A Palestinian state as absorber of anger

A Palestinian official on the radio today, when asked about the motives driving the latest wave of violence (including knife attacks on Israelis by a small number of Palestinians, followed by Israeli response), said the motives lay in 48 years of illegal occupation, coupled with feelings of hopelessness on the part of the younger generation.  The official compared this incipient 'third intifada' in that respect to the Arab Spring, and he compared Netanyahu to Mubarak.

Whatever one thinks of that suggested analogy or parallel, there is one obvious, glaring difference: the anger of the Egyptian protesters from 2011 on was directed at their own government, whereas that of Palestinians, as in the present moment, is directed outward, toward a government of occupation, a government not their own in any sense.  Hidden in this very obvious distinction is an implication one wonders whether Israel's leaders have ever fully grasped: namely, that once a sovereign Palestinian state is established, it would become the target at which its citizens would be most likely to direct whatever anger and frustration they might have about unfulfilled hopes or promises.  The longer that Israel continues the occupation, the longer the Palestinians exist in a basically stateless condition,  the longer it will be before there comes a time when Palestinians' anger is directed, in the first instance, where anger is typically first directed: i.e., at one's own government.

I wonder, in other words, whether Israeli leaders have ever taken an unabashedly pragmatic, self-interested view of a sovereign Palestinian state as an absorber of anger, which is what, among other things, it would be.  After an initial period of euphoria, once the state got down to the difficult business of governing and trying to improve its citizens' lives, it would become responsible or accountable in a way that the Palestinian Authority, despite its degree of autonomy in certain spheres, has never been.  This is presumably just one of several ways in which the establishment of a sovereign, universally recognized Palestinian state would benefit not only ordinary Palestinians (in psychic if not necessarily material terms), but also ordinary Israelis.

Added later: Lest the opening of this post give the wrong impression, I assure readers that I'm fully aware that (individual) Israelis have committed violent acts against (individual) Palestinians (including recently) and not just the other way around; on the level of individuals, the violence has flowed both ways, even while on the level of collectives it has been highly asymmetrical and unequal.  My basic position on the conflict should be fairly clear from previous posts; those readers in search of posts that consist solely of impassioned denunciations might be well advised to look elsewhere, since although I sometimes appreciate impassioned polemic, I don't do it all that often here.

Deaton interview

This year's economics Nobelist, Angus Deaton, was interviewed a couple of days ago on the NewsHour. I was a bit bothered by his statement toward the end that "there’s been very little serious discussion [of inequality] until recently," which I think was, well, unhappily or unfortunately worded (trying to give him every benefit of the doubt here -- he probably meant a particular kind of serious discussion, but it came out as just a bald statement).  I also thought one of Judy Woodruff's questions was rather silly (n.b. I think she's generally a competent, hard-working journalist), but I won't waste time pointing out the question. (Or more precisely, I won't take the time to point it out.)

Conference note

This weekend I'm looking forward to attending the annual meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH), being held this year in Wash. D.C.  Have no current plans to write about the conference on this blog, though I could change my mind about that.  The registration fees are quite reasonable; if interested in attending, follow the link at the end of this post.      

Bernie and the Great Books

It occurred to me this morning that I didn't know very much about Bernie Sanders beyond a few basic facts, so I took a quick look at the main Wikipedia entry on him.  I learned from it, among other things, that he is a graduate of the Univ. of Chicago.  Does this mean that if he wins the presidency (which I rather hope he does) the Great Books will get a new lease on life, so to speak, in the U.S. education system? 

[Note to the humor-impaired: This post is intended to be humorous.]

Quote of the day: Hoffmann on Kissinger

From the late Stanley Hoffmann's Primacy or World Order (1978), p.70 (endnote omitted):

...[B]oth [Kissinger's] failures and his successes in the business of preserving American primacy show an obsession with stability, which puts him far closer to Metternich than to his own criticism of the Austrian statesman.... Détente and the new triangular relationship were supposedly to allow the United States to worry more about the designs of its equals than about the tantrums of the pygmies.  And yet, even after Vietnam, the United States, in "destabilizing" Allende's Chile and in trying to help its friends in Angola, in submitting to South Korea's corruption and espionage in the United States and to Marcos's blackmail over our bases in the Philippines, in supporting the colonels in Greece, and in sustaining the Republic of South Africa (indeed in using it as a lever in Rhodesia, while proclaiming that it "cannot be regarded as an illegitimate government"), showed that the old equation of stability, anti-Communism and pro-Americanism had survived intact.  Metternich's excuse was the fragility of his country, its desperate dependence on the status quo outside.  Is the social and political order of the United States equally brittle and tied to conservatism everywhere?

[Comments as always are welcome, but before commenting please note, for the sake of context, when this passage was published.  And obviously it was written earlier than the publication date.]

Noted

D. Nexon gave a talk yesterday at the U. of Ottawa on "International Hierarchy and Symbolic Capital: The Ming Treasure Fleets and the Apollo Missions." Description here.  

What have Russian and U.S. strikes been targeting in Syria?

These maps from NYT (including one showing which forces control which areas in Syria, based on data from the Carter Center) show the difference between Russian and U.S. air strikes in terms of who is being targeted.

