Reflections on Trump

I just heard (props to C-Span radio) a bit of Trump's speech in Charleston, W.Va.  It was a series of disconnected assertions of the sort that typify his speeches: "we're going to win, win, win"; "we're going to negotiate great trade deals"; "we're going to have lots of people enter the country, but legally"; "we're going to bring back jobs"; "we're going to get rid of Common Core"; "we're going to repeal Obamacare"; "we're going to crush [or some similar verb] ISIS"; and, of course, "we're going to make America great again."  And he said to West Virginia miners: "get ready, you're going to be working your asses off [i.e., when Trump becomes President]." 

The slogan "we're going to make America great again" is empty without some conception of what makes a country great.  Does Trump have such a conception?  Would America be great if the coal industry were again engaged in large-scale strip mining and laying waste to the landscapes that Trump has probably never spent any time in?  Where does Trump stand on controls on emissions from coal-fired power plants?  How can one give a speech in West Virginia, a state whose economy is probably just as dependent on tourism as it is on coal (if not moreso) and not even nod in the direction of saying something about the state's physical beauty and natural attractions (if he did, it wasn't in the part of the speech I heard)?  Does Trump realize that climate change means that doing little or nothing to transition to non-fossil-fuel energy sources is signing a death warrant for future generations?

Instead of flying from New York to Charleston, giving a speech, and leaving, Trump should go to some small, depressed towns in southern West Virginia, for example in McDowell County, and he should talk to people who live there and actually know something about the region and the challenges facing those communities.  But that would require a degree of curiosity and openness to experience that Trump shows no evidence of possessing.  His entire career has been a matter of "winning" and attempting to advance the fortunes of Donald Trump.  Fans of Trump like to point out that as a businessman Trump has hired thousands of workers.  Who are they?  How are they treated and paid?  What is the turnover rate?  Are they going to vote for Trump?

A central question in this election is whether the way to "make America great again" is to hire as President a demagogic misogynist who embodies the worst aspects of a system that generates waste, inequality, and environmental destruction on a planetary scale.

Peter T. on the U.S. in the Middle East (Part 1)

Note: This is the first part of a two-part guest post by Peter T.  He is a retired civil servant who worked in Australian national intelligence for 12 years, then in law enforcement intelligence and related fields.  He traveled in Asia in the 1970s and taught in Iran in 1978.  He has degrees in history and International Relations (Sydney University and University of Kent).

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That U.S. policy in the Middle East is a mess is very nearly a truism.  For instance, a first quick look at my local library turned up a book by an American journalist with several decades of experience in the area, Patrick Tyler.  It's a long survey of six decades of the twists and turns of U.S. policy as shaped by the personalities of Presidents and their close associates.  Page 11: “After nearly six decades of escalating American involvement in the Middle East, it remains nearly impossible to discern any overarching approach to the region...What stands out is the absence of consistency...as if the hallmark of American diplomacy were discontinuity.”  And that's from a sympathiser.

To illustrate briefly: in 1975 the U.S.'s chosen major strategic partners were Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.  Iraq and Syria were in the Soviet orbit, the Afghan central government in the U.S. one, and the Kurds had just been abandoned to Iraqi mercies after a few years of not-so-covert support. Insofar as radical Islam was on the radar, it was not favoured.  A decade later, the U.S. was actively helping Iraq against Iran and the Kurds, and was running a proxy war against the Afghan government in alliance with a radical Islamic movement funded by Saudi Arabia.

A decade after that, in 1995, the U.S. was at odds with both Iran and Iraq, again offering aid to the Kurds, and becoming less comfortable with radical Islam.  By 2005, it was bolstering the Afghan central government against the tribes and radical Islamists, trying to keep an Iranian-aligned Iraqi government and the Kurds on side, but still supporting the Saudi government even as it funded a radical Islam declared to be the U.S.’s prime enemy.  By 2015, the U.S. was in a de facto alliance with Iran against a radical Islamic movement in Iraq and Syria, supporting “moderate Islamists” allied with the radicals against a Syrian government backed by Iran, propping up the Afghan government against the tribal and radical Islamist coalition it had nurtured in the ‘80s, backing the Saudi government against both radical Islam and Iranian-supported Shia populism in the Arabian Peninsula.  The U.S. is now on all sides of all the fights in the region apart, of course, from the Israel-Arab (or Israeli-Palestinian) conflict.  And, even there, it is not obvious that Israel and the U.S. are on the same sides, or which way the leverage runs between Washington and Tel Aviv.

