things Get Worse.......

March 3:

The most important news of the day is arguably contained in a somewhat-buried article in the New York Times by Robert F. Worth and C.J. Chiver, entitled “Seized Chinese Weapons Raise Concerns on Iran.”  The subtitle gives a hint of one of the reasons this information is so significant:  “Capture of Vessel Off Yemen Alarms Region.”  (As if it isn’t already alarmed enough.)

And well it should be alarmed. As the article makes clear, the Iranians, via the Revolutionary Guard Corps, are accelerating the volume and sophistication of weapons supplies transferred to extent and potential proxies in the region. In the case of Yemen, that’s the Houthi rebellion. In all cases, Iran’s support is to Shi’a or Shi’a offshoot groups fighting Sunni government or groups.  The qualitative escalation is symbolized by the presence of Chinese-manufactured manpads—the QW-1M. These weapons come from a Chinese state-owned company already sanctioned by the U.S. government for illegal arms dealing.

What are Iranian and Chinese officials thinking (and let me note that in neither case can we assume a monolithic government decision system)?

Why, first, are the Iranians doing something that is clearly going to alarm and drive together Sunni countries in the region, and quicken their willingness to cooperate with the United States? Well, they may have assumed they wouldn’t get caught. There have been times in the past when they did not get caught in a timely fashion, and other times when U.S. intelligence and other decision-makers thought that following rather than outing this behavior would bring more long-term benefits.
But they got caught: On January 23 the USS Farragut, a DDG-class destroyer took down the Iranian Jeehan I of the coast Al Ghaydah, a Yemeni town almost directly north of the island of Sucotra in the Gulf of Aden.


Personal aside:  I had the honor a few years ago of shipriding the Farragut into the Atlantic Ocean for a couple of days along with a half dozen other civvies. The ship, which sails out of Mayport at Jacksonville, Florida, was on a counter-terror, counter-piracy training mission in advance of a deployment to the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden. I got to watch simulated action take place, as Captain Phil Sobeck and his officers explained what was going on.  I also got to watch as a cruise missile was fired to its target at Hurlburt Field, near the Gulf Coast all the way on the other side of Florida. And I got to smell a large cloud of cordite during gunnery practice: a-yuck! Congratulations to the men and women of the Farragut, and all those who have been associated with her! The next time I wear my Farragut hat, a gift from Captain Phil, I will do so with special pride.


Note that the Iranians have plotted and implemented this escalation even as they have agreed to talks with the United States and others about their rapidly proceeding nuclear weapons program. Could today’s news possibly suggest that the Iranians have zero intentions of making a deal, and that they are using negotiations only to divide and distract the so-called international community (how hard is that, after all?), so as to buy some quiet time for themselves?

I don’t think that the prospect of getting caught seeding weapons all over the region was enough to stop the Iranians.  That is because there is a chance—a fairly good one, I’d say—that the Iranian leadership believes in the inevitability of war, whether a broad-scale Shi’a-Sunni war in the region, perhaps touched off in Syria and Lebanon between Jabhat al-Musra and Hizballah, or an attack by the United States, or both.  So why wouldn’t they position themselves for it as best they can?

Why the Chinese?  Because they’re willing, they’re discreet—and because they have the right stuff.
Speaking of the Chinese, why are they willing to do this, despite our having read them the riot act several times over this sort of behavior now going on many years?  I can think of two classes of reasons.

First, it’s free.  We complain to them in private diplomatic circles, and we toss a sanction here and there at a specific reprobate company, but we exact no real price.  Every time sanctions against Iran come around, the White House exempts China from them. Not a way to communicate a serious attitude, turning what our diplomatic folks do into what is frequently called in the State Department a “d’marchemallow.” So what’s really to stop the Chinese side from doing the deal?

Second, and much more attention arresting, the Chinese government (or at least the PLA) knows that if there is a fight one day in the Pacific—say one that starts more or less accidentally between China and Japan over some rock in the South China Sea (see the cover story of the current issue of TAI)—it would be very useful to any extended Chinese military campaign if well-armed anti-U.S. groups in the Middle East, taking their cues more or less from Iran, were capable of starting what amounts to a second front. As it is, it seems less than certain that the Obama Administration would back its Japanese ally if it got into a slapping match with China. The prospect of a second, Middle Eastern front coming into play can only make U.S. determination, and credibility, that much easier to doubt. One has to assume that both the Iranian and Chinese sides understand this.

So, important news? You bet.  Good news?  No such luck.

Hollywood Argonistes (with apologies to John Milton)

February 28, 2013

I saw Argo a few weeks before the Oscars, and I liked about 99 and 44/100 of it. Once the plot action starts, the tone, images, language and emotional pitch of the main characters all seem high-quality replicas of historical reality. Not that I have any expertise in making or evaluating film as an art form. I just know what I like and don’t like, and that mainly depends, in the case of historical fiction, on the fit between the fictive rendering and my own experience embedded in the mysterious workings of human memory.

