Quote of the day: Freud

I had remembered Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (orig. pub. 1930; Norton paperback, 1961, trans. and ed. J. Strachey) mainly for its emphasis on humans' (supposedly) innate aggressiveness and for its well-known thesis that 'civilization' is in conflict with 'instinct' and requires significant control of and renunciation of 'instinctual' behavior.  A recent glance at the text, which I hadn't read in decades, suggests that these rather grim themes are occasionally handled with a bit of what at least might pass for humor, as shown by this excerpt from a long footnote in chap. 4, pp.52-3:

Sex is a biological fact which, although it is of extraordinary importance in mental life, is hard to grasp psychologically.... The theory of bisexuality is still surrounded by many obscurities and we cannot but feel it as a serious impediment in psychoanalysis that it has not yet found any link with the theory of the instincts.... Another difficulty arises from the circumstance that there is so often associated with the erotic relationship, over and above its own sadistic components, a quota of plain inclination to aggression.  The love-object will not always view these complications with the degree of understanding and tolerance shown by the peasant woman who complained that her husband did not love her any more, since he had not beaten her for a week.

Orbán's fence

Heard a report on All Things Considered (NPR) today on the Hungarian government's attitude toward the Syrian and other migrants who are transiting -- not intending to stay in, but transiting -- Hungary en route to Germany and other European countries.  The latest move was to close the train station in Budapest to migrants, stranding them there.  The Hungarian government is building a barbed-wire fence on the country's border with Serbia.  Not only is that retrograde policy, it's unlikely to work.

Dueling mandarins: Vidal & Buckley in 1968

One of the better moments in The Best of Enemies, the currently playing documentary about the TV encounters between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. in 1968, is a three-minute side-by-side comparison of the two men's origins.  Both came from privileged if not especially 'old money' backgrounds, both went to elite prep schools, both rode horses well as teenagers, or so the photographs on the screen indicate.  Both were intellectuals.  Both spoke with the sort of upper-class accent that has now almost vanished.  Both ran for office (Vidal more than once).  A Marxist -- or anyone else, really -- from another planet might wonder how in the world these two men ended up calling each other names on prime-time TV during the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions in That Year, 1968.

Class is not always destiny, would be a five-word answer to that question.  And yet, as one of the many (too many) interviewees in this movie suggests, it is possible that each man saw a bit of himself in the other, maybe just enough to nudge dislike over the boundary into loathing.  Despite -- or, who knows, perhaps because of? -- his utterly despicable political and ideological stances, it is Buckley whose charm and air of insouciance (for lack of a better phrase) are more evident when the two square off in front of the ABC-TV camera.  Vidal was, as the person with whom I saw the movie remarked, more self-contained, his gestural, non-verbal language a bit less naturally suited to TV.  There was nothing shabby about Vidal's verbal performance, however, even if, as Hendrik Hertzberg points out with reference to the most infamous exchange, it was not actually true that Buckley was a crypto-Nazi, though he was unquestionably a reactionary.  Still, it's not difficult to see why Vidal, responding to a somewhat loaded question from moderator Howard K. Smith and faced with an annoyingly interrupting Buckley, reached for an insult.

The Best of Enemies is a thesis movie, i.e. it has an argument, and that argument is that the Buckley-Vidal encounter was the ur-moment that shaped TV punditry as it came to exist in the U.S. in the ensuing decades.  Maybe, though I think the argument is pressed a bit too hard.  I have no recollection of watching the Buckley-Vidal encounter at the time: my memories of 1968, somewhat sketchy in general given my age then, are not primarily televisual, though I do have a couple of memories of the Democratic convention that I think must derive from having watched some of it.

In the end, despite this movie's best efforts to convince one otherwise, the Vidal-Buckley debates must be considered, I think, basically an interesting footnote to a tumultuous, historic year -- even if it was a footnote that generated subsequent essays and lawsuits by the protagonists -- rather than a central event.  However, as many of us know, footnotes are not necessarily unimportant; and The Best of Enemies, despite its flaws as a movie, will help ensure that this particular footnote will continue to be remembered.

A few insular notes

1) Just heard on the NewsHour that it was nine years ago today that Pluto was demoted to the status of a dwarf planet.  Not something I'd ordinarily take note of, but given this blog's title, why not.  Btw, the title was decided upon on the spur of the moment when I started the  blog; my first couple of choices (I think Cries and Whispers was one of them) were already in use and thus unavailable.

2) It was well more than a year ago (two years? longer? whatever, not bothering to check) that I tried unsuccessfully to move this blog to WordPress.  There was a glitch involving my registration that WordPress, despite my notifying them of the issue on the help forum, never fixed.  Hence there is an inactive, empty WordPress blog of this name just sitting there, gathering dust, because of WordPress's negligence. Hooray for WordPress.

3) Google Analytics does not give a complete picture of this blog's readership but I think it gives a reasonably good indication, and its figures suggest that average daily readership of Howl at Pluto is probably at its lowest point since the blog's launch in May 2008.  Also, this year is on track to feature the fewest number of posts of any year since the blog's launch. Speaking of which, I think this will be my last post in August.

Politics and sex

"If politics is concerned with who gets what, or with the authoritative allocation of values, one may be pardoned for wondering why it need involve so much talk.  An individual or group can most directly get what it wants by taking it or by force and can get nothing directly by talk.  The obvious difficulty is the possibility of resistance, and it is counterforce that talk may circumvent.

"The employment of language to sanctify action is exactly what makes politics different from other methods of allocating values.  Through language a group can not only achieve an immediate result but also win the acquiescence of those whose lasting support is needed.  More than that, it is the talk and the response to it that measures political potency, not the amount of force that is exerted.  Force signals weakness in politics, as rape does in sex."

-- Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1964, paperback 1967), p.114 (footnote omitted)

Quote of the day

"The rhetoric [of the Republican presidential candidates] is really out there. On foreign policy, this is the most-aggressive kind of stuff I've ever seen."
-- Richard Herrmann of Ohio State Univ., as quoted in this Aug. 2 article in The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch

Human trafficking, Andaman Sea version

I've mentioned the Rohingya and their plight here before.  This NYT piece from last month (h/t HC) gives some interesting background on the human smuggling business that has grown up in recent years focused on, but not restricted to, stateless Rohingyas eager to flee Bangladesh for Malaysia.  Increasingly, the article notes, "ordinary Bangladeshis" are trying to get to Malaysia: "By early this year, Bangladeshis made up 40 to 60 percent of the migrant traffic, according to the United Nations’ refugees agency." 

The most dangerous candidate?

The most dangerous of the current bunch of presidential candidates may be Ted Cruz.  He strikes me as a demagogue par excellence.  Of course I realize he has competition for that title.

Solitary confinement in Mississippi and elsewhere

TBA posts on an NYT piece about a county jail in Mississippi holding a mentally disturbed teenager in solitary confinement (for much of two years).  This inhuman practice has not been confined to Ms., as recent stories about Riker's Island indicate.

ETA: There are also a fair number of prisoners being held in solitary in federal prisons (though I don't have time to look up the numbers right now).

ETA (again): on a different but somewhat related issue, see here (h/t to a commenter at CT).

