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My first post described a few anecdotes about what a warm person Bob Lucas was, and such a great colleague. Here I describe a little bit of his intellectual influence, in a form that is I hope accessible to average people.The "rational expectations" revolution that brought down Keynesianism in the 1970s was really much larger than that. It was really the "general equilibrium" revolution. Macroeconomics until 1970 was sharply different from regular microeconomics. Economics is all about "models," complete toy economies that we construct via equations and in computer programs. You can't keep track of everything in even the most beautiful prose. Microeconomic models, and "general equilibrium" as that term was used at the time, wrote down how people behave — how they decide what to buy, how hard to work, whether to save, etc.. Then it similarly described how companies behave and how government behaves. Set this in motion and see where it all settles down; what prices and quantities result. But for macroeconomic issues, this approach was sterile. I took a lot of general equilibrium classes as a PhD student — Berkeley, home of Gerard Debreu was strong in the field. But it was devoted to proving the existence of equilibrium with more and more general assumptions, and never got around to calculating that equilibrium and what it might say about recessions and government policies. Macroeconomics, exemplified by the ISLM tradition,  inhabited a different planet. One wrote down equations for quantities rather than people, for example that "consumption" depended on "income," and investment on interest rates. Most importantly, macroeconomics treated each year as a completely separate economy. Today's consumption depended on today's income, having nothing to do with whether people expected the future to look better or worse. Economists recognized this weakness, and a vast and now thankfully forgotten literature tried fruitlessly to find "micro foundations" for Keynesian economics. But building foundations under an existing castle doesn't work. The foundations want a different castle. Bob's "islands" paper is famous, yes, for a complete model of how unexpected money might move output in the short run and not just raise inflation. But you can do that with a half a page of simple math, and Bob's paper is hard to read. It's deeper contribution, and the reason for that difficulty, is that Bob wrote out a complete "general equilibrium" model. People, companies and government each follow described rules of behavior. Those rules are derived as being the optimal thing for people and companies to do given their environment. And they are forward-looking. People think about how to make their whole lives as pleasant as possible, companies to maximize the present value of profits. Prices adjust so supply = demand. Bob said, by example, that we should do macroeconomics by writing down general equilibrium models. General equilibrium had also been abandoned by the presumption that it only studies perfect economies. Macroeconomics is really about studying how things go wrong, how "frictions" in the economy, such as the "sticky" wages underlying Keynesian thinking, can produce undesirable and unnecessary recessions. But here too, Bob requires us to write down the frictions explicitly. In his model, people don't see the aggregate price level right away, and do the best they can with local information. That is the real influence of the paper  and Bob's real influence in the profession. (Current macroeconomic modeling reflects the fact that the Fed sets interest rates, and does not control the money supply.) You can see this influence in Tom Sargent's textbooks. The first textbook has an extensive treatment of Keynesian economics. It's about the most comprehensible treatment there is — but it is no insult to Tom to say that in that book you can see how Keynesian economics really doesn't hang together. Tom describes how, the minute he learned from Bob how to to general equilibrium, everything changed instantly. Rational expectations was, like any other advance, a group effort. But what made Bob the leader was that he showed the rest how to do general equilibrium. This is the heart of my characterization that Bob is the most important macroeconomist of the 20th century. Yes, Keynes and Friedman had more policy impact, and Friedman's advocacy of free markets in microeconomic affairs is the most consequential piece of 20th century economics. But within macroeconomics, there is before Lucas and after Lucas.  Everyone today does economics the Lucas way. Even the most new-Keynesian article follows the Lucas rules of how to do economics. Once you see models founded on complete descriptions of people, businesses, government, and frictions, you can see the gaping holes in standard ISLM models. This is some of his stinging critique, such as "after Keynesian macroeconomics." Sure, if people's income goes up they are likely to consume more, as the Keynesians posited. But interest rates, wages, and expectations of the future also affect consumption, which Keynesians leave out. "Cross equations restrictions" and "budget constraints" are missing. Now, the substantive prediction that monetary policy can only move the real economy via unexpected money supply growth did not bear out, and both subsequent real business cycles and new-Keynesianism brought persistent responses. But the how we do macroeconomics part is the enduring contribution. The paper still had enduring practical lessons. Lucas, together with Friedman and Phelps brought down the Phillips curve. This curve, relating inflation to unemployment, had been (and sadly, remains) at the center of macroeconomics. It is a statistical correlation, but like many correlations people got enthused with it and started reading it as stable relationship, and indeed a causal one. Raise inflation and you can have less unemployment. Raise unemployment in order to lower inflation. The Fed still thinks about it in that causal way. But Lucas, Friedman, and Phelps bring a basic theory to it, and thereby realize it is just a correlation, which will vanish if you push on it. Rich guys wear Rolexes. That doesn't mean that giving everyone a Rolex will have a huge "multiplier" effect and make us all rich. This is the essence of the "Lucas critique" which is a second big contribution that lay readers can easily comprehend. If you push on correlations they will vanish. Macroeconomics was dedicated to the idea that policy makers can fool people. Monetary policy might try to boost output in a recession with a surprise bit of money growth. That will wok once or twice. But like the boy who cried wolf, people will catch on, come to expect higher money growth in recessions and the trick won't work anymore. Bob showed here that all the "behavioral" relations of Keynesian models will fall apart if you exploit them for policy, or push on them, though they may well hold as robust correlations in the data. The "consumption function" is the next great example. Keynesians noticed that when income rises people consume more, so write a consumption function relating consumption to income. But, following Friedman's great work   on consumption, we know that correlation isn't always true in the data. The relation between consumption and income is different across countries (about one for one) than it is over time (less than one for one). And we understand that with Friedman's theory: People, trying to do their best over their whole lives don't follow mechanical rules. If they know income will fall in the future, they consume a lot less today, no matter what today's current income. Lucas showed that people who behave this sensible way will follow a Keynesian consumption function, given the properties of income overt the business cycle. You will see a Keynesian consumption function. Econometric estimates and tests will verify a Keynesian consumption function. Yet if you use the model to change policies, the consumption function will evaporate. This paper is devastating. Large scale Keynesian models had already been constructed, and used for forecasting and policy simulation. It's natural. The model says, given a set of policies (money supply, interest rates, taxes, spending) and other shocks, here is where the economy goes. Well, then, try different policies and find ones that lead to better outcomes. Bob shows the models are totally useless for that effort. If the policy changes, the model will change. Bob also showed that this was happening in real time. Supposedly stable parameters drifted around. (This one is also very simple mathematically. You can see the point instantly. Bob always uses the minimum math necessary. If other papers are harder, that's by necessity not bravado.) This devastation is sad in a way. Economics moved to analyzing policies in much simpler, more theoretically grounded, but less realistic models. Washington policy analysis sort of gave up. The big models lumber on, the Fred's FRBUS for example, but nobody takes the policy predictions that seriously. And they don't even forecast very well. For example, in the 2008 stimulus, the CEA was reduced to assuming a back of the envelope 1.5 multiplier, this 40 years after the first large scale policy models were constructed. Bob always praised the effort of the last generation of Keynesians to write explicit quantitative models, to fit them to data, and to make numerical predictions of various policies. He hoped to improve that effort. It didn't work out that way, but not by intention. This affair explains a lot of why economists flocked to the general equilibrium camp. Behavioral relationships, like what fraction of an extra dollar of income you consume, are not stable over time or as policy changes. But one hopes that preferences, — how impatient you are, how much you are willing to save more to get a better rate of return — and technology — how much a firm can produce with given capital and labor — do not change when policy changes. So, write models for policy evaluation at the level of preferences and technology, with people and companies at the base, not from behavioral relationships that are just correlations. Another deep change: Once you start thinking about macroeconomics as intertemporal economics — the economics that results from people who make decisions about how to consume over time, businesses make decisions about how to produce this year and next — and once you see that their expectations of what will happen next year, and what policies will be in place next year are crucial, you have to think of policy in terms of rules, and regimes, not isolated decisions. The Fed often asks economists for advice, "should we raise the funds rate?" Post Lucas macroeconomists answer that this isn't a well posed question. It's like saying "should we cry wolf?" The right question is, should we start to follow a rule, a regime, should we create an institution, that regularly and reliably raises interest rates in a situation like the current one? Decisions do not live in isolation. They create expectations and reputations. Needless to say, this fundamental reality has not soaked in to policy institutions. And that answer (which I have tried at Fed advisory meetings) leads to glazed eyes. John Taylor's rule has been making progress for 30 years trying to bridge that conceptual gap, with some success.  This was, and remains, extraordinarily contentious. 50 years later, Alan Blinder's book, supposedly about policy, is really one long snark about how terrible Lucas and his followers are, and how we should go back to the Keynesian models of the 1960s. Some of that contention comes back to basic philosophy.  The program applies standard microeconomics: derive people's behaviors as the best thing they can do given their circumstances. If people pick the best combination of apples and bananas when they shop, then also describe consumption today vs. tomorrow as the best they can do given interest rates. But a lot of economics doesn't like this "rational actor" assumption. It's not written in stone, but it has been extraordinarily successful. And it imposes a lot of discipline. There are a thousand arbitrary ways to be irrational.  Somehow though, a large set of economists are happy to write down that people pick fruit baskets optimally, but don't apply the same rationality to decisions over time, or in how they think about the future. But "rational expectations" is really just a humility condition. It says, don't write models in which the predictions of the model are different from the expectations in the model. If you do, if your model is right, people will read the model and catch on, and the model won't work anymore. Don't assume you economist (or Fed chair) are so much less behavioral than the people in your model. Don't base policy on an attempt to fool the little peasants over and over again. It does not say that people are big super rational calculating machines. It just says that they eventually catch on. Some of the contentiousness is also understandable by career concerns. Many people had said "we should do macro seriously like general equilibrium." But it isn't easy to do. Bob had to teach himself, and get the rest of us to learn, a range of new mathematical  and modeling tools to be able to write down interesting general equilibrium models. A 1970 Keynesian can live just knowing how to solve simple systems of linear equations, and run regressions.  To follow Bob and the rational expectations crowd, you had to learn linear time-series statistics, dynamic programming, and general equilibrium math. Bob once described how tough the year was that it took him to learn functional analysis and dynamic programming. The models themselves consisted of a mathematically hard set of constructions. The older generation either needed to completely retool, fade away, or fight the revolution. Some good summary words: Bob's economics uses"rational expectations," or at least forward-looking and model-consistent expectations. Economics becomes "intertemporal," not "static" (one year at a time). Economics is "stochastic" as well as "dynamic," we can treat uncertainty over time, not just economies in which everyone knows the future perfectly. It applies "general equilibrium" to macroeconomics. And I've just gotten to the beginning of the 1970s. When I got to Chicago in the 1980s, there was a feeling of "well, you just missed the party." But it wasn't true. The 1980s as well were a golden age. The early rational expectations work was done, and the following real business cycles were the rage in macro. But Bob's dynamic programming, general equilibrium tool kit was on a rampage all over dynamic economics. The money workshop was one creative use of dynamic programs and interetempboral tools after another one, ranging from taxes to Thai villages (Townsend). I'll mention two. Bob's consumption model is at the foundation of modern asset pricing. Bob parachuted in, made the seminal contribution, and then left finance for other pursuits. The issue at the time was how to generalize the capital asset pricing model. Economists understood that some stocks pay higher returns than others, and that they must do so to compensate for risk. The understood that the risk is, in general terms, that the stock falls in some sense of bad times. But how to measure "bad times?" The CAPM uses the market, other models use somewhat nebulous other portfolios. Bob showed us that at least in the purest theory, that stocks must pay higher average returns if they fall when consumption falls. (Breeden also constructed a consumption model in parallel, but without this "endowment economy" aspect of Bob's) This is the purest most general theory, and all the others are (useful) specializations. My asset pricing book follows. The genius here was to turn it all around. Finance had sensibly built up from portfolio theory, like supply and demand: Given returns, what stocks do you buy, and how much to you save vs. consume? Then, markets have to clear find the stock prices, and thus returns, given which people will buy exactly the amount that's for sale and consume what is produced. That's hard. (Technically, finding the vector of prices that clears markets is hard. Yes, N equations in N unknowns, but they're nonlinear and N is big.)  Bob instead imagined that consumption is fixed at each moment in time, like a desert island  in which so many coconuts fall each day and you can't store them or plant them. Then, you can just read prices from people's preferences. This gives the same answer as if the consumption you assume is fixed had derived from a complex production economy. You don't have to solve for prices that equate supply and demand. Brilliantly, though prices cause consumption to individual people, consumption causes prices in aggregate. This is part of Bob's contribution to the hard business of actually computing quantitative models in the stochastic dynamic general equilibrium tradition. Bob, with Nancy Stokey also took the new tools to the theory of taxation. (Bob Barro also was a founder of this effort in the late 1980s.) You can see the opportunity: we just learned how to handle dynamic (overt time, expectations of tomorrow matter to what you do today) stochastic (but there is uncertainty about what will happen tomorrow) economics (people make explicit optimizing decisions) for macro. How about taking that same approach to taxes? The field of dynamic public finance is born. Bob and Nancy, like Barro, show that it's a good idea for governments to borrow and then repay, so as to spread the pain of taxes evenly over time. But not always. When a big crisis comes, it is useful to execute a "state contingent default." The big tension of Lucas-Stokey (and now, all) dynamic public finance: You don't want any capital taxes for the incentive effects. If you tax capital, people invest less, and you just get less capital. But once people have invested, a capital tax grabs revenue for the government with no economic distortion. Well, that is, if you can persuade them you'll never do it again. (Do you see expectations, reputations, rules, regimes, wolves in how we think of policy?) Lucas and Stoney say, do it only very rarely to balance the disincentive of a bad reputation with the need to raise revenue in once a century calamities. Bob went on, of course, to be one of the founders of modern growth theory. I always felt he deserved a second Nobel for this work. He's absolutely right. Once you look at growth, it's hard to think about anything else. The average Indian lives on $2,000 per year. The average American, $60,000. That was $15,000 in 1950. Nothing else comes close. I only work on money and inflation because that's where I think I have answers. For us mortals, good research proceeds where you think you have an answer, not necessarily from working on Big Questions. Bob brilliantly put together basic facts and theory to arrive at the current breakthrough. Once you get out of the way, growth does not come from more capital, or even more efficiency. It comes from more and better ideas. I remember being awed by his first work for cutting through the morass and assembling the facts that only look salient in retrospect. A key one: Interest rates in poor countries are not much higher than they are in rich countries. Poor countries have lots of workers, but little capital. Why isn't the return on scarce capital enormous, with interest rates in the hundreds of percent, to attract more capital to poor countries? Well, you sort of know the answer, that capital is not productive in those countries.  Productivity is low, meaning those countries don't make use of better ideas on how to organize production.  Ideas too are produced by economics, but, as Paul Romer crystallized, they are fundamentally different from other goods. If I produce an idea, you can use it without hurting my use of it. Yes, you might drive down the monopoly profits I gain from my intellectual property. But if you use my Pizza recipe, that's not like using my car. I can still make Pizza, where if you use my car I can't go anywhere. Thus, the usual free market presumption that we will produce enough ideas is false. (Don't jump too quickly to advocate government subsides for ideas. You have to find the right ideas, and governments aren't necessarily good at subsidizing that search.) And the presumption that intellectual property should be preserved forever is also false. Once produced it is socially optimal for everyone to use it. I won't go on. It's enough to say that Bob was as central to the creation of idea-based growth theory, which dominates today, as he was to general equilibrium macro, which also dominates today.Bob is an underrated empiricist. Bob's work on the size distribution of firms (great tweet summary by Luis Garicano) similarly starts from basic facts of the size distribution of firms and the lack of relationship between size and growth rates. It's interesting how we can go on for years with detailed econometric estimates of models that don't get basic facts right. I loved Bob's paper on money demand for the Carnegie Rochester conference series. An immense literature had tried to estimate money demand functions with dynamics, and was pretty confusing. It made a basic mistake, by looking at first differences rather than levels and thereby isolating the noise and drowning out the signal. Bob made a few plots, basically rediscovered cointegration all on his own, and made sense of it all. And don't forget the classic international comparison of inflation-output relations. Countries with volatile inflation have less Phillips curve tradeoff, just as his islands model featuring confusion between relative prices and the price level predicts. One last note to young scholars. There is a tendency today to value people by the number of papers they produce, and how quickly they rise through the ranks. Read Bob's CV. He wrote about one paper a year, starting quite late in life. But, as Aesop said, they were lions. In his Nobel prize speech, Bob also passed on that he and his Nobel-winning generation at Chicago always felt they were in some backwater, where the high prestige stuff was going on at Harvard and MIT. You never know when it might be a golden age. And the AER rejected his islands paper (as well as Akerlof's lemons). If you know it's good, revise and try again. I will miss his brilliant papers as much as his generous personality. Update: See Ivan Werning's excellent "Lucas Miracles" for an appreciation by a real theorist. 

