One can only look on the continuing violence in Syria with a mixture of awe, anguish, and dismay. Awe because so many Syrians continue to protest against the Assad government, despite the enormous personal risks that this entails. Anguish and dismay because there is relatively little that outside powers can do to bring about a speedy end to the crisis, apart from the measures that have already been taken (which I support).

The Obama administration has come under some criticism for not turning against Assad sooner. I'm inclined to cut them some slack here, because it would have been far better had the United States, Turkey, and a few others been able to convince Assad to begin a genuine process of dialogue, compromise, and liberalization. So it was worth trying to see if a deal could be struck, even if that effort ultimately failed. Having tried to give the Assad regime a way out also made it much easier to line up international support for sanctions and diplomatic isolation.

The central difficulty at this stage is two-fold: 1) the regime has no easy exit options and thus every incentive to fight on, and 2) its opponents inside and outside the country -- including the United States -- do not have a lot of attractive ways to put more pressure on the regime. Let's consider each aspect in turn.

Assad's problem now is that he's lost any chance of a genuine compromise and must therefore fight on in the hopes that he can cow the opposition and restore order. Regrettably, that is precisely what his father managed to do when he crushed an uprising in Hama in 1982 (killing some 20,000 people in the process). Once an authoritarian ruler rejects compromise and liberalization and launches a bloody crackdown instead, they have to do whatever it takes to win. With 3,500 people already dead, no one in Syria would believe any offers Assad might subsequently make to share power, and Assad and his cronies undoubtedly know that the risk of future retribution will be considerable if other actors in Syria ever gain real political power.

The other option for Assad, of course, is accepting a graceful flight into exile (presumably with a pile of cash to pay for a comfortable retirement). Several Arab states have reportedly offered Assad this sort of safe haven, and other notorious dictators (such as Uganda's Idi Amin) left power in this way. But that option isn't very attractive for Assad either, because leaders with bloody hands now face international prosecution for crimes against humanity. Furthermore, this hypothetical option would only be available to Assad, his family, and perhaps his inner circle of advisors. But other members of the government are implicated in the crackdown -- most of them drawn from the minority Alawi sect -- and they would be inclined to fight on even if Assad himself were to leave. This situation helps us understand why the regime and its security forces haven't cracked yet: they just don't have a lot of options at this point and they must either hang together (or hang separately).

The problem for the United States, Turkey, and other opponents of the regime is that there are real costs and risks to trying to do a lot more than they are already doing. Syria is more urban, mountainous, and densely-populated than Libya, so an air campaign against the regime's security forces would be a far trickier affair and Syria could respond to a drone campaign or other overt military action in ways that we might find unpleasant. Moreover, Assad's security forces are mostly conducting small-scale operations against unarmed civilians, not massed army assaults on cities, so they are less vulnerable to an air campaign. Libya was also a minor player far from the center of Middle East politics, but Syria lies in the heart of the region and instability there could easily reverberate into Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, and Israel. Assad, for all his faults, is not as hated or despised as Qaddafi was, which means we aren't likely to get the same support from the Arab League that we had during the Libyan campaign. And we will never get UN Security Council authorization for military action, because both China and Russia are opposed. (This situation, by the way, is at least partly fallout from the Libya intervention, which Moscow and Beijing regard as having exceeded the Security Council mandate. It also reflects their enduring concern to limit U.S. efforts to dictate conditions in the Middle East.)

Hence the dismay one feels when reading news accounts and watching videos of the violence being wreaked against Syrian civilians, and when one remembers that their movement began in a completely peaceful manner. I fear that the Syrian tragedy will grind on for many months, and its principal victims will be ordinary Syrians who dreamt of a more open political order, and dared to think they could bring them about. And because societies take a long time to recover from extended bouts of internal violence (see under: Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia, former Yugoslavia, etc.), the consequences of this tragedy are likely to be with us for a long time after it is finally resolved.

Perhaps the single most remarkable development in 2011 is the wave of political protests that have occurred in widely-varying political contexts. In addition to the various upheavals that constitute the "Arab Spring," we've also seen tent cities in Israel, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement and its clones here in the United States, and various imitators in both Europe and Asia. This wave of political contagion is more widespread than the "velvet revolutions" of 1989 (though not yet as significant), and perhaps the nearest analogue would be wave of youth-revolutions and upheavals that occurred back in 1968.

What is going on here? Is there a common set of causes at work, or at least a common thread to otherwise diverse phenomena? I think so, because I see these upheavals as fueled by three important global developments.  

The first factor is economic globalization, which has made many states both sensitive and vulnerable to events in far-away places, and led to rising inequality both between and within countries. Yet most governments have failed to enact remedial measures to soften the consequences of economic change and to restore a more level distribution of income, thereby ensuring some degree of economic pain and political discontent.

The second development is the globalization of information, which allows events and ideas to spread much more quickly. As a result, demonstrators in Cairo can watch what's happening in Tunis and imitate it, and then other people in other countries get the idea that protest can be effective, even if their particular grievances are somewhat different. And so it spreads, as the radical idea of ordinary people taking action against the seemingly impregnable becomes increasingly contagious. Plus, each group can learn from each other and feed off the sense of being part of a larger process, instead of feeling like isolated and powerless individuals with scant hope of success. This sort of thing has happened before in world history (e.g., in 1789, 1848, 1919, 1989, etc.), but never in so many far-flung and widely different contexts.