Roots and implications of the Iran nuclear deal

Peter T., who has guest-posted and commented insightfully at this blog, sent me an analysis (link) of the Iran deal by Sharmine Narwani.  She argues, essentially, that the changed strategic situation in the region represented by the rise of ISIS and its gains in Syria and Iraq (and continued strength of other extremist Sunni groups, e.g. the Nusra Front) drove the U.S. to make an opening to Iran in 2012 in order to take "the old American-Iranian 'baggage' off the table..., allowing [the U.S. administration] the freedom to pursue more pressing shared political objectives with Iran."  Iran stood up to 'the Empire' and its allies, Narwani maintains, rode out UN sanctions, and emerged with an agreement that, in exchange for sanctions relief, blocks it from doing something it never wanted to do in the first place: namely, acquire an operational nuclear weapons capability.

While Narwani's assessment has its strong points, it perhaps goes too far in painting a rosy prospect of Iranian-U.S. strategic cooperation in the region.  The two countries do not have formal diplomatic relations; unilateral U.S. sanctions on Iran that are unrelated to its nuclear program but relate to its support for groups such as Hezbollah are, afaik, unaffected by the nuclear deal; and 36 years of 'baggage' cannot be entirely taken off the table, istm, in one fell swoop. The past several decades must have left a substantial residue of psychological scar tissue between Iran and the U.S. that no agreement, no matter how 'win-win' in its basic structure, can remove overnight.

Narwani's piece looks behind certain statements of the principals to get at what she thinks are the real motivations behind the deal.  This mode of proceeding is not without merit, but it risks overlooking some points.  The main U.S. ally in the region, for better or worse, is Israel, to the maintenance of whose military superiority -- its 'qualitative military edge', in the ghastly-sounding bureaucratic phrase -- the U.S. is committed to the tune of several billion dollars a year (a commitment that may go up).  This fact standing alone imposes certain limits on the degree to which Iran and the U.S. can jointly pursue their "shared political objectives".  Iran's human rights record and the fact that it still has several American citizens, one of whom is an American-Iranian reporter for The Washington Post, in custody also tells against an immediate warming of U.S.-Iran relations in the wake of the deal (assuming the deal survives congressional scrutiny and Obama retains enough congressional support to sustain a veto of a disapproval resolution, which I think he will).

Finally, it might be worth scrutinizing the "shared political objectives" of the U.S. and Iran a bit more closely.  Iran is of course a major backer of Assad.  And the fact that the Pentagon, as detailed for example in a front-page NYT article of July 31, is trying (with very limited success to date) to train 'moderate' Syrian fighters primarily to attack ISIS, rather than Assad, might suggest, as some other developments (including arguably the deal itself) do,  a convergence of interests between Iran and the U.S.: ISIS is the main perceived threat by both.  And yet the very same NYT article of July 31 pointed out that the CIA still has a covert program in place to train Syrian fighters to battle Assad, noting that the CIA and Pentagon programs are working somewhat at cross-purposes.

Narwani may be right that the nuclear deal represents a quasi-epochal shift in strategic alignments in the region.  I would be inclined however to a more muted judgment.  The Obama administration was not motivated to reach, along with its allies, a deal with Iran mainly because of the rise of ISIS, contrary to what Narwani suggests. The Obama admin was also facing a situation in which the pressure for a military "solution" to the perceived Iranian nuclear "problem" was rising, both domestically and also from Israel.  What the nuclear deal most obviously and immediately does is remove much of the pressure for a military "solution," pressure to which the Obama admin was unlikely to have succumbed but which might have grown increasingly irksome and irritating. This, it seems to me, is perhaps the deal's most significant implication.

Note: Minor edit after initial posting.

Added later: For another perspective, see this article in Counterpunch (7/15/15), which views the nuclear deal as a move toward U.S./Iran détente and examines the forces impelling it as well as the motives behind the opposition.  

Sewell on the capitalist epoch (and its possible end)

Following someone's Twitter trail, I came upon an entire issue from 2014 of the journal Social Science History that has been made freely available (link). It contains an address by sociologist William Sewell, as well as a piece by Julian Go on British imperialism 1760-1939, among other things.

"Immature sentimentality"

The NYT Book Review for July 17 carried a review by Randall Kennedy (prolific author on race relations and professor at Harvard Law School) of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman.  The 'teaser' for the review says (this is a close paraphrase): "Go Set a Watchman forces readers to abandon the immature sentimentality ingrained by middle school and the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird."  The nice thing about these teasers or summaries is that occasionally, as in this case, they make reading the review, if not exactly unnecessary, then perhaps optional.  One question though: Doesn't Atticus Finch lose the case in To Kill a Mockingbird? How "sentimental" can that outcome be? (Yes, I've seen the movie; no, I don't really remember it that well. Was a hell of a long time ago. And no, I haven't read the Kennedy review of Watchman yet.)

An unrealistic summer reading list

The Patterson School's 2015 summer reading list, linked by Farley here, strikes me as unrealistic in the sense that I don't know who except for a speed reader is actually going to plow through every word of eight pretty hefty books (one of which is Piketty, btw) in the space of a month or two.  The prefatory note says something like: "get an iPadAir2 and take advantage of your spare hour or two at the beach or in the mountains."  Ok, whatever you say.  The inclusion on the list of Bass's The Blood Telegram is interesting; I reviewed a book on the same subject, Raghavan's 1971, on this blog some time ago (here).  

On "turning points" and "critical junctures"

It is a truism that historical narratives impose a pattern on the past.  Narratives demand a structure, which the messiness of reality resists.  Hence historians' talk of "trends," "major developments," "main events," "phase transitions," "turning points."  Most writers deprived of recourse to these sorts of words and phrases would probably produce something either unreadable or confusing, or both.

Moreover, historians have long understood that metaphors -- tides, winds, take-offs, etc. -- can help make their narratives more vivid.  To take a not-quite-random example, E.J. Hobsbawm, in his chapter on the industrial revolution in The Age of Revolution (Mentor paperback ed., 1962, pp.45-6), borrowed the phrase "take-off" from W.W. Rostow.  Hobsbawm wrote:

...[S]ome time in the 1780s, and for the first time in human history, the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies.... This is now technically known to the economists as the 'take-off into self-sustained growth'.... [C]areful enquiry has tended to lead most experts to pick on the 1780s...as the decisive decade, for it was then that, so far as we can tell, all the relevant statistical indices took that sudden, sharp, almost vertical turn upwards which marks the 'take-off.' The economy became, as it were, airborne.

***

The recognition that history has to be narrated and that most narratives involve the imposition of pattern and order has given rise to at least two sorts of academic controversies, or, to use a perhaps better word, conversations.  Both of these conversations themselves have a long history, but to simplify things we can restrict ourselves to their recent installments. 

One of these discussions has revolved around issues of objectivity and truth.  As recounted by Andrew Hartman in A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015, pp.259-60), a divide emerged or re-emerged in the 1980s and '90s between those historians who, influenced by postmodernism, were inclined to emphasize the subjective dimension of historical narrative, and those who stressed, in the words of the authors of Telling the Truth about History (1994), "the need for the most objective possible explanations...."   Much could be said about all this, but it's not the focus of this post.

A second scholarly conversation, the one with which this post is concerned, involves the question of continuity and change.  Almost everyone agrees that these are not completely opposed categories.  There is no such thing as a completely static social system, and even those that appear to be static are subject to changes or variations in the course of reproducing themselves, as sociologist Wilbert Moore, among many others, pointed out (Social Change, Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp.11-16).  The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins put a very similar point this way: "Every actual use of cultural ideas is some reproduction of them, but every such reference is also a difference.  We know this anyhow, that things must preserve some identity through their changes, or else the world is a madhouse" (Islands of History, Univ. of Chicago Press, paperback 1987, p.153).      