The problem I had, and now have more than ever with the Oscars being announced, concerns the other 56/100 of one percent of the Argo movie experience.

Before the action begins the viewer is treated to a 2-3 minute potted history of post-World War II Iranian politics and U.S.-Iranian relations. As the narrator talks, vivid period photographs flash before one’s eyes. After the action is resolved, the film ends with a taped remark, running for maybe just a minute or so, from former President Carter. From the cracked voice it sounds like Carter is commenting fairly recently, perhaps after having seen a screener of the film.

These bookends to Argo compose an atrocity committed on the historical record. It’s typical Hollywood anti-establishment, mock-heroic crap. More specifically, it’s totally unreconstructed revisionist pablum that (mis)frames for the viewer what they are about to see or have just seen. Most viewers won’t remember either bookend explicitly or in any detail, so engaging is the actual movie in between. But into their heads it will have gone, and not to no effect.

For those who may not have a good grasp of the logic of anti-U.S. historical revisionism, let me spell it out for you. In the primitive, Manichean revisionist mindset there are only two sides to any conflict or situation: good guys and bad guys. The United States is always the bad guy, making anyone who is against the United States ipso facto a good guy. The way revisions logic works is that if good guys do anything good, it’s because it’s their nature to do good things—because they are good guys. But if good guys do anything bad, it’s because bad guys make them. Similarly, if bad guys do bad things, it’s because it’s their nature. If they seem to do good things, it’s only because the good guys somehow make them.

With this “logic” in hand, a revisionist can spin any historical event into one in which the United States is always at fault, and enemies of the United States are never at fault. If you understand this, you’ll understand exactly how these bookends to Argo work.  (You will also, incidentally, understand the tactical, logical innards of anything written or produced by Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky or Oliver Stone.) Thus, why did the good Iranians make hostages out of American diplomats in November 1979? Because the bad Americans made them do it, because of all the bad things we had done to them before. And why did the bad Americans pull off the Argo caper successfully? Because the good Iranians created the circumstances for their so doing—and of course the American hero succeeds not with but despite the bulk of American officialdom depicted in the movie.

Don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying that Ben Affleck knowingly lied to his audience. I’m saying that he doesn’t know any better, that he actually believes the nonsense that introduces and frames the film. He is a Hollywood type. He doesn’t know and cannot be expected to know any actual history. It’s not important to him. What is important is that he have a good storyline that appeals to the increasingly cynical, anti-Washington bias of most Americans. Well, maybe he dissimulated a little. Even he has to know, one would hope, that it was the imminent beginning of the Reagan Administration that finally sprung the hostages on January 20, 1981, the day before Reagan’s inauguration. But the name Ronald Reagan never occurs. The way things are left, Jimmy Carter gets credit for bringing the hostages home rather than blame for leaving them there so long in the first place. Well, if you’re going to lie, you might as well make it a whopper.

It is easy to lie vaguely. Indeed, the power of an historical lie rests in the juxtaposition of lots of trivial detail against a studied narrative vagueness. To explain a lie of this kind invariably takes more words than the lie itself. That is why skillful lying is so powerful: It gulls the listener by making understanding seem so easy. To unpack the lie requires more effort on the part of the listener, putting the un-packer at a distinct disadvantage. Nevertheless, I am game to do the unpacking if you are game to do the listening.

In the past, I’ve commented on President Obama’s speeches using footnotes which would pop up when you’d mouse over them on the page. This had some legibility problems online, so this time, we’ll try it a different, more standard internet way. It’s less than ideal because you’ll not get the sense of the original text as a unified whole. But for the sake of ease of reading, let’s give it a go like this: voiceover original in block quotes interspersed with my numbered comments. If you so choose, you can cut-and-paste the block quotes to reconstitute the whole on your end.

* * *

This is the Persian Empire, known today as Iran.

1. Statements do not get much more ignorant than this. Iran today is a tiny fraction of the territorial extent of three Persian empires from the past—the Achaemenid, the Sasanid and the Safavid.

For 2,500 years this land was ruled by a series of Kings, known as Shahs. In 1950, the people of Iran elected Mohammed Mossadegh, a secular democrat, as prime minister. He nationalized British and U.S. petroleum holdings, returning Iran’s oil to its people.

2. It is not possible to return something to those who never had it in the first place. The idea that Iran’s oil belonged to the Iranian people is a notion that virtually no Iranian at that point in time would have credited, except perhaps members of the Communist Tudeh Party. Iran’s oil was discovered, extracted, refined, transported and marketed by foreigners—mainly the British. Iranians could not have done these things at the time, so the money the concession paid to the government was money no Iranian would otherwise have had. What the Mossadegh government actually did was to expropriate property, mostly British, in violation of international contracts. In so doing, Mossadegh as prime minister went far beyond his constitutional authority in what was, after all, still a monarchy.

But in 1953, The U.S. and Great Britain engineered a coup d’étât that deposed Mossadegh, and installed Reza Pahlavi as Shah.