The third reason is the increasingly-evident incompetence and/or corruption of governing elites in many countries, and the tendency of governments to do too much to protect wealthy and powerful interests and not enough to help ordinary people. In Egypt, it was the overt corruption of the Mubarak regime, whether in the form of privileged deals for military officers or for Mubarak's son. In the United States, it was the taxpayer-funded rescue of "too big to fail" financial institutions as well as the "too-well connected to fail" recycling of some of the same people who helped create the whole mess in the first place. And then there's the continued recycling of policy ideas that had been discredited by events but never discarded. People may be disappointed by Obama, but real disenchantment comes from the growing realization that replacing him wouldn't make much difference and might make things much worse. You know the line: "Meet the New Boss....Same as the Old Boss." (Turns out Pete Townshend was a prophet when he wrote "Won't Get Fooled Again," which would be a nice anthem for many of these movements.)

There is, of course, a deeper taproot to all this. As my colleague Jenny Mansbridge reminded me in a superb talk I attended last week, (and which will be published next month in PS), the present combination of economic inequality and political gridlock is fatal to the proper functioning of democratic orders.  In a capitalist democracy, corporate interests tend to be wealthier than the rest of society, and the state is the only actor powerful enough to intervene to prevent corporate interests from going too far and exploiting their position. This is what happened in the Gilded Age and again in the Roaring 20s, which eventually led to the Progressive Era and later the New Deal.

But if the political system is gridlocked, then the state cannot act quickly or decisively to retard corporate power. Even worse, as corporate interests grow stronger they tend to acquire greater political power (and especially when a tame Supreme Court helps them, as it did in the Citizens United decision).  Instead of just hamstringing the state, corporate interests can get it to enact laws that favor them even more. The result will be rising economic inequality and precisely the sort of irresponsible and unregulated behavior that led to the Great Recession of 2007.

Put these three things together, and you have a recipe for global protests in very different countries. Despite the many differences between conditions in the United States, in Greece, in Egypt, in Syria, in Israel, or elsewhere, what unites the 2011 wave of global protest is the shared belief that the People in Charge do not know what they are doing, care more about their own wealth and well-being than they do about the common weal, or are simply too spineless and shallow to do what at least a few of them secretly know to be right.

Ask yourself: how many contemporary political leaders do you genuinely admire? How many of them would rate a paragraph, let alone a whole chapter, in a revised edition of Profiles in Courage? How many of them seem capable of giving you a straight answer to a hard question, as opposed to offering you a lot of happy double-talk? How many of them are better at making a powerful speech than they are at taking a principled stand and sticking to it? How many of them have really got your back, as opposed to pandering to the endless parade of well-heeled lobbyists and special interest groups? Is there political leader in your country who is not for sale?

If you've been paying attention, and you can't find such leaders in your country, and you having been watching the obscenely wealthy get richer and more powerful, so that they can rig the game to make themselves richer still, then you'd probably think about painting a sign and getting out in the streets. And if I didn't already have this blog for my soap-box, maybe I would too.

I have been distracted by personal concerns for the past week, and look what happens. The stock market is on a roller-coaster triggered mostly by political incompetence. There are riots in Great Britain, and large-scale protests are roiling Israel. Syria continues its bloody convulsions, our impulsive war in Libya grinds on, and the euro crisis looks no closer to solution. The United States suffers its single worst day in the long and misguided Afghan campaign. Add it all together, and 2011 is beginning to look like 1968 -- a year that violent upheavals occurred in the United States, France, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. Except that here the troubles are more widespread, more closely connected, and have more potentially far-reaching consequences.

What's most disturbing about all this is the extent to which so many of our current troubles are self-inflicted. It's obvious to any reasonably sane person how to get the U.S. economy back on track, the problem is that there's a dearth of reasonably sane people in positions of responsibility. Some of the seeds of the 2007-08 meltdown were sown during the Clinton administration (as Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner make clear in their terrific book Reckless Endangerment), but most of the damage was done by George W. Bush's foolhardy decision to cut taxes, start unnecessary wars, and then fight those wars badly. In short, the United States screwed up big-time between 2000 and 2008. As we all know from our personal lives: when you screw up, you generally have to pay a price.

That means that solving our current problems will not be easy or painless, and we should stop pretending that there's some magic bullet to fire at our current woes. Nonetheless, the basic outlines of what to do are hardly mysterious. We are in a fiscal hole and have a depressed economy, which means we owe lots of people lots of money and aren't generating enough revenues to make people confident that we can get back in the black. We need more revenue, therefore, but we don't want to choke the remaining life out of the U.S. economy. 

Accordingly, the best place to get some more revenue is from the wealthiest members of society (who got those big tax cuts from George Bush and made out far better than the rest of America over the past decade or more, and whose consumption won't decline if some loopholes are closed and marginal tax rates rise modestly). I mean, are Bill Gates and Warren Buffett going to lower their thermostats and cancel their summer vacations if we make them pay a bit more?) We also need to trim some entitlements over time, and to cut our bloated defense budget (no matter what new Sec/Def Leon Panetta says). For starters, getting out of Iraq on schedule and out of Afghanistan ASAP would suggest that our leaders really do understand what's truly important and would be a reassuring signal to global markets. In short: a simple combination of entitlement reform, tax reform, and strategic readjustment and we will be on our way to ending the deficit, maintaining our credit rating, and setting the stage for long-term economic recovery.

