Celebs

I didn't have a chance to comment on the revelations that foreign-policy insider Peter Galbraith received a 5 percent stake in an oil field in the Dohak region of Iraqi Kurdistan, for his role in helping the Norwegian oil company DNO negotiate drilling rights there. Galbraith was also involved in the constitutional negotiations that gave the Kurds substantial autonomy over the region and thus made the proposed deal possible, and the Times reports that he could make roughly $100 million or so for his efforts.

Not surprisingly, the exposure of Galbraith's dealings has caused some controversy in Iraq, though remarkably little in Washington  One of the Iraqi participants said "the idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless," and the whole business is bound to reinforce the widespread (and in my view, false) belief that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a "war for oil. " 

Galbraith is publicly unrepentant, arguing that his deal with DNO was arranged while he was a private citizen and declaring that "What is true is that I undertook business activities that were entirely consistent with my long-held policy views. . . I believe my work with [DNO and other companies] helped create the Kurdistan oil industry which helps provide Kurdistan an economic base for the autonomy its people almost unanimously desire. . . So, while I may have had interests, I see no conflict."

Of course, as a number of other critics quickly pointed out, the problem is not that Galbraith is in line to receive millions of dollars in compensation; the problem is that he failed to disclose his financial interests while he was busy writing op-eds and articles and engaging in other public activities on behalf of Kurdish autonomy. His behavior is no different than a medical researcher who takes millions of dollars from a pharmeceutical company and then writes articles or offers expert testimony about the efficacy of that company's products. The testimony may be entirely consistent with the scientist's "long-held views," but anyone exposed to the testimony has a right to know about the potential conflict of interest.

The whole sordid business got me thinking: is there any way to clean up the marketplace of ideas here in the United States?  We are drowning in information and opinion, much of it claiming to be objective and authoritative when it may in fact be inspired and funded by moneyed special interests eager to sell the public a story that advances their particular objectives. Most "think tanks" in Washington portray themselves as objective, quasi-scholarly institutions (indeed, they increasingly give researchers endowed chairs and other quasi-academic titles), but unlike most universities, most think tanks remain heavily dependent on "soft money" and are bound to be especially sensitive to what potential donors might be thinking. And some of them aren't really scholarly at all; they are just public relations operations or "letterhead organizations" seeking to mold public opinion and push the policy process in a particular direction. But unless you know who's paying for it, it's hard to decide who's giving you an honest opinion and who is just shilling for some powerful interest group.

Can we tame this beast without infringing on free speech?

Here's a suggestion: let's start by asking participants in the war of ideas to provide a lot more information about their financial dealings. The SEC requires companies to make relevant financial information available to investors; why shouldn't those who provide information in the public arena provide a similar level of disclosure to those who "invest" in their alleged expertise? We don't have to pass a law requiring think tanks or pundits to disclose the details of their funding arrangements to the public; as a first step, we could simply rank different organizations and individuals on the level of disclosure they provide, much as other groups help potential donors rate charitable organizations on their administrative efficiency. 

For example, think tanks could be ranked according to their willingness to provide lists of their funding sources, specifying both the sources of the funding and the specific projects that the donors paid for. Wouldn't you like to know who is bankrolling the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center for American Progress, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations, Hudson Institute, Middle East Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, the Federation of American Scientists, or the New America Foundation? 

Such groups shouldn't make us dig for the information; they could just put it all out on their websites. Lord knows that these groups work overtime disseminating reports, testimony, op-eds and policy memos; surely it is not too much to ask them to tell us who is providing the wherewithal. Organizations that come clean could get a 5-star rating, and journalists and citizens who get exposed to their "analysis" could attach the appropriate discount to whatever they were being fed.

Or take this idea a step further: why not ask prominent pundits and commentators to provide similar disclosure, and rate them for their transparency as well? Where do David Brooks, Juan Cole, Ann Coulter, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Goldfarb, Michelle Malkin, Matt Yglesias, Richard Perle, Steve Clemons, Fred Kagan, or George Will get their money? How much is salary, and how much is derived from honoraria, royalties, or consulting work? And who's paying the bills? 