3. Here is the key lie in this passage. In the first place, the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had been Shah before the Mossadegh government. He became Shah at a young age when the Allies deposed his father, Reza Shah, during World War II. It is true that Great Britain and the United States played a role in the overthrow of Mossadegh and the return of the Shah to his Peacock Throne, but most of the damage to the Mossadegh government was done by Mossadegh and his political allies themselves. They made lots of mistakes, they alienated most of their original allies, and they contributed to a genuinely chaotic environment. It was feared both in Iran and beyond that a small but resolute group of Communists, with Soviet support, might take advantage of the situation. This was not an idle fear, given the machinations of the Soviet government in Iran directly after World War II. There is a parallel here to the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The leftist myth paints Allende as an immaculate-conception kind of hero, a political saint who could do no wrong. The truth was that he did plenty wrong. Like Mossadegh, he also alienated large swaths of his original political coalition. Had Mossadegh and Allende not been such maladroit political operators, it would not have been remotely easy to dump them, and likely not possible at all.

The young Shah was known for opulence and excess. His wife was rumored to bathe in milk, while the Shah had his lunches flown in by Concord from Paris. The people starved.

4. Even if it were true, about the milk bath and the lunches flown in from Paris, it is not as though the Shah and his wife were doing anything that the majority of Iranians did not expect them to do. They were royalty, and most people expected them to act like royalty. Nor is it true that because of the excesses of the Royal Palace the Iranian people starved. There is no evidence whatsoever of significant starvation in Iran during the Shah’s reign. There was plenty of poverty in Iran, yes, but that poverty had existed for centuries and would have existed regardless of the personal habits of the Shah and his princess.

The Shah kept power through his ruthless internal police, the SAVAK. An era of torture and fear began.

5. Another outrageous misstatement. Toward the end of the Shah’s rule, after the shocks of the oil revolution generated tremendous corruption and dislocation in the political economy, it is true that the government became fairly brutal, and the SAVAK genuinely murderous. One of the main reasons for this is that over time the reform agenda of the Shah’s regime, which included confiscating vast amounts of land both from the aristocracy and from the clergy, generated a strong backlash. More about the Shah’s reformist agenda below. The point is that no era of torture and fear began in 1953, as the statement asserts. There was always opposition to the Shah’s reformist agenda from Iran’s hidebound rentier elite, but for the most part his rule was broadly popular—until around the early 1970s.

He then began a campaign to modernize Iran, enraging a mostly traditional Shi’ite population.

6. Another whopper. As I have just said, the effort to modernize the country, known as the White Revolution, which the Shah continued from the time of his father, and which also took Mustafa Kemal in Turkey as a model, did stir up some opposition. For example, the first time that the cleric Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini—aka Ayatollah Khomeini—got arrested for involvement in a street protest, in 1964, was on the occasion of the government granting the vote to women. This was by no means unpopular at the time, except, again, to the country’s hidebound Shi’a clergy. Is Ben Affleck trying to tell us that the Shah’s extending the franchise to women was a bad idea?!  That a vast project of land reform designed to alleviate Iranian poverty was a bad idea?! If that is what Affleck believes, let him please say so directly.

In 1979 the people of Iran overthrew the Shah.

7. The “people”, generically speaking, never do anything as such. It is very romantic to make such statements, but it is sociological nonsense. Of course, no one expects an intro to a movie to be a paragon of social science virtue.  Still…  The Shah fell because he was old and sick, and most of his sagacious political advisers were no longer on the scene. He fell because he could not control the creative destruction he himself had unleashed with his reforms and his engineering of the quadrupling of oil prices; he was to a very considerable extent the victim of his own success. And he fell because his most important ally, the United States in the form of the Carter Administration, did next to nothing to prevent it.  See below.

The exiled cleric Ayatollah Khomenei returned to rule Iran.

8. True as stated but misleading all the same. Somehow the impression has grown up that once the Shah was gone or very nearly gone, the only conceivable alternative was rule by the Iranian clergy. Anyone who remembers those days knows that the matter was vastly more complicated than that. Iran had an interregnum provisional government under Abulhasan Bani-Sadr. Any number of outcomes were imaginable at that point; there was nothing inevitable about clerical rule. One distasteful but, under the circumstances, not-beyond-the-pale solution was a temporary military takeover that could calm things down and set the stage for a parliamentary republic. There is still disagreement about the true attitude of the Carter Administration toward this option, all of it rotating around the Huyser Mission.

Anyone who has never heard of General Robert E. Huyser and his mission has absolutely no business writing so much as a single sentence on this general subject. Some say President Carter instructed Huyser to prepare a coup as a last ditch option to prevent the mullahs from coming to power. Others say the reverse: that Carter instructed Huyser to make sure there would be no coup. The truth remains to be established, but with Carter’s friend and UN Ambassador Andrew Young calling Khomeini a saint, who would soon return to his monastery in Qom, I for one lean to the latter interpretation.