The policy and the arguments are now approaching farce.  The think tank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has just put out a paper arguing that “pursuing U.S. regional interests must involve targeting not only ISIS but also its Shiite adversaries.”  Presumably the authors will simply assume that some alternative force conformable to U.S. preferences can be conjured into being (new improved Iraqi Army anyone?).  And that targeting both sides in a war will produce something other than anarchy.  Or take the recent announcement that the U.S. and Turkey had agreed on the training of “moderate” Syrian rebels.  They just disagreed on who the rebels will fight, ISIS or Assad.

No Friends, Only Interests?

Iraqi Kurds, Afghan Tajiks, Hazaras, Pushtuns, Iraqi Shi'ites have all been the victims of abrupt changes in U.S. policy; Iranian policy-makers have been treated to talk of reconciliation and then slapped with sanctions; Iraqi Sunnis were first treated to “de-Baathification,” then bribed to cease fire, and are now being bombed.  With experiences like this, it is no wonder that Pew reported that only 30 per cent of Middle Easterners had a positive view of the U.S. in 2014 –  by far the lowest score of any region of the world.

We've all seen those movies where the central character ends up in a nun outfit on top of a skyscraper with an ex-lover, a criminal, a banker, a lunatic, a stuffed bear and a stolen yacht.  The French do them really well.  As you watch the film, each move is explicable (“I was on my way to get some milk for the cat when....and because I love animals...and then the door opened...”), so much so that the end result is not so much a surprise as a culmination.  The foreign policies of Great Powers are not supposed to resemble these movies.

So this is one of those outcomes – like a depression for economics – that offers a teaching moment. There are plenty of reasons offered why the U.S. did and does intervene in the Middle East: oil, Israel, the geopolitics of anti-Communism, the “war on terror”.  There are large books (often written by the policy-makers themselves) explaining why each decision was perfectly rational and the consequences unforeseeable.  It is a journalistic trope that the Middle East is a strange, complicated place where people are irrational, extremist, un-modern....

Really? The Middle East is more complicated than the Balkans, South-East Asia, Latin America? Oil may explain why the U.S. is interested, but hardly explains why, to guarantee supply, it had to impose sanctions on Iran or wreck Iraq, or encourage, abandon, protect, discourage and then promote Kurdish autonomy (see also Northern Alliance, Pashtuns, Shi'ites....).  The same books that proclaim the regrettable irrationality of Middle Easterners often also lay out in detail the (perfectly rational) calculations behind each move – both their own and others'.

What can explain this?  One common phrase, loosely paraphrased from Lord Palmerston, is that “states don't have friends, they have interests.”  Like many such aphorisms, it dissolves on closer scrutiny.  Whose interests?  How are they identified?  How are “interests” reconciled and assigned priorities?  Don't states have an interest in being seen as reliable allies?  What interests have led the U.S. into this position?

Oil as Driver of U.S. Policy?

Oil?  The U.S. interest in ensuring oil flows to the world market was offered as a reason for supporting Iraq against Iran in the ‘80s (though the U.S. also secretly sold weapons to Iran), for U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, and for the heavy U.S. presence in the Gulf.  But it sits oddly with ongoing efforts to limit Iranian exports, particularly after chaos in Iraq, Libya and Syria markedly reduced flows from those countries.  It also sits oddly with the maintenance of sanctions on Saddam and with the strategies adopted in the Second Gulf War.  There does not seem to have been any great focus on protecting oil installations or ensuring continuity of trained personnel.  There were, of course, a few planning papers, but not so much focus on the ground.