The proposition that continuity and change are not cleanly opposed categories, that no change is ever total, doesn't resolve the issue, of course, but simply opens it.  Which changes are more or less important, and how does one decide?  John Lewis Gaddis has endorsed another scholar's suggestion that historians should look for "a point of no return," i.e., "the moment at which an equilibrium that once existed ceased to do so as a result of whatever it is we're trying to explain." (Gaddis, The Landscape of History, Oxford Univ. Press, 2002, p.99, citing Clayton Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation, 1996.)

Somewhat more helpfully perhaps, Paul Pierson, a political scientist, has emphasized in Politics in Time (Princeton Univ. Press, 2004) that the evolution of societies or institutions is often heavily influenced by relatively small events that happen early in a developmental path; that is, he stresses the "self-reinforcing" character of path-dependent processes.  Pierson cites (pp.52-3) as one example his sometime co-author Jacob Hacker's "analysis of the development of health-care policy in the United States...."  The failure to adopt national health insurance during the New Deal "generated powerful positive feedback, institutionalizing a set of private arrangements that made it much more difficult to make a transition to national health insurance at a later point in time" (emphasis in original).  In other words, the U.S.'s failure to adopt national health insurance in the 1930s was not a dramatic-appearing event, but it had long-term consequences for the direction of future policy.  This is the sort of 'self-reinforcing' effect that Pierson suggests occurs quite often.  

This point that "critical junctures" need not be large-scale, big-bang events -- that they can even be the failure of something to occur, rather than a positive occurrence -- is a significant one, as are, no doubt, some of the other arguments in Pierson's book (I haven't gone through all of it carefully).  But I suspect that, in the end, an element of subjective judgment is inescapably involved in deciding what counts as a critical juncture or a turning point, except for a few obvious instances that would garner wide agreement.  Some may find this a disappointing conclusion, but so be it.

Added later: See also Michael Bernhard, "Chronic Instability and the Limits of Path Dependence," Perspectives on Politics (Dec. 2015): 976-991.

Quote of the day

From Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (1973), p.5:

When General Maxwell Taylor admonished the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966 that France had lost its Vietnam war not in Vietnam but in Paris, which he considered to be an important object lesson to the United States, the proper reply might well have been: "Of course; where else should they have made the appropriate decision?"  The French army, which is to say its professional officer corps, was outraged by its government's decision after Dien Bien Phu to liquidate the war, and these feelings were to accentuate the subsequent bitterness over Algeria.  However, Premier Pierre Mendes-France agreed with the common judgment that whatever benefits accrued to France from keeping Vietnam as a colonial dependency were in no sense worth the cost.... Significantly, Mendes-France remained under the Fifth Republic the most respected of the political figures of the preceding regime, an attitude shared even by so nationalistic and imperious a figure as Charles de Gaulle, who in fact followed his example under the more difficult circumstances of Algeria.

Kasich's economics

Announcing his presidential candidacy today, John Kasich said that the way to create jobs is to "balance the books," and he had kind words for the idea of a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

It's as if these Republicans are living in a mixture of the austerian 2000's and 1920.  As if the Great Depression never happened and Keynes never existed.

ETA: Remember Nixon's "we're all Keynesians now"? When it comes to domestic policy, Nixon would be derided by today's Republicans as a RINO. (Clarification: I'm talking about Nixon's domestic policies when he was President.  His earlier career is a different matter entirely.)

Very brief thoughts on the Iran deal

From what I've gathered from the coverage, the Iran nuclear agreement is a good outcome; Susan Rice, appearing on the NewsHour this evening, did an excellent job of explaining and defending it.  Jeb Bush (according to the opening summary on the same program) called it appeasement, which is a silly remark showing that he is more worried about his right flank in the primaries than he's willing to admit.

An indirect route to the two-state solution

An article in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs (Grant Rumley and Amir Tibon, "The Death and Life of the Two-State Solution") argues that the best way for Palestinians to get their own state "is, paradoxically, to give up on trying to get one."

The authors suggest that one thing Israeli officialdom would like even less than a viable Palestinian state is the roughly 4.5 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza incorporated into Israel as citizens with voting rights.  Hence Palestinians should push for such incorporation, saying that what they really want is to be Israeli citizens (which is apparently true for much of the younger generation; Rumley and Tibon cite a 2013 poll showing that only 48 percent of the 18-to-28 age group favor two states).  As a result, the two-state solution would appear in a new light to Israelis: i.e., as the preferable alternative to Palestinian incorporation.

Would this approach work? I don't know, and I don't agree with every single statement in the article.  Still, the piece is interesting.  The concluding passage:

In such a situation...this [two-state] outcome could credibly be presented to Israeli voters not as a soft act of justice or charity...but as a hard act of self-preservation.  Dov Weisglass, who was [Ariel] Sharon's chief of staff during the Gaza disengagement negotiations, has said that Sharon presented the pullout to Israeli voters in "fluent Likudish."  Sharon did not conjure up fantasies of everlasting peace; he framed the decision as necessary for Israel's survival.  A pullout from the West Bank will need to be explained in similar terms.  Only then will the threats [or claimed threats--LFC] that come with it stop trumping the supposed opportunities of some distant peace accord.

ETA: On a related issue, Tom Gregory at Duck of Minerva had a post on the UN report on last summer's Gaza war (here).

When language, religion, and urination collide

This NYT column from last month (h/t HC) by Tahmima Anam focuses on the shortage of public toilets in Dhaka, Bangladesh.  The result has been a great deal of outdoor excretion by men (but not women).  To discourage it, the government has hired an ad agency and covered the walls in Arabic, urging the populace not to urinate on a language most of them can't read because it is the holy tongue (or some such reasoning).  This is beyond stupid.  As Anam writes:

[The program] tells Bangladeshi citizens that it is acceptable to urinate on their own language, but not on Arabic. At a moment when the shadow of Islamic fundamentalism looms large, the subtext of the signage is to declare the conservative religious forces triumphant in this symbolic struggle over language. Predictably, the ministry has been heavily censured. Critics argue that the government should spend its money on building toilets, not painting signs.

No! What a concept! Use the money to build more toilets. Duh. Of course one of the underlying problems is that Dhaka was never designed to be a city of tens of millions of people (it's projected to have 20 million people by 2025, Anam notes; Wikipedia, citing Mike Davis's book (Planet of Slums), says 25 million by 2025).  Anyway, having 67 public toilets, many of which apparently don't really function, in a city of some 15 million people, a fair portion of whom are either working outdoors or scrounging survival on the streets, is absurd.

Scalia: Pres. must not have "uncontrolled mastery" over foreign affairs [cough]

The SCOTUS passport case that came down today (pdf here) reflected mostly a liberal-conservative split (Kennedy writing the majority opinion), with Thomas wandering off on his own.  At issue was a statutory provision requiring the State Dept., on request, to list Israel as the place of birth in a passport of a U.S. citizen born in Jerusalem.  The majority struck this down, saying it improperly constrained the President's power to recognize foreign governments and noting that the official executive-branch policy is (in the words of the syllabus, i.e. the opinon summary) that it "does not recognize any country as having sovereignty over Jerusalem."