Campaigning for president in 2020, Joe Biden promised to resume Barack Obama's policy of normalizing relations with Cuba "in large part." But Democrats lost big in Florida, partly because Cuban American voters made a sharp turn to the right. That setback made the Biden White House reluctant to reverse the draconian economic sanctions Donald Trump imposed on the island, despite a mounting humanitarian crisis.As foreign policy, the results have been counter-productive. The Trump-Biden sanctions have catalyzed the largest migration crisis since 1959, with nearly 500,000 Cubans arriving in the United States in the past two years. The sanctions have angered Latin American and European allies, driven Cuba closer to U.S. global rivals Russia and China, and done nothing to improve human rights or the prospects for a democratic opening. Such are the consequences of foreign policy becoming a domestic political football.Sixteen elections and countingAs I outline in a new brief for the Quincy Institute, few countries have figured as prominently in U.S. elections over the years as Cuba. From the first campaign after the 1959 triumph of the revolution to the 2020 contest, candidates have raised the issue either to criticize their opponent for being soft on foreign policy, or to appeal to Cuban American voters in the battleground state of Florida. In election years, sitting presidents have frequently tightened sanctions or backed away from diplomatic engagement to boost their party's electoral prospects:In 1960, Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed the first trade sanctions on Cuba, urged on by Richard Nixon;In 1964, Lyndon Johnson abandoned John F. Kennedy's incipient dialogue with Havana, and successfully pressured the Organization of American States to adopt mandatory sanctions;In 1976, Gerald Ford halted Henry Kissinger's normalization negotiations when Ronald Reagan attacked the talks as appeasement;In 1980, Jimmy Carter back away from normalization when Zbigniew Brzezinski convinced him that it made him look soft;In 1992, George H. W. Bush signed the Cuban Democracy Act after Bill Clinton endorsed it.In 1996, Clinton signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (Helms-Burton) at the urging of White House political advisers;In 2004, George W. Bush imposed limits on travel and family remittances to defuse criticism from Cuban American hard-liners;In 2020, Donald Trump did the same in hopes of mobilizing the same Cuban American constituency.In campaigns from the 1960s to the 1980s, Cuba was framed as a proxy for the Soviet Union, and a tough policy toward Cuba was seen as the hallmark of a strong foreign policy generally. No national politician wanted to be branded "soft on Cuba." The collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War coincided with the emergence of Cuban Americans as a significant voting bloc, shifting how U.S. presidential candidates dealt with the issue. Instead of focusing Cuba as a national security issue, candidates from the 1990s onward appealed to Cuban American voters on issues of democracy and human rights.Before 1992, Democrats saw Florida as solidly Republican, but Bill Clinton aimed to compete there by appealing to Cuban Americans with a Cuba policy tougher than George H. W. Bush's. Although Clinton did not carry Florida in 1992, he did in 1996, establishing Florida as a battleground state. Al Gore's narrow loss in 2000 after Clinton's Justice Department returned six-year old Elián González to his father in Cuba convinced Democrats that Cuba was the third rail of Florida politics.Obama broke with this conventional wisdom in 2008 by appealing to moderate Cuban Americans with a policy of engagement. To the surprise of many, he won half the Cuban American vote in 2012, setting the stage for his dramatic decision to normalize relations with Havana in 2014. Then Trump, in a bid to mobilize Cuban American conservatives, turned back the clock, undoing most of what Obama had achieved. A shift to the right in Cuban American opinion in response to Trump's leadership and a new wave of disaffected immigrants reconfigured politics in south Florida, once again triggering Democrats' fear of Florida.Biden has responded with a bizarre hybrid policy, relaxing some of Trump's sanctions but leaving most in place—an impossible compromise between Obama's policy of coexistence and Trump's policy of regime change. The administration's watchword has been to be "tough on the regime" while "supporting the Cuban people" — as if it were possible to bankrupt the government without immiserating the population. The electoral landscapeMost of the electoral map of the United States is pre-determined. In 2020, there were only eight states in which the winner's margin of victory was less than 5 percentage points, totaling 123 electoral votes. Apart from these battleground states, Democrats begin the race likely to win 226 of the 270 electoral votes needed for majority; Republicans begin with 187. To win the election, Republicans have to win more than two-thirds of the electoral votes in the battlegrounds. Florida's importance is magnified by its size. If Republicans lose Florida's 29 electoral votes, they can only afford to lose one other small swing state.This is why Republicans see Florida as a must-win state and Democrats continue to contest it, despite their flagging prospects there. Ironically, despite the intensity with which both parties have focused on the state for the past 30 years, Florida has rarely been decisive in determining who wins the White House. Since 1960, Florida's electoral votes have made the difference only twice — in 2000 (the infamous Bush v. Gore contest), and 2004. Moreover, Cuban Americans have rarely decided the outcome in Florida. Prior to 1992, there were so few Cuban American voters that the margins of victory in the presidential election were frequently larger than the entire Cuban American electorate. Since then, Florida elections have been close enough that Cuban Americans could claim to have provided the decisive margin in just three contests: 1992, 2000, and 2012. In short, in 16 U.S. elections since Fidel Castro rode into Havana in 1959, there has been only a single occasion when Cuban American votes decided Florida and Florida decided the presidency: 2000.The national interestA Cuba policy that serves the national interests of the United States rather than the parochial interests of conservative Cuban Americans in Miami, or the political fortunes of would-be presidents, would start by acknowledging that the policy of hostility is not going to depose the Cuban government — something that ought to be self-evident after 65 years of trying in vain. A realist approach would identify and build on common interests, while managing areas of disagreement like human rights. In the field of national security, the United States and Cuba share a common interest in combatting transnational crime — narcotics, human trafficking, and terrorism — and on a wide range of other issues as well — transnational problems that near-neighbors have to tackle together, like environmental protection, the impacts of climate change and public health. Finally, the United States and Cuba have deep cultural ties that have grown more profound as the Cuban American diaspora has expanded.In 2024, a policy like this seems a bridge too far, but during the last two years of the Obama presidency, the United States took the first steps down this path. The progress made in just 24 months was substantial, though not without its setbacks. Asked what made Obama's dramatic break with past possible after so many decades of hostility, Ben Rhodes, who led the U.S. negotiating team, gave a surprisingly simple answer: leadership and political will. The normalization of relations with Cuba happened, he said, because it was something the president was determined to do.For a deeper dive into how the electoral ambitions of U.S. politicians have shaped policy toward Cuba from 1960 to 2024, see Professor LeoGrande's new Quincy Institute paper, Cuba's Role in U.S. Presidential Elections.

Published in partnership with The Intercept.Sen. Robert Mendendez (D-N.J.) is fighting charges that he accepted money in exchange for assisting foreign governments. That legal defense is being paid in part by donors with links to a former terrorist organization, a sign of the senator's need for fast cash.In September, federal prosecutors hit Menendez and his wife with a raft of bribery charges and, more recently, obstruction of justice. (Menendez and his wife pleaded not guilty to the charges.) With a trial scheduled for May, Menendez stands to rack up staggering legal fees. His legal defense fund, according to public disclosures, had already spent $373,223 as of the end of January.Much of the cash in the fund — he has raised over $400,000 — comes from sources one might anticipate. New Jersey and New York donors with various business and political interests in his home state, including the real estate firm led by Jared Kushner's family, have given the fund money. There are, however, many lesser-known donors. One is Ahmad Moeinimanesh, an electronic engineer from Northern California. Another is Hossein Afshari, also from California.At first blush, these smaller contributions to Menendez Legal Defense Fund might appear to come from a smattering of individual donors. An analysis of the donor rolls by Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, however, shows that about 15 percent of the people who gave to Menendez — including Moeinimanesh and Afshari — are linked to an Iranian exile group called the Mojahedin e-Khalq, or MEK.Menendez and the MEK have a relationship going back a decade. Shortly after the group was removed from a State Department list of "foreign terror organizations," Menendez advocated for the MEK following an attack on its members by the Iraqi government.Menendez's elevation of the group as a viable alternative to the Islamic Republic continued since then. The senator met with its leader, Maryam Rajavi, last May and heaped praise on the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a so-called political wing indistinguishable from the MEK, at a 2022 Capitol Hill event organized by the Organization of Iranian American Communities, a group allied with the MEK."Let me start off by thanking the Organization of Iranian Communities for putting together today's event on Capitol Hill," said Menendez. "I'm thrilled to see so many Iranian Americans from across the country, and I'd like to thank and recognize the National Council of Resistance of Iran for their commitment to elevating your voices, the voices of Iranians inside of Iran and constantly advocating for the freedom of the Iranian people."Moeinimanesh, the chair of OIAC's California chapter, who contributed $2,500, was one of a dozen Iranian Americans with links to the MEK or its affiliates that gave to Menendez's fund. (Neither Moeinimanesh nor OIAC responded to a request for comment.) Afshari gave $1,000. "Giving money to people I think are nice is not illegal," Afshari told Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, of his contributions to Menendez's legal fund. "He is a man with principle and integrity and I don't believe all of the negative things some media put out."In total, MEK-affiliated individuals made up approximately 5 percent of the total funds raised, over $20,000, by the end of January. (Seven other donors, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the OIAC, and Menendez's office did not respond to requests for comment.)Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept established links between the MEK and most of these donors by cross-referencing their names with signatories on OIAC and National Council of Resistance of Iran letters and affiliations. Court records linked Afshari to the MEK.Menendez and the MEKMenendez's perch atop the Senate Foreign Relations Committee made him one of the most influential Democrats on foreign policy. He was an attractive friend for Egypt, one of the two foreign governments now accused of bribing him for political favors. The dramatic federal indictment claimed cash, gold, and expensive gifts from Egypt were linked to a weapons sale and the release of a hold on $300 million in aid to Cairo. An updated indictment in January alleged that Menendez also accepted Formula One tickets and other gifts from Qatar in exchange for favors.The sway Menendez held in Washington — and his hawkish stances on Iran — also made him a valuable ally for the MEK. The group had made an arduous journey from its early days as a student-run radical Marxist group in the late 1960s. Anti-monarchists, the MEK fought on the winning side of the 1979 Iranian Revolution but faced a crackdown as the young Islamic Republic consolidated power. Forced into exile, the MEK fought on the Iraqi side of the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s, giving rise to antipathy against the group inside its home country.The exile in Iraq also brought an inward turn, leading the Rand Corporation to conclude that the MEK, due to its aggrandizement of its late-leader Massoud Rajavi and his wife, Maryam, was a "cult." Human Rights Watch, Rand, and The Intercept have reported that MEK leaders abused group members' human rights.In 1997, the MEK was placed on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations for, among other things, its role in the killing of six Americans in Iran in the 1970s and an attempted attack on the Iranian mission to the United Nations in 1992. The designation would last for a decade and a half. Following a successful lobbying campaign by its supporters in the U.S., the group won a major victory when it was removed from the American terror rolls in 2012.The shift in the U.S. stance meant American politicians, including Menendez, could grow close to the militant outfit without controversy about the terror label. Prominent figures were more regularly seen speaking at the group's annual conference outside Paris, casting the MEK and Maryam Rajavi as a viable political force within Iran if the Islamic Republic were overthrown. The appearances were often well remunerated; former Vice President Mike Pence, for example, received $430,000 from the MEK following the end of the Trump administration.Though he had been quiet on the MEK while it was designated as a terror organization, once it was delisted Menendez consistently expressed concern for the group and its members. In 2013, the MEK began a frantic lobbying push in Washington after its encampment in Iraq — the former base from which it mounted military attacks — came under attack from Iranian-backed groups; the Iraqi government, which was close to Iran, was unwilling or unable to guarantee MEK members' security.Menendez, a top recipient of campaign contributions from donors with ties to the MEK, stepped in. A month after the attack, he held up a sale of Apache helicopters to Iraq that were meant to be part of efforts to push back the Islamic State group. Speaking at a 2014 MEK rally in Paris, Menendez said, "I told Prime Minister Maliki" — Nouri al-Maliki, of Iraq — "in person last year that his commitment to the safety and security of the MEK members at Camp Liberty is a critical factor in my future support for any assistance to Iraq."Menendez has continued to address MEK convenings and speaks about the group in terms hinting at accepting its self-image as a government-in-exile. And he is quick to point out that he is a friend to the MEK. In a video message to the OIAC in 2021, Menendez wished the group a happy Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and reiterated his support for their work. "You know, that you have friends in Congress and throughout the U.S. government, as well as a host of international NGOs who will continue to shine a light on these abuses" — by the Iranian government — "and continue to press for accountability," Menendez said. "We will continue highlighting the plight of Iran's people at the regime's expense."Now, Menendez also appears to have friends among the MEK who are willing to help him with his plight — at their own expense.

