If you want to see just how ill informed and morally bankrupt an "establishment" political voice can be, check out David Broder's op-ed column in this Sunday's Washington Post. Broder argues that President Obama's prospects will remain bleak if the economy doesn't improve, and that the President cannot count on the business cycle to do that for him. So after reminding his readers that World War II helped end the Great Depression, Broder offers Obama the following advice:

With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history."

I haven't read such an ill informed and morally bankrupt piece of "analysis" in quite some time (which is saying something). For starters, on what basis does Broder believe that "Iran is the greatest threat to the world?" The United States spends over $700 billion on defense each year; Iran spends a mere $10 billion. That amount is less than Greece, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, or Taiwan. As I've noted previously, Iran has no meaningful power-projection capabilities, and its main "weapon" is the ability to modest amounts of money and arms to groups like Hezbollah. This behavior is clearly a problem, but Iran is not an existential threat to anyone. And if Iran were to get a few nuclear weapons at some point in the future -- which is by no means a certainty -- it could neither use them nor give them to terrorists without inviting devastating U.S. or Israeli retaliation.

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Here's something that probably won't shock you: I tend to agree with Paul Krugman more than I disagree with him. But not always. Case in point is his column last Sunday, which condemned China's hardline response to Japan's seizure of a Chinese trawler that had violated Japanese waters, and especially its decision to pressure Japan by cutting off the export of rare earth materials. He went on to criticize some other Chinese actions (including its chronically devalued currency), and said this added up to a picture of China as a "rogue economic superpower, unwilling to play by the rules."

I agree that China's overheated response to the trawler incident was foolish, if only because it will reinforce Asian concerns about China's rising power and make it more likely that other states will start taking concerted action to resist its influence. It's normal for great powers to throw their weight around -- if you don't believe me, just read a good history of U.S. relations with Latin America -- but doing so before one's power position is fully consolidated is a bad idea.

By the way, with the exception of the War of 1812, avoiding stupid quarrels with powerful countries was one of the smartest things that the United States did in its rise to superpower status. Not only did it avoid tangling with other major powers until after it had created the world's largest and most advanced economy, it also let the Eurasian powers bloody each other in ruinous wars, jumping in only when the balance of power was in jeopardy and leaving itself in a dominant position after both world wars (and especially WWII). This wasn't a perfect strategy, or even a noble one, but it was supremely self-interested approach that ensured U.S. primacy for decades.

If China's leaders are really smart, they'd act in a similar fashion today. They'd let the United States run itself to exhaustion in the Middle East, Central Asia, and elsewhere, while they stayed out of trouble, cultivated profitable relations with everyone, and made sure that their long-term development plans didn't get derailed. Picking fights with neighbors over minor issues is pointless, especially now, and on this point Krugman and I are in synch.

Where I part company is his characterization of China as a "rogue economic power," and his conclusion that "China's response to the trawler incident is… further evidence that the world's newest economic superpower isn't prepared to assume the responsibilities that go with that status."

For starters, this view assumes that China (or any other great power) has "responsibilities" to the global community. U.S. leaders like to proclaim that we have enormous "responsibilities" and "obligations" to the rest of the world, but this is usually just a phrase our leaders use to justify actions taken for our own (supposed) benefit. The leaders of any country are primarily responsible to their own citizens, which is why international cooperation is often elusive and why conflicts of interest routinely arise between sovereign states.

Moreover, the declaration that China is a rogue power that isn't "playing by the rules" neglects to mention that 1) many of these rules were devised by the United States and its allies and not by China, and 2) the United States has been all too willing to ignore the rules when it suited us. We went to war against Serbia in 1999 and against Iraq in 2003 without authorization from the U.N. Security Council, for example, even though we helped write the U.N. Charter that says such actions are illegal. Similarly, the US played the leading role in devising the Bretton Woods economic system after World War II, but it abandoned the gold standard in 1971 when this arrangement was no longer convenient for us.

The real lesson of the trawler/rare earth incident is that great powers can ignore the rules when they think they have to, and they can often get away with it. We should therefore expect China's leaders to pursue whatever policies they believe are in their interests, whether or not those policies are good for us, good for the planet as a whole, or consistent with some prior set of norms or rules.