Scalia, writing the main dissent (which was the only opinion I spent any time looking at), was indignant ("nonsense," logic worthy of "Mad Hatter") and professed to have enormous concern for the separation of powers and that the President should not have "uncontrolled mastery" over foreign policy.  Two things: first, Scalia insisted that recognition is "a type of legal act," not "a type of statement," which ignores or glosses over the fact that legal acts of recognition are themselves statements; second, one might be forgiven for wondering whether Scalia would have been so concerned about untrammeled presidential power in foreign affairs if this case had concerned something other than Israel and Jerusalem.

Note: Post edited slightly after initial posting.

Another Ataturk?

Margaret Warner on the upcoming Turkish elections (here):

this is an election at which you don’t have at stake the classic issues of war and peace or the economy. It’s really about Erdogan’s wanting to fulfill this lifelong dream of becoming another Kemal Ataturk, the all-powerful Turkish president who founded modern Turkey almost 100 years ago.

Of course, Ataturk founded Turkey as a secular state and Erdogan's party is an Islamic one. Details, details.

The usually perspicacious Ms. Warner also said this:

And so what you have now is, of course [Erdogan] still has a huge base of rural, conservative, Islamic support. And nobody thinks he won’t win most votes or his party won’t win most. But enough voters are telling pollsters that they are worried that, if he gets the kind of huge margin he wants to ram through this constitutional change [increasing executive powers], then he will become very much like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, in other words, an elected, but authoritarian ruler.

'Competitive authoritarianism' much? Where are Levitsky & Way when you need 'em? [link]

Update (6/10): The election is over and Erdogan did not win by the margin he needed to revamp the constitution.

The just war tradition and sovereignty (book review)

James Turner Johnson, Sovereignty: Moral and Historical Perspectives. Georgetown University Press, 2014. 181 pp. (including bibliography and index).

 
James Turner Johnson is an expert on 'the just war tradition,' and in Sovereignty he considers the co-evolution of ideas about sovereignty and just war.  Indeed the book probably should have been called something like The Just War Tradition and Sovereignty, since that would have more accurately indicated its contents than the title it actually carries.
 
Johnson's starting point is a conception of sovereignty that predates the modern state, one that defined sovereignty "in terms of the moral responsibility of the ruler for the common good of the people governed" (p.2).  Johnson is rather vague about what this meant in practice, but at a minimum a ruler's "moral responsibility" entailed meting out just punishments and protecting the political community from external (and internal) threats.  The 'sovereign', a ruler "without temporal superior," was sometimes required to wage war for these purposes.  This particular notion of sovereignty thus developed in tandem with what Part 1 of the book calls the 'classic just war tradition.'  One probably could also make a case, though Johnson does not do so, that this somewhat paternalistic view of authority traces back, at least in the West, to Plato's description of the guardians in the Republic. 

In any event, one of the book's main arguments is that this older view of sovereignty, in its concern with the quality of rule and the sovereign's responsibility for the common good, has a moral dimension that the modern view, with its emphasis on territorial integrity and non-intervention, lacks.  Yet some writers, such as Robert Jackson in The Global Covenant and Brad R. Roth in Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement, have argued that the principles of territorial inviolability and non-intervention have their own moral foundation, inasmuch as they allow, at least in theory, each 'political community' to shape its own destiny with a minimum of external meddling.  Roth's position is that "...international law's highest and best uses remain those given pride of place in the United Nations Charter: the establishment of a platform for peaceful accommodation among states representing a diversity of interests and values, and the protection of weak political communities from overbearing projections of power by strong foreign states" (Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement, p.5).  By contrast, Johnson is less concerned with "overbearing projections of power" from outside and more concerned that existing sovereignty norms often serve to shield bad behavior by oppressive or murderous rulers.  This in turn raises questions about, among other things, the moral status of state boundaries and state autonomy, questions that Johnson tends to answer only indirectly. 

***

Although there is a nod in the first chapter in the direction of Augustine and "the Augustinian heritage," the book's historical discussion really gets underway with Aquinas, who listed "three requirements for a war to be just: the authority of a prince [auctoritas principis], a just cause, and a right intention" (pp.16-17).  The prince's responsibility was to uphold "the moral order itself" and thereby "the divine will," by punishing injustices and those who had committed them (pp.19, 20).  Aquinas distinguished between rulers who acted in the interest of the political community and 'tyrants' who did not; however, he was not consistent on "how to respond to tyranny" (p.41).   

Aquinas's main concern was jus ad bellum, i.e. the grounds for starting a war, rather than what came to be called jus in bello, i.e. the conduct of a war once begun.  The latter considerations entered the tradition via the writing of Honoré Bonet and Christine de Pisan during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) (p.43).  These writers "joined the chivalric 'law of arms'" to Aquinas's jus ad bellum requirements, and the "combined conception was then passed on into the debates over warfare in the early modern period" (p.43).  Thus by the fifteenth century, if not before, 'just war theory' already encompassed two basic questions: (1) Under what circumstances is it just to begin a war? and (2) What constitutes just conduct on the battlefield (and in the treatment of noncombatants, prisoners, etc.)?

After discussing Aquinas and several of Aquinas's Neo-Scholastic successors, Johnson moves on to Luther and some other Reformation thinkers, and then to Grotius.  Grotius (drawing on some previous writers such as Vitoria) shifted "the locus of authority to wage just war...from the prince to the commonwealth," with the prince now seen as the polity's agent or representative (p.82).  Grotius also put more emphasis on defense, especially defense of the polity's territory, as a justification for war (p.84).  The political community's right to defend itself is now seen as derivative of the individual right to self-defense, and the authority to act in the community's defense is delegated from its members to the ruler.  

Johnson sees the Grotian emphasis on self-defense as a narrowing of the earlier conception of just war and sovereignty.  Here Johnson takes the traditional view of the Peace of Westphalia, i.e., he regards it as having laid the ground for the close connection between sovereignty and territory that has characterized the modern state system.  However, this view of the Peace of Westphalia has been quite persuasively criticized in recent years.  Older, 'feudal' notions of territoriality and authority clearly persist in the Westphalian treaties; Johnson neither acknowledges this nor quotes any articles of the treaties.  He does say that the shift in focus from the ruler-as-independent-actor to the ruler-as-the-polity's-agent resulted from reading the Peace of Westphalia through a Grotian lens (p.93), but that's a different point.  There's nothing wrong with accepting the dominant linguistic conventions and retaining the adjective "Westphalian" to refer to the current sovereignty regime (or key aspects of it), provided one notes -- as Johnson fails to do -- that its link to the actual provisions of the Peace of Westphalia is rather tenuous, to say the least.       

In the book's second part Johnson discusses issues of contemporary resonance, namely Islamic views of just war (ch. 6) and 'the responsibility to protect' (ch. 7), taking a broad view of the latter.  He is, however, unduly critical of the UN (p.160).  I'm not going to summarize these chapters in any detail here (so readers who are interested in them will have to consult the book).

The brevity of this book is welcome but it comes at a cost: Johnson does not engage with most of the secondary literature on the writers he discusses.  A fairly standard work like Richard Tuck's The Rights of War and Peace is not in the bibliography; nor is Edward Keene's Beyond the Anarchical Society, which connects Grotius to colonialism.  (Nor, with a couple of exceptions, does Johnson reference recent work on sovereignty and territoriality, though it's admittedly somewhat more removed from his main concerns.)  Still, Johnson's core chapters do provide an overview of some of the main lines of thought on just war and sovereignty in the Western tradition.  Rather than adopting the neutral tone of a textbook or survey, Johnson makes a definite argument, and one that might be questioned on certain points; this book is therefore probably best read in conjunction with other treatments of the same general ground that take a different perspective.       