Except that Washington won't do it. I used to wonder how political paralysis could lead Japan to experience a "lost decade," but we're about to do the same thing if we don't change course. Unfortunately, the GOP is in the hands of leaders who care more about regaining power than they do about the country, and held hostage by know-nothing Tea Party extremists for whom passion is a substitute for reasoning or thought. The White House hasn't helped either: it declared victory too soon on the economic front and thought it could continue "business as usual" in foreign and defense policy, with a better presidential salesman. And for some reason the most gifted presidential "communicator" since Ronald Reagan has been unwilling or unable to take his case to the American people.

What are these people thinking? I scan the political horizon, and I don't see anyone remotely like George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, or even Dean Acheson. We are in the midst of the biggest strategic challenge since the end of World War II, but where is our Kennan or Kissinger? Neither of them were infallible, but each had a genuine strategic vision for the United States, its position in the world, and the actions that needed to be taken to preserve vital interests. And make no mistake: what is needed now is a foreign policy that is based on a clear and hard-headed strategy, one that identifies key priorities, writes off liabilities, and marshals the relevant elements of power to preserve what is vital first and foremost. Instead, we get a foreign policy based on wishful thinking, lofty ideals, or an endless list of global projects offered up by policy wonks and special interest groups, along with more bad advice from the people who got us into our present circumstances. And the latest GOP presidential aspirant -- Governor Rick Perry of Texas -- seems to think that all our problems can be solved if we just pray hard enough. I don't want to tread on anyone's beliefs, but if that isn't a sign of desperation and policy bankruptcy, I don't know what is.

Lord knows that I don't have all the answers, but I used to think that at least a few people in positions of responsibility had a few. But at this point I'm beginning to wonder.

Andrew Sullivan takes me mildly to task for my comments on the Murdoch/NewsCorp scandal, arguing that NewsCorp never had a monopoly on the news in Britain and pointing out that I failed to mention the BBC, which is the world's largest news organization and obviously a looming presence in British media.

Two points. First, I never said nor implied that Murdoch had a monopoly; my main point was it was a problem when "any single company or individual exercises excessive influence in media circles." Judging from the information released thus far, it seems clear that British politicians and public officials were intensely aware of the power that Murdoch & Co. wielded, and did a variety of regrettable things in an attempt to curry favor with them. 

Second, Andrew's point about the BBC is well taken, at least in the abstract. A  government-sponsored media giant can also skew what citizens know or believe, as state-controlled media in various dictatorships demonstrates. In a democracy, however, these dangers can be ameliorated by regulatory measures designed to insulate state-subsidized media organizations from political pressure. I haven't researched it in detail, but I'd argue that the BBC's record over the years, while far from perfect, has displayed a level of journalistic integrity that far exceeds NewsCorp. And any organization that could bring us both HardTalk and Monty Python can't be all bad.

But I take it that Sullivan and I agree on the main point: For democracy to function well, citizens have to be able to hear lots of competing views, including views that challenge powerful interests and the government. To me that is still the main lesson of the NewsCorp business.

Postscript: By the way, who has been Rupert Murdoch's most effective defender? Not his wife Wendi, who demonstrated superb reflexes and excellent hand-eye coordination when a moron tried to throw a shaving cream pie at Murdoch during his testimony. In fact, it was the pie-thrower himself who did the most to aid Murdoch's cause. Not only did this stupid act (temporarily) turn Murdoch into an object of sympathy, but it has led a raft of reporters and pundits to focus on Murdoch's wife and her entertainingly deft response. In short, all the assailant managed to do was distract us (once again) from the bigger issues. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might even suspect that the pie-thrower had been hired by NewsCorp to stage the attack, but even I don't think they are that far gone.

Back in the good old days, American officials used to lecture other countries on how to reform their economies and how to be responsible players in the international economic order. Today, with U.S. credit-worthiness held hostage to a bunch of self-serving flat-earthers in the Republican Party, and with the management of the rest of the economy in the hands of  lobbyists, too-big-to-fail banks, and politically-connected financiers or financially-connected politicos, it's to be expected that states like China would start lecturing us. Who can blame them?

Yesterday I received an email from the Council on Foreign Relations, announcing the release of a Special Report on "Justice Beyond the Hague: Supporting the Prosecution of International Crimes in National Courts."   The author is David A. Kaye of UCLA Law School, and the report is a well-crafted document arguing that the United States, other like-minded countries, and the philanthropic community ought to do more to national courts in other countries, so that they can investigate and prosecute war crimes and other atrocities. To enhance human rights, in short, we ought to help countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or a post-Qadhafi Libya hold former officials accountable for war crimes or other abuses. Money quote:

The United States shuld put national-level justice at the center of its war crimes policy.  Internally, the United States should reorganize how it helps other governments develop the capacity to investigate and prosecute such crimes. . . . Externally, the United States should take a leading role in fixing and coordinating a currently dysfunctional international approach to national justice in the wake of atrocities."

Sounds laudable, except the report is almost completely silent on whether the United States also needs to do a much better job of investigating and prosecuting U.S. officials who might be guilty of war crimes themselves. After all, a more-than-plausible case can be made that the Bush administration violated international law when it invaded Iraq in 2003, that top officials engaged in war crimes when they ordered the torture of prisoners, and that U.S. reliance on "targeted killings" in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan is also a violation of the laws of war. I'm not a lawyer and I don't know if the officials responsible are guilty or not, but it seems clear that our government is as reluctant to tackle that issue as the ones that the report seeks to help

The CFR report acknowledges this problem only once, commenting on page 22 that "the United States . . . must deal with widely-held perceptions, especially abroad, that it failed to hold its own officials accountable for abuses against suspected terrorism detainees." Fine, we need to "deal with" these perceptions, but that suggests a bit of spin control, rather than asking whether these "perceptions" are valid and whether we ought to be doing something concrete in response. You know, like issuing indictments or at least conducting a serious investigation.