One much-cited source is a 2001 study commissioned by, among others, Dick Cheney, which identified Iraq's oil as the key to averting a looming supply crunch.  The report recommended that the U.S. “should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.  The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies."  It should do this “with the ultimate goal of stemming the tide of anti-Americanism in the Middle-East and eas[ing] Iraqi oil-field investment restrictions.”  This is pretty much a description of what the U.S. did not do.

The Second Gulf War stands out, of course, as the nadir of incompetence and wishful thinking.  Yet it is not obvious that supposedly more professional and realistic administrations have a very much better track record.  The Bush I/Clinton sanctions regime killed nearly as many Iraqis as the second war and its aftermath.  The U.S. officials making Middle Eastern policy have access to all sorts of expertise.  The evidence is that they do not use it.  Further, they mostly can't be bothered to actually engage with even the most basic realities in terms of thinking through what they might mean for strategy.  This is largely a failure of imagination, but it's also due to the fact that, up until quite recently, Middle Eastern peoples mostly lacked the means to assert their own interests.  Various factions and interests in the major powers could use the place as a playground, policy could hop from one foot to the other and it didn't matter.  The locals were powerless.  Policy did not have to be careful, considered, cautious.  The oil would flow even if State made empty promises, the CIA played James Bond, and the Pentagon sold and tested new weapons.  There were few domestic consequences, and no other power cared either.  And if the U.S. stuffed up in one country, there was always another nearby.   The meddling was just another manifestation of Great Power status, but the incoherence was not because the Middle East was important but complex: it was because it was complex (as everywhere is) and weak.  If the meddling had had more immediate or drastic consequences, quite a few policy minds would have been concentrated.[1]

Some Realities

What are some basic Middle Eastern realities?  One is that politics in the Middle East has an embedded religious dimension.  It is, after all, mostly Islamic.  Secular alternatives are not realistically on offer.  Ignoring Sunni, Shia, Druze, Allawi identities is silly.  So is supposing that they can be easily supplanted.  This does not mean that people are doomed to fight over religion.  It does mean that policy that does not take the religious angle seriously will be fragile.  Of course, religious identities cross-cut with ethnic and national ones, but in this the Middle East is no more complicated than Europe.  A map of the current front lines in the Syrian civil war is pretty much a map of the country's religious and ethnic affiliations, down to the village level.

A second reality is that no policy that seeks to exclude or ignore Iran is likely to succeed.  One can no more exclude Iran from the Middle East than one can exclude France or Germany from Europe. Iran is simply too big, too central, and too closely linked to its neighbours.  It has withstood U.S.-supported invasion, sanctions and threats, developed its transport and other links with neighbours like Turkey, Armenia, Turkmenistan and Pakistan, has close ties with the governments in Baghdad and Damascus and with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and built a modest but quite formidable local defense capability.  Quite simply, Iran has the diplomatic, military, and economic capacity to withstand more pressure than the U.S. can bring to bear, and so its interests have to be taken seriously.  This means accepting Iranian control over its civil nuclear program, something that occupies the same place in Iranian politics as revocation of the unequal treaties did in Chinese politics up to 1949: the acid test of sovereignty.  The signs are that the U.S. has not yet quite grasped this.  It took 20 years for the U.S. policy establishment to grok that things had changed in China.  It looks like taking at least 40 years for the penny to drop on Iran.

So if I were a U.S. policy analyst, I would advise reaching a modus vivendi with Iran as soon as possible, resignedly accept that Iraq will be a Shia-run state aligned with Iran, back Kurdish independence, and tell State that if they get involved in the Syrian five-way dog-fight they will get bitten.  So pick one dog to back or stay out, because being bitten by a few is better than being bitten by all.  But on past form, if I were a policy analyst my advice would be entirely disregarded except as it agreed with the listener's prejudices.

-- Peter T.

