Our sins and our debts ...

... are often more than we know, or so runs an old English proverb.

Linking to a post by Fabius Maximus, I recently pointed out the heavy level of societal indebtedness in America, especially household and consumer debt. The developing economic downturn will probably be an international episode, lasting part or all of a decade, like what Japan went through in the 1990s, the so-called "Lost Decade." (The recession proper might be short, but not the subsequent stagnation.) Post-bubble, the name of the game is deleveraging, working off debt, renegotiating debt, and (in some cases) defaulting on debt. The need to undo some of this indebtedness (the dead hand of the past) will put a definite crimp in everyone's style for at least a while, now and in the future.

The so-called "credit crisis" we've just passed through isn't really a "credit" crisis so much as a "creditworthiness crisis". If you have good credit and can prove it, you can borrow, even though the terms will be tougher. What has lending markets paralyzed is distrust of borrowers in unknown financial condition. Many are fine, some are struggling, and some are bankrupt. Helping bankrupt actors (banks, businesses, individuals) continue to borrow is a big mistake; it just prolongs the crisis and sends good money after bad. We have ways of dealing with bankruptcy, including deposit insurance for bankrupt banks. The right thing to do -- and what was done in the savings and loan crisis of the early 90s -- is to let the bankrupt go bankrupt, compensate depositors, collect and sell assets, and allow the non-bankrupt to prove their creditworthiness. Once everyone's financial state, both good and bad, is clarified, lenders will start lending again.

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Friends keep asking me if (especially if Obama wins) we'll get a new New Deal. The answer is no, we won't. The New Deal did not cure the Great Depression, but undoubtedly prolonged it. The world economy is far too interconnected to allow such economic experiments today: socialism requires, among other things, a closed economy and a fairly closed society. We're moving farther and farther away from conditions that made such maneuvers possible.

It is possible that reckless politicians could launch a trade war, fueled by demagoguery about globalization and alleged "deregulation." Investor concern about this, here and elsewhere, is one of the reasons for the big drops in stock exchanges worldwide in the last month. If it starts to develop, it must be stopped dead in its tracks. It would leave the world a less secure and poorer place, impacting the poorest countries the most.

But there are reasons closer to home why we won't be seeing a new New Deal, and that is that governments are no longer in the strong position vis-a-vis their economies the way they were in the 1930s. Western governments today are among the world's biggest debtors. Given the global economic integration we have now, inflating away the debt (by printing money) is not an option, and governments cannot raise taxes much, if at all. Both options would cause investors to flee and a much more serious credit crisis. The remaining possibilities are deflation (which I think we're definitely heading into in any case, central banks being unable to stop it) and a higher probability of government debt defaults. I don't think the US federal government is in that situation, but a number of states and municipalities are.

In a sentence: governments will not be counteracting private retrenchment; they will themselves be retrenching.

Deflation will bring some good things, the most important being the undermining of "commodity dictatorships" like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. Commodity prices are sensitive barometers of demand. With demand slackening off, all such governments are and will remain in serious trouble.

Although I strongly doubt the conventional wisdom that the Democrats will gain in Congress -- given Congress' unpopularity, they're more likely to lose some seats in the House -- my recommendation is to sit back and let an Obama administration go about its wrecking work. Voters will quickly suffer a shattering disillusionment once the Candyman Messiah is discredited. The real question is whether an effective conservative movement can be rebuilt from the wreckage of the last ten years. What we're seeing now -- a Republican administration looking the other way in the face of government-enabled bad debt, effectively nationalizing banks, extending government credit far beyond anything ever conceived, and so on -- is what happens when you don't have a conservative party or effective conservative politicians.

"The death of 1989"

It's the not the return of the Cold War, not by a long shot. But the wave of democratization, market opening, and globalization that began at the end of 1970s is definitely over. It reached its peak in 1989, with the fall of the Soviet bloc, but continued until the end of the 1990s, with the fall of Milosevic in 2000. But the last eight years have seen a strong reversal of the trend, which goes to show: positive trends can draw on powerful forces, but positive outcomes are far from inevitable. They require sound policies, leadership, and persistence. They're not part of some automatic unfolding of history.*

There's no ideology or coherent political system that ties these resurgent anti-liberal countries together. They're simply autocracies that learned to adapt and avoid the fate of, say, the Soviet Union, Serbia, or Iraq. (What's happening now in Georgia is best thought of as a cousin of what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s -- except the analogue of Serbia, Russia, is winning.) The most sophisticated of these autocracies have learned to smooth-talk their way with skillful twisting of Western concepts and language. Having nuclear weapons helps. But the main common factor among all of them is state monopoly control of increasingly valuable oil and natural gas resources. Already familiar from the corrupt petro-dictatorships of the Middle East, Venezuela, and west Africa, such countries feature the "strong state, weak society" model. The government frees itself from dependency on tax revenue by seizing control of valuable natural resources sold mainly to foreigners. Most other valuable economic activity is controlled by the state as well, not motivated by socialist ideologies, but by simple cronyism and gangsterism. The rest of society and economy go into sharp decline. Russia, in many respects, is the most advanced case of these trends.

We won't be hearing talk of "World War V," I hope. But the common denominator of energy monopoly in a world of sharply rising demand for energy will, I expect, stimulate energy-consuming countries to develop a common strategy to moderate demand and look for alternatives to fossil fuels exported from the petro-dictatorships. Such a strategy is certainly overdue. We also need to step back from our casually reckless adherence to the globalization paradigm and concentrate on repair and defense of existing democracies.

And one more point: the progress and retreat of political democratization, social and economic liberalization, and globalization go hand in hand, contrary to a certain piece of fashionable claptrap now making the rounds on the left.

POSTSCRIPT: Some fine reporting, as always, from Michael Totten. Also, thoughts from Paul Berman, who has rightly declared the "death of 1989."
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* The developments of the last decade have discredited not only the naive arguments of economic determinists (prosperity leads automatically to political liberalization), but the European post-historical fantasy of "soft power." The "end of history" has, well, ended. It didn't die all at once, but in stages: the rise of al Qa'eda and the 9/11 attacks, the return of Russia and China as great powers, the sharp rise in commodity prices, and so on.

Our energy mispolicy

If you can make sense of our energy policy, let me know - I'm more and more baffled.

We don't think twice when China starts to search for oil off the coast of Cuba, pretty close to US shores. We won't let additional American drilling happen on the same continental shelf.

One of the reasons gasoline prices have risen in the US is because gasoline sold here has to be refined in such a way as to meet US pollution standards. To the best of my knowledge, only US refineries can produce such gasoline from crude oil. No new refineries have been built in the US for about 30 years. Want to guess why?

Although we keep hearing about Brazil's growing use of biofuels, the main thing Brazil has done to improve its energy situation is to allow off-shore oil drilling.

While almost all other wealthy countries have revved up their use of nuclear power, the US is still stuck somewhere around 1980 on this issue. The main hold-up is disposing of the waste. But it's not a technical problem, merely a political one (i.e., Harry Reid).

Congress wants lower energy prices - so they say - but they will do nothing that would allow such an outcome. Instead, they talk about suing OPEC (!) and absurd "carbon caps" to stop the non-existent crisis of "global warming." They refuse to do anything to ease restrictions on coal-to-gasoline conversion, although the process continues to be greatly improved in both efficiency and cleanness.

Is the United States still a serious country?

Iraq war really not about oil

Proof. (If the link doesn't work, just Google "rumsfeld vespa examiner".)