Here's a penetrating leap into the obvious: sometimes China's interests will converge with ours; at other times, they will diverge sharply. Sometimes China's leaders will calculate their interests carefully and adopt smart policies for achieving them; at other times they will make costly blunders. Ditto their counterparts in Washington: sometimes U.S. leaders will act with insight and foresight and sometimes they will stumble headlong into disaster. Welcome to the real world. The bottom line is that it's neither illuminating nor helpful to hold China to a standard of "responsible" behavior that we fall short of ourselves. I mean, which country is currently detaining foreigners without trial in Guantanamo, and firing drone missiles into any country where it thinks al Qaeda might be lurking?

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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I've been thinking about U.S. grand strategy again, and pondering some big questions that ought to be central to the debate on America's global role. Some of these big questions are researchable, others are by their very nature more speculative. How you answer some of them also depends on the theories you think are most powerful or applicable (i.e., realist theory suggests one set of answers, liberal approaches offer a different set, etc.), and the answers your get should have profound implications for what you think U.S. grand strategy ought to be.

So here are Five Big Questions about contemporary world politics.

1. Where is the EU project headed? The construction of the European Union was a major innovation in global politics, but new doubts have arisen about its long-term future. Pessimists such as Notre Dame's Sebastian Rosato believe the highwater mark of European unity has already been passed, while optimists like Princeton's Andrew Moravcsik think that Europe's current difficulties are likely to encourage further steps towards integration. The answer matters, because the re-emergence of genuine power politics within Europe could force the United States to devote more attention to a continent that some argue is "primed for peace" and no longer of much strategic concern.

2. If China's power continues to rise, how easy will it be to get Asian states to balance against it? Balance of power (or if you prefer, balance of threat) theory predicts that weaker states will try to limit the influence of rising powers by forming defensive alliances against them. China's rise is already provoking alarm in many of its neighbors, who look first to the United States and possibly to each other for assistance. But how strong will this tendency to balance be? If China gets really powerful, and the United States disengages entirely, some of China's neighbors might be tempted to bandwagon with Beijing, thereby facilitating the emergence of a Chinese "sphere of influence" in Asia. But if China's neighbors get support from each other and from the United States, then they'll probably prefer to balance. 

But here's the question: Just how much support does the United States have to provide, given that this issue ought to matter more to the Asian states than it does to us? If you think balancing is the dominant tendency (as I do), then the United States can pass a lot of the burden to Japan, India, Vietnam, etc. It can "free-ride" to some degree on them, instead of the other way around. But if you think these states will be reluctant to balance, then the United States might have to do a lot of the heavy lifting itself.  

To make matters more complicated still, both the United States and its Asian allies may be tempted to do some bluffing with each other, to try to get their allies to pay a larger share of the burden. Asian states will quietly threaten to realign or go neutral if they don't get more backing from the United States, and U.S. leaders may drop hints about disengagement if they don't get what they want from the allies they are helping protect. And this means figuring out just how large and iron-clad the U.S. commitment needs to be in order to sustain a future balancing coalition is a tricky business, and there will be lots of room for disagreement.

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Color me skeptical. The past few weeks have seen a spate of news suggesting that the US/NATO effort in Afghanistan isn't going well at all. For starters, the assault on Marjah last spring failed to achieve any decisive strategic goals. The much-heralded summer offensive in Kandahar has been delayed and downgraded, and U.S. officials have been steadily lowering expectations. We learnt over the weekend that U.S. intelligence is increasingly focused on uncovering corruption, which means we are getting sucked back into "nation-building" instead of focusing our assets on destroying al Qaeda (which is what President Obama said he'd do when he (foolishly) decided to increase the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan. The Taliban managed to bomb Afghan President Hamid Karzai's semi-bogus "peace jirga," and Karzai himself is said to be losing faith in our ability to prevail and hoping to cut a deal with the Taliban.

So today -- surprise, surprise -- comes news that Afghanistan isn't a poor country whose primary strategic asset is its ability to grow opium poppies. Nope, turns out Afghanistan is just brimming with iron ore, lithium, cobalt, copper, and other strategic minerals. This report -- which comes from "a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists" may well be completely correct, but isn't the timing of the release a mite suspicious? This looks to me like an attempt to provide a convincing strategic rationale for an effort that isn't going well.  