A matter of terminology

Discussing the response of "relatively conservative Americans" to the American Revolution, Henry F. May wrote (in The Enlightenment in America [1976], p.96, endnote omitted):

Conservatives had many qualms, but there was no Thermidor, still less an aristocratic and legitimist reaction like that of Europe in 1815.  There had never been a base for real aristocracy.  The colonial bourgeois elite was not destroyed, only divided and weakened.  Moreover, American conservatives were not romantic reactionaries, but Whigs and moderates.

The last sentence of this passage would seem to contradict Corey Robin's argument in The Reactionary Mind (2011, pb. ed. 2013) that conservative and reactionary are basically interchangeable categories.  But perhaps the difference here is less substantive than terminological.  According to Corey R., the "priority of conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of power -- even at the cost of the strength and integrity of the state" (p.15; italics added).  It is subordination and hierarchy "in the family, the factory, and the field" (p.15) -- more than in the polity -- that conservatives have been concerned above all to defend.  So if the "conservatives" in America in the 1780s were primarily concerned with 'order' in the public realm, then perhaps, in the framework of The  Reactionary Mind, they were not conservatives at all, but merely traditionalists (see ibid., pp.22-23).

Another point might be that if conservatism in its recognizably modern form(s) arose in response to the French Revolution (ibid., p.43), then, perhaps, no responses to the American Revolution should be classified as conservative.  (And didn't Burke himself favor independence for the American colonies?)

P.s. (added later): May, p.99, discussing the Constitutional Convention: "Most of the opposition to the adoption of the completed plan [i.e. the Constitution] reflected no fundamental difference of ideology.... It seems to me doubtful whether the Constitution could have been either framed or adopted if the Convention [of 1787] had been held only a few years later, when the Moderate Enlightenment had been challenged by a new kind of revolutionary ideology and most moderates had become reactionaries."

Noted

Realpolitik: A History, by John Bew, is due to be published in the U.S. by Oxford U.P. on Dec.1, according to Amazon; presumably the book has already been released in the UK.  It clocks in at roughly 400 pp. (some of the contents are available at Amazon Look Inside); the author's previous book, a biography of Castlereagh, was longer.  Whether Bew has much that is new to say about postwar American realism is perhaps doubtful, given the amount of extant scholarship on that particular subject, but the book claims to be the first comprehensive history to trace Realpolitik from its German roots to its American (or Anglo-American) variations.

Speaking of books, I currently have a review in the works of this, but the review probably won't be up for a while, for various reasons.  So expect things to be quiet here for the immediate future.

Quote of the day

From S. Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (2013), pp.218-19 (notes omitted; italics added):

On 30 July 1971, a member of the [Bangladesh] Awami League showed up at the US consulate in Calcutta seeking an appointment for Kazi Zahirul Qaiyum, a national assembly member from the Awami League, to meet with the consul-general.  Instead, the consulate arranged for Qaiyum to see a political officer the following day.  Qaiyum said that he had come at the behest of Foreign Minister Khandakar Moshtaque Ahmad, who wished to reestablish the Awami League's contacts with the United States [with a view to the U.S. facilitating negotiations between Gen. Yahya Khan, ruler of Pakistan, and the Awami League].... The US embassy in Islamabad observed that even if Qaiyum's proposals represented those of the Bangladesh government, Yahya was unlikely to accept them.  In serving as a conduit for these messages, the United States risked upsetting its relations with Pakistan.  Nonetheless, in the interest of long-term relations with the Bangladesh leadership, the risk seemed worth running.  The White House had a rather different view.  Kissinger insisted that asking Yahya to parley with the Awami Leaguers in Calcutta was "like asking Abraham Lincoln to deal with Jefferson Davis."  Nixon agreed that "we can't ask Yayha to do that."  Yet, he asked the State Department to sound out Ambassador Farland [the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan] on this issue.     

To say that Kissinger's remark was an inapt analogy would be an understatement.

Otherworldly?

Just became aware of the publication last May of Stephen Benedict Dyson's Otherworldly Politics: The International Relations of Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica.  I would have expected some of the Duck of Minerva people to have mentioned this book; perhaps they have.  (I've never even seen 'Game of Thrones', so this is not really up my alley.)

Stanley Hoffmann, 1928-2015

-- New York Times obituary here
-- Appreciation (A. Goldhammer) in New Republic here 
-- Harvard Center for European Studies press release here [pdf]
-- Hoffmann festschrift (Ideas and Ideals, Westview Press, 1993) here 

Added later: For previous mentions of Hoffmann on this blog, see, e.g., here (quoting his 1977 essay "An American Social Science: International Relations") and here (quoting a 1995 article of his in Foreign Policy).

Added still later: Peter Gourevitch on Hoffmann at Duck of Minerva (here), which links to other things, including a piece by Gary Bass at Foreign Affairs online that I haven't read yet.    