Please understand that I'm not criticizing these organizations for accepting contributions from any legitimate source, and I'm not suggesting that commentators shouldn't supplement their income through various outside activities. This is America, where, making a buck is a perfectly worthy enterprise. Nor am I suggesting that think tanks and pundits are just selling their opinions to the highest bidder; more commonly, outside groups pay for someone's services because they already know what he or she thinks and they want to support it or consume it (i.e., by hiring a well-known pundit to give a talk). My point is simply that consumers of a think tank's products or a public intellectual's work have a right to know who is paying for their activities, so that they can take that fact into account.  

Nor am I proposing that full (or even partial) disclosure be a requirement for bloggers, journalists, pundits, or essayists who engage in public debate. Needless to say, that would be a gross infringement of free speech.  My proposal is much more modest: we should start asking about their sources of support, and somebody ought to keep track of how different people answer it.  Any commentator or public intellectual who wants to keep their financial information strictly private is free to do so. But if they do, then we are entitled to ask if they have something to hide, and to rank them lower than those who are willing to divulge their backers.

Am I willing to practice what I preach? Sure. For the current year, for example, about 80 percent of my income is my salary from Harvard. Harvard pays me to teach courses, advise students, administer a research program, and serve on various school committees, and it also expects me to publish research on various public policy issues. I like to think that I'm pulling my weight in each of these areas.

The remainder of my earnings comes from service as the academic consultant to the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, writing this blog, co-editing a book series, and assorted royalties and honoraria (mostly for giving talks or writing articles). The latter, by the way, is almost all from universities or citizens' groups, although I also got some modest compensation for participating (along with a bunch of other scholars) in a workshop series funded by the National Intelligence Council. 

So far, nobody has offered me a stake an oil-field.  If anybody does, I'll let you know right away.

I haven't read Sarah Palin's new autobiography, and frankly, I don't plan to. But I did Michiko Kakutani's review in yesterday's New York Times, and I was struck by this passage:

In Going Rogue Ms. Palin talks perfunctorily about fiscal responsibility and a muscular foreign policy, and more passionately about the importance of energy independence, but she is quite up front about the fact that much of her appeal lies in her just-folks "hockey mom" ordinariness. She pretends no particular familiarity with the Middle East, the Iraq war or Islamic politics -- "I knew the history of the conflict," she writes, "to the extent that most Americans did." And she argues that "there's no better training ground for politics than motherhood."

Yet Mr. McCain's astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (less than two years as the governor of Alaska, and before that, two terms as mayor of Wasilla, an Alaskan town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate underscores just how alarmingly expertise is discounted -- or equated with elitism -- in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge.

I think Kakutani is right, but I wonder why so many people -- including Senator McCain, Ms. Palin herself, and the other folks who supported her -- seem to think you don't need to know anything to be good at running foreign policy. I doubt if Ms. Palin would let someone perform surgery on one of her children (or even repair her car) simply because they had parenting experience or an entertaining life story. No, she'd want to make sure that the person in question actually knew what they were doing. Virtually all of us normally insist on genuine expertise when we hire anyone to do an important job -- whether it's carpentry or a cardiac bypass -- yet millions of people in this country seem to think that the most momentous decisions about our collective future can be entrusted to people who are sublimely comfortable in their own ignorance.

George Frey/Getty Images

I'm in the UK at a conference, but I came across the following video, courtesy of Newsweek. If you've been doing a Rip Van Winkle or otherwise engaged for the past ten years, here's a quick way to catch up on the first decade of the 21st Century. My thought: "no wonder I'm tired ... it's been a busy ten years."

Professional economists may be dismayed, but scholars and students of international politics should be delighted by the decision to award this year's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (aka the "Nobel Prize in Economics") to Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University.  She is not only the first woman to win the economics prize, she's also the first political scientist.  She holds a Ph.D. in the subject from UCLA and is a past president of the American Political Science Association.

Ostrom's main research is pretty far from my own concerns, but I did list her book Governing the Commons on one of my "top-ten" lists earlier this year.  She is primarily known for her work on institutional solutions to collective action problems, most notably in the area of resources and environment.  Via a combination of "soft" rational choice theory and careful empirical work, she shows that common resources can be shared and managed through various institutional mechanisms, but also shows that there is nothing inevitable about this outcome, due to familiar dilemmas of collective action (that's why we call them dilemmas!), and the complex interactions of humans, institutions, and larger ecosystems.