Needless to say, this is the sort of pious moralizing that drives lots of people in other countries crazy. The issue isn't just our reluctance to put former top officials in the dock, it is also our relentless eagerness to preach to others about how they ought to behave, even when we are manifestly unwilling to live up to the same standards ourselves.  

By contrast, if the CFR issued a report saying that the US ought to do more to strengthen national courts both overseas and here at home -- even if this meant that a few CFR members might find themselves facing an indictment -- that might raise some eyebrows and force some rethinking.  But don't hold your breath.

If you're relaxing on Memorial Day and reflecting on the sacrifices that some of our fellow citizens have made to advance the common good, I have three suggestions for things to read.   All are drawn from the Sunday New York Times, and together they paint a worrisome portrait of the challenges we face as a nation.

The first article, appropriately, is a portrait of several soldiers from the 1st battalion, 87th infantry and the challenges they face as they return from Afghanistan. Several have been wounded, one has seen his marriage dissolve, all of them face an array of medical problems or personal obstacles, and none seem to have bright prospects once they return. Together, their stories remind us that most of the people who have been fighting these wars aren't members of a privileged elite; quite the contrary, in fact.  

The second article, by Gretchen Morgenson, summarizes a recent paper by Joseph Gagnon and Marc Hinterschweiger of the Peterson Institute of International Economics. Here the subject isn't the human cost of war; it is the economic consequences of a decade or more of American profligacy. The basic story is that our society has lived well beyond its means, and we will face a rising mountain of public debt -- in the best case rising to more than 150 percent of GDP by 2035 -- unless we "design a long-term plan to reduce fiscal deficits in the future." Gagnon and Hinterschweiger believe there is still time to ward off this gloomy scenario, but only political leaders are willing to make hard choices about entitlements, tax rates, and other forms of government spending (including defense).  

And the third article is Robert Reich's review of a new book on the financial crisis: Reckless Endangerment, also by Gretchen Morgenson (the same) and Joshua Rosner. The book (which I have downloaded this but not yet read) is a portrait of some of the key individuals who helped create the environment in which the mortgage crisis and financial meltdown occurred. Here's the paragraph (by Reich), that caught my eye:

The real problem, which the authors only hint at, is that Washington and the financial sector have become so tightly intertwined that public accountability has all but vanished. The revolving door described in "Reckless Endangerment" is but one symptom. The extraordinary wealth of America's financial class also elicits boundless cooperation from politicians who depend on it for campaign contributions and from a fawning business press, as well as a stream of honors from universities, prestigious charities and think tanks eager to reward their generosity. In this symbiotic world, conflicts of interest are easily hidden, appearances of conflicts taken for granted and abuses of public trust for personal gain readily dismissed."

Reich is quite familiar with this world, having famously been a "Friend of Bill (Clinton)" from the latter's Oxford days, as well as faculty member at Harvard and Secretary of Labor in Clinton's first term.  As someone who has been lucky enough to teach at prestigious universities, I've some experience with these interconnected webs of influence myself, though hardly at the highest reaches, and Reich's summary here rings true to me.

Put the three pieces together, and it makes somber reading for Memorial Day. For they remind us that the people who have engineered our biggest failings in recent decades -- including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan-have largely escaped any of the consequences. Similarly, most of the people whose mistakes led to the financial meltdown have retained their wealth, status, and political power. And as we spend the next couple of decades  digging ourselves out from these various messes (assuming that our sclerotic political system actually manages to make do something effective), it's ordinary Americans who will pay the biggest price. As usual.

Remember the "unipolar moment?" You know: that period that began when the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the United States in an unprecedented position of power. As former President George H.W. Bush put it in 1991, the United States found itself "standing alone at the pinnacle of power, with the rarest opportunity to remake the world." And both Democratic and Republican administrations tried to do just that: expanding NATO, supposedly spreading democracy, putting "rogue states" in the cross hairs, and sending the U.S. military into action on virtually every continent.

Of course, in the wake of the financial crisis and the self-inflicted wounds in Iraq and Afghanistan, things don't look quite so rosy today. China's GDP is likely to overtake America's in the next decade or so, which will mark the first time in over a century that the United States won't have the world's largest economy. China still lags behind the United States on many other indicators of power, so it's far too soon to talk about a fundamental transfer of power from Washington to Beijing. Nonetheless, its steady rise and obviously growing assertiveness are making plenty of people wonder about how the United States should respond.

So let me simplify this issue for you. Boiled down to its essentials, the biggest question facing U.S. leaders over the next decade or so is whether America's global position will be enhanced more by successful foreign-policy initiatives, or by successful policy responses here at home. In other words, will America's long-term security and prosperity be enhanced most by various foreign and defense policy maneuvers, and especially by successful efforts to deal with potentially dangerous situations in various parts of the world? Alternatively, we will be more secure and more prosperous if we do less abroad and use the time and resources to get our house in order here in the United States instead? This is obviously not a simple either/or situation, but the key question is what priority one decides to place on each policy domain.