Now it gets interesting

The coming fall of PCU, triggered by intolerable costs, is preceded by the final stages of rising prices and hemorrhaging subsidies. This bubble is now the subject of more and more active discussion in the blogosphere and the specialized higher ed press.*

Over at the Yeah Right blog, the mysterious Batman refers to this article on the student loan bubble, following the lead started by Instapundit:

... about "the next market bubble" being higher education, where government subsidies (obstensibly, to improve access to higher education) have had the unintended (but certainly foreseeable) consequence of inflating the costs of college: "Over the last 10 years, after adjusting for inflation, tuition is up 48% at public schools and 24% at private schools."

There are several important parallels with the recent housing bubble; policy goals of extending participation (in higher education, in home ownership) led to people with serious credit risks borrowing a lot to pay a lot for something that, it turns out, isn't worth what they paid....

This bubble, like all bubbles, will have its tragic stories, so I don't want to cheer this on. But if there's a silver lining, it's that it may make people rethink the value of those four years that polite society assumes you need.

Discussion ensues.

How much you wanna bet now on a federal plan in 2009 or 2010 to "save" higher education from a government-enabled burst bubble? And, of course, to keep pushing college education on students who don't need or want it? Just like pushing houses on people who don't need or can't afford them ....

POSTSCRIPT: Nice blog, BTW. Although Batman seems even more mysterious than we are :)

Additional thoughts about how the cultural elite skews education spending the wrong way, from Jerry Pournelle.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Some bloggers caught Megan McArdle's hysterically funny take on HillaryPlan, but not all of us saw it:

What do Americans care most about this election season? The troubled housing market, and the short supply of oil. That's why Hillary is here with a plan. Specifically, a plan to discourage investment in the oil industry through a windfall profits tax, and to destroy the mortgage market by freezing foreclosures and interest rates. That way, no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won't be any to worry about. That's just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is.

Plus Megan has some really cool economics charts that take me back to college days. I guess my public college education is worth something. And it means Megan is way cool.

And that is why my new life goal is to meet and marry Megan McArdle.
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* Your guides to the academic scene, Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Inside the biofuels craze

I've been meaning to blog on this topic for a while. Reading the apparently opposing conclusions of Cinnamon Stillwell's blog and Robert Zubrin's book on biofuels, Energy Victory, pushed me over the edge.

The first thing to say is, human-induced global climate change isn't happening, at least not at a level significant enough to distinguish it from anything happening in climate anyway. The facts that biofuels, when burned, produce more carbon dioxide is not important from that angle. OTOH plants currently alive will love it - at least, until they're harvested to feed our fuel hunger.

Ah, the circle of life :)

Anyway, the corn-based ethanol industry does seem to be an unequivocal subsidized boondoggle. It's breathed new life into those ridiculous agricultural supports that Congress actually tried to phase out a decade ago,* but failed to. You pay twice for them: once through your taxes, and then again the grocery store - they indirectly drive up the cost of other commodities, as Cinnamon explains in her post. The craze for ethanol is also causing a lot of environmental damage, much of it government-subsidized: accelerated chopping down of rainforests and other trees, pollution run-off, pressure on water supplies, and so on.

The real argument for biofuels is geopolitical. It's a way for hydrocarbon-burning countries to get alternatives to the monopoly of petroleum. Moderating petroleum demand worldwide is the key, not the obsolete ideal of energy independence. Zubrin argues more in favor of biodiesel and methanol (which can be made from any biomass, and the latter from coal and natural gas as well). But his recent statements have increasingly gone over the cliff in promoting biofuels, and he's thrown away any earlier caution he had about ethanol. He does effectively demolish the claims for hydrogen as a fuel source, something that thankfully you no longer hear much about. He also smartly promotes nuclear power for fixed-site power generation. Virtually every other advanced country in the world has been moving rapidly forward with nuclear power; the US is stuck in the 1970s on this.

But there's still a significant role for conservation. Scandalously, the US vehicle fleet's fuel efficiency, which rose from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, has been falling for more than a decade, thanks to all those SUVs and monster "light" trucks out there. There's been something of a turn-around recently, but not enough. It has to be larger and sustained for a decade-plus to make a real impact. Since this is a geopolitical problem, it's perfectly reasonable for the Feds to impose a much higher gasoline tax, say enough to pay for a quarter or a third of our military budget, that part tied up with the Middle East. The tax rate should be set up to rise or fall as the price of petroleum falls or rises, so as to maintain a roughly constant and high pump price for gas. The gas price doesn't have to be at European levels, but it does need to remain at a reasonably high, sustained level. A few years of oil price collapse would probably erase whatever progress is made, by removing the pressure to conserve.

There is a good case for methanol and biodiesel. They're derived from partially or completely transformed biowaste, not from plants grown for food, and their negatives are far less than ethanol. Methanol is also economically competitive at the $1.00 to $1.50 per gallon level. It's just then a matter of getting a vehicle fleet that can burn methanol pure or mixed with gas (so-called M-85 fuel and variants). That's what Zubrin's book is about. Unfortunately, there's no big payoff for politicians. Methanol is easier to produce than ethanol and can't be rewarded with targeted subsidies the same way. But selling cars with the right engines is complicated by pollution and fuel efficiency rules. Like many of our problems these days, this is more political than anything else.

POSTSCRIPT: Here are some basic science about ethanol and methanol, both alcohols, and some basics about alcohols as fuels.
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* Back when Congress still had a significant number of conservatives.

Afghanistan, bin Laden, and all that

A mindworm has returned, one familiar from 2001 and 2002. Inspired by the book and recent movie, Charlie Wilson's War, and Pakistan's troubles, the worm says something like this: in the 80s, "the US supported bin Laden," or "bin Laden supported the US," or the 1980s anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan is somehow responsible for al Qa'eda. None of this is true. Those events and forces do have significance today, most of it not foreseen back then. But the Afghan anti-Soviet war (1978-1989) helped to delay the rise of al Qa'eda and Sunni radicalism directed at the US, rather than accelerate it. And Sunni radicalism needed certain prerequisites - the end of the Iran-Iraq war (1988), the end of the Cold War (1990), American troops stationed in the heart of the Muslim world (Arabia, 1990-2003), the rise of Arabic satellite television (after 1994) - that didn't start falling into place until the end of the 80s.

Few people in the Western world in the 1960s and 70s foresaw the rise of radical Islam. Superficially, at least, the Middle East was dominated by ideologies familiar in a Western context: nationalism, and various types of socialism. Not understanding that the Middle East is really a distinct civilization with a history very different from the West or Asia, most pundits and experts projected the future as more of the same. Most people unthinkingly believed in an automatic secularization, modernization, and so on. The Middle East was mentally lumped into an artificial construct, the "Third World," made up of non-white peoples either patronized as "noble savages" or feared as simply "savages."

The Islamic revival of the late 1970s came as a shock to the West, the communist bloc, and Westernized elites in the Middle East. Several events marked turning points and milestones in the return of political Islam. The failure of modernization and the Arab defeats in 1967 and 1973 helped to discredit secular regimes. At the same time, Saudi Arabia's successful orchestrating of the 1973-74 oil embargo - taking the industrialized world's economy hostage, in effect - marked a power shift away from secular governments like Egypt's and Syria's, once the centers of the Arab world. The Saudis already enjoyed a unique prestige from their position as keepers of the Muslim holy cities (Mecca and Medina) and as the strictest Muslims. There and elsewhere in the Middle East, Muslim radicals began to argue that Islamic purism was an authentic identity Muslims should return to and reject alien imports like nationalism, secularism, and socialism. The 1977 and 1979 hostage crises, one in Washington DC, the other in Mecca, were both carried out by Sunni radicals enraged by the gap between the Saudi regime's purist rhetoric and its modernizing, semi-cosmopolitan, and often corrupt reality. These marked the first of what would, later in the 1990s, become a familiar stream of events. At the same time, a double opposition to the Shah's regime of autocratic modernization in Shi'ite Iran put the region's secular autocrats on notice. Most Western observers expected the liberal, secular opposition to win and were stunned when the 1979 Iranian revolution turned Islamic.