Demography 101

There seems to be a fair amount of misinformation being purveyed in the comment thread to Loomis's post about population, though at least a few of the comments are accurate, such as the one that noted that global population is on track to level off at about 8.5 or 9 billion.  The problem is not the simple one of too many people, but rather, as a few comments noted, how environmental issues, land use, consumption patterns, and maldistribution of resources interact with population density.  The projected impact of climate change on the low-lying areas of Bangladesh (which comprise a large part of the country) is a case in point.  

The fertility trend in many countries has been downward, often sharply so, in recent decades, with sub-Saharan Africa, if I'm not mistaken, being an exception.  One would expect the poorest countries in the world not yet to have completed 'the demographic transition', i.e., birth rates in those countries have remained high while death rates have fallen (e.g., infant and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, although still substantial and unacceptable from a human-rights standpoint, is notably lower than 20 or 30 years ago).  I don't follow these issues all that closely but I believe what I've said here is roughly correct.  The 'demographic transition' is Demography 101, and the apparent absence of reference to it in the LGM comment thread is perhaps indicative of the thread's quality.

What I learned tonight (or is it this morning?) at LGM

(1) I learned that among the sites my old computer can't really handle (too much ad volume, I guess) is a site called The Toast. (I'm still using the old computer because I've been too lazy to do certain essential preliminary things on the new one. Soon [sigh].)

(2) I learned that my friends Ronan and TBA are still regular readers of LGM, which I more or less knew -- I just hadn't been over there for a while. (Btw, thanks for defending me vs. 'troll' charges in that thread, Ronan.)

Have a great weekend, all!

(P.s. For those who may be new to the blogosphere, LGM = Lawyers Guns & Money.)

Machiavelli on mercenaries: a note

[Quotations from The Prince in this post are from the H. Mansfield translation, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 1998.]

Machiavelli didn't like mercenaries, something that is evident both from The Prince and (I see from a quick glance) The Discourses, where he writes that good soldiers are the sinews of war, not gold, and that it "is as impossible for good soldiers to fail to find gold as it is for gold to find good soldiers" (Penguin ed., 1970, p.303). [See also his The Art of War.]

In chapter 13 of The Prince, Machiavelli continues a lecture against the use of mercenaries begun in the immediately preceding chapters.  Among other things he criticizes King Louis XI of France (reigned 1461-1483) for his reliance on Swiss pikemen:

...when he [Louis XI] gave reputation to the Swiss, he debased all his own arms.... For after they [the French] had become accustomed to fighting with Swiss, they did not think they could win without them.  From this it follows that French are not enough against Swiss and without Swiss do not try against anyone else.  Thus, the armies of France have been mixed, part mercenary and part their own.  These arms all together are much better than simple auxiliary or simple mercenary arms, but much inferior to one's own. (pp.56-7)

In referring to French weakness, Machiavelli was thinking of a then-recent event: the French "having been forced out of Italy in 1512" (according to an editor's note in the Skinner & Price edition of The Prince, Cambridge U.P., p.50).  However, Machiavelli does not mention that Louis XI largely owed the Swiss his victory over Charles the Bold of Burgundy at the battle of Nancy in 1477, a  battle that altered the geopolitical landscape of western Europe. [Correction/clarification: It was not really "his" (i.e., Louis XI's) victory; see the discussion in the comment thread.]  Machiavelli says that "a wise prince...has preferred to lose with his own [arms] than to win with others, since he judges it no true victory that is acquired with alien arms" (Mansfield trans., p.55).  Louis XI presumably would have begged to differ.

Postscript: The problem for the Swiss mercenaries, according to Michael Howard (in War in European History, p.28), was their slowness to adapt to changing conditions of war: "...as shot became increasingly important and formations increasingly flexible the Swiss pike phalanxes became left behind like dinosaurs unable to adapt to a new environment, as much of a curiosity in the history of infantry as the English bowman of the later Middle Ages."

Btw, what would Machiavelli have said about how to combat ISIS, or about any other current issues?  Is this question even worth asking?

Paris or San Salvador?

There is an establishment in one of the little malls near where I live called La Baguette de Paris. The stenciled slogan in the window reads: Pan fresco todos los dios. Just noticed it last night while walking past it, but I plan to go inside the store soon. I doubt many people's attention is caught by the juxtaposition of languages, but mine was.  As I've had occasion to remark previously, a knowledge of French is useless in my neighborhood, whereas being able to speak Spanish is very useful.

Recalling the USSR's role in WW2

A column/post at WaPo's 'Worldviews' site recalls the Soviet role in WW2; it's a summary of points that are probably already known to most readers here. The piece has generated a great many comments, none of which I have the time (or particularly the inclination) to read.

Noted: 'Burma at the Crossroads'

This hour-long radio program, which I heard yesterday, examines the situation in Burma as it readies for elections this fall. (One can find different aspects of the program split into separate written pieces near the top of the page here.)

Reading and other notes

I don't read many novels, nor do I much try to keep up with what's being published. (I get the NY Times Bk Review in my in-box on Fridays but it, more often than not, sits there mostly unread.)

However, I've lately been reading (and am close to finishing) Ian McEwan's The Children Act (2014), which is competently done, a fairly quick read, and fairly absorbing, if not deep with a capital D.  And last night I happened to hear a radio interview with the author of the recently published The Sympathizer (link), which seems to have gotten very good reviews.

I'm also pretty much finished with a non-novel, J.T. Johnson's Sovereignty: Moral and Historical Perspectives (2014), and will be posting a review of it fairly soon.

I also finally bought (this aft.) a very-much-needed computer to replace my current one, although, true to form, I have yet to remove it from the box. All in good time.

That slippery word "liberty"

A perusal of the transcripts of the oral arguments in Tuesday's same-sex marriage case in the U.S. Supreme Court revealed several odd moments, and one of the oddest occurred at the very opening of John Bursch's argument for the state of Michigan. Here is how Bursch began:

This case isn't about how to define marriage. It's about who gets to decide that question.

Is it the people acting through the democratic process,

or is it the Federal courts?  And we're asking you to

affirm every individual's fundamental liberty interest

in deciding the meaning of marriage.

In the language of U.S. constitutional law, a "liberty interest" typically refers (doesn't it?) to a 'negative freedom' -- a freedom not to be interfered with -- not to a 'positive' right to "decide" something. At least, that has been my impression. From this standpoint, it's not surprising that Justice Sotomayor immediately jumped in and said to Bursch that a defeat for his client (the state of Michigan and its ban on same-sex marriage) would not take anyone's liberty away. 

But Bursch seemed not to be referring to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment language about not depriving anyone of liberty without due process. He meant something else. He was asserting that individuals have a "fundamental liberty interest in deciding the meaning of marriage." Can that possibly be right?

In a constitutional democracy (a phrase used by Justice Kagan in the course of the argument), individuals have no "fundamental liberty interest" in deciding policy questions. There is a general right to vote, of course, and there is a right to speak and assemble and to engage in other forms of individual and collective political action, but there is no right to have a direct say on every policy question that governments face, even one as (supposedly) significant as the definition of marriage. After Sotomayor's intervention, the asserted "fundamental liberty interest in deciding the meaning of marriage" pretty much vanished from the argument and the exchanges between the lawyer and the Justices; it may have been so strange-sounding that everyone tacitly let it drop.