Those who favor the first position -- i.e., who think our security/prosperity depends mostly on the role we play globally -- tend to think that the United States faces many threats and that our forward presence in various parts of the world is essential for stability in key regions and indispensable for keeping lots of bad guys at bay. If we aren't fighting them in Kandahar, flying drones in Pakistan, helping rebel forces in Libya, providing aid and advice in Colombia, so the argument runs, we'll face rising dangers closer to home. Or sometimes they argue that the United States has a moral responsibility to use its power on behalf of others. This view is most evident among die-hard neoconservatives, but plenty of liberal internationalists still see the United States as the "indispensable nation" that has to shoulder the main burden whenever serious problems arise almost anywhere.

By contrast, people who incline to the second view think that the U.S. foreign-policy establishment has a built-in tendency to overstate threats and a real problem setting clear priorities. They see the United States as remarkably secure and insulated from most problems by two enormous oceans, by a formidable nuclear deterrent, and by strong conventional forces that can tip the balance in key regions like the Persian Gulf. In this view, a lot of what we've been doing lately isn't making Americans richer or more secure, and certainly isn't worth the cost. They question whether spending $100 billion a year on Afghanistan makes a substantial contribution to American security and believe that sort of money could be better spent on productivity-enhancing projects here at home. When they read that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is about to lay off 4,000-plus teachers in order to close a budget deficit, they see it as one of the many independent policy decisions whose cumulative effect will be to leave America dumber and therefore weaker in the years ahead.

The second group recognizes that America does have a global role to play, but believes that in the end our power and influence depends far more on having a healthy, highly educated, politically loyal, and energetic society here at home than it does on shaping political outcomes in far-flung corners of the world. And the second group tends to think that we'd be a lot more popular in some parts if we weren't constantly trying to tell others how to live (and blowing things up in order to persuade them).

I've been sketching a pretty crude picture, of course, and the proper answer lies somewhere between these two stark alternatives. But as readers of this blog know, in the present era I think it is pretty clear that it is the home front needs the most attention. We do need an active foreign policy, but the emphasis has to be on setting clear priorities, liquidating commitments that are not vital (and may even be counterproductive), and making it clear to others that the United States is not a philanthropic organization with an infinite bank account and endless tolerance for feckless, fickle, or uncooperative allies. (Pakistan heads that list this week, but it is hardly alone). And at the same time, we need to address the eroding infrastructure, failing schools, world-record incarceration rates, elite corruption, and rising economic inequality from which the United States now suffers, all of which pose a far greater long-term threat to our security and prosperity than groups like the Taliban or al Qaeda do.

But here's the problem. Presidents and their advisors have lots of latitude in foreign policy, and we still have a big defense establishment that gives them lots of options for meddling. Heck, the president can decide it's a good idea to overthrow the government of Libya and get busy doing it, without asking anyone's permission or facing significant political opposition. But given the decentralized nature of the U.S. government, the pervasive influence of special interest lobbies, and the present state of political polarization, trying to implement major domestic reforms is like trying to drag a shipping container through quicksand with a bicycle. So it's no wonder that this administration (like its predecessors) finds it tempting to focus on foreign policy. It ain't easy, but it's a lot more fun than trying to fix what's broken back home.

Closing teaser: Some folks in the DoD seem to have reached similar conclusions to the ones I've expressed here, and a paper by two military officers (writing collectively as "Mr. Y") has been receiving some fawning attention in the press lately. Although I'm sympathetic to some of their ideas, the paper itself is a disappointment. I'll lay out my reasons in a subsequent post.

To what extent should journalists (and perhaps scholars) allow their sense of patriotism to shape what they publish? And more broadly, how should those concerns shape their  interactions with government officials? Debate on this issue has been rekindled recently in the case of Raymond Davis, the CIA employee who is now under arrest in Pakistan after an incident where he shot and killed two Pakistani assailants.  

For competing perspectives on this incident, see Jack Goldsmith here and Glenn Greenwald here.  Both writers make useful points and I recommend the whole exchange, but one passage in Goldsmith's post leapt out at me:

For a book I am writing, I interviewed a dozen or so senior American national security journalists to get a sense of when and why they do or don't publish national security secrets.  They gave me different answers, but they all agreed that they tried to avoid publishing information that harms U.S. national security with no corresponding public benefit.  Some of them expressly ascribed this attitude to "patriotism" or "jingoism" or to being American citizens or working for American publications.  This sense of attachment to country is what leads the American press to worry about the implications for U.S. national security of publication, to seek the government's input, to weigh these implications in the balance, and sometimes to self-censor."

Nationalism and patriotism being what they are, I don't expect reporters and commentators (or academics, for that matter) to be able to completely disassociate their personal attachments from what they think or write. But when they do let those biases in -- and especially when they do so explicitly -- then the rest of us are entitled to question their judgment on those matters. More generally, here's what disturbs me about the idea that national security journalists consciously adjust what they say in response to their patriotic feelings.

First, it is a common error to equate "patriotism" or "love of country" with deference to or support for the policies of the government. In fact, the main justification for a free press in a democracy rests on the assumption that it will take a skeptical, even adversarial, attitude towards the government and its policies. Such skepticism is needed given the information advantages that government officials normally possess: they can classify embarrassing materials, leak secrets selectively, and curry favor with sympathetic journalists by offering them unusual levels of "access." The more you dilute the basic confrontational attitude between journalists and officials, the more the vaunted "Fourth Estate" starts to resemble a Xerox machine that just repackages facts, arguments and justifications offered by those in power.