In those days, everyone in the West viewed the Cold War as far more important and failed to take Islamic radicalism seriously. The war between North and South Vietnam had just ended (in 1975) with a communist victory. Only in the Iranian case was Islamic revolutionary politics viewed as genuine and threatening: by the US, because of the Iranian hostage crisis (1979-81),* and by the conservative Gulf monarchies, who rule over significant Shi'ite populations and live next door to Iran. In fact, the Gulf governments were thrown into a panic, one that led them in 1980 to prod Iraq into launching the Iran-Iraq war.** Few could see how Muslims from the ultra-conservative Gulf states would experience a growing and intolerable tension between the supposed purity of Islam in Arabia (its home) and the reality of the Gulf kingdoms, then being showered in oil wealth.

The 1978 communist coup in and December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought this budding Sunni radicalism to a stop, or rather temporarily transformed and redirected it. Suddenly the region was under a genuine threat, not from the US, but from the Soviets. After the 1978 coup, the US began to support Afghan groups directly. The most important was the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik and not a member of Afghanistan's Pashtun majority. The US continued to support Massoud, but later in the 80s, found itself shut out of the more important channels for helping the Afghans, controlled by Pakistan and its military intelligence service (the ISI). (This is the part where Charlie Wilson came in.) The US, which has always had a rocky relationship with Pakistan, upgraded its ties and kept them there until 1990, when they were downgraded again, because of Pakistan's nuclear program.

Here truly a devil's bargain was made, but it has nothing to do with the Afghans. (No Afghan has been involved in terrorist attacks on the US.) The problem is Pakistan and the later involvement of Saudi religious institutions in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which began after the anti-Soviet war was over, in the 1990s. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89, the US made a terrible (if familiar) mistake of just walking away from Afghanistan. It entered into a vicious, three-way civil war pitting against each other the remains of the pro-Soviet regime, Massoud's forces and allies, and radical Islamic groups sponsored by Pakistan. From the Saudi seeds and Pakistan's continued attempts to take over Afghanistan sprang the Taliban, whose core were madrassa (religious school) students determined to turn Afghanistan into an Islamic utopia.† After coalescing in 1994 and obtaining widespread popular support for bringing the civil war to an end, the Taliban (with massive Pakistani aid) took over most of the country by 1996. Popular support evaporated, once Afghans got to see the Islamic utopia close up (as in The Kite Runner), but by that point, popular Afghan sentiment meant little. Poor and isolated, Afghanistan had been unwillingly and unwittingly turned into a "jihad theme park," with Islamic radicals implementing the vision they could not in their home countries.

As for the rest of the myth, it's almost all fabricated, largely in retrospect by al Qa'eda, its supporters, and credulous Western journalists. The "Afghan Arabs" who supposedly fought against the Soviets actually did no fighting, confining their support of the Afghans to monetary donations. The religious motives for Sunni radicalism are rooted in Arabia, the home of Islam, and fundamentally result from the large contradiction between its dominant Wahhabi (Salafi) type of Islam and the materially modern life made possible by all that oil wealth. Pakistan, an artificial country lacking a national identity, finds promoting Islamic radicalism an almost irresistible temptation. It's a practical good as well, since it helps the ISI run an insurgency next door in the Indian province of Kashmir (claimed by Pakistan) and promote Pakistani control of Afghanistan, its geographic "rear," through the dominant Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghani border. To come full circle, when the US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, its local allies were made up of - you guessed it - the same Northern Alliance we started supporting in 1978, but then abandoned in 1989. Massoud had visited the US in the summer of 2001 to warn Americans about the Taliban and its al Qa'eda allies. After his return to Afghanistan, he was assassinated, two days before the 9/11 attacks, by an al Qa'eda suicide bomber posing as a journalist. The Taliban and al Qa'eda guessed correctly that their upcoming attacks on the US would lead to a US invasion. Killing Massoud, in advance, deprived the US of an important local ally, one we had supported in the past.

The radical Islamic project remains today, among Sunnis, a violent cult inspired and funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and largely hosted by Pakistan. That these are supposedly American "allies" just adds what history will view as a cruel twist. From this perspective, the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are, not diversions, but sideshows, chasing around and killing or capturing terrorists whose beliefs and activities are the result of the policies and religious proclivities of countries we dare not touch. A year-and-a-half after invading Afghanistan to overthrow a government made possible and supported by Pakistan, we failed to logically take the struggle home to the countries that hatched the crisis and instead invaded Iraq.

There are some important lessons here, but they have little do with lachrymose theories of "blowback" and other "radical" claptrap.†† The most important is the damaging American habit of walking away from a foreign involvement after a period of intense engagement, abandoning hard-won friends in the process. The US has always had, and probably will always have, a strong isolationist streak, reinforced by our attention-challenged media and short election cycles. But foreign policy is not about one-night stands and can't be built on dubious "allies" and so-called "friends." And the other lessons are familiar to readers of this blog: the sinister roles played by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the rise of radical Sunni Islam and our strange relationship with Saudi Arabia. Even an enormity like the 9/11 attacks was not enough to shake that relationship, in the end. Our descendants will stare at this fact in wonder.

POSTSCRIPT: There's another angle to Afghanistan, besides the fact that its security problems are all baked next door in Pakistan. We've heard over and over in the last few years how much the US needs to be multilateral and follow the NATO model of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, and not the Iraq model of largely unilateral action. But there's trouble on the horizon for NATO. It's an organization that was founded to cope with the Cold War, which it did, with great success. But in the 1990s, it was pressed into service in new ways not part of its original mandate and which are now proving more difficult, costly, and unpopular than originally anticipated. Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, supposedly models of multilateralism, may instead prove its graveyard. US military action in the future will probably look a lot more like Iraq than people think.

Another important development that our wonderfully unbiased and objective news media are all over - right?
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* Notice how often the word "hostage" comes up in this posting.

** Here's a place to lay to rest another myth, that the US supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. While the US did quietly grant security guarantees to the Gulf kingdoms, it was officially neutral in the conflict ("it's too bad both sides can't lose," was Kissinger's famous quip). It was the Gulf kingdoms themselves that directly supported Iraq with money. Using that and his own oil money, Saddam bought weapons mainly from the Soviets and, to a smaller extent, from France. (The French had their own reasons to back Iraq against the Iranian revolutionary mullahs.) Iraq didn't fight Iran with American weapons, but with Soviet ones: AK-47s, not M-16s; T-55s and T-62s, not M1s; MiGs, not F-16s. But the price of oil collapsed in the later 1980s, and Saddam's income dried up. Unable to pay off his loans from the Gulf states, he invaded one of them and threatened to invade the others.

† In Farsi (Persian) and related languages, taliban just means "students."

†† As for "blowback," the ultimate in tragic backfiring is the death of Benazir Bhutto. It was during her terms as Pakistani prime minister (1988-90 and 1993-96) that the ISI turned into a dedicated machine for promoting radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan and in Pakistan itself. And of course, it is just those groups who were responsible for her assassination.

Again, these developments started after the end of the anti-Soviet war. Only once Pakistan was no longer an object of superpower interest did it unabashedly and recklessly go full-time into the Islamo-radicalism business, picking up the thread dropped in 1980.

Good czar, bad czar

Something very bad has happened in Russia in the last eight years: the rise of Vladimir Putin and the new Russian mafia state. Contrary to myths still repeated in the West, this period has not seen Russia become more stable or a nicer place: on the contrary. The Russian state has prospered, because it's seized control of Russia's oil and gas wealth. It's now become another petro-dictatorship. The decline of Russian society, arrested in the 90s, is accelerating.