It descended into score-settling, death squads, and chaos.

9. “It” descended?!  What actually happened was exactly what anyone with a brain would expect to happen: The guys who won, the guys with the guns, went around the country jailing, torturing and murdering the opposition. The statement makes it seem as though everyone was equally to blame for the mayhem. The technical term for this is “bullshit”, or, better, “bullshistory.”

Dying of cancer, the Shah was given asylum in the U.S. The Iranian people took to the streets outside the U.S. Embassy, demanding that the Shah be returned, tried, and hanged.

10. Again, the Iranian people did nothing of the sort. The protests were large, drawing on a grievance culture deep within the Iranian psyche.  But the foot soldiers of the protests were members of the new clerical political movements.  This was their job. The intimation that the entire country was behind these protests, and took part in them enthusiastically, is simply false.

* * *

And here is the Jimmy Carter ending voice over:

* * *

They went in, as you know, under the guise of making a motion picture, and there was a high possibility of failure. And after it was successful, of course there was a lot of temptation to reveal all the stories, so that I could take a little bit of credit for it, since I was president. But we had to keep it secret. Tony Mendez has gone down in history, after his retirement, as one of the top fifty most important CIA operatives of all time. Eventually, we got every hostage back home safe and sound, and we upheld the integrity of our country, and we did it peacefully.

Jimmy Carter has become increasingly delusional as the years go by. Nowhere in the movie does anybody mention, nor does Carter mention it here, that there was a failed attempt to rescue the hostages by dint of military force. If that operation had not been grounded early on, there is every prospect that at least a limited fight would have taken place.  Carter’s intimation that everything he ordered throughout the ordeal was spic-and-span peaceful is a flat lie.

As for upholding the integrity of the country, this is almost too ludicrous to believe. Carter’s indecisiveness at the critical moment lead to the rise of the clerical regime in Iran. Carter’s weakness in the face of the seizure of our embassy ended up enabling a small number of Iranian radicals to essentially take the entire foreign policy of United States hostage for more than two years—and enabled Ayatollah Khomenei to claim, famously and damagingly, that United States “cannot do a damn thing.”

Now, when Carter says that he would like to have taken credit for the Argo operation, he does not directly claim credit for the return of the hostages. But he does imply it when he says “we got every hostage back home safe and sound”—and if he does not then Affleck does. This amounts to another lie.

As already noted, nowhere is there a mention anywhere in this movie, whether in its bookends or in its main section, of Ronald Reagan. During the 1980 campaign Reagan criticized Carter repeatedly for his mishandling of Iran, and he left no doubt in anyone’s mind that, if he had it in his power, he would take a very different and much more muscular approach to the problem. The public record thus far is mute about how the incoming Reagan Administration might have communicated its intent to the Iranian regime after the results of the November 1980 election were in. But the man who would become CIA Director in that new Administration, one William Joseph Casey, was hardly at a loss to know how to do such things. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that the Iranian regime took to heart whatever was communicated to it from the Reagan transition team, possibly via Swiss intermediaries, between the election and the inauguration. They were plainly afraid of Ronald Reagan, and that is the main reason they let the hostages go. Had Jimmy Carter won the election, they almost certainly would not have been released at that time.  Whatever would have become of them no one can know.

* * *

Why belabor all this?  After all, it’s just a movie, and nobody takes these things seriously, right?

Alas, that’s not so. No one takes them seriously as such, perhaps, but a lie repeated in public space often enough becomes truth through a process of lazy entertainment osmosis. Most of the people who have seen, and will now see, Argo are too young to remember what was going on back in the mid to late 1970s. Most viewers, too, know little to nothing about the history of Iran or U.S.-Iranian relations—why should they?—and so they have no basis against which to protect themselves from weapons-of-misinformation-dumps (WMD). Most important, we exaggerate the capacity of most people to distinguish between fact and representations of fact, because being able to do so is very context specific. Let me tell you a story about this.

Many years ago there was an actor named Robert Young. He was famous for being the father figure on a very popular television show called Father Knows Best. Later, he played the unimpeachably marvelous Marcus Welby, MD on another very popular television show of that name. Either toward the end of or after his Marcus Welby role, Sanka hired him to sell instant coffee in TV commercials. How did they do this? They dressed him in a doctor’s white coat, put a stethoscope around his neck, and gave him a pointer to point at some graphic purporting to show how healthy this instant coffee was for you. Now, of course, if you asked viewers outright if the guy on their TV screen was actually a medical doctor, or just an actor, most of them could probably tell you that Robert Young was just an actor. But given the associational promiscuity of the human mind, and the tendency of television as a technology to put a viewer into a semi-hypnotic trance, most of the time the question was never asked and the distinction never made. As far as I know, the commercial did exactly what the Sanka people wanted to do.