As Jack Snyder noted in his book Myths of Empire, the "El Dorado" myth is a common justification for imperial expansion. Great powers often convince themselves they have to control some far-flung area because it is supposedly rich with gold, diamonds, oil, etc., and that physical control is essentially to preserving access to them. In most cases, however, the cost of trying to control these areas isn't worth the resources they contain, and it usually isn't necessary anyway. Gulf Oil used to pump oil from Marxist Angola, and those pesky Iranians would be happy to sell us oil and gas and give us fat development contracts for their petroleum industry if only we were willing to do business with them. 

We don't need to control Afghanistan in order to gain access to whatever minerals do exist, because whoever is in charge is going to have to sell them to someone and won't be able to prevent them from being sold to us (even if indirectly) if we want to buy (that's how markets work). And if we want to make sure that U.S. companies have the opportunity to compete for the opportunity to mine these resources some day, it might be a good idea if we didn't spend the next decade blundering around and angering the local population.

For the past 500 years or so, world politics has mostly been driven by the actions and priorities of the transatlantic powers (aka "the West"). This era began with the development of European colonial empires, which eventually carved up most of the globe, spread ideas like Christianity, nationalism and democracy, and created many of the state boundaries that still exist today. (They also screwed a lot of things up in the process). Although other actors (e.g., Japan) played significant roles too, especially after 1945, the transatlantic community (broadly defined) had been the most important set of players for centuries.

Europe's decline after World War II was immediately followed the era of American liberal internationalism. With NATO and Japan as junior partners, the United States underwrote a variety of global institutions (mostly of its own making), maintained a vast array of military bases, waged and won a Cold War, and sought-with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success-to spread core "Western" values and institutions to different parts of the world.

I don't want to go all Spenglerian on you (or even Kennedy-esque) -- but I'm beginning to think this era is essentially over, and that we are on the cusp of a major shift in the landscape of world power. Asia's share of world GDP already exceeds that of the United States or Europe, and a recent IMF study suggests it will be greater than the United States and Europe combined by 2030. Europe has already become a rather hollow military power, and the current economic crisis is going to force European states-and especially the United Kingdom -- to cut those capabilities even more. Needless to say, hopes that the euro might one day supplant the dollar look rather hollow today. Politics within many European countries is likely to get nasty as austerity kicks in, and there will inevitably be less money and less support for Europe's various philanthropic projects in Africa, Central Asia, or the Middle East. Such activities won't disappear entirely, but it's hard to see how they can continue at anywhere near their current levels.

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I'm in Athens at the moment, attending an Economist conference on "What is Shaping the Global Agenda?" My task, in case you're curious, was to offer an American perspective on the global foreign policy agenda, in fifteen minutes or less. I focused on four issues: climate change, the changing balance of power, Israel-Palestine, and global nuclear security. I may not have offered many bold new insights, but at least I didn't exceed the time limit. And if you want to know the basic line I took, read this.

Not surprisingly, the big topic in most of the conversations (and many of the sessions) is the Greek financial crisis and its broader implications. There's been a pretty clear consensus from the people here that I've talked with (most of them from the business community): 1) yes, there will be a bailout, 2) it will probably work; 3) Greece's situation is mostly of its own doing (poor investment choices, ineffective tax system, padded public budgets, fatal combination of persistent deficits and falling competitiveness, etc.) and 4) the whole mess raises big questions about the EU.

I am hardly an expert on financial markets (though like a lot of other Americans, I've gotten more interested in them since 2008!) so I have no great wisdom to impart on the origins of Greece's troubles or the specific nature of the rescue package that is now being assembled.  But it seems to me that this crisis is a serious body blow to the European Union itself. The EU can point to plenty of successes over the years, but the combination of continued expansion and the creation of a common currency back in 1995 now looks like an exercise in hubris. 

The central problem, as plenty of people pointed out, is that EU didn't create the right institutional machinery when it created a unified currency. Once states give up their own currencies, they can't deal with financial or fiscal crises by devaluation. With that flexibility lost, the EU needed far more centralized economic authority (e.g., a true European central bank and a centralized European tax system) to make things work properly. As one banker told me here, it would be no problem if Europe were really one country and Greece was just a poorer province. But Europe's member states refuse to give up those powers, and so the stability of the euro rested on the naive assumption that all the member states would follow the rules and stay within certain fiscal targets.  This was like assuming that it would never rain, or that at least everyone would always be carrying their own umbrella. Or as one European academic recently put it: European monetary union was "not ready for bad weather."