But there's also a whole army of bagmen (consultants, lobbyists, etc.) out there who've clouded the issue both here and especially in Europe. The West lacks the clarity on the issue that it had during the Cold War, even though Russia is causing problems in Iran and is about to in Kosovo. This is not the 90s "holiday from history" any more. And there's no good czar - Yeltsin - to deal with.

Bad - bad - czar - bad - bad.

More on resurgent conspiracism

PRE-POSTSCIPT: Follow the saga of the Saudi-sponsored school in northern Virginia by starting here. The Washington Post, normally sensible on such questions, has inexplicably gotten lost on this one. They ask, what about parochial schools? Indeed: what if Catholic schools didn't just teach Catholic doctrine, but advocated religious war against Protestants or forcible conversion of Jews? Or if Protestant schools taught that Catholics should lose all of their civil and political rights?
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First, a follow-up to the earlier posting on Walt and Mearsheimer's book, which reviewers have mostly panned. What's amazing is that the book fails to even mention the Saudi lobby or the effect of oil money in buying influence in Washington. Having now looked at the book myself, I also cannot believe how much it uses recycled mythology about Israel and its supporters pushing for the Iraq war. Walt and Mearsheimer themselves register these facts in their book, but it strangely leaves their argument unchanged, showing how disconnected from reality they are (and from Israel's real concern, Iran). Clearly, they're in the obsessive "Jews-on-the-brain" zone, à la Pat Buchanan. Whether you want to call that "antisemitism" is a fine semantic point up to you.

Remember: the 9/11 and other al Qaeda attacks - from 1990's assassination of Rabbi Kahane in New York City through the two attacks on the WTC, and on down the list, including the present mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq - could and would not have happened without Saudi money, Saudi pressure for accelerated normalization of travel and visa requirements, and Saudi wacko ideology. Saudi Arabia is the cause of those attacks in two senses, for you Aristotelians out there: "first" cause (the basic driving ideology) and "efficient" cause (enabling the means).

For a book to seriously discuss these effects without mentioning their cause is a farce.

A book-length counter to the myth-spinning of Walt and Mearsheimer is Abe Foxman's new book, The Deadliest Lies. (Foxman is the head of the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith.) The ADL is a problematic organization and routinely misses the mark in their strategy by not understanding the real purposes of antisemitism, wrongly thinking that it's fundamentally about the Jews. (The ADL's serious flaws are a topic for another day.) Nonetheless, the book is on target with its analysis of the archetypical antisemitic fantasy: secret cabals, the secret cause of wars and financial panics, etc. The patterns of Walt and Mearsheimer's book and its cruder cousins are striking and, to any student of classical antisemitic theorizing, very familiar. Yale University's Charles Hill blurbs Foxman's book this way: "Conspiracy theories are a measure of a society’s mental health; when on the rise, trouble lies ahead. In The Deadliest Lies, Abraham Foxman diagnoses the ‘Israel Lobby’ conspiracy theory and reveals how sick it is." Even in the 1930s, people had a vague sense of conspiracism as a mental disorder, but we're more sharply aware of this now and have fewer excuses for tolerating it.

Finally, the new issue of Foreign Affairs contains an important review by Walter Russell Mead. He points to one of the realities that Walt and Mearsheimer keep colliding with but never understand: the ways in which foreign policy elites intersect with broad democratic norms and the assumption, natural to American political culture, that broad democratic norms should influence foreign policy - an concept alien in most other countries, even other democracies. And Mead perceptively identifies the way in which Walt and Mearsheimer use classical antisemitic tactics, including the attempt to put American Jews in a bind over criticizing their book - so they can appear outraged that American Jews should be provoked by what is so clearly intended as a provocation. As Mead says, Jimmy Carter is the past master of this tactic, but Walt and Mearsheimer give Carter stiff competition.

But Mead also lets his fellow academics off the hook too easily, in my view. It's hard to believe they're unaware that most American Jews voted against Bush both times and that most American Jews (and most American Jewish organizations) were neutral on or opposed to the Iraq war. The recycling of discredited mythology is only superficially about pseudo-facts; such myth-spinning always serves some other and normally unstated purpose. And while they might be naive about American politics, they are not naive about the Middle East. Like many so-called experts, they hide much of what they really know, even from themselves, and peddle oil-realism as a higher morality. Walt and Mearsheimer cannot not know the truth about the Middle East, its oil regimes, Islam, etc. They also cannot not know the truth about the Arabs of Palestine, an important topic to consider next.

POSTSCRIPT: Regional cooperation in the Middle East is possible, once you get outside the context of the UN and spectacles like the ridiculous Ahmadinejad. Israel and Oman just marked 10 years of cooperation on regional water conservation.

How about that Chinese market?

So how about that Shanghai stock market? It's been going like gangbusters - a typical emerging market in its early stages - and now it's dropped 9%, sending the other equities markets around the world into a tizzy. Perhaps China is headed for a developing world financial crisis à la 1998, or Japan in 1990. Some pessimists here think it might trigger a recession. US economic growth will slow in the next couple years, but a recession is unlikely in that same period.

International market gyrations affect everyone now. Many retirement accounts took a hit, and long-term interest rates may rise if there isn't as much Chinese capital available in the global bond market.

It's interesting to consider the future of China, not only in comparison with other emerging markets, but also compared to the theories fashionable in the US for the last decade or so. One theory, promulgated by neoconservatives and others, is that China is like imperial Germany circa 1900. China is the world's last empire, but the theory is almost certainly false. China has a booming economy, but it is also politically weak, and its economic boom is driving multiple social upheavals that the ruling Communist Party struggles to contain. China's foreign policy is fundamentally defensive, but it also - in spite of its economic boom - has little interest in joining a Western- or US-led liberal international order. Its interest in overseas investment is strictly mercenary, with no larger governance or political dimension. (For example, because of its need for oil, China plays a crucial role in backing the petro-dictatorships - Russia, Iran, Sudan, the pre-2003 Iraq, etc. The foreign policy the US is sometimes accused of having, China actually has.) These facts put the kibosh on another, less fashionable but still widely held view, that China is about to fully join the current world order or reshape it as a new hegemon.

There's another circa-1900 analogy that fits China better, and it is the great pre-1914 empire-states that disintegrated as a result of World War I. Austria-Hungary is the most obvious analogue: politically weak, economically booming, undergoing rapid social change as a result. Of course, except in some border areas, China is overwhelmingly Han Chinese in its ethnic makeup, making it very different from the Hapsburgs' polyglot, multiethnic empire. That source of instability is not at work in China's case, and Taiwan will probably not play the part of Serbia - at least, one would hope not.

China is an ancient civilization that will survive and even prosper one way or another. But its current incarnation - politically repressive and corrupt communism, booming capitalist economy on the coast, the rest in a post-communist limbo - has only a limited time left.

Debating the clash of civilizations

I've posted before on the "clash of civilizations" (Islam vs. everyone else) theme - why it's happening and that it's happening (in the face of denial and wishful thinking). Check out this video from a recent debate in London on just that theme. Two of the participants (Douglas Murray and Daniel Pipes) are brilliant, while the other two (Ken Livingstone and Salma Yaqoob) are revealing in a very different way. Livingstone in particular shows how far the European left has gone in its Islamist sympathies.