It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry in response to recent press reports suggesting that the Biden administration is gearing up for a "sustained bombing campaign" against the Houthis in Yemen. Unsurprisingly, the initial coalition strikes against the Houthis apparently did not destroy the Houthi arsenal being launched at commercial vessels in the Red Sea.As was the case in the great jihadi hunt across Southwest Asia stretching over nearly a quarter century, the United States today finds itself at war in a conflict with no defined political objective and a clearly unachievable military objective against an enemy that is nested in a complex political and strategic circumstance that is completely unfamiliar to the United States. Sound familiar?It is also a war with no apparent timeline in which the application of force is linked to ill-defined benchmarks, suggesting that we could launch our bombs and missiles indefinitely or until we run out of ammunition — to no strategic purpose. Have we learned nothing from our follies of the last 25 years in which we proved incapable of clearly relating ends, ways, and means in making decisions on when and under what circumstances to use force? For those states that can afford them, standoff weapons and bombs have become the preferred method of policing the international system. Yet it's hard to remember any of these strikes having any sort of lasting positive impact once the headlines and videos faded. Strangely, these tools of war maintain a hold on government and the popular imagination as some sort of "decisive" action that curiously demonstrates strength, commitment, and resolve.The reality is that strike warfare — long range strikes by planes and missiles — has rarely achieved its advertised political and strategic consequence. Yet it remains a dangerous, drug-like chimera to countries like the United States desperately searching for some sort of easy, low-cost way of maintaining global influence, control, and primacy in a chaotic world. Like all drugs, the initial rush feels great, but the long-range addiction is, in the end, far more destructive, dangerous, and difficult (if not impossible) to kick.We tell ourselves that the state/bad guy on the receiving end (in this case the Houthis) will feel the wrath of our (duly proportionate) strikes and reconsider continuing their attacks. Yet, of course, the Houthis in public pronouncements seem to have welcomed the chance to start shooting directly at the United States. Moreover, we have limited knowledge of the Houthi anti-ship weapon arsenal in its entirety, let alone the political motivations that surround their own use of force. The truth is we have no knowledge or understanding of whether and under what circumstances the Houthis will cease fire, but blithely assume that our missiles and bombs will make them behave. The history of America's fetishOpen-ended military strikes regrettably have become an ill-considered American fetish. We told ourselves the same thing in December 1998, in the three-day fusillade against Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox, when Washington wanted to stress its disapproval of Saddam Hussein's recalcitrance toward UN weapons inspectors. And, of course, Desert Fox was really just the exclamation point on a campaign of long-range strikes during the 1990s that sought to control the Iraqi dictator's non-existent WMD programs.My favorite strike of the 1990s was the 1996 cruise missile strike to warn Saddam off attacking the Kurds in northern Iraq. He did not. But the strategic consequences of those strikes went unrecognized at the time, and they had little to do with Saddam. Following those strikes, the U.S. took on the role of protecting the Kurds and tacitly endorsed their dream of statehood — a decision that today continues to shape the region in ways that may or may not support our interests. In the end, the era of the 1990s culminating in Desert Fox proved to be little else but the bridge to the next phase of the U.S. war on Iraq.We told ourselves the same thing in the opening phases of the shock and awe campaign of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as we blasted away in our creative targeting against Saddam's armies under the rubric of "shock and awe" and "effects-based operations." Sure enough, Saddam's armies indeed melted away from our initial bombing and our advancing armies, only to regroup and morph into something much more dangerous and deadly that is still shaping the landscape of the Middle East today.We told ourselves that same thing in Afghanistan, as we unleashed a fusillade of strikes called in by CIA jawbreaker teams that sent the Taliban scurrying over the border into Pakistan in 2001 to rest and refit. Once they had done that, they slipped back across the border to resume the war — a conflict they would eventually win 20 years later — forcing the United States to retreat and leaving the Taliban in control of the country.We told ourselves the same thing in Libya in 2011, when we believed that a few well-placed missiles and bombs would enable a peaceful transition of power from Qadafi to someone more amenable to, well, us. Of course, as was the case in Iraq, the strikes were only the opening round in an ongoing struggle for political power and authority that continues to this day.As was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, the second-order effects of the strikes in Libya ended up being of far greater strategic consequences than was anticipated at the time. The current Biden national security team, which engineered these strikes, obviously learned nothing from the experience.We've told ourselves the same thing in the global war on terror, where we have sent our robots and special forces hunting for sought-after "high value targets" all over the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. We have surely rained death and destruction on these enemies (and killed lots of innocent people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time) with our Hellfire missiles, but did we win any of these wars?Yet we remain addicted Despite these uncertain results and even colossal failures, we remain addicted to strike warfare, telling ourselves that we can police the politics on the ground by dropping bombs from on high. The reality is, of course, different. Targeting people and property with high explosives tends to make them angry and fight harder. Just ask the Houthis, who have endured years of U.S.-sponsored and supported airstrikes by the Saudis and others in the Yemeni civil war. Obviously, the Houthis were not bombed into submission.Therein lies the strategic dilemma for the West, which has invested billions in the strike, information, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities designed to blow things up at long range with little advertised collateral damage. The revolution in military affairs (and billions of taxpayer dollars) indeed delivered the strike complex — much to the delight of political leaders, who saw in it a low-cost substitute for sending armies to the four corners of the globe to police local political disputes. As described above, this is largely a myth.The Houthis have indicated they'll stop shooting when the Gaza War ends. Perhaps Secretary Blinken should stop by Sana'a on his next trip to the region for consultations. Even more importantly, maybe the Biden Administration should listen to the Houthis and others and take decisive steps to end the war in Gaza instead of becoming enmeshed in the conflict's wider fires to no strategic purpose.Surrounded by the wreckage around the world wrought by strikes stretching back over half a century, you'd think that it was time for us to get into the rehab center and confront our addiction, yet this latest round of strikes tells us that our habit depressingly remains as strong as ever.

Was Deutschlands Politiker, Bildungsexperten und Verbände zu den historisch schlechten PISA-Ergebnissen sagen.





Die Präsidentin der Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK), Berlins Bildungssenatorin Katharina Günther-Wünsch (CDU), nannte die PISA-Ergebnisse "besorgniserregend". Eine zunehmend
heterogene Schülerschaft stelle das Schulsystem und auch die Lehrkräfte vor enorme Herausforderungen. Zudem zeigten sich weiterhin die Auswirkungen der pandemiebedingten Einschränkungen und
Schulschließungen. "Und wir stehen vor der Herausforderung, sicherzustellen, dass jede Schule die notwendigen Mittel erhält, um eine hochwertige Bildung zu gewährleisten. Dies umfasst nicht nur
finanzielle Ressourcen, sondern auch die Unterstützung durch qualifizierte Lehrkräfte und zeitgemäße Lehrmaterialien." Alle seien sich einig, dass es jetzt vor allem auf die Stärkung der
Basiskompetenzen ankommt, und das möglichst frühzeitig.



 



Als "besorgniserregend" stufte auch der parlamentarische Staatssekretär im BMBF, Jens Brandenburg (FDP) die PISA-Befunde ein. Die Daten zeigten ein generelles Absinken des
Leistungsniveaus. Der Zusammenhang von sozialer Herkunft und Bildungserfolg sei in Deutschland nach wie vor stark, gerade auch im Vergleich mit anderen OECD-Staaten. "Wir brauchen dringend eine
Trendwende und müssen die Anstrengungen erhöhen, um die Grundkompetenzen aller Schülerinnen und Schüler zu stärken. Und wir brauchen dringend eine gezielte Förderung für die sozial
benachteiligten Kinder und Jugendlichen." Mit dem Startchancen-Programm das Bundesbildungsministerium etwa 4.000 Schulen mit einem hohen Anteil sozial benachteiligter Schülerinnen und Schüler
besonders stärken. "Bis zum Ende der Programmlaufzeit wollen wir den Anteil derjenigen, die an den Startchancen-Schulen die Mindeststandards in Lesen, Schreiben und Rechnen verfehlen,
halbieren." 



 



Die Vorsitzende der grünen Bundestagsfraktion, Katharina Dröge, und die bildungspolitische Sprecherin Nina Stahr bezeichneten die Ergebnisse als "erneutes
Warnsignal für unser Bildungssystem. Nicht nur für die persönliche Entwicklung der Kinder und Jugendlichen sind die Daten alarmierend. Auch für den Wirtschaftsstandort Deutschland sind sie von
hoher Bedeutung, denn die Schüler*innen von heute sind die Fachkräfte von morgen." Statt konjunktureller Debatten über Bildung brauche es eine gemeinsame bildungspolitische Strategie von
Bund, Ländern und Kommunen mit gesamtstaatlichen Bildungszielen. "Diese muss unter enger Einbeziehung von Zivilgesellschaft und Wissenschaft erarbeitet werden. Es ist wichtig, dass die
Bildungsministerin diesen Prozess steuert und die Beteiligten an einen Tisch bringt." Nötig sei zudem eine ergebnisoffene Debatte über die Zukunft des Bildungsföderalismus. 



 



Der Leiter des ifo Zentrums für Bildungsökonomik, Ludger Wößmann, sagte, einen derartigen Rückgang der Bildungsergebnisse hat es noch nie gegeben. "Mittlerweile sind die
Leistungen sogar unter das Niveau gefallen, das vor gut 20 Jahren den ersten PISA-Schock ausgelöst hat. Der Rückgang von 25 PISA-Punkten, wie wir ihn gerade in Mathematik gesehen haben, kostet
Deutschland langfristig rund 14 Billionen Euro an Wirtschaftsleistung bis zum Ende des Jahrhunderts." Die Verbesserung der schulischen Ergebnisse müsse in Politik, Bildungsverwaltung,
Schulen und Familien Vorrang haben.



 



"Wir brauchen einen fast schon revolutionären Neuanfang in unserem Bildungswesen", forderte Arbeitgeberpräsident Rainer Dulger. "PISA 2022 dokumentiert die erschreckenden
Ergebnisse der Bildungspolitik. Wenn die Verantwortlichen jetzt nicht umgehend handeln, ist ein Kompetenzverlust nicht mehr aufzuholen", sagte der Präsident des Bundesverbands der Deutschen
Arbeitgeberverbände (BDA). Die bisherigen Bildungsstandards, aber auch die Ausbildung der Lehrkräfte müssten auf den Prüfstand, MINT-Kompetenzen müssten als Zukunftskompetenzen gezielter
gefördert, die Digitalisierung an den Schulen verlässlich und langfristig gesichert werden. "Der Ganztag an Schulen sollte gezielt zur individuellen Förderung genutzt werden. Das sind wir unseren
Kindern schuldig." 



 



In einer gemeinsamen Pressemitteilung forderten IG Metall und der Arbeitgeberverband Gesamtmetall, Schulen müssten Priorität bekommen. "Bildung muss aus den Sonntagsreden raus und rein in echtes
Handeln", sagte Gesamtmetall-Hauptgeschäftsführer Oliver Zander. "Es ist unverzeihlich, dass die Schulen nicht die Aufmerksamkeit und die Unterstützung bekommen, die sie
benötigen."  Die Kultusministerkonferenz müsse einen Masterplan Bildung vorlegen. Hans-Jürgen Urban, geschäftsführendes Vorstandsmitglied der IG Metall, verlangte
mehr Unterstützung für die Berufsschulen an, deren technische Ausstattung sei oft mangelhaft, auch die personelle Situation gebe Anlass zur Sorge. "Nötig ist eine
Investitionsoffensive an den Berufsbildenden Schulen. Wer hier investiert, investiert in die Zukunft!"



 



Ein grundsätzliches Verständnis für naturwissenschaftliche und mathematische Zusammenhänge sei Voraussetzung für die Teilhabe am öffentlichen Diskurs – "vom Klimawandel bis zur
Impfstoffentwicklung", sagt Michael Fritz, Vorstandsvorsitzender der "Stiftung Kinder forschen". "Wir können es uns als Gesellschaft nicht leisten, junge Menschen ohne
ausreichend mathematische Kompetenzen von der Schule abgehen zu lassen. Gleiches gilt für die Naturwissenschaften." Naturwissenschaften und gerade auch Mathematik seien nichts, was man
auswendig lernen kann. "Kinder lernen diese Dinge am besten, wenn sie damit konkrete Probleme lösen können, die mit ihrem Leben zu tun haben."



 



Hamburgs Bildungssenator Ties Rabe (SPD kommentierte, die Ergebnisse seien zu erwarten gewesen. "Wir müssen in der öffentlichen Diskussion endlich die Ursachen klar
benennen. Nur so wird der Blick frei für Lösungsansätze." Die Ursachen lägen auf der Hand: "Alle Lernstandsuntersuchungen nach dem Jahr 2020 zeigen, dass die lange Zeit der Schulschließungen
und Unterrichtseinschränkungen während der Corona-Pandemie zu deutlichen Lernrückständen in Deutschland und vielen anderen europäischen Ländern geführt hat. Zudem hat sich gerade in Deutschland
die Schülerschaft deutlich verändert: Die Zahl der Kinder aus bildungsfernen Elternhäusern hat erheblich zugenommen." Rabe, der die SPD-Bildungspolitik in den Ländern koordiniert, fügte hinzu:
Angesichts der veränderten Schülerschaft müssten mehr Zeit und mehr Konzentration für das Erlernen von Basiskompetenzen wie Lesen, Schreiben, Zuhören sowie Mathematik eingesetzt werden. "Wir
können uns nicht mehr darauf verlassen, dass die Kinder in ihren Familien Lesen, Schreiben und Rechnen durch Übungen festigen. Deshalb haben wir in Hamburg die Übungsprozesse in die Schulzeit
integriert." Zudem habe sich es sich bewährt, bereits vor der Schule mit der Förderung beginnen. "Wer in Hamburg mit viereinhalb Jahren nicht altersangemessen spricht, wird bereits mit fünf
Jahren schulpflichtig und intensiv gefördert."