Indeed, as Steven Erlanger points out here, it's been a pretty tough couple of years for the EU. It didn't cover itself with glory in response to the 2008 recession, and the EU had no mechanism for dealing the volcanic eruption in Iceland that snarled air traffic all over Europe. Instead, what we got was a confused array of poorly-coordinated national policies.  And then Greece had to turn to the IMF rather than its European partners to arrange a proper restructuring program.

Among other things, these events cast further doubt on the possibility that Europe will ever speak with one voice on foreign policy. By creating a president of the European Council and a High Representative for the Union of Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 was supposed to be a step in that direction. In reality, however, foreign policy (including economic policy) remains primarily the prerogative of national leaders, with all the potential for division and delay that this implies.

There are in theory two ways that the EU could go in response to these events. One possibility is that these recent failures will eventually prompt a further expansion of all-European institutions.  This view is the modern version of old-style functionalism: if Europe needs certain institutions to work properly, it will eventually create them. 

The second possibility-which I'd deem more likely -- is that we have in fact seen the high-water mark of the EU project.  Nationalism is still alive and well in Europe, the Cold War is over and there is thus less need for unity against an external threat, Germany is gradually shedding its post-World War II reticence, and the consequences of over-expansion and excessive ambition have been fully exposed. I'm not saying the Union is headed for the dust-heap of history or anything like that (no bureaucracy goes out of business that quickly, especially when there are thousands of pages of laws involved), but a significant consolidation of power in the near future seems most unlikely.

Given that the EU Union has been one of the more interesting political experiments in recent decades, this is going to be fascinating to watch. Time for IR theorists to place their bets?

The New York Times and other news agencies are now reporting that China is preparing to get behind the U.S.-led effort to toughen economic sanctions on Iran. The Times's headline (in the print version) reads "China Supports Iran Sanctions," but the actual story tells a rather different tale. It says that President Hu Jintao agreed yesterday to "join negotiations" for a new sanctions package, but reminds readers that China has a well-established pattern of using negotiations to delay and deflect stiffer measures. In particular, the article reports that former President George W. Bush tried three times to "corral Chinese support " for tougher penalties on Iran, only to have China use its participation to "water down" the resulting resolutions.

This pattern should not surprise us, because China has every reason to drag its feet on meaningful economic sanctions. To begin with, China wants to safeguard its access to Iranian oil and gas and protect its ability to invest in Iran. Iran is now China's second largest source of oil and gas (providing about 15 percen of its consumption), and China is Iran's second largest customer. China has also become a substantial investor in Iran's economy. With demand for oil likely to grow in the future, this is not a relationship Beijing is likely to jeopardize.

Second, China is sanguine about the prospects of an Iranian bomb because it has a more realistic view of what that development would mean. China's leaders know that they didn't gain a lot of geopolitical clout when they tested their own nuclear weapon in 1964, and being a nuclear power didn't enable them to dictate or blackmail Taiwan, Vietnam, the Koreas, or anyone else. China's rise to great power status was driven by its economic development, not its modest nuclear arsenal, and Bejing knows that same would be true for a nuclear Iran. While China would probably prefer that Iran not develop nuclear weapons, it hasn't succumbed to worst-case paranoia and isn't willing to pay a large price to prevent that from happening.

Furthermore, keeping the U.S.-Iranian pot simmering (but not boiling) is in Bejing's long-term interest. America's ham-handed involvement in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia has been a tremendous strategic boon for Beijing, and they undoubtedly feel a profound schadenfreude as they watch the Uncle Sam expend trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan while simultaneously maintaining an icy confrontation with Iran. After all, the more time, money, attention and political capital we devote to Iran, the less we can focus on China's long-term efforts to build influence in Asia and eventually supplant the U.S. role there. Plus, bad relations between Washington and Teheran creates diplomatic and investment opportunities for China. The last thing Bejing wants is a prompt resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue, because it might pave the way for a more substantial détente between Washington and Teheran, thereby diminishing Beijing's value and allowing U.S. strategists to shift their attention elsewhere.

At the same time, China doesn't want a war to break out in the Gulf, which could send oil prices soaring (at least temporarily), put the world economy back in recession, and lead to other unpredictable consequences. So it would like the United States and its allies to keep confronting Iran via economic sanctions, but slowly, so that the dispute with Iran never goes away and the use of force stays off the table.