Strange, you say - isn't the left supposed to be "progressive" and all that? No - that's so 1930s. The left today is driven by little more than hate. The growing left-Islamist alliance screams this fact loudly and clearly to anyone ready to listen and draw the obvious conclusion.
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An important related development is the self-abasement and self-abnegation of Jews on the left and the corrosive effect this has been having lately on mainstream American Jewish life. An important essay on this subject can be found here (PDF; requires registration), by Alvin Rosenfeld of the University of Indiana. For stating the obvious so simply, the article has provoked "controversy" - as reported by the Times - meaning, some people can't stand that much probing honesty. The Times article refers to leftists as "liberals" - another nice, evasive euphemism we're now so used to, we don't think about it. Leftists (motive: hate) become "progressives" (sounds: warm and fuzzy) become "liberals" (sounds: innocuous and mainstream). Such journalistic obfuscation is how leftists acquire the respectability and legitimacy they crave.

More to come on the blinders of mainstream Jewish institutions in a future posting. The phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred would take more than a posting - more like a book, or a whole library. It's already been written too, but the books are old and musty, and many are in German. It's a subject that needs a thorough reconsideration, translation, and updating. You could do worse than start with this article on George Soros, a delusional megalomaniac with his own billions, rather than some sheik's. Soros is on his way to becoming a 21st-century cross between Ross Perot and Henry Ford - except Soros is Jewish. His billions are now going towards buying out the Democratic party.
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Apropos of Jimmy Carter, check out this close examination of his post-presidential career. It seems not so much "I'm-still-president" delusions as a mixture of narcissism, bitterness, and a distinct messianic-martyr complex. He's a "good" peacemaker beset by "evil" Jews - sound familiar? It's Mel Gibson again.

A question for Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter recently appeared to speak at Brandeis University, near Boston. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School offerred to debate him, but Carter refused. Dershowitz spoke anyway, without Carter, and asked this question.

It's been clear for some time that Carter has degenerated into a delusional crank. If the answer to Dershowitz's question is yes, then Carter is also a dangerous delusional crank. He needs to be isolated from the American political mainstream; his supporters need to be ejected from American politics.

If the Democrats allow him to speak at their 2008 convention, they will have a very serious problem on their hands.
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UPDATE: Cathy Young, of Reason magazine and the Boston Globe, has more details about the Carter appearance at Brandeis. Brandeis conceded to the delusional Carter complete control over the event, a very unusual concession in an academic forum. A Brandeis professor referred to the format as "like a Soviet press conference." And Carter's rhetoric, in response to the attacks on the book, has drifted further and further into classical anti-semitic canards.

As Young discusses towards the end of her posting, Carter has had an ongoing relationship with and accepted money from, not just any old Persian Gulf sheiks, but specifically people with a track record of radical Islamic connections and views. Even more disturbing is the lurid light it sheds on the ongoing buy-out of the significant figures in American political life by Saudis and other Gulf-niks with lots of petro-$$. Many of them sound like, not ambassadors from us to them, but ambassadors from them to us. You saw some of this uncovered after 9/11; Carter has accidentally lifted the veil again. At the risk of repeating it too often: the real corruption of the oil business is not the buying of the oil; it's how those oil dollars are recycled after they get into dubious hands.

Civilization, states, and ideology: More decline of realism

Now that the Democrats find themselves back in charge of Congress, the media chatter about "realism" (often just meaning, American friends of the Saudi royal family) has faded. But it's worth exploring realism as an historical doctrine, unhooking it from its recent perversion in connection with petro-regimes. I emphasized in previous postings that classical realism, rooted in 18th-19th century Europe, has had declining relevance to foreign policy throughout the last century, and that its significance will continue to fade. Liberal internationalism is in trouble for other reasons, and the consequent vacuum has come to be filled, in a strange turn of events, by a militant sort of neoconservatism.

Schematically, the evolution of realism goes something like this:

1. Realism was the master paradigm of European foreign policy from the end of the Reformation until the outbreak of World War I, roughly 1690 until 1914.

2. The critical year of 1917 saw the entry of the US into WWI, the collapse of the French army, the March and November Russian Revolutions, and the Balfour Declaration. Ideology, of all kinds, took off in importance, especially the most spectacular cases: Communism in Russia and Nazism in Germany. But their main effect was by taking over existing or reconstructed nation- and empire-states (Germany and Russian - later, China). Few years have been so important in world history as 1917.

The two main rising powers of the early 20th century were Germany and Russia. Their ideologies became, respectively, Nazism and Communism. Their respective civilizations were Western (on the border) and Eastern Orthodox (in a revolutionary phase).

While civilizational categories might help you understand aspects of 20th century conflict, they do so only in a very general way, as a deep historical background. The political and ideology categories are far more important, and ideology is central. We spoke of fighting Germany, but also Nazism. During the Cold War, it was common to elide Soviet into Russian, reflecting the dual nature of these conflicts: between nation- or empire-states, but also traditional political units animated by radical ideologies. No one spoke that way during World War I, which, until its last year, had no significant ideological aspect. Wilson and Lenin changed all that.

3. Ideology in decline: in the European/Western world, after the death of Stalin; in the rest of the world, since the 1980s.

Now we're in a world of geopolitical tectonic plates. The plates are civilizations, and they grind past one another, often peacefully, sometimes violently. The existence of different world civilizations doesn't mean they have to come into conflict. It just means if there is conflict, they are the basic units that must be used in analysis. The nation-state is secondary; states are important only insofar as they are exemplars of civilizations. And ideology is no longer as important as some people think.

Here we see the influence of some bad analogies casually misused - reflected in the questionable neologism "Islamofascism," for example. European models had a strong influence in the Islamic world, from the mid-19th century until about 1980, and post-World War I developments kicked off the rise of one-party secular totalitarian states: successively, French and British Enlightenment ideas; then in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, fascistic ideologies; finally, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Soviet and Maoist Marxism. But since about 1980, outside ideologies have been in sharp decline in the Middle East, which is simply becoming more itself, laying bare the underlying culture. It's not a Western-style system of nation-states (unlike Europe or even Asia), but instead composed of tribalism, sectarianism, warlordism, and the honor-shame system - more like Europe during the wars of religion or even the Dark Ages. Of course, the AK-47 and the RPG-7 have - ahem - changed the technical details.

In the clash of civilizations between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds, certain characteristic patterns recur that fall far outside traditional realist thinking, like stateless jihadist ("terrorist") and state-sponsored proxy fighting groups. In turn, the nature of the conflict signals a breakdown of traditional nation-state-based rules of foreign policy; e.g., the Geneva Conventions (laws always written in response to the last war); the standing need for new legislation and new treaties; the question of how to deal with non-democratic countries deemed essential in the fight (Pakistan and a number of Arab countries). Troublesome policies such as rendition and detention are a direct result of this breakdown.

All these developments bode ill for realist-type theories of foreign policy. They also create serious problems for liberal internationalism, which only really works if everyone lives in a democratic-republican nation-state. That problem has been obvious for a long time; the problem with realism has been less obvious.
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POSTSCRIPT: Here's an interesting question: Western/Central Europe - the parts that are historically Catholic or Protestant - make up "Western" civilization - originally, Latin Christendom. Is the United States part of "Western" civilization? Think about it before answering. Is it not a nation-state in a new civilization, as yet unnamed?

Reality and unreality in the Middle East

UPDATE: Maybe the ISG is just a decoy blowing smoke in our faces and the real action is elsewhere. Everybody who's somebody in the Middle East has a sponsor. The Kurds have us, in effect, as their sponsors. Willingly or not, the Iraqi Shi'ites have Iran as their sponsor.

That leaves only the Iraqi Sunnis without a sponsor. Hmmm ... I wonder who could fill that role (hat tip to Reynolds). And there's more ... and this ....
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Tom Donnelly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies puts it better than I can:

It just hasn't worked out the way the punditocracy planned: The "adults" of the Bush 41 administration were supposed to talk Bush 43 off the ledge, get him to give up his dream of democracy in Iraq and return to reality. But the main recommendation of the Baker- Hamilton "Iraq Study Group" - withdrawal by early 2008, covered by negotiations with Iran and Syria - has little value outside Washington, and none in Baghdad or the region.