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[1] There are other places that resemble the Middle East in that outside powers used them as playgrounds without regard for consistency (or for the locals).  China 1860-1949, Latin America up to the 1990s or Central Asia in the period of the Great Game fit the bill, as does, ominously, Eastern Europe post-1989.  Even the tropes are the same: there is much talk of irrationality, corruption, regimes mired in ancient superstition and needing to be dragged into the Modern World, of bringing efficiency, order, enlightenment.  As well as, of course, making money.

 

From economic growth to a 'steady state' economy

I don't write a lot here about environmental and resource issues, mostly because I feel I lack the required expertise to say something valuable. But I recently looked at this piece by an Australian philosopher named Rowan (E. Loomis linked to this which in turn linked to it), and it raises some questions that need to be discussed more widely. As Rowan points out, even the most resource-efficient, 'clean' versions of economic growth are not sustainable propositions in the long term: eventually the world will run out of physical space (for the "stuff" that people are using plus the non-bio-degradable "stuff" they have thrown out), and well before that happens raw materials will have been depleted. The way to avoid this is to transition over time to a non-growth, steady-state global economy, while ensuring, or so one would hope, that it is also marked by considerably less poverty and more material equality than the present system. Sounds like a tall order, but the alternatives if it doesn't occur will be very unpleasant. Such a transition might (probably will, I suspect) require the wealthy and the upper-middle-classes in the 'developed' world to give up some of the "stuff" that they currently view as either necessary or desirable props of their existence. 

The alternative to thinking about these issues and doing something about them will be an eventual (note "eventual" not "imminent") collapse of civilization. If it does happen, it will occur, I would guess, several hundred years after I am no longer around. But that isn't too much consolation. Humans, probably uniquely among animals, have the capacity to think about the long-term future, and that really is something more of us should do more often.

Noted

R. Lizza (of The New Yorker) on the Keystone pipeline.

IEA report on CO2 emissions

Emissions rose 1.4 % in 2012, putting the world on track for a 9 degrees Fahreinheit temp rise. Emissions fell in the U.S. and Europe, but rose in China (although at a slower rate than in the past) and in Japan, as the latter "imported and burned large amounts of liquefied natural gas and coal to compensate for the loss of electricity production from nuclear plants that have been idle" since the tsunami.

Natural gas and political turmoil

Erik Voeten links to Charles Mann's article which is about, in Voeten's words, "the potential deleterious consequences of finding large quantities of natural gas (methane hydrate) underneath the seafloor." Voeten's post and Mann's article suggest that among these consequences could be increased political instability, as regimes now propped up by oil become weaker and -- this point is the one Voeten stresses -- as countries become less dependent on oil imports. Dependence on oil imports makes the dependent countries co-operative and leads them to behave like good international citizens, lest turmoil interfere with the international flow of petroleum on which they rely: so say Voeten and Michael Ross in a paper on SSRN to which Voeten links.

Having only skimmed Mann's article, my off-the-cuff reaction is that the more serious potential deleterious effect of methane hydrate discoveries is that they will slow down the shift to renewable energy sources (solar and wind). Mann mentions this at the end of his piece. That seems like a fairly certain consequence of new natural gas discoveries, whereas the argument about political consequences seems somewhat more speculative to me. For instance, I doubt that its current oil-dependence has all that much of a constraining effect on U.S. foreign policy. YMMV.

Reflections on the Democratic convention and the election

Can one learn something from convention speeches? The answer is yes. At least, I learned something -- or was reminded of something -- from the passages on the energy issue in both Clinton's speech and Obama's. In those sections, they both highlighted the same set of facts about the last couple of years: the increased use of renewable energy sources and the rise in domestic oil and natural gas production and corresponding decline in oil imports. As Clinton put it, oil imports are at "a near 20 year low and natural gas production [is at] an all time high. Renewable energy production has also doubled." Both speeches also mentioned the increase in fuel-efficiency standards that will double the minimum required miles-per-gallon "by the middle of the next decade" (quote from Obama). I had been vaguely aware of all this but it hadn't been at the front of my mind. Whether it sank in with all that many people is of course an open question. Perhaps doubtful, given all the hoopla, distractions, etc. that tend to dominate these events.