The point is that in the context of our obsessive entertainment culture, narratives about real politics tend to smuggle their way from the fanciful to the factual without most people ever bringing their critical facilities to bear on what they’re hearing. In our culture, which loves to be entertained more than anything else under the sun, the temptation to believe an easy truth is tantamount to a done deal. People associate being entertained with authenticity, with emotion, with really being alive, so that anything one learns about history, say, in the midst of an entertaining experience is given pride of place as truth. I cannot resist quoting from the late Michael Crichton’s masterful 1999 novel Timeline:

What is the dominant mode of experience at the end of the twentieth century? How do people see things, how do they expect to see things? The answer is simple. In every field, from business to politics to marketing to education, the dominant mode has become entertainment. . . .

Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren’t bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused—everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society at the end of the century.

In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time is on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.

I fully expect that the result of Argo and its popularity will be to permanently deface recognition of the actual historical record when it comes to Iran and U.S.-Iranian relations from this period—and this for a relationship that has anything but run its course. If the revisionist logic is as insidiously contagious as I think it is, it stands to reason that the notion will spread that if the good Iranians want a nuclear weapon, it’s only because the bad Americans are forcing them to have one. Get the picture?

- See more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/2013/02/28/hollywood-argonistes-with-apologies-to-john-milton/#sthash.IP3SEssv.dpuf

A French Exit Strategy in Mali

It has come to light in recent days that alongside French and other African troops fighting in Mali are both Chadians and, more important, cadres of the MNLA—the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad. The few media expressions of this latter datum generally dump this key piece of information far down in their articles. We have to wait until the ninth of 11 paragraphs in this piece, for example, for any mention of the MNLA.

The importance of the Chadian soldiers ought to be obvious. They understand exactly what the mostly Tuareg Islamist rebels are doing tactically, because they have used the same tactics in more or less the same setting for approximately half of forever. (In an earlier post I suggested that anyone who wants to understand the tactical nature of this war in Mali should review the war between Chad and Libya from the mid-1980s.)

But it’s the revelation about the alliance of convenience between France and the MNLA that is by far the most interesting. Until the war in Libya helped to boost the fortunes of Ansar ul-Dine in Mali, the MNLA was the Tuareg rebel organization putting pressure on Bamako over many, many years. Once the Islamists took control of the rebellion, the MNLA seemed to disappear into thin air—or at least that was the impression one got from the Western media. I was pretty certain they were still around somewhere nearby, but I wondered what their strength and new strategy might be. Now I think we know: The MNLA has put itself forward as a useful proxy of France in the hope that, when the war is over, it will become the main political force in the Tuareg areas of Mali—this time with the acquiescence of France and, presumably, also of the dependent government in Bamako (however grudgingly given).

It is not a bad bet. The French, having hastily announced very expansive war aims, soon found themselves in a nasty fix: namely, without the means to achieve their ends. They certainly did not wish to police all of northern Mali themselves from now until eternity, and the more realistic among French civilian and military decision-makers had to understand fairly quickly that no African Union force could do the job either. And there stood the MNLA, Tuaregs prepared to do a deal.

The most that the French will promise the MNLA in payment for its services is pressure on Bamako to offer genuine autonomy to the Tuaregs. Ultimately, that will not satisfy the MNLA. After all, they are the ones who last April declared Azawad independent. So this is not over, or even close to being over, in a political sense. For the time being, however, neither the French nor the secular Tuareg nationalists have a better option.  So it goes in politics as well as life. As Wallace Stevens once put it, “Our paradise is the imperfect.”

[Image of Chadian soldiers from AFP/Getty images.]

Map Humor

26 Feb. 2013

In the February 24th Washington Post, in accompaniment to an article by Karen DeYoung and Elizabeth Sly entitled “In Syria, new influx of weapons to rebels tilts the battle against Assad”, there appeared a genuinely hilarious map. I laughed so hard I nearly dropped my morning bagel. Here it is:

Knowing a little bit about how newspapers operate, I am reasonably sure that the authors of the article had nothing to do with the map, and probably saw it only when they saw their story laid out for public consumption.

Obviously, humor is a relative thing. In this case, it is relative to what a person knows about Syria.  Now here is a population density map of Syria, which I was able to find in about ten seconds on the internet:

You will see the “fit”, nearly exact, right away. Inescapable conclusion: There are areas of conflict in Syria wherever there are people. Well like duh, Washington Post editor dudes. Not many people live in the vastness of the Syrian desert… go figure.

If you don’t think this is funny, well, as I say, humor is highly idiosyncratic. I count myself fortunate that a laugh has little difficulty attaching itself to my smile.

The Second Coming of Warren Christopher

February 24, 2013

Today the new Secretary of State, John Kerry, began his maiden voyage as dean of American diplomacy. He is headed to nine countries; specifically, to London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Ankara, Cairo, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. According to the State Department and sources quoting Secretary Kerry’s entourage, and according to Kerry himself at a February 20 speech delivered at the University of Virginia, the main purpose of the trip is to consult with our European allies and Middle Eastern friends about the current ongoing tumult once mindlessly labeled the Arab Spring.