The ISG report (the Hamilton part) actually has valuable advice, similar to the 9/11 Commission Report, on changing how the US government works. But the diplomatic part (the Baker part) is mostly a fantasy of misguided and/or obsolete ideas. (The funny thing is the early 2008 withdrawal date was the original Pentagon plan - that's how Washington works: you present your original plan as a bold breakthrough and radical departure. :-) The Washington Post's editorial board weighs in cogently on this aspect, and former Reagan-Bush-Clinton diplomat Dennis Ross discusses the Iran-Syria axis at length here in the New Republic (requires subscription). And read this as well. Or, if you prefer your politics in the form of cartoons, US News obliges with this priceless offering: a grim situation can't be made cuter than that.

Iran and Syria aren't friendly or ready to help - they're only ready to deal if they're afraid of us or want something we can give them, as Max Boot explains (requires registration). What happens months or a year or two hence, when we no longer have anything to bargain with, and they're no longer afraid of us? Chaos, that's what - a full-blown proxy war in Iraq, Lebanon, and maybe elsewhere. Lebanon is already feeling the intense Syrian pressure again, as Hezbollah prepares to destroy what's left of the Cedar Revolution.

The ISG report did reach its real audience, the news media, incessantly asking, "Will Bush listen?", never asking the right question: "Will the media listen?" Of course, the media has largely given up on reporting from Iraq. Most of its reporting is from Washington, which makes sense: that's where the main quagmire is.

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The tragedy of the neoconservative democracy crusade is that it's pre-empted real conservative policy possibilities, a "really real" realism based on correct understanding of the Middle East and the conflict were now in, instead of the ever-misleading and now-obsolete Baker-Scowcroft "realism," or the well-intentioned but now-fading-into- history liberal-internationalism.

What we need to recognize is that the policy paradigms of the Cold War era are exhausted and obsolete. "Realism" is dead. The old standbys (it's Israel's fault! start up the "peace process" again! suck up to the Saudis!) will no longer work. (For one thing, the designated fall guys for the US-Iraq mess - Israel and the Kurds - are not lining up to be sacrificed - why should they? That era is over.) What we need is new ME policies reconsidered from scratch with the oil factor and Israel playing no fundamental role. The ME's basic problems have to do with a toxic mix of Islam, political illegitimacy, and religious reaction. The region's dominant and long-indulged groups (Arabs, Sunni Arabs in particular) are largely unwilling to face their own problems and instead obsessively blame outsiders or "deviants." The oil money hugely exacerbates these problems, fueling an extreme fantasy of grievance and entitlement, while flooding the region with the by-products of modern civilization: electronic media, modern weapons, etc., that reinforce the Islamic world's growing reaction and intolerance.

The resulting conflict is a clash between civilizations, but also a clash within a civilization, giving rise to a series of wars (Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.) that are not "civil" in the strict sense - they do not respect national boundaries, because Islam denies the legitimacy of the nation-state. The conflict is a composite of smaller conflicts, between Sunnis and Shi'ites, between moderate and extremist Muslims, between Arabs and non-Arabs, and between Muslims and non-Muslims, all simultaneously. Superficially, these wars are just internal tribal and sectarian conflicts. But when you look closer, you discover that in Iraq, as in Lebanon, local conflicts are blown up and made much more difficult by the sponsored-proxyship phenomenon, a classic feature of the modern ME "dark ages", inflamed by the honor-shame system. The sponsors here: Iran and Syria (sponsoring the Shiites and even helping the Sunnis) and private parties in the Gulf sponsoring the Sunni jihadists allied with al Qaeda. As with Israel and the Palestinians in the 90s, attempts like the Oslo "peace process" to move towards conflict resolution are defeated when the most extreme parties can look towards hardline rejectionist states like Iran and Syria for support. Local conflicts become swept up in global jihad and are transformed from difficult to impossible.

Meeting these challenges means breaking with classical American and Western policy, largely driven by the need for oil, protecting oil supplies and oil regimes, and recycling petrodollars through contracts. (The resulting corruption-for-oil-$$ needs to be seen for what it is and so often isn't. See here, for example. Unlike the ludricrous "blood-for-oil" lies of a few years ago, the oil-$$-realism-sucking-up-to-the-Saudis/ Iranians/whatever phenomenon is very real.) In the case of Europe, important additional factors include a non-fatal but persistent anti-semitism and the weird combination of prejudice against Muslim immigrants while pandering to the worst elements of the Islamic world, especially a factor in France.

This kind of cynical "realism" seems, well, "realistic" - workable at least in the short run. But we've outlived the short run and today live with the consequences, like al Qaeda. "Realistic" policies like this are myopic and destructive in the long run. And remember: we're living in that long run now.

The wrong-headed thing called "realism" today (the Saudi-Egypt-Kissinger-Baker- Scowcroft axis) is superficially like the real 19th century thing, but at a deeper level, has little connection with reality. Today, we're faced with a clash of civililzations even farther from 19th-century balance-of-power realism than the 20th-century clash of ideologies.

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There are real barriers to implementing better ME policies. The oil-$$-corruption factor plays a large and insidious role here, as it is not only in play among Washington power brokers, but also fuels "radical" "Middle East studies" in academia. It is rarely reported in the American news media, unless a catastrophe like 9/11 happens. Notice how the issue came up after 9/11, but then faded away. The news media returned to "the" ME conflict, which is supposedly just Israel and the Palestinians. The news media almost never register the truth: there is one big meta-conflict (jihad, or violent political Islam), made of up lots of smaller conflicts, of which Israel is a piece.

The news media itself is a major barrier to better thinking. It endlessly recycles obsolete and wrong ideas and policies, if they fit its dimwitted and warped view of the world. And since there is so little shame in public life any more, people associated with policy and intellectual failures get to peddle their wares endlessly too, long after they've overstayed their welcome. They're never kicked out of the public square and can clog it with no end of distractions and junk. Only the better-educated editorial writers and experienced commentators can act as a counterweight to the flow of political detritus through the "news" and "news analysis" (read: BS) columns.

POSTSCRIPT: A remarkable and prescient essay (in French) "Towards a New Foreign Policy" appeared in 1992 that (fourteen years ago!) predicted the decline of traditional realism in the post-Cold War period with a startling clarity that elites all over the Western world haven't yet caught up with. The anonymous essay in particular dwelled on the obsolete and destructive Arabist policies that de Gaulle inaugurated in the mid-1960s. The pseudonymous author is reportedly now a highly-placed French diplomat. His essay is discussed and quoted at length (in English) here.

Mazal tov! :: Further thoughts on energy independence

Speaking of life, Kavanna has already heard from me about his new addition, little Jacob or "Jack," born this past Monday - but here I am in public: congratulations! Binah hopes he'll be posting some pictures soon. We want to see :)

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And speaking of making the world safer for Jacob's generation, here's a sensible discussion about US energy dependence and the need for international cooperation to moderate demand. It's a roundtable of academics and others associated with Stanford. They also discuss the strange nature of the oil-gas market, how it's both close to a perect market in some ways and, in others, thoroughly political. Here's one participant's take on the bad influence that natural resource extraction economics has on countries that heavily depend on it:

The real problem is that energy—oil, especially—doesn’t operate according to normal market principles. Something like 75 percent of the reserves of oil and gas are controlled by companies that are either wholly owned or in effect controlled by governments, and there’s enormous variation in how those companies perform. Some of them are just a disaster ... and others can work at world standards.... Some of these governments ... use oil revenues for political purposes that undermine U.S. influence. High prices do not automatically generate new supply or conservation, partly because suppliers can drop prices to undercut commercial investment in alternatives. Second, we have what has become known as “the resource curse.” There’s a lot of evidence that the presence of huge windfalls in poorly governed places makes governance even worse. Revenue that accrues to oil-exporting governments is particularly prone to being misspent, often in ways that work against U.S. interests.