Read on

I'm back in Singapore for the first time in nearly two years, and what a difference two years can make. Back in 2009, Singapore was reeling from the after-effects of the global recession, which hit its trade-dependent economy particularly hard.

The island nation has regrouped quickly, however, and its economy reportedly grew by an astonishing 17.9 percent in the first half of 2010. The harbor is chock-full of ships again, construction is proceeding apace, and the government expects robust growth to continue.

I don't want to go all "Asian values" on you, and comparing Singapore's economy with that of the United States is risky at best. But I've been reading a few books and articles on the endemic corruption (or if you prefer, criminality), embedded within the United States political/economic system (and watching documentaries about it too). And it made me wonder how much this feature might have to do with the varying trajectories of the two countries.

Case in point: today's Herald Tribune reports that Goldman Sachs has concluded that there's nothing really wrong with how it does business. To quote the print version (not the online edition) Goldman decided "its operations need only a fine-tuning, not a complete overhaul." Hmmmm. I don't know about you, but when a major investment bank has to get bailed out by the American taxpayer, and just paid a $550 million fine to settle civil fraud charges (not the first time Goldman has had to do something like this, by the way), one might reasonably conclude that there were more fundamental problems involved. Not from the point of view of Goldman's present profits, perhaps, but from the point of view of what is good for the society as a whole. And the problem seems to be that maximizing political influence is as much a part of Goldman's business model as the pursuit of economic gain itself.

Mind you, I'm not an economist, and I'm sure there are legions of people out there who would be quick to leap to Goldman's defense. And I'm not really picking on Goldman, because the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 suggested that the rot was far more widespread. Instead what troubles a layperson like me -- and maybe ought to worry you, too -- is that we've just lived through the most significant global recession since the 1930s but don't seem to have learned much in the process. That recession was triggered by malfeasance in mortgage and financial markets, and yet not much seems to have been done to create new arrangements that would prevent something similar from happening again. And the main reason isn't conceptual or economic but political: financial interests give a ton of money to politicians, and -- surprise, surprise -- those same politicians tend not to take actions that these donors oppose, like significantly tighter financial regulations. 

Singapore is far from a perfect society, and as I said at the outset, direct comparisons between its situation and that of the United States are somewhat dubious. But I can't help but wonder if maybe we could learn a few things about political economy from them. Like not letting private money play an enormous role in politics, and paying civil servants enough so that more of our best brains choose public service over Wall Street.  

I am traveling a lot this week -- first to D.C. and then to Toronto -- so blogging is likely to be light through Friday. Before I head off to get poked and prodded by the friendly TSA personnel at Logan, I thought I'd leave you with a hypothetical to ponder, inspired by the latest WikiLeaks releases.

Here's the question: How much difference would it really make if all these "private" diplomatic meetings were public? Suppose there was no such thing as a "private" diplomatic meeting or a back-channel discussion. I can easily imagine that world leaders wouldn't like it very much -- but how much would world politics change if all these conversations were held in public so that people could see and hear what was being said?

I don't have a firm answer on this issue, but one possibility is that this hypothetical situation would pose a much bigger problem for authoritarian leaders than it would for democratically elected ones. If an autocrat knew that their conversations would all be public, they wouldn't be able to say one thing in private and then say something else when speaking on the record. And that means that some of them might have to adopt positions that were more in accordance with their populations wishes, particularly if their hold on power was tenuous. It would all be on the record. By contrast, a democratic leader would just have to take positions that they felt would appeal to their electorate, which isn't such a terrible idea on its face.  

Of course, there's a downside here: you'd get a lot more posturing, and maybe even diplomatic rigidity, as leaders of all kinds tried to show that they were tough bargainers. And public opinion is a fickle thing, and you wouldn't want leaders to be nothing more than weather vanes mouthing whatever their latest poll told them to say. It's also likely that some diplomatic conversations would be empty and stilted, because nobody wanted to talk about anything serious in the full glare of open disclosure. But diplomatic problems still need to get solved, and a world of full disclosure might actually force leaders of all types to explain the realities behind their decisions a bit more, and educate the population when public opinion was off-base.

But my real question remains: Would it really make that much difference? Would a world of "open covenants, openly arrived at" (to use Wilson's phrase) really be that different than the world in which we live today? And aren't all those people who are now defending the importance of diplomatic confidentiality really saying that there is a lot of information that our leaders have to keep from us, or else the world will all go to hell? 

George Orwell once wrote: "In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." I thought of that line as I tried to sort through my reaction to the latest set of releases by Wikileaks, consisting primarily of detailed action reports from Iraq. My question is: Are we better off having an organization exploiting the viral potential of the internet in order to make public information that government officials would prefer to keep secret?

On the one hand, it doesn't thrill me to see individuals inside the national security bureaucracy take the classification process into their own hands and decide to leak large quantities of information. As much as I admire the courage of a whistle-blower like Daniel Ellsberg, government agencies can't operate without a certain degree of discipline and there's always the danger that someone will leak material that isn't just political embarrassing but actually contains information that might put us at greater risk. There's also the obvious concern that leaked information might expose people who have been helping us in places like Iraq or Afghanistan (although Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has acknowledged that earlier Wikileaks releases did not in fact compromises sensitive information or methods). Still, I think some secrets need to be kept, and that belief makes it hard for me to see Wikileaks' activities as an unalloyed good.