For China, therefore, the optimal strategy is to drag its heels and play for time. This approach means never quite refusing to go along with stiffer sanctions but never saying "yes" either. They'll probably agree to some additional penalties eventually (maybe after a desperate United States agrees to guarantee China's oil supplies against an Iranian cutoff!), but they won't back anything severe enough to convince Iran to forego nuclear enrichment altogether. The dispute will continue, U.S. leaders will devote lots of time and attention to it, and China's long-term interests will be advanced. 

That, ladies and gentlemen, is Realism 101. Too bad that Washington seems to have forgotten how to play it.

Yesterday our distinguished and highly principled House of Representatives passed HR 2194, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA). The new measure is the brainchild of Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), and best one can say for it is that it is a foolish bit of political posturing.  As Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now and Matt Duss at the Center for American Progress make clear, this act will do virtually nothing to change the Iranian government’s behavior or weaken the political grip of the clerics and Revolutionary Guards. (See also Gal Luft and Alireza Nader's 's FP pieces here and here.) Instead, it will undoubtedly cause a lot of suffering among ordinary Iranians and reinforce the widespread perception that Uncle Sam is indifferent to the sufferings of others. It will also complicate U.S. efforts to get stronger multilateral sanctions on Iran, and is therefore counterproductive to any broader effort to address Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And you may rest assured that when this new set of sanctions fails, hardliners will  argue that "we've tried everything," and that we must therefore rely on other options (i.e., preventive war).

It's not like Congress was unaware of some of these counter-arguments -- for example, all four witnesses at a Tuesday hearing before the House National Security and Foreign Affairs subcommittee said they would vote against the legislation if given the option--but these expressions of sanity could not stop the stampede to folly. AIPAC endorsed the legislation (duh!), but so did J Street, the self-advertised "pro-peace, pro-Israel" lobby that appears to be trimming its sails more and more with each passing month.  Needless to say, the act passed overwhelmingly (412-12, with four others voting "present"). No wonder Mark Twain once complained that Congress contains "the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes." With maybe sixteen exceptions.

I was struck by Louis Uchitelle's article in the Sunday NY Times on the dearth of big public works projects here in the United States. "For the first time in memory, the nation has no outsize public works project under way," he says, and then reports that:

Some economists argue that the continual construction of new megaprojects adds a quarter of a percentage point or more, on average, to the gross domestic product over the long term. Again, cause and effect aren't clear, but the strongest periods of economic growth in America have generally coincided with big outlays for new public works and the transformations they bring once completed."

One might add that we aren't spending enough to maintain our existing public infrastructure, and state and local governments across the country are facing deep budget deficits (and in some cases, a very real risk of bankruptcy).

But it's not as though the United States hasn't started some big public works projects over the past decade or so; it just hasn't been doing them here at home. We've spent billions constructing military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, and another billion or more on a giant embassy in Baghdad and another one in Pakistan. Needless to say, those "public works" projects are a drain on the U.S. economy rather than a source of additional productivity.

As I've said before, Americans have come to believe that spending government revenues on U.S. citizens here at home is usually a bad thing and should be viewed with suspicion, but spending billions on vast social engineering projects overseas is the hallmark of patriotism and should never be questioned. This position makes no sense, but it is hard to think of a prominent U.S. leader who is making an explicit case for doing somewhat less abroad so that we can afford to build a better future here at home. Debates about foreign policy, grand strategy, and military engagement -- including the current debate over Obama's decision to add another 30,000-plus troops in Afghanistan -- tend to occur in isolation from a discussion of other priorities, as if there were no tradeoffs between what we do for others and what we are able to do for Americans here at home.

And no, I'm not suggesting a return to isolationism, a retreat to "Fortress America" or any of the other labels that hawks use to try to discredit those who want a more restrained foreign policy. Rather, I'm suggesting that national security spending should not be considered sacrosanct and that a nation's leaders can hurt the country just as easily by under-investing at home as by neglecting its defenses. And given that we currently spend more on national security than the rest of the world put together, have several thousand nuclear weapons, face no great power rivals, and don't have any serious enemies nearby, it's kind of hard to argue that we're "neglecting" our defenses. We are using them unwisely (see under: Iraq, Afghanistan) and Obama is about to make his own contribution to this bipartisan blunder, but we're not exactly scrimping.