Similar thoughts expressed by two other participants, who also note the need for stable higher prices, to promote both conservation and new investment:

The key factor in normalizing market conditions is assuring the market that high prices are here to stay [....] If oil is discovered in a country before democratic institutions are in place, the probability of that country becoming democratic is very low. In countries where the state does not rely on the taxation of its citizens for its revenues, it doesn’t have to listen to what its citizens want to do with that money. So instead of building roads or schools or doing things that taxpayers would demand of them, they use their money in ways that threaten the security of other countries, and, ultimately, their own.

Exactly. This is a refreshing departure from the depressing "realism" we keep hearing about, or the even more ridiculous "blood-for-oil" libels of a few years ago. It's especially important now that a new Democratic Congress is coming in, one with a distinctively anti-globalization, isolationist, and xenophobic tendency - the "Lou Dobbs Democrats." Read the whole thing.

More on the unreality of realism

It's not just recently that foreign policy realism has seemed, well, unreal. Fifty years ago, 1956 saw the Hungarian Revolution and the Suez crisis. The latter in particular was a fiasco that has cost us a lot in the years since: the US sided with Nasser's Egypt and the Soviet Union against Britain, France, and Israel over Nasser's illegal seizure of the Anglo-French Suez Canal and his support for Arab guerilla attacks on Israel, just after encouraging, then failing to help, the Hungarians throw off the Soviet yoke.

Eisenhower and especially Dulles undoubtedly thought they were being sophisticated and clever. In fact, what they did was delusional and self-destructive. Later, after he left office, Eisenhower admitted as much.

Instead of explaining it myself, I'll let Arthur Herman and Martin Peretz do the talking. The Suez crisis marked the first cracks in the Western alliance and the start of the grand delusion of pan-Arabism, the immediate ancestor of the pan-Islamic virus.

POSTSCRIPT: About the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution, see Charles Gati's remarkable new book and his talk on C-SPAN.

The decline of realism

One of the vital Western foreign policy traditions of the last three centuries (since the end of the Reformation) has been realism, a school of thought strongest among conservatives but more widely influential. Realism holds that the only thing that matters in a country's foreign policy is its power, and perhaps its economic, interests vis-a-vis other countries, and that foreign policy consists of the relationships between governments, not societies at large.

The origins of realism lie in the period after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) that established the modern Western nation-states and empire-states that survived until 1914. After more than a century of religious warfare, with dynasties and churches battling for dominance, religious peace required governments to ignore what neighboring governments were doing internally and consider only their power interests vis-a-vis each other -- most fundamentally, the balance of military power and, later, the balance of trade. The craft of diplomacy took its modern form under these conditions. Hence we use the word "diplomatic" for someone who doesn't ask too many nosy questions. (Spying came into being in its modern form at the same time, precisely to answer those nosy questions in indirect ways.) Realism constituted the dominant foreign policy paradigm of 18th- and 19th-century Europe. Conservative-realist politicians like Bismarck and Disraeli exemplified it; Bismarck christened it realpolitik.

Realism as a master paradigm died during World War I. It could not explain or accept the realities of total war involving the struggles of whole societies against one another. The 20th century was subsequently dominated by ideology. Until the 1980s, the dominant foreign policy conflict in America was between isolationism and liberal internationalism, but realism became an important secondary component in American foreign policy thinking after two key debacles, World War I and Vietnam. It has resurfaced repeatedly in reaction to liberal activism and, now, neoconservative crusading.

While it was the controlling principle of foreign policy in the Western world in the 18th and 19th centuries, realism has lost ground in the last hundred years to ideology, and in the new era of globalization, it will continue to lose importance, for three reasons.

1. Societies are becoming interconnected as they interpenetrate. The backwards areas ("Gap") are those not well-connected. They need to be more connected, not less. Diplomacy has to be about more than relations between governments. The work of Tom Barnett is very good on this subject. This development undercuts the traditional realist protocols of diplomacy.

2. The end of the Cold War saw not a decline of American power and a renewal of multipolarity (what the realists expected), but an unprecedented situation of unipolarity and burgeoning integration. This undercuts the realist paradigm of competing, roughly equal states.

3. The single most important foreign policy problem facing us now is Islamic radicalism. Classical Islamic political thought is, to use Christian terminology, imperial, theocratic, supersessionist, and triumphalist. Islamic radicalism today wants to revive and enforce this paradigm. Realism has no way of coping with this.

The terminal decadence of realism is typified today by the profitable but troubled realist romance with America's dubious Middle Eastern allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, surely the last century's biggest foreign policy scam. The realists have no way of understanding what's happening in the Middle East and instead throw tantrums such as the antics of Harvard's Mearsheimer and Walt and their notorious "working paper" on the "Israel lobby." Surrealistically, the paper mentions "oil" only a few times and "Saudi Arabia" not at all. Of course, protecting oil fields, and consequently oil regimes, from their enemies foreign and domestic is the whole reason we got involved with Saudi Arabia in the first place, with all the consequences with Iraq. Part of this realist outrage is the radical transformation of the Bush Jr. administration from a realist-oriented foreign policy to a neoconservative policy of crusading "democratism." The sense of betrayal is thick. But there is also the long-standing interconnection of the realist foreign policy establishment and the Saudi government, exemplified by the careers of James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. The 9/11 attacks and the second Iraq war have rendered these connections of dubious value.

Nothing changes this fact: realism is no longer up to being the key to foreign policy. It was a living reality from roughly 1690 to 1914, but in the 20th century, it has acquired a mummified, academic air. Realism today is unreal.

But having come to bury realism, let me now praise it. While realism cannot serve as a controlling strategy for American foreign policy, it must remain with us as an important secondary layer that emphasizes reality checks, a proper relationship of means and ends, getting the most for the least, and avoiding fantasies of omnipotence. With regards to military power, we can't forget another fact: the US military is the world's most powerful, but a mere 3/4 million on active service. That's less than half what is was in the 1980s, a sixth of its Vietnam-era size, and a tiny fraction of its WWII size. Its size and US military spending are the smallest as a ratio of the whole economy since 1940. Its just that there are now no other competing wealthy-country militaries to compare it against. The present size of the active-service military places strigent limits on how it can used.

The second Iraq war was a gross violation of these rules. Had the rules been observed, Iraq and Saddam would have been dealt with, but in a way very different from the Bush approach. Two cheers for realism.

UPDATE: Here's a column by George Will that typifies the conservative-realist mindset: the proper use of military force is ... military force, not nation-building or other essentially civilian projects.

It's sobering and correct to perceive the Bush administration as very far out of line with anything recognizably conservative. Neoconservatism is not conservative at all, but a liberal heresy. Hence: the "new" Republican party as a party of hyperactivist big government and a parody of modern liberalism. (It even has its own sex scandal now!) About this, more soon.

The rise of the natural resources monopoly dictatorship

It comes in different flavors, but it's here and in our faces at the UN and elsewhere: the Natural Resources Monopoly Dictatorship (NRMD). It's a widespread phenomenon in the Middle East, but it's spreading alarmingly elsewhere too: Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia.

The government controls a valuable natural resource (oil or gas typically). This sector constitutes the lion's share of the country's economy. It inverts the relationship between productive society and tax-dependent government. The government buys off the people and functions however it wishes, with no input from tax-paying voters.

The developed world can look on with concern or horror, but as long as it's using the resource, there are limits to what it can do about NRMD. OTOH, the developed world spooks itself with a false sense of doom: the NRMD does not hold a monpoly weapon ("oil weapon"), except in the short run. In the long run, the NRMD needs to sell as much as we need to buy. Roger Stern of Johns Hopkins University has analyzed this situation brilliantly in this technical economics paper (PDF download; non-technical summary here).