Some points I thought were perhaps too heavily emphasized by the Dems. E.g. the auto industry rescue deserved emphasis but probably it was overdone. Apart from Kerry's speech, foreign policy got fairly short shrift, and Obama, for the most part, raced through the foreign policy sections of his speech, which were anyway rather unsurprising and, e.g. in the case of the Middle East, extremely vague (one sentence, in fact). However, the line about Romney being caught in "a Cold War time warp" was good, as was the line about it being time for some "nation-building at home."

Last thought: Martin Gilens's research, which he wrote about in a series of Monkey Cage posts, e.g. here, shows that the most affluent in the U.S. have far more success in translating their positions and political preferences into policy than everyone else. This casts doubt on the rhetoric of both parties about democracy, responsiveness to the popular will, self-government, and so on. So the question in the election might be less one of a grand philosophical choice between visions -- though there are of course real and significant philosophical differences between Obama and Romney -- and more a question of which outcome will intensify even further the situation Gilens documents, i.e. make the connection between affluence and influence (to use the title of his book) even tighter. I don't think readers of this blog will be in too much doubt about my answer to that question.

New book on climate change and conflict

Will climate change generate armed conflict? The present state of research on this question would seem to be somewhat inconclusive, at least to judge from this Monkey Cage post and the accompanying comments. Just now I was over at the Polity Press site for another reason and happened to see the announcement for Climate Wars (by Harald Welzer), so I'm passing it on fwiw.

Update: defense bill

The U.S. DOD authorization bill, containing detention provisions that I blogged about earlier, has now cleared both houses of Congress and is headed to the Pres.'s desk, the detention provisions having been reworked just enough, apparently, to avoid a veto. The measure includes sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran, application of which, according to the linked WaPo piece, threatens to disrupt oil supplies and to cause shortages and price increases. Good one.

The Keystone XL pipeline

I haven't been following the details of the controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline, but I'm aware that it's aroused some passionate opposition. A demonstration is planned for Nov. 6 in front of the White House. For those interested, the Tar Sands Action site is here.

'Drifting' U.S.-India nuclear deal

The expected benefits of the U.S.-India nuclear deal, signed a few years ago, have so far not materialized, for reasons examined in this piece. Nicholas Burns is quoted in the article as saying the fault lies on India's side, and that seems to be accurate, inasmuch as the liability law passed by the Indian parliament deters U.S. companies from selling reactors, etc. The Japanese nuclear disaster following the tsunami has also made India understandably more wary of nuclear power.

Commenting on the linked WaPo article, a reader writes: "another bush/cheney [sic] debacle." Not really. As I wrote at the time, the U.S.-India nuclear deal was one of the very few Bush foreign policy moves that was defensible. And it may yet turn out to pay some dividends, assuming the current obstacles can be removed. (Sec. of State Clinton is now in India for talks.)

Food, water, and conflict

A post by Daniel Little with numerous links.

The curse of oil

A piece in this past week's Wash. Post about why the countries in the Mideast now undergoing political turmoil are also in need of economic renovation had a few too many quotes from IMF people for my taste, but it did include an interesting chart (via the IMF) showing that even Saudi Arabia's GDP per capita has declined, albeit slightly, over the 1980-2010 period (measured in inflation-adjusted dollars). The article did not use the term 'resource curse' but its main point is that oil revenue (in the case of Egypt, revenue from tourism and the Suez Canal) has helped these regimes to avoid the kinds of economic measures less well-endowed countries have taken. Even an opponent of neoliberalism, which I am, would probably have to admit that the state's domination of the economy in many of these societies has not served them well.

(Note: The GDP chart is in the hard-copy version but apparently not in the online version of the article.)

Japan-India trade & nuclear energy deal

Here.

The oil & energy speech

Without wanting to have turned it into a seminar, I think it would have been appropriate for the President to mention the historical roots of U.S. oil addiction -- namely, the cult of the private car, c. 1950 to the present, and the decisions it brought in train in terms of how the country's infrastructure and cities were developed. Otherwise, it was a decent speech, but it will take more than speeches to start tackling this problem as it should be tackled. Real political courage would have entailed proposing an increase in gas taxes, for example -- but in an election year and with a recession still not shaken, that was never in the cards.