Darren McCollester/Newsmakers

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

Riffing on Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan nails it:

Late empires are known for several things: a self-obsessed, self-serving governing class, small over-reaching wars that bankrupt the Treasury, debt that balloons until retreat from global power becomes not a choice but a necessity, and a polity unable to address reasonably any of these questions -- or how the increasing corruption of the media enables them all.

Obama is, in some ways, a test-case.

He was elected on a clear platform of reform and change; and yet the only real achievement Washington has allowed him so far is a massive stimulus package to prevent a Second Great Depression (and even on that emergency measure, no Republicans would support him). On that he succeeded. But that wasn't reform; it was a crash landing after one of the worst administrations in America's history.

Real reform -- tackling health care costs and access, finding a way to head off massive changes in the world's climate, ending torture as the lynchpin of the war on terror, getting out of Iraq, preventing an Israeli-led Third World War in the Middle East, and reforming entitlements and defense spending to prevent 21st century America from becoming 17th Century Spain: these are being resisted by those who have power and do not want to relinquish it -- except to their own families and cronies.

Nepotism is part of the problem; media corruption is also part; the total uselessness of the Democratic party and the nihilism of the Republicans doesn't help. But something is rotten in America at this moment in time; and those of us who supported Obama to try and change this decay and decline should use this fall to get off our butts and fight for change."

Wish I'd said that. And it makes me wonder: would Obama agree with the above (meaning he is a reluctant prisoner of well-entrenched interests), or is he is part of the problem too?

GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/Getty Images

A while back I commented on the two imbalances of power that drive American grand strategy. The first is the gap between the United States and the other major powers, which makes Americans think they are responsible for managing much of the world and convinces them that they can do so with near-impunity. The second imbalance is the strength and political clout of a host of different institutions and interest groups whose common agenda is encouraging greater international activism on the part of the United States. In recent decades, the forces in favor of "doing more" have been better-funded and better-organized than those who favor greater restraint, which is one reason why we spend so much on defense and why we find ourselves entangled in intractable conflicts on several continents.

But when I read some early reports about the Obama administration’s health care plans, I began to wonder if the various forces that favor global activism are going to face stiffer opposition in the future. We are likely to have a sluggish economy for some time to come and the U.S. population is getting older. Virtually everyone agrees that serious health care reform is badly needed but will cost a lot. Plus, Obama's various economic recovery measures are going to saddle us all with record deficit levels. Us baby boomers are not exactly noted for our altruism, and my generation is going to put a lot of pressure on politicians to deliver the entitlements we've been promised. All of this means that budget dollars are going to be very tight, and the Pentagon is going to face tougher scrutiny when it brings in gold-plated requests. The Nation and Mother Jones may not be all that formidable a political opponent, but what about the AARP?

One of the great triumphs of Reagan-era conservatism was to convince Americans that paying taxes so that the government could spend the money at home was foolish and wrong, but paying taxes so that the government could spend the money defending other people around the world was patriotic. Ever since Reagan, in short, neoconservatives supported paying taxes to promote a U.S.-dominated world order, while denouncing anyone who wanted to spend the money on roads, bridges, schools, parks, and health care for Americans as a “tax and spend liberal." But if I'm right about the emerging fiscal environment, that situation may be about to change.

TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images

Barry Eichengreen has an excellent piece on how the economics profession went astray in the years before the Great Meltdown (hat tip: Matt Yglesias). I'm not an economist, but it's more nuanced and convincing than some of the other jeremiads I've read on this subject. Money quote:

The late twentieth century was the heyday of deductive economics. Talented and facile theorists set the intellectual agenda. Their very facility enabled them to build models with virtually any implication, which meant that policy makers could pick and choose at their convenience. Theory turned out to be too malleable, in other words, to provide reliable guidance for policy.

In contrast, the twenty-first century will be the age of inductive economics, when empiricists hold sway and advice is grounded in concrete observation of markets and their inhabitants. Work in economics, including the abstract model building in which theorists engage, will be guided more powerfully by this real-world observation. It is about time."

Of course, I like this line of argument because I once wrote something similar about the imperial tendencies of rational choice theorists in the field of security studies. The point is not to eschew all formal approaches or become atheoretical, however; the point is to maintain a healthy balance between deductive theorizing (whether done with formal tools or not) and various forms of empirical testing (experimental, quantitative and qualitative/historical).