Ostrom (and the co-winner, organization theorist Oliver Williamson) join a group of recent winners chosen more for theoretical insight and real-world relevance than for mathematical scholasticism.  Others in this same group would include economic historians Douglass North and Robert Fogel, behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, game theorist/strategist Thomas Schelling, and economist-philosopher Amartya Sen.  Scholars with an international orientation have been doing pretty well in recent years too: Schelling was awarded for game-theoretic work on international conflict, Paul Krugman for his work on international trade, and Sen's work on poverty and famines has clear international implications.  Kudos to the prize committee for their eclectic approach to the award--if only more economics departments thought this way.

One more thing: need I mention that Ostrom received the award for work she had already done, as opposed to some other Nobel Prize winners I can think of?

Photo: Indiana University via Getty Images

Everybody with a website has gone bananas over Obama getting this year's Nobel Peace Prize, so why shouldn't I add my two cents?   I'm here in Norway at the moment (from which the prize originates), so I want to make it abundantly clear that I had nothing to do with it.

As for my reaction, I'm with the many voices who think this is way, way premature, and also with those who think Obama's best move would have been to decline it gracefully, while saying he would be thrilled to be deserving at some later date.  The Nobel Committee might have felt dissed, but I believe he would have won enormous plaudits elsewhere. 

Why is the prize ill-chosen?  Because we all know that "talk is cheap," and thus far that's mostly what Obama has offered us.  We're getting out of Iraq (though maybe not completely), but George W. Bush had already signed the deal to do that before he left office.  We aren't getting out of Afghanistan any time soon. He's given a great speech in Cairo, and then whiffed on the follow-through towards Israeli-Palestinian peace. He's given another nice speech about eliminating nuclear weapons, but anyone want to bet on whether he delivers on that particular pledge? America's image is improved (except in the Middle East), but I can't think of a single conflict that has gone away (or even significantly decreased) since he took office. So far, his main tangible foreign policy achievment was getting the Olympic Committee to unite in rejecting Chicago's bid and awarding the games to Rio.

More importantly, this award risks discrediting the prize even more than some earlier choices.  We don't know what Obama will be forced (or will choose) to do in the rest of his presidency (which could last another 7+ years) and if he ends up escalating any existing conflicts or-heaven forbid-starting a new one, it will make a mockery of the whole idea of the prize. I wouldn't be surprised if this award doesn't generate more than a little resentment around the world, especially if U.S. foreign policy changes less than many people still hope it will.

Finally, the Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and all the Norwegians I've talked to thus far think it was a bizarre decision. One Norwegian friend had a simple explanation: the chairman of the committee is Thorbjorn Jagland, a former president of the parliament who is apparently something of a running joke in Norwegian political circles and famous for boneheaded statements.   My Norwegian friend called this decision "typical."

In any case, I'm putting in for next year's peace prize now.  I haven't done anything to deserve it either, but what if I promise to write a great book or article in the next twelve months that will substantially contribute to world peace?  In fact, I'll even promise to retool as an economist and put a mathematical model in the piece, so that I'm eligible for two prizes, not one.  OK?

DANIEL SANNUM LAUTEN/AFP/Getty Images

I don't know how many people subscribe to both Foreign Policy and Sports Illustrated, but I do know lots of people who take athletics seriously. Human beings seem to be hard-wired into making "in-group/out-group" distinctions, so it's not surprising that the loyalty that sports fans show for their favorite teams looks a lot like the broader phenomenon of nationalism. And I'm not saying that just because I'm a proud member of Red Sox Nation.  

Success in sports can be the first step toward a successful political career (e.g., Bill Bradley, Sebastian Coe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack Kemp, etc.) and athletes like Pele, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods have become genuine global icons. Of course, using sports to demonstrate national prowess or as a source of national pride is a common practice. The revival of the Olympic games in the 1890s was at least partly intended to promote international cooperation and understanding, but as a good realist would expect, the Games eventually became yet another arena where states could try to demonstrate the superiority of their own system and enhance their global influence.