Still, behind the odd language about a "fundamental liberty interest in deciding the meaning of marriage," Bursch did have a more intelligible (if not especially convincing) claim: that "the people acting  through the democratic process," not the federal courts, should decide on the definition of marriage. But it's not clear why that should be the case. As Kagan said (though not in these exact words), the Constitution puts limits both on the substantive decisions people can make and on what sorts of questions they get to decide.

No doubt these issues were explored exhaustively in the briefs that were filed in the case (none of which I've read), but the oral argument itself, which could conceivably have turned into a contentious seminar on democratic theory, was too choppy and disjointed to approach anything like that. Plato was mentioned (by Justice Alito at the outset), but the names of no other political theorists, classical or modern, came up in the argument. Maybe their ghosts were hovering around. Or maybe not.

Buried in the wrap-up

Amid the more pressing news of the day yesterday -- the revelations about the deaths of Weinstein and LoPorto; the EU and the migrant crisis -- there was this in the PBS NewsHour's opening summary:

There’s word that North Korea may already have 20 nuclear warheads – and the ability to double its arsenal by next year. An account in the Wall Street Journal says Chinese nuclear experts relayed that estimate in a closed-door meeting earlier this year. North Korea has carried out three nuclear tests in recent years.

Would it matter if the DPRK had 200 nuclear warheads? (I mean, who gives a ****?) Remember all the hand-wringing over the seemingly endless on-again off-again six-party talks? If they were ever to resume, one wonders what kinds of things N. Korea would seek in return for a commitment to dismantle the 20 (or however many) warheads it has. I think, though, the DPRK probably isn't going to give up its nuclear arsenal anytime soon. Its utility is as a (perceived) guarantee of survival, at least vis-a-vis (perceived) external threats. The regime of Kim Jong Un has not much else to crow about. (This reminds me that some weeks ago in a library I ran across an English-language South Korean-based publication that follows developments in North Korea. One of the featured articles on the cover referred, if I recall correctly, to the "alleged" marriage of Kim Jong Un's sister. A bizarre-sounding headline, but I was pressed for time and didn't read the story.)

No 'linkage'

I've said before that I don't think reaching a nuclear deal with Iran means that Iran will (or should) become a U.S. "partner" in the region.  This seems to be a hard point to get across, judging from recent discussions of policy toward Iran that I've encountered (I'm not giving specific refs. now, perhaps later).  A nuclear deal does not imply that the P-5 countries would thereby approve of any aspects of Iranian foreign policy.  A nuclear deal would not legitimize Iranian support of Hezbollah, for instance.  I'm not entirely sure why various people seem to find this so difficult to understand, unless they're pretending not to do so because such a pretense serves their purposes.

ISIS now denies responsibility for Jalalabad

Via FP's South Asia Daily for April 22, linking this.

ISIS claims responsibility for Jalalabad bombing

Here.

(p.s. Haven't forgotten I still owe a comment on previous post. Update: Comment now added.)  

Shocked

Just over at the Duck and I see that Prof. Busby, in the Disqus thread attached to his post on the Iran nuclear framework deal, links to Kissinger and Schultz pieces in WSJ that apparently express rather serious (pulls a serious face) doubts about the framework.  I haven't read the pieces -- for one thing, I assume they're gated; for another, life is too short -- but, to paraphrase Major whatever-his-last-name-was in that famous movie whose name I don't even have to mention, I'm shocked, shocked that Schultz and Kissinger have taken to the WSJ to express doubts about the framework.

Rude awakening

The cherry blossoms are out here, the fairly horrible winter is over, and at about 5:45 this Sunday morning some people -- presumably young men; who else would be such jerks? -- decided to rev their hot rod's engines very loudly and continuously for roughly fifteen minutes -- though it felt more like an hour.  Eventually I saw a police car cruising around, but by then the malefactors were gone.  If you infer from this that I do not live in one of the fancier suburbs of Washington, D.C. -- the sorts of places wherein reside (some of) the people who make (some of) the policies often critically examined on this blog -- well, you are so damn right.

How not to make fun of Rumsfeld

Even occasional readers of this blog know that I am no fan of Donald Rumsfeld, and that's an understatement.  However, to twit him (via) for a brief memo he sent in April 2003 to Douglas Feith, then undersec of defense for policy, seems a little misplaced.  Yes, the memo is very short and easy to laugh at; on the other hand, Rumsfeld presumably liked the idea of short memos.  Can't say that, in itself, was bad.  It's the policies that were the problem, not the length of the memos (or, in this case, some of the content of the memo). 

Btw, I see from the FP South Asia Daily (that I get but am always behind on reading) that the Obama admin's proposed budget for the next fiscal year would cut U.S. aid to Pakistan by 10 percent (though the overall figure remains relatively substantial, albeit considerably below aid to Afghanistan, of course.)

One thing at a time

Update (4/8): Just to mention that N. Lees, who has occasionally commented here, has resumed posting at his blog; his posts are always worth reading. 

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In the wake of the Iran nuclear 'framework' announcement, a couple of commenters at Internet sites I occasionally visit have suggested that Iran would make a good 'strategic partner' (in the words of this commenter) for the U.S., because the U.S. and Iran share interests in, among other things, opposing ISIS and Al-Qaeda.  That may be, but there are other issues (e.g., support of Hezbollah and of Assad) where U.S. and Iranian interests diverge.   Note also that when Iran was heavily involved in aiding the Iraqi army's recent effort to retake Tikrit from ISIS, the U.S. hung back; when Iraq requested U.S. airstrikes after the offensive had stalled, Iranian involvement in the offensive apparently diminished (I say "apparently" because I'm sure that the situation on the ground was extremely tangled and complicated and I did not even try to follow it closely). 

In short, I don't think the "let's make Iran our new strategic partner in the region" response makes a lot of sense.  It's the opposite of those who are groundlessly concerned that reaching a nuclear deal with Iran somehow amounts to recognizing its putative hegemony in the region.  Carts should not be put before horses.  Get the nuclear deal done and see how that goes, then worry about broader issues of the future of U.S.-Iran relations.  The amount of time it took to get the U.S.-India nuclear deal ironed out -- a civil (i.e. non-military) nuclear deal with a country that the U.S. has much better relations with than it does with Iran -- would suggest that no one should think implementing the details of the Iran 'framework' is going to be especially easy.

The 'framework'

Those who follow such things seem to think that the framework agreement on Iran's nuclear program is more detailed than was expected, which raises the chances that the remaining details can be resolved between now and June.  I can't say the details are all that crucial for me, since I think the dangers of Iran's nuclear program have been considerably exaggerated, but they are crucial for some people, including the parties to the talks.

If a successful conclusion is reached in June and if Congress can be kept from mucking up the works, it will be a clear triumph for all the  parties.  Among other things it will be a foreign policy win for the Obama admin, whose foreign policy record to date has been very mixed (at best).  But I would be wary of concluding that the path would then be open for quick normalization of U.S.-Iran relations.  Normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations, which has been out of the headlines for a while now, is presumably going to be a fairly long process, and I see no reason to assume that the future course of Iran-U.S. relations will be different in that respect.