Self-consciousness and the ethic of responsibility

I heard a snippet of an interview today in which an unidentified politician (i.e., unidentified in the few minutes I listened), perhaps one of the Republican presidential candidates, said he was opposed to the U.S. taking in more (i.e., any significant numbers of) Syrian refugees.  He then said that the U.S. is "the most compassionate country" in the world.  That's when I turned the radio off.  I'm not sure how the interviewee was planning to connect the two statements -- presumably something along the lines of saying that as the supposedly "most compassionate" country, the U.S. need not do anything in this particular instance -- but I couldn't stand to listen further.

What was at work there? Deliberate manipulation of the listening audience? Callousness? Pandering? Ignorance? All politicians have prior inclinations about matters, prejudices if you will, just as all people in general do, but when prejudices are reinforced by ignorance their effects are compounded. Some writers (Gadamer in Truth and Method, for one) see "prejudice" not as a synonym for irrational dislike or hatred but as denoting something inescapable and even positive.  However, in the more common and everyday meaning of "bias" or irrational partiality, prejudices can be kept under control and countered only if one is aware of them.  This requires self-consciousness (in the sense of self-knowledge, not in the sense of shyness) or, to use a fancy word that is basically synonymous, reflexivity.

This connects, at least arguably, to what Weber famously called an ethic of responsibility.  To weigh the consequences of acting (or not acting) in a given situation and then to accept responsibility for the consequences brought on by acting (or not acting) is the mark of a conscientious leader.  In Politics as a Vocation, Weber wrote that "the honor of a civil servant" is to carry out a superior's instructions, whereas "[t]he honor of the political leader, of the leading statesman...lies precisely in an exclusive personal responsibility for what he does, a responsibility he cannot and must not reject or transfer."  

One of the criticisms made of Kissinger by Michael J. Smith in his 1986 book Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger is that Kissinger's complete conviction of the correctness of his own decisions and his total "confidence in his ability to judge consequences," as displayed in his memoirs, blurs the line between an ethic of responsibility and an "ethic of intentions":  

To say, "trust my calculation of consequences -- my sense of responsibility is beyond question" differs very little from saying, "trust me -- my intentions are good."... [Kissinger's] untiring efforts to place the blame for the failures of his policy anywhere but on himself do not speak well of his adherence to the Weberian notion of personal acceptance of responsibility. (p.216)  

This was arguably even truer of Nixon.  The most he did retrospectively was to admit certain unspecified "mistakes" with respect to his actions in Watergate.  If he hadn't been, in effect, forced from office, he wouldn't have left.  One should recall that when listening to replays of (or reading) Nixon's remarks on his final departure from the White House in August 1974.

The U.S.-Russia war chatter

The amount of chatter about the possibility of a war between the U.S./NATO and Russia increased over this summer.  For one thing, there was a cover piece in The National Interest on the topic; I bought the issue in hard copy, rather predictably I barely glanced at it, and now (even more predictably) I am not sure where the copy of the issue is (yes, I could find it, assuming I didn't throw it out, but it's apparently not in one of the piles on the floor any more).

Just now I glanced at a piece in Vox (h/t) from this past June by Max Fisher summarizing the alarm bells that various experts have been ringing.  The most telling point, based on my skim, appears to be that Putin has lowered the threshold for nuclear use in Russia's official nuclear doctrine.  The official position now is that Russia will use nuclear weapons if a conventional conflict poses an "existential" threat to it; that's what I took from the Vox piece.  The implication is that certain influential Russian strategists, and maybe Putin himself, now think a "limited" nuclear war is possible and "winnable."  As far as I'm aware, no serious strategist in the West has entertained this ludicrous notion since the mid-1950s.  

One can probably see (or at least this is my view) that maintenance of tactical or 'battlefield' nuclear weapons makes no sense for countries that don't see a limited nuclear war as a realistic possibility, i.e., that think any nuclear exchange will likely escalate.  That's one of the reasons why it's pointless and a waste of money for the U.S. to still have 200 'tactical' nuclear weapons (gravity bombs) deployed in Europe.  These weapons have no purpose, nor much of a deterrent effect, unless one thinks that a limited nuclear exchange will stay limited, which Western strategists, as far as I'm aware, don't.

However, recent official statements emanating from Russia suggest that Putin might have adopted the belief that a limited nuclear exchange could stay limited, or even that use of a 'tactical' nuclear weapon would not draw a nuclear response (or a conventional response of high intensity).  Or maybe Putin just wants people to think he believes this.  Yeah, that Putin.  Crazy like a fox.

Biopolitics, refugees, and other matters

It can only be a matter of time before biopolitical takes on the current European refugee/migrant crisis begin showing up in the IR journals (and other journals).  Since the crisis revolves in large part around bodies and their relation to states, it would seem tailor-made for such treatment.  Although I think I understand at least a few of the basic notions, I can't say biopolitics "does" much for me in an intellectual sense.  Thus when I learned, via a recent comment thread attached to this post at the USIH blog, that there has been a biopolitical appropriation of Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies, I was interested but not bowled over.  As I mentioned on the same thread, I cited The King's Two Bodies in my dissertation, which did not address biopolitics; I also mentioned that I had not actually read the Kantorowicz straight through (or even come anywhere close to doing so), but basically had only pillaged, with appropriate attribution of course, a couple of its footnotes that related to my subject.

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.)