Anyway, as summer winds down and the fall term looms, I found myself wondering about various episodes where sporting events actually had an effect on world politics, or told us something about how the world was changing. Here's my list of ten key moments, in no particular order.

1. The Berlin Olympics, 1936.

Adolf Hitler uses the Olympic Games to highlight the superiority of the Nazi regime, but his efforts are at least partly undermined when a black American, Jesse Owens, wins four gold medals.

2. La Guerra de futbol (aka “Soccer War”): El Salvador vs. Honduras, 1969. 

Here’s a case where sports may have helped cause a war: a hard-fought match between El Salvador and Honduras in a preliminary round for the 1970 FIFA World Cup exacerbated the existing tensions between the two states and helped spark a brief four-day war in which over 1000 people died. The war ended inconclusively and El Salvador eventually won the actual match, but was ousted in a subsequent round and did not make the finals.

3. "Ping Pong Diplomacy:" U.S. Table Tennis Team Visits China, 1971. 

During the world championships in Japan, the U.S. table tennis team received an unexpected invitation to visit China, and shortly thereafter became the first group of Americans to visit China since the communist takeover in 1949. The "ping heard 'round the world" was the first tangible sign of normalization between the United States and China (even though the Chinese teams reportedly had to throw a few matches to the Americans). The visit was obviously not the cause of the subsequent rapprochement, but it shows how sporting events can be an effective diplomatic tool.

4. U.S. Women Win Soccer World Cup, 1999.

I see this as significant for two main reasons. First, it underscores the growing importance and legitimacy of women’s sports, which has been an important element in modern feminism. Second, it shows the United States finally demonstrating real prowess in the world's most popular sport. Plus, the final game was against China, which makes it a nice harbinger of 21st century geopolitics.

5. Black September at the Munich Olympics, 1972:

Palestinian terrorists seized and eventually killed eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. The heinous act sets back Palestinian national aspirations and triggers a protracted Israeli reprisal campaign that assassinated a number of Palestinian leaders and at least one innocent victim.

6. South Africa Wins Rugby World Cup, 1995.

South African teams were barred from most international competitions during the apartheid era, a step that highlighted the regime’s pariah status and helped undermine popular support for the policy. The post-apartheid team’s victory in 1995 was a vivid symbol of South Africa’s new beginning, symbolized when President Nelson Mandela awarded the victor’s trophy to team captain Francois Pinear, a white Afrikaner.

7. Australia II Wins America’s Cup, 1983.

The Aussie victory broke what was probably the longest winning streak in the history of sports -- 132 years of dominance that began when the schooner America outpaced a British flotilla in a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851. (When she asked who had finished second, Queen Victoria was reportedly told "Your Majesty, there is no second.”). In retrospect, one could see the Australian victory as a symptom of globalization: cutting-edge yacht design wasn’t an American monopoly any longer. Since then, alas, the competition has been driven by another American export: gamesmanship and ceaseless litigation over the rules of the competition.  

8. The "Miracle on Ice": the U.S. Olympic Ice Hockey Team Defeats the Soviet National Team, 1980. 

Labeled the greatest sports moment of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated, the improbable defeat of a heavily-favored Soviet team by a group of U.S. college players arrived at a moment when many Americans mistakenly felt the Soviet Union was pulling ahead. In fact, the USSR was on its last legs, though its hockey establishment remained a powerhouse and eventually sent a lot of players to the NHL.

9. “Das Wunder von Berne:” Germany Wins World Cup, 1954.

An underdog German team defeated Hungary in the final in Berne, a win that set off a wave of euphoria in Germany and is seen by some historians as a key event that restored a sense of national pride after the shame of the Nazi era and helped signal Germany’s re-integration in the world community.

10. Pentathlete Boris Onischenko Disqualified at Montreal Olympics, 1976.

I was on the fencing team in college, so I can’t resist adding this to my list.  Onischenko was a member of the Soviet modern pentathlon team who was disqualified after referees discovered that his sword had been modified to enable him to register “hits” on the electronic scoring machine by pressing a switch concealed in his grip.  Together with the East German steroid scandal, such episodes helped undermine the image of the Soviet empire.  Plenty of other athletes have cheated, of course -- think of sprinters Ben Johnson and Marion Jones, bicyclist Floyd Landis, and subway-riding “marathoner” Rosie Ruiz -- but their transgressions had less impact absent the Cold War atmosphere.