 



"Schlimmer geht doch immer", kommentierte die Bildungspolitikerin Nicole Gohlke (Linke). "Da hilft nur eins: Weg mit den ideologisch verbohrten Brettern vor den Köpfen
derer, die an alten Systemfehlern kleben. Weg mit dem Kooperationsverbot."  Bund, Länder und Kommunen müssten in die gemeinsame Verantwortung. Bildung muss auf allen Ebenen Chefsache werden.
Dem massiven Bildungsfiasko müsse endlich umfangreich und wirksam entgegentreten werden: "Umdenken, sozial gerecht und massiv investieren, Lehren und Lernen in Schule spürbar verbessern,
Lehrerbildung reformieren. Wir brauchen eine Ausbildungsoffensive für mehr Lehrkräfte und Erzieher und ein 100-Milliarden-Euro-Sondervermögen - und zwar sofort."



 



Der Philologenverband (DPhV) konnte den Ergebnissen auch Positives abgewinnen. Zum einen sei es gelungen, trotz der Schwierigkeiten während der Corona-Krise den Anteil der Schülerinnen und
Schüler in den niedrigsten Kompetenzstufen in allen Kompetenzbereichen unter dem OECD-Durchschnitt zu halten, sagte die DPhV-Vorsitzende Susanne Lin-Klitzing. Gleichzeitig seien
zum Teil sichtbar mehr Schülerinnen und Schüler als im OECD-Durchschnitt in den obersten Kompetenzstufen, zum Beispiel im Bereich der Naturwissenschaften, dabei sei die Leistungsschere nicht
weiter aufgegangen. Selbstverständlich könne man zum anderen aber mit der Leistungsentwicklung über die Zeit betrachtet überhaupt nicht zufrieden sein. "Obwohl die Studie schulische
Bildungsziele als Gesamtheit nicht ausreichend abbildet, bestätigt sie doch insgesamt leider negative Trends, die wir seit Jahren beobachten." Es sei wichtig, dass die Politik den Fachunterricht
wieder zur Priorität erkläre. "Lehrkräfte müssen umgehend und nachhaltig von unterrichtsfernen Aufgaben entlastet werden – sie sind weder Hilfskräfte in der Verwaltung, Sozialarbeiter noch
Reiseverkehrskaufleute."



 



Der Deutsche Lehrerverband forderte mehr Anstrengungen für den Bildungsbereich ab der frühkindlichen Bildung. Die Grundkompetenzen im Lesen, Schreiben und Rechnen seien Schlüssel
zu nachhaltigem Bildungserfolg. "Im Vorschulbereich müssen fehlende Sprachbeherrschung und fehlendes Kulturverständnis identifiziert werden. Die Kinder müssen ihren sozial-kulturellen Hintergrund
mit der hiesigen Gesellschaft verbinden können." Darauf aufbauend müssten die Grundschulen sich auf die Grundfähigkeiten des Lesens, Schreibens und Rechnens als Schlüssel zum nachhaltigen
Bildungserfolg konzentrieren – immer in Bezug zur gesellschaftlichen Vielfalt einer freiheitlichen Demokratie. "Angesichts der zahlreichen Baustellen im deutschen Schulwesen – vom
Lehrkräftemangel über Lernlücken aus der Corona-Zeit bis hin zu baufälligen Schulgebäuden – braucht es keine Strukturdebatte, sondern Ressourcen für unser bestehendes Bildungssystem."



 



Die Pisa-Ergebnisse müssten wir die deutsche Politik "ein Weckruf" sein, sagte Schleswig-Holsteins Bildungsministerin Karin Prien, gleichzeitig stellvertretende
CDU-Bundesvorsitzende. "Wir müssen mehr in Bildung investieren. Wir brauchen ein neues Selbstverständnis! Deutschland muss den Weg vom Sozialstaat zum sozialen Bildungsstaat einschlagen."
Über alle Altersstufen hinweg müsse Bildung in den Haushalten von Bund und Ländern priorisiert werden. "Frühkindliche Bildung, Schulbildung, Aus-, Fort und Weiterbildung aber genauso auch
Grundlagen- und Spitzenforschung." Deutschland habe sich über Jahrzehnte in ideologischen Debatten über das Schulsystem verheddert, sei spät in der Digitalisierung gewesen und schaffe es trotz
der zweithöchsten Lehrergehälter der OECD nicht, genügend qualifiziertes Personal an seine Schulen zu bekommen. "Trotzdem führen wir Debatten über immer neue Verteilungsmechanismen in unserem
Sozialstaat. Die Antwort unserer Gesellschaft muss aber lauten: Sozial ist, was Bildungsgerechtigkeit schafft." Der soziale Bildungsstaat müsse als Ideal über allen politischen Debatten
stehen. 



Zu müde, um erschüttert zu
sein?



Deutschlands Neuntklässler erreichen bei der neuen PISA-Studie
historisch niedrige Testwerte. Was das bedeutet – und warum ein neuer PISA-Schock vermutlich trotzdem ausbleiben wird. (05. Dezember 2023) >>>



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Last week I was honored to be moderator for a discussion with Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott on their new book "Canceling the American Mind" at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.  Link here, if the embed above doesn't work Here are my questions. I shared them with Greg and Rickki ahead of time, so the actual questions are a bit shorter. But this may give you some interesting background, and I think they're good questions to ponder in general. 1) The book is full of great stories. Perhaps you can help everyone get a sense of the book with one or two of the most informative cancellation stories. 2) I notice a progression in your work. "Coddling" has moved to "canceling" and is moving to "censorship."  People think of  "canceling" as a social phenomenon, twitter pile-ons. But, as you show in the book, it has now moved on to organized institutional censorship, in universities, scientific societies and publications,  medicine and medical schools, journalism, media and tech, publishing, psychotherapy, law schools, and corporations, which not only punish transgressors but enforce ideological conformity. I'd like you to choose a few stories, explain some of these mechanisms,— for example "DEI" bureaucracies, speech surveillance, curriculum mandates, and so on. 3) There is an important distinction between free speech and academic freedom. It is one thing to censor and fire people for political tweets, but entirely another that whole lines of research are censored — covid, sex and biology, race and policing are examples. And the spread of censorship to the formerly hard sciences seems more damaging than just how much of a lost cause the humanities are. Yet academic freedom in research and teaching is not absolute. If you're hired to research and teach cosmology, the university is right to say you can't do lots of creationism, and the right to invest in what it thinks are promising fields.  I don't like "where do you draw the line" discussions, but I would like your thoughts on academic freedom. It also strikes me that we find your stories so compelling simply because the things people are censored for seem so reasonable, and their censorship so ridiculous. Yet the ideologues think we're ridiculous. It's not clear that academic freedom is the central issue, rather than just how ridiculous and politicized most universities have become in their teaching and research priorities. Perhaps free speech and academic freedom are  necessary but not sufficient to fix universities.4) A softball: Free speech is all well and good but surely "hate speech and disinformation must be regulated." —usually stated in that maddening subject-free passive voice, leaving who and how unsaid.5) Censorship now infects the government. Since you wrote the book, the twitter files and the savage Missouri V. Biden injunction have come out, detailing how the government got tech companies to silence its political critics. A notable example includes the Great Barrington declaration signatories who turned out to be right about masks, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and school closures.  I fear that social media and AI regulation are really all about censoring political speech, which now includes scientific discourse. Are you?6) You also wrote the book before the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. Campuses and much of Europe exploded with pro-Hamas protests. University leaders, used to denouncing every small injustice in the world, issued muddles. Long-time donors are rebelling. Well, they say, don't you believe in freedom of speech and academic freedom? If we want to go on a campus rampage with "kill the jews" signs, that's freedom of speech. If we want to run an exercise in class where we make Jewish students stand apart, that's academic freedom.   Follow up: In my view, the main lesson is not the hilarious hypocrisy, or a pointless "where do you draw the line" on free speech.  The real question is why universities have chosen to admit, hire, and promote so many people who, given free speech, choose to use it on murderous anti-semitism? How do you process these events?7) Your book valiantly tries to balance "left" and "right." I want to push us to a more nuanced view, which may help to defuse partisan sentiments. It's not really "left" and "right," as most people on each side still support free speech.  [Greg pushed back hard on that, which was very interesting.] Rather there is a small, but influential minority of each that is the enemy of free speech. And let's get past whose "fault" it is.a) Let's start with the left. I think of the free speech enemies as the totalitarian progressives, sometimes called "woke," but I try to avoid that charged term. Who do you see the as enemies of free speech on the left, what do they want, and what dangers they pose? b) Now on the right. I was surprised to learn how much cancellation is coming from the right.  Who are they? In your book, I count some ham handed anti-woke politicians, some traditional book-banning social conservatives, a smattering of "national conservatives," "common good conservatives" and a vortex of Trump supporters rallying around his peccadillos. But I shouldn't put words in your mouth. Who are they and what do they want?c) You try to be even handed, but I want to push you on that. The anti-speech forces on the left have won the long march through the institutions. You describe a string of selection mechanisms starting in grade school to enforce left-wing ideological conformity. They're on the advance. On the right you describe have ham-handed "anti-woke" legislators, and what you call a "fringe theory from the Opus Dei wing of the conservative movement." The the left has Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford.  You cite right-wing cancellations at Collin College, University of Rhode Island, Montana State and University of Kentucky. Is not the present danger to freedom really mostly from the small minority of left-wing activists, and the crowd of bien-pensants who go along with them?8) I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed about your "cures."  Maybe depressed is the right word — if you two don't have magic bullets, we're in real trouble. You outline a radical restructuring of universities, which is great, but not who is going to take over universities to do it. You emphasize nice rules for a better rhetoric: free speech, logic and evidence, ignore what someone said about another topic, no ad-hominem attacks, and so on. But the opponents of free speech ignore traditional enlightenment rhetoric for a reason. The far left says that logic and evidence are colonialist white supremacist racist thinking; we don't have to listen to evil people. And faced with their latest ideological word salad, it's hard to see what there is to discuss on a factual basis anyway. The far right says, we are faced with a Maoist / Bolshevik cultural revolution, aimed at seizing power. There's no free speech in a war. Voluntarily abiding by better rhetoric doesn't seem likely. Neither side likes your "free speech culture." 9) Let's close with another softball. As you note, free speech is a rare and recent idea. Censorship for political or religious reasons has been the norm in human societies.  In your words, why is freedom of speech and thought so crucial? 

In an interview with Le Figaro published on August 16 and based on his new book, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy laid out what has been missing from Western thinking on the war in Ukraine: a diplomatic Plan B in case the present Ukrainian offensive fails.


If it does fail, as seems increasingly probable, the most likely alternative to a diplomatic solution is an indefinite and bloody war of attrition along roughly the present battle lines.


Quite apart from the threats of disastrous escalation and a NATO-Russia war described by Sarkozy, Westerners who are or claim to be friends of Ukraine should consider the consequences of an unending war on that country. These include a continuation of dreadful human losses and continued destruction of the Ukrainian economy, with no certainty at all over who will pay to rebuild it. They would also entail the indefinite postponement of the process of EU accession, which would have offered Ukraine its best chance of truly joining the West and the inability of Ukrainian refugees to return home, leading to a catastrophic and permanent decline in Ukraine's population.


In addition to all of this: the possibility that a Ukrainian army exhausted and bled white by years of failed offensives will eventually fall victim to a Russian counter-attack, leading to territorial losses far greater than Ukraine has suffered so far.


This being so, one might think that even those who disagree with Sarkozy's specific recommendations would welcome the chance to hold a serious public debate on ways forward. Instead, the response from the great majority of Western (including French) politicians and commentators has followed the wearisomely familiar path of denunciations of the former president as a "Russian influencer" and "friend of Putin" whose remarks were "shameful" and "shocking."


A survey of Western "news" reports (mostly in fact veiled and hostile opinion pieces) is interesting in this regard. Of the ten top stories about the interview resulting from a Google search, only two focused on Sarkozy's remarks themselves. All the others, in their content and headlines (like "'Shameful' Nicolas Sarkozy Under Fire for Defending Putin" in The Guardian), highlighted and quoted at length the angry attacks on Sarkozy.


What Sarkozy actually said is the following:



"Without compromise, nothing will be possible and we run the risk that the situation will degenerate at any moment. This powder keg could have frightful consequences…


The Ukrainians... will want to reconquer what has been unjustly taken from them. But if they can't manage it completely, the choice will be between a frozen conflict... or taking the high road out with referenda [in territories occupied by Russia since 2014] strictly overseen by the international community… any return to the way things were before [ie Ukrainian rule over Crimea] is an illusion. An incontestable referendum... will be needed to solidify the current state of affairs.



On the question of NATO membership for Ukraine, Sarkozy said that:



"Russia has to renounce all military action against its neighbors … Ukraine must pledge to remain neutral … NATO could at the same time affirm its willingness to respect and take into account Russia's historic fear of being encircled by unfriendly neighbors."


He also described as unrealistic and hypocritical suggestions that Ukraine can join the European Union in the foreseeable future, comparing this to Turkey's hopeless decades-long efforts: "We are selling fallacious promises that will not be kept to."



On French President Emmanuel Macron's previous efforts to negotiate with Putin, Sarkozy said that these had been correct, but that Macron had failed to follow up with any concrete proposals for compromise, partly "due to pressure from eastern Europeans."


Sarkozy asked Europeans to remember that, like it or not, Russia will always remain part of Europe and a neighbor of the EU, with which it will be necessary to co-exist. Therefore, "European interests aren't aligned with American interests this time."