But several other considerations override these concerns, and lead me to conclude that, on balance, Wikileaks is performing a valuable service. To begin with, official outrage at Wikileaks' activities is more than a little disingenuous given the frequency that top officials leak classified information when it suits their political purposes. If former Afghan commander Stanley McChrystal can successfully tie a president's hands by leaking a confidential report calling for more troops, then why shouldn't others use Wikileaks to share information that they believe the public ought to know? And as long as senior officials try to advance their political agendas by sharing inside information with sympathetic journalists in off-the-record "background" briefings, it is hard for me to feel outrage when their subordinates decide that the information to which they are privy deserves a wider audience.

Furthermore, we live in an age of "universal deceit," when it is hard to trust anything someone in the national security world tells you. From the very moment that the Iraq War was conceived, for example, top U.S. officials deployed a vast array of disinformation and deceit -- supposedly based on top-secret intelligence information -- to convince the American public that Saddam Hussein posed a mortal threat to U.S. national security. Nor were they the first leaders to lie to the American public. And the lies continued well in to the war, as former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Ellen Knickmayer makes clear here. (H/T to Glenn Greenwald, whose own posts on this topic are well worth reading).

As Eric Alterman and John Mearsheimer have both documented, it is clear from the historical record that all governments lie for a wide variety of reasons. But unless you're willing to believe that the people in charge are always right and that their lies are therefore justified (and if you think that, you haven't been paying attention), you ought to be in favor of any mechanism that brought more facts to light.

It is also increasingly clear that the U.S. taxpayer is funding a vast array of clandestine activities of which they are only dimly aware, and whose value they have been asked to take almost entirely on faith. If some of these activities are misguided, then not only will we get stuck with the bill, but we are paying for activities that could be making us less secure.

Furthermore, if we have no idea what our government (or that growing army of private contractors) are really up to, then Americans won't understand why other countries may not like us very much. If we don't know about all the bad stuff we're doing, we'll think they hate us for "what we are" instead of "what we do." As I've noted before, Arab or Muslim hostility to the United States really shouldn't be a mystery, given the policies that the United States has adopted towards many of these societies over the past several decades. Do you really expect Iraqis to be grateful that the U.S. invaded their country and set off a civil war in which hundreds of thousands died and millions became refugees?

The Founding Fathers thought that separation of powers and an independent press would ensure accountability, and but it's not as if Congress were performing rigorous oversight over all these activities, engaging in spirited debates over the merits of military intervention, or forcing either this administration or the last one to justify what it is doing overseas. The mainstream media hasn't exactly covered itself with glory over the past decade either, despite some isolated bright spots that subsequently disappeared down the memory hole. And lord knows that few, if any, of the architects of our recent foreign-policy debacles have been held accountable in any meaningful way.

Realist that I am, I believe that human beings are more likely to misbehave if they think they can shield what they are doing from public view. For that reason, I also believe that democratic societies are more likely to adopt better policies when information is plentiful and when government officials cannot determine which facts are available to the public and which are not. Because its primary function is to make more information available on issues that concern us all, I therefore conclude that what Wikileaks is doing is on balance a good thing.

Given the great power at the United States' disposal, I want the people running foreign and defense policy to know that what they are doing might be exposed to public scrutiny. I want them to think twice about whether the policies they are pursuing are defensible on either moral or practical grounds. I wish we'd known the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, or that we'd known the truth about Saddam's WMD (and his non-existent links to al Qaeda) before we invaded. And I'm glad we're finding out more about the Iraq War now, because that knowledge might help us avoid similar quagmires in the future. And if our elected officials, their appointed representatives, and a politicized and co-opted media won't tell us what we have a right to know, then I guess I'm glad that Wikileaks will.

Postscript: Contrary to FP colleague Peter Feaver's view, I don't think the documents offer that much help to defenders of the so-called "surge." No one denies that violence went down after the surge began, and those who discount the impact of the surge concede that the additional troops and new tactics played some role in that development. The new releases also confirm that changes within Iraqi society were also critical; i.e., violence also declined because Iraqis were war-weary and because prior ethnic cleansing had eliminated the mixed-sectarian neighborhoods where much of the prior violence had occurred.

The new releases also confirm that Iran was meddling in Iraq and backing some of the insurgents. This is not news, of course, and Iran's behavior was hardly surprising, given its obvious interest in trying to influence the shape of post-Saddam Iraq. Moreover, the U.S. is hardly in a position to accuse anyone of "interfering" in Iraq, given what we started in 2003. But this not-very-stunning "revelation" doesn't mean the surge was a success, because it didn't end Iranian influence in Iraq any more than it led to political reconciliation among the various Iraqi factions (who still can't manage to form a government). Once the United States had dismantled Saddam's Ba'thist and predominantly Sunni regime, Iraq's Shi'ites were bound to be more powerful and Iran's influence was bound to increase. (Too bad the Bush administration didn't think about that possibility before the war!) The surge didn't reverse that trend, and so the new revelations don't demonstrate that it was anything more than a tactical success whose long-term achievements remain very much in doubt.

Q. How can you tell when William Kristol is giving bad policy advice?

A. His lips are moving. Or he's typing. Or he's writing an open letter for a bunch of hawks to sign. Or launching some new letterhead organization.