It is by no means unusual for the first trip abroad of an American Secretary of State to be to Europe. Presidents may appropriately go to Canada or Mexico on their first journey outside the country, but since the time when Secretaries began traveling extensively—after World War II, really—most have gone first to Europe, almost invariably starting in London. Outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton did not do this; her first official trip was to Asia—and that was before the temporarily famous (or infamous, depending on one’s tastes) ”pivot” to Asia. But she is the exception.

The reasons for the Europe focus are easy to list, since there are really only two that matter. First, Europe is where the heart of America’s most important Cold War alliance was, and since long before that Europe has been at the very core of American strategic concern. Despite the end of the Cold War, legacy relationships between the United States and Europe remain strong, as do our extensive economic ties. They remain so strong because, second, Europeans are the forebears of America’s 17^th- and 18^th-century founding population and Europe is the source of America’s foundational political principles and cultural expressions. All of Europe in its considerable diversity is not created equal in this regard, of course; Britain and France clearly stand above all others, albeit differently, in that regard.

If those two reasons explain the past behavior of travelling American Secretaries of State, do they also explain present behavior? America’s population as a whole is today less traceable back to Europe than ever. Its dominant Protestant origins, indelibly linked with Britain and its history back at least to Henry VIII, stand diluted as never before. Beyond culture there is a changing strategic landscape. Having pivoted to Asia, and having sharply reduced the post-World War II American military–strategic footprint in Europe, many observers take it for granted that those Obama Administration decisions ratify Europe’s lack of strategic importance to the United States.

Indeed, prominent ex-policymakers and academics—some of them European—have in growing numbers and confidence dismissed the strategic significance of Europe. They point to a group of countries that punches well below its weight in global affairs on account of its protracted failure to invest in defense capabilities, and that stands in what seems to be an endless political muddle amid a careening economic swoon. The European Union’s internal problems, which are epiphenomenal of key decisions made (or avoided) in Berlin, Paris, London, Rome and Madrid, are more political than economic, but they nonetheless contribute much to the current pall of economic uncertainty and the broadly psychological distress it brings in train.

If all that is the case, then why is Secretary Kerry heading off first to Europe? If we have pivoted to Asia, why not go to Tokyo, Seoul, Manila, Jakarta and New Delhi first? Does he think the Europeans understand what is going on in the Middle East better than we do—assuming anyone does—and even if he does, what help can he expect from them? These are allies that could not even “do” Libya without us. These are allies that do not help their own; the French fight in Mali serves the basic interests of all of Europe, but none of France’s European partners have come forth to help them in a significant way (never mind for the time being whether French war aims and capacities even come near to matching).

And as brave as the French are in the Sahel, they are hardly brave. Against our pleadings and protests, the French government insists on refusing to label Hizballah a terrorist organization, despite the recent verdict of the Bulgarian government and new incriminating facts come to light from a trial in Cyprus. Notwithstanding the blather we hear from the French and the Germans about Hizballah having social welfare functions and political legitimacy in Lebanon, French reluctance is in truth based on cowardice. The French government wants to avoid turning French soldiers operating within the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon into more prominent targets than they already are. But the underlying fear is broader: By branding Hizballah a terrorist organization, the government worries that French interests worldwide will be attacked in response. This is perversely inverted reasoning. Hizballah can smell weakness from a distance. Supine behavior in Paris is far more likely to attract attacks than to deter them. From Europeans like these Secretary Kerry expects to get wisdom and assistance in dealing with the Middle East?

*****

Withal, Secretary Kerry is doing the right thing all the same, and for two reasons. First, to my way of thinking, for what it’s worth, dismissals of Europe’s strategic significance are exaggerated. Despite the frailties of Europe’s capabilities in military terms, everything is relative in this regard. Where else in the world can we find partners that combine both overall (not just military) capability and enough political commonality to foster effective and sustained coordination? One can point to certain countries here and there outside of Europe that make the grade, but nowhere on this planet is there a cluster of them comparable to U.S. allies in Europe. Yes, they are weak, often irresolute, divided among themselves and are thus in no few respects a pain in the ass to work with—as the illustration concerning Hizballah attests. But they are still the best we have, and they tend to come as a set. A country like Poland, which has been a stalwart ally (at least before we alienated its leadership and popular opinion alike in recent years), is far more likely to help us in a pinch in the context of the broader U.S.-European alliance framework.

Second, thanks to the drawdown in U.S. military forces there, and the rhetoric surrounding the Asian pivot, a lot of Europeans think we don’t love them anymore. We have to show the flag. We have to make nice. We have to hold hands. We have to smile a lot, and whisper when it seems engagingly appropriate. We probably have to give a speech or two. That’s how this stuff works; the care and feeding of old allies is a day job.