Despite the near-universal vilification Sarkozy's interview has provoked, much of what he said has in fact been stated on background by some U.S. and European officials, and quoted in the Western media. In February, unnamed Biden administration officials told the New York Times that the U.S. goal should not be for Ukraine to retake Crimea (something that they judged both extremely difficult military and a risk for Russian escalation towards nuclear war) but instead to "credibly threaten" the Russian military hold on the peninsula, so as to "strengthen Kyiv's position in future negotiations."


This however leads – or should lead – to the obvious question: Future negotiations about what? Unlike Sarkozy, these U.S. officials and their European counterparts have not been willing to state the obvious conclusion: that if Ukraine could achieve such a military success without actually reconquering Crimea, the resulting negotiations would have to be about returning to Ukraine the territories it has lost since last year, while leaving Crimea (and probably the eastern Donbas, also in practice held by Russia since 2014) in Russian hands.


Nor have they addressed the question of how such a peace settlement could be internationally legitimized. Here Sarkozy has suggested a democratic solution that has also been proposed by Thomas Graham and others, but has been rigorously ignored by the governments of Western democracies: to place the decision in the hands of the populations of the areas concerned through internationally supervised referenda.


At present however — and as the Pentagon correctly in advance warned was likely — the Ukrainian army is still very far from being able to retake Crimea, and will very likely never be in that position. The probable failure of the present Ukrainian offensive is now being widely discussed by Western official and unofficial analysts. Once again, however, few have drawn the obvious conclusion that the result will be a prolonged war of attrition, leading either to an eventual ceasefire along present lines or — possibly — to a new Russian victory.


Even fewer have echoed Sarkozy in arguing that the eventual result will have to be a compromise peace, and suggested what the terms of that peace should be.


As to Ukrainian EU membership, EU officials and analysts with whom I talked in Brussels last autumn echoed in private Sarkozy's profound skepticism that this would be possible for a very long time to come. This is partly because the costs of Ukrainian reconstruction would place unprecedented and colossal strain on EU budgets. Six months ago, the World Bank estimated that the cost of this reconstruction would already be around $411 billion — two and a half times Ukraine's GDP for 2022 and more than twelve times the EU's entire present annual spending on aid to its poorer members.


Severe doubts were also expressed to me about Ukraine's ability to achieve the kind of internal reforms that would enable it to even begin to meet the conditions of the EU's Acquis Communautaire. President Macron believes that even if peace can be achieved, it will take Ukraine "several decades" to qualify. In these unfavorable circumstances for Ukraine and the West, to reject Sarkozy's remarks reflexively and without discussion seems the height of irresponsibility, hypocrisy, and moral cowardice, and also does not serve the real interests of Ukraine.


In 1916 and 1917, as the Western front congealed into a horrendously bloody stalemate and Russia sank into revolution and civil war, dissident voices began to be raised in the European combatants calling for a compromise peace. And in all these countries, these voices were also described as "shameful" and silenced by accusations of "treason" and "surrender."


The result was that three great European states were destroyed, the victors (with the exception of the United States) were irrevocably crippled, and the grounds were laid for Fascism, Stalinism, and the even greater calamity of World War II.


One hundred and six years later, very few historians today would describe those advocates of peace as "shameful," or their critics as correct. What are historians one hundred years from now likely to say about present Western witch hunts against those who propose peace in Ukraine?

To many observers, the leadership of President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has marked an emerging shift in the Indo-American relationship, pointing towards a new era of mutual alignment. A plethora of bilateral summits proclaiming a "high-level of engagement" to craft "an enduring India-U.S. partnership," expanded joint-defense collaboration, the 2+2 Ministerial Dialogues, deepening technological linkages, and shared security interests regarding the rise of China indicate there may have been a substantial shift in Indian strategy.While relations are undeniably strong, policymakers should remain skeptical that this stems from an underlying geopolitical alignment. Despite moving closer to the Western camp, India maintains a strategy of multi-alignment and will likely continue to do so in the coming decades.We Have Been Here BeforeThis is not the first time that there has been an apparent Indo-American rapprochement. India's doctrine of nonalignment, combined with their linkages to the Soviet Union and American diplomatic relations with Pakistan, caused distrust throughout the Cold War. Yet, the partnership blossomed after the turn of the millennium under the Bush administration, with significant cooperation in counter-terrorism, advanced technological development, democracy promotion, and environmental protection.Despite India's nuclear program and subsequent nuclear tests violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), George W. Bush lifted economic and military sanctions in 2001. In 2006, India and the United States signed the Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, which allowed access to civilian nuclear reactor technology.Much like today, there were several joint agreements. If you file off the dates, many mirror Biden and Modi's pledges, with commitments to expand joint exercises, defend democracy, and create cooperative groups such as the Defense Policy Group (DPG), which resulted in new American arms sales to India.There was considerable optimism at the start of the Obama administration that India would officially pivot into the Western camp. However, this hope was illusory. New elections in India brought in elites who favored strategic autonomy. Obama inflamed fears around American credibility by improving relations with China and discussing a potential G-2, a core Indian concern. Despite inching closer towards alignment for the past decade, India rapidly flipped away from the United States by joining China-led initiatives such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Furthermore, India continued to maintain its reliance on Russian arms, which limited the potential for joint military planning.Obama tried to mend the rift, but it was too little, too late, and the alliance has maintained a distinctly transactional feel until the present day. A lesson should be learned: seemingly strong Indo-American bonds can crack when security interests shift.Flashpoints for TensionsMuch like in the Obama administration, a confluence of factors could easily reverse recent gains. India and Russia remain partners despite the invasion of Ukraine. In line with much of the Global South, they have consistently abstained from condemning Russian actions and refused to sanction Russian oil (although allegedly this may have been in line with Washington's desire to stabilize oil prices). Perhaps most importantly, India's military remains reliant on Russian arms. Recently, they started to somewhat distance themselves from the Russian defense industry, but India still calculates that a strong relationship with Moscow is necessary to prevent isolationism that would push them further into China's strategic orbit.This limits India's commitment to one of the main American security architectures in the Indo-Pacific, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD). Russian arms are not interoperable with the rest of the QUAD's forces, which could dampen air and sea superiority in a crisis. But even if India tried to fully transition away from Russian arms, Russia has sold them the largest share of weapons for decades. The limited interoperability of Russian and American arms complicates any large-scale shift by magnifying costs and risking Indian defenses in the meantime. Regardless of how the American relationship develops, Russia will continue to be a fixture in Indian security interests for the foreseeable future. India has new concerns about American reliability, especially after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Already, there are concerns that the weapons left behind are arming Kashmir separatists trying to split from India in favor of Pakistan. While relations under the Trump administration were not hostile, a return to an 'America First' foreign policy could make India calculate they need to hedge their bets away from the United States if they don't trust Trump's willingness to assist in a crisis.Perhaps the most recent flash point in the relationship was the attempted assassination against Sikh activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen, on American soil. All signs point to Indian officials being directly involved with the plot, which could be unacceptable to the United States.This points to a broader divergence between New Delhi and Washington: Indian democratic backsliding. It seems increasingly doubtful that Indo-American relations, as some have argued, can be grounded by shared ideological values. The rise of Hindu nationalism has tarnished Indian democracy, leading to discriminatory legislation against Muslim Indians and a substantial increase in hate crimes. Modi himself recently implied Muslims were "infiltrators," a common Islamophobic trope in Hindu nationalist hate speech. Outside extra-judicial killings, Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has increasingly escalated assaults against India's democratic principles. Political opponents, from politicians to activists to journalists, have been jailed under the pretense of anti-corruption measures, with peaceful protests violently stamped out. Most measurements of democratization have downgraded democratic India's status to "partly free" or even an "electoral autocracy."None of this is to gloss over the United States' electoral flaws, but India's trajectory is directly contradictory to the "shared values" expressed in the joint summits and implies that should security interests diverge, there won't be much tethering Indo-American coordination.Indian Multi-Alignment and Great Power AmbitionsIt is undeniable that Modi's foreign policy choices are motivated by great power desires. India is the world's most populous country and in a position to surge economically. A consumer boom and wage growth are likely incoming, with plenty of room for industries to meet the needs of the growing consumer class. Its population size will create a powerhouse working class to power growing markets for emerging technologies, clean energy, and businesses seeking new supply chains outside of China. Additionally, India is increasingly trying to position itself as the voice of the Global South, which often puts it in opposition to American and European interests. India has one of the strongest militaries in Asia and the ability to project power regionally. The Indian Ocean's name is no coincidence. India will not give up regional hegemony without a fight. To achieve these goals, India cannot play second fiddle to America forever. It is increasingly clear that India's strategic approach is to keep its options open so it can take advantage of whatever side best suits its interests. This is not to imply that there will be an imminent breakup. For the time being, there is a growing bipartisan understanding in Washington that China is the largest long-term threat to American security, which makes for a natural partnership with India, which fears Chinese territorial encroachment. India's threat perceptions seem to be locked in after military crises in 2014, 2017, 2020, and 2022.As of now, the BJP is positioned to maintain power after the 2024 election, making it unlikely to impact the trajectory of the relationship barring an unforeseen anti-American faction gaining footing. Should the party expand its hold over Parliament, the surface of the relationship may remain the same, but centralizing Modi's power would only exacerbate his authoritarian and hawkish leanings.Still, India's growing illiberalism shouldn't be a barrier for the moment. The United States has a long history of working with dictatorships that have questionable human rights records. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pinochet-controlled Chile immediately come to mind. Security interests frequently trump moral qualms. But should the security situation change — as a result of U.S.-China rapprochement, a surprise change in Indian or American leadership, or a crisis of credibility — policymakers may find that there is not much at the core of the relationship. India may be useful to American strategists who want to balance China for now, but make no mistake, India will not sacrifice its core interests to appease the United States. Security relationships can seem momentarily strong, but they are a house of cards vulnerable to shifting geopolitical winds.

I am currently in the most wonderful Helsinki airport, waiting to go back to Berlin.  I have been in Helsinki to study the Finnish case for the Phil/Ora/Steve book on Defense Agencies.  It has been a great albeit cold and mostly wet week.  Definitely glad we have this case in the book, and, yes, it is making it imperative to go to Sweden to see how NATO membership is a common process with perhaps not entirely common politics.First, the joy of Helsinki before I discuss what I have learned for the book project.   It is on the Baltics, so when the wind blows, brrrrr.  Yes, we got some snow here last night, deep into April.  Makes me feel like I am back in Canada, except Ottawa has more sun and not as much cold winds. This is only my second time here, and the first one hardly counts as it was a brief layover between Leningrad (that tells you how long ago it was) and NY.  I got used to tramming around town, never using the metro as everyone was very well located in the center except a couple of interviews--one requiring a bus ride to beyond Helsinki and one or two requiring cab rides.  Two parliament buildingsand funky sculpture One of my fave new experiences for interviewing was that they had a conference center where folks could hold meetings with far less security and inconvenience than going out to the ministries.  I still did manage to go to the Ministry of Interior, which was not far away, and to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was a 20 minute walk or 15 minute tram ride.  The Parliament buildings were not just huge (everyone kept reminding me this is a small country with a small population, but their parliament buildings suggest otherwise), but also had more security than any other legislative building I can recall.  Sure, everyone has a front entrance with thick windows, x-ray scanners, etc, but to get from point a to b inside, my escort had to badge the doors every five or ten steps.  And, yeah, my escort in was the counsel to the defense committee, and on the way out ... a parliamentarian who was recently the chief of defense!  They don't have much of a history, by the way, of senior ex mil leaders serving in parliament but Ukraine changed that.  More on that below.reindeer on potatoI am not a huge fan of fish, so I tended to look for non-Finnish food (not all Finnish food is fish, to be clear), so I had Chinese, Italian, Mideast, and Georgian.  Pretty sure that was my first time having Georgian food, but the waitress didn't understand my order, so I didn't get the classic big bread thing dish, so I will have to try that in Berlin (I found a Georgian place near my apartment).  The people were very friendly, even though I have no Finnish.  They all understand that no one speaks Finnish besides Finns, so they all speak Swedish (there is a sizable Swedish minority and the Swedes used to run the place), and English.  Some folks remarked that the kids these days are less interested in learning Russian.  So much for Russia's soft power....Yes, Russia loomed large here, as the Finns have a strong memory of the trauma of the Winter War--their fight with the Russians during World War II.  Apparently, the Ukraine war hit the old folks very hard.   I did wonder where the bunkers are, as  I had heard that civil defense is a big thing here.  I didn't recognize the signs apparently, as I was told that pretty much all of Helsinki has underground facilities.  The difference between old US bomb shelters and Finnish bunkers--the latter are used on a daily basis--parking lots, swimming pools, gyms, etc that are underground.  This keeps them fresh, their air good, and also, most importantly, has the Finns comfy with going to these places.  The economy is not doing well, and it may or may not have much to do with the fact that the Finns have pretty much cut off most trade with Russia.  The whole of government thing Canadians and others have a problem doing?  Finland has whole of society, comprehensive security.  In its history, it has always been alone until ... the last year.  So, they are ready to mobilize the entire society if the Russians attack.  This means a draft (just for men [all young men including one NBA player], women can join the military but their conscription is voluntary [holy oxymoron]), an extensive reservist system so that the small army can swell to 280,000 and then 900,000, coordination of all parts of society to respond to an attack.  The drafted are paid about 5 Euros a day.... which does not go far in super expensive Helsinki.  Decorations inside Parl buildingThe military has been running a month-long defense course 4x/year for a long, long time, where they create cohorts of 50 people, elites from across society, to learn about the military and the rest of comprehensive security.  This is a hell of a public diplomacy effort--it is not cheap although some companies provide the food and booze and such for free.  Companies apparently don't have a big problem with losing an employee for a month.  To provide a comparison, the army exercise I did in 2019 was one day.  This experience is really important as it came up in almost all of the interviews and mostly without my prompting.In ye old comparative politics, the phrase is war made the state.  While not entirely true, the idea is that societies developed more and more extensive political institutions in order to fight and win or survive in international relations.  It may be the case that NATO membership has the same but smaller impact.  That joining NATO has caused Finland has to dramatically enlarge and perhaps empower its very small Ministry of Defense.  NATO requires meetings, document vetting, preparation, the sending of personnel to NATO hq's in Brussels, Mons, and elsewhere.  AND most NATO policy is made by civilians even though NATO is far more an organization about military stuff than civilian stuff (hence why much of the effort to build an Afghan government was run by separate national governments (foreign affairs, development agencies) rather than by NATO.  The relevance of this is that it gives the MoD a greater role in making defense policy than in the past.  That is, the Finnish defense forces made much of the policies but that may be changing now.  Oh, and it was the first EU country I have been in where the NATO flags easily outnumber the EU ones.In terms of the project, Finland is an interesting case with a largely autonomous military, that their number two in the MoD is always a retired senior military officer, their MoD is tiny (150 now, swelling recently thanks to NATO), their President is commander in chief which means the military can try to sideline the MoD and the PM by insisting that the President is the one who oversees them, the President and PM have tiny foreign/security offices, and that conscription deeply shapes everything.  Sweden will be a fun case to compare since the Swedes had a draft, dropped it, and have recently started it again while also joining NATO recently. Random things I heard along the way:five different Baltic pipelines have had "accidents" since the war in Ukraine started!Finland has reached 2% of GDP on defense because it frontloaded the cost of buying the F35s, which means that when that goes through the system, Finland may have a hard time procuring enough to keep at 2%.  Womb chairs!  Multiple waiting rooms in govt buildings reminded me of Oberlin's library way back in the day.  I do love my job even if it requires me to transcribe my interview notes.  I have many more countries to visit and I still have to do some work to figure out the German case as well as write up the Finish case.  All I know is that comparative civ-mil relations has been mighty good to me.Next week, Mrs. Spew hits Europe, so we drive through Germany and then fly to Italy.  So, a very different bit of fieldwork ahead.  Much more focused on comparative cuisine.  