Choke points

If I had a working TV, which I don't, I would probably watch Charlie Rose's interview with Bashar al-Assad, scheduled to be aired tonight.  Presumably it will be available later for online viewing on the C. Rose website.  Btw, I was just at that website now, watching a small snippet of a Rose interview with Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and Int'l Studies, about the situation in Yemen.  Cordesman, asked by Rose about U.S. interests at stake, mentioned AQAP, and then he proceeded to mention that should Iran gain control, via air or naval bases in Yemen, of the choke points (Cordesman's phrase) of global commerce that are the Red Sea and Suez Canal, that would threaten U.S. economic interests.  True enough, I suppose, but one has to wonder whether Iran would risk trying to choke off the flow of commerce through the Suez Canal.  After all, it ain't 1956 any more, when the U.S. sided against Britain, France, and Israel in their spat with Egypt over the Canal.  A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then -- or perhaps I should say, through the canal.

Cruz control

I heard a radio re-broadcast this morning of much of Cruz's horrible Liberty University speech.  He used the phrase "shining city on a hill" more than once.  If it was good enough for Ronald Reagan... (Cruz also referred in passing, and not in an uncomplimentary way, to FDR; again, shades of Reagan.)

Added later: But in both cases, it was just an appropriation of FDR for their own purposes.

Another edit: for the Biblical origins of the '(shining) city on a hill' phrase, see this 2012 post by L.D. Burnett.  

Quarter-truths

The notion that there is one broad path to modernity, that 'developing' countries will come to resemble 'advanced' ones in key respects, is an old idea, and it's part of the semi-conscious mental equipment that a lot of educated Westerners (as well as some non-Westerners, often with Western educations) carry around with them.  It sometimes gets expressed in passing, in contexts where it's not especially crucial to an argument and might therefore not attract much notice.  The example I currently have in mind comes from a recent article about Tocqueville in the American Political Science Review, the author of which, at the end of the article's introduction, writes that:

...[A]s places that once lay outside the scope of Tocqueville's thought come increasingly to resemble the West, his analysis of the moral psychology of modern democracy only becomes more broadly relevant.  As they modernize, developing nations will see more of themselves, for better or for worse, or for both, in Tocqueville's portrait.

These sentences appeared in an article published in November 2014, but they could as easily have been written a half-century earlier.

Alongside this narrative of Westernization, another narrative is also part of the semi-conscious assumptions of many educated Westerners; one might call this one the clash-of-civilizations, or more colloquially, the they-hate-us narrative.  One recalls the sometimes plaintive, sometimes bewildered "why do 'they' hate 'us'?" question voiced after 9/11.  In this narrative, modernization-as-Westernization produces a severe reaction, portrayed most obviously (though not only) as religiosity vs. secularism.

Both these narratives are quarter-truths (a notch down from half-truths) at best, but their presence in the discursive air suggests that quarter-truths can be durable.

Added later: Not posting on the Israeli elections because one can find plenty of discussion of that elsewhere.  This blog does not have the capacity or (always) the inclination to chase the headlines.  (If you want that, go to LGM.)         

The 1965 Vietnam decisions fifty years on

As has been extensively reported, this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the famous civil-rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  It also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of U.S. ground forces in a combat role in Vietnam.  The immediate justification for the move was the need to protect the U.S. air base at Danang from possible Vietcong attack in response to Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign that the Johnson administration launched in February 1965.  As one historian writes:

The expanded air war...provided the pretext for the introduction of the first U.S. ground forces into Vietnam.  Anticipating Vietcong attacks against U.S. airbases in retaliation for Rolling Thunder, General Westmoreland in late February urgently requested two Marine landing teams to protect the air base at Danang.... [O]n March 8 [1965], two battalions of Marines..., with tanks and eight-inch howitzers, splashed ashore near Danang where they were welcomed by South Vietnamese officials and by pretty Vietnamese girls passing out leis of flowers. (George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 2d ed. (1986), pp.130-131)

Several months later, in July, Johnson decided to commit ground forces on a large scale (50,000 immediately, followed by another 50,000 before the end of the year).  Johnson did this without going to Congress for authorization; attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach assured Johnson that bypassing Congress was within his prerogatives (Herring, America's Longest War, p.140, citing Katzenbach to Johnson, June 10, 1965, Johnson Papers, National Security File, Country File: Vietnam, Box 17).     

One of the reasons Johnson decided to take this approach was that "he feared that going to Congress for authority to wage war in Vietnam would destroy his dream of creating the Great Society at home" (Herring, p.140).  He also declined to mobilize the reserves, call up the National Guard, seek a tax increase or do much of anything else to indicate the country was preparing to wage a war (ibid.).  While this might have avoided political problems in the short term, in the long run it helped paved the way for disillusion with the U.S. war in Vietnam, especially as it became clear that the conflict was not going to be short.

The leading explanation in the literature for the Vietnam escalation decisions of 1965 used to be, and perhaps still is, that the general commitment to containment of Communism and the specific commitment to not let a Communist regime take power in Vietnam dictated the decisions.  However, there were different escalation options on the table and containment doesn't explain why particular ones were chosen and others were rejected.  As Y. F. Khong argued in Analogies at War (1992), the Korean War experience and the fear of provoking Chinese intervention weighed heavily on LBJ, inclining him to choose "graduated" escalation options.  One consequence of that choice was to make it very likely that the U.S. would not be able to prevail against an adversary willing to pay almost unlimited costs.  [Clarification added later: I'm not sure, on re-reading, that this makes sense. I guess what I meant to say was that, while no strategy was likely to succeed in attaining its goals, the 'gradual' options chosen were especially unlikely to succeed. I'm not completely sure that's right, but it seems right.] As early as June 1964, North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong had told Canadian diplomat J. Blair Seaborn that "the NLF [Viet Cong] and its supporters were prepared to endure regardless of the cost" (Herring, p.119).  That remark proved to be accurate.

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Note: Vietnam War is a new index label; previous posts here about the Vietnam War can be found under the label Vietnam in the topics index.

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Added later: Re anniversaries, March 9 was the 70th anniversary of the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo; see here. (I may have something more to say about the linked piece later.)

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(Post edited slightly after initial posting.)

CCP to Dalai Lama: you will return

Via: an NYT piece about the latest clash between Chinese officialdom and the Dalai Lama:

Tensions over what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama, who is 79, dies, and particularly over who decides who will succeed him as the most prominent leader in Tibetan Buddhism, have ignited at the annual gathering of China’s legislators in Beijing. Officials have amplified their argument that the Communist government is the proper guardian of the Dalai Lama’s succession through an intricate process of reincarnation that has involved lamas, or senior monks, visiting a sacred lake and divining dreams. Party functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate. That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s presence and policies in Tibet.

Someone in Dharamsala must be having a quiet chuckle about this, wouldn't you think?

ISIS and the Reformation

T. Greer at The Scholar's Stage has a characteristically long post about ISIS, taking off from the much-discussed Graeme Wood article in The Atlantic (that I haven't read).  On a quick read, I agree with some of what T. Greer says, but I am leery of his endorsement of the analogy between the current struggles within Islam and the Reformation.  (D. Nexon, I believe, is also opposed to the analogy, and he knows more about the Reformation than I do.  I can't say I recall the *precise* grounds on which Nexon opposes the analogy, without refreshing my memory by looking at the relevant passages in his book or other writings, which I'm not going to do right now.) 