The solution for us is to use less of the NR that's being M'ed by the D. With oil and gas, this isn't hard. If oil- and gas-consuming countries banded together in the same way that petro-producing countries have, they could impose taxes to push their citizens out of their SUVs and "light" trucks and in the right direction. It won't do to declare "energy independence": oil and gas are fungible commodities. And there's no need for hare-brained and dubious schemes for subsidized "alternative" energy technology. If it's economical to start with, oil and gas taxes will make the technology in question attractive on price grounds alone.

And that's the point: to deny the Ds M'ing the NRs the revenue stream. Think of all the Middle Eastern mischief that could be prevented. And no Chavez buffonery at the UN (this decade's recycling of Khrushchev's shoe-banging tantrum at the UN in 1956 -- but this time, less tragedy, more farce). $75/barrel oil buys Holocaust-denial from Ahmadinejad. What would $40/barrel oil buy? Or $30/barrel? Would we even be hearing from the wacky mullah-ocracy in Iran?

Related thoughts from Tom Friedman here, and from the Washington Post.

POSTSCRIPT: The oil minister of Venezuela in the 1970s once famously referred to oil as the "devil's excrement," because of the topsy-turvy things it does to the country whose economy is addicted to selling it. But the countries buying it help things along. Here's a cute cartoon from Venezuela that underscores the point. Translation:

Chavez: "You're a devil, you smell like sulfur, you're a drunk, you're the demon, you're a genocidal Mr. Devil, you're a dictator, you're an assasin Mr. Devil, you're a ...."

Bush: "Yeah, yeah, whatever you say ... fill the tank, kid!"

Codependecy?

Middle East: Deep background

Friends want to know from where I know what I know about the Middle East (ME). My first advice: stop watching television news and treat newspapers with a large grain of salt. The latest faux-tography scandals just reinforce this point.

The Middle East's most basic problems are (1) its tribal/sectarian social structure; and (2) the curse of oil money.

1. The first means that ME countries are not societies in the Western sense, but tribal collectives lacking a "social contract" and making civilization and progress impossible. The only apparent alternative to endless Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all is dictatorship or theocracy.

2. The flow of oil out means a flow of oil money in. That money goes into the hands of elites (governmental and otherwise). It gets squandered on war and terrorism, or socked away in Swiss bank accounts. Governments also use it to buy off their populations, inverting the normal relationship between productive citizens and the tax-dependent state. Without the normal flow of money from society to state, society has no say in how the state operates. Here is one of the main reasons why the Middle East is not democratic.

American policy must be rebuilt from scratch to counter these two problems:

1. Political reform (NOT forced regime change) in promising Arab countries (like Jordan, Morocco, Gulf States) while reducing American relations with Saudi Arabia and Egypt; and

2. An international effort by oil-consuming countries to reduce demand for oil. This is not mainly an American problem (most of that oil goes to Europe and Asia), but American leadership here is nonetheless essential. The international oil market is fully flexible, and oil is a fully fungible commodity, meaning that its pointless to try to achieve "energy independence" -- the oil market in one place is completely coupled to everywhere else.

On the subject of oil money and what it does, look at Roger Stern's concise, arresting analysis of oil market power (a politically managed monopoly with artificially elevated prices) and the ME mischief it makes possible (PDF download). Here's a non-technical summary.

Take a look at JihadWatch and its DhimmiWatch page. You will learn things that the establishment media would rather not discuss about Islam and its attitude towards nonbelievers and their status under traditional Islamic law. If you want to know what a dhimmi is, think of Uncle Tom living under Islamic law, then go read DhimmiWatch. In this vein, consider these books: Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad (2005) and Ibn Warraq (pseudonym), Why I Am Not a Muslim (2003). In a related vein, check out The David Project, led by the brilliant Charles Jacobs.

The best blog on the Middle East is that of Michael Totten. It is essential reading if you want to keep up and get a flavor of what it's really like. Totten has spent the most time in Lebanon, but also a lot of time in Israel, Kurdistan, and other places. And he has a long list of links to other great blogs and resources, as well as to wonderful essays by himself and others.

Here's my own, far from exhaustive, list of essential books, with comments.

Bernard Lewis: Any book you can get, especially The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), The Jews of Islam (1984), Semites and Anti-Semites (1986), Islam and the West (1993), and What Went Wrong? (2001). The last of the polymathic giants, an unrivaled knowledge of languages and literature, one of the last century's greatest historians and Orientalists. Increasingly under attack by PC-ignorant "Middle East studies" hacks not worthy to lick his shoes. Has important blind spots -- too close to the subject in some ways, often blinds him to what Pryce-Jones writes about (see below).

Speaking of PC-ignorant academic hacks, contemplate the corruption of American academia by political correctness and Saudi oil money by following Martin Kramer's devastating study of "Middle East studies," Ivory Towers on Sand (2001).

David Fromkin: International relations faculty at Boston University, author of A Peace to End All Peace (1989), the best single book on the origins of the modern Middle East. Narrows temporal focus to 1910-1924, broadens geographic focus to all of "greater" Middle East, including central Asia (Persia, Afghanistan, Soviet "stans").

Critical insights: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and its caliphate in 1921 started the transition of the ME from an imperial-theocratic to a Western-style secular nation-state system, which transition is resisted by Islamic traditionalists and reactionaries. More than ever, now that the Cold War is over, this is THE major conflict at issue in the ME.

David Pryce-Jones: Journalist and novelist, 60-plus-year veteran of the ME, author of The Closed Circle (1989), the best single book on the culture of the Middle East. Dark, dense, long, with depressingly pessimistic conclusions, worth the long slog to get through it.

Critical points: defines like no other book the keys to the ME's tribal culture: the honor-shame system, power challenging and violent careerism built on sponsored proxyship (think Arafat, Zarqawi, Nasrallah etc.), lack of social contract, resulting in no progress possible -- hence, the "closed circle" or "zero-sum" game. How these tribal patterns interact in a toxic way with Islamic restrictions on women and religious and ethnic minorities. The noxious role played by petrowealth in creating pseudo-modern countries with the material trinkets of modernity (bought from actually modern countries), but lacking real political, social, and economic modernity.

Fouad Ajami: Now teaching at Johns Hopkins, author of two essential books on the post-1967 Middle East, The Arab Predicament (1981 and 1992) and The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1998). The best criticism of the ME is by semi-insider/semi-outsiders -- in Ajami's case, a half-Persian, half-Arab Shiite from Lebanon now living in America.

Conor Cruise O'Brien: Famous Irish diplomat, once Ireland's ambassador to the UN, got to know Israel's ambassador because "Ireland" is next to "Israel" in the alphabet, author of The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (1986). Somewhat dated and superseded by more recent scholarship, but still the best single-volume introduction.

Fareed Zakaria: I should also mention a book that I'll return to later, his The Future of Freedom (2003), one of the most important foreign policy books published since the end of the Cold War.

This generations' sharpest critics of Islam, not surprisingly, are women. Everyone suffers under the theocracy-based system of honor-shame, but women more so as a rule than men. Many of the best women authors here are Iranian. See these personal odysseys:

- Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), an astonishing best-seller
- Marjan Satrapi's Persepolis (2003) and Persepolis 2 (2004)
- Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No (2004)

And they're not all Iranian: don't miss Irshad Manji (The Trouble with Islam, 2004) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (The Caged Virgin, 2006, based on Submission, a 2004 film co-produced with director Theo van Gogh, who was murdered by an Islamic fanatic as a result). See Christopher Hitchens' tribute to Ali here.