 Today marks the anniversary of my doctorate--in the days of yore, before social media, I completed my dissertation, defended it, and then didn't go to graduation as I was already professing as a visitor.  With this much time past since those callow days of talking IR theory and job market stuff  on the second floor pathway (balcony/terrace/veranda?) outsider our (Motel 6-esque) offices, I wonder about some stuff, am bemused by other aspects, and am mostly quite grateful.Before I get into it, what did I dissertate about?  The international relations of secession.  I first wondered whether sovereignty was about borders or governments and wanted to contrast the IR of secession vs the IR of revolution.  Once I realized the conventional wisdom of the former was wrong, yes, there has been plenty of support for secessionists, I sought to understand why some states support specific secessionists and why other support the government--why countries take sides in other people's ethnic conflicts.  Nice to have a question that has enduring relevance.  I argued vociferously that the countries are not deterred by their own vulnerability to separatism, and I focused on several secessionist crises--Congo Crisis, Biafra, Bangladesh--and one country that supported multiple separatist movements--Somalia.  I argued that the ethnic politics of the potential supporter interacted with the perceived identities of those in conflict--that ethnic ties drove much of this. Which led to the title of the subsequent book, The Ties That Divide, which dropped the Bangladesh case, as it was really about India's intervention, and the Somalia case, as it was really about irredentism (and became the starting point for the next book), and added Yugoslavia's demise, which was largely done by the time I turned to revising the book, and some basic statistics (thanks to the editors of International Organizaiton where I placed a key piece summarizing the dissertation/book). What do I wonder about?Mostly, am I now out of touch with the experience of being a grad student?  I know the job market has bounced up and down over time, but it was awful when I finished and much more awful now.  So, I have much sympathy for the students finishing today.  But I am not sure how much of the process and stresses have remained the same or have gotten worse.On the bright side, the old fashioned job placement at the conference thing is dead--so much stress, so little promise of anything developing.  Now it is all electronic and pre-arranged.  No more waiting in the job placement room for someone to put a slip of paper into one's box.On the down side, the competition is so much more fierce, and the expectations are so much higher.  I do wonder how grad school is these days--has the pressure to publish meant that there is less some for the silly stuff.  In my day (I say with an old man's voice), we played soccer every friday, some of the folks would play basketball regularly and get their knees fixed semi-regularly, the last few years we had a regular softball/bbq on Sundays, and more than a few parties.  Is there any fun in grad school these days?  No idea.I wonder where my career might have gone had I stuck to the IR of ethnic conflict stuff.  I have no regrets about moving on to NATO and thus to comparative civil-military relations, but staying in the same spot of research would have led to some different opportunities and perhaps less new lit to review.What am I bemused by?That my dissertation is now as old as I was when we had our daughter.  It means that both it and I are, well, much older.  I am prouder of the latter than the former, but the former has been pretty good to me, too.  That despite my best efforts, the big lessons of the book--that countries are not deterred by their own vulnerability, that precedents don't really matter that much in restraining support for secession--folks still trot out those arguments.  Turns out my book didn't re-shape how policy-makers think about this stuff.  Given the cynical heart of my dissertation, the assumptions it makes about politicians, I should not be very surprised.  Plus as I learned over the years, confirmation bias is a thing.How accidental it all was. I didn't go to grad school to study the international politics of ethnic conflict.  I just fell into it.Likewise, I didn't try to do something that was super timely--that I defended my dissertation proposal the same month Yugoslavia flew apart was an accident.I am bemused that the book that is the basis of the first half of my career keeps competing with an article I wrote that is perhaps the most outside my lane for citation: how institutions amerliorate or exacerbate ethnic conflict.  What am I grateful for?Damn near everything.  This project established my career, made my reputation in the field (whatever that is), gave me not only two books, but a heap of articles and book chapters, and indirectly that next project that led to the life-changing experience in the Pentagon that ultimately led to my second career as a civil-military relations scholar and to the next two jobs.Tis the handiest picture from those daysas my time in grad school precededsmart phones by a couple of decades.Oh, and I was most grateful for this amazing little guy, the Fonz of dogs.I am grateful for having such a terrific supervisor, Miles Kahler, who would let me meander from my initial topic to what I studied, giving me heaps of constructive and often painful feedback along the way, to make sure the project was feasible and then reasonably well-executed.  I am also grateful for an amazing committee that gave me much to think about, but didn't force me in any particular direction--Peter Cowhey, Lisa Martin, Arend Lijphart, and Edward Reynolds.  I will be eternally thankful that I lucked into a department so chock full of terrific smart silly graduate students, who not only taught me so much about their work which shaped mine, but helped me survive and, yes, thrive, through the difficult process of starting my first act of academic creation (destruction/criticism is far easier than coming up with one's own idea and pursuing it).  We all followed the examples set by Debbi Avant and Hendrik Spruyt.  The folks in and near my cohort were so very sharp and sweet, tolerating my forays onto the soccer field (basketball? not so much), teasing me about all things Steve, welcoming my wife and later my dog into our various shennanigans.  I will always be grateful to Dave, John Carey, both Lisas, Frank, the more dangerous Steve, Neil who left us way too soon, Keith, Judy, Mike, Bart, both Erics, Mona, Chris, Kathy (not my wife, the other one), and all the rest.I am also grateful that this place kept attracting terrific people long after I left, so that I am part of a larger community, which gave me some terrific friends in this business: Wendy, Idean, Cullen, Kathleen and Steve, and so many others.I am definitely not where I expected to be thirty years ago--not in terms of location (Canada?) or research or teaching.  It has been from the very start a journey of accidents and surprises, from the grad school I ended up at, to the topic I studied, to the various jobs along the way, to the focus of the second part of my career, to my role these days as pundit and as a leader of a network, and all the stuff that came with it.  I used to regret a lot some initial decisions, and I had a lot of frustration on the various job markets.  But it all took me here, a perfect spot for me thirty years later.  So, no, I don't regret where I went to grad school, nor what I did there, or where I went from there.      

After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the U.S. far right and supporters of Israel pointed to Iran as the main behind-the-scenes culprit, hoping that their message would spur a military attack on Iran. It is well known that the Islamic Republic has supported Hamas for decades, but Hamas is not a puppet of Iran. During the civil war in Syria, Hamas supported the armed opposition, angering both Iran's leadership and Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. And in the current war, Hamas appears to be angry that Iran and its allies have not provided it with direct assistance or intervened on its behalf.Tehran's leadership, as well as that of the Lebanese Hezbollah, was as surprised as anyone when the attacks took place, with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, asserting in a speech that his group was not given advance notice about Hamas' plans. So did Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who flatly denied that Iran had participated in planning or executing the attacks, or had advance notice. U.S. and Israeli officials also stated that there is no evidence that Iran participated directly in planning the attacks.Khamenei has also stated that Iran will not enter the war on behalf of Hamas. In his recent meeting with Ismail Haniyeh, the chairman of Hamas' political bureau, Khamenei reportedly criticized Hamas for attacking Israel, calling it a strategic mistake that resulted in the redeployment of a large U.S. force to the Middle East and threw Washington's full support behind Israel.The Israel-Palestinian conflict began 30 years before the Islamic Revolution in Iran and will continue indefinitely even if the Islamic Republic disappears tomorrow, so long as Palestinians are denied their own independent state. At the same time, the fact is that Iran's internal political dynamics are complex, and various political factions are not unified about Iran's policy toward the Middle East, in general, and the Palestinians and Israel and the current war, in particular. There are deep fissures within Iran when it comes to debating foreign policy, particularly Middle East policy.To begin with, all Iranian political factions agree on, (1) forcing the U.S. military to leave the Middle East; (2) raising the costs of the "maximum pressure" policy that began with the Trump administration and continued under the Biden administration; (3) the importance of having a strong deterrent against possible military attacks by the U.S. and/or Israel, and (4) supporting the rights of the Palestinian people. But there is no agreement on how to put such policies into effect. The hardliners believe that to punish the U.S. for its "maximum pressure" policy and force its military to leave the Middle East, the best approach is to forge alliances with China, Russia and other nations that oppose the U.S. interventions around the world and to create problems for the U.S. in the region. Moderates and pragmatists, on the other hand, advocate close relations with Iran's neighbors and the Arab nations of the Persian Gulf, as well as with Europe, to reduce tensions. The hardliners believe that the most effective deterrent is arming the country and its proxies with advanced weapons, whereas moderates, while supporting arming the nation, also believe that regaining the confidence of the Iranian people by opening up political space, holding free elections, and taking deep and irreversible reforms would be the most effective deterrent. As former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif put it recently, "what has preserved Iran is not its weapons, but its people."While the hardliners equate supporting the Palestinian people with arming them, moderates and pragmatists believe that Iran should limit its assistance to diplomatic support and humanitarian aid. What these factions do not agree on are (1) a foreign policy based on ideology, which is supported by the hardliners, rather than one generally preferred by moderates, reformists, and pragmatic conservatives that gives highest priority to Iran's true national – rather than ideological -- interests; (2) rapprochement with the United States, which is rejected by the hardliners but supported by all other factions; and (3) how to punish Israel for its campaign of assassinations and sabotage in Iran and its support for Iran's small separatist groups. The hardliners view arming Iran's proxies as the "best" option because it forces Israel to spend its resources on its own borders, whereas all other factions believe that diplomacy is the best possible approach. In the current war between Hamas and Israel, all factions have condemned Israel's attacks on civilians in Gaza, with the moderates having also condemned the October 7 attacks on Israeli civilians. But the similarities end there.At the beginning of the war, some of the hardliners declared that Iran should join the fighting. But this was hollow posturing whose purpose was to outmaneuver competitors within their own faction. Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who has always been close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, even warned that Iran's proxies have "their fingers on the trigger" and may enter the war. While there have indeed been skirmishes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, they appear to be carefully calibrated, and viewed in Tehran as a way of lessening the pressure on Hamas, and not a prelude to a full-blown war, unless, of course, the carnage in Gaza escalates to much worse levels.Thus, Amir-Abdollahian's declaration should be viewed as his attempt to elevate himself within the hardline camp since he has been an utterly ineffective foreign minister who even Khamenei does not seem to trust completely. And while President Ebrahim Raisi has adopted a hard line regarding the war in Gaza, his stance should be best seen as an attempt to distract attention from his administration's failure to improve the economy and reduce inflation. Similarly, the IRGC's Quds Force commander, Brigadier General Esmail Qaani, declared, "We will do anything required in this historic battle." This, however, is only bluster, as Qaani is trying to use the war to elevate himself to the level of his predecessor, Major General Qasem Soleimani [promoted posthumously to lieutenant general], who played a key role in organizing Iran's proxies in the region and was assassinated by the United States in January 2020. As noted above, Khamenei, Qaani's boss, has already ruled out Iran entering the war.Qaani and the IRGC are simply trying to use the war to regain full control of Iran's Middle East policy and suppress voices of dissent protesting their hardline posturing. But, even within the IRGC, there are voices of reason that oppose Iran's entry into a a war with the U.S. and Israel. Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of IRGC's aerospace force, which oversees its missile program, recently said that after the Trump Administration assassinated General Soleimani, Iran did not attack all the U.S. military bases in the Middle East because "ten, fifteen thousand civilians would have been killed, and the country's development would have been set back by 20 years."At the same time, moderates and pragmatists have called for restraint, fearing a wider war in the Middle East that could engulf Iran. As Zarif put it a few days ago, "Supporting the Palestinian people does not imply that we should fight for them. The best defense of the Palestinian people is [creating the conditions] to prevent Israel from calling them [Iran's] proxy. The [Iranian] people are tired of paying the price [for arming the Palestinians]." Former President Mohammed Khatami has also spoken out in favor of restraint. "The era of occupying other people's lands has ended," he said recently, stressing that Tehran should rely more on diplomatic initiatives based on Iran's national interests and its leaders should avoid taking positions based on factional politics. It thus appears that the most important political factions in Iran reject war with the U.S. or Israel and favor a policy of restraint in the current war, however much this may disappoint Iran hawks in the United States. But so long as Palestinians are denied their aspirations for an independent state, Iran's hardliners and other non-state actors, including radical Islamists like Hamas, will seek to take political advantage of their plight. The most effective way to neutralize Iran's hawks — and thus reduce a chronic contributor to regional instability and tension — is for the U.S., the West, the Arab world and Israel itself to finally grasp the nettle and work seriously to help Palestinians realize their goal as expeditiously as possible.