Speaking for myself, I'm uncomfortable about an analogy between the religious struggles within Christianity (Christendom? whatever) of the 16th and 17th centuries and the struggles within Islam today. For one thing, the Protestant reformers were not trying to recapture an historical golden age by recreating a territorial entity under their control -- i.e., no analogy to the restoration of the Caliphate.  That is just one difference.  I'm sure there are others. 

ETA: Such as differences in the content of the ideologies and the methods.

The U.S. and the Middle East (Coda)

Note: This post by Peter T. follows on his earlier posts: here and here. 

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The Middle East is often said to be a volatile, complex region, and therefore difficult for U.S. policy to deal with.  I'm sceptical of this claim.  Take SE Asia: it has at least as many states, ethnic minorities, rebellions, disputed borders, historical animosities, religious cleavages and revolutionary movements as the Middle East.  It also has oil and a great many other natural resources, a key strategic position, and is a continuing arena for great-power rivalry.  The U.S. has a long history of covert and overt intervention in the region.  Yet today the U.S. can be said to have reasonable relations with pretty much all the states in SE Asia.  Pew Surveys find that over 60 or 70% of people in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam have a positive view of the U.S.  This compares with 22% in the Middle East.

The main lines of U.S. policy in SE Asia are straightforward.  It has remained allied with Thailand and the Philippines despite, in both cases, erratic domestic politics.  The U.S. was not so committed to military regimes in Thailand as to be unable to get on with democratic ones, or vice versa.  Likewise, it could deal with both Marcos and Aquino in the Philippines.  There have been ups and downs with Myanmar and Indonesia (and in both, some CIA meddling), but no outright conflict.  Vietnam was, of course, caught up in the U.S. obsession with anti-communism, and it took the U.S. some time to get over defeat in 1975: a grudge the U.S. carried until 1991. Since then, U.S. relations with Vietnam and Cambodia have been pretty normal, in the sense that differences have been resolved or carried on without recourse to covert ops, sanctions or menacing talk.

If SE Asia were the Middle East, the U.S. would be bombing upper Thailand in support of a government in Bangkok allied to a regime in Vietnam under severe U.S. sanctions, while maintaining close ties to a militant Buddhist government in Myanmar funding terrorist groups in Bali, Laos and Bangladesh...or some such.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that the U.S. has not made some bad policy mistakes in SE Asia.  It misread the decolonisation movement in the late '40s and '50s, committed major forces to a strategically hopeless position in South Vietnam, and behaved atrociously in Cambodia both before and after 1975.  Yet it has been able to recover from these and, for the last two decades, managed to avoid major problems.  This is in strong contrast to the Middle East.  What explains the difference?

-- Peter T.

Note added by LFC: With respect to CIA meddling, I think the 1965 mass slaughter of Indonesian Communists by the government is one episode that stands out. (See e.g. here.)

Thoughts on nuclear weapons and the Middle East

Update (3/11): This FP column by Graham Allison is to the point.

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The U.S. and the USSR had a few close calls during the Cold War, moments when the possibility of a nuclear exchange came too close for comfort.  India and Pakistan had an apparently close call during the Kargil crisis in 1999.  The existence of these close calls means that nuclear deterrence is not an airtight guarantee against a nuclear exchange.  Nor is 'the nuclear taboo' an absolute guarantee, since an exchange between two nuclear-armed countries might conceivably occur essentially unintentionally, i.e. by accident.

However, while nuclear deterrence did not provide an absolute guarantee during the Cold War and while there were a few close calls, on the whole it worked remarkably well, at least in the narrow, relevant sense of "worked".  The Cold War never turned into a hot war between the superpowers, who wreaked havoc on the Third World via proxy wars and caused an enormous amount of human misery and death, but managed to avoid the sort of cataclysmic exchange that, in the worst-case scenario, would have meant the end of anything resembling 'civilized' life on the planet.  In other words, the "delicate balance of terror" between the superpowers (to borrow the title of a famous article by Albert Wohlstetter from the late 1950s) turned out to be quite sturdy (safety as "the sturdy child of terror," as Churchill put it, in something of a metaphorical mash-up).

These rather unoriginal reflections may serve as a prelude to the thought that, if Iran should one day acquire a nuclear weapon or the capacity to obtain one in a short time frame, the consequence would not be an existential threat to Israel, contrary to Netanyahu's assertions (n.b. I haven't yet read the full transcript of his speech to Congress).  Israel of course has its own (officially unacknowledged) nuclear arsenal, and there is every reason to suppose that nuclear deterrence would operate between Iran and Israel as it operates between India and Pakistan, and as it operated between the U.S. and the USSR during the Cold War.  That doesn't mean no possibility whatsoever that an exchange could occur, but it suggests it would be highly unlikely.  The Iranian leadership would have to be insane to launch a deliberate nuclear strike on a nuclear-armed state with a powerful conventional military, one closely allied to the most militarily powerful country in the world, and I'm aware of no evidence to suggest that Iran's leadership is insane.  (Though doubtless there are people who would rush to furnish some were they to read this post, which they probably won't.)

The 'threat' from an Iranian bomb, insofar as there would be one, would come, or so it seems to me, in the form of an increased boldness on Iran's part to throw its weight around in the region, engage in coercive diplomacy vis-a-vis, e.g., Saudi Arabia or Turkey, and generally become more of a nuisance in the eyes of its adversaries.  That's not nothing, of course, but it is not the existential threat to Israel that some people claim would be the result of an Iranian nuclear-weapons capacity.

The latest news from the talks is that Iran has rejected the proposal (or 'demand', whichever it was) for a 10-year freeze on certain nuclear activities.  However, the talks will and should continue.  Netanyahu's prescription of increased sanctions and an end to the negotiations does not seem like a prescription for anything other than disaster in the long run.  As Peter T. pointed out in his guest posts recently published on this blog (see here and here), Iran is, by virtue of its size, location, capabilities, and level of development, not the sort of country that can be sanctioned into submission -- not, at least, without setting the stage for precisely the kind of potentially explosive or catastrophic consequences that everyone should be eager to avoid.

A final note about how we think about security claims, which I'm tacking on because I just read Jarrod Hayes's post at Duck of Minerva.  Jarrod points out that a speaker's authority to make security claims may be undermined if the claims come to be seen by the target audience as 'political' (though all security claims are political).  Although I agree with this, I think Netanyahu's speech is an instance where one should focus on the objective merits of his claims as much as on their 'authority'.  Jarrod writes: "Even though the construction of security is intersubjective, it is spoken about in objective terms. Where the objectivity of the claim rubs thin, as in Netanyahu’s case, his ability to speak security is undermined."  

But the objectivity of Netanyahu's claim rubs thin not simply because it may be perceived as 'political' but because it lacks 'objective' merit.  The fact that the construction of security is intersubjective does not mean that there is not a world 'out there' about which one can make better or worse, more plausible or less plausible, claims.  The claim that an Iranian nuclear capacity poses an existential threat to Israel is unconvincing, for reasons suggested above.  It is unconvincing because it clashes with what history, logic, and evidence suggest about how the real world works.  Contrary to Patrick Jackson's view that the world does not exist independently of the mind (mind-world monism), I believe there is a 'real world', that it exists independently of our minds, and that claims about how the world works can be judged as more or less convincing on the basis of evidence.  That does not mean I am a neo-positivist (and actually since I have no research agenda and essentially no standing in the IR 'profession', it doesn't really matter what my meta-theoretical leanings are); what it does mean is that in this case we should not lose sight of whether Netanyahu's claims, irrespective of his authority to make them, accord with what we know about the real world.