Quote of the day (2)

"Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine together inherited more than 4,000 strategic nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. As a result of negotiated agreements among Russia, the United States, and each of these states, all of these weapons were returned to Russia for dismantlement. Ukraine's 1,640 strategic nuclear warheads were dismantled, and the highly-enriched uranium was blended down to produce low-enriched uranium, which was sold to the United States to fuel its nuclear power plants. Few Americans are aware that, thanks to the Megatons to Megawatts program, half of all the electricity produced by nuclear power plants in the United States over the past decade has been fueled by enriched uranium blended down from the cores of nuclear warheads originally designed to destroy American cities."

-- Graham Allison, "Nuclear Disorder," Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2010, pp.82-83

Lowther's linkages; or, could a nuclear Iran be good for the U.S. and the Middle East?

In a recent New York Times op-ed ("Iran's Two-Edged Bomb," Feb.9), Adam Lowther argues that a nuclear Iran might be a blessing in disguise for the U.S. and the Middle East. He should have settled for making the point that a nuclear Iran would pose less of a threat than is generally supposed. Instead Lowther produces an intricate and implausible linkage scenario that makes the most convoluted aspects of Bismarck's diplomacy look like tiddlywinks by comparison.

Here's the gist of his argument: (1) a nuclear Iran threatens countries in its region, including, e.g., Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states; (2) the U.S. could offer security guarantees to these countries mainly in the form of "a Middle East nuclear umbrella" and in return (3) the U.S. would demand: (a) wide-ranging democratic and other reforms in Arab autocracies that would drain some of the major breeding grounds of Islamist militancy; (b) higher oil production and lower oil prices from the oil-producing countries and (c) cost-sharing by those under the 'umbrella' for the expense of maintaining it. The result of all this, says Lowther, could be defeat of al-Qaeda and other similar groups; "a victory in the war on terrorism"; lower oil prices; a "needed shot in the arm" for the U.S. defense industry as weapons systems are exported to U.S. allies (read: client states), etc.

Now I happen to think that Western governments and foreign policy establishments exaggerate the potential bad consequences of Iran's getting nuclear weapons. But Lowther's scenario rests on some weird assumptions. First is the notion that trading a U.S. nuclear umbrella for fundamental reforms in Saudi Arabia and other allies is something these allies would go for; if they felt as threatened by a nuclear Iran as Lowther says they would, why couldn't they turn to China or Russia for security guarantees instead of the U.S.? Unlike the U.S., China and Russia would not demand those pesky domestic reforms; instead they would probably be content with economic rewards and concessions. Secondly, Lowther seems to think it would be a wonderful thing to create a Cold War-style regional balance in the Middle East, with a nuclear Iran playing the role of the USSR and Saudi Arabia et al. playing the role of Western Europe under a U.S. nuclear umbrella. How this arrangement, even if it did lead to domestic reforms in the Arab autocracies, would result in the demise of Islamist militancy is something of a mystery. Doesn't Lowther recall that one of al-Qaeda's main complaints was the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia -- i.e., in proximity to some of Islam's holiest sites -- during and after the Gulf War? The notion that the extension of a U.S. nuclear umbrella over Saudi Arabia would persuade al-Qaeda and similar groups that they should give up the struggle, because the price of said umbrella would be a fundamental transformation of the Saudi polity, doesn't really compute. Where is the evidence for the argument that autocracy breeds discontent which breeds terrorism; therefore get rid of autocracy and you are on the road to getting rid of terrorism? Are those attracted to the jihadist worldview really interested in seeing a parliamentary democracy in Saudi Arabia? To be sure, they want to remove the current Saudi regime, but I was under the impression that it was that regime's links to the U.S. that is one of their prime grievances.