U.S. President Joe Biden's brief trip to the Middle East, comprising just a few hours in Tel Aviv, will be remembered in this tragic chapter in the recent history of the Middle East for two main reasons. Firstly, because of the almost exaggerated reaffirmation of the alliance with Israel, and secondly, because of the metaphorical slap he received for the abrupt cancellation of a summit in Amman that was organized and canceled within just a few hours, due to the heightened tension after the Ahli Hospital massacre in Gaza. (A rearranged conference was held in Cairo last Saturday; 31 countries were represented, as was the UN.) The cancellation was a humiliation for the president and American diplomacy, but also a sign of a change of direction, and the beginning of a new order in the power equation in the Middle East.Let's start with the reasons behind the American request to meet at short notice with Jordanian King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The purpose of the summit revolved around the idea of getting as many Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip as possible. This idea — which, in short, involves emptying the enclave to aid the military goal of eliminating Hamas and its infrastructure — came from Israel, but won the Biden administration's support in Washington. To begin carrying this out, Israeli authorities ordered more than a million Palestinians from Gaza's north to move to the south — primarily toward the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah, Gaza's gateway to Egypt, which the authorities in Cairo have kept shut.Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli deputy foreign minister, made the following remarks in an interview with Marc Lamont Hill on Al Jazeera in English on Oct. 15: "[We're not telling Gazans to] go to the beaches, go drown yourselves, God forbid … There is a huge expanse, almost endless space in the Sinai desert, just on the other side of Gaza. The idea is … for them to leave over to [sic] the open areas where we, and the international community, will prepare the infrastructure … Tent cities, with food and with water … just like for the refugees of Syria that fled the butchering of [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad a few years ago to Turkey." To be refugees or fugitives: that is what Ayalon, and indeed Israel, is offering to 2 million Palestinians.The majority of Gaza's population is, in fact, composed of descendants of Palestinians who took refuge on the southern coast of Mandate Palestine, in the area of Gaza's commercial port, forced out of their homes in places like Jaffa, Majdal, and present-day Ashkelon. Even then, waiting for them — like nearly all the refugees of 1948 — were tents and tent cities. Anyone familiar with the name given to the Nakba's refugees, the "people of the tents," knows that to propose a tent city in Sinai is to remind them, as if necessary, of what they were forced to become."This proposal cannot be accepted, and not only by the Palestinians. It dives into the most significant change in the Middle East in the last century, the birth of the State of Israel and the Nakba. This change is etched in the history of neighboring countries, first and foremost Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The uprooting of Palestinians to Sinai would be a burden on the Arab countries' shoulders — a burden they cannot bear, as was declared loud and clear in the statements issued by all the Arab leaders after Blinken's visit. They all focused on the Palestinian refugee issue, rejecting any possibility of a new population transfer from Palestine.Hypothetically, even if Blinken had received suggestions from Israel to propose, during his diplomatic tour of the region, a transfer of the Palestinian population to Sinai, the firm stance of all Arab interlocutors would have convinced the U.S. administration that it could go no further. Blinken made clear in an interview with Randa Abul Azm of Al-Arabiya that the United States would not support a transfer. "We've heard, and I've heard directly from Palestinian Authority President Abbas and from virtually every other leader that I've talked to in the region, that that idea is a nonstarter, and so we do not support it. We believe that people should be able to stay in Gaza, their home." King Abdullah expounded on the reason for the refusal on Tuesday at a press conference in Berlin with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, where he referred to refugees as "a red line." The next day, the Egyptian president said the same to Scholz at a journalists' gathering in Cairo. Finally, after his quick return from Amman to Ramallah after the attack on Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, Abbas clarified that Palestinians will not leave their country. Abbas, a veteran refugee from Safed, has all the experience to determine that, for the Palestinians, Nakba 2.0 is the fear that has been hovering over them in recent months and years, and is a chapter in their history that they refuse to live again at all costs.Blinken's diplomatic whirlwind tour of major Arab capitals, from Cairo to Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Amman, in which he attempted to formulate an exit strategy for the Israelis from Gaza, effectively failed even before the mass killings at Al-Ahli Hospital. From the very moment Al Jazeera began broadcasting the horrific images of the dead in the hospital compound, another element entered the game: the emotional and political reaction of the Arab street, of the people and societies looking at a story that is already etched in their personal biographies and national history.There were immediate, spontaneous demonstrations in the streets of Amman, Tunisia, Beirut, and Cairo. Governments were careful not to prohibit the protests, instead settling for restricting them, because they know very well that everything is different since the Arab Spring of 2011. Through the history of rebellions and revolutions, anyone who has gone out into the streets has internalized the following: a regime can fall. Everyone knows this, including the rulers.The surprising momentum of the events following the hospital bombing led to the hasty cancellation of the summit. For the Arab players, it was impossible to meet with the United States about the issue of refugees while the Americans are increasingly perceived as clinging to their alliance with Israel. On the other hand, the events shifted the discussion from the refugee question to an immediate demand for a ceasefire — not humanitarian corridors, but an immediate cessation of hostilities. The Arab states are demanding an end to the war, as is the UN.As has already happened in the region's history, the wind rising from Gaza blows beyond the narrow boundaries of the enclave, with all the dangers involved. For example, Sisi does not want to go down as the first president in the history of the Egyptian republic to allow Nakba 2.0, and certainly not before the Egyptian elections this December, which are supposed to consolidate his rule. King Abdullah heads a state with a significant Palestinian presence, not only numerically but also in terms of economic weight. And above all, relations between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hashemite Kingdom have always been chilly and at times very complicated. The question of preserving the holy sites of Islam and Christianity in the Old City of Jerusalem is, among other things, at the heart of a fierce diplomatic clash between Jordan and the Netanyahu-led extreme right-wing coalition that has unfolded in recent years.Even Saudi Arabia, although it has begun the process of normalizing its relations with Israel, is no longer the same country that offered a peace plan 20 years ago in exchange for security, out of sensitivity to its alliance with the United States. The deepening presence of China in the Middle East, which during the COVID-19 pandemic consolidated its economic ties with many of the Persian Gulf coastal countries, is one of the main factors in the game today, first and foremost because China has managed to mediate a surprising reconciliation between the two biggest competitors in the region, Saudi Arabia and Iran.In other words, the United States' leeway for action is shrinking. The role of Washington, which clings so closely to Israel, is in danger of being tested at a critical moment when the Middle East will no longer be what it was. It seems that the United States does not have a sufficient understanding of the region, just as the $100 million offered by Biden as aid to the Palestinians at the end of his visit to Israel certainly does not suffice: each of Gaza's reconstruction plans, after five Israeli military operations in the past 15 years, is estimated at billions of dollars.This article was republished with permission from +972 Magazine..

The ongoing conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is a pivotal event in the modern history of Sudan. With hundreds, possibly thousands of civilians killed in the conflict, there has been a deep sense of horror particularly in Sudan's capital Khartoum, resulting in 2.5 million residents of the city fleeing to nearby regions of Sudan, or neighboring countries Chad and Egypt.For those remaining in Khartoum, fear and anxiety are constant, as gunfire, heavy artillery, and smoke rise above the city, fighter jets fly at low altitude over residential areas. The current war will have a devastating mental health impact, in addition to its many fatalities and physical injuries. Children in particular are more likely to suffer severe depression, flashback and post-traumatic events as a result of exposure to the horrific violence and abuses.Exacerbating these anxieties is the use by both the SAF and RSF of psychological warfare. Through social media, both sides have shared graphic content from the battlefield, intended to intimidate their opponents and influence public opinion in their favor. Much of this content has been impossible to verify independently. The SAF has struggled to gain legitimacy with the public, discredited for being part of the former regime of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan's long-time former dictator. The SAF leadership claims to be fighting for stability in Sudan, despite allowing the proliferation of former regime-backed militias since the ousting of Bashir in 2019.Meanwhile, the RSF leadership has used media outlets to claim they are fighting against the SAF for being part of the former regime. Their stated intention is to restart the process of handing power from the military to civilian politicians in the framework agreement signed with the Forces of Freedom and Change, which came to an end with the military takeover in October, 2021. However, the RSF's claim is grossly misleading, as the RSF has been accused of committing genocide in Darfur since 2003.In both cases, the message is clear. Each side wishes to give the perception that it is winning the war on the ground. But, neither has been strong enough to achieve outright control of Khartoum. Hence, they merely seek to mislead people who are not residents of the city.The current war in Sudan arguably represents a long power struggle between the RSF, currently led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo or "Hemedti," and remnants of the Bashir regime that dominate the SAF, headed by Lieutenant-General Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan. Since the Bashir regime was toppled, its supporters have used the transition period to organize.The SAF has targeted activists, members of resistance committees and politicians with arbitrary arrests and accusing them of backing the RSF. Over the last four years, they have waged a war against Sudan's demand for democracy. Effectively blocking all political efforts to ensure a smooth post-2019 transition, they have sought to prevent the outcome of a credible civilian democratic government. They have instigated violence, attacked civilians, and portrayed the revolution as a project planned in the West to divide Sudan.Furthermore, the SAF's leadership has made use of Sudan's lucrative black market to sabotage any economic progress. They have done so through raising the foreign currency rate against the Sudanese pound and creating shortages in the country, prompting the Sudanese people to feel economic pressure and protest against the civilians in power, providing justification for the military counterparts to launch their takeover. The emergence of numerous militias was encouraged, and the security forces that once maintained the Bashir regime's security turned a blind eye to crimes such as robbery, burglary, and aggravated bodily harm.Historically, the SAF is the oldest security institution of the state, and civilian political parties have used it to capture power in 1958, 1969 and 1989. After al-Bashir's coup in 1989, the Sudanese Islamists Movement, precursor of the National Congress Party (NCP), stacked senior officer positions in the SAF with their supporters.Simultaneously, the regime created various security institutions and militias to counterbalance the threat of a further coup, and to crush rebellions in outlying areas of Sudan. One of these security forces was the RSF, which originated in the early 2000s as the Janjaweed, Arab militiamen used by Bashir to defeat insurgencies in Darfur. Most Janjaweed fighters were of the Rizigat tribe, which includes the Mahria branch of which Hemedti is a member. In 2017, Sudan's parliament passed the Rapid Support Forces Act legitimating the militia. When Bashir felt threatened by his competitors within the NCP, he summoned the RSF to Khartoum to protect him; ultimately, it was the RSF's desertion of Bashir which sealed his regime's fate.After Bashir was toppled in 2019, Burhan became the president of Sudan, appointing Hemedti as his deputy in August 2019. Burhan's focus was on staying in power and preventing the transition to civilian rule. Burhan feared that out of power, he may be prosecuted for his claimed role in the Darfur genocide alongside Hemedti. To reduce any possibility of being ousted, he empowered Hemedti by abolishing article 5 of the RSF Act, allowing the RSF to act independently of the SAF command structure, while establishing loose ties to Burhan. Hemedti was able to increase the number of his forces from 20,000 to over 100,000, most being trained in SAF camps in Khartoum. The RSF was tasked with protecting strategic sites in Khartoum, including the presidential palace, general command, Khartoum airport, and the building of Sudan's Television and Broadcast Corporation. Burhan also retired several SAF generals who had criticized the expansion and new roles of the RSF.Ironically, Burhan's focus on staying in power resulted in his clash with Hemedti, who had his own presidential ambitions. Over time, Burhan and Hemedti started to compete with one another, regionally and internationally. Hemedti cemented his ties with Russia through the Wagner Group, a relationship with its origins in Bashir's request for Russia's help in protecting his regime in 2017. In 2018, it emerged that Wagner was contracted to train the regime's security forces, including the RSF, in riot control.Hemedti's relationship with Wagner expanded through gold smuggling operations that helped Russia offset the sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine, and the RSF's support and Hemedti's influence for Wagner's extraction of resources in the Central African Republic (CAR). In January 2023, Hemedti used his forces to close the Sudanese-CAR border, to prevent CAR opposition forces from using Sudanese territory. Wagner has supplied the RSF with anti-aircraft missiles that have deterred the SAF from attacking its positions in Khartoum in the current conflict.The RSF-Wagner relationship has deepened as a result of both paramilitary groups' relationship with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The UAE is a key destination of Sudan's mineral resources, for example receiving 40 percent of Sudan's gold exports. Geopolitically, Wagner, Hemedti and the UAE are all backers of Libya's Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar. Hemedti sent 1000 RSF fighters to support Haftar's attempt to take over Libya's capital Tripoli in 2019, when Egypt refused to send ground forces to support Haftar despite also being an ally. There are indications that, in return, the UAE has been supporting Hemedti and the RSF in Sudan's current conflict.Burhan has also developed close regional alliances. Burhan received military training in Egypt, and the Egyptian Armed Forces today sees the SAF as the only institution that can hold Sudan together, and represent Egypt's own interests in the country. The Egyptian leadership deeply distrusts Hemedti and the RSF, who they view as a mercenary group with no loyalty to the state. Egypt has accordingly provided the SAF with covert air defence aid in its current conflict with the RSF.Burhan also uses his position as the president of Sudan, and commander of the SAF, to win the backing of Saudi Arabia. Strategically, Saudi Arabia needs to ensure the security of its Red Sea investments that are part of its Vision 2030. Saudi Arabia has also proven to be interested in investing in and deepening trade relations with Sudan, putting it in competition with the UAE's influence represented in Hemedti and the RSF.The current conflict has militarily incapacitated the forces of both Burhan and Hemedti, with Khartoum becoming a graveyard for their soldiers. The fighting has shown that both sides are just interested in cementing their own regimes in a post-conflict scenario. It remains to be seen how civilians will be able to resist whichever party, with its regional backers, emerges victorious from the violence, and continue Sudan's long journey towards democracy.