Wherefrom do I know this? Because when Condoleezza Rice became Secretary of State early in 2005, she did more or less the same thing. Her first trip was also to Europe and the Middle East combined, and in a moment I will discuss how those circumstances differed from the ones at hand today. But right after the Europe trip she went to Asia, a place where, at the time, our allies wondered if we even knew they existed. I remember sitting with the Secretary and about a dozen or so others in the John Jay conference room, just outside the Secretary’s suite on the Seventh Floor of the State Department building, to discuss plans for that trip. I was there because I was her speechwriter for the major address she planned to deliver at Sophia University in Tokyo; just by sitting in and keeping my mouth shut I was supposed to get some guidance for how to write the speech—in lieu of actually being able to ask the Secretary directly. I remember this meeting being rather heavily logistical in nature: Would the Secretary want to meet celebrities at airports for that populist photo-op advantage? Would she play the piano this time, as she declined to do in Europe?—and so forth and so on. After about 45 minutes of this sort of thing, one recently arrived aide (whose name I will not mention) asked a simple but probing set of three questions: Why are we going on this trip? What do we want to accomplish? What’s our business there?

Now, as it happened, there actually was some business to conduct, but it was not the sort of thing properly discussed at large in a trip meeting like this, and it was not at all the sort of thing to be mooted directly in a speech. (Some of it had to do with communicating to the Indians and the Pakistanis our concern about a prospective energy pipeline deal with Iran; some of it had to do with communicating some facts to the Chinese government about recent North Korean behavior, which is probably why General Ray Odierno, the Secretary’s military adviser at the time, was on the trip; but I’ll say no more about that “business” here.) The answer in the room that day, after an appropriate stunned silence, was that we were going to Asia to refute the impression that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had pushed that entire continent completely off our radar screens. We were going to show the flag. You can imagine, perhaps, how much speechwriting guidance I got from that….

In short, as with Secretary Rice’s trip to Asia in March 2005, a lot of what Secretary Kerry’s first trip is about is symbolism. And there’s nothing wrong with that. So if he returns from Europe and the Middle East without having accomplished any actual business, it won’t really matter. State Department mattress mice by the hundreds will create a thick briefing book filled with background on a whole range of issues, from the idea of a Transatlantic free-trade zone to the Hizballah issue all the way to the continuing scar of Gitmo. There will be plenty to study on joint and parallel U.S. and European program efforts to promote reform in the Middle East over the past two decades, a legacy of at least three previous Secretaries of State. Secretary Kerry and his senior staff will not lack for stuff to study and talk about. But this is really a gardening phase, get-to-know-you symbolic trip rather than a serious business one.

It’s also a test drive in a way. Every Secretary has to learn how to use his 24/7-capable Executive Secretariat, which includes an amazing group of professionals who take his office onto Air Force II and around the world with stunning alacrity from one five-star hotel to another, coordinating travel, security and all the multinational liaison that goes with it. These folks do their jobs with consummate skill; it’s the new Secretary who has a learning curve to draw.

*****

Precisely because this trip is largely symbolic, I have a problem with the itinerary. Actually, I have two problems—and avoiding Israel is not one of them. The Israelis have just barely put together a governing coalition after their January 22 election, and they are not in a position to properly receive an American delegation. These days, too, if an American Secretary of State goes to Israel, he also has to visit Ramallah to talk to the Palestinian Authority. And if he does that that he is immediately asking to be swamped by the highly emotional, very telegenic and almost completely futile exertions of the so-called peace process. That’s enough to swallow an entire trip whole. Believe me, that’s best avoided, whatever the reasons.

No, it’s okay that Kerry is not going to Israel. It’s not okay, in my view it, that he’s not going anywhere in Central/Eastern Europe—to the “new” Europe, and the newest members of NATO. The first Obama Administration made a hash of relations with Poland, and this would be a good opportunity to start repairing them. But if Secretary Kerry thinks that too many Secretaries of State have gone to Warsaw and not enough to Prague, then that would’ve been a suitable destination, too. To leave out Central/Eastern Europe altogether is a mistake. Within a few years of the end of the Cold War too many American observers of international affairs checked the box for this part of the world, as if the entire region was in the bag, so safe for democracy and inextricably pro-American that nothing really could go wrong there. For years now we have been taking this entire part of the world for granted, and that’s just not a good idea, as recent fairly ugly developments in Hungary testify.

Part of the first problem, perhaps, is that he is also going neither to Brussels nor to Dublin, the capital of the current rotating president of the European Union. If we really mean what we say when we claim that we support more mature forms of European integration, then why not symbolize that support on this trip?

The second problem is that Kerry is going to Qatar but not to Jordan. The Qataris are big time troublemakers. By going there he more or less gives them undeserved equal status with the Emiratis, who are genuinely useful and sincere allies. But the sin of commission with respect to Qatar pales compared to the sin of omission with respect to Jordan. There is no end to the failure of American statesmen who are not expert in the Middle East to underestimate the importance of this little country. Jordan is a critical buffer in both a north-south and an east-west fashion; that’s the reason Winston Churchill created it after World War I. Jordan’s very existence keeps Israel and Iraq apart, and it keeps both Egypt and Saudi Arabia at a healthy physical remove from the Fertile Crescent. If the country falls apart or its moderate government collapses into the hands of salafi hotheads, there will be lots and lots of trouble both near and far. And Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy is itself in more trouble today than it has been since the middle 1950s.