There are other examples one might add: Budge versus von Cramm at Wimbledon, the controversial Soviet "defeat" of the U.S. men's basketball team at Munich, or the notorious Soviet-Hungary water polo match at the 1956 Olympics (played in the shadow of the Hungarian Revolution, the game was so violent the water reportedly turned pink). So please feel free to contribute your own suggestions.

IOC Olympic Museum /Allsport 

Plenty of words have already been written about former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and more will be written now that he is gone. I was only twelve years old when he "stepped down" as secretary of defense, and I didn't know much about his role in national security policy or even his disastrous mis-management of Vietnam at that time. I studied his career during college and graduate school, however, and subsequently paid a lot of attention to his various pronouncements about nuclear weapons, his recollections about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his belated mea culpa about his role in Vietnam.

Some commentators see McNamara as a tragic figure; a talented, driven, and dedicated public servant who mishandled a foolish war and spent the remainder of his life trying to atone for it. The obituary in today's New York Times takes this line, describing him as having "spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war's moral consequences," and as someone who "wore the expression of a haunted man."

I see his fate differently. Unlike the American soldiers who fought in Indochina, or the millions of Indochinese who died there, McNamara did not suffer significant hardship as a result of his decisions. He lived a long and comfortable life, and he remained a respected member of the foreign policy establishment. He had no trouble getting his ideas into print, or getting the media to pay attention to his pronouncements. Not much tragedy there.

McNamara may have been a gifted analyst and corporate executive, blessed with a lot of raw smarts, but he was also one of those people who could not imagine being wrong or resist the desire to tell the world what to do. Failure in Vietnam did not teach him humility; he ran the World Bank with same ego-driven sense of infallibility he had brought to the Pentagon (and with predictably mixed results). Yet this second experience with failure did not temper his love of the limelight or his desire to prescribe How Things Should Be Done. He spent the last decades of his life offering high-profile advice on various aspects of nuclear weapons policy -- with the same degree of self-assurance he had always displayed -- and he sought the spotlight once again with a belated memoir on his role in Vietnam. As always, however, it was filled with "lessons" for others; to the last, McNamara retained an unwarranted confidence in his own ideas as well as an inability to keep quiet.

Overall, McNamara's post-Vietnam behavior raises a broader question about the role of former officials who have led their country into major disasters. Ordinarily, we should respect the men and women who have devoted years of their lives to public service and listen carefully to the counsel of those who have the benefit of long experience. Moreover, someone who is no longer competing for a job in Washington may be more likely to give honest advice than someone who is still worrying about the questions she might face at a confirmation hearing.

But in some cases -- and a lot of former Bush administration officials come to mind here -- the failures are of sufficient gravity as to render all subsequent advice suspect. And when a government official's repeated errors have left thousands of their fellow citizens dead or grievously wounded, along with hundreds of thousands of other human beings, it would be more seemly for them to remain silent, in mute acknowledgement of their own mistakes. And if they persist in pontificating -- as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, and Dick Cheney are now doing -- a nation that understood the importance of accountability might have the good sense to pay them the attention and respect they deserve. Which is to say: none.

AFP/AFP/Getty Images

A number of readers wrote in regarding my last post, which described French Open champion Roger Federer as having delivered most/all of his acceptance speech in English (even though he speaks French fluently). They report that I was dead wrong, and that most of his remarks were in French, save for the comments he directed at runner-up Robin Soderling (who spoke in English), and Andre Agassi (who was there to present the award).

Except for the announcer, I didn’t hear any French in the broadcast I watched, but NBC may skipped that portion of the coverage. It's also possible that I was refilling my coffee cup and returned to catch the English portion of his remarks. Mea culpa, and apologies to all for missing this one.

Speaking of French, I will be trying to resurrect my own rusty skills in that language over the next week. I'm visiting the The Graduate Institute in Geneva to participate in a thesis defense and give a colloquium, and then attending a conference on "Rising Powers Amidst International Turmoil: The United States and Europe Facing China and Russia" in Talloires, France. I'm told the hotels all have WiFi, so I'll be posting from the road as time permits.