The debate over work requirements for social programs is hot and heavy. I'll chime in there as I don't think even the Wall Street Journal Editorial pages have stated the issue clearly from an economic point of view.  As usual, it's getting obfuscated in a moral cloud by both sides: How could you be so heartless as to force unfortunate people to work, vs. how immoral it is to subsidize indolence, and value of the "culture" of self-sufficiency. Economics, as usual, offers a straightforward value-free way to think about the issue: Incentives. When you put all our social programs together, low income Americans face roughly 100% marginal tax rates. Earn an extra dollar, lose a dollar of benefits. It's not that simple, of course, with multiple cliffs of infinite tax rates (earn an extra cent, lose a program entirely), and depends on how many and which programs people sign up for. But the order of magnitude is right. The incentive effect is clear: don't work (legally). As Phil Gramm and Mike Solon report, Since 1967, average inflation-adjusted transfer payments to low-income households—the bottom 20%—have grown from $9,677 to $45,389. During that same period, the percentage of prime working-age adults in the bottom 20% of income earners who actually worked collapsed from 68% to 36%.36%. The latter number is my main point, we'll get to cost later. Similarly, the WSJ points to  a report by Jonathan Bain and Jonathan Ingram at the Foundation for Government Accountability thatthere are four million able-bodied adults without dependents on food stamps, and three in four don't work at all. Less than 3% work full-time.3%. Incentives are a budget constraint to government policy, hard and immutable. Your feelings about people one way or another do not move the incentives at all. A gift of money with an income phase-out leads people to work less, and to require more gifts of money.  That's just a fact. What to do? One answer is, remove the income phaseouts. Give food stamps, medicaid, housing subsidies,  earned income tax credits, and so forth, to everyone, and don't reduce them with income. Then the disincentive to work is much reduced. (There is still the "income effect," but in my judgement that's a lot smaller for most people in this category.) Rather obviously, that's impractical. Even the US, even if r<g or MMT are true, would run out of money quickly. That's the problem with Universal Basic Income. Even $20,000 x 331 million = $6.6 trillion, essentially the entire federal budget right there, and $20,000 of total support is a lot less than people with $0 income get right now. (Gramm, Ekelund and Early, and Casey Mulligan estimate about $60,000 is the right number here.)  Put another way, to eliminate the work disincentive in the social programs, we would have to jack up marginal tax rates on everyone to such stratospheric levels that nobody works. You can't escape disincentives. So, support for the unfortunate must be limited somehow. That's why we limit it to people below a certain income level. But even if each individual program maintains a reasonable marginal phaseout, they add up across programs, and next thing you know we're back to 100% phase out. Posit that work is still desirable,  to earn some money, to contribute to your fellow citizens, to reduce the need for income assistance, and to build human capital.  (Plus the more ephemeral goals all sides of the debate ascribe to work -- self reliance, life meaning, self-respect, participation in society, and so forth. I promised no moral or sociological arguments, but these values being shared by both sides of the debate, I can make a little exception. Nobody thinks that an entire lifetime of living on a government check, doing nothing but drink take drugs and play video games all day, makes for a desirable society, no matter who they vote for.)  If so, if the social safety net creates a 100% marginal tax rate on work, and if abandoning income phaseouts will bankrupt the state, then we have a problem. Work requirements are an imperfect method to try to replace the incentive to work that social programs eliminate. Our government does this sort of thing all over to transfer income but contain the disincentives: Subsidize gas, and then regulate against its use for example. It is inefficient, as you can tell from the brouhaha. It's much more efficient to get people to work by saying "if you earn a dollar, you can keep it," rather than "if you earn a dollar we'll take it away from you but we're going to force you to work." As the WSJ details here and often, the rules are complex, and people and governments game them. Just who should work? Progressives will quickly find a sick single mother taking care of elderly parents and commuting to some horrible fast food job who falls through the cracks, and they are right. Rules and bureaucracies are very rough substitutes for market incentives. More importantly, if you're working for money, you find the best job you can, you work hard, you look for better opportunities. If you're working to satisfy a bureaucratic work requirement in the face of a 100% tax rate, you find the easiest job you can, you don't care about the money and thereby the social productivity of the work, and you do as little as possible. So I'm not defending work requirements as a perfect offset to a 100% marginal tax rate. But they are there for a reason, as a very rough offset to some of the huge disincentives that means-tested programs pose. The point today is that we should start to understand and debate work requirements in this framework. If you're going to remove market incentives, you need some replacement. By the way, supposedly socialist Europe, after its experience with "the dole" in the early 1990s, is much more heard-hearted about these sorts of incentives than we are. Progressives who think we should both emulate nordic countries and also expand our safety net should go look at nordic countries. Is there a better way? I've long played with the idea of limiting help by time rather than by income. That's how unemployment insurance works. We understand that replacing people's paycheck forever if they lose their job has bad incentive effects. Unemployment is understood as a temporary misfortune, and understanding the incentives, you get unemployment checks for a limited amount of time. Could not many other programs aimed at misfortune also be limited by time -- but then allow you to keep each extra dollar of earnings? Perhaps even unemployment should be a fixed amount of time, and you can keep receiving it for the full (normally) 26 weeks even if you get a job. The trouble with that, of course, is that some people will not get their acts together in the required time, and then you have to be heartless. But is it not just as heartless to say to a person who had been on food stamps, earned income tax credit, social security disability and housing voucher, "well, congrats on getting  a job, and a good one, that pays $60,000 per year. Now we're taking away all your benefits. Enjoy the $1?" Also, the safety net does include a detailed bureaucracy to determine who is needy. Disability, unemployment, and so forth look hard at these issues. Replicating that with a different set of rules for each program seems mighty wasteful. Another wild idea: Good economists all understand that consumption, not income, is the right measure of well being. That's why consumption taxes are a good idea, and we should measure consumption diversity not income diversity. (I don't use the word "inequality" anymore as it prejudices the right answer.) One advantage of a consumption tax is that it would be easier to condition benefits on consumption rather than income. If you work and save the results, you can keep your benefits. One last point, which maybe should be the first point. It is a bit scandalous that income phase outs in social programs take away benefits based on market income, but not social program income. If you have food stamps and earn an extra $10,000 of income, you can lose your foods stamps. If you get housing worth $10,000, you don't lose anything. Ditto in the entire social program system. This is an immense distortion towards putting effort into obtaining more social programs rather than working. Phasing out based on consumption, including cash and non cash benefits, would make a lot more sense. But one could phase out benefits based on which other benefits you receive too. Disincentives come from the social program and tax system overall, and any hope of continuing disincentives and saving money must take a similar integrated system approach. The argument also is over how much money the programs cost. That leads to "how could you be so heartless" vs. "but the country will go broke," also going nowhere. A focus on incentives offers the way out. Fix the incentives, and we end up helping people who need it a lot better, we end up with a lot fewer people who need help, and spend a lot less money. Win win win. There is no clean answer. A main lesson of economics is that there is always a tradeoff between help and disincentives, between insurance and moral hazard. We can make this tradeoff a lot more efficient than it is, but we can't totally eliminate the tradeoff. The bottom line remains, this discussion would be a lot more productive discussion if we talked about the constraint posed by incentives, rather than the usual moral mudslinging.    Update:So work requirements are a little tightened, but not if you have Medicaid. WTF? Medicaid is limited by income. The incentive spaghetti here would be fun to unravel. Of course, we have an  additional reason to stay below the income cap for Medicaid. We have an additional incentive to sign up for Medicaid, which may be the idea here. "Get a job, lose your food stamps, or sign up for this free government program." Hmm. Feel free to riff on this one in the comments...   

Adam N. Michel


Ways and Means Committee Republicans recently introduced the American Families and Jobs Act, an economic tax package that addresses significant ongoing tax increases on domestic investment built into the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Most of the Republicans' major proposed changes in the American Families and Jobs Act expire after 2025, worsening current tax uncertainty and obscuring the necessary reforms' fiscal cost.
Other than permanence, the American Families and Jobs Act could be significantly improved by adding Universal Savings Accounts for family savings flexibility and neutral cost recovery for currently excluded building investments. The proposed legislation includes a series of other reforms, many that are good and a few that are misguided.
The package is comprised of three bills: the Tax Cuts for Working Families Act (H.R. 3936), the Small Business Jobs Act (H.R. 3937), and the Build It in America Act (H.R. 3938). Here is a brief summary of the most important provisions.
Expensing. The central pro‐​growth component of the package is the extension of full business expensing for R&D, equipment, and machinery. As I recently explained in a Cato brief, the normal tax rules require businesses to deduct their investment spending over time (between 3 and 39 years). Especially during times of high inflation, such as the current economic climate, these rules increase the after‐​tax cost of new investments because the value of the associated tax deduction decreases over time.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act temporarily fixed this problem by allowing businesses to fully deduct the cost of some new investments in the year they are made, called full expensing or 100 percent bonus depreciation. Beginning last year, companies started amortizing research expenses over five years, and beginning this year, equipment and other short‐​lived investments lose 20 percent of their immediate expensing deduction each year through 2026.
The American Families and Jobs Act would allow full expensing for short‐​lived investments and R&D spending through 2025. It would also increase the expensing limit for small businesses to $2.5 million. By not extending full expensing to longer‐​lived assets, such as structures, the legislation does not apply to a significant portion of annual business investment. The legislation could be improved by making the expensing changes permanent and including a neutral cost‐​recovery system for structures, which provides a similar economic benefit as expensing by enabling businesses to index their write‐​offs for inflation and time, such as in the CREATE JOBS Act.
1099 Fixes. The previously obscure 1099‑K form reports business transactions with a credit or debit card or online settlement platforms such as PayPal or Venmo. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 lowered the 1099‑K de minimis threshold from more than 200 transactions and $20,000 in total payments to a single $600 threshold. In 2022, the IRS delayed the implantation of this rule as it threatened to sweep as many as 20 million taxpayers into the costly and unnecessary new reporting system. The proposed legislation would repeal the 2021 change.
The legislation also increases the general reporting threshold for other Form 1099 transactions from $600 to $5,000, indexed for future inflation. The current threshold is not indexed for inflation and has not been raised since 1954, when $600 was worth more than $6,500 in today's dollars. The higher thresholds will ease compliance burdens and lower administrative costs.
Interest expense limitation. Beginning in 2022, the business interest deduction limit switches from 30 percent of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) to a more restrictive definition of earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). The tighter write‐​off definition increases the cost of debt‐​financed investments. The Republican legislation would maintain the pre‐​2022 EBITDA base through 2025. Keeping taxes on investment from rising is an important goal, and using EBITDA follows international norms. However, policymakers should remember that the current treatment of interest in the tax code is neither uniform nor ideal and deserves a more holistic reform in the future.
Expanded capital gains exclusion. Under current law (IRC Section 1202), individuals are allowed up to a 100 percent exclusion of $10 million of capital gains on qualified small business C corporation stock. The legislation would expand the exclusion by extending the preferential treatment to S corporations and phasing in the exclusion's benefit during the 5‑year mandatory holding period.
Among other reasons, keeping capital gains taxes low is critical to spur "investment in startups and growth companies, particularly technology companies," as explained by Chris Edwards. The expansion of Section 1202 is a step in the right direction of a lower capital gains tax rate. However, Congress should ideally treat all types of investment equally, at one low or zero rate, instead of carving out specific types of investments for preferential treatment.
Repeals select energy credits. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included as much as $1.2 trillion in distorting energy market subsidies, intended to put Washington bureaucrats at the center of critical energy investment decisions. The Republican's proposal would repeal just 5 of more than 20 tax subsidies in the IRA. The bill repeals two energy credits that do not take effect until 2025 or later and three electric vehicle (EV) credits, leaving a more limited EV credit similar to pre‐​IRA in place.
All of the special‐​interest IRA energy credits should be repealed. If left in the tax code, each new IRA credit will lead to the misallocation of investment, cronyism, and other costs that are almost always the result of targeted industrial subsidies.
Temporary increase to standard deduction. The current‐​law standard deduction for families is about $28,000 ($14,000, single) through 2025, when it gets cut in half as the 2017 tax cuts expire. The proposal would temporarily increase the standard deduction by $4,000 for married filers ($2,000, single) below $400,000 in earnings ($200,000 single) in 2024 and 2025. Congress should focus on making the current‐​law standard deduction permanent instead of this $4,000 bonus that will increase the cost and complexity of the 2025 fiscal cliff.
Moving more taxpayers off the complicated itemized tax system and to the standard deduction is a worthy goal. However, it should be done by limiting the value of specific deductions, such as those for state and local taxes or mortgage interest, instead of expanding the standard deduction. Alex Brill, Kyle Pomerleau, and Grant M. Seiter estimate that the temporarily larger deduction would lead to about 4.1 million more taxpayers relying on the standard deduction. The larger standard deduction would also mean more Americans are entirely exempt from paying any income tax and is not well‐​targeted at other goals, such as inflation remediation.
Rural Opportunity Zones. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created Opportunity Zones that offer lower tax rates on specific investments in designated low‐​income Census Tracts. The proposed legislation would create a new Opportunity Zone designation targeted at poor, rural Census Tracts.
As Joel Griffith and I detailed in 2019, 40 years of academic and government studies "consistently show place‐​based development programs fail to increase employment, raise wages, or advance general economic opportunity for targeted residents." Despite limited data, the evidence from Opportunity Zones has largely confirmed that the targeted preferences primarily subsidized already‐​in‐​the‐​works projects in wealthy areas. Adding new Opportunity Zones would be a mistake. Instead, Congress should lower the capital gains tax rate for everyone, to let private individuals instead of Congress determine the most productive locations for new investment.
Land tax. The legislation would impose a 60 percent excise tax on the purchase of farmland by citizens of "countries of concern," such as China, Russia, and Iran. Scott Lincicome and Ilana Blumsack explain that "there's little current indication that foreign farmland purchases – even by Chinese entities – justify the type of broad‐​based government restrictions that some in Congress are contemplating." They go on to show that combined, all foreigners own just 3.1 percent of private farmland in the United States, and China is not even in the top 10 countries that hold the most U.S. farmland. Narrowly tailored rules restricting foreign land purchases near military assets may be justified, but punitive taxes or other bans on land purchases from entire countries are misguided.
The legislation makes other changes, such as repealing the superfund tax and addressing foreign tax credit regulations.
Room For Improvement
The most critical pieces of the pro‐​growth economic tax package—full expensing for R&D, equipment, and machinery—address costly tax increases already making domestic investment more expensive. The proposal could be significantly improved by making these reforms permanent and adding neutral cost recovery for investments in structures.
The legislation would also benefit from adding a Universal Savings Account, which would operate like retirement accounts but without restrictions on how taxpayers spend the funds. Additionally, several of the provisions are targeted capital gains tax cuts—Opportunity Zones and Section 1202—it would be best if the legislation simply cut the capital gains rate for all investments.
The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the bills would lower revenue by about $21 billion over ten years but, if made permanent, would be significantly more costly. Repealing all the IRA tax credits and curtailing itemized deductions instead of boosting the standard deduction would more than offset the lost revenue from critical pro‐​growth tax reforms.