I refer, of course, to Kristol's recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (co-authored with the presidents of the  the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute). The basic theme is that the world is very, very dangerous, and so the United States should not cut a nickel from its defense budget, even though we already spend more than the rest of the world combined, have most of the world's major powers on our side, and possess a robust nuclear deterrent. So even though the country is also facing massive budget deficits, at least partly due to policies that Kristol has previously promoted, we need to build a wall around the defense budget and make sure it doesn't get shrunk. At all.

Seriously, given Kristol's track record over the past decade, you'd think that people who were hoping to be taken seriously in Washington would shy away from any association with his policy ideas. But to think that, you'd also have to believe that there was some degree of accountability in American political discourse, which is of course not the case. So despite the various disasters that Kristol and his associates have helped cause over the years, they are back with another well-orchestrated campaign to convince the country to do something foolish.

This latest proposal (part of a new "Defending Defense" initiative) has already attracted ample fire from a diverse array of experts and pundits, including FP's Dan Drezner here. I see no need to pile on these various critiques, each of which makes good points. Instead, I want to focus on something that the critics have largely ignored; namely, how difficult it is going to be to make substantial cuts in defense spending, even in period of budgetary stringency, without simultaneously rethinking America's overall grand strategy.

To start with, any serious attempt to cut defense spending would face opposition from Congressional representatives who want to keep defense contractors busy and military bases open in their states or districts. Thus, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' proposed that DoD save some bucks by closing the Joint Forces Command, the suggestion drew howls of protest from Virginia's entire Congressional delegation. Was this because a separate Joint Forces Command was so essential to our national security? Of course not. It was because its headquarters was located in Virginia. When you consider how carefully the Pentagon scatters bases or sprinkles defense dollars in every Congressional district, you can see how hard it is going to be to make a significant dent in our current defense expenditures. And you certainly better not try to do so by trimming veterans' benefits.

Second, as I've noted before, defense spending (and an activist foreign policy) are proudly defended by most prominent DC think tanks, many of whom depend on military contractors for a substantial part of their funding. This has been true of AEI and Heritage for a long time, but take a look at the funding sources for supposedly more "progressive" think tanks like the Center for New American Security. Inside the Beltway, defenders of a large defense budget are bound to be more numerous and better-funded than critics, thereby ensuring a chorus of "expert" opinion defending the budgetary status quo (or at the most, disagreeing at the margins).

Third, national security wannabes (i.e., civilians who aspire to careers in the national security establishment) have learned that critics of excessive defense spending aren't taken as seriously in Washington and have a tougher time landing big foreign policy jobs. To be blunt, there isn't that much daylight between hardcore neocons and energetic liberal interventionists, especially when it comes to preserving U.S. military preponderance or using that power against anyone we've taken a dislike to. So even though a lot of national security jobs are likely to open up in the next year or so (as Obama's initial appointees cycle out) you shouldn't expect to see advocates of a more restrained U.S. foreign policy replacing the current group. Sadly, most of the bloggers who've been eviscerating the Kristol et al position are not in line for big jobs in DC.

Fourth, cutting defense spending is going to be hard as long as we are still fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, maintaining a globe-encircling array of military commitments, and letting most of our allies free-ride on our protection. As Drezner notes, Kristol and Co. vastly overstate the actual level of threat we face. But although U.S. forces are smaller than they were during the Cold War, we are still trying to patrol the same amount of real estate and the social engineering we've been trying to do in places like Afghanistan is very expensive, especially when compared to the strategic benefits it brings. Plus, we've burned up a lot of equipment over the past decade, and some serious money will have to be spent to re-equip U.S. forces once those wars are (finally) over.   

Which brings me to my main point. Although it is mind-boggling to realize that five percent of the world's population (the United States) now spends more on defense than the other 95 percent put together, this situation is hard to avoid when you see threats emerging virtually everywhere and when you think all of them are best met by an ambitious and highly interventionst foreign policy. If Americans want to be able to go anywhere and do anything, then they are going to have keep spending lots of money, even if all that activity merely reinforces anti-American extremism and makes more people want to come after us. (And for more on that latter point, read this book).

If you want to cut defense spending significantly, in short, you have to make some non-trivial adjustments in U.S. grand strategy. As some of you know, I think the United States would be both more prosperous and safer if we had a more restrained grand strategy and a more intelligent foreign policy. Until that happens, however, reducing defense spending itself is going to be an uphill fight, and our defense expenditures will be closer to the views of Kristol et al than to mine. Unfortunately.

I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with a group of Harvard colleagues (and a visiting speaker), and we got into an interesting discussion about America's future as a world power. Nobody at the table questioned whether the United States was going to remain a very powerful and influential state for many years/decades to come. Instead, the main issues were whether it would retain its current position of primacy, whether China might one day supplant it as the dominant global power, and whether U.S. standards of living would be significantly compromised in the future.

One participant (a distinguished economist), was especially bullish. He argued that the United States enjoyed a considerable demographic advantage over Europe, Russia, and Japan, largely due a higher birth rate and greater openness to immigration. These societies will be shrinking and getting much older on average, while the United States will continue to grow for some time to come. He also argued that the United States remained far more entrepreneurial than most other societies, and a better incubator of technological innovation. Despite our current difficulties, therefore, he was optimistic about the longer-term prospects for the U.S. economy and for America's position as a global power.

But then came the crucial caveat. After reciting this long list of American advantages, my colleague remarked: "of course, our political system could screw it all up." And everyone around the table nodded in agreement.

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