Maybe King Abdallah II doesn’t want the Secretary of State in Amman. Maybe he and his senior aides think a visit would be counterproductively inflammatory at this point. If that’s the case, and we have been so informed, then not going to Jordan isn’t a mistake. But if we are the ones who are spurning a welcome, then we are indeed making an error. If the Jordanians will host us, it’s a propitious time to buck up the Hashemites, and to come bearing some palpable help for the enormous burden of dealing with Syrian refugees the kingdom faces today.

*****

With the new Secretary’s trip about to begin, I can’t help being reminded where I was eight years ago. I accompanied Secretary Rice on Air Force II as she set off for Europe and the Middle East on her first trip abroad as Secretary. Whereas Secretary Kerry is going to nine countries, that trip involved eleven, plus a refueling stop. That trip took us from London to Berlin to Warsaw to Ankara to Jerusalem and Ramallah to Rome to Paris—the site of the Secretary’s maiden speech at Science Po on February 8, 2005—to Brussels to Luxembourg (which then held the rotating EU presidency) and then to Shannon, Ireland for refueling before heading back across the Atlantic to Andrews Air Force Base. That’s a total of 22 takeoffs and landings, if I’ve counted correctly, in less than two weeks. That’s enough to make a person feel like a kind of galactic yo-yo.

Obviously, there are differences as well as similarities between the business—even the symbolic business—to be conducted now as opposed to then. That trip back in 2005 preceded a presidential trip to Europe. Maybe the trip this coming week will also do so, but there is yet no indication of that. That trip back then was a “clear the decks”, “clear the air”, “let’s put the past behind us” sort of trip. This trip is not entirely clean of bad feeling; several European governments are none too thrilled with the whole Afghanistan caper we dragged them into. But this is nothing like the bad Transatlantic air produced by the Iraq War. The “old” Europeans, to recall Donald Rumsfeld’s unfortunate terminology, did not like the American President in 2005, but by and large the “new” Europeans did. Today, the “old” Europeans like the American President, but by and large the “new” Europeans do not like him nearly as much. Why, and what does it matter?

There are many reasons, but the main one is that the “new” Europeans do not chafe from strong American leadership. To the contrary:  They wanted to be part of Europe, but the Transatlantic link mightily reinforced their post-Communist trajectory. They are not wildly fond of the Obama Administration’s passive “lead from behind” body language. That leaves them in the company of a bunch of Germans, Frenchman, Brits, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Greeks, among others, who cannot seem to make any purposeful common decisions and actually stick with them. And that’s why this maiden trip by a Secretary of State to Europe should remind us not so much of Condoleezza Rice’s journey, but of Warren Christopher’s.

Secretary Christopher sallied forth to Europe for the first time in office in May 1993 during one of many odious stages of what I call the Wars of Yugoslav Succession. In that same month the then Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Peter Tarnoff, set off a tempest when he told the press that the United States, after the Cold War, would pare down the definition of its vital strategic interests in the world. Tempest or no, he was indeed speaking accurately for the Administration, whose President had determined to be a domestic policy, not a national security, President.

When Christopher arrived in Europe, our allies, whatever the history of their complaints about our overbearing nature, expected, as before, American leadership. It would not be too much to say, I think, that at that moment they desperately sought it. And what did Christopher, in essence, say to them? Something along the lines of, well, what you guys think we should do? The Europeans were appalled. They wanted leadership, but they got highly uncharacteristic, and utterly unhelpful, modesty instead. Fecklessness, some would (and did) say. It is therefore not entirely without interest that Secretary Kerry has characterized his forthcoming trip as a “fact-finding” journey, one in which he intends to be a good listener.

Yet what else can the new Secretary do? Everything about President Obama at the start of the second term suggests an unusually passive American role in the world. Everything suggests that, like Bill Clinton in 1993, he wants his second term to be a domestic policy and not a national security presidency. A diplomatic duck-and-cover drill looks to be in prospect for every crisis that comes down the road during the next four years—at least until the cumulative damage of that passivity prompts the White House to do something, somewhere. Every Secretary of State knows, or ought to know, that the policy of the United States is the policy of the President, because he is the one who got elected, and all of his cabinet members serve at his pleasure. A wise Secretary, whatever his personal inclinations and analysis, can never let too much blue sky show between himself and the President who elevated him to high office.

I doubt this will be a problem for John Kerry (or for Chuck Hagel, assuming he actually becomes Secretary of Defense), a man who seems as reluctant to want to actually do anything as Barack Obama. That is probably the watchword to keep foremost in mind for this trip: It may be the Secretary who travels, but it is the President’s brief he ultimately carries.