The main argument of Lowther's column has the feeling of a fantasy, of a Rube Goldberg contraption dreamed up at a desk. Instead of arguing that a nuclear Iran could lead to all good things from "victory" in the "war on terror" to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, Lowther should have written a column about why in fact a nuclear Iran poses less of a threat than is widely thought, how states that acquire nuclear weapons generally do not become irrational or insane in their foreign policy behavior, and why the West should therefore not be getting its knickers into such a twist over the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Now Lowther does make the point at the end of the piece that "unless the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, and his Guardian Council chart a course that no other nuclear power has ever taken, Iran should become more responsible once it acquires nuclear weapons rather than less." But this sensible sentence has been preceded, unfortunately, by so many non-sensible sentences that I doubt many people will still be reading.

Satellite photos of retreating Arctic ice

Here.

[Hat tip: The Int'l Interest]

On the misuse of "pragmatism" and "pragmatic"

Tonight on the PBS NewsHour, a lawyer for utility companies said he was "optimistic" that Obama's energy policy appointees would turn out to be "pragmatic." Translation: not press industry too hard on environmental standards.

A few days ago, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber pointed out (citing a piece in The Nation) that the use of "pragmatism" to mean "non-ideological" or something equivalent is misguided. Farrell observed that Deweyan pragmatism is not apolitical or non-ideological:

"You simply can’t get the politics out of pragmatist accounts. Furthermore, Dewey’s arguments may carry some quite radical implications. Dewey and other pragmatists lay a very heavy emphasis on the benefits of unforced inquiry as a guide to practice. Yet unforced inquiry is only possible in a society where there aren’t economic or social barriers to free engagement in discussion and deliberation. Thus – to really achieve the benefits of free debate and untrammeled inquiry – you need (where it is feasible) to dismantle barriers that prevent full and unfettered participation in the processes of discussion through which inquiry takes place."

Or, to put roughly the same point differently, you need a marketplace of ideas to which access is relatively equal and in which some voices don't drown out others by virtue of concentrated wealth or other privileges. This is a very old problem (or debate), of course, but one that never seems to go away.

The road to Kabul runs through Islamabad

In "From Great Game to Grand Bargain: Ending Chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan" (Foreign Affairs, Nov./Dec. '08), Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid argue that only a regional diplomatic initiative that changes Pakistan's calculations can lead to a long-term solution in Afghanistan. They propose, among other things, the establishment of a UN-authorized contact group to facilitate dialogue, especially between India and Pakistan, on the issues of Afghanistan and Kashmir.

"A central purpose of the contact group would be to assure Pakistan that the international community is committed to its territorial integrity -- and to help resolve the Afghan and Kashmir border issues so as to better define Pakistan's territory.... [This] might encourage Pakistan to promote, rather than hinder, an internationally and nationally acceptable political settlement in Afghanistan. Backing up the contact group's influence and clout must be the threat that any breaking of agreements or support for terrorism originating in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] would be taken to the UN Security Council. Pakistan, the largest troop contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, sees itself as a legitimate international power, rather than a spoiler; confronted with the potential loss of that status, it would compromise."

Although I don't recall that Rubin and Rashid explicitly say this (although they may, since the article meanders around a bit and I read it a while ago), one aspect of a diplomatic strategy might be to offer Pakistan a nuclear deal similar to the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal, on condition that Pakistan take a more vigorously constructive and helpful stance toward the U.S./NATO position in Afghanistan. Now that the A.Q. Khan network has stopped functioning, even if Khan himself remains something of a revered figure in certain Pakistani quarters, there is no principled reason to deny Pakistan the same sort of nuclear arrangement that India has with the U.S. (Concerns about the long-term stability of the civilian government, however, admittedly might be a complicating factor.)

In addition to the contact group proposal, Rubin and Rashid urge driving a wedge -- or furthering the already-begun estrangement -- between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. A pledge by the Taliban to dissociate themselves and any territory they control from any global jihadist activity, in return for cessation of military operations against them, "could constitute a framework for negotiation." And any regional "grand bargain," whatever its precise terms, must, they emphasize, also take into account the interests, and mobilize the cooperation, of China, Russia, and Iran.